I expect it is an issue of conflicting arrogance from Google and Detroit.
Tech companies do things fast, if it doesn't work, well it was worth a shot now for the next project.
Car companies need to make sure the car lasts for years, a ton a regulations are on them to make sure the car runs and is safe. Every glitch can mean you have to go to a congressional hearing.
Recalls cost a lot of money and it isn't just a software patch. In general things in Detroit are much harder then Google probably expects.

Normally poor quality isn't from the product designer, but some guy in middle management who want his bonus ships the product out before all the issues has been worked out. Then after he ships it out, factoring that they can fix the problems later on, then decides to move all the workforce onto an other project.

What is the value of freedom.
How many human lives are worth freedoms. That is the biggest question. If you want to be very safe, we need to live and work in a controlled environment with little to no freedoms.

If it were a Microsoft Issue, this would be so a bug and not a feature.

Linux/Unix are an old design of an OS. There are some designs in its main way of doing things that do not work in today's much more secure environment.

Things have been upgraded Telnet replaced with SSH, hacks on FTP to make it more secure. But the underpinning is still there. Back in the day where computers needed to do things.

We all love to be part of a social clique that will make you seem better then the rest of the world.
Mensa is one of those groups that requires a high IQ score.
Having a high IQ doesn't mean you are a good person or a desirable member of society. Just that you are good at tests meant to measure your IQ.

The IQ test is better at finding people who have mental retardation who may need additional assistance.

Well companies can do much more to improve on that front though.
1. Architect the product, not just build it. All too often the focus is on meeting business objectives and security is added later. An product that was well thought-out and designed handles security as part of the core design as well as the business objectives.

2. No Back door, design the program so the programmers can't get in without having rights to do so. The password DB should be only managed by the computer and humans shouldn't be able to figure it out.

3. Infrastructure planning. The Website shouldn't also be the Database server. The Database should only allow access from select sources, and give permissions that are appropriate to the user.

4. Plan for failure. Figure if someone breaks into the system find way to minimize the impact. Make sure the Salt for your hashes are hard to find, etc...

Right now at the Gas Pump we have 87, 89 and 91 gas.
Having this change to Gas, Charging, and Hydrogen would be a welcome sign.
The problem we have with our energy policies is that we are trying to find a sliver bullet. This isn't the case anymore, we will need to have a more diverse set of engines that run on different methods. This will allow for greater competition in the energy market and keep price per performance uniform.

For the most part these paid bonuses are not as much cheats but shortcuts from hours of grinding.
The cheat codes of old, had things like God Mode where you just won't dye, so you can go on and fight the bad guy boss bare handed if you want to. Or just automatically give you the ultimate weapon, or boost your stats to the max.

Now the paid stuff is usually gust giving you extra game cash to buy equipment where otherwise you will need to play the game for days to earn it.

Now also in the old days, most "free" games were shareware. Often you had a few levels then you needed to buy the game. Today you get the full game however you either are asked the pay for game upgrades, or sift threw adds. You are still paying for the game one way or another. Unless you were happy with just playing the first few levels.

The most amazing thing about the universe is the smaller something gets the more complex it is. Which is at odds to our general world view, where larger things are more complex then smaller things.

Just the fact the odds that we are hear thinking about it is such amazingly low probability Infinity/finite is practically 0% chance that we exist.

That is the reason for American Strength.
WWII Ended.
The US was one of the few major countries not ravaged by wars.
Having a monopoly on nuclear weapons, we were not in threat of retaliation for an other war.
The Men came back and with the GI bill many of them went to college.
After dealing with the Great Depression and WWII the population was starving to take advantage of the modern age, Cars, Radio, TV, a Home of their own.
As part of the great depression a lot of public works projects and infrastructure paid off. As well with the war effort manufacturing became optimized.

So we had all this stuff while the rest of the world is trying to rebuild. So the 1950's and 1960's was America's golden age. By the Mid 60's the rest of the world has been rebuilt and are in the process of getting back on track.

American dominance is less about how much better people we are, but more about being lucky enough to get a head start after WWII
 

The problem is while the money is going back to the US. It isn't a 1 for 1 improvement in American jobs.
American Companies are efficient, they are getting damn too efficient for the average working Joe.
Automation, electronic quality checks in the like. Means a a factory 30 years ago needed 500 people to keep up with demand needs about 50 people to today. Most of these 50 people are paid more, however there will be some at minimum wage too.

Well if you were to mine for gold, vs bit coins what is the difference.

Gold is just a piece of medal, while has some nice properties to it, its value is that it is a rare element. Bit Coins are from a unique hash combination which are rare to generate and is getting harder and harder to find. It is just the same thing.

The issue is mining isn't free, it takes labor and power to crunch the data, so if they told people with you 100,000 USD investment I can get you 200 bit-coins valued at 120,000 USD. However what they ended up doing is with that 100,000 USD investment the return say equates to 100,100 USD. So the investors are suing as they were expecting a 20% margin while they are getting a 0.1% margin and they could have put their money in something better.

Yes I pay for my Band Width.
I also pay taxes to support my roads, but if I ship out a product I need to pay the delivery company to ship the product. If I buy a product I either pay the shipping costs or it is included in the price. The shipping company and the retailer also pays for the roads and infrastructure too.

If someone wants to make a living providing a web site, they have to make money some how to get those silly things like Water, Food, Shelter, Health Care, etc... As well they need to pay for their bandwidth, their servers, power, often additional staff who wants their own Water Food and Shelter... A hobbyist can probably have a decent website running, but they will need an other job to keep it running. But if that website gets popular, and it expands it no longer becomes a hobby and needs additional funding and time to let it grow.

There's no way Amazon.com is going to walk away from $125,000 in free money when they have absolutely no risk.

No Risks except from legal action, possibly a class action suite. Distrust in the service and decline of its brand name. Lack of repeat customers and new projects being posted as they are afraid they will be considered a scam project as well.

I will not blame Perl or Slashdot. But MySQL and MicrosoftSQL 2000+

Late 1990s most programs were off a lot of file I/O. Writting to a file and reading from it. But full fledge Database systems were Expensive and took a lot of resources. So Perl with its Regular Ecpressions made it a great tool for handling these files.

MySQL and Microsoft started to push high quality, affordable and runs well on low end systems database software. Allowing for Languages with better DB integration without the RegEx ugliness so PHP and .NET took over perls web space.