nope. Workers in Shenzhen are highly mobile and if they don't like something, they walk out and get another job across the street. Bosses moan they have to pay more and more to keep workers on the job. It sounds like you were a victim of the NPR fake story that said things were like that. Seriously, it was a total lie, the journalist just went there and told a story about what he wished were true instead of investigating the conditions on the ground. It was widely reported when it came out and we're going to be dealing with the fallout for years to come. Facts != narrative.

Better yet would be if the vendors just took care of it, of course, but given their lack of motivation and alacrity

Perhaps the first step could be to hack the execs' phones and make them send text messages out to all the employees telling them that this patch needs to be pushed ASAP.

How will my friends know what I'm listening to?!

/Oh right, I don't have any friends. So no problem!

1) Bounty Hunting is expensive, not cheap. If they won't pay 5k to have him arrested, they certainly won't pay the 50k. As for KILLING him - he has not come close to committing a crime worth killing over. In fact, your desire to have him killed for $USD 50 K is in fact more of a crime than anything he is wanted for currently. I would rather you personally go to jail than him.

2) Even ignoring your casual attempt to hire an assassin, Bounty hunters are paid by bail bondsmen that have loaned money to people arrested and charged with a crime. In order to get that loan, they give legal permission for the Bail Bondsmen to hunt them down. It is illegal for a Bounty Hunters to go and hunt down someone that has not legally given them (or rather their bail bondsmen) permission to hunt them down. That is called KIDNAPPING, not bounty hunting. They could do a citizen arrest, but you never get paid for that.

3) This was in Illinois one of the seven stats that have either banned or heavily restricted bounty hunting (Canada has outlawed it).

You must be new here.

Is that like the login form AT&T used for a while to pretend it was all mobile-6-point-oh-like where the password field was a plain text box with a script that turned the letters you typed into dots after you type the next letter?

There's a reason that all the major browsers don't autofill forms until you tell it to.

I'm pretty fucked if anyone wants to pwn my Sprint HTC Evo 4G.

At this point, HL3 (or even just "HL2 episode 3") is going to become Valve's Daikatana or Duke Nukem Forever. Just following on from the end of Hl2e2 is going to be a huge hurdle (their writer must be at least this good in order to get on this ride) never mind whatever Source engine technology they want to show off.

I think that Newell sees only two possibilities: 1) they never make the game or 2) they make the game and everyone hates it.

This is one of those "You only hear about the failures" situation. No one hears about the crazy kid that was given psychiatric counseling and decided NOT to use an ak47 to kill everyone.

There have not been 4 attempts to do this (Hitler, Stalin, Saddam, North Korea), but 400. We stopped well over 90% of them, but you don't hear about them

As for those people you mentioned, many of them were hamstrung by ethical people whose refusal to kill slowed down their crazy lessons.

The problem is not the rise of an AI revolution.

Instead, it is the rise of a human psychopathic tyrant working with a force of soldiers that obediently kill at his command, with no chance of moral rebellion within his own force.

The technical problems you mention have obvious solutions.

Not enough roof space on a high-rise to supply power to all of its residents? No problem, just put the solar panels somewhere else instead. Wires make it easy to move electricity from one place to another.

Need more power when the sun isn't shining? That's a bit more expensive to solve, but the solution is obvious -- generate excess power in advance and store it in batteries, so that it is available when you need it. The cell phone, laptop, tablet, and electric car markets are all driving the costs of battery storage down to the point where this will soon be economical to do at scale.

193 square miles is 0.006% of the surface area of the United States.

Or, if we wanted to only put the solar panels on existing residential roofs -- there are currently about 6184 square miles of residential roof space in the USA. (ref)

Because they are quite literally too cheap to pay for five airlines tickets - oneway for the rapper and two return trips for the cops necessary to bring him back.

Unless we are talking murder, high profile case, or something in excess of 1 million dollar stolen, the police simply do not bother to extradite criminals across state lines.

Because absolutely nothing will do more for a rapper's reputation and music sales than to have some idiot police chief stop a performance because he didn't like the lyrics that the rapper had used PREVIOUSLY.

the most obvious solution is to uninstall third party driver management and hand it all over to Windows Update to avoid clashes.

This is neither obvious nor desirable, never a solution. Windows is an OS written by Microsoft. Generally, Microsoft makes no hardware, yet, the OS runs on hardware.

So the obvious solution is for MS to publish and adhere to standards for device drivers interfacing and integrating with the OS, and keep shut. Otherwise, Microsoft should be the sole mfr. of all hardware that is supported by and on Windows.

H/w vendors aim to make money by making their products superior - faster, better resolution / frame rate / quality etc. So they tend to keep their innovations private. If MS demands all h/w mfrs to send their code to Seattle and get it certified for every version and release, the vendors would be afraid of backstabbing, and code, architecture, design reaching their competitors.

So only obvious way is to release a standards compliance OS and keep shut. Or else, like Linux, MS can open source their OS and allow the distribution makers to bundle the OS, h/w, appln s/w, printer drivers and updates to all of them. Or else MS must put up and shut up while ambitious companies like NVidia, Samsung etc. try to innovate..