I'm glad you're the final arbiter of what is right and wrong in the field of taking pictures and vacations; that people must only enjoy themselves in a manner of which you approve. You're obviously intent on curing the technological ills that plague our modern world, and for that we should all be grateful. I'd vote for you because you clearly won't allow those pretentious people to be pretentious on your watch.

In other words, "Lighten up, Francis."

Who the hell "dreads" a pole with a camera on it? You are seriously deranged if that's a clinical phobia you suffer from.

This will probably come across as a kneejerk response, but the submission makes it sound like Liu's themes are almost entirely derived from PRC propaganda. You hear this sort of stuff all the time if you pay any attention to Chinese state media ... planned economies are best, the individual's primary responsibility is to the family unit, Western ideas have failed, and so on. If anything, these books demonstrate the poverty of a literary scene where everybody has to constantly watch what they say.

Your average home user doesn't reinstall anything, and for many reasons.

Even if he or she wanted to, they won't have a viable consumer OS installation disk anymore. They get the "System Recovery Disk" with their new purchase, and it's likely filled with the same Lenovo image that was used to bundle the malware in the first place.

I'm pretty sure that the people who've already been impacted are enough to bring a class action suit; eliminating a few more plaintiffs won't change much.

Cameras and license plate readers, and Bluetooth readers, have already automated the data capture of your travels and no longer require you to voluntarily participate by running a state-provided transponder.

You're in a public place, in a publicly licensed vehicle, on a public road, and technology means that data is now a matter of public record. Welcome home, Winston Smith.

"In Soviet Russia, 3D printers print you!"
Turns out that's the headline, not the punchline.

Nobody took computer security seriously back in 2001. Things have changed a lot since then. For example, if you were to contact that same bank with the same information today, they would likely know better and would now contact the FBI and have you arrested on charges of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Actually, contacting the FBI might not be a bad choice for the story submitter. They would probably be very interested in working with that bank to shut this problem down quickly.

OH MY GOD, THE HYPERBOLIC FUEL IS SO UNSTABLE! It will lead to the explosions of every satellite in orbit! And it's so acidic it will eat through the fuel tanks, dripping killer toxic acid rain onto every surface on earth!! The world will end!

Or, perhaps, your device auto-corrected hypergolic, which is to say a chemical combination that self-ignites when the two substances are brought into contact with each other?

I've always been under the impression that all of the 'bloat' is packaged as additional packages in XFCE. At least in my experience, if you install just the minimum of xfce packages, you get no bloat, but also *SHOCK* are completely lacking in any features beyond the basic window management, task bar, and program launcher.

That's the change: they've come to the realization that they can't lock developers down to anything, at least not like they used to. I think it's long past due, but that's from an outsider's perspective where it's easier to see the whole landscape, not just focus what goes on in Redmond.

Microsoft is a very different company than they were under Gates or the Sweat-hog. They long ago figured out that their cash cows were kind of fragile, and they more recently figured out that they alienated a lot of developers. They are now trying to find ways to woo developers to any of their product families, not just to Windows. And they've done some great work on a lot of software engineering fronts, including secure development, powerful tools, integrations, and are even dabbling in open source,

Its not about judgement, it is about programming. We are not asking the robot to make a judgement call we are asking who's judgement the robot should follow.

If I buy my elderly grandfather a caretaker robot and I program the robot to bring him juice but not beer (because I know he shouldn't be drinking due to meds), what should it do when he asks for a beer. I would say that the robot should obey the wishes of the owner, not the patient in this case but it should probably not prevent the patient from getting a beer themselves.

My point was that DDT was the first large scale agricultural pesticide that was engineered specifically to be less toxic to humans. You could use cyanide gas on a field, but your farm hands or animals would die if they wandered into the cloud. That meant a farmer wouldn't apply those kinds of poisons except in severe infestations.

DDT made the application and use of pesticides measurably safer, and led the way to routine applications of pesticides on all kinds of crops. Today's pesticides can be deployed on a schedule as a preventative measure to ensure reliable crop yields, and not just applied on an as-needed basis. For that matter, GMO crops are now engineered to express all kinds of toxins throughout the plants, with the plants' own cells serving as microscopic pesticide factories from germination through harvest.

As I recall, the agricultural pesticide industry was initially derived from the chemical weapons industry, not the other way around. Poisons had been known for centuries, but weren't widely applied as they were toxic to both humans and pests. Large scale agricultural applications of pesticides began with DDT, which wasn't developed until 1939.