And the reasoning? As always Terrorists, pedophile, criminals, etc. Guess what: If those guys have not learned yet to make a big detour around official chat apps, they deserve getting caught. My bet is, those people already have their own secured means of communication. Maybe they have their own encrypted app, or they have a forum somewhere in the Darknet, whatever. But the chance that this new law will catch anything worthwhile is practically nil.

You don’t have them yet?

GNU Image Manipulation Program (or Project)

I had it worse. I needed to book a hotel for a business trip, and they offered me two prices: Either take them cheaper, but you cannot cancel or get a refund, or you can spend a bit more, and cancel it up to one day before arrival for a “cancellation fee”, which amount was not disclosed at that moment.

I booked the latter one, and in the booking confirmation it said that the cancellation fee is exactly the same as the cost for the room!

The other word for “finish the job” is “Endlösung”.

Well, a lot of the Leavers wanted to bathe in a perceived Victorian Empires’ Greatness. At least in that aspect they have reaches Victorian levels…

I was just using it. But the behavior/reaction to button presses showed me that a button was obviously connected to the wrong function.

I don’t know how to see a memory bug in an out of order elevator, but I once saw and reported a wiring error of a working elevator. It was an interesting talk at the reception desk, but as I could precisely describe what was wrong and the verifyable consequences, they took me seriously. And sent me a “Thank You” email later ;-)

One key point here is: While you actually can replace a bunch of junior developers with AI in some places, any replaced junior developer will never become a senior developer that cannot be replaced by the AI because he/she is basically experince on two legs.

So, corporations, don’t complain about the lack of experienced, senior personnal because YOU have been the main reason they don’t exist.

Let’s come back to all of this when all those “quantum breakthroughs” manage to compute anything worthwhile that is not a quantum computer benchmark, but solves a real world problem.

But that would miss out the large amount of government control over the masses! Think of the kids, not of your rights being trampled on! /s

All batteries are replaceable. Some take a bit more effort and some specialized equipment, though.

Well, lets call it an armed robbery, then.

I’d pick Apollo, the most sciency guy of the bunch.

The phone market has been a lot like the PC market 20, 30 years ago.

Back then, you actually had an advantage by getting a new machine quite often, as the newer machine was so much better and faster than the model from the year before. It actually made a difference for 99% of the users: The text processing, calculating, or browsing programs ran way better and faster on the current model than on the one or two year older one.

Nowadays, any off-the-shelf PC fulfills the needs of 95% of the users. It runs Windows/Word/Excel (or whatever else they use) fast enough to not be an issue. The only people who still need the bleeding edge stuff are some high-end uses e.g. in engineering, and gamers.

Same with cell phones. Ten years ago, the annual new model actually provided a big leap of abilities and comfort. Nowadays, I’m replacing my 5+ year old model just because the battery is getting close to the end of it’s usability.

Counter-Argument: Each camera in a bedroom can be free entertainment for millions!

Good luck holding a company sitting in China “responsible” for about anything.

I had a friend at university who got a job fixing cobol stuff before Y2K. The bank paid him extremely well, housed him in a luxury apartment during the job, and, as he had no driving licence, dropped in a car with free driver for him.

Well, at least there are people who still use Perl.

I remember being forced to learn this in university.

I started CS from the POV of someone with several commercial projects under the belt and at the time being fluent already in five or six different programming languages. But the university where I started had had an issue - they had been way to theoretical (imagine people writing their CS thesis on a mechanical typewriter, and professors telling us that one does not need computer access for mastering CS!). So they had been more or less forced to include at least a bit of real world stuff into their blackboard and paper world. Which resulted in a no-excuse-mandatory beginners course in Turbo Pascal in the first year and Turbo Prolog in the second.

And I was not alone. It was painful. They showed a programming task to be done on the overhead projector, and about 90% of us could have just typed down the answer without thinking and be done with the weekly assignment in five minutes. Nope. Instead, we had to follow (and join) a lengthy, boring, and worthless discussion about the very basics of programming, before we were allowed to work on it. And woe to us if we did not follow the precise path that we had been “taught” in that lesson, even if it was done in a way that no normal programmer would ever implement it.

If they had given us all the assignments for the semester in one go, we would probably had finished them in one afternoon, including documentation and time to spare.

At least with Turbo Prolog we learned something new. First and foremost that there are strong reasons that nobody uses Prolog for serious programming.