Touchpads are great, but only after I disable the tap-to-click function. Trackpoints suck for me because they are either slow or imprecise (for me). A trackball would be nice, but nobody makes laptops with them anymore.

Give up land to repay debt. Oh, Putin would love this. Finally, a rationalization of what he's doing to Ukraine ("they owe us for gas Ãnd their land is really cheap because it's bombed to shit so we'll take quarter of the country, since they refused to give it up voluntarily, we are now sending our debt collectors, and due to the costs incurred by the need for debt collectors, we'll now take half the country").

Building a car is not very difficult and since cars have been around for a very long time, you can build a car that's quite nice without infringing patents that are still valid.

Patents last for 20 years, right? So, you can legally duplicate a 20 year old car provided that you change it a little bit to remove trademarks and copyright protected software, but then a 20 year old car won't have that much software (or you can copy a 30 year old car that does not have software).

However, the foreign creditors most likely will not come with tanks to cut a part of the territory or whatever of a sovereign country. Well, Russia might do that, but the EU is not Russia.

Speaking of Russia - maybe it will help Greece pay off the debt in exchange, the Greece would allow some Russian tanks and rockets to be placed on its territory. That would annoy the EU a lot.

I agree, there is no way to undo the technology, the "right to be forgotten" cannot be enforced without really clamping down on the internet, and we don't want that.

Technology changes society, however, society always lags behind usually by decades (until the people who had the technology as children grow old). At some point in the future, the boss will disregard a 20 year old page about what the candidate did when he was 15, because there probably is a similar page about the boss himself. However, currently, there is no such page about the boss if the boss is old enough.

In the past, you had to do something really unusual to appear in a newspaper etc, which means that if a newspaper did write about you, you most likely did similar things that were left unmentioned by the newspaper. Now, especially with Facebook, there probably is an account for every stupid thing you did, but an old fashioned person reading this will think that a lot more was unmentioned.

It does not work normally. The boss can usually choose from tens if not hundreds of candidates, so he can think of a "politically correct" reason to not hire a particular candidate, even though the actual reason was his sexuality or a stupid past. If the boss asks whether you are gay, and you say yes and then he does not hire you, you may have some basis for a complaint, but if the boss does not ask (because Google told him) you do not have the basis for complaint. Also, it's not like the court can force the boss to hire you, and even if it can, do you really expect to have a good working environment and the boss not trying to find a reason to fire you?

I personally do not use Facebook, and never put my real name anywhere that can be indexed by Google. Luckily, some people who have the same name as me can be found on Google, which means I have good noise-to-signal ratio :)

Because the original content may be on a server that is outside the jurisdiction of the court. The same reason is why MPAA wants Google to remove links to torrents.

It's nice that there are a lot of job offers where you live. In other places unemployment is high so you have a choice of either working for that company or starving. And if the company won't hire you because of what you did 15 years ago...

Before search engines, there was a natural decay of public information. While there are archives of newspapers and such, it takes a lot of effort to go through it to find whether somebody was mentioned there, unless the event in question was recent and people still remembered it.

If privacy is a dead concept, why so much hate on the NSA and similar agencies? At least their database isn't public (unless somebody leaks it).

Even an improperly tuned carburetor can still do a good enough job. A few percent CO in the exhaust and the engine still runs fine. At least at the legal speeds, I am sure that the carburetor would need to be tuned for the current air temperature, engine temperature, altitude if I wanted to race and get the most power from the engine, but since the top speed of my car exceeds the speed limit even if the carburetor adjustment is less than optimal, the requirements are a bit less strict.

For some reason some aircraft engines still use carburetors.

Split the /64 into smaller networks -- SLAAC no longer works -- Android devices have to be manually configured with static IPs since they do not support DHCPv6.

But don't private ASs and Provider Independent addresses conflict with the "neat routing tables" goal when I take my AS to another ISP which may be in another country?

Software, compared to mechanical parts, does not rust or wear out. Write it properly once and it will work properly forever.

Pass a law that requires all car software to be in a mask ROM and you will see the decline in bugs as the cost of updates increase. The software will be written more carefully and there will be less of it.

Just like my old tape deck or CD player or TV does not need updates (because that would be done by replacing a chip) but a new TV or Bluray player does.

The turn signal cancelling in my car is mechanical. I dislike heat so I will put in AC in my 1982 car (the most important and difficult to obtain part already ordered with $400 shipping from the US). Heater is also useful to defrost the windshield or when it's -30C outside.

However, I do not need my car to be controlled by software. A carburetor does a good enough job of supplying air/fuel mixture to the engine and does not need software.

My daily commuter is a 1982 MB W123 modified to run on LPG (LPG costs 38% of what gasoline costs here). No software at all.

Rust is a problem but so far I have no problems keeping the car patched. The engine still works, it did not need an overhaul yet.

In case this car is no longer in serviceable condition I am going to buy a different car of a similar year of manufacture. In case the law prevents me I am going to buy a car that has the least amount of electronics in it and then try to increase security by separating hackable components. I do not need WiFi or Bluetooth, so that would be disabled quite quickly.

There is always a reason to everything. Why did a car run over a pedestrian? Because the driver was drunk. Why the driver was driving drunk? He was not drunk enough and wanted to buy some more.

And cars have no security because security costs money. Unless the penalty for having a buggy code is higher than the cost of security, cars will have buggy code.

However, the problem is that by connecting the engine to the same bus as the radio you allow the radio to have control over the engine, or at least this is how it is now.

The radio is built to lower security standards (it's a radio, even if someone hacks it they won't do any real damage), which is OK, but then it needs to be separated from the engine or brakes or steering (where a hacker could do real damage). Have a firewall or something. Just like you don't allow your web server root access to the backups or some other critical server.

telnet car-ip
login: root
password: admin

root@car ~# service collision-avoidance stop
root@car ~# service braking stop
root@car ~# throttle_set 100%
root@car ~#
Connection lost.