It's not so much the lighting parts themselves I'm worried about, but the sensors, control systems, and the need to calibrate the orientation of potentially a whole set of very bright lights and the related sensors much more accurately than aligning the old dipped and high beam bulbs.

As long as the lead vehicle is stopping as a whole, as distinct from something falling out/off and potentially decelerating much more quickly, there is some truth in that.

But a lot of tailgaters on the motorway in the UK would likely be seriously injured or dead from the impact before they even registered the brake lights coming on as the car in front executed an emergency stop. Sadly, so would some or all of the occupants of the car in front.

These days, I no longer consider it extreme to slow down until the distance between the car behind and my own is safe for speed we're doing even if that means I drop down well below the normal traffic speed. If they're really close, I'll use the brakes to do it and not just easing off the gas, so they get the lights flashing at them as well. I'm always wary of frustrating the real crazy ones into making a dangerous overtake, so usually I'll try to adjust the speed somewhere they can and hopefully will choose to pass me safely, but on balance I think it's safer to keep that safety zone all around anyway.

I also fear the current trends will be a peak, but more because car manufacturers will abuse the new technology both to build in obsolescence and to spy on drivers in order to market newer cars to them.

Technology in cars is a double-edged sword indeed. Modern systems for things like fuel injection, ABS and AWD have brought significant improvements in both efficiency and safety, and in most cases if anything does go wrong they can give ample warning and fail to safe. But all the communications and interactions and remote access make me very nervous. As a software developer with experience in some related industries, I've heard way too many scary but probably true stories to trust that stuff on either privacy or safety grounds.

And you forgot to mention the subsequent retraction and unconditional denial that this was actually the case, even though it's mentioned in the exact same article you linked to. They could just be lying to cover themselves, of course, but usually when companies try to cover themselves like that they do it with weasel words and half-truths to mitigate potential lawsuits.

Well, drivers who plan ahead and drive within their and their vehicles' capabilities do have a much higher chance of living long enough to become grandparents...

This is actually the biggest single advantage of the modern headlight technology that is starting to appear, IMHO: these lighting systems do effectively run on full-time high beam at higher speeds except that they have mechanisms for cutting out specific part(s) of those beams to avoid dazzing other road users. They do it different ways -- BMW have been advertising something like this Ford system for a while, and the Audi matrix headlights are another interesting variant -- but the overall effect is still much the same.

The only downsides as far as I can see are the much higher cost and the reliability and maintenance issues. It's already reached the absurd point where I have to take my current car to a dealer to change the headlight bulb, because I don't have enough tools to disassemble the significant proportion of the front of my car required to access them myself, certainly not with me on the road. With the previous car I had, changing a blown headlight bulb was a two minute job requiring I think one standard screwdriver (and I'm not even sure about that; it may have been a completely tool-free procedure). With a new car, if one of those matrix bulbs blows or if the sensors that detect other traffic to adjust the lights isn't working properly, I expect the bill from the dealer will be astronomical, at least for a while until these systems are universal. Fortunately, technology with such obvious safety benefits tends to come down in price and gain widespread acceptance very quickly, particularly if regulation/legislation gives it a nudge. Except in the US, of course, where as far as I know driving cars with many of these safer headlight systems is actually still illegal on an obsolete technicality, but presumably that will change reasonably soon.

Depending on the conditions, even that speed may be unreasonably high. Consider a narrow country road where your lights are the only major source of illumination. A cyclist may be close to invisible until you have a direct line of sight to any lights they have on and/or your own lights hit their reflective clothing, but they could still be moving at considerable speed towards you. And on a narrow country road, they may well be cycling in unusual road positions to avoid other hazards as well.

Even a motor vehicle going in the opposite direction to you could be hidden by a bend or dip in the road so you don't see it or its lights until relatively late. If you assume you're both travelling at similar speeds, then if you're both going so fast that you're at the limit of your headlight visibility, you're almost sure to crash if there isn't enough space to pass.

The reason for the wave effect is at least in part because a relatively large proportion of the spam that gets sent actually comes from a very small number of sources. Someone figures out a formula for defeating the current spam filters on enough major systems to be viable and then exploits it heavily for as long as they can. The mail services note the changes in traffic, adapt, and block that traffic. On a really good day, a major spammer actually gets taken to court and removed from the system altogether for a while, though mostly that's probably just wishful thinking.

I might not be six sigmas from the population mean, but the aggressive filtering of Google's mail service is annoying me more and more. I don't use it myself, but quite a few of my recurring professional contacts do, often behind their own domains so there's no way to know until it breaks. Aside from the privacy implications of that, I'm getting awfully bored of finishing a day's work, e-mailing the results to wherever they need to go, and getting in the next morning to find a nasty note from Google that was sent back after I'd left saying my mail had been blocked because they considered something in the attached file a security risk. This is particularly infuriating if I'm working in the UK and sending the results to a contact on US time, because it costs between half a day and an entire day to catch up.

In fairness, if you have users who will double-click an e-mail attachment called "Naked Mila Kunis.jpg.exe" without a second thought, there's not much Microsoft or anyone else can really do to help them short of installing a dramatically more robust security foundation in the OS -- which I hope they will do one day, but it's an extremely complicated problem to do that without undermining usability too much in the process.

As far as software updates go, the vast majority of security vulnerabilities that get patched this way were avoidable with a realistic amount of effort. Many of them come from still writing system or networking software in absurdly error-prone languages like C and C++, for example. Plenty of them happen simply because someone decided to short-circuit a professional level of review and testing procedures, aiming for fast/cheap at the expense of good. As one of the few tech companies in the world that actually has both the resources and the talent to change that, it would be nice to see an organisation like Microsoft pushing for better standards, not joining the ship-junk-and-patch-it-later train as it seems to have been lately. And if they did shift the culture successfully, I see no reason we couldn't go back to having occasional security updates available on demand and keeping major functionality or UI changes separate and optional.

Alternative theory:

Every time a big established provider tries to lock users in with this sort of hostile action, they create an opportunity for someone to disrupt their market.

No-one actually likes software that gets updated to be worse than it was when they first chose to install it, just as no-one actually likes having in-your-face advertising or privacy invasions or spam messages when they sign up for free stuff. We now know that a lot of people will tolerate a lot of messing around from technology anyway if there's something in it for them in return, particularly on-line, but usually only as long as they don't think they have a better alternative, and sometimes only as long as they don't fully understand what is really happening or can find a way to rationalise behaviour they aren't really happy with.

Fair enough, but I think it's also fair to say you're probably the exception rather than the rule here, both in the frequency with which you switch vehicles and the diversity of the controls you encounter. Maybe it's different here in the UK, but basically one rental or courtesy car probably works 99% like any other, apart from the manual vs. automatic controls. The gear stick for a manual is always in roughly the same place, and every car or van I've ever driven that had 5+ forward gears had 1-5 in the same positions, with the only variations being where reverse is and whether there are extra forward gears.

But in most cases, the automobile someone drivers does not.

And when someone does change car, maybe every 5-10 years, getting up to speed with the new controls takes them a few minutes.

This is because, fair as the examples you give of evolving car controls might be, ultimately you still turn the steering wheel to change direction (and you turn it anticlockwise to turn left). When you get a different car, you still have the same gas and brake pedals you used to. If you drive a manual then you still have the same clutch pedal and probably a near-identical gear stick arrangement. The range of external lights and when you use them hasn't changed a lot in decades. The internal and external environment-related controls are still roughly the same. The changes are mostly cosmetic, more akin to changing visual themes in software than changing actual functionality to something significantly different that the user must then learn before they can use the software effectively again.

If software only changed its UI significantly every 5-10 years, and you could choose when to switch, and when you did it would still basically work the same way but you might have to spend five minutes figuring out where the main functions were found in the new version, I don't think users would be nearly as frustrated by the changes as so many are today.

Well, one unwelcome trend more recently is for software updates that actually remove or break functionality, or indeed the entire system. This has certainly happened several times with Windows updates, and other vendors have screwed up similarly (ask anyone who was using -- or rather, trying to use -- Creative Cloud a few weeks ago).

Another unwelcome trend is abusing the software update process to push entirely separate software. Windows update has been trying to get me to install various other Microsoft products for some time, and of course there was the now-infamous Windows 10 update nag screen a few weeks ago.

If you want to be taken seriously as an OS provider, you have to provide security updates for a reasonable period after someone installs your system, but everything else can and should be separate. They clearly can do it, because the Enterprise edition will.

However, given that Microsoft aren't making any money directly on providing the updates, not even to Windows 10 itself, and their stated aim is to monetize the surrounding ecosystem in the future instead, they have every incentive to lock as many people as they can into this compulsory update cycle and then start using the mechanism to promote or outright install new software or services that do make them money at your expense. And you consented, remember?

Yes they are, at least as currently announced. Unlike Home, with Pro you get to delay updates for a few months if you want by following the Current Branch for Business, but beyond that, if you don't install all the updates then you lose security updates too.

You will need the Enterprise edition if you just want to apply security updates and not be forced to update other parts of the system at all.

That's a fair point, but it's also true that as someone reasonably careful about security I have had far, far more downtime over the years due to bad Windows updates than I ever have due to intrusions.

The compulsory updates alone make Windows 10 a non-starter for me, even if I saw anything else that might make me want to upgrade. :-(