"We balance the needs of the business with the 'life happens' moments customers face by offering unsuspension for up to 15 days (customers in this scenario can use and are charged for service during this time); often users just need an unsuspension for a few days while they wait for their next paycheck."
– Nodas 

"I am so impressed. I contacted to find out what the amount was needed to have my service turned back on. I was offered 10 days longer to pay my bill and you turned my service back on!!! You guys rock!! Thank you so much!!"
– an affected customer

This article is surprisingly sensible despite the title: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-09-01/maybe-blockchain-really-does-have-magical-powers

I just realized that "Blockchain" (it's a proper noun now) is this generation's XML.

How not to set up your github account, in one URL: https://github.com/foss-for-synopsys-dwc-arc-processors/toolchain

> Warning: ignoring LD_PRELOAD in environment.

Huh. This concise message from our build system worried me in surprisingly many ways, all at once.

I don't really understand why people are so upset about Apple dropping the ancient headphone jack. I'm generally a late adopter (and am not planning to buy a first-generation iPhone 7 either) but I think switching to a digital output will be great. This article covers most of my reasons why.

My own reasons include:
- Headphone/earphone/speaker vendors have more control over DAC, amplifier, and EQ. (The DAC can be calibrated to the exact characteristics of the physical output device!)
- Phone can remember your preferred volume (etc) settings for each different output device.
- Button inputs (volume up/down, pause/play) have always been flakey hacks on analog connections; now they'll work right.
- Lightning connectors appear to be generally higher quality than old-style analog audio connectors, so you should get less of the partially-disconnected sort of problems (playing only in one ear, etc).

I also look forward to wireless earphones, but I definitely wouldn't buy Airpods 1.0. That way lies madness. 5 hours of battery life is okay, but not really good enough for a long coding session. (Also, having watched people debug bluetooth accessories on my team, and sometimes using supposedly production bluetooth stuff myself, I applaud Apple's decision to do something, anything, else. Bluetooth is a flaming trash heap.)

http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/7/11874706/iphone-7-lightning-headphones-reasons

Okay, maybe now I can switch to python 3.6. I don't know if I care about the other stuff, but an unappreciated side effect of this change: python unittest methods will actually be able to run in the order they're declared! I can write tests from fastest/simplest to most complex, and have the simple ones fail in an understandable way! All because dicts will be ordered by default, whether accidentally or otherwise.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12460936

What happens when engineers run a charity? They write detailed postmortems, of course, so they can fix their mistakes.

http://reports.ewb.ca/failure/

[Rephrased to avoid accidental negative connotations.]

Wow. Math is weird. But the idea is you write a function that maps {arbitrary dict} to drawing commands, and it figures out how to do the inverse, so that you can then drag around any point in the drawing and have it do something sensible.

http://omrelli.ug/g9/gallery/

Theory: "Remember me" and "Keep me logged in" checkboxes (some sites have both!) are placebos... for the software developers who made the site.

I can't imagine that end users could possibly understand what they do. I don't even understand what they do. They certainly don't keep me logged in.

It even runs win98 on my phone. And gives it the battery life of a win98 laptop. Very realistic!

https://github.com/copy/v86/blob/master/Readme.md

I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere. This is a completely different rabbit hole than the one I was looking for.