So, a carefully designed and managed system is capable of determining whether your life is not worth living? Presumably they will also find that some people are wrong in wanting to die, otherwise they wouldn't need a system at all.

Which lives are worth living or not sounds to me like the kind of question it's maybe not right to set an official answer to.

I have sympathy with people who feel life isn't worth living. But I wish they would not demand that others validate their choice by killing them.

If you don't comply with a lawful order, you're taking a pretty big risk.

Remember the thing they say about loans? If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem. Microsoft, Google, Oracle, they're pretty damn important to the US economy. Also, unrestricted executive power isn't entirely unopposed in government. If

The point of this is also that these orders, even if "lawful", give government a headache about how to enforce compliance. You can't just send Tim Cook to jail without an explanation. If Jeff Dean mysteriously turns up dead in a ditch somewhere, lots of people are going to get cold feet, and start asking themselves whether they want to be part of this anymore. The silicon valley elite have a lot of power to say no, more than they probably admit to themselves. Yes, there are risks, but it's not nearly as bad for them as less powerful people (e.g. Ladar Levison) face.

You're right. People don't have nearly as much power...

I agree with your point, but Jim Henson was also an writer, and if you ask me a highly original and talented one. The actual performance with the puppets was a small thing of what he made.

Oh, the vast majority of music scores and poetry would benefit from the makers thinking of it more as skill, and less as art,

The spice girls weren't the only or the first, but one of the most clearly and well-executed "music group" concoctions (cynically) aimed at a specific demographic.

Oh, they weren't remotely the first. A really old example is the Comedian Harmonists, formed in 1928. It was assembled after a newspaper ad calling for auditions, and the plan was explicitly to create a German equivalent of a foreign group that had impressed the originator, namely The Revellers. That was exactly how Boyzone was formed too, only there the foreign group was Take That.

Village People was also formed after a newspaper ad and auditions. There, the purpose was maybe not so much to make a localized version, as a subculture-inspired twist on an established concept.

That's how Spice Girls were formed too, as an obvious twist on the well-established concept of a boy band. But they didn't succeed in the market they were formed to target, which was teenage boys! Luckily for them, they were surprised by the emerging market of pre-teenage girls.

All these bands were formed after ads and auditions, but some of them - perhaps the most deserving of being called "boy bands" - were formed by managers or other people who weren't themselves performers.

A way to give them a headache, is just to quietly not comply. Not post the national security letter, not shout anything from the rooftops, just refuse to do as you're told. They either have to punish you openly, drawing attention to what they were trying to do, or go full criminal and "cause something bad to happen to you" (which has risks of its own for them).

I have argued that once several, actually important people started to do this (e.g. silicon valley tech sector employees, or even execs), the government would quickly find out the headaches weren't worth it, and change policy - either to the better, or at least to more visible aggression. Don't underestimate the power of sand in the machinery.

Except whenever a device has any flex to it we hear people complain that it doesn't feel solid enough or premium enough, so people scream for metal frames instead of plastic etc.(Current technology can do plenty of flex from the stand point of avoiding breakage, but people don't want it.)

This is par for the course for chess programs of that generation, though. I remember an old DOS chess program that would allow "castling" by just switching the king and rook, regardless of whether there were pieces between them. One Win 3.11 chess program I remember, was ridiculously easy to break if you used the take back a move function. Some sort of internal data structure wasn't properly cleaned if you did that, so the computer would start making illegal moves, randomly putting pieces on the board, etc.

It's chess more or less as it was played 100+ years ago. It's not FIDE chess, that's true.

This works well for FedEx, UPS, and Purolator. But Canada Post can't seem to figure it out. They refuse to read the big sign on the front door that says "all couriers please go to side entrance" and instead hang a card on the front door. Unfortunately the "front" door of this building is nowhere near anyone inside and therefore nobody hears if someone were to knock there.
We asked Canada Post at one point and were told their policy prohibits going to any door other than the front...

Who the hell wants to watch other people sing at the opera when you could be singing yourself?

If there's a specific piece of knowledge you want to get, reading the wiki is better. However, if you don't know much about the game and just want to learn as much as possible, watching it being played is far better. Sometimes videos are better even for specific knowledge (think for instance Super Meat Boy levels).

Well, one of the things I like to watch on twitch is Spelunky runs. Every run is different (random levels, don't you know), and the streamer interacts with chat in between levels (sometimes in the middle of levels, if they're reckless). They also have a "death roulette" function, so you can compete in guessing how the streamer will kick it, obviously that's one thing that won't work with prerecorded video.