In the first generation mobile Core i processors (i7-xxx and i5-xxx), the low end ones (i7-6xx, i5-4xx, i3-3xx) are fixed, but the higher end ones (i7-7xx, i7-8xx, i7-9xx) are being stopped. Same is true with the desktop processors.

I suspect that's a matter of what's architecturally viable to fix as opposed to *ahem* marketing considerations. Perhaps the processor in question has more aggressive speculative execution baked into the hardware that's difficult (if possible at all) to mitigate.

So again, the problem is what about people who are working full time, but on low-paying jobs (which is where this got started)? We still need those sales clerks, call center staffers, janitors, what have you. And there isn't enough demand for engineers, managers, skilled tradespeople, higher level sales people, and all that to ensure that there are positions available for everyone. You say you expect everyone who's able-bodied to work, but aren't then prepared to ensure that everyone who's working can live on the compensation.

Don't say "it's about better education" or whatnot -- more supply of skilled labor doesn't ensure that the demand for it will be there. Again, are you good with telling hard working people "sucks to be you, but you're on your own, pal"?

It doesn't have to be that way -- we can decide as a society that everyone's basic rights do include affordable access to healthcare, for instance. Yes, that means people will have to pay taxes and such. But that doesn't make it impossible to accomplish.

We still need people to drive people around from point A to point B, answer customer complaint calls, and that. It doesn't matter how much people improve their skills and all that, somebody has to do those jobs; we still need them, and there aren't enough engineering, executive, what have you jobs to go around for everyone and there never will be.

Are you willing to say that it's OK that some people, no matter how hard they work, have to live on the margins? Because I don't think that that's a very healthy society.

Municipal power companies aren't that uncommon. They often charge lower rates and provide better service; after an early snowstorm in October 2011 in Massachusetts, the municipal utilities had their towns back in operation a lot faster than the private ones.

This is a 17" "mobile workstation" type laptop, with an excellent keyboard as those go, although it certainly doesn't compare to the old Sun keyboards. It has some quirks, in particular that the function and control keys are swapped and the default is for the function keys to perform the special functions rather than send the keystrokes, but that can be fixed in the BIOS.

The most annoying quirk is that the touchpad is somewhat to the left of center, although centered relative to the main keyboard, and I found my left palm inadvertently moving the mouse around. But KDE offers a setting to disable the touchpad when a mouse is plugged in, which solves that problem.

The action is heavier than my old Dell M6500, which is also a 17" mobile workstation. I personally like that. It's also designed to be water-resistant, and they designed rain gutters -- channels through which fluids spilled on the keyboard can drain out the bottom of the laptop.

Firefox has been increasingly defeatured over the past year or two. And to make matters worse, the FF developers consider that a feature.

The first big one was requiring add-ons to be signed by Mozilla, putatively to protect users (because Mozilla would inspect the code). That was sort of OK-ish at first, because there was a preference that could be set to turn that off, but they did (as promised) get rid of that option in FF 52. The stated intent was that people could be hurt by rogue extensions coming with instructions about how to turn off the signature enforcement. But it turns out that there is still a saving throw; only add-ons require signature enforcement; other types of addons (such as themes) don't, and the ones that do are listed in a file. Maybe the Mozilla people did that by intent, so that someone who wants to run unsigned extensions badly enough can do so. But yes, this means that you can't run your own extensions in your own browser, unless you submit each new version to Mozilla (not necessarily make it public), or you use the developer version.

(This was never implemented for the long-term support versions; these versions are intended for corporate use, and they know that corporations won't allow their code to be submitted for inspection.)

But the really big change, as of FF57, is to get rid of all of the old extensions altogether in favor of "WebExtensions", which use an API supposedly much more like that of Chrome, to make it easier to port addons between browsers. This strikes me as a highly self-destructive act (why use fake Chrome rather than the real thing?), but that's what they want to do. The problem is, as the OP noted, that none of the classic extensions are WebExtensions, so they're basically destroying their ecosystem overnight.

"Firefox search partner codes"

"mobile marketing vendor"

"marketing campaigns"

Gaah. This ain't your father's Mozilla. And I really don't want "personalized recommendations" (read: customized ads). I want to do my own searching, with search terms I pick (which usually have nothing to do with buying anything).

I use Firefox because I have it very heavily customized with a lot of addons (some of which I've modified myself). I suppose I'm going to have to stay on the last working version of FF forever and hope things don't get too bad, or hope that someone picks up and forks it, preserving legacy extensions.

Trying to make Firefox more compatible with Chrome is just plain absurd. If it's going to be compatible to the point of excluding the reason why people use Firefox to begin with, what's the point of even using Firefox? People use Firefox because of the XUL and other legacy extensions that do things that other browsers don't. Period.

(And let's not even get into "we won't let you turn off signature validation, so all your extensions are belong to us. Well, not quite, but close enough. Although they did actually leave a workaround in place.)

I don't trust any capability to completely wipe a phone. So I wouldn't lease it and then have to return it. But that also means I wouldn't sell my phone or hand it down to someone.

I follow the same principle with disk drives: once I put real data on them, I don't return them (even for warranty) unless everything has been encrypted.

Indeed.

Wrecking legacy plugins needs a really, really strong justification. "Compatibility with other browsers' APIs" is not it. I'm not looking to run Chrome extensions; I'm not running Chrome. I want my _existing_ legacy plugins to work.

Mozilla (Firefox in particular) has become increasingly paternalistic over the years; the thing about mandating signed extensions most notably (although there is actually a viable workaround (at least for now). But the plugin API thing does not appear likely to have any kind of workaround.

Yeah, that helps me temporarily (but makes a mess of my distro's packaging -- there are a lot of things that depend on firefox). But only until FF56.

All Tabs extension works nicely.

Because:

1) I have a bunch of older extensions, some of which aren't signed.

2) Sometimes I modify extensions (fix bugs, get rid of annoying behaviors).

3) I don't want to have to "apply" to someone else for the right to run something on my own computer.

If it works, it isn't "fundamentally flawed".

I don't care for these "workspace" solutions, because it means a heavyweight switch between sessions rather than just jumping to a different tab.

It sounds like that means switching between sessions constantly, if you operate the way I do -- jumping around rather than working on one thing for a while. What do you do if you're in the middle of something and "I just want to check the weather radar?"