Don't you remember all the different chargers? I love being able to use any micro USB charger with any phone or camera. No more digging around to find the proprietary charger that I may have labelled to identify the device that it works with. It may pay the individual companies to design their own proprietary chargers and still be better for the consumer for the government to insist on a single design standard. The "free market" isn't some wonder drug.

That is precisely what scares me. With Trump as president and Congress run by radical nut jobs, who knows what might happen. Certainly nothing good. The man is truly scary.

Of course nobody would use a VPN? Note that the ad that came with this story read: "Slashdot Deals: Get The Fastest VPN For Your Internet Security..." (Their capitalization.)

Yup. I still have two 41cv's that I bought new 40+/- years ago. They both work fine, although it's getting harder to find N cells.

I've been working with computers since 1961. I've had decades of back problems. Standing is not the answer. Get up and walk around - frequently. If you can stand it walk several miles a day. I just had a 50th college reunion and I think I'm better off than many of my classmates because of walking and exercises. Start now.

I disabled ipv6 last night. Comcast drops the connection after a day or two and then anything that is trying to use ipv6 takes forever to fail over to ipv4. It was interfering with my usage. The only way to solve it was to reboot the router. Not worth it.

Tech reporters should be licensed. I seriously doubt that Maxwell's equations are failing: "Maxwell’s equations explain how high-frequency flows of electrons in conductors generate electromagnetic waves, but they do not explain how an insulating material, where there is no flow of electrons, would also act as an antenna."

It's an IRS site, what did you expect?

We ran a Windows server for many years with no firewall. We took credit card info (which was immediately encrypted). We had spent over a month hardening the server by shutting down all but the services that we truly needed. We never had a problem with that arrangement. We added a firewall when PCI required it but I'm still not convinced that it mattered.

They are already paid by the end user and by the distributors like Netflix, who pay for their bandwidth usage. What the carriers want is to be paid three times.

That logic leads to debtors' prisons. They didn't work out so well.

Off by 25 years. (I'm kind of old, I was 37 when I got my first home computer.) If I use the first computer I used at work, I get a ratio of 10,000,000 and I'm still off by 11 years.

In 1961 I took an evening course in Fortran for physics students taught by a volunteer from MIT. We were promised a chance to actually run our programs at the end of the course, but that never happened. I last used Fortran in 1971, when I maintained a subscription fulfillment system for a student-run academic journal. The print routines were in 1401 assembly language, but we'd lost the source and only had a binary deck of cards to work with.

I used LaTex in the mid to late eighties to set type for several professional journals and newsletters. It was the only product I could find that was capable of dealing with footnotes that had to be split across pages. We marked up the articles with tags in Xywrite and then used its macro-programming language to translate into LaTex. Worked like a charm and saved a fortune over commersial typesetting.