Buttons and UI design and components have a cost. Companies making tens of thousands of an item are after savings in the order of pennies per item if they can get them. The number of features is a selling point, but putting more physical buttons onto a device has a cost. So companies want to export some of the UI to a smartphone app where possible. It's much cheaper for them.

It's also cheaper to be able to do an over the air firmware update than to handle the costs of support services during the warranty period.

Not saying any of it is right or perfect, but the current situation isn't inexplicable.

Or downloaded and read the freely-available PDF of the manuals of the specific models that he was interested in before even going to the store? It baffles me that people are happy to spend that much on a purchase just by going to a store and thinking 'That looks pretty, I'll have that one'. Especially for a software engineer!

Regulation does but litigation doesn't. In the UK someone could make a claim that this amounts to age discrimination, as the elderly are less likely to be able to solve the problem via digital channels. As there is a cost being imposed in terms of time and potentially money, depending on how the call is placed, HP may struggle to defend this in court.

It's a matter of 'right end, wrong stick'.

While the example used is incorrect, the principle has very much impacted the NHS. The government has set metrics and targets, and hospital management has of course tried to find ways to meet those targets by gaming the system - just like any other person would. Government needs to find better ways to foster improvement in the big systems that it manages (healthcare, education, etc.).

Nobody is going to leave in protest of a return to the office order if they think they can't easily get another remote job. That means that those who stay are the ones least likely to be able to get another good job. The result is that you just caused your most talented employees to quit.

It's a cheap and easy way - doesn't mean it's a good way. If the CEO is looking to quickly reduce headcount so that they can also leave and get a better job based on how successful they were at doing that, then it's a good way for them (but not so good for the company).

Currently sitting here developing the software for the ground segment of a space mission and visualising the result of algorithm changes on the data using a Mac with those specs - absolutely flies compared to the fully-specced iMac Pro it replaced.

This is true. It's also true that a large segment of the user base of lowest-spec MacBook Airs use their machines so lightly that this will never be a problem in practice during the lifetime of the machine.

Well, of course they will. That's the price-point that they have computed will bring them the most profit. You set your price according to what the market will bear - simple free-market economics.

The main reason that the UK has a problem today is because Russian-sponsored organised crime has established a pipeline to convince people they can legally live and work here and then charge them vast amounts of money to get here. Back in the day, this would have been effectively countered by having a presence in the countries that this is happening in, courtesy of the foreign aid budget. That got massively slashed years ago due to certain elements spreading the story that all of our tax was going overseas to foreigners. So if not bigotry, then certainly people weaponising bigotry for their own purposes.

Also, if you are really short of cash, the publisher has frequent sales, I've seen Command: Modern Operations available at 40%-60% off a few times in the past year. Really no excuse to pirate at those prices.

The definition is: 'obtained via a net reduction in outgoing cash'. The 'massive entry cost' was zero, and the net cost of making the switch is getting more negative each month. I'm literally saving money by driving a BEV.

A link to the science, which itself has several useful papers cited. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a...

TLDR; Serifs don't make much difference, but a serif font can (in some circumstances).

There are two ways to achieve that. You can buy a vehicle capable of doing that and pay the increased cost of running it over the lifetime of the vehicle. Or you can buy a vastly more efficient vehicle that meets your day to day needs and rent something suitable for towing when you need it. The second approach is what someone in the prudent fiscal conservative camp would take.

Depends on your 12-year old 'econobox'. A new BEV can be free - you don't get that with an ICE. Because our old ICE was really inefficient, the monthly fuel cost was larger that the cost of a loan to buy the BEV plus the cost to charge it. Scrapping the ICE and buying a new BEV literally saved us money each month. Of course, this requires you to be living somewhere where petrol is expensive, electricity cheap, and have an inefficient ICE.

I won't, because the fact that they punished him for breaking rules that he had agreed to tells us nothing about their concerns for his education, nor about their actions to remedy it - that's a presumption on your part. Indeed, being punished for breaking rules that you agreed to is a useful lesson in and of itself.