I feel you're jumping the gun on that conclusion, because it would justify essentially all kinds of nanny-state behavior on what an alleged future self might want. The twenty-something me did a lot of things thirty-something me wouldn't have and didn't do a lot of things I would have, but that was past-me's choice. And I'm going to pass along my choices to forty-something me (hopefully) but I don't know what he'll think of them. Heck, hangover-me often thinks last night's party-me could have skipped those last beers. I wouldn't take away his/my freedom to make those choices.

Of course you might argue that if you're dead you don't have a future, but you are arguing the same principle. If it's for the good of your future self, society can disempower you from making your own choices today. I don't find that nearly as unproblematic as you. As for philosophy, I can't say more than it's more my life than anyone else's. I can't give a proof for it anymore than you could prove "All men are created equal". A racist would disagree, it's more of a fundamental theorem on which you can build a moral compass. If instead you imagine a master and slave race you get a different compass, they're more like different mathematical models built on different axioms than one indisputable truth.

Almost totally false. Studies show that women who have unwanted pregnancies but give birth don't usually end up with more kids total, those who do take an abortion generally want to start a family just not there and then. Heck, this would be totally obvious if you had any contact with the opposite sex, most women want a few kids and once they've had two or three few want four-five-six and beyond though they're certainly biologically capable of 10+. Now if you'd said contraception that's certainly helped keep the population down, but assuming they exist abortions don't make any significant difference.

Still outpriced 10:1, just checked my local pricewatch.
SSD: 3649 NOK for 1 TB
HDD: 1379 NOK for 4 TB = 345 NOK/TB

With M.2/NVMe they keep getting better and better, but not so much bigger and bigger for the same price.

And they're selling a very popular OS that barely trained monkeys can manage.
And they're selling a very popular office suite that barely trained monkeys can use.
And so on.... the world runs on barely trained monkeys.

If you have a problem with that, take it up with the Creator who made a 1% patch to a chimp.

Well, private chargers are generally really slow and usually meant for overnight charging, it's rarely what you want to wait for if you are running out of juice. Here in Norway we already have several vendors that have set up paid fast charging points - not quite as fast as superchargers but 20-50 kW is overkill at home. And you'll still be paying for the same power, just not the premium but if you put any reasonable value on your time it's probably better anyway unless there's something you'd like to spend time on (eating, shopping, entertainment, whatever) nearby.

Vsync prevents the frame from being written to while it's displayed, avoiding tearing. FreeSync/Gsync makes the monitor wait for the frame to be rendered and ready for display instead of the other way around.

I really doubt a car without an "emergency stop" button will ever fly. And if by default won't let you open the doors then an override and/or an emergency hammer to break the glass, they're not going to make something where you get trapped in a fire. Maybe it won't go offroad or pull up the driveway for me, but street address to street address it should be "close enough" unless I got 30kg of luggage. Otherwise I can complain and maybe they can do a remote drive-by-wire or get half off / refund.

Doesn't matter, he was the perfect talking head. He got people engaged, he got people enraged, he was speaking directly to a gravely wounded national pride. You might think the captain of the boat is a total idiot, but you're not going to stage a mutiny as long as he's on the course you want to be. Never underestimate the power of telling people what they want to hear.

Actually that's exactly what this card is not, they've dropped FP64 performance and basically made a bigger, more badass gaming card. If there's any others who can use it, that's because they don't really need the compute features. This is like Intel's "Extreme Edition" CPUs, the performance/dollar is abysmal but it's not an Xeon. Neither is this a Tesla. This is for the "I can drop $3k on a gaming rig" market. I know people with more expensive hobbies than computers.

You do realize that 8K @ 12GB is the same as 4K (25% the pixels) @ 3GB? Are you claiming the GTX970/980 is equally overspecced at 4GB(-ish)? I don't think we have 8K monitors yet but make a triple UHD monitor setup and I think you'll make quad-Titan X sweat.

It probably depends on the meaning of free, particularly "free to" and "free from". I'm free to wear my gold chain for a stroll in Somalia, but the odds of being free from crime is probably better at home. Recently we had a court case about a guy who was openly applauding the IS atrocities and calling them heroes and martyrs and true followers of Islam, but stopped just short of encouraging others to commit terrorism. On the one hand it would be silly to criminalize approval of illegal actions - it would make saying you approve of pot smoking criminal - on the other hand you can't get a more clearly told unsaid message if you tried. Or even directly through handpicked quotes, hiding behind the book to avoid saying it yourself. It's not some axiomatic rule set where one right always outranks the other, they brush up to each other and there's shades of gray were you can argue both ways. I even sometimes manage to disagree with myself depending on the starting point.

That depends on whether it's all fun and games. Like what you want to do is play ball, not be the groundskeeper. They can pay someone to do that. You don't want to scrub the toilet in the clubhouse. They can pay someone to do that. Same with FLOSS projects, you're there to write cool new features. Do you want to triage bugs? Write documentation? Test for regressions? Fix the build server? The fun parts will be done better, the not so fun parts is probably the other way around exactly because you're not paying anyone do to them.

No, actually there's where I'd like the manager or business owner to get in the way and do his job of figuring out what's most important and if necessary make those hard calls between schedule, quality and cost. I've actually worked a lot with project and portfolio management tools and I know those warning lights start blinking but poor managers want to have their cake and eat it too. Like one project I was in once was supposed to last eight weeks, it got three weeks delayed due to a contract problem but the deadline didn't move an inch. Neither did the scope. Or the resources. Beneath the manager talk it was just "do eight weeks work in five", like we had three works of slack to begin with.

It's got nothing to do with perfection, it's to say it takes what it takes. If you give me a list of features and tell me you need all of them, the amount of work doesn't change just because you set a deadline. I can tell you - with some level of uncertainty - what's reasonable to expect in that amount of time. If those two don't add up, you need to solve that not just dump it on me. Or if that was my job I'd have to do it, I'm quite sure I know how but I don't want it. The problem is when you won't manage and just crack the whip then developers won't take the shit. That's when you get progress bars where the first 90% take 90% of the time and the last 10% forever. But it looked great until shit the fan because everyone fudged the numbers.

The problem when you won't manage is that you often end up with something not actually working but gets rolled into production anyway. To use the infamous car analogy, instead of cutting a few features like lane assistance and automatic windshield wipers you've only half finished the steering, engine, gearbox, transmission and all the other must-have items so you slap the fastest, ugliest hack you got on there and ship it. Yes, I am familiar with time to market but there's no good time to flop in the market. And then you blame the developers for shipping a buggy clusterfuck.

If we're trading compliments, it sounds like you've actually got a clue about running software projects and that will produce far better products than those who want to polish their project all day long. But your statements really don't reflect those of someone who has ever actually been on the receiving end of crap management.

I don't think it's an unrealistic standard of perfection, the point is that it's done when the code does what it's supposed to do. It won't be done because the boss sets a deadline or marketing wants it or the bean counters want to hit the Christmas sales. Or even because the developer wants it to. They act like the code is in the chain of command, they tell the developer what to do and the developer tells the computer what to do so if they say Thursday it will be done.

Except the computer doesn't give a damn, isn't responsive to feedback and is entirely unhelpful in tracking down what the problem is, if you've ever thrown your hands in the air and exclaimed "WHY???????" you know what I'm talking about. This is particularly fun during fire fighting, where the answer is that I might find the bug 30 seconds or 3 days after we end this meaningless conversation because I have no basis for an estimate, much less a guarantee for when it'll work.

Yes, I know that for planning purposes you have to make some kind of educated guess but I can only estimate what I know needs to be done, not the "unknown unknowns" that can throw your estimates off by an order of magnitude or simply make it unfeasible. This is particularly - but not only - true when you're working with third party software and libraries. I say I have a worst-case estimate but really that's probably the 95th percentile, there's no hard limit where you can guarantee it'll work.

What kind of meetings do you go to? Most my meetings have more points on the agenda than we'll conclude on and the remaining discussions are tabled to the next meeting because some of the members have to attend other meetings, the room is booked for a new meeting or people need to leave for the day. Status meetings can be the exception when there's a fixed time slot set off every week and not much is happening, but rarely those where we plan the schedule and resources, discuss the architecture and design, solve implementation issues and so on. It always could be fine tuned further, the question is if it's good enough that we can move on or if we have to resume the discussion later.