From HST's suicide note:

To my reading, his suicide is entirely in line with his stated philosophy...the only problem was that his body held out longer than he thought. That is the hazard of the "live fast, die young" credo: what do you do when you survive the consequences and end up old and worn out? I don't mean to help rationalize suicide, but it fits his stated belief.

Substitute "don't ban" with the essentially synonymous "allow": "As long as companies allow guns on their property, this will continue to happen."

...and the responses are arguing against firearms in the workplace, which is pretty much what was said in the first place.

Also, we've basically got video phones now, although it's clunky and more difficult to use than a phone call was back then.

Video phones were not science fiction in 1968. The first prototypes of videotelephony date to the late 1920s, Bell Labs was demonstrating intercontinental video phone calls at the 1964 NY World's Fair, and that technology was commercially available by 1970, only 2 years after "2001". There are many reasons why it failed in the marketplace, but the main one is that virtually no one wanted it, and the few who did had no one to call (i.e., no "network effect"). Otherwise, it would have almost certainly been a mature technology by 1980, rather than taking another 25 years or so to be commonplace, with the advent of most people already owning equipment capable of doing it (i.e., internet connected computers).

So if god created man in his image, why did he do such a shitty job? We are what god made us after all, so if he made us sinners then it's his own damn fault. "The fall" is just god's excuse for shoddy (and probably drunk) workmanship.

Hey, let's get serious...
God knows what he's doin'
He wrote this book here
An' the book says:
He made us all to be just like him,
So...
If we're dumb...
Then God is dumb...
(an' maybe even a little ugly on the side)

Frank Zappa - "Dumb All Over"

But I'm just not sure who would actually want this.

I wasn't sure who would want an always-on listening device in their home either, but evidently many people enthusiastically embraced the Echo and the like.

I think the same way about it as you, but don't underestimate the ease with which a disturbingly large portion of the population will happily trade privacy and/or security for convenience.

Being curious, I decided to check this out, and I found nothing to suggest that "bête" was even a common synonym for penis, much less the original meaning.

Wiktionary, which you cite for your examples, says the same thing as the GP: Borrowed from French bête noire (literally "black beast"). Nothing about penises.

Unless you have a source I somehow missed, I conclude "bête means penis" is 100% bullshit.

it's roughly $1.1 Trillion (thousand-million)

Check your math; that doesn't even work in long scale.

To get "economic citizenship" in Canada, you still must be a permanent resident in Canada for 4 years before you can actually become a citizen. According to the law you cite, one could not do that and remain a Chinese national.

I don't know what loopholes there may be in the Chinese law, but it not nearly as simple for a Chinese national to 'buy' dual Chinese/Canadian citizenship as you suggest, especially since Canada has radically curtailed its investor visa program in the past few years.

And about 30% of them are auto-updating with random "changes" that probably started out as one of your suggestions, but BREAK MY WORKFLOW.

Obligatory xkcd

They should use the capitalist approach to the problem. Move the servers offshore, and transfer the ownership of the content to a non-US based corporation, so that the law no longer applies to them.

Here's a better approach...and one that is more likely to actually happen. Anyone who cares to preserve the material will band together to download it all from Youtube, and upload it to TPB. You have 9 days, pirates. Arrrrrr!