All data should be encrypted from now on.

Well, if we count invading Iraq, to open it up for exploitation by American oil companies, as a subsidy to 'Big Oil' you can add at least $1 trillion in direct costs and lord only knows how much in indirect and delayed costs. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the war in Iraq would eventually cost $1.9 trillion (according to Wikipedia that's $6,300 per U.S. citizen) and I'm pretty sure that figure will be revised and such revisions are normally not downward ones.

Which is why I will never get on a plane unless there is a pilot to switch off the AI if it goes haywire and fly the aircraft old-school. Furthermore I will never trust my well being to an AI driven car. With a plane at least there are a couple of minutes to react if the AI goes ape-shit before you run out of sky, with a AI driven car it's perhaps 10 seconds if you are lucky before you get T-boned by a truck and become a slimy red coating on the inside of a car wreck. I am still on the fence about AI driven trains.

Right, build or contract a small fleet of trainers (perhaps twin turboprops or two seaters trainers like PC.7s or Tucanos or even set aside an old 737 or something in that class) and make these people fly their ass off once in a while. I'm sure simulators are great learning tools but there is no substitute for taking a plane up and actually practicing things like: engine restarts, flying on one engine, simulating an emergency descent after a rapid decompression or just boning up on basic aerobatics (the value of practical experience is one of a number of reasons the military hasn't replaced exercises like Maple Flag with simulater-only LAN partys). That should take care of any 'bureaucratification' problems your pilots are suffering from.

Aggressiveness tends to be a function of population density rather than technological sophistication. Until the neolithic or thereabouts as populations grew enough to finally strain the available resources there is hardly any evidence at all of tribe-on-tribe warfare. Among the very little amount of evidence of something you could call warfare before c.a. 15.000 years ago was cannibalism and that was probably driven more by extreme famines than any conflict over resources or some (hypothetical) genetically predetermined human lust for looting, raping, killing and conquering. And even then cannibalism may have been a ritual practice rather than the result of famine driven warfare. This relative lack of inter-tribal conflict during pre-neolithic times was, as he pointed out, probably due to the low population density which meant that there when you ran into other human groups you could usually find yourself an unsettled place where you were not likely to step on that other tribe's toes and interaction largely consisted of relatively peaceful activities like trading, cooperating on big game hunts and exchanging tribal members through marriage. Primitive tribal societies that engage in warfare today, in places like Papua and in Africa usually have high population densities and the conflicts are usually over limited resources.

The definition of species and subspecies has been fluid, and to some extent still seems to be a subject of debate. Google defines them like this:

Subspecies can interbreed and produce viable offspring. That means that modern human 'races' vaguely qualify as subspecies at best. Furthermore, according to this definition can be argued that Neanderthals were a human subspecies if we define 'human' as species Homo Sapiens. Neanderthals differed mildly in appearance, feeding habits and for a time, distribution but could still indisputably interbreed with modern humans and produce viable offspring (since some modern humans carry Neanderthal DNA). Now H. Neanderthalensis arrived in Europe 400.000 years before modern humans emerged in Africa about 200.000 years ago. Does that make Neanderthals more _pure_ humans than modern humans? Did Europeans and Asians become _purer_ humans than Africans by interbreeding with H. Neanderthalensis? IMHO the answer is no, it's more the case that the whole concept of some group of people being _pure_ humans is a steaming pile of BS.

Caveats: It is still debated whether H. Neanderthalis was a subspecies of Homo Sapiens or a species of the genus Homo, i.e whether it we should call it H. Sapiens Neanderthalis or H. Neanderthalis. Secondly recent discoveries have completely blown apart our previous picture of the entire genus Homo.

Actually Google has pretty fierce competition these days from Bing, the caliber of Bings competitiveness is simply not acknowledged on Slashdot for religions reasons. While several recent studies have refuted Microsoft's BingItOn claim of two thirds of users preferring Bing results. Interestingly enough blind studies also suggest that that Bing actually delivers superior results to Google 41% of the time and 6% of the time they tied. Furthermore a lot of Bing's inferiority is largely perceived (i.e a 'halo' effect of the Google brand), people actually pick Bing results over Google results much of the time when you swap the brands on the search results. Myself I prefer Bing image results to Googles much of the time, the image search results from Bing often contain less noise.

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That last link seems pretty negative at first but it also concludes:

I remember when Bing's market share was far down in the sub 10% range not that long ago.

How can you be a monoculture within your own product line? Apple has fierce competition on the PC market, the smartphone market and the tablet market. Now sod off to Starbucks or something and try really hard to come up with a better troll.

Google harvested data on peoples web surfing habits against the express wishes of their customers and they did it by quite deliberately circumventing browser settings. I don't care what you name you choose to call this behaviour, the fine should have been at least one order of magnitude higher. A penalty of $17 million is a pitiful amount.

I don't know how small you can make these scanners, but assuming the can be made to fit into a mobile device I can think of one more feature: Face recognition. That might spare Apple embarrassing moments like Google had with it's face recognition login feature. People laugh about CCC hacking Apples fingerprint button, but at least that hack takes more than 20 seconds.

Microsoft? Try, a good way to keep them out of the hands of Google/Samsung et al.

Shhhhh.... you are running the slashvertisment.

Seriously? Why is everybody getting worked up over this? I remember watching a documentary about US American narco cops less than a year ago and one of the things they showed was police officers cooperating with environmental inspectors systematically sampling sewer water to track down meth-labs. It's just a logical progression of what environmental agencies are already doing on a regular basis to monitor pollution and to track down businesses trying to cut costs by pouring toxic chemicals down the sewers. Nobody blew up in a firestorm of outrage over EPAs monitoring pollution levels, even wing nuts on the far right hand fringe of politics like to have unpolluted drinking water (well... at least here in Europe they do).

I put it down to bureaucratic incompetence rather than malice. It stills shows how powerful Google has become. If they wrongly flag your side as harmful and nobody at Google support gives enough of a shit to help you sort it out, your site is pretty much dead because of Google's dominant market share. The only traffic you will get is from Bing/Yahoo users. Other than that you will get some traffic from places like Russia (Yandex) and China (Baidu) where Google has not managed to monopolize the market but traffic from those sources may not be what you want if your site is primarily interesting to people in countries where Google has the search market cornered for whatever reason.

There are two sides to that coin. A friend of mine operates a small aviation website that was flagged as infected by Google for over a year and they steadfastly refused to fix the situation even though he got his site certified clean and uninfected by multiple security companies. Google finally relented when he blogged about his experience and it started topping the search results on their own search engine. I suppose they figured that a headline starting with the words "Why I hate Google..." wasn't doing their image any good. His site did not carry ads, it's a pretty basic HTML based site.