The assumption underlying your argument is that the HE technology is inherently less reliable. That doesn't seem to be true though. Japanese brands are incredibly efficient but also last a long time. It seems more likely that the manufacturer just saw an opportunity to build in some obsolescence and blame it on the government.

I'm sad to say that a lot of US and v European brands have gone to shit like this. With US brands they seem to get bought for their good name and then used to sell crap, and with European brands they just re-badge stuff or whore their name out willingly.

That doesn't sound like a bad thing at all. You had a problem, not enough water available. You took steps to address it. The overall cost to the consumer remained the same, the environment was improved, the problem solved and quality of life maintained.

Get ones that come with a good warranty. I buy the fairly cheap Osram ones, which I think are sold as Sylvania or something like that in the US. They come with a five year warranty so at the price I pay are guaranteed to work out.

Other brands that offer reasonable warranties are Verbatim (Mitsubishi), Philips and Panasonic.

To be fair, he is saying that even with a warrant of the device is encrypted and you refuse to give up the password they are boned.

Anonymous Coward owes me a keyboard because I just blew coffee all over mine.

The only problem with old cars is that they need maintenance. It's fine if you can do it yourself, but not so good if you can't. Some people like leasing because then they don't have to maintain the car themselves, even if it costs more.

OT but here is a little tip for buying expensive things like cars. In the UK if you pay for anything on credit card worth over £100 you get full protection from the bank. It's legally as if they sold you the product. They are jointly liable for any issues with it. Maybe in the US there is some similar way you can make them liable.

A few years back a guy bought a £27k car and paid the first £100 on credit card, the rest in cash. The dealer went bust and he didn't get his car. The bank was jointly liable though so had to pay him back the full £27k.

Some cars stop the engine when idling at the lights to save fuel. It sounds like the cut off device can't tell the difference between that and turning the key to the off position.

As for the highway stuff, I expect development was farmed out to the lowest bidder and they didn't bother with extensive testing, so it's not hard to believe.

Of course you blame the people who put the clamp (boot) on. Look, parking in the wrong place is bad, but making the car impossible to drive is going way too far. It's also counter productive since now it can't be moved from the space except by tow truck.

A fine is one thing. People make mistakes, they are under a lot of stress (in the example the woman's daughter had a life threatening disease and she was probably in debt from paying for treatment) and this sort of thing just makes it worse.

People keep saying this but never present any evidence. At best you get a few pathetic links to YouTube videos that don't offer any sources, or are told to "just google it" but when you do it's all stupid blog posts and bullshit.

The goal is to "catch" people before they commit a crime, i.e. when they are only thinking about it and no-one has been hurt yet. Therefore thought needs to be criminalized.

There are forum posts detailing how it was done and offering to do it if people can supply email addresses. It worked by brute forcing passwords, which for celebs isn't hard because you can find the name of their boyfriend or pet with Google. Then software from Elcomsoft was used to download the data from icloud, including deleted images that were in old backups etc.

Expect it all to be spelled out in detail in the inevitable lawsuits. It will be interesting to see what the dignity of a celebrity is worth.

It's interesting how the narrative has become "an attack on gamers" simply by people like you repeating it so often. The assault on Ms. Quinn is quite unprecedented I think, and Anita Satkeesian actually goes out of her way to point out that most gamers don't hate women and even the developers are mostly just lazy rather than malicious.

Of course none of that matters. The professional victims like Thubdetf00t have too much to gain, and it's easy when your audience has too short an attention span to view the original material you are criticising.

You assume an awful lot there, which I think is more telling of your attitude than anything. Maybe it's time you dropped the victim angle and tried to address the actual issue being discussed here.

They gave everyone a free rubber bumper to fix the antenna problems, without admitting that there was a problem. In this case they would have to give out free cargo pants or a lanyard case to suspend the phone around the user's neck.