I agree, that rabidreindeer oughta switch mechanics since private mechanics will usually do what you described, but he's also right that they don't have to do that.

Just as we have the option of working off the clock to do our debugging, mechanics can choose to do the same thing and in small shops they often choose to for the sake of costumer good will and personal pride. I suspect if you find a good private developer to contract some small coding projects to, he would come back and fix serious bugs for free as well. I'd certainly consider doing that if I was that developer.

Because they don't have to, big repair centers won't do this for you and their employees usually won't. The employee ran the standard diagnostic tools in the standard way; the tools indicated a problem that is to be fixed with X (even if his gut tells him Y), which he then installed precisely to specification. Didn't work? Not our problem; talk to the manufacturer about making better diagnostics. And the same goes for software development projects. In both cases, the employee got paid a rate to do X, like hell I'm coming back in to work for free and buying my own hardware because now my boss wants me to do Y.

Don't care. I still want to check the status of my dryer on via internet. And I'm still going to sell my neighbor on how great it is to sit upstairs and monitor the dryness of my clothes from my computer and so he should totally buy my tripped out dryer monitor project.

I, and I think "they," totally accept your fact. We just don't care. We like playing with computers and were going to continue to put them everywhere so we can play with them in new ways and we are going to talk on the internet about how fun it is to have them all. You don't have to join us.

As someone who has had to live with some pretty disgusting roommates, I would pay a premium for a fridge that automatically discarded moldy food and not have to argue about who gets to decided what's too moldy: the fridge decided and I threw it out!

Also, just last week I had something (I forget what, happens every few months) hidden behind some jars until it rotted and I had already bought another one. If it had had an RFID tag, I'd just ask my fridge if I had one, where it was and how long until it officially expired.

No, I don't want to study the arts of fridge organization, schedule regular fridge checkups and better vet my house guests or in general, do anything if I can just buy a piece of technology to make all of that easier. That's what technology does: make things easier.

Theoretically, but in reality, anything that looks too suspicious has to be investigated. Otherwise, if someone who actually wanted to build a bomb knew that fake data was discarded, they just run 10,000 random queries in the exact same manor as the few real ones they need and easily hide their intent. Or consider after a terrorism indecent, the report on why some beyond-obvious activity wasn't caught, "Well, they looked too much like terrorists, like they were some caricature perpetrated by someone trying to troll us so we ignored it."

Also, I know for a fact that once you check so many boxes, They have to come do an investigation. My random e-mailer pissed off the secret service right after 9-11*. Though in that case, my service provider passed on the unusual activity when they noticed I got their domain blacklisted by Yahoo for spam email; I wasn't caught by NSA spying.

The question you would be asking anywhere but slashdot would be: "why did you do that?" And the answer would be: in a course I was taking at college, internet monitoring came up, and I single handedly argued against the whole class and teacher that They would not show up for a few emails with the word bomb. So I went home to prove the class wrong and maybe the class was kinda right.

Your idea sounds really cool, kinda like what TOR does but more-so. I just wanted to point out that random activity does get noticed. Your welcome to try your own experiments though!

No really, non-techies, who own a machine for fun, often just need a web browser and some games, which Ubuntu has. On some laptops, Ubuntu can even use the wireless card without all the typical struggle to get the driver into the kernel.

It's not until you have to install printers and run niche software that other operating systems actually start being needed.

Really is that weird. What operations do your coffee machines do that requires a full featured operating system?

Though, my coffee maker was $2 while I've known people who have owned several hundred dollar, personal, espresso machines, so my conception of coffee machine might not be up to snuff.

I was thinking the exact same thing: I'm in front of my computer typing furiously right now. I kinda wish I had a chip to record this moment of what looks like extreme productivity.

That might actually be great PR for upper management; as it is ,I believe they just golf all day, except when it's time to pay themselves bigger bonuses. If they staged a few productive meetings, I'd be all "Wow! Management actually does stuff; I had no idea!"

Yeah, but like alot of things tha t aren't hard, they are hard to people completely new to it with none of the common knowledge people who do these things have about it.

When I first realized I didn't know how to steer on snow, luckily everyone around me did know how, and no accidents occurred when I went spinning down the freeway. In Atlanta, I've been told, most people aren't experienced with snow driving, one person losing control starts a chain reaction of people suddenly realizing they can't control their vehicles.

Whoah hoah, rich guy! Your welcome to save up whatever amounts you want, but the question really is: if you had what you currently consider to be plenty of money (in your case 5m), would you still be working, or would you put that in your newly created 'jet fund' and continue slaving away?

$1mil invested to grow at 5% per year would give me (and most of the US population) more than my after tax and 401k subtracted salary. I would retire immediately unless you can find me something more fun than drinking margaritas on the beach, which in my case would not be cleaning toilets.

And for people who aren't dead?

I.e. can I get this to replace my long distance X-girlfriend? Or would it also decide I'm getting too creepy and we need to break up?

I can't be the only slashdotter that wants it for this purpose.

No we don't. The longest battleship I know of is 333m long and the worlds longest ship is only 460m long [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world%27s_longest_ships]. These are exceptional, we don't build even these short things these all the time. You are looking for a 500m radius, which means we need something twice that long to make 2 little habitable zones on either end.

Hunks of space debris traveling at relativistic speeds may need to be accounted for. Also radiation shielding is not just for humans, it screws up all your electronics too. Plus there are other design You do need to make this proposed space ship pretty durable as well. Also consider that aircraft carriers need regular servicing, so put that in your budget too.
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We built the worlds longest craft ever and armored it for space; let's launch it:

A fully loaded space shuttle is something like 200,000lbs and the launch weight (e.i. fuel + breakaway boosters) is something like 4,500,000lbs, over twenty times the weight of the craft. Launching the shuttle costs about $450,000,000 per mission [http://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/about/information/shuttle_faq.html#10]

The seawise giant (1/2 the length we need) with no cargo is 183,408,960lbs. And assuming I we can magically scale our shuttle-scale launch gear up to that size at no additional cost (we'd probably launch the pieces and asseble it in space, though we don't have the tech to do so yet).: its launch weight will be 4,126,701,600lbs and cost $412,670,160,000 to launch. 400billion, which is actually doable, but that is just for the launch assuming everything goes perfectly and we already have all the equipment sitting around.
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So, yes its technically possible and earth could use fewer religious zealots hating science, but this is alot of work to prevent astronauts from getting dizzy on landing.

That is an important fact, but in this case, the lesson is: don't do business with companies that can't deal with social engineering.

The hacker didn't have to guess his passwords and it looks like he didn't even try. The hacker just social engineered paypal and then godaddy to hand over control.

Well, yes, but this has been going on for centuries: We have been automating areas in the work force that means less people employed doing brain numbingly boring tasks over and over and over again. Even Baxter will need human supervisors and teachers, so he it will automate away a few more jobs, but we still haven't gotten to the point where robots run the factories autonomously. The recent economic slumps have not been from technological progress either.

As a geek, wanna-be maker, I've been trying to think how to automate all of my friends out of jobs, and all of them are secure for the time being. I haven't even designed something to effectively dust my house, and I still need to vacuum and mop even after my Roomba goes over the floor a couple times.

One day I hope we have to make the decisions you are worrying about, and get to the Star Trek, "Money? Whats that?" Era, and capitalism can go die in fire while we eat robot-peeled grapes on our robot wheeled chaise lounges in our robot tended gardens, but we aren't close yet. We are getting closer though; for example, we have retirement, complete with government stipend. which was non-existent in the working classes a century ago.

Though it must also be pointed out that other primates have mouths that stick out while human's have theirs set back below their noses, and therefore humans need something to stick out in order to suck on it. Of course, breasts are way to big for that to be the sole driving factor in their development, and I would blame sexual signalling for getting them to the size that they are.