Well, one thing should be quite clear: for factual historical information you do not turn to the media, and I say in this case Google qualifies. You read and you ask the proper people, and you learn. You can't argue or discuss about a topic (*) if your knowledge base comes solely from the internet - well, you can, but you won't ever be taken seriously, and rightfully so.

(*) Of course we're not talking about hardware reviews or celeb gossips...

I've never, ever in my part of life connected in any way to computers have I seen an Acer product that would've jumped over my quality threshold. I've never bought any of their products, but I've seen enough to know I made a good choice. Their Predator is no less disturbing - anyone (well, not anyone, ...) can put together PC parts, but it would be really an impossible task to find a worse PC case than they've built their parts into. Anyway, if they think they'll be the last to go, then I really hope I won't live to see it.

"features that I would like to find in a service: respectful of user rights, ad-free, built upon open source software, and with auditable results"

Well, well, well. For me there's only one single feature of a search engine that makes it a go or a no-go: have a damn good indexing engine that can provide relevant results in a timely manner. Everything else is just a load of crap that I will never care about. If I can't find what I'm looking for, that I couldn't care less how it protects your rights or whether it is open source or not. Oh yeah, about that auditability... forget that. I don't want to find what other people think I should find, I want to find the best match for my queries. That said, good look, develop away, maybe you'll indeed make a better indexer and ranker than Google's and we'll be all better off.

"Visible global filesystem on a phone always seemed like a gee-whiz feature that wasn't really justified. Frankly I think the visible global filesystem on personal computers isn't really justified, considering how many people just dump everything into ~/Documents and most productivity apps have their own bespoke document browser/organizer."

First: average users being ignorant doesn't mean what they do is OK, or acceptable for everyone.
Secondly: for crying out loud, how many times do we need to repeat that not everyone is in a constant consumer-only mode, and - surprise - not everyone is an idiot.
Third: I'm just simply too tired with the leagues of idiots thinking dumbing down everything to the point of frustration and sometimes sheer pain is the way to go.

I've been on planes landing in ridiculously high side-winds that I'd have a really hard time believing an autopilot could ever land safely, or for that matter, a human controlling the plane remotely - for the simple reason, that in these cases one needs to actually 'feel' how the plane reacts, and neither an autopilot, nor a remote joystick-operator can accomplish that. On a sidenote, there is no way in hell I'd trust hundreds on human lives to an autopilot built with technologies that we have today - what we call artificial intelligence, and what we have as machine learning are so far from such a thing, that it's not even funny. Unless we'll have R. Daneel Olivaw piloting that plane, I'm not boarding it :P

"The Internet is such a powerful environment, where you can enter any question, and you basically have access to the world's knowledge at your fingertips,"

No, not exactly. First, it's not the 'Internet', it's the search engines that give you that power. Secondly, just do a simple test and try 3-4 search engines to look for something more deep than names of celebrities and see what you get, if you don't submit the right query string. Nowadays some search engines are fairly good in 'guessing' what you mean, but most are a crapload of bonkers.

My point is no, Google doesn't make 'People Think They Are Smarter Than They Are', it's the smartass people who make themselves think they are smarter because they can eventually find something they are looking for.

" It all varies in quality, but it doesn't take much effort to find them."

But it does take much effort to watch them. While the intentions are laudable, quality is important. Even a good story can be mightily ruined by too simplistic rendition and/or unskilled acting and/or unskilled filming/camwork. And they usually are.

"delivering enterprise grade security and privacy"

Somewhat offtopic: I'd so wish people would stop flinging this phrase around, like it would actually exist... That enterprise grade security has failed millions of people over the years, sometimes quite spectacularly. Adding a heuristic set of mixed-up unreliable biometrics won't change that, but it will make your life hell, when it fails (as it inevitably will). All that incorporated into an OS that likes to call home more often than an average person calls their Mom :)) So, good luck with all that :))

I've used GPG since... I don't even know, for a very long time. However, since I communicate a lot internationally, and I don't know (and I don't want to know) about every country's regulations regarding encryption, I gave up sending encrypted e-mails at the very beginning, but I still always sign my mails. I never even thought about how many people use or don't use GPG, it's just been there, ever so useful - and I think that's good so. I think "run its course" is harsh though. Why? Because one Moxie Marlinspike says so? Bollocks. If it's useful - and it is -, it's good to have it.

"I doubt any one person has full knowledge of how a computer works. I have a reasonably good grasp of most of the software layers, and a fairly good idea of how the hardware abstraction works, but reading about the pentium division bug makes it clear that an undergraduate math degree is not enough to understand the inner workings of the CPU."

In my third year we had a 'digital computer architectures' course, which should be compulsory at every uni for every CS/IT student, regardless whether they just want to become coder monkeys or sw engineers, etc.

Actually my first M degree was called 'IT engineering', which was hard to explain to a lot of people, so I always told I had a CS degree. However, when I started to move more around internationally, and I learned what a CS degree in the U.S. means, I stopped doing that. My opinion is (and not just mine), that any degree that has CS or IT in its name has to include courses about computer architectures, electrical engineering, math&algorithms&numerical methods to some extent, simply to provide a basic background knowledge, so the graduates will have something to build upon later, having a better understanding of how things work.

In the extent of relevant background knowledge, U.S. CS/IT master level university programs still fall very much behind in what central/eastern European universities can provide (despite the huge financial differences), and with a strong background knowledge and understanding it's always easier to go forward professionally.

"so you no longer need to hire someone with a doctorate to use a machine learning algorithm"

Unless you actually want that someone to actually know what they are doing, e.g., to know that there's no one-size-fits-all "machine learning"...

Only one comment I can think of: outrageous prices (still, and again) combined with outrageous terms.

Regards,

a European broadband user.

It's not the sheer number of hypothetically available charging points that matters. It's the accessibility (how many are pubically accessible on the street), the real number (number of publically available points per let's say every 100 miles), and the real availability (on average, how many of those points are available at any given time, taking into consideration that on car can block a charging point for 4-6-8 hours easily thus significantly reducing availability statistics).

Anyway, unless we're talking about a small electric car, used solely inside a city, and charged every night at home, I'm still not interested. Until the day we can drive 1000 miles with max 2 stops, max 15 minutes each, I won't ever be interested.

I'll say this: all this seems that in a world where most freedoms are being curtailed, this seems to be one issue over which people can still have some control. However, dumb and idiotic it might be. Now, I know that there are many kids who - for some medical/health issue - can't get some of the vaccinations. I'm OK with that. But people denying their kids the vaccinations that could save them from a lot of trouble, I feel that's simply stupid, and dumb beyond any conceivable sane limit.

I mean measles? Really? In all my life I have never met anyone who didn't get the vaccine for it. When I heard about how people don't allow their kids to have it, I just stood really dumbfounded. It's just simply one of those things you'd never have believed existed. These people really want to leave their kids vulnerable to all kinds of preventable diseases? I'm sorry, but to me, and to a lot of other people I discussed with about this, it just seems insane.

The U.S. is generally very protective regarding the safety of the country and of its citizens, so why not regarding the children? If we'd make a list of freedoms curtailed or stepped on in the last let's say 50 years, the freedom to unnecessarily endanger your kids should have been the first to go.

You can bash me all you want for this opinion, but I couldn't care less. Why? Because my kids will never get the measles.

Simply WTF. If nothing else but "names, birthdays, medical IDs/social security numbers" would've been stolen, that in itself would've been much more then acceptable. Hell, one would expect the most sensitive data of people would be more protected... At the very least, the company should cover IDtheft protection expenses for _all_, for at least a year, maybe more. Plus, they should be fined, with such a large amount that they'd get scared, and start implementing _real_ data protection policies. Yeah, you wish...

At companies and agencies handling such data, _all_ kinds of data leaks or thefts should be treated as criminal offenses and they should be punished, I mean really punished. If you can't handle the protection of the data, don't handle them in the first place.

While I also consider the thieves to be criminals, I'm more angry with those, who simply are inept to protect their best assets, even more so since they have the money, manpower and resources to do so.

Also, I'd like to see a national blacklist established, with all companies and agencies on it, who had similar massive data breaches, and made publicly available, so as everyone could judge and decide whether they'd like to entrust their data to such idiots.