It should be a felony for a police officer to do this, because they wield so much more power in this equation. If the police aren't going to bother either learning, or following the law ... they have no business being police officers.

Exactly. The police are charged with enforcing the law; because of that they should be held to a higher standard than normal citizens, not a lower one. I think police should automatically receive triple penalties for all criminal offenses, because in addition to committing the crime they also abused their position and violated the public's trust.

in this case: who is this magic person who can say "all of the bad cops are fired" and make it happen? this person can skip the police union? they can skip due process?

Fuck "due process!" Due process is for citizens who have been accused of a crime. Nobody has the "right" to be a government official; officials accused of abusing their authority should be considered guilty until proven innocent!

Was that a joke, or are you a fascist?

The best part is the scene later, when they're escaping the hospital:

Elderly patient: [the dialysis patient is being wheeled down the hall after being given the pill by McCoy]

[joyfully]

Elderly patient: The doctor gave me a pill, and I grew a new kidney! The doctor gave me a pill, and I grew a new kidney!

Intern #1: [in disbelief, walking ahead of the patient] Fully functional?

Intern #2: [incredulous] Fully functional!

The issue is that I pretty much only drink coffee at the office, and there's no way I'd be able to convince all my coworkers to switch. (At home, all I own is a cheap french press that I barely use.)

Too bad you can't easily use the coffee grounds when they're encased in dozens of stupid little plastic cups.

Windows even lets you snap windows into half the display by dragging to the edge these days.

The problem is that if you have two monitors, Windows won't let you snap against the "middle" bezel.

At my previous job, I used 3 monitors, all in portrait mode. It's effectively 3240x1920.

(A single 4k monitor would be better, of course.)

...and bootstrap the whole thing by cross-compiling on several unrelated kinds of hardware (ideally including some old enough that maybe nobody had thought to put backdoors in it yet), and then checking that the resulting binaries are identical. Maybe use a 386, an ARM or PowerPC, and something Chinese, for example.

How flammable is it (considering that it's going to be heated up in the presence of electricity/sparks)? Would it interfere with the connection if you tried to plug things in (e.g. replacing a CPU or PCI card) while "wet," and if so, how easy is it to wash off?

Very unlikely. What comes out of a data center is diffuse, low grade heat. Maybe useful for running a dehydrator or drying system, maybe replacing building heating systems... but not much more as the temperature is too low.

You could run a Stirling engine, perhaps using geothermal (instead of the ambient air) to get a more reasonable temperature differential.

It's common in Scandinavia because of the climate - but not many people live in that cold of a climate. (The equivalent latitudes in the America's are way the hell up in Canada.) Geography matters.

Indeed, geography matters: the equivalent latitudes are way the hell up in Canada, but the equivalent climate is much farther south in the United States because Scandinavia benefits from the Gulf Stream. For example, Oslo, Norway doesn't get as cold as Minneapolis, Minnesota. (The average January low is 19.8F in the former vs 7.5F in the latter.)

"What no one was anticipating is that the bots are extremely effective [at] looking like a high value consumer."

Maybe because "high value consumers" are usually bot-like drooling idiots.

If you work outdoors, like most of our ancestor did, you generally don't get acne. (One theory is that the sun's radiation kills the related bacteria, or at least co-produces chemicals that do.) Thus, acne is not a good example because it's mostly caused by modern living.

Generally those who are more attractive, especially females, get more resources than the ugly, so acne genes probably would have been filtered away under normal circumstances.

We have zero experience with what might happen

We do have experience for what the creators of malware do, and "expand, gather info, and destroy" is often the mission they build into their creations. Thus, it's reasonable to speculate that the first and early dangerous AI will want to "expand, gather info, and destroy".

Well, just off the top of my head ... the Playstations probably use the signatures

I'm looking forward to next week's headline: "Massive PS4 Botnet Discovered."