Honestly it's all a bit strange, the various attacks on the US / UK/ France / Germany were all over the media in Australia, and the general sentiment was that they are an attack on us, despite them happening literally on the other side of the planet, and the conflict in Syria is closer. When the Australian media talk about who North Korea might decide to fire nuclear weapons at, of course the topic comes up of "where in Australia is in range".

People in my home state worry about what the US, China, Russia, North Korea, and ISIS are all up to despite being arguably on the safest bit of land on Earth, its just bizarre and I didn't see it until I spent a number of years in the UK.

Pretty much all of the above, the Australian public has been whipped up into a xenophobic frenzy just like people in the good ol' USA, Europe,and elsewhere, and much of it is overblown nonsense.

We Aussies like to think of our country as a lot more important than it really is on an international stage, when the rest of the world views us as a nice holiday destination and we spend all our time having barbecues or at the beach. So *of course* the terrorrists, chinese, asylum seekers, and everyone else, want to attack us and destroy our way of life.

Octopuses sounds terrible, as does Octopi and Octopodes. I've never understood why the plural isn't simply Octopus, like Sheep, or Squid.

Octopus tend to be solitary anyway, so its rare you really need to make the distinction between one and many Octopus, and more often you are talking vaguely about the species as a whole.

I think this is the gambit that Xi and Kim are angling for.

Under the Trump administration the US has been erratic at best, with suddenly withdrawing from the TPP and imposing trade restrictions on China without thinking about how it might affect their allies, as well as all of the rhetoric and sabre rattling over North Korea. From the perspective of South Korea, is their ongoing alliance with the US worth it? Or has it become something of a liability?

So Xi tells Kim to stop the nuclear programme in return for demanding the withdrawal of US troops, and the South might just be considering it.

Unfortunately the planet doesn't care for per-capita emissions, only global total emissions.

Per-capita Australia is one of the worst emitters around, but because we only have 26 million people we are only a drop in the bucket of total global emissions

I agree, but it could also be a sign of a highly unequal society that companies no longer have to go to the broad public to raise funds as they can get all they need from a handful of private investors.

Mining Bitcoin in the LMA skunkworks office obviously

Interesting enough the Trump Presidency may have had a postivive effect on the whole Hollywood sexism thing; Remember that 'womens march' that happened just after his inaugeration? Where thousands of men and women marched in response to sexual allegations against Trump. I'd say that would embolden anyone else to speak out about other high profile attackers and pave the way for things like #metoo.

Which makes you wonder, why *aren't* they being priced that way? Surely these toy makers want to make the most money right?

I wonder if people are willing pay more to the online scalper than they would otherwise be prepared to pay in a Big Box Store for some reason. Is it because thrifty families have a chance to buy the toy earlier and rich families can't bare the thought of some poor kids having something that their kids don't? Is it simply that a toy becomes more desirable the more unavailable it is? Certainly it seems like there's more to it than simple supply and demand, because otherwise makers would see the presence of scalpers as a signal that they can increase prices without altering demand.

I think its premature to be calling these things 'Artificial Intelligence', because as you say there doesn't really seem to be a whole lot of intelligence in these systems at all. The way I explain it is by calling them 'Artificial Instinct' machines instead, because that's closer to how these things actually function. The networks build up a set of kneejerk reactions to stimuli which is why they seem to work well for things that humans can do without really thinking about it, like driving cars.

The Chinese and the Russians are developing Sailfish OS for use in domestic markets, presumably because they aren't happy with US developed systems owning their markets.

This isn't unique to Microsoft though, and is seen throughout the industry not as 'nefariousness' just what makes good business strategy at any point in time.

When you're the underdog, you want people to switch to your offering, and as such software compatibility makes that easy. If you're successful and become top dog, you want to stop people leaving which you can do by ensuring your software compatibility is as hard as possible to replicate elsewhere.

Microsoft is certainly guilty of this, but imo its just the way business is. You don't give your competitors a level playing field unless someone makes you.

The problem is the education critical mass for productive work is increasing, you simply need to know a lot more stuff to be able to contribute to society.

Take away retail jobs (unproductive), and the now unemployed people (still unproductive) are going to need further education (also unproductive) and probably some kind of welfare so they can continue to live whilst retraining to do something useful.

In the long term this will probably be a good thing, but we need to stump up on education now and be prepared to pay for a large amount of displaced workers whose livelihoods have been made redundant. The idea that you can learn a simple trade, and spend your entire life doing it I believe is coming to an end, and the era of life long learning is beginning.

For us millennials its appears that assembling IKEA furniture has become some kind of rite of passage, and a true sign of 'adulting'.

And would you believe it, most of us completely suck at it. I've helped so many friends construct some basic things because the whole idea of screwing a few bits of chip board together completely terrifies them. Millennials by and large are just not practical people.

So the fact that there exists a service where you can summon someone from the internet to assemble your IKEA furniture for you doesn't really surprise me at all.

Not always, I *still* can't really believe people gave away a treasure trove of biometric facial data in exchange for cutesy pictures of their face as a cat or dog. I would be really surprised if Snap .inc doesn't have a deal with Palantir or other such government contractor.