Yeah, this shocked me when I learned it. The actual "deal" is the defendant agrees to plea guilty in exchange for the prosecution giving a specific recommendation of sentence. (In most cases, there are some exceptions of course)
The right to have an lawyer provided by the state only applies to criminal cases, not civil cases like in this one. In civil cases the burden of funding a defense is on the defendant. Even if it’s initially thrown out, the appeals process can take years and even more money.
There's a difference between a toolchain becoming unsupported, and putting a hack around a feature that later becomes obsolete due to business decisions.
That hack could certainly be technical debt, up until it isn't. If the code that it was implemented in is no longer used in the future, you didn't incur any cost to it.
Not an original idea but I can't remember where I heard the idea. Technical debt is the best kind of debt, because it's the only debt that you might not have to pay back.
It doesn't have to be a hack to be technical debt. Anything with a shelf life, even out of date design, has risk and costs. The old python 2 is technical debt even if it wasn't a hack. Something needs to be done, it's just a question of what and when.
My biggest gripe is that the up and down arrow keys are half the size of the left and right arrow keys. It makes it difficult to quickly move the cursor or scroll through previous commands in a terminal. If I didn’t use emacs I probably would have picked another machine
