[duped]

The irony of the Unix philosophy is that it's the antithesis of a computer. The entire point of a computer is to be a machine that can do anything if it's connected to the right hardware.

As computers are cheap and reliable now it's not surprising to me that we can make products that do more than one thing, and it's desirable to consumers.

The problem is when manufacturers start making these computers do things customers don't want and hiding it from them. And that's what regulation should support, since the market can't pick and choose which useful bits of an arbitrary machine are allowed to be used in a product when the manufacturer can reprogram it at will and never tells you what it does.

[malcolmgreaves]

Unix philosophy: connect simple programs together to create more complex programs.