My fear is that the easier it is for manufacturers to update the software, the sloppier it will be on initial release. You already see this with computer software. It'll be terrible until six months after the cars go on sale (and maybe longer). Then they'll give up entirely a few years later when the new revision comes out.

I appreciate my 14-year-old car with manual, physical switches and buttons for everything more every time I get in a new car these days.

It more like it's unreasonable to expect a person to be able to sit and pay enough attention to what's going on when they're not engaged in the task at all. I either want full control, or no responsibility for control.

What I meant by 10-15 years worth of raises was that I would have had to stay there that long to equal the increase I got by moving on after a handful of years (at my last job, you'd get +$1-2k/yr regardless of merit, and I got +$25k for jumping ship).

I agree that being somewhere for along time with no promotion can be a red flag, but I've also worked places where they'd rather hire externally than give someone too big of a raise.

I also tend to choose jobs based more on what I can learn than what I can earn. Then, so long as you can learn, the money comes naturally. My current job has so many opportunities to gain experience with technologies I haven't worked with before that I'd probably stay here for a while even with no raises at all, knowing that I'll be worth a ton more when I did finally leave (but they actually have a sane promotion path, with technical track positions all the way up to SVP/EVP level).

As much as I normally hate litigation, I'd kind of like to see anyone contracting something dangerous like measles from someone who chose not to vaccinate turn around and start suing the shit out of them. People might not listen to sense, but they probably will listen to their pocketbooks.

Even parents that that have to quarantine their children who are too young to be vaccinated due to exposure and have extra expense or must miss work might be able to have standing.

This is usually the problem right here. The last two times I've switched jobs, I ended up with a pay bump equal to about 10-15 YEARS worth of the wimpy raises I got for keeping my valuable institutional knowledge at the same place.

The limits most places put on promotions & raises mean you're usually shooting yourself in the foot if you stay someplace more than a few years.

3Mbit up? It's still garbage. Wake me up when they make it 25Mbit up & down.

It doesn't really make sense for MS to use a subscription model for the OS, even from their perspective. I would actually be perfectly willing to pay $20-30/yr, but the problem is, what happens when I stop paying, or some kind of problem occurs with the system? If it totally locks you out, you'd have people lining up with pitchforks and torches. If it just stops getting updates, you have a bunch of insecure Windows boxen, that would make MS look bad. You could potentially turn it into nagware, but you'd still have people just ignore it. Same with doing nothing - people would pay for the first year, then stop. So, you charge several years' worth of "subscription" up front, and then provide updates until the EOL date.

Well, no one said they were planning on making a profit selling it. Could be propped up by other sales, just to push competitors out. Or maybe to game the "fleet average" fuel economy numbers.

I'm sure that customers with astronomically expensive or critical payloads will always have the option to specify a "new" booster if they're willing to pay more.

On the other hand, if you need to launch a constellation of 20 satellites, it might be much cheaper to budget for 22-24 cheaper "used" launches than 20 more expensive but more reliable new ones.

I beg to differ. Games that are trying to run hundreds/thousands of copies of a unit AI or pathfinding (Dwarf Fortress, RTSs, etc.), or are doing tons of physics (KSP, From the Depths, etc.) are what usually end up causing slide shows for me these days, not the graphics. More cores & threads, please. (Yes, I'm aware that a lot of times this due to the games not taking advantage of existing cores)

The real problem is that some desktop tasks really need one thread to run as fast as possible, and others (path finding for 200 drunken Dwarf Fortress denizens, for example) would benefit from having 100 somewhat slower cores. When you buy a desktop CPU, all the cores are the same, and you end up having to compromise between number of cores, single-thread speed, heat, etc.

Maybe it's time we started designing systems with two separate chips - one dual core chip optimized for running single tasks as fast as possible, and another with 10-50 simpler cores optimized for parallel tasks. I think we're halfway there already, what with GPUs being used that way to some extent, but standardizing it would actually allow non-custom applications to make use of it.

If you're a 'suspect', and they want to talk to you, then at a minimum, you're forced to pay to retain counsel (unless you're stupid, and talk to them without one). So you're screwed no matter what at that point.

My favorite way to deal with people that claim a right to not be offended is to point out that I find them taking offense at whatever stupid thing they're on about very offensive, so by their own logic, they must stop being offended because they're violating my rights. :P

What we really need is a purpose-built "CopCorder" device. Has a camera and mic that records to local storage, and streams via 3/4G to mitigate confiscation. It would have a panic button that can be configured to lock it into recording mode for a time period, until the battery dies, or it's destroyed (so it's physically impossible to comply with any order to turn it off). The storage to local media means that if THEY destroy it, they've destroyed evidence, and you probably have a recording streamed of them doing it. If they confiscate it, you continue to get the streamed recording of whatever they subsequently do/say. Bonus if it can support a hidden external bluetooth or whatever external camera or mic, so if they take it and put it in their car or something, you may still get a recording.

Or quit buying AAA titles at all. There are enough good indie games around that I haven't even got around to looking at the big names for the last two years. Even the pre-alpha/alpha/beta versions seem to have fewer bugs (and they get fixed faster) than a major release of a AAA title.

Makes you wonder just what the budget split is in the big studios between bling/marketing/executive leeches and actual development.