TIOBE basically searches a bunch of search engines and other things for "$LANGUAGE programming", applies some magical fudge factor and calls that a result.

It's absolute nonsense. It's highly manipulable if you can convince people to use the " programming" wording. It's going to be highly affected by the appearance and disappearance of documentation websites. It will of course still pick up ancient archives of stuff that nobody is actually using today.

I have an extreme skepticism of that VB is anywhere near the top 10. The original VB died long, long ago. VB.NET wasn't backwards compatible in the slightest and I don't think it ever had much adoption, because what's even the point? You might as well use C# instead. In fact long ago I had a VB project I considered transitioning to VB.NET and quickly decided it wasn't worth it, and went with C#. That was somewhere in the early 2000s, and I don't think it's gotten any more appealing since.

TIOBE is still nonsense of the highest order, not sure why anyone bothers using it.

It's some search engine counts based voodoo. Maybe not the most terrible metric possible, but I have no idea why it's the one always being discussed when there's better things one could measure at this point. Like say, GitHub.

If we want to know what's currently most popular, what we should want is measuring the actual usage. That might be projects, or commits, depending.

Actually, there's a huge difference. It's called the "reasonable person test". In law, that means that if a reasonable person would not expect a hardware purchase to suddenly get massively reduced in functionality for buying a used game, then Nintendo generally speaking will be hard pressed to prove that their terms of service (being a contract of adhesion) are not unconscionable. In the absence of such determination, Nintendo disabling the device at least arguably has no legitimate basis in the law, and could be considered fraudulent.

Add to that the presumption that Nintendo has incentive to make used copies of games scary for consumers because they will make more money selling directly to the consumers, and this starts to rapidly fall into the "attempt to monopolize" section of the Sherman Act, which makes the behavior legally actionable federally.

I could go on, but it suffices to say that this is highly questionable on Nintendo's part from a legal perspective, and is a really great way to get their company nailed to the wall on multiple federal charges.

That said, none of the questionable legality of their behavior, their terms of service, or their warranty policy negates the fact that Amazon's vendor contracts determine whether or not Nintendo has to take the return, not any agreement between the customer and Nintendo.

That's where you go to your credit card company and issue a chargeback. Amazon really doesn't have a choice in the matter unless you give them one. As someone who has used this process successfully, it is absolutely better than getting screwed by a sleazy vendor.

Nintendo's perspective is moot. What matters is whether a contract of adhesion is so draconian that it would be held unconscionable by the courts. I would argue that it almost certainly would be held unconscionable under those circumstances or anything remotely similar to those circumstances.

And again, you're still talking about warranties. None of that matters. The return policy is dictated by a standard Amazon vendor contract, not by whatever pile of legal vomit Nintendo wants to put down on paper.

That said, installing a game presumptively manufactured by Nintendo or one of its licensees does not, at least to a reasonable person standard, meet the criteria you're mentioning here, which means installing a game that to the best of your knowledge is a legitimate copy of the game resulting in Nintendo choosing to brick your online access is fraud, and absolutely is grounds for warranty service, were you not returning the product through the original retail channel, which makes the warranty moot.

Nor does installing a game appear to meet the criteria here. The user did not use any game enhancement or copier device. The possibility that someone else may have sold a game that was so copied is moot. Nintendo still doesn't have any legal right to brick the device, even under a strict reading of those warranty terms.

And the fact that Nintendo has to do something to make the Switch 2 not work — that it is not the fault of the enhancement/copying device actually breaking the Switch 2, but rather Nintendo deliberately doing something in response to someone having used such a device — means that this warranty, if interpreted the way you interpret it, is likely not legally a warranty under Magnusson Moss, and therefore, sale of the product with such a fraudulent warranty would be per se illegal in the United States.

You can't just write a bunch of contract terms down on a piece of paper and claim that because someone appears to have violated them, that person has no rights. The law doesn't work that way. A company can disclaim a warranty only for things that were actually damaged by the use of third-party hardware, software, etc., not merely because of the use of third-party hardware, software, etc. The law is very clear on this. Their warranty terms do not give Nintendo any right to disable a device, nor to return a device so disabled, merely because Nintendo *knows* that someone has done so, much less merely because Nintendo *thinks* someone has done so. The legal bar is far higher than that.

No, the damage is due to Nintendo arbitrarily declaring that the device is banned. Installing a game is not consumer abuse, period.

Also, I think you're greatly overestimating how much effort Amazon puts into defective returns.

DOA returns don't work that way. As a vendor, Nintendo has two choices: refund the money and pay for return shipping back to Nintendo or refund the money and let Amazon scrap the product. There's no warranty involved at that point.

Yes, they absolutely could do that, and no doubt would. But A. they would take a monetary loss on that, because by law they would have to then sell that unit as refurbished, at a discount, and B. they would have to pay for Amazon shipping that product back to them, pay someone to check the product and repackage it, and then pay again to ship it back to Amazon. I'd be surprised if that added up to less than a $150 loss every time it happens.

In other words, the financial loss to Nintendo would be far greater than the cost of the game that Nintendo incorrectly believes that this person stole, so if everyone did this, Nintendo would stop doing what they're doing, because it would be a net loss for them.

Banning online access for a specific device is tantamount to bricking it, because that means you can't play any games that require online access. It's also theft, because they could not download content that they had paid for.

I can't. Either their servers are secure or they aren't; banning access from known-compromised devices won't change anything, because hacks will likely come from devices that are not known to be compromised.

Besides, reusing a game key number doesn't make the device compromised. You're trying to justify something that really isn't justifiable.

We often support and praise killing, not murder. Murder has a very narrow meaning, and is IMO per se evil, precisely because we have defined murder narrowly to include only premeditated killing without justification. No one praises or supports actual murder; to do so would be evil, even under your narrow definition, because it would be actively corrupting others to commit antisocial acts.

That's evil as a *noun*, sure. Evil is also an adjective. And whether used as a noun or an adjective, the word evil can also refer to the act itself, not just a moral condition. And as such, it can mean causing harm or intending to cause harm to others, and it can also mean morally corrupt.

In this case, the act of bricking a brand new game console without any evidence is doing an entirely evil act (harming others) in the name of justice. And from a theological perspective, there are few greater evils than this.

So IMO, your statement is not just wrong; it is bordering on heretically wrong. :-)

If you're smart, you'll return the console to Amazon as defective. If everyone did this every time, and ideally returned *multiple* new Switch 2 units in a row as defective (Nintendo even having the ability to do this is arguably a defect), Nintendo would end up with a huge pile of e-waste that they can't do anything with, the supply for their hardware would crater without any actual users, and they would be forced by market forces to pull their heads out of their asses.

Treating your customers as criminals is never okay, and if government is not willing to punish companies for such abuse, then it becomes the responsibility of the buyers to find a way to do so, to the maximum extent allowable by law.

As youâ(TM)ve pointed out many times, the UK is much smaller than Canada, and this means that EV charging is incredibly straightforward for me

In another slashdot post about EVs, a poster was saying that it 'feels like' it would be impossible to drive across Canada in an EV in the middle of winter.

I pointed out that A Better Route Planner exists, and he doesn't need to 'feel' anything about it, he can just go look. And yes, it turns out that with a modern EV, even in the middle of winter, you can drive cross country with zero issues. Charging added something like six hours or so on to the several thousand KM trip, and that assumed all fast-chargers and no overnight charging at a hotel or anything.

The minute you switch from that mentality to âoeIâ(TM)ll charge while I do something elseâ, it all just slots into place. So on road trips, I charge when I eat or while Iâ(TM)m parked up for the day (or overnight).

Yup. You *have* to change your mentality away from 'refueling is an activity/event in and of itself' to 'refueling is something that happens while the car is parked anyway while I'm sleeping/shopping/pissing/eating/whatever.'

treating EVs as thought theyâ(TM)re inconvenient ICE vehicles instead of adapting your modus operandi even the slightest iota will lead to you having a shit experience.

Truth. I see this attitude a lot.

"I don't want to sit around for half an hour while my car charges." Yeah, that's why we don't do that; we plug in the car and wander off to do something.

But even *if* it's a charger in the middle of nowhere and you're stuck sitting there charging, I'd rather half an hour in the car, while the heater's running, than standing outside for a few minutes in -30c plus wind chill pumping gas.

Maybe they'll find life on Mars and the Lochness Monster while there.

Addendum: it will play and send back recorded radio waves to Earth when on the near side of the moon, so it's a cycle of scoop-n-spew.

It will probably only listen when on the far side and wait out the rest.

Aliens should play some Pink Floyd to mess with us.

Human behavior is unpredictable under such circumstances. The instinct may be to cover it up.

there is a mechanical block requiring you to lift the switches before operating them.

I thought some believe the lift-lock was missing on some planes due to a factory snafu or something. Boeing sent a bulletin out about it, but it was perhaps ignored.