This still seems baffling. But WWDC is next week, so maybe that will shed some light on the real story.

And here are the results: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=182AepOJjMs I guess he wasn't that good after all. Actually if you look into the story here it's really tragic.

In Objective-C of course ;-)

- (BOOL) isKnownMacVirus:(NSURL*) url
{
return NO;
}

Wrong. The body was made from waste cotton fibre bonded with phenol resin. It's a great material - light, strong, reasonably eco-friendly, non-corrosive. It's not a million miles from carbon fibre or even what this article is talking about. The rest of the Trabant was a conventional spot-welded steel monocoque.

It's lazy stereotyping to mock the Trabant without actually looking at how it was made. Sure, the design was dated and yes, the engines were terrible, but they were reliable and cheap, and actually a much more efficient car than most of the gas-guzzlers made in the west.

My main gripe about the Trabant's build quality was the poor panel fit, but that's not an inherent drawback of the materials it was made from, just a side-effect of somewhat old-fashioned tooling.

What autosave seems to miss is that deliberately NOT saving something is an active choice at times. If I have a document - a graphics file say - and I want to just try a quick experiment but don't intend to permanently change the file, then that's my active choice. But autosave subverts that, making the 'experiment' far from quick, and a lot more long-winded. You have to duplicate the file or open a copy, or else undo or back out the change afterwards. It's much more work.

An app we develop (Mac) provides a preference so that you can opt-out of the system's standard autosave and do it manually. It's proved to be an extremely popular feature.

This guy could do with learning about Gerald Ratner. Never heard of him? Google will help. He's not saying the cars are 'crap' of course, but it certainly seems like a very odd way to promote his brand.

The Concorde was most definitely NOT a failure. In scheduled service for 27 years? Almost 50,000 flights at supersonic speed? That's not a failure - plenty of "classic" aircraft have not flown anywhere near as long. Concorde's main problem was that the USA took against it out of spite, because they didn't like to be beaten in aerospace technology. (which is weird, because Britain and Europe certainly admired the contemporary achievements of Apollo, and the 747, etc). That meant that it wasn't the economic success it should have been, but it was and remains a technical triumph.

The real problem wasn't the shape of the windows (which were NOT rectangular, they had rounded corners), but the thinness of the skin combined with a stress point. The skin was thinner than typical because the jet engines of the day were not very powerful, so the weight had to be shaved down to the minimum that would work safely. Unfortunately they got that wrong. If it had been built with the same skin thickness as those pressurized Boeing/Convair/Douglas piston-engined aircraft, the windows would not have failed. But then the plane would have been too heavy to fly. By the time Boeing caught up 5 years later, jet engines were already much improved in power, making the weight saving unnecessary. Remember the Comet first flew in 1949 - that's very early, even pressurization wan't very mature, let alone jet power. Boeing's 367-80 which led to the 707 first flew in '54.

I must say I totally agree with you - including the Comet in such a list is utterly stupid. Sure by modern standards you can easily look back and point out various issues with the plane's design, but at the time, none of that was known. Every advance in a field is going to look quaint once sufficient time has passed. And as for the comment that "people died!", well that's a shame, but people die all the time. People died in Spitfires and P51s too, in far greater numbers. Does the fact that these aircraft were not proof against being shot down make them bad? Arse. (I know you didn't make that point, but if I'm going to rant I'd rather do it in one go).

Don't bother; don't buy/eat that crap.

SMS is much more expensive than data (though for no good technical reason - it's a traditional way for carriers to fleece users), so it makes sense to use data when possible. But if you don't want to use iMessage, you are not obliged to - it's an opt-in setting.

So people aren't flocking to become programmers?Good. It's not like the current rate has held technology back in any way - there are plenty of programmers - certainly enough to keep up with the rate that technology itself demands. More programmers wouldn't increase that, it would only make salaries lower. And that's probably why there seems to be a push from industry to get more people interested: more programmers = cheaper wages.

HVAC doesn't need controls. It needs proper measurement. Once it knows the temperature, it just needs to maintain it at 21ÂC. That's comfortable for everyone.

This could be a good opportunity to wake up the populace to the very real threat to their liberty that mass surveillance is. Or it could just be a stupid "action" thriller that focusses on the wrong thing entirely - Snowden's flight. I'll reserve judgement, but my bet would be on the latter.

way to[sic] left for me

Which means that by the standards of most of the rest of the world, he's probably a little to the right of centre. I can't understand you Americans - what's exactly so terrible about a little bit of social justice and equality? That's all the left stand for. You've been so brainwashed by years of anti-communist propaganda that anything that even slightly whiffs of "the left" is automatically, viscerally rejected without any real thought. For whatever the left's faults might be, the right's are far, far worse. We've now had thirty-odd years of right-wing government across most of the developed western world, and where has it got us? The rich have got richer and the poor are poorer, and no-one is any happier. What a great system! How about considering a few mild alternatives, or at the very least some moderation?