If you're going to bring up Hancock, please allow me to mention Simon. Paul Simon that is - who of course predicted this technique back in 1986 in "The Boy in the Bubble."

Need some reminding,
"These are the days of lasers in the jungle,
Lasers in the jungle somewhere,
Staccato signals of constant information"

OK so this is a poor attempt at humor. Couldn't help it - as soon as I read TFA, I got this stupid song ripping through my head.

to say that I flee our new robotic overlords! I figure that this can only mean that both the Mayans and John Cameron were partially correct. The end of days will happen in December 2012 like the Mayans predicted, but it will be due to Skynet achieving self awareness, not any kind of cosmic alignment. I have to admit it is sort of sad to see that mankind will be hunted down by terminators constructed from small Danish building blocks, and not the cool steel cyborgs depicted in the films.

We've got armadillos in our trousers! (Armadillos in danger of extinction? I doubt it, though they are leprous little buggers... http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1306/is-it-true-that-armadillos-carry-leprosy

Printed newspapers, while not quite dead yet, certainly appear to be at risk for extinction in my lifetime due to the Internet. Many of the local and regional papers have closed, and the ones that remain are slim shadows of what they were just a couple years ago. (USian perspective, your global village mileage may vary). Vinyl records remain, but (my opinion, I may be wrong) this is a niche medium for some audiophile cranks and collector and has been entirely surpassed by CD, DVD, and MP3. Verging on being pedantic, but 78 records, 8-track tapes, Betamax, regular cassette tapes, 8mm home movie cameras, all of these technologies are essentially dead. OK, so these are incarnations of media, not media types per se.

I'd also suggest that a number of service oriented industries are also taking a severe pounding and may eventually go away entirely - businesses like video rental stores, travel agencies and insurance agencies spring to mind.

Question: What is your process to determine that every computer you've ever owned has never been compromised by malware? Are you doing some kind of checksum on system function and monitoring each inbound and outbound network packet? Not all malware generates a big red flashing skull on your screen. The malware that operates quietly and gives no indication you have a problem is the stuff you need to worry about. Malware frequently actively attacks anti-virus software on top of this; leading to an increasing frequent discussion with users or level 1 support folk along the lines of "what do you mean this machine is infected, the AV didn't pick anything up!" We find these surreptitious infections through layers upon layers of analysis, with many tools watching what's going on. I don't think you can make that kind of definitive statement even if you are running AV software.

The internet turned me into a newt!

Why is Theora more susceptible to submarine patents, or indeed granted patents that simply have not yet been enforced, over the technology of h264?

One aspect to this is programming the mind itself.

To some extent we already do this naturally with our learning and memory forming cognitive capabilities. Simple programs are easily written to our minds.

THINK ABOUT YOUR BREATHING
YOU ARE NOW BREATHING MANUALLY

It will take time to build a language in which we can program more complex behaviors, but I have no doubt it is possible.

Nothing unusual with Oracle killing the fun.

Happy to oblige :)

Its my theory that thinking "correlation is not causation" causes a person to study statistics.

Clever, wasn't it? :)

Hey - I'm not sure I'm a fan of this policy either. I was just saying that the reason that stuff like this happens is that there is no rational dialog about these kinds of things.

What exactly is the value of privacy, and what exactly is the value of not being killed on your way to wherever? If we assigned values to all of these things and also figured out what the actual risk reduction of the new technology is, then we'd have a pretty rational basis for a decision.

I tend to agree that this is security theater, but it is hard to say for sure without a real analysis of the impact. Personally, I could care less if somebody wants to stare at my fine physique - dealing with that is more their problem than my problem. I do realize that others might be sensitive about this, and as a result there is a need for a national dialog on these sorts of things...

After spending a while in Japan (and observing their net/electronic pattern usages), combined with purely anecdotal observations on communication and usage patterns of people here in the US and in my beloved 3rd world country of origin, it is fair to say most people are fine with a device that lets them e-mail and twitter and upload pictures on facebook, google for stuff, read the news and job sites, maybe run MS Office or Google Apps, and for the savvyy video conference with skype (which is how my grandma who lives in a little town up in the mountains got to see my newborn baby for the first time after getting Internet over dial-up.) Shit, even some of the Xingu people up in the Amazon have internet access now!!!! Anyways, go back to the topic...

The average electronics consumer WILL NOT use that type of device to run DVDs (there are super-cheapo portable DVDs for that) or run gcc, Mathematica or a LAMP. They don't need a super-duper CPU and the latest and greatest graphics card.

We, what we call "powerusers") certainly want a mighty gadget that can run everything we want in one device. But we do not represent the average electronic consumer.

Typical people, the average electronics consumer of 2010, whether here or Japan or south of the border, on the other hand will be happy to have an iPhone/BlackBerry, the smallest possible laptop/netbook that can do the job without much jitters and a portable DVD player (comes handy for entertaining your kids while you are busy with your laptop/netbook while having breakfast at Panera or wherever they sell breakfast with free wifi).

Warren East is re-stating the obvious (and inflating stock values), but that's his job. What we are missing here, is our ability to objectively judge the merits of his claims, not from our point of view as l33t hax0rs, but from the shoes of the average consumer - they are the ones that constitute the market (and the opportunities therein), not us.

The government has had this technology for years. They use these dental implants to send auditory signals to the populace while people are asleep. It's all part of the one-world government conspiracy. Many of the so-called paranoid schizophrenics are really just people who don't tolerate the subconscious aural programming very well. Take a look outside your window for the black helicopter before you mod me down. I'm the guy leaning out the back with the parabolic microphone, waving at you.