WoW has always amazed me because Blizzard was able to sell both the service and not just the client (which is common) but also updates. What the hell are you paying for with the service if not the updates? Because running the servers is not the hard part, the amount of data is small and the latency is not as critical as in many financial applications (to say nothing of the security) so it's relatively ho-hum. Highest grossing game of all time, possibly the most profitable as well.

Managing the steering wheel is the easy part, doing shifts well is much harder than steering. The ease of operating the shift lever is going to depend on which is your primary hand. As I'm right-handed, driving on the right side of the road and sitting on the left side of the car is optimal for me. But as you say, the manual transmission is unfortunately going away, and all we are left with in ICEVs are expensive DCTs and inferior and more expensive everything else. (Slush boxes/traditional automatics can be good, but usually aren't. CVTs are poop.)

Batteries degrade even if you don't use them. A battery which is rated for 10,000 full cycles might be able to do 100,000 partial cycles or more, depending on the charge and discharge rates. Why would you not want to get paid for owning a battery that always degrades?

Dispersed power can be more robust yes, but it's also potentially a greater threat, because your local fire department[s] can only respond to a limited number of incidents at once. In areas made up of a bunch of smaller towns with small volunteer fire departments, they might literally only be able to handle one major fire with the use of resources from most of those departments.

If the attack on those batteries is via internet, cellular network etc., then having them dispersed might in fact not make them any harder to interfere with. This tendency for everything to phone home all the time for updates is a security risk and then some. It solves one problem by creating another...

There's a real need for battery systems which report the history and health of the battery, that's an actual concern. But V2G won't necessarily do that, depending on how it's implemented. Do I trust GM to get it right no, but they might if they are cautious enough in fear of lawsuits and recalls. Some low-C use of your battery that changes its charge state by 20% or so will barely affect its lifespan.

Is that really a bad thing? There are certainly plenty of examples of old things that suck; either because genuine improvements became available after they had already solidified or because they were always broken and are now running purely on denial-fueled risk tolerance; but, in principle, it seems like it should be a bad thing that age is seen as a bad thing. Especially when software is more like math than like civil engineering in terms of the tendency of its materials toward corrosion, embrittlement, and fatigue. (and when so many 'modernization' projects turn into expensive failures or go way behind schedule and over budget to eventually death march toward feature parity, sometimes even achieving it in time to be declared legacy themselves.)

I'm not calling for a crusade against 'fast fashion' software; if people want to bang out an app on the fast and cheap to catch the moment when people care they can do that; fine, whatever; but it seems like software built on real long term service timescales should get a lot more credit than it does. Absent specific criticisms; it's not "eww, there are people who weren't even born then", it's "the software has been in service for a generation".

All the more if there are a lot of outfits doing the same thing: having some unique oddball legacy thing means having potentially crushing maintenance requirements unless everything was gloriously secure from day 1, which it probably wasn't; but if there is some big mass of enterprise Java 8 why should we call it all eol and scramble rather than just maintaining java 8? Especially when we can do so in software, without some of the vendor and hardware inflexibility you see with things like old school mainframe applications where there's an implied commitment to a single old school mainframe vendor in perpetuity.

It's not elegant; but realistically we are far enough both into the history of computer science and the history of computers-as-hardware-you-can-buy that there's a lot less obvious, low-hanging, progress to be had by going 'modern' relative to the amount of fashion and fad chasing. Especially if (as is the case for a great many people and organizations) the scale of your problem has grown at or below the rate at which hardware advances have made systems not particularly well designed for scalability faster.

Obviously this would require coordinated action, and some people likely have other reasons to want to either poke at or kill legacy applications; but(since all those java versions are solidly post openjdk) I'd be very curious to know how the cost and risk associated with "modernize because java 18 is going eol!" would compare to just...not...having java 18 go eol. Unsexy maintenance project that you'd need to pay to have done, sure; but very plausibly better characterized and lower risk than trying to deal with a lot of the oddball internal accretions that would otherwise need updating; and, depending on how much people have running on java 18, certainly possible that they'll individually spend a fair bit more running the treadmill than it would cost to just keep kicking java 18 down the road until (almost) nobody cares.

Most of it.

And yet, there's a long way yet to go.

My response was specifically to the original poster who, for some reason, was taking a "we are losing the class wars; breed faster!" position rather than the "if you are already losing the class war why would you even think about putting in that much effort and cost so your children can deal with a bad or worse outcome?" position.

It would honestly not surprise me if that is a nontrivial contributing factor: If you aren't emotionally invested in children as an end in themselves the wage and cost of living numbers have done very little to encourage you to see them as affordable since roughly the late 70s(with a combination of substantial stagnation for anyone who is primarily wages rather than capital gains; and such good news as there is mostly confined to people who complete at least undergraduate education and remain in a career track full time) and people who are emotionally invested in children are often willing to go to considerable lengths to try to improve their children's outcomes; but are presumably discouraged by the prospect that they will most likely be downwardly mobile instead.

It's not a surprise that people who want labor, cannon fodder, or taxpayers to be abundant for them are fretting about it; but it's hard to see why most of us should care. Why do things that are good for society when society is pretty overtly disinterested in being good for you? You may be able to squeeze the current labor market a bit; because people who already exist tend to take the "or starve" possibility pretty seriously when deciding what they will put up with; but if you offer nothing but the demand for a toiling underclass to encourage people to have children that's not terribly compelling, either for those who aren't interested in sacrificing for children and see hitting education and career hard as increasingly existential or for people who would sacrifice a lot to better things for their children but are more or less accurate in seeing it as highly unlikely that they will be able to.

I'm rather doubtful of the plan's viability; but if they are willing to justify the company name by chaining Bezos to a rock so a bird can eat his liver repeatedly I could be persuaded.

Only if you treat them like shit.

Effects.

Treating women like shit makes them not want to pump out babies. Now they have a choice, so they are doing a lot less of it. Literally all it would take to get a large portion (a majority IMO) of them to do it without support from a decent partner would be to gracefully and quietly fund the programs that ensure they will be able to feed and provide medical care for their children even if their circumstances change, but there seems to be a problem even meeting that bar.

But then your entire fucking point becomes pointless about 8 seconds later, literally before I could read it and roll my eyes about it.

Except it doesn't. It's shit all day. It makes people upset all day. This means it's costing productivity all day. See, in the real world with real humans, these user pain points have real impacts on those real people.

HTH, HAND!

Same for if it is made in America. If it's not FOSS, then it's not trustworthy, and even then it's limited to e.g. devices you can build your own firmware for.

The US solved this problem 150 years ago. First with the observation that immigrants acculturate. Second with the acceptance that elements of their culture are going to get melded in to form a new culture. Culture is never static, anyway, it always drifts and morphs. Immigration just changes it a bit faster. But it's good! This ongoing immigrant-driven culture change is what made the US a superpower. Embrace it.

Indeed is USED to work this way....and if so, sure, cool.

The trouble is...it no longer works that way, there is no more 'melting pot'.

For various reasons, one being we've let WAY too many in at once....they do not come here to become Americans and assimilate, they are here to take over and make a Mini-whatever country they came from .

They segregate, they do NOT learn the language and in Muslim cases, they try to change our laws to fit their religion.

In the old days, you didn't see protests with migrants waving flags of their home land, but instead were waving the US flag....

So, no that old way isn't working....and if we don't stop the influx....we risk losing our country even more than we risk losing it right now.