Greetings and Salutations;
          Well, I have been editing and contributing to OpenStreetMap for several years now, and, I have to say that while there is a point to the criticism, in general, I would disagree with their analysis. It is a bit too self-serving for my taste. I do not own a TomTom, but, have had a couple of Garmins, and, have used a TomTom unit before. The commercial maps have been no better than the Open Source maps, and in several cases have been far less accurate. There are a number of places here in East Tennessee where the commercial maps have the GPS insisting that I am driving through the fields on the side of the road.
          One point where Open Street Map shines is that it has actual roads and trails in such places as National Parks and forests...where the commercial maps have nothing but blank green areas.

They're not using Pentium III based parallel processing machines.... :-)

Greetings and Salutations;
          Hum...I have, for years, wanted to see some of the outtakes from "Ice Pirates". It is a truly awful film, but, right after that line, there is a cut and from the expressions that remain on the actor's faces I suspect there was something terribly amusing and probably pretty crude that got said.

          Now, I am going to have to get a copy of it and inflict it on some folks....Sigh.

        Pleasant dreams
        dave mundt

Greetings and Salutations;
          I totally agree with the first line. It may be possible, by spending enough cash, to get a version of Windows that is secure enough to not get hacked every week...but it is neither easy nor cheap. However, there are no distributions of Linux that I know of that lack the tools to turn it into Fort Knox. I have had several clients that i switched from Windows to Linux. With Windows, they were getting hacked very often. After I set up Linux as their server software, they never got hacked again.
          As for the support issues....Linux makes it very easy to create scripts to maintain and update machines remotely. If it is a business setting where there are a significant number of machines on a network, then, IT should have a "standard" setup, and employees should not be allowed to pop whatever software onto their systems that they want, without approval.
          It is not a simple thing though, as it involves telling folks "no" and most people react like 4 year olds when this happens.
            pleasant dreams
            dave mundt

Greetings and Salutations;
While you have a point here, this is a bit of a harsh evaluation, especially since we do not have any information on the projects the OP speaks of. I can think of half a dozen places in Home Automation, for example, where a small, cheap, embedded controller, with a touch screen, would be a great answer.
While the solutions you propose are, in general, quite workable, what they lack is flexibility. For example, a mechanical timer WILL spray water at the same time, for the same volume, but, it has no way of knowing if it is pouring rain. Nor, for that matter does it know if the drought conditions have depleted the water levels in the landscaping more quickly than normal. These can easily be dealt with by a smart controller, with a couple of sensors added to it. Your second example, turning the lights on at dusk and off at dawn is specific enough that one would likely not gain a lot by automating it beyond a simple switch. However, what about a very cloudy day? also, what about turning the lights off when it is still dark? I will give you the car headlight example with no argument, though, as that is pretty well defined.
          Pleasant dreams
          dave mundt

It's good advice (your golden rule). There are only two levels of paranoia, to a computer security person. Absolute, and insufficient.

Agree completely. I've installed it and found it unworkable.

Do not down play Woz's contribution to Apple. One of the major reasons for the success of the Macintosh was the IWM chip that was the heart of it This amazing hardware hack coupled complex state machine logic and individual circuits together in one chip to become greater than the sum of its parts. Woz's design used the partial circuits in a dozen or more different ways, reconfiguring itself on the fly to do what needed to be done at that point. Could another engineer have done this design and made it work so well? Perhaps, but, I doubt it. "IWM" stands for "Integrated Woz Machine", and well it should. It remains a pretty spiffy hack,
          pleasant dreams
          bee man dave

You think there won't be after market programming for these cars? They can't stop you from rooting your iPhone or Android. New root kits are available within hours of a new "fix" to prevent them.

On the other hand, self driving cars would help in interesting ways. It could drop you off in front of your destination in a big city while you tell it "go park somewhere". Parking would be assigned based on availability and expected duration -- it sure would make airports easier to deal with.

You could take public transportation most days, and if you needed your car for an alternative destination after work or had to leave early, you could have it meet you at the office, or some half way point train station.

Long drive cross-country? Why stop? Just go to sleep and let the car take over for a while.

These are just a few that come time mind.

Advertising on web pages went from small, single banner ads to obnoxious fly-across animations and other practices that went past what I was willing to allow -- so I block virtually all of it.

Advertising on television has gotten nearly as bad. It's very poorly targeted, frequently either offensive or incredibly banal. It's disingenuous or outright misleading, and aggressive.

Programming is no longer a good enough trade for me to sit through the advertising.