Restricting right to repair should be covered by RICO or other anti extortion and racketeering legislation.

Ironically this war has worked out well for Russia—it draws media attention away from Ukraine while simultaneously expending supplies of Patriot missiles and other munitions, and the spike in oil prices has basically wiped out the benefits of crushing them with sanctions for the past four years.

These are just some of the 'miracles' you can accomplish when you let Bibi Netanyahu start another war so he can keep postponing the conclusion of his corruption trial...

My Kindle 3 died recently, and I replaced it with a basic Kobo Clara. The browser is a mixed blessing (very buggy), but certain familiar mods—custom screensavers and ssh are built in. It was very weird to buy a device that wants to be hacked! It literally comes with a file called "ssh-disabled" that contains the instructions "rename this file to ssh-enabled and reboot," no jailbreak required.

Just a couple weeks ago, I replaced the battery in my 6-year-old Lemur Pro. Not very hard, and now it's great at holding a charge again.

Yes, getting this thing in 2020 cost me 2-3 times as much as today's new Macbook Neo, but I needed a machine I could rely on, that wasn't designed as though I'm the manufacturer's adversary.

* No reasonable RAM upgrade path
* No reasonable storage upgrade path
* for some models, difficulty replacing battery

I would love to get something like the Apple Neo laptop if I knew I could extend its life to 8-10 years by upgrading hardware at the 4-5 year mark at a reasonable cost and replace the battery as needed at a reasonable cost.

Without those options, I'm looking at non-Apple hardware, which means a non-Apple OS and not being in the Apple ecosystem and not giving Apple the revenue stream that goes with being in that ecosystem.

I hope someone at Apple sees this and lets the right people know that their decisions to make hardware upgrades difficult or impossible is costing them future revenue.

At least one of the late-1980s/early-1990s Mac desktops and at least one IBM* enterprise-fleet-targeted desktop were designed for very fast in-the-field repair by corporate IT staff. By repair I mean "unscrew the case, replace the faulty component, screw the case back together, and get the customer back up and running ASAP."

I personally saw computers from both companies that had ONE screw, not counting customer-installed security screws/locking devices. Everything else was held in place by latches, friction, or other easy-to-manipulate no-tools-required connections. You could literally replace any one of the major components with less than 5 minutes of downtime once you'd done it a few times. Floppy drive, check, hard drive, check, power supply, check, motherboard, check, add-in boards, check, various cables, check, case, check. OK replacing the case might take 10 minutes but only because it requires moving all of the other components.

* IBM sold off its PC computing line to Lenovo in the 1990s or 2000s.

The future is to use AI to screen code before it is published to the world.

For code written or influenced by an AI, have a different, independently-developed AI screen it for security bugs.

Could the point of the brag be that it's newer hardware? My understanding is that successive generations of earthling chips are more vulnerable to malfunction from cosmic rays, etc due to their much higher density.

But I've totally not kept up. Is this still a problem?

Installing more than one modern AAA title.

They were named after people who did some pretty unsavory things during their times in power.

Doing unspeakably evil acts is part of many "successful business models." Whether it's mafia-style threats of "pay me or I will rape/kill your family," eliminate-your-competition/opponent mass-murders-and-take-their-property-as-spoils like you see in some wars ("ethnic cleansing" anyone?), or actually selling the "work product" of crimes (e.g. selling stolen goods or filming a rape and selling the photographs), there is money to be made from acts of evil.

Wait until people are dead long enough for most skeletons to come out of the closet before naming a building after someone.

640 days after death ought to be enough for most people.

Thanks for your insightful posts. I expanded on that idea in 2010: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

That said, indigenous ways were "the original affluent society" (even if such ways might have been harder to practice on a restricted reservation after extensive conflicts with Europeans wielding "Guns, Germs, and Steel"):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The basis of Sahlins' argument is that hunter-gatherer societies are able to achieve affluence by desiring little and meeting those needs/desires with what is available to them. This he calls the "Zen road to affluence, which states that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate"."

The outage may have been caused by an overload in the filtering systems run by Russia’s communications watchdog

Overload? It's probably an overly-excited inference, but that sounds like a basket with too many eggs in it. Anyone know?

"Ukraine, if you're listening..."