What about near the motorway? On the shoulder of one, calling for help? Calls that are data only? (Those are still normal cellphones underneath, with a number and everything.) Should passengers be allowed to use the phone? What of people who live in buildings adjacent to them?

Of course, this is all assuming that you can even tell that someone is on a roadway with any amount of certainty.

Deliberately breaking a class of technology isn't going to stop people from being distracted while driving a car. I would wager that someone on an animated phone call is still safer than all the people that read while driving.

Your scenario is more likely to end up like the annoying GPS systems that lock the screen out from changes while moving: disabled.

Couldn't the science community just not update the firmware?

Only until the PS3's they are running break. Which is scarily looking like it will start occurring soon; the community of users with early PS3's have been seeing early warning signs and ramped-up failure rates for some time now.

What they need, and probably will look for now, is a way to get "behind" hypervisor, install an alternate bootloader or some other method of loading Linux up, and go that route. And the moment that happens, the "pirates" (yarr harr fiddle de dee) will get hold of it and we're off to the races...

Hey, pizza doesn't deliver itself.

Yes, yes it is. If someone offers you exorbitant compensation from public funds and imposes no consequences for failure to deliver, it is unethical to persist once you realize what's going on since you're basically stealing from the public. Both sides of the deal are in the wrong. If the donor were a private entity, then there's no problem.

Say I accept that we can reach agreement about a definition of normal sight. That does not change the argument I am making, which is that once we start using this technique we will almost immediately come up against a different question of normal for which the answer is not obvious, and it would be very easy to cross that line without realizing it until after the fact. There is a slippery slope here. Which is not to say we shouldn't do it at all. But we need to carefully weigh the consequences and determine where we wish to stop before we begin, because if we do it after it may be too late to slow the momentum for improvement and prevent the fracturing of society into physically distinct classes.

Actually, they had a paper slip system where you could enter the time you got there and left if you forgot to punch in. People started forgetting to punch in a LOT (and oddly enough working more overtime).

Yeah, I can hear Steve Jobs railing on his staff from here.

"Damn it, you boobs! You switched to non-industry-standard units, and you STILL didn't get us darkpixel2k? Don't give me those iPhone and iPad sales numbers, you guys FUCKED UP!"

US billion or UK billion?

Mixing 1000 and 1024 just made my day. Well done.

Sorry, you have to obtain the incriminating photos of government officials before you submit your application.

What if they discover there is a gay gene? Would 'curing' gay people still be ok? What if there is a gene that makes people 'republican' ( it has been discussed as a stubbornness gene ), would that be ok, or one that makes some a liberal? I get the argument with colour-blindness, my brother is colour blind. I think the question should be do these people want a cure? I'm sure some blind people do, but there may be some that are ok being blind. I think the question is do these people want to change not weather we should be able to change them or not.

There's a legion of pointy haired bosses who lead staffs of developers charged with applying DRM. They have a keen interest in seeing DRM applied in any and all situations. Further, they aren't shy about warning their respective executive chain about the horrors the business would experience in the absence of DRM.

furthermore, i despise the fact that just because i have quicktime and adobe and java installed, i have to always have these useless potentially bogus processes constantly running in the background doing nothing but waiting for their once monthly updates

it makes much better sense to have ALL software updated through one repository which, obviously, has to be microsoft

I think it makes more sense for these apps to STFU and not run at all, unless another program calls them. THEN it can update, or better yet, just have an updater run on boot then shut itself the hell off until you need the app.

I hate today's mantra of "throw more hardware at it".

I just bought a new gaming PC. I took my old PC and hooked it up to my TV.

The TV is a giant projection TV I got from my father-in-law when he upgraded to LCD TVs. It has an HDMI port on it.

I got a cable to convert DVI to HDMI and used that to go from the PC to the TV, and another cable that takes stereo out from my PC and coverts it into left and right RCA for the sound input on the TV.

For Christmas, at the company party, I won a Microsoft wireless keyboard/mouse, and VX3000 Life Cam kit. Unfortunately the wireless range on the mouse and keyboard is not good enough to reach to the couch.

Other than that, it works great.

We can surf the web and watch Netflix "Watch Now" or other web content on the big-screen TV. Plus I can watch ripped movies (from my own collection, of course) right from my PC.

We just canceled cable TV because we never watch it anymore. I just have the cable for internet access.

No, he absolutely right. The safest one lane bridge will be one made with 10 bazillion cubic feet of cement and steel...with a few holes to let the water through of course. But, this is the real world, you can't do that. It would be ugly, environmentally harmful, and cost too much money; it wouldn't get built on real earth.

There's ALWAYS compromise for functionality. This is why things such as "margin of safety" exists. You don't build something that will not fail, you build something that a failure is, statistically, pretty slim.

If you read your quote, he says it's always tempered by the real world. This is true. So, I challenge you: name *one* device that functions as it should, 100% of the time, without compromise.
If I were given this impossible challenge, the first thing that would come to my mind is medical devices. Look up how fruitful medical device production is these days. It's not, because for anything beyond something simple like a screw, you nearly *can't* make them reliable enough and still turn a profit over their lifetimes (lawsuits for failing devices are expensive for some odd reason).