The trouble with these things is that they want to "phone home" too much. For energy conservation, Nest talks to a Nest, Inc. server and tells it too much. The info it needs (outside temp, power grid load status) is freely available from read-only web sites. (Given a ZIP code, the National Weather Service site will return info in XML.) But no, it has to talk to the "cloud" and give out personal information. That's totally unnecessary.

ICU is medical reason. A heterosexual can't visit with children there half the time, and if you fail to fill out the correct HIPPA form, the hospital can't even acknowledge that you exist at all.

I have several Teletype machines from the 1926 to 1940 period. All are in good working order. They're completely repairable; it's possible to take one apart down to the individual parts and put it back together. But they're high-maintenance. There are several hundred oiling points on a Model 15 Teletype. There are things that have to be adjusted occasionally, and manuals and tools for doing that. Every few years, the entire machine has to be soaked in solvent to clean off excess oil, then relubricated and adjusted. This is the price of building a complex machine good for a century or more.

(The Model 33 of the minicomputer era is not one of the long-lived machines. This was by design. The Model 35 was the equivalent long-lived, high-maintenance product; the 33 required little mainenance but had a llimited life.)

The problem is C. Programs in all the languages that understand array size, (Pascal, Modula, Ada, Go, Erlang, Eiffel, Haskell, and all the scripting languages) don't have buffer overflow problems.

It's not an overhead problem. That was solved decades ago; compilers can optimize out most subscript checks within inner loops.

I've proposed a way to retrofit array size info to C, but it's a big change to sell. There are many C programmers who think they're so good they don't need subscript checks. Experience demonstrates they are wrong.

One problem with this is that there's already a documented history of companies rejecting bug reports and not paying the bounty, and then some time later include a fix for it in their periodic updates. It's basically the same process that causes a company's "app store" to reject a submitted tool to do a particular job, and then a few months later releasing their own app that does the same thing.

I know a good number of people who've been bitten by the latter, from both MS and Apple. In the case of a bug, it's a lot harder to document that this has happened, but various software guys I know express a strong suspicion that it has been done to them.

It's widely believed that corporations don't have ethics at all, only costs and income, which would easily explain this sort of fraudulent "offers" of rewards with no intent to pay. We've heard here often from lots of people who think that this is right and proper, and that corporations should only be motivated by the bottom line.

When combined with the growing penchant for treating someone who reports a security bug as a criminal "security hacker" and prosecuting people who report bugs in software products, this should reasonably make a sensible developer reluctant to take rewards programs seriously. Given an offer which could get you thanks and some money, or could land you in jail for your efforts, and no way to know beforehand which the company will do, why would you even consider letting them know your name?

(Actually, my name has appeared in numerous companies' lists of honored contributors thanks to my bug reports and patches. But I haven't sent in security-related bug reports to many companies, only to the ones I have reasons to believe I can trust.)

Well, as I've stated above, the problem is selling them. The kind of people who buy their cars aren't buying the arguments about electrics, it doesn't matter if they're right or wrong. They're the ones with the money.

If Mercedes became convinced tomorrow that they could sell more EVs than dino drinkers, that's the direction they'd head. If they can make balls-out concept EVs, then they can make an actual car.

I just (yesterday) found a module with a bright sticker that says PROTOTYPEN in the E-Box of my A8... egads!

But most of them in fact are in that situation. If you want to make no real sysadmin comments, I may well agree, but it doesn't change much.

I had a similar problem (although in my case they fixed it remarkably fast - in a few days) and that's exactly why I like to have both the stable and slow moving OpenOffice along with the fast moving LibreOffice.

Yeah right, there also were too many PC-makers out there...

It is a great thing that I can have both LibreOffice and OpenOffice installed on my PC without them knowing from each other so that when LO crashes on a document (which did happen here) I can still use OO as a backup.

Wrong, both have their place:

OpenOffice is the more stable "enterprise-ready" version that won't change too much.

LibreOffice is the bleeding-edge version that incorporates new features (SVG-support, yay!) but sometimes also introduces new bugs. They also seem to think that users should update every couple of months.

And the best feature of them all:

You cannot easily install two versions of either OpenOffice or LibreOffice, you can however install OpenOffice along LibreOffice, so you can have the best of both worlds.

I don't find it to be ugly, it just looks like another car to me. If you compare it only to the insipid selection of blandmobiles that we get here in the USA, I suppose it looks a little fruity. However, it is definitely better kitted than a base econobox. You can get all the same features on your shitpile, but it will cost more than 10k.

Actually, a lot of people buy an S Class (or the equivalent Audi, a well-kitted A8L) and then put many, many miles on them. It's not a coincidence that there's a bunch of 80's S-Classes with over 300k on them, and 90's S-Classes and A8s with over 200k. These are being driven by businessmen who will be able to write off much of the significant recurring expense of putting many miles on a german car.

In short, these cars are not made worth a fuck. They use components guaranteed to degrade when components which would hold up just fine are available. Rubber bushings (not sure of the material) and EPDM vac hoses when they could be made of polyurethane and silicone respectively and last the life of the vehicle. And everything is crammed into as small a space as possible, because that's how it is today. I have big fat meaty hands, a lot of these cars require me to take some stuff off so that I can take some other stuff off before I can get at a third thing. Even if you have a lift you're best off removing the engine in many cases because you still can't get access otherwise. But sadly, they don't have an engine harness, so you have to disconnect forty things to pull the motor. Perhaps literally; just the coil packs and injectors account for sixteen connectors on a V8.

S-Class and similar are for people with lots of money, and/or people who are playing games with taxes. Not for the plebes. You can own one only if you are a mechanic. The saying is that there's nothing more expensive than a cheap Mercedes. The same applies to VAG cars. You can't afford to own an old Audi if you don't turn your own wrenches.

For the money that Mercedes will cost you over its lifetime with major mechanical failures, nickel-and-diming you with electrical problems, et cetera, you could buy a Model S for the weekdays, and a used roadster for the weekend.

I suppose you could also buy a land rover or range rover to go next to the Mercedes. I see that a lot. If you get really lucky they won't both shit themselves at once.