I think there will be a market niche to accommodate the previous poster -- imagine a car that works just like a traditional car, except that it refuses to run into anything. It will be analogous to a (smart) mechanical horse -- you can try to get a horse to run into a brick wall, but most horses are going to turn or stop before they break their neck. There's no reason a car couldn't do the same.

Damn right nobody dresses the gorilla in the room. Gorillas are inveterate nudists, and anyone who tries to force clothing onto a gorilla is going to regret it.

entrapment: undercover agent walks up to suspected terrorist: "here's the trigger to that bomb, it's yours to detonate." he (attempts to) detonate the bomb. he's arrested -- invalidly?

This article needs a soundtrack.

The next question to ask is, why should it bother a company so much that a companyname.sucks domain name exists that is not under their control? (i.e. why would they feel the need to spend $2500 or more to obtain it?)

It's pretty apparent that anyone who spontaneously types that domain name into their web browser probably already feels that (companyname) sucks, otherwise they wouldn't have typed in that domain name.

The other way people would find that domain name is by entering "companyname sucks" into a search engine -- in which case they will see all the "companyname sucks" pages, regardless of where they are hosted.

It's doubtful anyone is going to mistake such a domain name for a legitimate company-owned site.

And finally, paying the $2500 is definitely not going to prevent people from saying that "companyname sucks" -- they'll just say it on some other web page, and that web page's URL will be the one that comes up when you google that phrase rather than companyname.sucks. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, AFAICT.

I'd say that if companyname.sucks is getting a lot of traffic, that (company) might want to figure out why people think they suck and take corrective action, rather than simply trying to quash peoples' complaints.

Sorry, I know this is a really basic question, but a quick Google search didn't turn up any satisfying answers.

The question is: why is it useful to have certificates expire after a particular amount of time? Isn't that similar to writing a program that contains a bug that will cause it to automatically stop working in (so many months/years)?

The only reason I can think of is that if the certificate was compromised this would make sure that people eventually stopped using it; OTOH if the certificate is compromised you'd want people to stop using it immediately, not wait (however many) months/years before stopping; so presumably this wouldn't be a sufficient mechanism to handle that use case anyway.

(Replying to myself before someone else does...)

This problem is technically avoidable if every code author is careful to always use tabs only for each line's initial indentation, and never use a tab after a space (or after any other non-tab character on a line), and never use spaces as the initial indent characters.

However, in practice this doesn't happen reliably, presumably because the inevitable mistakes are invisible to the code's author (since it all looks correct in *his* IDE)

Because in every project that uses tabs,
The code is inevitably
        littered with
        the occasional
  line that does not line up with the others
        for no apparent reason.
        and you will spend part of every day
        either changing your editor's tab settings
        to match the tab settings of the code's author
        or editing the code to "fix" the problem
        (which will of course "break" it for the
        next person whose tab settings don't match yours)

If you avoid tabs and use only spaces, OTOH, the code formatting will look correct on any editor with any tab setting.

You appear to have either misunderstood the article linked to, or read a mistranslation.
The article is quite clear (although inconsistent in one place) - this is a *trademark* and not a *patent*. Trademarks can be extended by 10 years when they expire. The inconsistency is in that they say the trademark was last extended on 15 June 2005 so it expires in 2025.

If the trademark has not been used for 5 years, it expires.
Apparently Apple (Switzerland) is already advertising their new product which would indicate that they are confident of being able to sell it there.

Have you ever heard some of the more obscure Swiss German dialects?
"Rätoromanisch" is only spoken in Switzerland, but only in one rural corner of the country so it hardly counts.

... then you haven't hidden it well enough.

Real Programmers' Easter eggs can undergo code inspections without being noticed by any of the other developers. (Do it well enough and you might get talent-scouted by the NSA! ;))

In general I think that's true, but I wonder about whether it applies to the special case of EVs in 2015-2020, given the current rapid evolution of battery manufacturing technology. For example, what do you suppose will happen to the resale value of an 80-mile-range Nissan Leaf if/when Chevy comes out with their 200-mile-range Chevy Bolt at a similar price point?

Yes, but they suck quite a bit less than the electric cars of just a few years ago. The state of the art is advancing rapidly; every year there are more EVs and they become competitive for more use cases. The writing is on the wall.

I take it you do all of your programming in assembly language, because there's nothing to be gained by using anything higher-level than that, because you totally know what you're doing at all times?

(Or if not, you've tacitly admitted that there is a benefit to using a tool that enforces some level of safety; you're only quibbling about what that tool should be)

What can I say?
I *am* antisocial. If I'm outside walking/cycling/skiing/whatever, I don't want to be telephoned. Interactions are face to face or not at all.
I may have a google+ account (it came with the gmail address, which was a necessity when I bought an Android phone) but that does not mean I have ever used it, or the gmail account. No Facebook, no Linkedin, no Whatsapp, no whatever-the-other-one-was-which-Rupert-Murdoch-bought. I don't see a problem.