Pretty sure they could if they used the right excuse.

Something the "we'll live without being subject to any nation's laws" crowd never seem to consider is that it means they are truly on their own without the protection of any nation. When you become a nation unto yourself, as they aim to be, there's nothing stopping any nation from declaring war on you if they decide they want to.

Fuck yes. Absolutely.

Of course, as with any other stance, it's ultimately down to a question of just how much one cares to, or can afford to, or can stand to, or is practical, take it.

Vegan? There's precious little made that doesn't involve bits of some dead animal at some point in its manufacture, even if we exclude oil.

Gun control? It's generally accepted that it's a practical necessity for there to be at least some level of civilian firearm ownership, opinion just differs on where to draw what lines.

For huge numbers of end consumers, there's not much choice. With wage stagnation and general costs of living generally increasing, the cheap Chinese-made thing is all they can afford. If there even is an option made somewhere else. Assuming the other options aren't made by companies being just as exploitative.

The real question should be, "is it ethical for corporations to outsource all their manufacturing to China?"

I'm definitely in Camp Universal Income. Everyone gets enough to live comfortably enough on, and if you want more income on top of that, you can work. Guaranteed jobs for everyone on the face of it doesn't sound like a bad idea, but it will wind up being the case that a lot of people are given pointless makework. As much as people do like to keep busy, no-one respects being given work that exists only for the sake of keeping them busy.

Only in that enough people lived long enough to reproduce to keep things going. Now that we have the know-how, many deaths that would have been inevitable are now preventable. Saying "well we don't really need this because humanity has scraped by without it" is a pretty callous attitude to have.

This is exactly the idea behind Microsoft's forced updates: most people are never applying updates, which causes problems, so if the updates get applied without user intervention, problem solved. I don't think they're entirely wrong, but they went about implementing mandatory updates in a kind of brain dead way.

iOS doesn't have forced updates; it is always up to the user to decide to install updates or not, though Apple do a bit to encourage it. The difference between iOS and Android in terms of updates is that Apple as a matter of course rolls out security updates to every device currently supported (and they are supported for quite some time, contrary to the largely inaccurate stereotype of Apple devices getting thrown out and replaced annually) and new versions of iOS to basically all devices capable of running the new version. With android, it's left up to each hardware manufacturer to provide security updates and new versions for their devices. Many don't bother at all, many others do a couple of security updates and maybe a new version while the device in question is "current" before basically abandoning it. Even if a device is technically capable of running a new version, it's not usually an option to "go over the manufacturer's head" for updates; a build has to be tailored to the model in question, and while the wider open source community does offer some for some devices, it's very much a mixed bag of what's supported, how up-to-date it is, and even how trustworthy the third party is.

Maybe everyone is wrong but you. But maybe, just maybe, you're the one with a strange idea about what "modified" means.

If I plug a USB webcam into my desktop PC, my PC hasn't been modified, it's had a peripheral plugged into it to provide functionality it otherwise lacked. On unplugging said peripheral, my PC is back to being the same as it previously was. This cartridge of his can be plugged into any old NES, using the exact same interface as any other cartridge, and provide it additional functionality. On this cartridge being unplugged, the NES is back to being the same as it ever was. No actual modification has taken place; no chips added to the motherboard, no wires soldered to existing chips.

As another poster points out, a number of published NES games included additional hardware on the cartridge, and no-one's described a NES that's running one of those games as being modified because of it.

Yeah, the snark about the headline accuracy is really unnecessary; it's an impressive feat to do this with an unmodified NES, however it's achieved. And sure, there's probably ways to do it better. And sure, there's not much practical use for this specific thing. But it's a cool and interesting proof of concept; taking the knowledge gained from this, one could develop a NES cartridge that could make an unmodified NES do all sorts of things no-one would dream it's capable of.

The fact the cartridge would necessarily be itself a more powerful computer than the NES is neither here nor there, as is the fact that in most cases there'd be no practical point to including the NES in the equation versus just using the other hardware on its own or with less troublesome video output. It need not even be a NES that further work in this direction is done with; the basic theory would be applicable to other systems, even if implementation would be very different.

If it's not what was advertised/described, that's effectively defective from a consumer viewpoint: either way you're not getting what you think you're getting. Australian consumer law actually codifies this.

Really, it's more akin to my posts, rather than any Anonymous Cowards replying to my posts. There is the common thread, my username, attached to every post I've made. Looking at every post I've made and what I've said about my real life in them, one could build a profile on me - incomplete, but potentially enough to match to a profile from a different source.

Cryptocurrencies will be less anonymous than that. In my posts I could be embellishing the truth (or outright lying) enough to throw off a match, though careful enough analysis would counteract that to some degree. But a cryptocurrency ledger would be more definite; X amount paid to Y on Z date. One transaction in itself pretty meaningless, but payments are generally going to be for something, and unless you're seriously paranoid, you're not using a different throwaway wallet with no other traceable links for every single transaction. A pattern of purchases can be associated with a pattern of real-world movement of goods or provision of services. And of course, if you or one of the other parties gets careless about even one of the transactions and it gets tied to you, everything gets tied to you.

Anyone who's surprised by this isn't suspicious enough of the idea that a currency built on a permanent public ledger of transactions could possibly be anonymous.

If I were a betting man, I'd bet that a future generation's Edward Snowden will leak documents showing that Satoshi Nakamoto was on the NSA's payroll from the get-go.

It's a rather naive hope; to date the only use case where it offers any kind of meaningful advantage over other payment options is online trade of illicit goods and services. For anything where (pseudo-)anonymity isn't a high priority, the cons heavily outweigh the pros.