As far as the automotive portion of this, they've overlooked a pretty critical detail...

Are you sure they have overlooked this? I think the words "google" and "car" and "driver" have been used in a lot of sentences over the last few years, especially with the word "driver" modified.

Make no mistake, there really is a vision here, and it's pretty damn clever (even if it's also insideous and horrible). Outside of dense areas with usable public transportation, a lot of "eye hours" are being "wasted" every day. Google is able to fund work on self-driving-car development, precisely because claiming this resource will be so much like finding the holy grail.

Human: "Take me to Joe's Brewpub."

Car: "Ok, here we go. By the way, Fred's Brewpub is also nearby and they have a new Imperial Red Ale that has received 14 positive reviews in the last 4 days. Would you like to g--"

Human: "Take me to Fred's."

Google: "Dear Fred, one conversion. That'll be a dollar, please."

Joe: "Dear Google, I would like to place an ad."

So UFOs exist, but disappear as soon as we identify them?

Only some fake UFOs disappear. The unidentified UFO objects remain!

If all the I/O is subverted, then you better make sure you really sent your key, though.

Crazy sci-fi dystopian future scenario is that Alice's software decides to send her key as qrcodes but then actually displays Eve's key's qrcodes but also sends Alice's public key over covert channel. Then the Bob's software, wishing to display a fingerprint for its new key (Eve's) on screen, does that. Except its subverted I/O shows Alice's fingerprint instead. Bob reads the fingerprint out loud and Alice says "Yep, that's mine" (because it is) in spite of the fact that Alice really has the wrong key. Later, Eve MitMs everything Bob and Alice say to each other.

Sounds like a lot of work and requires her subverted subsystems to be quite powerful. (It has to understand the intent of everything that goes up on a screen in real time, and do replacements.) That's ridiculous and there's no way it'll happen before 2114. *sigh* That probably means someone is already doing it successfully. ;-)

If you do that, then I swear, we will stop trying to have customers, and then our competitors will eat us alive. See how happy you are then, paying a $16/month bill for your fast capless Internet. I dare you, FCC. I double-dog dare you!!

Empire was a beautiful movie. I'm not even a Star Wars "nut" and I would say that outside of the scope of "which of [faintly derogatory dismissive tone] these is best?" that movie deserves high marks relative to the average movie. The Empire Strikes Back is positively delicious. The people who put those totally irrelevant flashing lights on the safety guard rails at Bespin really deserve to be proud and I'm sorry it took a third of a century for you to hear it from me. But I did notice them and I do care. Thank you. I hope not too many of you are dead yet.

I hereby request all CostCo, Amazon, and my local power and water utility company customers to please abstain from ever being suspected of anything.

If you're not sure whether or not you might be suspected of a crime, perhaps a good rule of thumb is that you should try to stay two hops away from any actual criminals. So if you're a Bank of America customer, yes, that means I'm asking you to not use my local power utility.

Thank you for your cooperation.

NO, WAIT! NO!!! No, I didn't mean to imply I'm cooperating with those suspected suspects. No. Oh, shit. Shit! *sigh* Sorry, neighbors. Yes, of course, I will immediately cancel my local power utility.

After the US government doing so many things to encourage people to host services outside of America, Russia returns the favor. This could result in greater cooperation between the two peoples, as we can now cross-serve either other. You host our pirate search engines, we'll host your politics blog.

instead, I gleaned that she ended up acting pretty damn rude to her relatives who inadvertently broke her self-imposed techology exile

I RTFAed but I didn't find any examples of rudeness.

All I can think of, is that maybe some people consider Facebook unfriending to be rude. Has that become true? Or was it some other act (e.g. asking people to help collect gift cards, maybe)?

Morally speaking, how different is a person that kills someone robbing them and a doctor killing someone to get a paycheck? They both killed for money, so there is not a whole lot of moral difference between the two acts.

Plenty of murders happen simply because "damn Vikings, moving into the neighborhood and lowering property values" or because "if I can't have you, no one can" or because someone was snorin' too loud or because that little voice in my head that usually just whispers "...be an asshole .. one-up all their anecdotes .. make backhanded comments about things they care about ..." whenever I meet someone, starts whispering "... kill them .. make it look like an accident, maybe involving the microwave oven and nondairy creamer .. no one will suspect..." instead. These people are still going to be considered murderers, even if unprofessional, and plenty of 'em, pro-DPers will still want executed.

Similarly, suppose the state sentences someone to die and calls for unpaid volunteer executioners. You know someone will come forth, willing to do the job. The state might even be able to charge them (it's easy to imagine a lottery, for certain high-profile cases.). Yet I doubt many anti-DPers will be any more accepting of the death sentence.

I don't think taking money out of it, is going to sway many people in either direction. If it does the job for you (and no, I don't seriously think that was your point) then you'd be in the minority. The debate would continue on, still never won by anyone. It ain't about the money.

So you are arguing that privacy/security on by default is a bad thing?

Nobody's arguing that. The mistake is in thinking of DNT with a privacy/security mechanism. If that's what it were, Microsoft's decision would be defensible or even good. But DNT is something totally different. I'd argue two things:

1) DNT is for expressing a user's preference. Not even just a preference, but the user's preference. It is impossible for any application's default setting to express a user's preference for anything. (Your editor can default to a white background, but it can't, out of the box, honestly tell other people that YOU prefer swiss cheese over provolone. The person who wrote your editor might have some strong opinions and could even show some polling information, but in the end, he doesn't really know what kind of cheese you want. He can only take a guess.) MSIE's default DNT:swiss header is a communication between a web server and Microsoft Corporation, rather than a communication between a web server and a user.

Yes, a DNT:swiss default is a bad thing (just as bad as a DNT:provolone default). By doing that, Microsoft undermined DNT and helped the ad industry justify ignoring it. If you're a user, you should be angry at MS about this (at least so far as DNT is important at all).

2) DNT is nearly useless for protecting a user's security. If you want security, then you must deny capability to your adversary, or put costs on things, not merely politely ask him to behave in a certain manner. That means having your browser not initiate certain connections, or not send certain things (or send noise) over those connections, or .. whatever.

I have to say "nearly" useless because at least DNT could signal that some users care, but just don't care enough to stop sending intell. But it looks like this subtlety was lost on .. damn .. nearly everyone, I think.

Up to now I've thought of DNT as a basically good idea (a weak one, but still positive), but maybe it's time to accept that if nobody understands DNT then it can't possibly communicate anything meaningful.

If people _are_ being executed the obviously someone did win the debate.

If people were never being executed, would you say the same thing? No matter what happens, or what fraction of the population is persuaded, someone is always a winner? What a nice "the glass is half-full" attitude! :-)

Why does the US still even have the Death penalty?

Why does the US still even have fines? Why does the US still even have imprisonment?

Answer any of these questions, and you'll have answered them all. Show the foolishness of any of them, and you'll have shown the foolishness of them all.

I think the most popular answer, is that we have these things to punish criminals. HTH.

but rarely discuss the morality of executing people.

WTF? People discuss that all the time. And apparently they split, with some people saying it's intolerable, and some people saying it's a good idea, and as usual, lots of people falling somewhere in between.

But let's not pretend that issue hasn't been discussed to death. Of course it has. And there are no new inputs, so few people have reason to change their opinion from whatever it already is. The fact that you (or the other side) never "won" the argument doesn't mean it hasn't happened. It just means that people don't know how to prove points of morality.

And if you don't like it, then you're an "elitist."

No, no, no. This is just plain incorrect.

Copyright does what you're describing. Before anyone ever heard of DRM, we already had hundreds of years of experience with copyright doing the job. Nearly every corporate "content provider" you've heard of, built their fortune and become the big name that you recognize today, through sales or rentals of non-DRM content. (Netflix being a notable exception.)

DRM has nothing to do with arts-patron taxes, "giving away at a loss" or content-providers' revenue. (Uhr.. except so far as it decreases their revenue, the same way that telling customers "fuck you" decreases revenue in any industry.) If you want to prevent an arts tax and also support a society with many creators, you should be against DRM, not for it. DRM only keeps people out (both supply and demand).