It's still possible to get a cheap ryanair, or easyjet flight over to heathrow; so no, it makes no sense at all.

I imagine it would be a lot like owning an iPhone.

And both of those wreckage's were a result of a failing MCAS. A system that could not be overridden by the pilots. A system that the pilots didn't even know existed. A system that ultimately forced the nose into the ground. Without MCAS, those flights would have more than likely, landed safely.

Once one slips through the net, a tidal wave is bound to follow. Good engineers hire great engineers. Mediocre engineers hire terrible engineers.

200 very long lines.

No it doesn't. Good programmer != good build engineer. You can be a superb code architect without knowing anything about CMake, or you can be an expert in the build process whilst being a merely competent software engineer. Every so often you'll find someone who is superb at both. Software development is a team exercise, so it doesn't really matter if some people are better at one than the other, the only thing that is important is that your team can cover both bases.

Bletchley park called, and they'd like their place in computing history back.

So long as you are prepared to use a noticeably different GLSL version to GL3+ (with differing syntax), and don't mind designing your code around pre-HW instancing, and don't mind doing lots of work on the CPU that could be done using transform feedback, and don't mind the lack of vertex array objects, and don't mind manually setting every individual uniform param separately (instead of loading them in a uniform buffer), and don't mind the inability to manually specify the vertex attribute layouts from within the shader, and don't mind the inability to specify the fragment shader outputs (since GL2 only specifies gl_FragColor); then yes you could do 'clean shader-based programming' (albeit a variation of shader based programming that has none of the functionality you'd expect to find in a clean shader-based programming API, thereby forcing you to do far more in C than should really be necessary). The AC was bang on the money, but I fear you've missed the point by quite some margin....

Chrome libs includes a free cloud based backup solution for your data and passwords, all paid for by the NSA.

They've had the same QC issues with Nvidia chips in MBP's in the past (GT8600M). Last time they extended the warranties. This time.... ?

Theoretically that's the situation in the UK, although in practice there appears to be collusion between the big six companies to effectively fix prices....

Hopefully when the tech has matured and mutated for 15 years or so, it'll be swimming in sewers. I imagine it will have developed a love of renaissance artists by them....

The UK is a member of the EU, and as such the European Court of Justice has a higher authority than any UK court, or the government.....

Find an EU law that the UK government has broken (shouldn't be too hard!), and then file a case. If the case is from an individual, then the European Court of Human Rights may be an alternative. (IAANL, so YMMV)

I have written the 3D renderers for a number of commercial software packages for the film VFX and games industries. The parent is right. PEBKAC. The drivers are fine. You are a shitty developer (who needs to make sure your code conforms to the GL/D3D spec properly).

Nvidia drivers are shittier than AMD. End of story. AMD drivers implement the graphics API's to the letter. Nvidia lets any old crap through. The result, is that apps developed on Nvidia GPUs, rarely conform to the target graphics API, and as a result end up failing on AMD/Intel hardware (although admittedly Intel can also fail due to either a lack of resources, or the occasional bug). If an app fails on AMD, blame the shitty software you're running, not the drivers. AMD releasing mantle would appear to me to be nothing more than a way of forcing Nvidia to adhere to an API spec for a change, rather than routinely ignoring it (as they do now)