I don't mind the idea of hiding the error message behind some kind of "advanced" button on the error dialogue, but removing it entirely is just nuts.

On the other hand, I've noticed a steady decline in documentation for commercial software too. Manuals have gone from the thick reference books I remember from 20 years ago to little "quick start" books if you're lucky. More frequently no documentation at all.

Self documentation is going downhill too - there seems to be a trend to removing UI hints such as the short cut keys from menus, so where you would discover stuff from clicking around in the UI and seeing it, now it frequently seems that you'll never figure this stuff out without googling for an answer.

Error messages, too, have disappeared - back in the day you used to get a descriptive error that told you what broke. Ok, so the non-techies probably didn't understand them but at least they could ask a techie. Over the past few years, error messages have been replaced with generic "something broke" errors that give no one any hints as to what went wrong. Increasingly (especially on Android and iOS) apps don't display an error at all - if something breaks they often just plain don't work and its very difficult to figure out why.

I still don't get the whole throw-away culture... People seem to think I'm nuts because I don't have the latest everything..

Examples: up until recently I had a ~12 year old ADSL modem running my internet connection. At one point my ISP expressed surprise about this and suggested that I should upgrade it. I have no idea why - a new one would do *exactly the same job* as the old one, which still worked fine(*), so what's to be gained in me spending money to replace it?
(* ok, it was a buggy piece of shit; but since every other consumer grade ADSL modem I've ever seen, including brand new ones, is also a buggy piece shit, an "upgrade" would simply be trading one set of bugs for another set of bugs).

I still have a CRT TV. It works fine, it gives a good picture, it sits in the corner of the room. Various people have said I should replace it with a flatscreen. Why? In the corner position it's in, I would gain no more space, a flatscreen would just have more useless space behind it.

My laptop is now 7 years old. It's got plenty of memory and a CPU that's fast enough to do everything I need it to do... Yet people take the piss out of me having an "old" laptop.

Hell, when my wife lost her iPhone 3GS a few years back, she *wanted* to replace it with another 3GS because she had been completely happy with it and it did everything she wanted. But the 3GS was no longer sold - she would've had to get an iPhone 5 instead. And the only reason I replaced my last phone (HTC Dream) was because it died - the one I replaced it with (Samsung Captivate Glide) may be faster, but the form factor is nowhere near as nice to use and the support is abysmal.

I just don't get the pressure to have the latest gadget - if what you've already got still works and still fulfills your needs then why the hell would anyone replace it? People think I'm weird for repairing stuff that breaks instead of throwing it away and buying a new one...

And also aren't great at providing base load supply.

Don't get me wrong, I think wind(*) and solar are good ideas, but pushing for them to be our *only* source of power is a pretty good example of why the political "environmentalists" like Greenpeace are a problem.

(* But I tend to think that the variability of wind power should be coupled with a load that can be varied to match rather than trying to balance wind power against other generators. For example, when there's an excess of power being produced, utilise some of it to do stuff like cracking water into hydrogen, etc. for use in cars; then when the wind drops just cut production of hydrogen rather than having to deal with a shortfall on the grid at large.)

The problem is people conflating environmentalists (people who actually give a crap about the environment, learn and understand the problems and try to figure out a sensible way to make our lives cleaner) with "environmentalists" (the likes of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth who make a lot of noise about saving the planet but don't bother to actually learn about the problems and end up blocking every solution that isn't (in their eyes) perfect, failing to realise that there are no perfect solutions and an imperfect one is better than doing nothing).

You keep using that word - I do not think it means what you think.

It is some kind of a hardship because you still have to figure out which emails are legit - I'm not going to go log in to my bank every time I get a phishing email. When the vast majority of emails claiming to come from my bank are phishing mails, I'm pretty much guaranteed to miss legitimate ones unless the bank give me a trivial way to know that they're legit - MIME signed emails would allow that, but no banks seem to be interested.

Or they train them with exactly the opposite of good behaviour.

Case in point: a few years ago my (at the time) bank sent me a marketing email (and yes, I confirmed it was legit). It wasn't from the bank's normal domain name and it contained lots of links to product descriptions that were also on an unusual domain. It said that I could verify it's authenticity because it contained the first half of my post code (i.e. something that's trivial for anyone to find out). I complained to the bank and the regulator - neither of them would do anything. The bank's excuse was that none of the pages linked from the email asked for my bank credentials so it was ok. This kind of thing trains people to expect that their bank will legitimately send them emails with clickable links that don't go to the bank's main website - the distinction between a link that asks for your credentials and one that doesn't is going to be lost on a lot of people.

Similarly, my Paypal account is currently suspended because they sent me an email telling me I needed to "verify my ID" (by sending them a scan of my driving licence)... this email went into the bin along with all the phishing emails asking me to "verify my paypal account", so when I didn't send them any ID they suspended the account.

Now, banks _do_ need to communicate with their customers, and I can't discount email as a viable method for them to communicate, but they really really need to start providing a sensible method for people to authenticate the legitimacy of the email - why the hell don't they MIME sign the messages, for example? At the moment they are sending out emails that are indistinguishable from phishing messages and then blaming the customer when they get phished.

Well, not quite. As far as I understand, the ECJ declared the snooping law unlawful because it was too broad, and outlined what restrictions would need to be placed on any replacement snooping law. So parliament is basically just passing a new law with those restrictions in it to satisfy the ECJ.

Of course, that doesn't make the law right, but then neither was the original law.

I've written a bit about it on my blog.

Because there's probably way too much data for that to be a reasonable idea. Have you any idea how many planes there are flying at once?

You may not be able to serve warrants to actually force entry into foreign offices and collect physical evidence, but you probably can subpoena a domestic company and require _them_ to present things that are held in their foreign offices.

Of course, Microsoft et-al are right to fight this from a business point of view, since the "US can demand anyone's data" attitude is going to actively harm their foreign business.

In the UK, personal data has to be handled in compliance with the Data Protection Act. This generally means you're not allowed to store personal data outside the EU since it would no longer have the prerequisite protections. Microsoft usually guarantees to store your data in the EU, making it safe to store protected data on their servers. I'm not sure how this ruling affects DPA compliance - is it still ok to store your data with US companies on EU servers, given that the US now has the right to take it? I'm not sure, but it certainly muddies the waters.

Frankly, I consider it completely idiotic to store confidential data anywhere other than on your own systems, but a lot of people are pushing stuff out to the cloud with very little regard for the security of that data.

I do wonder if MS can just move their non-US servers into separate (non-US) companies in order to protect them from US jurisdiction. I'm sure they've got a building full of very expensive lawyers figuring that kind of thing out at the moment.

Hmm.. I forgot that the US banking system is nuts. Here in the UK I have 2 current accounts, 2 savings accounts and 2 ISAs and none of them charge a monthly fee...

That's more of an "all eggs in one basket" problem than a problem specifically made worse by being cashless. If you split your money between multiple banks then this kind of thing wouldn't be an issue (or have multiple credit cards, etc.)

I don't own a tablet - I use a desktop machine for every day work, a laptop around the house and an Android smartphone. I wouldn't really want to read books on my smartphone except in an emergency - screen's too small to be comfortable. And I don't want a bigger smart phone because then it wouldn't be convenient to carry around and I honestly can't think how a higher resolution display would make my phone better.

On the other hand, my wife does have a tablet... She occasionally reads books on it, but it mostly gets used for facebook, web surfing, photo browsing, etc. My experience of using it for reading books isn't great - if I want to sit in the garden in the sun I find the screen too reflective, and if I want to sit in bed at night then a backlit screen is really glaring.

I think, if I were going to buy a device to be an ebook reader, I would have to buy an epaper device to be really comfortable with it, and epaper is a bit too limited to use the device for non-book uses. So since I can't get a device that would be a reasonable all-rounder then I'm not likely to buy one soon. The perfect tablet for me would probably be one that has an LCD display on one side and an ePaper display on the other so I could just turn it over to choose which display was most suitable for the current situation - no one makes such a thing.

In truth, the prevalence of DRM on ebooks is likely to keep me from being especially interested in buying an ebook reader. Whilst I do consider tablets to be quite "shiny" and nice for surfing the web on, when I look at what I'd use it for honestly, I really don't think I'd get a lot of use out of it so there's not a lot of point in me buying one.

I don't think there's a lot of risk of piracy of paper books. eBooks are another matter, but they are one thing I wouldn't touch because of the DRM (yes, I know you can trivially remove the DRM, but if I'm going to have to break the law to use something I purchased I start questioning why I didn't just break the law instead of purchasing it in the first place).