Well, Amazon now have drones, and Google just bought a home automation company... and a few months ago Google had their name linked to a Lockheed fusion project...

Admittedly WWIII would also have lit the cities extremely well... for a couple of microseconds.

I think the generation who grew up after the 1980s don't really grasp just how intensely we 80s kids felt the shadow of nuclear war. You can't really understand 80s culture without that; it seeps into almost every part of art and culture from 1980-1989, especially New Wave music. Climate change and the War on Terror combined? They don't even begin to approach a fraction of the existential certainty of absolute destruction we felt. (Though we had both back then too; watch 1973's "Soylent Green" and you'll see global warming as part of the backdrop). And the relief at WWIII being postponed when the Wall fell... quickly turning to disgust as capitalism ate everything...

"I wanted to run through the street yelling, to grab them all and say: 'Every day from this day on is a gift. Use it well!' Instead, I got drunk."

That right there is everything you need to know about Generation X and why we feel so burned out on life. But, hey, alive after twenty, and not expecting to be, and every day we don't have a nuclear apocalypse is a good day. And every nuclear warhead destroyed and turned into toxic but not explosive nuclear fuel is a win.

But the nukes are still there, and the missiles are being repurposed as 'conventional' warheads, and that's sure going to end well for all concerned. Before, identifying nuclear attack was easy: an unscheduled ICBM launch means you push the button. Under Prompt Global Strike, how do you tell if an incoming ICBM signature is a nuke warhead or a conventional warhead? You don't. You guess. That's.... nice.

So, the Doomsday clock is still relevant and I for one am glad it's there. To remind us all of what once was, the shadow we lived under, and the shadow that still hasn't completely gone away.

I prefer the Kerr metric myself, but I suppose you could say anything with an event horizon is pretty much doomsday...

Isn't that also the part which everyone else considers an unacceptable privacy intrusion? Someone coming up to you wearing Glass might as well be holding a sign saying "hi, I'm going to record this conversation without your permission and post hilarious videos of you on social media! Do you want to 1) run away, 2) put on your Oculus Rift as a privacy shield, or 3) skip the preliminaries and punch me right now?"

No, I find the libraries break the filesystem model entirely. They are folder-like entities which aren't folders if you browse via cmd or Powershell, don't have paths associated, can't be enumerated via the standard API, but 'exist' in some half-defined sense only for Explorer.

How do you script writing a file into a library? How do you script renaming a library? How do you configure a corporate application so it installs into a library? How do you write a script to backup your files out of a library when it doesn't even have nameable path? When you write a file to a library, how do you find where it really wrote to? How do you identify where a file you read out of a library is really coming from?

Now, if they'd added the underlying Library concepts (a folder which is a union of multiple read-only and read-write source folders) into the filesystem, at the appropriate level, then I would have been cautiously supportive. It would probably still be a breaking change, but would break far less and integrate into the system automation level well. But as it is...

Only "non-existent" to people who weren't thinking and weren't paying attention to the literature. There had been a LOT of academic warnings back to the 1970s about the potential security problems of interconnected networks. Heck, the entire genre of cyberpunk science fiction in the 1980s - Neuromancer was 1984 - didn't come out of thin are but was based around the then-current academic discussions of the security problems of the early Internet. The first IBM PC virus was 1986, the Morris Worm was 1988, pretty late in the game.

Yes, it wasn't headline gossip-reality-show news like it is today - but industrial control designers? In the 1990s? Nope, there's no excuse. They were definitely in a position to know, should they have bothered to care.

Ah, so exactly like how large corporations don't ever try to destroy their competitors, industries never injure the environment, financial bubbles don't form, and organised crime simply doesn't exist, Bitcoin miners can always be counted on to altruistically pass up an opportunity for massive temporary personal gain in order to enrich the wider community?

I like this principled Libertarian machine you've built here.

ORDER RECEIVED: Pick daisies.
TARGET LOCATED: Daisy lawn, municipal park.
WEAPON SELECTED: BLU-82B ammonium nitrate/aluminium tactical thermobaric device "Daisy cutter"
EVALUATION: Commander will be so pleased.

Well, you'll at least be the ones turning them on...

I blame the chickenhawks for this.

It's worse than that - I hear he has a quorum and takes minutes, too.

Why do people of a certain political stripe use that word as if it's an insult? Is Roberts Rules of Order the new Protocols of Zion, or something?

Yeah, pretty much. At the time her CIA identity was "revealed", didn't she drive every day to the CIA Langley headquarters to work and park in a CIA parking place? And had been doing so since 1997? I'm not entirely sure, but if I were a foreign intelligence agency, that little slip might just have tipped me off that she might have been a CIA officer even before Rove announced it.

I was raising my eyebrows at the time and thought "this seems like an incredibly tiny thing to be all more-patriotic-than-thou about and will rebound badly on the Democrats when the next military-industrial complex whistleblower comes along".

And here we are.

Correction: You haven't hurt anyone yet. But you definitely have and want the ability to hurt someone. Having that ability is obviously really important to you. Otherwise why do you need a functioning firearm at all, and not just a plastic replica?

Because in the best case, using these "tools" in an urban environment correctly and safely for their designed and intended purpose, at least one person will die. Hammers or circular saws only tend to kill people when they're misused.

I don't mind if people in the country want to walk around with rifles in case they're, um, swarmed by rabbits or something. But in a city? There aren't many bears or injured horses here.

Hey lighten up, it's not like programming is a field where you need to be able to understand syntax and type keywords exactly, right?