I do sincerely appreciate those two pointers you gave me. Thanks!

I use Firefox exclusively as well and I have plenty of negative things to say about it. Where to begin... I'll save the major issues for last. Firstly the ads everywhere, pocket, sync, homepage, search. You can disable all of them.... For now. Still rankles. Secondly, sync itself, why can't we have this service available in a way that allows me to keep it local/run my own service? Default to DNS over http to break my entire local network DNS. And this is all ignoring the structural issues and indecipherable about:config options and dumbed-down to almost nothing normal settings.

But the biggest problem from a usability perspective is mobile... everything. Only a couple plugins available even though for years now every plugin I rely on works fine if you jump through all the hoops to get them in Firefox Nightly. That's the only thing that's saved mobile browsing for me and I still hate it. And I just had to move to a new phone so my fresh nightmare is literally no way to export or copy bookmarks from one to the other (without sync and I refuse).

-- I have more but I ran out of time to rant. If anyone can point me to any way to surf from Android with an open source product that doesn't hate me and has full plugin support for things like RES and greasemonkey and adblocking I will be your friend for life. For now Firefox Nightly is the best ... And that's not saying much.

They only dropped the "don't."

You had me going until that hyperbolic end. Maybe if you refrain from that you'll convince more folks.

I'm also nearly 50, fully retired, and it took me a minute to realize you claimed to be "consulting" in the 80s when you were a teenager. I was a precocious kid too but I'm almost 50 so I know better.

Our former sysadmin purchased a drill press for the purpose of rendering old hard drives unrecoverable. Seemed both fun and practical.

So he wrote a single algorithm, 30 years ago, and did some code review, 20 years ago, and this makes him a computer genius? No.

Factoring large primes, or any primes, is not only trivial, but fast. Super fast. You meant the products of large primes, I'm sure.

To feel otherwise is to directly admit IP laws do not serve the public interest.

This looks as much like a portal turret as a stick figure looks like an actual human.

Thingiverse has already suffered several takedowns of allegedlycopyrighted materials.

Also, they recently overhauled their site, and somhow made it EVEN WORSE, when it was already pretty intolerable.

...one of my siblings raised a family of 5 on no more than $40,000/year (combined income, many years it was lower - I know this because I helped them with taxes for years). They lived in a small town, originally in a mobile home, but through an FHA guaranteed loan they were able to purchase a small house (and now own it outright).

So this was at least 30 years ago? C'MON, SERIOUSLY? Have you HEARD of INFLATION?

I've never wanted or sought out credit, no credit cards or car loans or anything... so it blew my mind when I went to get a home loan last year and they told me I'd have to get a credit card first, use it for a while, then they'd be able to give me a home loan. Really? REALLY? The guy who's too responsible to need credit in the first place is a bigger risk than the guy you KNOW has $40,000 in debt? WHAT THE FUCK.

But you can't use something that must be licensed for them. These kids need to learn a skill they can go home and practice - if any of them are going to use the skills they learn from you, the tools required had better damn well be Free and Open to them.

You got +5 funny, but as someone who has to buy his share of ISO documents to get the details of standards in my line of business, they actually ARE signed and numbered, with my name on every page and a notice that says the PDF is for me only and giving it to anyone else is a violation of copyright and such. Really annoying.

That's a brilliant article and should be required reading. It's good enough reason to not use Microsoft's present compilers.

Just for the record, though, the article doesn't seem to suggest anything about actual compilers as a service; it still seems to discuss a normal compiler that runs on your local machine. Very confusingly titled.