So they specifically are not prohibiting the police from having killer robots. Which frankly is the only plausible scenario where a robot kills someone.

No. They are going with the same principle of all gun bans: If you possess a gun we will send you to prison for 5 years. Completely ignoring the fact that people contemplating murder, distributing drugs, or bombing the Boston Marathon (just to pick a random example that really happened) will be completely unmoved by adding 5 years to their capital offense. What are they going to do keep someone tied to the lethal injection table for 60 months?

This is just another "Law for Thee but None for Me" that all governments just can't help themselves when the opportunity to enact it shows up.

Commercial fusion has been 10 years away for 70 years.

In the last couple decades governments have stepped up their game and actually built real hardware that can create an actual fusion reaction. This is a net positive over the theoretical papers that were about all we had to show for the preceding half century. But at the end of the day these devices are almost exclusively industrial dead ends. We knew in 1950 how to cause a fusion reaction: pressure + heat = fusion. So while these experiments are of potential use in filling in edge information they simply are not headed in a direction that will generate grid power.

Myself being an unrestrained believer in capitalism in general and greed in particular propose a different role government can play in solving this problem.

Pass a Constitutional Amendment backed by international treaties that fusion power can never be regulated or taxed. This will need to be locked in with every legal structure available in the world because in today's reality of governance abuses and double crosses businesses are going to need as many assurances as humanity can give that national governments won't just change the rules when they smell a revenue stream to be extorted.

Private research would explode to a level seldom, if ever, seen in human history. Fans of Extinction Level Event Sci-Fi will recognize the resources marshaled from every corner of the planet.

My prediction is you will have multiple grid level fusion power plants online within 5 years. But if not we will then finally know it CANNOT be done with the best physics we have today. Thus even failure tells us something important.

Apple threw an absolute FIT when Palm used their USB device identifier to get their device to work with iTunes. But there was no law saying they couldn't do that.

This is specifically called out in the anti-human government gift to corporations DMCA! They'll be lucky to stay out of jail by the time Apple finishes with them.

It is sad but not surprising that the cancer of DMCA still exists a generation after such a one sided horrific law was so unwisely codified.

The missing part? There should be a meaningful penalty for filing nuisance, fraudulent or just plain wrong takedown notices.

For decades copyright trolls like MarkScan have abused the system and done very real damage to anyone and everyone that crossed their path. The easy solution is for the copyright holder to pay the innocent victim 1% of their global net income. So if "Basement Bob" decides to be a jerk then this victim gets 1% of his $7.50 / hr income. And if Sony decides to attack some poor person, instead of having to fight an uphill battle against a faceless corporation with limitless resources now 1% of Sony's entire net income is on the line.

Think you can get a lawyer a little better than the typical ambulance chancer for 1% of Sony's income? Because I bet you can!

Suddenly takedown notices become serious lawfare. Where your ability to ruin the life of some poor smuck has a Meaningful downside if you are wrong.

Which is of course why it will never happen. The people that pay for the politicians get the laws they buy. Still it would be nice if just once the government gave the tiniest little crap about the citizens of the nation.

Well there's a bunch of money that could have been spent on absolutely ANYTHING else.

Seriously you have a body tidal locked to another body. In other words one side is always facing it MUCH larger anchor while the other side is sticking out in space to get hit by any random crap that their shared gravity well can capture.

Sometimes research is pointless. Sometimes it is full on retarded.

The article doesn't say who is going to pay for it. But you can bet it won't be a use tax on the people that will be using it. Socialism doesn't work that way. Most likely it will come out of their usurious gas taxes.

I am not opposed to these projects in general and this project in particular. Bicycles have no business on the road with cars. I'd just like to see them stand on their own economic feet. If it can't pay its way (cough) wind power, then it shouldn't be built. When you steal money for politically motivated projects you hurt everyone because resources are finite. What is spent on unsustainable project A is then unavailable for sustainable project B.

" the worst quality in the history of broadcasting "

When he was actually popular didn't most people listen on AM radios. Some neat high fidelity features of AM radio for those that didn't know their cars even can pump that signal out the 4-8 speakers in the average factory radio setup today:

• They have about a 10 KHz bandwidth. Nothing says quality like hacking off all the harmonics
• Everything from high humidity to, of course, lightning causes anywhere from mild crackle to complete detection failure of the Amplitude Modulation signal
• Any song over 3 minutes had to have a special "radio cut" or they simply wouldn't play it
• For many decades (not sure if it applied when he was popular) songs were truncated because the news played at the top of the hour ON THE TICK. Anything else was simply cut off.

Some more facts that apply universally to every form of reproduction in the era:

• The RF and audio amplifiers were largely unshielded electronically, yielding a predictable intrusion of electronic noise
• Frequency response has always been listed as 10-20K Hz and totally flat. It is a lie today. Then it was a "DAMN LIE".
• Rare earth magnets were quite simply unheard of. Iron ruled the day. So the Single 6 inch speaker in your car, 2 inch speaker in your handheld, or even 10 inch speaker in your console, leisurely wallowed back and forth as it tracked the audio signal at a relatively low correlation.

Add to this the hiss of cassette tapes or the overbearing continuous POP POP POP of a sterile vinyl record with brand new "needle", not to mention when either of these gets dusty, and yeah, the good old days were fantastic and rightly remembered as the golden age of audio reproduction technology.

Tell me again how it's not about the money.

These sweeping generalization stories flow like water after EVERY baby step in technology. From long before the paperless office myth, to high level stop lights that were going to eliminate rear end collisions and now HUDs each new technology faces it's microsecond of judgement when the lame stream media decides whether to evangelize or condemn it with little, if any, evidence.

The actual truth is ANYTHING you do to change "normal" for the average person will have a wildly disproportionate impact on immediate studies -- until people get used to it. High level stoplights are the quintessential example. Somewhat well constructed studies showed a holy grail sized impact from this wild new thing no one had ever seen before; within 3 years they were little more than light pollution.

OF COURSE your, not really statistically valid, "random sample" will demonstrate people are staring at the new bauble. This proves less than nothing at all. Most of the time it gives a VERY false impression of long term results. We are addicted to instantaneous results being nowhere near fast enough, but for any hope of a valid study you'd have to leave the mice with their toy for a year before you START the study.

One of the reasons "science" has fallen into disrepute and distrust is because the modern "scientist" is a political creature that doesn't really have any idea what the scientific method is, or means. He also never learned basic statistics. But he is a GRAND MASTER at filling out Grant Requests and producing the results desired by the Grantor.

Bringing a unified GUI to the PC fundamentally changed the device.

The icon based launcher meant the user didn't have to learn names and what they did. Just look for the picture of cards and she could be playing Solitaire.

Similarly the menu bar and WYSIWYG lowered the skill requirement such that just about anybody could accomplish "something" with a computer. It also let a lot of people that should be running cash registers at McDonalds become bookkeepers. I suspect Excel has bankrupt a LOT of small businesses.

But you can't put the genie back in the bottle.

Most all "carbon dating" is absolute fiction. You cannot carbon date something that was never alive. They just pull most of these numbers out of their butts. It is completely unknowable.

This is just utterly mystifying! There are continuous claims of temperature rise and counterclaims ranging from cherry picking data to outright forgery. Etc etc etc the battle for hearts and minds ranges.

BUT this is very different. Now both sides are claiming to have real world facts showing a delta in measurements. Alarmists say they have data showing Antarctic ice disappearing while the other side claims to have data showing it is at near historic high levels. One side or the other is PROBABLY lying. Although we shouldn't completely discount the possibility that it hasn't changed at all.

Figures don't lie but liars figure.

I assume this solution would be based around the app providing bogus passwords if you enter a bad master password. I suppose that would be something you could do for foiling the petty pickpocket or keystone cop. But surely any attacker that actually plans to succeed will use a cryptographic attack against the data store, not poke random keys on the UI.

I have wondered before if security could be improved by storing an encrypted file inside another encrypted file, ideally with different schemes. But from a serious attacker standpoint I don't really know what I'm talking about. It sounds good, but probably would only prove vaguely annoying, rather than mega-secure.

PER-HAPS this white elephant will be built. But there is absolutely no guarantee. Will bankrupt California be in a position a decade from now to still be pouring money into this hole? Current estimate is $68 billion. Thus if the Boston Big Dig has taught us anything, assuming you were a complete moron and didn't know it already, $68 billion is a hopeless pipe dream that will be no better than 50% of the final cost ASSUMING everything goes letter perfect.

If it were to be completed my guess, which is FAR better than theirs but still only a guess, is for $225 billion with construction completed in 2042. 400% over budget on money and 100% over budget on time. That sounds historically accurate.

One has to wonder what sort of road they could build for $200 billion, or even $100 billion. I envision I5a I5b I5c I5d; each of them 12 lanes with automatic switching so each 50,000 cars would travel a different road. Couple this with I5e and I5f dedicated to self driving cars traveling at 150 MPH and the california bullet train looks like a bigger dinosaur than the F-35-never-to-fly-in-combat USAF boondoggle.

And all this leaves out the fact that in the next 50 years there will probably be some big earthquake that damages the line. Creating a huge infrastructure item with a single point of failure is just plain stupid. Say it all works. It won't. But say it does. Say they ignore primary transportation and funnel all the gas taxes into this thing to the point they have to close I5. Now when anything from earthquake to terrorists to sinkhole breaks it for 6 months, or maybe 18, what the hell are you going to do?

The Linux ecosystem is already severely wounded, possibly mortally so, by systemd's attempted coup. The operating system loses most all practical advantages because of this malware - I will literally go so far as to say if I have to have Linux with systemd I don't want Linux. I might as well just run Windows. They are both black boxes of unknown function and unrepairable, not to mention unfindable, vulnerabilities. So why bother with the down sides of Linux if it has no up side?

At this point I am evaluating BSD vs Windows 10; BSD is winning. Hopefully Linus will never allow these evil monsters to commit their viruses to the kernel. That will be game over for Linux.

So basically bombing developing children's minds for a decade or more to make the more receptive to the state indoctrination is an important psychotherapy. But an adult voluntarily using the same drugs to further their personal goals shows once again how America is barbaric and discriminates against workers etc etc etc etc.

Got it. Thank you Comrade Marx