I wrote code for an air traffic communications system. This stuff had to be reliable.

The code ran on the metal - no operating system - which helped. I devised my own memory allocation strategy, used the MMU to leave unmapped pages between allocations in the hope that bugs would show up sooner rather than later, took extreme care with casts and pointers and blah, blah, blah.

And one day I came within 12 hours of forcing a major airport to close because I had made a booboo.

For cases where it really does matter (and I would argue that anything to do with aviation counts here) an additional layer of checking is worth using if it is available.

No, I'm not going to go back and rewrite the whole thing in Rust - I'm retired now - but I would hope that whoever is writing safety critical code these days has the sense to consider it.

And that was enough.
They add a markup to the food outlet's price, and a delivery fee on top.
Then, when it turns out that the order is wrong they are stunningly unhelpful.
Offer $3.6B
Value $ 9.99. Maybe.

Once, Intel Inside meant you had a decent machine.

Now, Intel Inside means "Don't buy this"

WFIW, I have been pretty happy with AMD silicon since they brought out the Zen architecture.

Maybe to divert attention away from a capability that is useful?

My ancient (by phone standards) Android thing requires that I poke the screen to set an alarm, which can be at a particular time of say, or in a specific amount of time. It is fairly reliable, having been known to fail only if I am too drunk to point my fingers at the screen accurately.

By modern standards, it is probably crap.

But it is crap that works, and gets me out of bed in the morning to drive my daughter to school on time after helping me boil an egg for the correct number of minutes.

[waving phone] Hey Siri, can you copy this?

Here is the UK, children don't get to have a bank card until they are 10 years old.
When my daughter was 9 she was very upset that a shop in the high street refused to let her buy something using her cash.
I spoke to the manager who was a complete arsehole, and since then neither she nor I have been in that shop.
Whether you like to use cash or not, as an adult you have a choice. As a child you don't and my opinion is that any business that a child could use should be required to accept cash.

For what it's worth, I heat my house with a heat pump and drive an electric. I buy power from a supplier of renewables.
The only fossil fuel I use is gas for the barbecue, and that gets infrequent use (the weather here in the UK...)

This is hard to do if the objective is to stream Netflix or Spotify...

In days of old, if I bought a fridge or a TV or a dishwasher I expected it to work until it broke down and the cost of repair exceeded the cost of replacement.

As a consumer, why should me expectation be any different now?

As a computer guy I understand about software vulnerabilities... which is why my (85 inch, expensive) TV set and fancy receiver are not connected to any network and all streaming is performed by a cheapo Amazon TV stick which can be replaced as necessary. The TV works just fine as a dumb monitor, and can continue to do so until it fails. And if the TV stick/disc player/HTPC get too old to be supported they are easy and cheap to replace.

Of course, all the manufacturers want us to buy a new TV every few years so will schedule "end of life" to maximise shareholder value, so this problem is not going to go away in a hurry.

Replaceable battery
3.5mm headphone socket
SD card slot
2 SIM card slots
Rootable
Robust, waterproof

I would rather be blind for the rest of my years than allow that man to control a chip implanted in my head.

... my initial thought is, "That's a shit lot of data to lose in one go"

EVs are going to become seriously popular when and only when we get charging sorted out for people who cannot charge at home.

Here in the UK I pay 7p/kWh to charge overnight on my drive.
The pool soul down the road who charges on a public socket attached to a lamp post is paying something like 35p/kWh.

Apart from being seriously unfair, this is a major barrier to the take-up of EVs, and we want people to use EVs, particularly in cities where air pollution is a serious health issue.

I see nothing there that would preclude distribution of a patchfile.

I used to work with air traffic control comms. We used Ethernet. Each node sent an audio packet every 2ms... the latency was low enough that the sidetone delay was not noticeable.

How to do that sort of thing with Bluetooth escaped us. Despite quite lot of effort we never managed to provide a Bluetooth based wireless headset with acceptable performance and reliability.