Who's the power provider? I see agreements on chip supply, but not on the electricity.

Bounties are incentives to do the legwork to discover flaws. If the cost of that discovery drops to near zero, the queue is jammed as a result, and the capacity to remediate is oversubscribed, you should stop paying bounties.

Nobody is saying you should stop fixing bugs. Only that the process of identifying them has been devalued. Which it has.

If you thought what they could fake in the late 60's was impressive, imagine what they an do now.

It just sucks to see them screw up the illusion with such trivial mistakes. Are you seriously expecting me to believe they'd go with a broken toilet? Or use Outlook?

This isn't the worst idea. Reasonably effective, and, honestly, held in the hands of a company that, while being wildly profitable, has generally been a good steward of personal info. If it's being forced by regulation, I guess I'd rather have them do it than almost anybody else.

Money for bounties is not infinite. If the pace of claims is so large that you can't fix them all and you can't afford to pay the bounties, you stop. Makes perfect sense to me.

Unless I'm missing something, this ruling is just plain weird. Does contract law work differently in Italy?

This is not a long term contract. If Netflix was offering a price for, say, a two year commitment, then I get the objection to arbitrarily changing the terms. But to my knowledge, they are month to month, meaning the contract is for the month, and by agreement a new contract is created each month

Going back to those previous contracts seems like nonsense.

"Simple, honest, direct language." - George Carlin

Sigh... the good old days. I ran Word 2.0 on WFW 3 with 16MB of memory. That was extravagant - they recommended 2MB.

And it did 95% of what I've ever done with a word processor.

They won't. Some misguided twits seem to think it's a kind of badge of honour to remain backwards. It stopped being an omission and started being a decision long ago.

It's too convenient to just write off Jobs. The truth is somewhere in the middle, as it always is. The idea that plenty of others could have done what he did is just too dismissive. When he died the company was worth a third of a trillion dollars. Not just any sociopath can pull that off.

For their money, large companies want the proverbial throat to choke - even when they've never successfully choked the throats they've paid for. The footprint of open source in these companies often grew through bottom up implementation. The moment that somebody has to pay an ongoing support contract, it will become a financial and strategic decision. That means vendor management, tech and vendor downselection, risk analysis... the best-effort maintainer isn't going to fly.

If I were a betting man, I think the result would be a decline in usage - and that might be fine. If the model isn't working, that definitely needs addressing. But the companies most able to afford licensing are probably the ones least likely to pay for it.

I'm too uneducated. If 92 antiprotons end up annihilating themselves in collisions with matter, how much energy is released? Is it "did you hear that?" or, "I found the driver's femur!"

And would Uber apply a surcharge?

Americans are predisposed to use energy wastefully. They aren't alone, of course, but when national symbols include huge homes and big trucks, and their president hates windmills, non-incandescent bulbs, and low flow toilets and showers, their collective behaviour won't change until a plea to conserve comes with financial pain and an honest-to-goodness shortage.

Watch how a populace fields a request to not water lawns in a drought region to see how they move.

One of the primary ways that the population can try to find fairness, redress, and compensation for wrongs incurred is through the justice system. By putting a blanket stop to that, they are doing an end run into what is really the only tangible power the people have.

No matter how you feel about the rest of this complicated matter, wiping away legal accountability en masse is a terrible precedent.

Well, yeah. That's what it says on the tin. :)

But there's a suggestion that some people did have safety incidents, we just won't mention them. I wonder how many, and of what nature. Were their errors understandable, and have steps been taken to correct the possible misuse, or at least the documentation?