I tend to agree... they're big enough to cause some damage on the way down if they continue the "we can be a little evil" route.

Over? You say it's over? NOTHING is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?

Germans?

Shut up, he's rolling.

Pretty much this.

There was a Planet Money episode where they go into all the evil-ness that is medical billing. It even has George Bush's cousin in it.

Some things aren't the way they are because people are stupid/lazy. Somethings are the way they are cause some things are hard.

As far as change goes: any time you think "hey, that's stupid, we'll change it.. its so stupid it should be easy to change".. remember that every situation is the way it is for a reason. In every stupid situation there will be some people who make money on the situation precisely because it's stupid, and you'll have to convince them to give up their cash. Good luck with that.

With certain things, the devil is in the details. I think this is one of those. I could patent "method to bring a person to Mars and back" but there are a lot lot lot of steps between writing "put them on rocket, send, have them come back" on a piece of paper and getting Chris Rock there and back safely (why Chris Rock? why not?).

Remember for Apollo, they had a few ways of getting people to the moon and back. What if someone had patented "method to get someone to the moon, somehow, someway" then waited for someone to Idunno, actually do it. Think of all the actual work involved, the Mercury/Gemini programs that were stepping stones, the new materials, the money, the build out of the space centers in Houston and Florida (pork barrel spending at its finest) but i could have put a wrench in the works by having some overworked underpaid patent clerk that stamped some piece of paper that said "method to convey someone to the moon and back".

...It's that users aren't bright enough or are too lazy to turn off wi-fi detection when they're not using it.

I think you're being a bit harsh here.

One, this is a moderately complex concept, that your phone is emitting uniquely identifying info when you're not even connected to a network.

Two, we've conditioned people to keep WiFi on. Between capped bandwidth plans, video services restricted over Cell data, and even Apple asking you to keep it on (they use the GPS + SSID data to help their mapping efforts) having WiFi on 24/7 is normal to a lot of people.

We live in a complex world with a huge number of interactions. It's pretty normal to not think of them all. Ask Jon Corzine if there was any complexity that he missed. And he's a pretty smart guy.

Well that and competitors to BlackBerry messenger.

I remember hearing that BlackBerrys are pretty common in some poorer countries, mostly because of BlackBerry messenger helped avoid high SMS fees.

Now, you have Line, WhatsApp, iMessage, and more and more competitors to that advantage. Then, as BlackBerry market shrinks, it gets less and less useful due to network effects. They're talking about releasing BBM clients to other OSes, which may have worked at some point - cannibalize some sales in order to keep some relevancy in a shrinking market between phone releases - but now I think it will be too late.

Back when Apple first came out with PowerPC (the PowerPC 601 based 6100, 7100, 8100) the Ford EEC controllers were PowerPC 40x cores.

We had "PowerPC Inside!" marketing stickers (I worked for the campus Apple Reseller) that i wanted to stick on random Ford cars for the hell of it. I never did, didn't want to screw up their paint jobs.

Im sure there still are PowerPC applications in cars. And think of the 68000/DragonBall. A family that came out in 1979 but was sold until the 2000's as an embedded controller.

No knock warrants on wrong houses... The government is made up of people and people make mistakes. Wait until some SWAT team with a no knock warrant and M16s drawn and then you can say "well I had nothing to hide". This has happened, it is not a theoretical straw man. The constitution was written to save you from these.

I have heard: "I have done nothing wrong and have nothing to hide from someone I trust".

I've been browsing more and more in Incognito mode... at least (in theory) my Google searches don't trigger a rash of new ads. I've a family member on my wife's side who needs medical treatment, and i make sure I hit incognito mode with the searches for info for them.

I hate that my searches on my phone now show up on my desktop. I hate that a joke query on my ipad for a porn site that happens to be close in name to a place i wanted to visit now ends up on my desktop google. I hate that google tried to tie desktop and browser with games and not mention their ulterior motive.

At my work, we were given a book "From Good to Great". Google is going "From Good to Corporate". Forget "Don't be evil".. try "Don't be a typical corporation"

It's mostly scapegoating from the right.

True. And the opposite with Reagan. Reagan got most of the credit for the fall of the Soviet Union, but Gorbachev did most of the work. Some other things about Reagan pissed me off too, but the point being a massive effort by Republicans to name things for Reagan as part of some coronation as The Great President.

The major cause of war between humans is that they're human.

Don't assume we have a feeling to take care of all humans. Don't assume we even can conceptualize all humans as humans. Assume that we're somewhat aware of humans as numbers, but really we have a small clique of people we can think of as humans, and we take care of those. That means it's very easy for us to abstract out anyone else, and yes, kill them. One death is a tragedy. One million deaths is a statistic.

So, we find semi-random excuses to kill people. Religion. My flag has stripes and stars, but yours has a single star; you must therefore die. I'm on this side of this line of some demarcation. You're on this other side; you must therefore die.

Need more proof? Don't even think of war only. How many times has a NGE (non government entity) decided that it's OK for you to die. Bhopal India was a corporate disaster, where a corporation thought it was easier to risk you dying rather than fix some valves. A web search for "death by corporate negligence" will pick up one or two other cases I'm sure.

So blame the human brain, that allows us to abstract out the life of other people and eliminate them for various reasons. Don't act as if Religion is the actual cause, nor Video games, nor Patriotism. They're really more tools than causes.

Anyone for Compute! 8 bits should be enough for everyone.

What happens if two chatbots start chatting each other up? Do they both get arrested?

One of my favorite "bots" was a reverse bot. It would troll on AIM, pretending to be a 16 yr old girl, usually very quickly getting a horny teen male. Then it would it a second time, netting a second horny teen male. Then it would pair them up, both assuming they're talking to a girl.. Then after some awkward teen male sexting (before it was a term) it wasn't too long until "FAGGGGG" was shouted and heterosexuality challenged.

Then there's AOLiza. which hooked Eliza to AIM. Sadly, the chats have been taken down, some were pretty good.

Jokes aside, UIC has a pretty good computer graphics department. Dr DeFanti helped the design the computer graphics model for Star Wars. The Death Star graphics? Yeah, that was him. He also helped develop the CAVE, one of the first immersive virtual reality environments.

I kind of agree with this, sadly. I think anyone that thinks "oh, I'll just have an island in the middle of the ocean". Wait until you get pirates, or some foreign government deciding they want your rock. Your freedom at some level depends on what you can defend by force.