If all the laptop components break at the same time, there's no need for repairability. Then it’s just a somewhat disposable computer by design. For a car analogy, this is how many americans could afford their first car.
The truly bad designs are when one broken component is preventing repairability. Hello apple!
I wonder if we could form a graph that would make a collusion ring intuitively visible (I’m not sure what—between papers, authors, and signings—should be the edges and the nodes, though). Making these relationships explicit should help discover this kind of stuff, right?
Another problem with my idea is that a lot of famous luminaries wouldn’t bother playing the game, or are dead already. But, all we can really do is set up a game for those who’d like to play…
If you're building on a computer language, you can say you understand the computer's abstract machine, even though you don't know how we ever managed to make a physical device to instantiate it!
> If a project hasn't gotten a new commit in 2 days then the project is claimed dead.
That is certainly true, those projects are effectively dead. They lack security updates, lack integrations with new platforms, lack support for new HW architectures, lack newer privacy guarantees, etc., etc.
I suspect that CVE inflation has poisoned the minds of many developers.
A db driver may have an issue with unsanitized user input when run against SQLite, but you only use it with oracle and sanitize input anyway, but that shows up as a 9.1 critical deployment blocker for corporate employees.
Unexploitable CVEs with inflated ratings make using any open source software a pain in the butt at BigCo.
Very few projects update dependencies that often, and only very big ones are found with security issues that often.
> lack integrations with new platforms
You don't need a new intration _every 2 days_, not to mention that many projects don't need such integrations at all. Moreover some popular and updated projects lack such integrations despite having lot of commits.
> lack support for new HW architectures
This is something that many projects get for free. But also, you don't get a new HW architecture every 2 days.
> lack newer privacy guarantees
What more privacy guarantees do I need from projects that don't communicate with external services or store data at all?
People who are earnestly engaging with their point have assumed “two days” was hyperbole so that they can instead respond to the greater idea, yet you have not: you’re stuck on an unserious detail like it’s the lynchpin of their claim.
Certainly that depends on the nature of the software. For instance, I don't expect some header-only library that does what it's supposed to do to ever need updating.
> Certainly that depends on the nature of the software. For instance, I don't expect some header-only library that does what it's supposed to do to ever need updating.
If it's a headers-only library in a language such as C++, if the project is not dead then the very least anyone would expect from it is being updated to support any of the modern C++ versions.
Also, if the project is actively maintained then there is always a multitude of low-priority issues and features to address.
Being FLOSS also means anyone in the whole world is able to contribute anything. If no one bothers to do so, that is aligned with the fact the project is indeed dead.
> If it's a headers-only library in a language such as C++, if the project is not dead then the very least anyone would expect from it is being updated to support any of the modern C++ versions.
Did I miss a new C++ version released <2 days ago perhaps?
If you somehow believe this kind of work is done in a couple of days, that's a good way to explain to the world how oblivious you are about the topic you are discussing.
> If you somehow believe this kind of work is done in a couple of days, that's a good way to explain to the world how oblivious you are about the topic you are discussing.
And, in turn, you appear to be oblivious to the point - the release cadence of this best-case scenario still means like a decade between updates to the project.
C++26 was released 4months ago; pointless to update it until compilers and deps are updated. So, best case is maybe you'll have complete bug-tested support in the supported compilers in 2030.
If we're looking at 2035-ish for the next release, we're still only looking at 2040 before you update.
You still have to take into account that updating might not even be necessary. It's not like C++ < C++26 suddenly doesn't work.
> And, in turn, you appear to be oblivious to the point - the release cadence of this best-case scenario still means like a decade between updates to the project.
It doesn't seem you are managing to think the issue all the way through. Even if you believe you can claim that release cadence is a factor, C++26 is the latest release in a process that outputs a new version every two years. Therefore, your argument would lead you to agree that there is a greater need for maintenance as there are more releases still evolving.
> C++26 was released 4months ago; pointless to update it until compilers and deps are updated.
This is a silly argument to make. At best you are trying to argue that you somehow believe maintenance needs aren't as urgent. Except urgency is irrelevant to the discussion, and the whole argument is derived from specious reasoning to begin with.
It sounds like you are fully invested in contrarianism and not invested at all in thinking about the issue you are trying to discuss. This is not the best use of anyone's time.
> I refuted what arguments you tried to put together by pointing the specious reasoning behind them.
You're confusing me with the person at the top of the thread. My response to you was to point you in a subtle way that you are attacking people, not arguments.
Read through your posts - the bulk of your "refutation" is basically calling the other person ignorant.
> If it's a headers-only library in a language such as C++, if the project is not dead then the very least anyone would expect from it is being updated to support any of the modern C++ versions.
C++ versions are backward compatible. You don't need to modify code that works just to use recent languages features that you don't need.
This policy would backfire greatly. For one, if I want to keep a competitor from expanding into my town, I'll just lease some commercial space and keep it vacant. That way they cannot build in my town.
> We already get taxed multiple ways. I pay income tax and sales tax
Shouldn't we also not do that?
Suppose you pay a 25% income tax and then a 10% sales tax. You're paying the same amount, almost a third of your income, as you would with a 47% sales tax. Which to begin with misleads people into thinking their rate is lower than it is, and on top of that incurs the significant overhead of needing two independent collection infrastructures.
> Suppose you pay a 25% income tax and then a 10% sales tax. You're paying the same amount, almost a third of your income, as you would with a 47% sales tax.
No, I don't, because I don't spend 100% of my income every year on income-tax applicable goods. A good chunk of my income, even that which is taxed with income tax, goes to other things (like my mortgage, other investments, groceries, savings accounts, charitable donations, etc.) that either defer paying sales taxes or have no sales tax applied.
Meanwhile other purchases have extra sales taxes applied such a liquor or hospitality taxes.
Obviously the hypothetical is assuming a uniform 10% sales tax, but what's your point? If you had a 20% sales tax on accommodations then incorporating a 25% income tax into it would make it a 60% sales tax. If you wanted to continue omitting the existing sales tax contribution to groceries but apply the income tax portion you could use 33% instead of 47% and so on.
My point is some people spend all their money on sales tax applicable things while others don't spend all their income. So those who don't spend all their money get to avoid those taxes on some percentage of their invome, potentially indefinitely.
Think for a second. What kind of household spends every penny they make? Which one maybe manages to toss some money into savings every month? Which one doesn't even come close to spending their income?
Which household here pays the highest effective tax rate?
Which still doesn't have anything to do with whether it's income or sales tax. If someone has some money they're not intending to spend anytime soon then they put it into a 401k to defer the taxes, or any of a dozen other things that have a similar result.
Sure it does. There are caps to those tax advantaged savings accounts. There's no cap on not spending money.
You're still designing a system where the highest effective tax rates are paid by the lowest income people and the lowest effective tax rates are paid by the highest income people. You've pointed to nothing that changes this truth.
> There are caps to those tax advantaged savings accounts.
Caps that are set to the amounts where people start having enough money to hire a tax accountant and thereby use the various other ways of deferring income tax on money you're not immediately spending.
> You're still designing a system where the highest effective tax rates are paid by the lowest income people and the lowest effective tax rates are paid by the highest income people.
The status quo is even worse: They not only defer income tax on the money they're not spending, they defer it on money they are spending, by borrowing against the assets and spending the loan. Which a consumption tax would have them paying.
Meanwhile you can exempt necessities from a consumption tax to various degrees or issue a large fixed tax credit to everyone, which lowers the effective rate on ordinary people by as much as you like.
It's unfortunate, but corporations moving to nations with lower corporate rates could reduce overall revenue if the domestic rates are too aggressive. In many ways it's easier to corporations to change nations than citizens.
Because the tin didn't say "repairable and upgradable and poor battery life and shaky case". It only mentioned the benefits but not the drawbacks.
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