battery.

That, and a something that indicates if the computer (or, more specifically, each individual replaceable component) has ever experienced liquid damage or a severe shock/hard drop.

For the most part, the info I want (but can't always easily get) includes:
* Release date of the computer and release date of each of its major parts (CPU, etc.). This indicates likely time-to-obsolescence.
* A very recent and thorough diagnostic report. This indicates overall hardware health.
* As part of the diagnostic report, for parts that are expected to wear out well before the computer is going to be scrapped anyway, some indication of the remaining useful life. HDDs, SDDs, and batteries are your primary concerns here.
* A list of what parts are user-replaceable and at what cost and difficulty.
* A visual inspection of the insides and outsides to check for things like liquid damage, rust/corrosion, bad capacitors, and plain old physical abuse/wear-and-tear. This indicates possible "submarine/time-bomb" issues.

A certified repair-history or certified "mechanics inspection" is a plus but it isn't required.

After all, we are talking about devices usually worth less than $2000, not devices usually worth over 4 times that much.

I'm surprised, and you should be too, if your view is evidence-based, because this is a new effect that was not predicted by any of the previous models, which already consider the melting permafrost, methane emissions and fossil fuel use.

They've been pushing this, C. P. Snow Two Cultures-style, for some time now. Codifying the meaning of 'creative' to film, music...whatever. This coercion of language use is all a bit Eloi vs Morlocks for my liking.

It's not true. And I say that as someone who plays and writes music too. Toolmaking can be creative. Software design can be creative. I'm less well versed in physical industrial processes but I'd be more than willing to bet that there's creativity going on there too. On the other hand, acting is only sometimes creative as well, music often written to a formula...these 'creative industries' are often not very creative. And they often don't create, they use the output of some tools they were given.

I hate the language. I'm clearly not saying that all film making or music is bereft of creativity. I'm more saying that creativity as a word shouldn't be relegated and codified in this monstrously industrialised and high-handed manner so dismissive of everyone else.

Diminished maybe, but not all that much.

I think we can reasonably assume that if there's a huge blackout, it won't last forever. A lot of smart people will work hard on getting things up and running again. A few years ago in the USA it lasted for a bit longer, what was it, a week or two? Recently in Spain it lasted a few days. But all those power stations and power grid operators don't just shrug and go home. So getting through those days is probably all it takes for any reasonably realistic scenario.

And you can build things up piecewise. I've got my solar now. The next thing will be a battery. Once I have that, I can think about an electric car.

I suppose, but that's nothing like the world we live in. In our world, food is abundant at never-before-seen levels. Agricultural productivity has not only matched but significantly exceeded population growth. Unless climate change or some catastrophic event has large negative impacts on food production, directly or indirectly, it seems unlikely that the human race will ever again experience significant food scarcity.

I think it's more likely that approximation is necessary to complex, higher-level thinking, and that produces a certain form of error which is therefore inherent in all intelligences capable of it. This can be improved by adding subsystems that compute more precisely, just as humans do, using processes and equipment to augment their intellectual abilities, ranging from complex computation engines to pencil and paper (Einstein said "My pencil and me are smarter than me").

I feel you need to elaborate a little further on that. The book lays out sources, equations and testable hypothesis. Interestingly it rarely suggests actual policy. Page 5 of the Motivations sections also laws out why - it is as scathing of campaigners as it is of incumbents.

That aspects are outdated 17 years after its last update does not surprise me. That it is fundamentally incorrect however...given the sources and calculations, I think you'll need a to provide a little more reasoning than "you should fee bad" (sic.).

As someone who has had a strong interest in this area for a while now, not professionally - just following along, it's been fascinating to watch almost every single prediction from the 1990s UK government advisor come true. These recommendations were, in 2015 this was put up as a web site - Sustainable Energy - without the hot air. This is not a political book, the "without the hot air" bit alludes to that. This is a quantitative book with the maths to back up all assumptions and recommendations.

In it, David McKay makes comments about future energy mix. If you look at the full PDF, the idea of a cable from northern Africa to elsewhere is explored starting page 178. Bear in mind this book was written late 90s/early 2000s with the last revision being 2008 (the author has sadly passed). Generating from Morocco appears on page 181.

Thoroughly good read and I recommend it to anyone interested in the mechanics and figures behind energy transitions. Clearly some will now be outdated...but it's surprising how little. A lot of what he suggested is now unfolding.

If they're still using VMWare's licensed software, are they a former customer? I think the answer depends on the details of the license and purchase agreements.

What if I'm a DropBox/OneDrive subscriber storing hundreds of megabits per second to local storage that is also backed up to a cloud provider? I'm not running a service, but I sure as heck "need" ("need" vs. "want" can be subjective here) upload speeds at least as fast as my write-to-disk speeds.

I do agree with your solution though: If I really need high upload speeds, whether I'm running a server or not, I need to find a provider that offers them at a price I'm willing to pay, or learn to do without. If that means getting a business plan, then so be it.

I think they'd argue that the audit is a condition of the license to use the software, which the customer already agreed to and which was not tied to an ongoing support contract. Depending on the details of the license agreement, this could pass legal muster.

It still seems like a stupid move on the part of Broadcom, alienating their customer base in the hope of extracting a few more fees. I wonder if they've decided that their virtualization business is soon going to be eaten up by OSS anyway, so they have to get what they can while they can.

But what I'm saying is that's all vocational. Computer science is basic information theory, patterns, HCI...all of that kind of thing. I'm a graduate of Comp. Sci myself, though in the UK from 1992. During that time we were taught a programming language as an abstract for various concepts (I was taught ADA, for instance) but it was assumed you would go and teach yourself any language you were interested in. I self-taught myself C for instance.

What you seem to be looking for isn't Computer Science grads, it's programmers. From your description I don't think you'd care if they new Huffman's Information Theory or deep graph theory, but would care if they didn't know Javascript. And this is what I mean - that's not a Computer Science thing, that's vocational

I think that's an industry fault rather than yours for instance. I think pushing Computer Science as the name but turning out average programming people is an educational failure.

I hate to be blunt, but what has any of that got to do with Computer Science? This is the problem. To quote Dijkstra - "Computer science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes".

People wanting vocational programming degrees or courses should get them. Computer science is not about teaching Angular. And from my own observation over the years, I can clearly remember the first time I interviewed a programmer who clearly had no idea how a computer worked, or any of the theory behind one. They just knew syntax to type in - that was all. Came as a shock to me at the time, but it's decades ago now and I'm more used to it sadly.

"printer drivers" for nothing.