Most notably, for anything small enough to fit in a car, attempting a chemical -> kinetic conversion causes Carnot's vengeful ghost to flip you the bird. This can be a bit of a drag.

Only once somebody clones the fuel cartridges.

According to their site, a fuel pod is ~55 cubic centimeters. Brookstone wants $20 for two. A liquid fuel had better be nigh-indistinguishable from magic for $180/liter.

"A dead battery means important missed calls and emails, no GPS when you’re lost, no e-reader on your train ride, no communication in an emergency, and an overall feeling of dread and anxiety."

Yes, they actually say that. May I be the first to recommend spending less on fancing charging gadgets and more on anxiolytic lifestyle aids, like benzodiazepines or heavy drinking?

Which gets yet-another-nearly-interchangeable-columnist more hits?

Option 1: 'I drove a Tesla S. It takes longer to charge than to pump gas; but is otherwise pretty ok.'

Option 2: "Electric so-called 'supercar' strands writer during epic freezing nighmare journey!"

Writing for the NYT moves at a slower pace than being a blogger and whoring for hits; but is subject to the same basic incentive structures.

" How is this any different than 30 or 40 years ago when TVs started using transistors and you were unable to easily replace out your tubes yourself?"

Well, they switched from a component that had to be easy to replace because it burned out all the damn time under normal use to a component whose lifespan is measured in decades unless unlucky or badly abused...

In this case, on the other hand, Li-ion batteries have pretty much the same time from manufacture to uselessness as they did 10 years ago. Treating it as some sort of MS-specific problem is, of course, nonsense; but transistorization was at least a reliability improvement to go along with a reduction in ease of service.

Hopefully the two tiny fans don't inhale any dust, or exhibit the reliability that tiny fans on video cards have been cursed for for years now...

At least most sealed modules aren't air-breathers with moving parts.

It's also worth mentioning that "No User Serviceable Parts Inside" is frequently code for 'There's AC power at local grid voltage and/or a beefy inverter in here, don't fuck with this unless you know enough to know that this warning isn't meant for you'.

It's much less common to see the warning on devices powered by external DC supplies, especially now that cold cathode backlights seem to be giving way to LEDs. Such devices are frequently less likely to actually be user-serviceable in any useful way(given that AC PSUs are, by necessity, frequently built from pretty chunky components that you don't even need sharp eyes to rework, while low-voltage DC gear seems to get smaller every year); but that specific phrase mostly seems to show up when there is a shocking surprise available inside.

I'm not sure why such a negative spin is being attached to these stories.

As our press release clearly stated, new Corexit Ice(tm)(r), in 'fresh blast' or 'glacial menthol' scents, works harder, longer(tm) to protect pristine arctic environments. Apparently, eco-fascists want penguins to die, oil-soaked, when our competitor's inferior dispersants break down quickly under cold weather conditions...

What is especially crazy about promoting a less secure environment for everyone, just so that you can hack your enemies, is that the US is among the more dependent on hackable IT systems...

Sure, neither computers nor good hackers are free; but they are cheap and broadly available enough that more or less any country that isn't starving to death in its own filth(and some that are) can trivially afford some. Even relatively petty gangs can run a profit by fielding a few. Vulnerability, though, is something that you accrue as your society becomes increasingly dependent on electronic communications and finance, SCADA-controlled industrial base, etc.

So, if you reduce security overall, you increase your own vulnerability to every last hellholistani intelligence service, nationalist script kiddie, and slimy pin-skimmer gang, in order to infiltrate the systems of people who probably depend less on computers than you do.

Genius, really.

You do realize that much of the world has fallen below replacement rates by the simple expedient of making people wealthy enough that they can choose whether to extrude yet another baby or not?

China has been trying to avoid the messy demographic squeeze that occurs in the intervening period(since improvements in standard of living usually slash child mortality before they slash fertility rates, you end up with ~1 generation of unsupportable boom children); but the evidence is overwhelming that people actually don't like keeping up the uterine-clown-car act once they have an option.

To say that they 'need' it would be a gross overstatement; but if they are doing their casual youtubing on a relatively recent wintel, they'll be using it anyway...

Does anybody know what language(s) are used for the "Dead Hand" second-strike control system that the Russians were working on during the Cold War? Personally, I'd nominate them as the programming languages that will outlive us all...

You do realize that, while Hypertransport vs. FSB was a hilariously lopsided contest(and one of the reasons that even the most Intel-friendly OEMs were forced to start shipping Opteron servers in the multi-socket segement), all remotely recent Intel silicon(except Atom, which is off marching very slowly in its own direction) use QPI and integrated memory controllers? It took them long enough; but recent AMD and recent Intel CPUs again have substantially the same layout in terms of interface bandwidth and placement of system RAM.

The Woz probably isn't the best comparison: In this rant, the guy who kicked off MS' Xbox strategy is complaining about how MS is fucking up Xbox strategy. In the case of Wozniak, Apple's original hardware-hacker-geek occasionally laments the fact that a company that bears almost no resemblance to the "Apple" of his era except the name now produces products that don't even pretend to be interested in the likes of him.

Not to the degree that the old-school enterprise players (IBM and Oracle, say) do it; but Windows licensing has already been spec based for quite some time now. As far back as NT 4.0, there was 'server' and 'enterprise server'(if you wanted 3GB of RAM per-process and an 8 CPU SMP license).

2000 brought 'server', 'advanced server', and 'datacenter server' (4CPU), (8CPU, 8GB RAM w/PAE), and (32CPU, 32GB RAM w/PAE) respectively.