I agree that they accumulate, but not necessarily that they don't break. I've recently recycled a 600e (working), a T30 (working), and a T61 (motherboard dead). There was a massive build quality difference between the (brilliantly solid) 600e and the T61. I'm hanging on to an x61s for the time being, since it still works and it's quite small.
I still love the design ascetic of these laptops and I wouldn't be surprised to find myself buying one in the future.
I must say, having switched from Google OpenID 2.0 to Google OAuth2.0 for authentication on our site I raised an eyebrow when I belatedly read on Homakov's 2013 blog[1] that OAuth2.0 was never intended for authentication, only authorization for certain discrete resources. At least with Stack Exchange doing it I'm in good company, but - if Egor is correct - it raises the question what's really a good choice for authentication nowadays.
You get all the benefits of a mature and very full-featured RMDBS.
Neo4j is a great database, and I use it myself for a project that involves lots of deep hierarchies. But it has a fairly sparse feature-set where schema enforcement and data integrity checking are concerned; you basically have to add all that stuff yourself at the application level which can amount to a lot of work.
I think it's fair to hope for a more customizable Chromium, since customizability is one of the things Opera was known for. For me personally, things like a bookmarks sidebar and more flexible tab positioning would help tempt me to switch back to Opera from Firefox.
> it's not possible to unambiguously segment the text into distinct letters (which is a necessary first step in any OCR engine that I'm aware of)
In my experience, the ability to handle overlapping letters (which is very common on type-written text and professionally typeset material) is one of the key things that separate the relatively lightweight OCRs (like Ocrad and GOCR) from the big complicated ones (Tesseract, Cuneiform, Abbyy etc). Whitespace character segmentation cannot be taken for granted if you want to do any useful OCR of "historical" material.
That's not the case in my experience. Anecdotal, but I worked at a company where the brunt of the downturn layoffs fell disproportionately on people who needed work Visas, which have become much more difficult to justify in the current climate. AFAIK nothing's changed in that respect.
Being quite familiar with Kirsty Wark and Newsnight, my impression of this segment was that she was playing devil's advocate, almost doing Greenwald a favour by allowing him to easily rebut some of the more common charges against his handling of the Snowden leaks.