Lighting (the Mozilla calendar app) is also pretty nice. Rust is gaining a lot of interest as a systems programming language, although not so much in the application space.

Again, hand waving without specifics. The most noticeable change for me was that they button to customise the UI is now on the toolbar by default, rather than hidden away somewhere. What can you no longer customise that you could previously?

I really don't understand this complaint. The UI changes were relatively small, and one of the biggest ones was making the 'customize UI' button more prominent in the new versions.

I switched to Firefox on Android recently because Chrome for Android has the same handicapped cookie management policy as the older Android Browser, but Firefox lets me run the self-destructing cookies plugin, which does exactly what I've wished for the last 15 years all browsers would do by default.

No, it's developed in the open, but it's really hard to get changes pushed upstream. We have a bunch of patches for the FreeBSD support and to improve sandboxing, and it looks like it will end up taking 2-3 years to get them all upstreamed. Meanwhile, the code follows the traditional Google development model of gratuitously refactoring things (are Google people paid by number of lines of code changed?), so it's a lot of effort just to keep the patches up to date.

Building schools after you've been seen to come in and overthrow their government doesn't buy you nearly as much goodwill as building schools after you've just helped them overthrow a foreign invader and then removed your military presence from the country.

Arming Afghanistan wasn't the problem. Arming them in secret (so most of the population had no idea that the USA was spending half a billion dollars a year on helping them fight the USSR and felt abandoned) and then cutting off the money as soon as the USSR pulled out and leaving the country a mess, rather than helping to rebuild schools and so on was the problem.

Cutting off the flow of gas would hurt Europe a lot more than it would hurt Russia at this point. Entering the winter with your largest gas supplier no longer providing you with the gas that you use for heating would suck. And as gas is fungible, it doesn't matter to Russia if we stop buying it from them, unless everyone else stops buying it from them - if China doesn't join in with the boycott then it just means that they'll be buying more has from Russia because the price of everyone else's gas will go up.

I'm not that old, but I work with quite a lot of people who are older than you at various big companies. They're all exceedingly competent. I suspect that's part of the problem for the grandparent: the older you are, the greater the expectations. If you're as competent at 45 as someone else at 25, then people start to wonder how you've managed to work for 20 without gaining more insight. If you hire a competent 25 year old, then there's a good chance that they'll mature and improve over the next 5-10 years. If you hire someone who has only achieved the same level of competence by the time that they're 45, then they don't look like such a good investment.

What high-level language does not depend on the C standard library and so would be suitable for implementing the C standard library?

It is possible, but for good performance it needs hardware support. We've implemented hardware-enforced bounds checking for C code using our processor. If you only care about accidental bugs and not about a malicious attacker, and don't use threads (or are happy to bound every pointer store with a transactional region), and don't mind that the semantics of C are subtly broken in the kinds of permitted pointer operations, then Intel's Memory Protection Extensions will do the same thing.

The OpenBSD philosophy says that the difference between a bug and a vulnerability is the intelligence of the attacker. There are lots of categories of bugs (null pointer dereferences, integer overflows) that were thought to be unexploitable, right up until someone exploited them. It's the same as with cryptosystems: the fact that you can't break your encryption algorithm doesn't mean that it's secure.

I remember when hard drives didn't fail. It was the time in between getting my first hard drive and it failing...

Actually, come to think of it, my first hard drive (40MB!) didn't fail, but my second one (60MB in a laptop) did.

Your laptop has to be on the same network as your backup machine, but even backing up my laptop over WiFi only takes a couple hours for an incremental backup. I don't have to leave it doing nothing, I just need to leave it on. If I haven't backed up for a while, I might leave it doing the backup overnight, but most of the time I run the backup while I'm working.

I bought 3 2TB disks just before the flood. About a month ago, they finally became cheaper than I paid. I'd been planning on swapping them out for 4TB disks after 2-3 years, but the 4TB ones are still 50% more than I paid for the 2TB disks. At this rate, 4TB flash will hit the £50 mark before 4TB hard disks...

The difference in cost between tapes and disks hasn't changed much, but the difference in cost of the tape drives to disk drives has changed hugely. You used to be able to get a tape and a drive for only a little bit more than the cost of the disk it would back up. It made sense to use tapes for backups then, because you could afford one tape for the same cost as a backup disk and add new tapes for very little money. Now, if you buy a disk at the sweet spot for price, the tape drive that can back it up to a single tape will cost you about an order of magnitude more than the disk drive. At that point, unless you want a lot more than 10 backups per disk, it isn't worth it.