It's really disingenuous to mud sling people with a different view by implying they themselves don't exist/are astroturfing/are bots.
I'm a real human who decided to use their service for kicks and actually like some of the benefits and control over the results compared to other search engines.
Especially when I'm doing research, which is usually half of all my time searching anyways.
Enough that I decided to pay for the service. I'm happy with it and want to share that happiness with others.
Are you saying that because I liked a service that I can't seem to get anywhere else I'm now the bad guy? Because I like something and want to share it with others, that's bad?
Is the alternative that you might prefer to be corporate astroturfing instead of organic discussion and growth? Like, really, seriously, what's the alternative here if people talking about and sharing something they like is not acceptable?
I'm in my house right now with a perfectly working thermostat that's 70 years old.
And given the mechanism of action it will continue working in another 70 years.
16 years for hardware used inside of homes is a ridiculously, absurdly, short lifetime. Even for a vehicle that would be pushing the edge of "too short".
That said 16-year-old software is not that old. If it's built using sane language choices it should actually be functioning and modern today.
What a great way to dismiss an entire problems based that affects our society. It's easier to just hand wave it away as someone else's problem than to actually consider it...
When a problem becomes systematic it's now a societal and cultural problem and not an individual responsibility problem. Individual responsibility isn't working so it's now down to the society this is occurring in to solve the systematic problem in a systematic way.
Wonder how much that ends up costing per month and how much that ends up costing over the lifetime of the vehicle.
Assuming the lifetime even matters when they decide to just cut off subscriptions at some point in the future to turn features off to drive you towards buying a new vehicle and dumping this one like a good consumer.
So, essentially, really poorly written malware? Given the number of assumptions it makes without any sort of robustness around system configuration it's about as good as any first-pass bash script.
It'd be a stretch to call it malware, it's probably an outright fabrication to call it a virus.
