My dad also likes having a printer. I don't. They're high maintenance, and if that isn't bad enough, we all know the crap that ink jet manufacturers pull to drive our costs up even more.

I tried to persuade him that he didn't need a printer, but got nowhere. He still writes checks and orders more checkbooks when he runs low, sometimes prints out emails, and other absurdities from not connecting with what technology can do. He keeps his contact list on a handwritten sheet of paper beside the monitor, rather than using some program to manage that info. It's one of the cases where he didn't even use the printer, he wrote that all down himself, with pen and pencil. I've tried to get him to use a spreadsheet or at least a text editor for that, but he's just more comfortable with pen and paper.

That is standard denialist fearmongering and propaganda, this thinking that the only cure is lots of sacrifice. It's not true. It's the opposite. It will employ an awful lot of people to do much of the work we can do to address Climate Change. That's a lot of jobs.

Lots of those things will also make our personal lives better. In general, it's called efficiency. Now flat screens are in nearly every way better than CRTs. Refrigerators became much more efficient in 1996.

People should get over their predujices about what makes cars pretty, and embrace better aerodynamics. One example is the Aerocivic. As noted on that site, there were bonuses with the improved aerodynamics: the car is quieter, stays cleaner, and is steadier, which makes it safer. Trucks can use vortex generators. One guy I know objected to vortex generators on the grounds that they were ugly. I asked him why was it important whether an already butt ugly truck trailer not have these? Surely not for the sake of beauty?

Then there are roads. Who could possibly object to smarter traffic lights? Everyone who has ever driven much has had the experience of being stuck at a red light for nothing, because currently the devices are not capable of sensing traffic soon enough to be proactive. They are essentially mindless with no ability to learn traffic patterns and adjust their timing.

The law is neither perfect nor pure. Otherwise, why not have the penalty for a violation be death? But we recognize that some illegal acts are not serious problems, may be wrongly blamed on an innocent, or recognized as not criminal at some later date, and that where there are these doubts it is wise to have relatively light penalties.

Corruption is a big problem-- it's just too easy for a powerful business interest to bribe politicians to enact favorable legislation that is against the public interest and serves only to enable someone to line their pockets at the expense of the public. That's why we have such ridiculously long copyright terms.

Even when corruption is absent, the law can be too simplistic or wrongheaded. The goal is traffic safety. Speed limits are a simplistic and crude but reasonably effective means of making driving safer. However, there are times when it is acceptable to speed. For instance, if taking a seriously injured person to an emergency room. A friend of mine who works for the emergency department was once called and told to get to the hospital right away as they needed him urgently. He sped and blew through a few red lights, and a cop saw this and pulled up beside him, but he held up his medical badge and the cop decided not to bother him.

I hope you don't take that kind of crap lying down. Because when you do, you hurt not just yourself, but everyone. Were you mislead? Mislead or not, you definitely misunderstood the deal. Don't accept all the blame for that, they know very well that they deliberately make their deals complicated and confusing to cause exactly those sorts of misunderstandings. Did you complain to AT&T? The BBB? The FCC? I have complained to the FCC before about AT&T, and I got results. AT&T refused to admit that they did anything wrong, but in the interest of customer relations they refunded the measly $9 overcharge I complained about.

One of my PCs is a Gateway GT5628 PC with an Intel Q6600 chipset. Shutdown used to work every time on this PC, with kernels around the 2.6.32 version. By 2.6.38, shutdown was unreliable. About half the time shutdown works, and the other half the computer goes through the shutdown process successfully and at the very end, fails to turn itself off, sitting on the text screen with "power down" displayed on the monitor. I have to hold the power button for 4 seconds to complete the shutdown.

I haven't submitted any bug report. It would be nice if shutdown worked every time like it used to, but it's a minor problem with an easy workaround, so minor I figured no one would care to hunt it down and fix it. I haven't. I could try a bunch of old kernels out to narrow down when this feature was broken, but haven't felt it was worth my time.

Linux is very good about supporting old hardware, but inevitably some does get left behind. They deliberately dropped support for the 386 somewhere around kernel version 3.5. Other old hardware simply isn't checked. When was the last time anyone tried a mouse that plugs into the serial port? Not USB, not PS/2, but ye olde 9 pin (or 25 pin!) serial port? Last time I fooled around with one about 5 years ago, I couldn't get XWindows to recognize it. The fastest "fix" is to just get a USB or PS/2 mouse. Or, at the price of systems these days, a whole new computer.

LOL, that's great. Classic "pot calling the kettle black".

I've had many calls from those miserable sons of bitches. The first thing they say is "This is Windows Technical Support. Your computer has a virus." They persist even if I tell them I am running Linux. I've tried telling them to prove it by telling me what my IP address is, and they ignore that too and plow on with their script. When I ask them for their name and phone number so I can call them back is when they usually hang up on me.

What I find strangest is that, given how relatively expensive it is to run a boiler room, it is somehow still profitable to try ths. Adding computers to zombie networks just doesn't seem worth that much trouble, isn't valuable enough to warrant trying to do it on an individual basis over the phone. So, they must be after something more lucrative, like information for commmitting credit card fraud and identity theft.

Who's bitching? We like being called pirates. Everyone is a pirate. Sadly, some people are still ashamed of it, or afraid of copyright enforcement, but that will change. Sharing was the old normal, and will be, or already is, the new normal.

Everyone will eventually realize that the copyright extremists were controlling, tyrannical, hypocritical, propagandizing, rent-seeking scum. They twist meanings to equate copying with theft, and moralize to us about theft while they commit the very "thefts" they complain we do. They will take their place in history as bad guys akin to the Inquisition.

If it's power efficiency that's wanted, shouldn't ARM be mentioned?

Interesting that you mention Pepsi. Speaking of stuck in the 1990s, did you mean to allude to former Apple CEO John Sculley?

Yes, I've noticed that what Google is embracing with Android is the walled garden model. One little thing their search engine does, and a big reason why I'm trying to move away from them, is this redirection. Click on a link on their search results, and it doesn't send you straght to the linked material, no, it sends you to a Google URL that does a little something, then sends you on to the link. It's slow. I thought I could get away from that at DuckDuckGo, but they've been doing the same thing.

What about Google's language, Go? Anyone using that? I've been looking at webRTC, from Google, wondering if it could be used to move away from the client server model of web and Internet usage. For instance Skype (now owned by MS), requires that users connect to a central server, which does provide a little bit of service, tracking who is avaialble and who is away. But at what price?

As to being stuck in the past, I still don't trust Microsoft. Remember OOXML? That wasn't the 90s, that was 2008 when they ran their ugly campaign to cozen and bully ISO into making it a standard. Then there was the little technical problem from 2012 in which Windows 7 didn't offer users a chocie of browsers as they had promised, and for which Europe penalized MS. Now one of MS's latest stunts is this huge change in how they sell Office. You can't buy it any more, you can only lease it? If you think file format lock was bad, how about cloud dependency? Be a real shame if you let your Office 365 subscription expire, and lost access to all those documents you foolishly stored in MS's cloud. Of if you became dependent upon their services to sync and share your documents. Not to mention the little detail that sensitive info may be in their cloudy hands, ripe for data mining, seizing by law enforcement, or leaking in industrial espionage incidents.

A few years back there was a great deal of interest in computers doing visual processing and recognition, and I was doing a little work in this area. The interest is still there, but news about it seems to have retreated from the front page. The security industry was especially interested in facial recognition. Alongside that interest were the usual peddlers of hype and hysteria. It was difficult to sort through all the noise. When I looked into research papers, I found that the details told of all kinds of limitations. Yes, they could match faces with 90% accuracy. If the lighting was good. And was the same level in the two photographs. And the subjects were all facing the camera at the exact same angle. And the subjects hadn't grown or removed any facial hair or glasses, or even changed hair styles. And they didn't have different expressions. And the database didn't have more than a few hundred subjects. But never mind, soon we would have video cameras on every street corner, matching every passing face to enforcers' databases of millions of criminals.

Despite the noise, which might lead a cynic to think that it's all hype, facial recognition has improved over the years. It will be the same in robotics. We won't see Robot Basketball Player replace Kobe Bryant anytime soon, no Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island. But we will see more and better robotics. John Henry scored a pyrrhic victory against a steam hammer. Fighting like that to keep jobs from being taken over by robots is just as useless and futile.

We may yet see that promise of more leisure time come true at last, thanks to robotics. So far, all our labor saving advances somehow have failed to free up much leisure time. Instead, we've put that time towards doing more work. Our parents worked hard so that we can have a better life, meaning, less hardhsip and more leisure time. But it seems more leisure time doesn't automatically make for a more satisfying, better life. Asimov's combination of his Foundation and Robots books had this idea of robots doing so much for us that we became slack and unable to do much for ourselves, and at the same time very unhappy that the struggle had been removed from life to such an extent that it felt empty and meaningless, so that finally we had to abandon the robots. I don;t think that will happen either.

No, don't make the ads so obnoxious. I wouldn't block them if advertisers wouldn't pig out on my resources and force me to turn off the sound so I'm not embarrassed or distracted by some loud jingle, with blinking text, frenetic animation, and a flashing background. When ads take more than 5% of my bandwidth, RAM, and CPU, and make my browser unstable, I do something about it. If I have to reposition windows to hide obnoxiously distracting animation, I'll block it. IF it's not easy to block, I'll quit visiting the website.

I suspect part of the reason for the choice of QNX has nothing to do with technical merit or niches. It's out of a religious belief in capitalism, and doubts that a "communist" effort like Linux can really be sustained. Or in other words, FUD. Microsoft has exploited this belief very well. What does Ford use internally on the desktop? Large companies as a rule are conservative, and Ford is a bit more conservative than average for a large company and an automaker. Expect it's mostly Windows. That they recently were partnered with MS practically guarantees it.

As to the niche QNX occupies, yes, Linux doesn't fit well, but there are free choices. There are other microkernel based OSes that have the advantage of being open source and free. Minix 3, for instance. Better to put resources towards making Minix 3 into a quality, realtime OS, and formally prove its correctness, than accept never being allowed to examine the QNX source code. I should think part of Ford's deal with QNX is access to the source code.

Oh come on, Windows 95? The OS that couldn't even sit idle without eventually crashing? That's a real low bar.

I've heard from people who work with QNX that it has plenty of bugs. It may be secure, but it's actually not that stable.

It makes sense that QNX is overhyped and not near as good as some claim. Being proprietary and small, they simply do not have the resources to polish it and keep it polished. Linux has many huge companies paying for hundreds of talented developers to work on every part. In many cases, the best algorithms for many of the problems an OS faces, such as task scheduling, storage management, and networking, are complicated and difficult to implement well. It's no accident that there are more than a dozen good file systems for Linux, each with their points. Windows is still plodding along with NTFS and FAT. And QNX? They simply cannot keep up, even if they rip good code straight from Linux. They're going to skimp on features and choices, and what they must have will be the most dead simple method that delivers adequate performance, and spin that as a virtue because the code is smaller and therefore easier to audit and prove correct. If they discover that their design imposes a fundamental limitation, they live with it, while the Linux world can think of going for a redesign, because the resources are there. QNX could never think of doing a massive reworking of the system like the replacement of X with Wayland or Mir, or the development of btrfs.

Rejected for being too smart?!? What idiots! The problem is the opposite: trying to find smart people willing to do a dangerous and often tedious and boring job that nevertheless has many judgment calls that can benefit greatly from intelligent decisions.

In Lord of Light, a Hugo Award winning novel by Zelazny, a similar thing happened. At one point in the story, the leader of the oppressors has been assassinated and the rest need to pick a new leader quickly. They reject one of candidates, possibly the best one, for being too smart. He might have lead them on a more conciliatory course, made concessions, and the rest didn't want that to happen. Instead, they selected their most extreme hardliner. It proved a stupid mistake, ending tragically for them.

Let's be clear on what plagiarism is. It's deliberately and knowingly claiming authorship of the work of others. It's lying about who created a work.

Plagiarism and intellectual property need not have anything to do with each other. The people who argue that copyright prevents plagiarism are either confused, or trying to scrape up another justification to keep copyright. I think copyright should be abolished. And, that independent of whether copyright exists or not, plagiarism will still be undesirable, and that we can detect and punish those who do it. You don't see grade school students who are caught committing plagiarism being beat over the head with a copyright lawsuit, you see them punished with a failing grade, and perhaps detention.

Having said that, we don't want to get too extreme about plagiarism, start seeing it everywhere. Duplicate chess problems, in which someone honestly creates essentially the same problem that someone else did, maybe 100 years ago, are so common that there's a term for it: anticipation. Chess has been around for centuries, and it is getting harder to find original and novel concepts. Anticipation may become a problem in many other areas as they mature. George Harrison famously committed "subconcious" copyright infringement (plagiarism really) with My Sweet Lord, how should that be handled? The day will come, may already be here, when every possible short melody has been composed. What about ghostwriting, should that be accepted? We also don't want people bogged down trying to give due credit for everything. Otherwise, a research paper would have to credit the Phonecians for inventing the alphabet, lots of Greeks for various elementary mathematical concepts, the Babylonians for the base 60 time system we still use today, and maybe the Egyptians for papyrus, if the research is indeed printed on actual paper.