A dead patient is no longer a source of revenue.

But their estate still can be.

I can't speak for others, but writing stuff down helps me a lot. When I was in school, I never studied before exams because I took copious notes, and the mere act of taking those notes made something click in my head to push that info into long-term memory and make it quickly available for later recall without ever having to look at the notes again. You're absolutely right about writing forcing you to organize your thoughts, but I suspect there are also other, possibly more subtle, benefits to be gained in the neurological and psychological realms.

Plus, the way a lot of modern cars are put together, it costs $750 in labor to disassemble/reassemble everything that needs to come apart just to get to the damned $40 part that needs replacing.

I actually used my phone as part of my HVAC system. The system has a Bluetooth service interface, so it was helpful to see if it had a clogged condensate line or other issue that I could take care of quickly. Unfortunately my login appears to not work anymore after an update, and I suspect the manufacturer has started cracking down to limit the use of the app by DIYers.

You don't even need to involve iCloud at all - you could include a printed TOTP secret that's associated with the device and will work with any TOTP app to generate a credential when needed, and don't be dumb enough to keep the secret anywhere on the device itself or in its bag/case. The pairing software will ask for a credential, and you give it when needed. Or you could provide the key as a YubiKey-like device, but that too would need to be kept separate from the phone/computer. Recyclers could pay a bonus for devices with a working key to encourage folks not to lose it.

This is just off the top of my head, and obviously the idea would need to be fleshed out, but the point is that there's no reason to make it a requirement that the manufacturer be involved anytime a device needs to be repaired while still maintaining a reasonable degree of anti-theft protection.

I think if you could sue the officers personally instead of making the taxpayers foot the bill we might see some changes.

Or just treat law enforcement like a lot of other professions, and make a current professional liability insurance policy a requirement to keep their LE certification. Eventually, the problem children will accrue enough claims to make them uninsurable, which also fixes the "resign and go to another agency" problem that's way too common. I too would prefer to see an end to qualified immunity as it currently exists, but the insurance angle would probably be easier to implement while remaining fairly effective in weeding out those who abuse their authority.

IBM got the GUI Workbench which became Presentation Manager

Do you mean Workbench as in the Amiga Workbench? Presentation Manager was nothing like Workbench, aside from using a window-centric paradigm, using a mouse, etc. Presentation Manager under OS/2 looked and behaved nothing at all like Workbench, and in the OS/2 1.3 release, PM was practically indistinguishable from the then-new Windows 3.0 unless you looked closely. I own three Amigas myself (a 1000, 500, and 1200), and spent a few years working on pre-Warp OS/2 code way back when, so I got pretty familiar with both systems.

I don't think OS/2 being successful would have automatically meant that MicroChannel would have gone anywhere. It was a great system at the time, and technically advanced, but the licensing fee they wanted for its use pretty much guaranteed that everyone bought an ISA-based 386 from Gateway, Dell, or Compaq instead of a Model 80, given that OS/2 ran just fine on those other machines. The only place I ever saw MC in use in the wild was in IBM shops where they were supporting a S/390 or something like that.

BYTE was the big dog for me, though. I miss that rag SO much.

For sure. When I was working on an OS/2 1.3 app back in the very, very early 90's, I needed a 386DX-33 system with 8 megabytes of RAM and a 120 meg disk. The wailing and gnashing of teeth from the procurement/accounting folks was biblical in scope.

Well, you *could*, you just had to implement the multi-user functionality yourself. I did exactly that under 1.3 EE for the Naval Undersea Warfare Center back around 1991 or so for what essentially was a BBS on steroids that could have as many simultaneous user accounts active as there were serial ports available, each with their own enforced user space. It was a hell of a lot of fun to work on, but frankly the Navy would have been just as well off running something like MajorBBS under DOS and having us write custom doors for it instead. Somewhere around here I still have the fairly good-sized Lucite trophy that IBM sent to folks that shipped a working OS/2 app back then.

Three things, actually:

3) It's not about outsmarting the law, it's about outspending it. What's legal now can be made illegal with the proper application of a sufficient amount of currency directed at the appropriate legislators, and if even if it remains legal, those who choose to fight you will almost certainly be able to tie you up in court until you can no longer afford to fight.

No I think people hear the wrong thing or get their information from the wrong sources like Hollywood.

My favorite is still "Independence Day". Sure, we can hack an alien spacecraft with technology so advanced that the ship could eliminate the gravitational effects of a mass a quarter of that of the Moon, without knowing anything about it (not even knowing if it uses electronics and/or computers as we understand them) and get it to destroy itself, and be back home in time for dinner. No problem, but I think a little extra cash in next week's paycheck is called for.

I don't know if the issue was explained to me but I suspect that the LED with voltage supplied it would light up full brightness and then go dark immediately once voltage was removed, which is unlike an incandescent indicator or even many other LED types. Our attempts to modify the PWM code to dim it only resulted in blinking brightly.

I can't remember ever having come across an LED that wouldn't respond well to PWM that was at a fast enough pulse rate and sufficient resolution in the duty cycle, but I 100% agree that real hardware doesn't always respond like the simulations did, particularly when it's integrated into a larger system. A few months back at work, we shipped an avionics update, and we're kind of amazed that it's worked in several types/blocks of the real aircraft exactly as it did in the simulations - the customer hasn't reported a single problem in five months of ground and flight testing, and is releasing it organization-wide very soon. Obviously we screwed something up.

I've stayed for about a week in Aylesbury and Wycombe each, and I can't remember there ever being any kind of noticeable noise at night.