The future could be pretty bleak if that war doesn't happen until after the wealthy have their own automated weapons systems powered by that same AI...

Also, these echos appear to be contained inside SLU-branded cases, like the ones that the kids edition come in. What's to stop someone for swapping out the echo in some one else's room, to one that they have hacked or have control over? Should be trivial to remove the case from the original and plug in the hacked version.

Seems like it would be worse than if the whole system is monitored, because it would be directly targeting specific students.

That's how I read it too, but how much of the increased cost of the newer vehicles is attributed to engineering costs of (a) improving fuel efficiency versus (b) all those new fancy safety features (as well as other luxury features that are all becoming "standard" in vehicles these days)... I'd argue that those new features are as much a factor, if not more so.

It seems to me that the increased fuel efficiency requirements was a necessary step to spurn innovation in fuel economy; the auto makers were complacent with the status quo. They had no real incentive to invest in improving fuel efficiency when they could instead spend that money/effort adding new flashy features to their vehicles (and/or just keep pumping out the same-ish models every year).

Whether or not we've already reached a tipping point, or if "freezing" the standard for the next few years is beneficial overall is certainly debatable, and you make some good points.

I just figure they expect to be dead by the time climate change becomes an issue for them, so they don't give a shit. Even if bad stuff starts to happen soon, they have all that money they can use to keep themselves comfortable and safe until they die.

I didn't know about that law until just a few days ago, and it seems kind of ridiculous to me. I'm all for preventing people from bringing guns on airplanes or into courthouses, but legislating that current gun technology has to comply with older technology designed to detect them seems like grasping at straws, and completely useless against a determined criminal (they're already planning to break at least one law, so why not another?). What's to prevent that person from replacing the metal part(s) with plastic or ceramic parts to bypass the metal detectors?

After moving into my house and only subscribing to internet service from Comcast, they have called me on the phone and pushed HARD to try and get me to add cable. I eventually hung up. So, apparently they do care.

I recently moved from an apartment with Fios at 75 up/down to a house without Fios available, but was able to get a Gigabit connection through Comcast for about $90 / month (just internet, no cable). Even with Adding Hulu and a few premium channels from Amazon, I'm saving a significant amount of money over what I was paying Verizon, and with a much faster connection.

Comcast has since called me up to try to up-sell me on cable, and it fairly reasonably priced (I think about $20 more per month, with Showtime included), but I love never having to change inputs on my TV (use FireTV for everything), they don't have an X1 app on FireTV (despite what the sales person insisted), and the sales person was so pushy and annoying that I eventually hung up.

Micro-transactions in games isn't inherently bad. If it's implemented the way that Fortnite (the game mentioned in this story) has done it, it seems like the best-possible business model for any game (and clearly it's working). The game is entirely free-to-play for everyone, you never have to spend a penny on the game if you don't want to (meaning there are far more players in the game -- which is essential in a PVP game), but those who are willing to shell out a little cash for some cosmetic items can do so and support the continued development of the game in the process. It's a complete win-win.

The issue is that most games don't stick to this model and allow people to purchase items that affect the game play, giving them an advantage over other players who don't spend money. And / or add gambling loot boxes so people have to spend a lot of money to get the particular item they want (if they get it at all).

The main issue is that all of this carbon has been slowly trapped in the earth over the last hundreds of millions of years, until we started releasing it at an alarming rate within the last few hundred years. That's obviously going to have a significant affect on the environment.

This is a fairly long read, but worth it. At least checkout "The Story of Energy" section.

If it (the cosmetics) pays for the game to keep running and have active development, then I don't see what the issue is. It's better than selling weapons / armor / etc that affect game-play (pay-to-win), and better than the subscription model (more players to play with / against).

The point is, you don't need the cosmetic items to play or be competitive, but it also allows the people willing and able to spend some money on cool looking stuff to support the game financially. That seems like a win-win to me.

Similar thing happened to me when I bought a car a while back. The salesman begged me to not fill out the survey if I couldn't give him a perfect 5 score for everything. I thought that was a bit dramatic at the time (about 6 years ago), but looking back I understand why.

When commercial air flight was first starting out, it was also only the rich that could afford it, but that has obviously changed. It seems reasonable that over time the same thing will happen to space flights.

Looks like about 1.2 Billion people

If it weren't for games, I wouldn't be running Windows on my primary home computer. Unfortunately, while Linux support for games is getting better, many of the games I like to play are only Windows (and sometimes Mac as well).

But I am fortunate that I can run Linux on my work computer, since I'm doing web development and don't need any specialized programs. I do have a Windows VM I can fire up if I really need it (checking IE compatibility of the web-pages, for example), but I can't even remember the last time I've had to do that.

The only real reason I've been able to come up with for why you want to upload your home security video to "the cloud" would be to have an off-site backup so you have a way to look at the video and see who burned your house down. A reasonable solution to that would be to have it periodically encrypt the footage and upload it to some general "cloud" storage solution where only you have the key to unlock it. Why anyone would want to have a camera in their home watching them all the time being uploaded and controlled by a third-party company baffles me.