They are there to fund themselves, usually by writing grants and getting their indentured grad students to do the work.

A lot of the issue boils down to a gap between college and "career" for the first 2-3 years after college. Employers know that hiring a guy with a physics degree to do an engineering or programming job job will be a money loser for at least a couple years, even if they are pretty darn sure he'll come up to speed and be a major contributor. It is safer to either hire someone who is already trained (and grill them about their possible lack of loyalty), or to get someone with just the right set of skills to minimize the training. After a new guy/gal has some experience there is no assurance that they will stick around. Often you can't get a decent raise, no matter how well you are performing, without jumping ship to another company (a dose of bureaucratic stupidity worth ranting about all by itself).

At-will employment has made this entry level dance crappy for both sides. Everyone knows that they can be let go at any time with nothing guaranteed beyond a cashout of their meager vacation accrual. Employers know that if they sink a large amount into an employee to bring them up on a new or in-demand skill it increases the likelihood that the person can get headhunted away. Stock options and other incentives try to patch this broken relationship by putting some carrots out there, but the young guys usually get very few of those until after they have proven themselves (and a lot of companies has dispensed with them for peons entirely). Other companies know they most incentive plans are crappy and they matching the loss with a hiring bonus and/or sign-on options and still be cheaper and easier than training one of their own (and outsiders are smarter, obviously, than the whiners already sucking at the payroll teat).

It is all pretty perverse. I work in the states for a foreign company, and having a counterpart doing the same job with a very different employment setup regularly makes me question the US system. My counterpart is part of a union, has many more holidays, more vacation, has his hours strictly limited, is not allowed to work at all from home, and cannot be easily laid off (and his college was tuition free).

Somehow EULA's need to get reigned in.

Perhaps we need to fight fire with fire. Maybe start slipping a CEO's first born clauses into open source software, or other ridiculous things so that a few major corporations can find themselves signed up to make major donations to charity after their employees clicked through the latest update.

We are supposedly a country of rights and laws, but we have run out of times and places where those rights have not be superseded by some arbitration clause, or some automatic opt-in BS.

The FMEA's I was party to were basically to give cover. "We had an FMEA, and it still managed to fail." When usually it was actually managed into failure despite engineers asking for more time and less feature creep, and specification uncertainty.

Sounds more like a socialist paradise you are describing.

A Libertarian one would be a bunch of toll roads where the operators can make bids based one money, speed, and number of potholes for the automated system to heuristically choose between to optimize your travel experience.

Yeah, my first thought was that this was technology solving the wrong problem. Local governments cut road repair costs before cutting things like salaries, and understandably so. So in most cases I think our bad potholes are not a matter of a poor reporting method, but rather of neglect and underfunding. Without a steady and sustained funding source our roads and infrastructure vary in quality quite a bit more than is ideal. Nice to see these car companies worrying about their delicate little flowers having a bumpy ride.

If autonomous cars can't handle shoddy roads either HAL will get shut off so I can cross lanes to get to work, or there will be enormous pressure for local governments to keep the roads up to snuff. Guess which one seems more likely to me?

Similar here, but mine is >6 years old (I think?).

i7-920 at stock 2.67 GHz
GTX-970
500 GB SSD drive
9 GB of whatever RAM came in it
4k Crossover 44k display

The SSD was a big upgrade, as was the 4k display. I have a 2 year old, so I don't do much on it anymore, occasional gaming to wind down, but most of my hobbies have been mothballed since the kid came along.

I intend to upgrade the CPU/motherboard once Skylake comes along. The faster SATA3 vs SATA1 speed would be nice for the SSD, but on the whole the death of Moore's law makes the upgrade options pretty disappointing.

Right now we have a very wide variety of drivers on the road. If we move to a mostly autonomous situation it is quite possible that bizarre and unexpected patterns of interactions will show up. Imagine having a group of Brand A and Brand X cars in a group. If they have different reaction times and following distances it might degenerate in a group of lurching and pulsating speeds in unexpected ways.

I don't think it will be necessarily worse than today, but I expect there to be failure modes that are hard to predict until we've actually tried it all out.

Have you every tried to do real work as a passenger in a car? Many folks get nausea just trying to read as a passenger, if nothing else it is very distracting to get jostled around at every stop and turn.

A likely unintended consequence is that if driving to work is less annoying you will see people commuting from even further away to save on housing costs. I see eating, TV watching, and napping on the way to/from work as likely outcomes more than getting any actual work done.

Many busy people are likely to shut it off as soon as it obeys speed limits and fails to weave through traffic as they prefer.

Really sounds like some major whining for the minor annoyance of free stuff screwing you, and not being able tolerate a slight slow down in using your other free program.

My same thoughts. Expect them to use photoshop and medified EXIF data to send future bombs strategically elsewhere.

The Brits broadcast false news about V1 and V2 rockets landing in southern London to get the German army to adjust their targeting to land them past the city and cause a lot less damage. The game is likely to continue with social media instead of broadcast radio.

If you delete data on a day to day basis there is no issue. However, once there is an incident and this is the reason you go an delete stuff you are breaking the law. Nothing new here. Companies who have a legal deletion/shredding policy and regularly implement it are fine (and must not continue to exercise it documents subject to a subpoena once it is issued). Companies who only selectively exercise that policy when they suspect litigation may occur, or after a subpoena has been issued are breaking the law.

I am still waiting for a clear picture of their revenue model. Is this a case where they just are charging for new installations since almost nobody buys retail Windows upgrades, or are we paying to decripple our systems along the way?

I am honestly wanting a clear explanation as to how this is supposed to work in a way that they are not losing revenue (MS doesn't know how to do that voluntarily), yet not end up doing something evil (that they have down pat).

Obligatory XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/927/

Works both ways. I share my opinions liberally of the bad shops amongst fellow engineers. Word gets around, and they have a harder time getting decent folks. Active Karma baby.