It all comes down to economic efficiency. Manufacturing costs have plummeted while labor costs have skyrocketed, so it's not a productive use of one's time to repair. Time is expensive, stuff is cheap.

Repair isn't the only skill that's suffered; we've forgotten how to farm, forgotten how to weave our own clothing, forgotten how to do many things that were required of a household a century or two ago. It's also why we get connected halfway around the world for customer service and don't get our fuel pumped and windshield washed by a whistling attendant.

Whether this is ultimately good or bad depends on your point of view, but unless we run short of raw materials, drive up costs via pollution taxes, or see an economic meltdown in the west it's not likely to change course. Rising wages in China and other industrial companies will only do so much before factories switch to robot labor.

There's a big difference between allowing something and requiring it. I think OO was the natural evolution of concepts like interfaces and namespacing, but what sets it apart is that it insists (so far as it can) the developer encapsulate information, while procedural languages at best suggest it.

Of course it's possible to write clear code in any paradigm, and some of the most beautiful code I've ever seen has been purely procedural, but that is unfortunately the exception. Most code I read is pretty poor, and the worst OO code I've encountered is far ahead of the worst procedural code in terms of readability and maintainability. I'll take the kludginess of OO over the heroic measures it takes to keep a large C project from turning into an unintelligible mess.

OO isn't about anthropomorphism, it's about isolation and providing a clear API. If this was a large scale project with fifty people working on code that could move students, I don't want them implementing fifty different versions of move_student that will break whenever the Student or Classroom model changes.

I know it's trendy to hate on things that have been around a while, and OO indeed isn't the answer to everything, but it's still a useful way of keeping a complex program from getting out of control.

Sorry if that came off a bit harsh, but it should be fairly obvious that multifocal lenses are not suited for viewing objects at a fixed distance. Everyone I know with 'progressive' lenses dislikes them; they find them disorienting and only wear them because they want a single pair for all purposes and hate the look of bifocals.

Your eyes are not something to be trifled with; get a pair of proper conventional lenses that suit the distance you will be working at and save yourself the misery of 90% of your vision being out of focus all the time.

So you're asking us how to use the worst available tool for a task... better?

Android significantly less than 1GB? Hardly, unless you're managed to strip it to bare bones. iOS devices reserve about 3GB, and Surface tablets reserve 15-60GB (I kid you not) for Windows RT/8

They're just trying to remove crud from the web. Is that so wrong?

No, they definitely break.

sorry, clips not chips (autocorrect strikes again)

Unfortunately the defects were in the chips they sourced from nVidia and to a lesser extent ATI/AMD, and there's little computer manufacturers could do to avoid it. It's true that Apple runs components fairly hot to reduce fan noise and that accelerated some failures, but the real culprit was the early attempts at lead-free solder companies were using to meet new RoHS standards.

Fixed a MBP's bad nVidia chip using a heat gun, an infrared thermometer, and a shield made of aluminum foil. I wouldn't recommend the oven approach unless you're desperate, since many parts are really not meant to go past 100C, much less the ~250C required for proper reflow.

Oh, and whatever you do, be sure to remove any plastic/rubber chips or standoffs first as they will most certainly melt, and reapply thermal paste afterwards (Apple and many OEMs are infamously bad with thermal paste, so this is a good idea whenever you crack open a laptop).

I got in just long enough to see #lahar is trending.

The base iPad Mini 2 lists at $299 and was as low as $229 during recent sales; the N1 is launching at $249.

Last time I checked, humans today can't easily tinker with their own bodies and brains, they have plenty of known bugs and vulnerabilities, and many methods of altering their function are heavily regulated if not illegal.

While I support the author's idealism, what do you think will happen in this cyborg future when software can be physically addictive or kill you or change your personality? People have always been willing to give up a certain amount of freedom for a certain amount of security, and they will continue to do so.

Good luck finding devices that get dim enough, though; manufacturers have focused on making screens brighter for daytime use at the expense of nighttime usability.

About the only devices I have that dim enough to tolerably use in a dark room are my Retina MBP and iPad, and even then I must use f.lux or light-on-dark color schemes to make it comfortable. I've tried screen filtering apps for Android, but they never seem to dim the soft keys and can cause unexpected battery drain.

Oh, and don't get me started on backlit keyboards.