zipwitch

Wish I could award more points to this comment. After getting a counterfeit power bank recently, I realized that the due diligence I was going to need to do when buying some small additions and replacements to my camping gear was eating so much time it was easier to just go to the store, nvm the hour+ round trip and slightly higher prices.

They could always try to more dirctly monetize gmail.

A murder destroys a single life, or handful of lives, directly. Is a bank executive who wilfully commits fraud that damages million of lives better or far worse?

Regardless of how bad it is (and I do think there are arguments to be made both ways), being allowed to effectively escape punishment because the distributed nature of the crime makes it hard to comprehend its real impact is both wrong and damaging to society in the long run.

I wonder if there will be job offers from a certain large country in Asia?

The big problem with hiring older workers is that they're better at knowing what they're actually worth. They also tend to avoid personal sacrifices (mainly time and health) that are of net benefit to the company but not to themselves.

Do not underestimate the American corporation's ability to believe they have a right to a profitable business model. This is a nation where municipalities are regularly stopped from building their own broadband.

This is merely the inevitable outcome of what we've known has been coming for a while, even if many haven't wanted to acknowledge that the corals were effectively already dead. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/14/opinion/a-world-without-co...

The problem with the "humanity will survive... somehow" is that without a great deal of work now in order to direct the future, we are abdicating our control of the how part. When the specifics are left up to circumstance, the details are all too likely to be horrific.

Are there numbers behind that reasoning?

I ask, because that doesn't match up well with my (anecdotal) experience as an end user. When I'm searching for software to either replace something I'm currently using but dissatisfied with or when I'm doing something new (to me), I want to demo candidates so I can get a feel whether I like them or not. I don't mind paying for quality software (though much quality software is free), but requiring credit card info for even a demo is the exact sort of hurdle which I won't put up with. The cost (in time, and potentially wasted time in the future) is just too high.

There is quality content out there, much of it for free. It's just hard to find, particularly via search engine.

Obligatory _Snow Crash_ reference along with the increasingly redundant observation that we really are living in a cyberpunk dystopia.

What are the chances that the access pass from the foreign government to actors you don't want spying on you: criminals or your own government's intel agencies?

Careful there. If you start really thinking about long-term tradeoffs and the real costs of externalities you might fall into a bottomless pit of despair and rage. (And not just at Uber.)

Or the sunken microcontinent in the Southern Indian Ocean: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerguelen_Plateau

When certain groups are exempt from the force of the law, while others feel its full weight, it is not justice, but rather a mockery of it.

I read _Against A Dark Background_ as a teen an thought of it as a pretty fun sf, almost space-opera adventure story. Then I read it again as an adult and... wow. Bank's SF work is very good, but the quiet existential horror that lurks behind the scenes in that novel really merits the title. Makes good old Lovecraft seem like a piker by comparison.

I've been following space news since I was a kid in the 70s, and now I'm to the point where I find these repetitions of "Mars in ~25 years" to be more pathetically sad than anything else.

Maybe Musk and SpaceX will succeed, maybe not. But either way, he's not playing the same tired tune I've heard my entire life.

The U.S. Patent Office will grant a patent for basically anything. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100819/12015210689.shtml

If doing so proves beyond a shadow of doubt that our government officers are lying both to the people of the United States and to their representatives in Congress, as Director of National Intelligence did, isn't that a good thing?

Just so I'm clear here, you're expecting us to trust the NSA? An agency that is publicly on officially on the record as lying to Congress?

A rifle really is the best tool for: hunting large game for food and defending yourself from hostile megafauna.

As xkcd put it, "In the last few years, with very little fanfare, we've conclusively settled the questions of flying saucers, lake monsters, ghosts, and bigfoot."

https://xkcd.com/1235/

The Chelyabinsk meteor was pretty amazing, though.

How terrifying would status quo power holders find a free, universally available and readily usable software tool that provided real and uncrackable anonymity for anyone?

If all you're concerned with is keeping basic information out of the hands of comparatively low-resource adversaries (such as hiding your IP address from single website and its authors/owners) there are low-cost and comparatively simple solutions. For examples, a decent VPN or visit to Starbucks costs <$10. (And there are also free proxies, within limits.)

I thought the whole point of Tor was that it would work against highly capable or motivated adversaries?

I seem to recall that one of the drags on the Shuttle's performance was the Air Force insistence on a larger cargo bay and requirement that it be able to reach polar orbit.

Or perhaps made from some strange matter, alien to understanding? (What does a fossilized Great Old One look like, anyway? Would it still be alive?)

To quote Mike Brown (who has the best Twitter handle ever), "Weekly PSA: no, in fact the earth is NOT going to be destroyed by [fill in crazy thing seen on internet here] next week. Thanks for asking." https://twitter.com/plutokiller

Billionaire's personal media outlet promotes virtues of panoptic surveillance!

What they're _planning_ is not relevant. What matters is whether they're competent enough to keep such keys secure. (Such as by not allowing malicious actors to get copies of them.)

What is relevant is that they are demonstrably _not_ competent.

Data-mining.

How can the smart-fridge company sell your eating habits if your fridge only tells you (and not them) how you're using it?