You REALLY have to be careful on Amazon, and read the NEGATIVE reviews if you're looking for an honest answer about a questionable item. I've learned the hard way - the first purchase after I decided to pull the trigger and sign up for Amazon Prime I got 100% ripped off by a seller. Ordered my item (which seemed like a steal for the price at the time) and 3 weeks goes by with nothing, no tracking, etc. I message the seller and get no response. Another week goes by and I start seeing all kinds of seller reviews saying do not buy from this person as they too had paid for items and not received them. I contacted Amazon and they told me I had to attempt to contact the seller first before they would do anything - I told them I did and they requested I do it again since I had started a claim and document things. Never mind the fact that there's now a month's worth of over people (over 60 at the time) reporting the same thing right on their site about this seller. I play ball and message the seller again... crickets after two more weeks. Finally two weeks after THAT I got Amazon to agree to refund my money.

So, to sum things up my FIRST experience as a Prime member I have a problem and Amazon takes over two months to fix it.

Now I really try and weed out fishy items because there are a TON of them on there among the many good ones.

Funny what people consider "affluent", such as in this article. My wife and I make more than $75,000 per year and I can tell you that we're not affluent. But... some people think making $15 per hour is somehow the mark of making enough to have a comfortable life too.

At some point growth is going to slow if nothing else because the population is only so big and only so many of the existing populous will want to use it - the is a ceiling to growth once you reach all of the globe. The only "real" growth will then be measured in generational increments as new people are born, come of age and become consumers.

I'm in IT and my company literally just dealt with this. We refused to pay anything and instead recovered out own data after repairing the infrastructure. Our governments need to be able to do the same. I've recent;y read about millions being paid out by various municipalities, court systems, etc. and it's all coming out of our tax dollars. I've never understood how government organizations can be so far behind regular business in technology hardware and strategy.

The funny thing is... is that it's these conditions which allow Amazon to offer the fast order fulfillment, etc. that we all came to like from them in the first place.

Can we please stop using the word "hack" for things that aren't hacking?

Why any of you buy these overpriced hunks of continually lowering quality hardware is beyond me. I've been a technician for two decades now having to support both platforms and I just don't get it... especially in recent years - they've tanked quality-wise with their last few models.

Honestly, if it weren't for their iPhone they would've probably gone bankrupt (again) and gone away... and people have started to realize that the iPhone is nothing great any more either. But, they've gotten so big they can plow through their dwindling fan-base for a long time at this point. For those still drinking the Kool Aid, cheers.

"Poor air quality has been associated with depression, anxiety, and psychotic experiences such as paranoia and hearing voices." - Drug abuse has also been associated with this and although you'll find it everywhere it's far more pervasive in most cities.

Nice (I suppose) - BUT, a large amount of them are from legit numbers they buy in bulk and on a temporary basis from the phone company just for this use... and you know as well as I do the phone companies know what's going on when they let them in the first place. The phone company could easily put a stop to this by not only not allowing such a thing but you can't tell me they don't have the ability to look into mass calling being done on those lines. Make AT&T and the others accountable for this garbage and I bet things change quickly. Aside from all of this - WHO THE HECK even responds to these so that the places doing it actually make any money from it? I don't know one person that doesn't either ignore the call or hangup right after they answer.

Why anyone would use a Windows-based server for web hosting is beyond me. Linux (RHEL, CentOS, etc.) is by far the way to go... and much more reliable too.

Bitcoin getting too hard to mine? Let's just make up yet another new one! People buying into this stuff have about a 50/50 chance of losing it all... good luck with that. I don't have enough disposable cash to risk it.

Kind of silly to finally add support now when we're nearing the end of life for Win 7.

As long as it stops changing... I always thought it was stupid in the first place.

Of course it's possible to cure HIV... just ask Magic Johnson.

"The eight character password is dead."... yes, because the average hacker has a $10,000 rig just to hack individual Windows passwords. That's a silly statement at this point in time. Beyond all that, being an admin and developer at my company I can tell you that the vast majority of people use more than the minimum amount of characters anyway. At any rate, raw password hacking accounts for about 1% of compromises these days... we really need to focus more effort in other areas as well as education of end-users in a manner that they will pay attention to.