There have been many attempts to do this over the years, I guess stuff like Huron/Objectstar, Natural, SuperNatural etc. on the mainframe and dozens of tools on PC platforms.

They all tended to be 80% solutions, if your problem domain fitted the niche of the tool. When it came to performance, the other 20% etc. they rapidly became more complex than traditional tools to achieve with lots of hacks to get around the shortfalls. Even if later versions addressed some of the points there were already solutions in the wild with the hacks which no one wanted to go back and fix.

Other events like Y2K highlighted the risks of these with the developed solutions perhaps having Y2K problems and large unstructured, unmaintained solutions out there which no one even knew if there was a user of any more.

WIll these tools have got better, undoubtedly, and the domain of problems in which they can be useful will have grown, but are they something to revolutionize development, I doubt it.

Doesn't make much sense to me, Google will need to be in line with whatever UK law succeeds GDPR. If US law is weaker (quite likely) then they won't be able to contract users out of the UK rights, same way they can't do that with GDPR protections. So they'll have to conform with the UK version. it's possible that the UK Law will have things in it which aren't compatible with GDPR, but if it doesn't, then they an just stay put.

"It was a feature they were already paid for by the orignal owner. The idea Tesla should get paid multiple times for a one-time purchase to enable a feature is half the problem here."

Except it was a return to tessla, they presumably gave the original owner a replacement or their money back. So no they aren't getting paid multiple times, by your logic the original owner had paid for the car so Tessla should have just given the whole thing away so they don't get paid twice. It would be different of course if someone else had bought the car from the original owner directly and tessla did this.

From reading the original story it's hard to tell who is really culpable on this (Excepting the customer who seems to have been a bit too trusting if anything). I'm sure tessla as any corporate are plenty capable of being dicks as are car dealers, at least in this case tessla have had some sense to bring it to a close.

3 vs 150 seems a rather extreme example. I've seen the "3 line solutions" which are incredibly densely written code, with no structure, no comments and no one else can penetrate to try and fix the edge cases not accounted for. The end investment in that code over it's useful lifetime can end up being far greater. I'm not convinced that make the programmer better than the 150 line over verbose, over structured code not utilising language constructs, or library calls well. Though I guess I've had more luck training the 150 line case to see the ways it could have been better over the 3 line self professed programming god who lost interest in the code 10 minutes after writing it.
Real productivity is tough to measure.There are people who are experienced who get dragged every which way into meetings, discussions, help sessions etc. who personally don't produce much code, but remove the person from the team and the overall output drops far more.

Not sure why this response has turned up here, It;s not the reply to this link I clicked.

Surely that's a function of structure. Or is the suggestion that now wireguard is part of the many more 1000s of lines of linux code that it's overnight become fundamentally more insecure. In which case this seems rather bad news.

If we're into anecdotes, I've a non-apple phone with micro usb where I've done many insertions/removals and the port is still fine.

My initial reaction is that I don't know why that would be, where is the increment in energy cost vs the same stuff running at home. You could argue the recycling of the hardware to service different users at different times vs perhaps being left on idle at home maybe a saving. (No idea if any of the services properly shutdown idle instance only having a small pool ready but idle at a time?) Further thought I guess it depends on time of year and location. In cooler places at the right time of year I guess the heat is not so great it's disposed of but work to heat the home a little, thus reducing heat energy elsewhere (though of course that's heat from electricity with all the power losses involved compare to natural gas (say)) In those locations if the heat energy from the data centres could be recycled and used for heating other spaces, then I would assume the energy costs to be similar.

I like the answers like this https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.co.uk%2Fask%2Fq... "I have never bought this product. Why is Amazon asking me these questions?"

Only a week since their previous breakthrough https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhardware.slashdot.org%2F...

I would imagine it to be a difficult business to get into. When I last replaced some light switches I got ones which matched in with the decor, screwless design etc. Or I could have paid 5-10 times as much for a white plastic switch with smart features tied to some central hub. The geek in me likes the smart stuff, less so the centralization, but it's a hard sell for the price and lack of choice. Of course the choice can be resolved, but requires much more inventory tooling etc. getting the stockists to hold more lines.... For the non geek, I can see it's an even harder sell. It seemed to have some nice features, like NFC reading (no doubt an added cost) so attaching a smart tag to the plug meant it would know which device was plugged into which socket. (Though my experience with smart sockets has never been great, I don't have a persuasive use case, unlike lighting where using home assistant I can automate many aspects)

I was about to come and post that it's a bit ironic, in earlier years I'd replace my laptop for other technology improvements (CPU and Memory mainly), these days that seems less of an issue. I guess there are use cases where upgrades to more recent hardware make a lot of sense, in my experience useful lifespan of hardware is increasing. Somewhat ironic I guess that replaceable battery (something I've rarely required in a laptop) removal corresponds with that, or a conspiracy of some sort. (Or a bollocks slashdot story, which is an ever increasing option)

I note this 2002 paper (got from 2 seconds googling via wikipedia) https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fui.adsabs.harvard.edu%2F...

I've already got a VOBOT for this (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgetvobot.com%2Fclock) which provides an implementation of Alexa (so omits some stuff that they don't specify/allow), only listens on button press. It contains a battery which is good for a few hours away from a usb charger it seems, will power down and still wake for Alarms if you don't reconnect, provides a wifi hot spot - so useful when travelling. Alarms can execute submit voice commands to Alexa directly, so can do most things. It's not perfect but I'm pretty happy with it.YMMV