I don't think the jury is still out. I have worked from home off and on for decades. In my current job, I was going into the office every 6 weeks until recently (haven't been in the office in probably 6 months). Since that also involves flying there and back, one week in the office is about as productive as one day at home. I'm not being facetious about that - I'm just considering burn down and tickets that actually get closed out.

While I do understand the desire to have face-2-face whiteboarding sessions, that's rarely what we are doing.

We use conferencing (Hangouts and unfortunately also WebEx at the moment) daily for an international team. While it may take a minute or two to start a chat online, when onsite it usually takes much longer to find each other AND an available room. Half the time, we crowd around one monitor anyway.

However, the less distracted assumption is also not really all that true. Even ignoring things going on at your own house (deliveries, pets wanting fed, etc), you still get constant distractions from meeting invites and slack conversations. The only real difference is you are less likely to be pulled into a meeting or an off-site lunch.

You'll probably find that how you manage your project has a bigger impact than a lot of that. How many administrative meetings are you having? How many scrums and retrospectives and grooming sessions and artificial deadlines etc?

All that being said, I do tend to turn down onsite jobs anymore because I don't want to waste 2 hours a day of unpaid time commuting.

If someone like ShapeShift wanted to challenge it, they could show that they had prior art in effect at the time of filing. They would most likely have to outspend BofA on lawyers, which is unlikely. In addition, BofA only has to have 3 points of differentiation from a company like ShapeShift - even if they already had a patent - for it to be a valid new patent. That could be something as small as whether or not to display a QR code on the screen.

The whole system is broken and favors large corporations over the individual inventors.

I started first grade in 1979. Computer programming was a required class for ALL students in elementary school. We too started with pseudocode and Logo (in 1st grade). Since I've been programming for 38 years and it's currently my career - I definitely think it was effective for me.

Your best bet is to start with the site supporting the firmware flavor (DD-WRT, OpenWRT, etc) that you want to run. Their site will be able to tell you which models currently work with their current firmware. When I went to buy my router, they had screenshots of the packaging to help identify between v1 and v2 - which the casual buyer might not have noticed. Support levels on them were different. If the shiny new router mentioned at CES isn't supported yet, you may need to rethink your plan or do a lot more work. The sites usually also include information like how you might have to flash to version 1.1.9 before you can downgrade to 1.1.8 again, etc.

using spaces simply because the code is consistent for everyone

That's a false assumption.

My father was legally blind. We were sharing code remotely, using spaces, and he could not differentiate the gaps in the same way that I could. Every commit he would change my 2 or 4 spaces to 8 or 16 spaces. Every commit I would change it back, because it was horrible for me. We eventually switched to tabs, and the constant code reformatting stopped because we could each choose how strong that spacing looked for each of us, independently.

At work, they are currently enforcing that we use spaces, so I am.

I would no longer choose to do so on my own project because I know that it makes the code inaccessible to the handicapped. I am quite honestly surprised that this argument goes back and forth. The ADA should probably just start suing companies for being non-compliant.

I just never need it, or never have the right amount. It's more inconvenient.

However, in much of the country I could imagine there being a concern about it being taken. Jon Oliver episode on Civil Forfeiture:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fyoutu.be%2F3kEpZWGgJks

I don't need paper for work. It probably helps that I telecommute, so there is never anyone handing me a piece of paper. When I travel, tickets are all on my phone. Timesheets are online, invoices are online, paychecks are direct deposit. The closest I get to paper is random PDFs.

The thermostat continues to function even if power goes out or if you remove it from the wall. It charges an internal battery from the wiring.

The Nest does charge from common (or other wires if you prefer). Not sure what the actual bug was that caused it to drain so fast. I'd assume some tight looping.

This is exactly what happened. A medical device refused to work, claiming it was too cold. I went to check the thermostat and it wouldn't function. I checked the mobile app and it said that it had lost connection with the Nest 5 hours earlier. I plugged it into USB for about 1/2 hour so that it had enough of a charge to startup the heater.

I had considered hot-wiring the HVAC behind the Nest panel, but my HVAC has protections against that.

It's a little too bad the USB port isn't external so that I could attach a charger to it while it was still on the wall.

Unfortunately, we already have that law in Oregon.

I completely agree. If I wanted an Apple interface, I wouldn't have been using Ubuntu.

And they obviously have done 0 regression testing with multi-monitor setups. Your have an app in monitor #3 and the menu for it is in monitor #1? They have no clue what usability means.

As new releases come out, I do whatever hack is necessary to disable Unity. Once I can no longer do that, Ubuntu is gone.

I used a Netgear Dual-WAN for years. It allows you to specify (via the web-interface) which traffic goes over which network.

I agree. One thing that people wouldn't normally think of is that she really shouldn't censor herself in it. A filtered and washed down version is not going to be as valuable to your kids as being able to see into what someone really thought.