alt Hacker NewsWhat you're actually saying is that I shouldn't be allowed to determine what kind of RAM my application needs. Instead, you are saying that someone with a gun should dictate this choice to me.
That's what we mean when we say that people with your point of view are promoting nanny-statism. It amounts to infantilization of adult consumers and subsequent disempowerment.
Occasionally such legislation can be justified, as when genuinely hazardous products are involved, or products whose use involves wide-ranging externalities, but usually not. People can and should be educated -- and expected -- to make their own decisions about things like whether they need ECC RAM.
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How do YOU propose doing this when most computer "experts" have never used ECC RAM and when it's only available in high end specialist systems that aren't on sale in regular computer stores?
I think my knowledge of the topic is pretty good but I learned from this discussion that almost all AMD CPUs support ECC RAM and you apparently just need a motherboard to match. When accompanying people who were buying "gamer" PCs (after they rejected my recommendation for a second hand workstation grade computer with ECC RAM) I never witnessed store staff saying "hey you could get a motherboard with ECC support".
> People can and should be educated -- and expected -- to make their own decisions about things like whether they need ECC RAM.
So you think its realistic to expect the average consumer to assess the pros and cons of using ECC RAM?
We could solve this by better information which addresses your concerns about it being nanny statism. We would need it to be something that consumers understand - e.g. We could require all computers without ECC RAM to have a warning label saying something like "this computer uses cheap memory so is prone to crashing and losing your data". I strongly suspect the impact of that would be very similar to that of just banning non-ECC RAM.
I would also argue that having reliable RAM is a reasonable extension of existing legal requirements for consumer products: e.g. that they are of satisfactory quality and fit for purpose (to use the current UK terminology).