Also internet phones like google voice and if you are willing to spend small payments a site I have used in the past textverified.com to great success.

Could I please see a reference demonstrating a strawman EVERY SINGLE ONE is strawmaning while typing and that EVERY SINGLE ONE would have written a strawman? Has no poster ever strawmaned with non-strawmaners?

Not joking. As soon as I saw this headline, I checked the date to make sure it was not Apr 1.

Yes! My Ford was perfect. 6 months later, they did an automatic update that ended up raising my electric bill by $60 a month. When I contacted ford to get them to fix this, they said I now needed to create an online account with them to manage my car. I know I am just one drop in the bucket, but I no longer buy fords. I was able to buy a toyota and opt out of automatic updates which has made my experience perfect.

Because of this, I don't see myself ever buying a tesla, or a modern electric car unless I can opt out. Keep in mind, even if you put a faraday cage on the car's wireless endpoint, you cannot plug your phone into the car because they will use your phone as a data portal.

Oh, I'll provide a prediction here too. There will come a time where every device will come with a wireless sim stick and phone home on it's own every so often to get around the whole being cut off from the users internet.

When that happens, you will see a whole new industry of faraday cage wrappers being sold as a 3rd party ad-on for your purchase.

You are totally spot on. I have a Visio TV in my bedroom and over time, with more and more updates, it's become absolutely unusable. All I did was buy a $19 roku stick and disconnect the TV from the internet. It's like I now have a brand new highly functional TV again.

  I really would love to see a study of people who make these decisions thinking they are doing a good thing. My guess is there is a cross section between purposefully evil CEO's like Martin Shkreli and other CEO's who stick their head in the sand and hope for the best.

The "village idiots" meme has been heard loud and clear by a generation of potential converts. Which is why Windows and the Mac still dominate the market.

I`m sure many Slashdot posters know kids who have iPhones. But I rather doubt that is the norm.

MS Chat was a jargon free IRC chat client with a very clean layout and the animations were optional.

The IBM PC team went to Microsoft for an OS - and Gates sent them to Klildall. At a time when everyone and his brother was trying to make a serviceable 16 bit CP/M clone. Klidall could be difficult to work with and CP/M-86 drifted into development hell. The $240 price tag for the affordable SOHO office machine IBM waanted to build wasn`t helping his case either. MSDOS got the job done and competive MSDOS machines were on the cloneing of the IBM PC BIOS.

I'll take it as given that you are single without children or other dependents. Also that you never experienced a flood, wildfire, dust storm or blizzard. The real thing is nothing like a YouTube video. A lesson I don't advise learning the hard way.

I am growing increasingly weary of reboots. For every series that hit all the right marks - Harley Quinn and Wednesday come to mind. Perry Mason perhaps -. we get a dozen more which are lame and lazy - or exist only to kick the fandom in the teeth. Velma. There is also something to be said as well for having a clear driving narrative that encourages strong and engagaing character develooment. You shouldn't be exposing all the pieces at once, but they should be falling naturally into place. B5 did that kind of serialized story telling very, very well.

I`m reminded of Data`s attemt t master stand-up by playing to a holodeck audience. The canned laughter in response to his jokes sounded forced and unatural. Profoudly unsettling. You learn comedy by engaging with your audience not by looking into a mirror.

No where on the site is a floor plan or a rendering of the finished structure. Which sort of matters to potential buyers. Lenders, zoning boards, etc. There is walled estate home here that suggests a minimum security prison or a sewage treatment plant with delusions of granduer. Not the most welcome of neighbors. Edison`s concrete homes were a beast to repair, plumb and wire. How well is this structure going to to age? Will it still be marketable 15, 20, 30 years down the road?

Edison sold cast on site "concrete" homes as affordable houses. The forms had to radically simplified to build a singuarly ugly box like tract home. Plumbing and electrical work - repairs of any kind - were a nightmare. This about the time Sears and others were moving towards selling attractive soundly enginered wood frame homes in kit form.