Any idea whether it'll work internationally? Android 4.4 has NFC transaction support but it's only actually supported in the U.S.

They think "reds under the bed" worked for decades during the cold war, and it's been just long enough that it might work again.

Not any more! That's kind of the point of these pushes to alter the way copyrights are enforced online: They want to shift the burden of proof from the copyright holder to the alleged infringer.

Actually involuntary euthanasia = murder. That's kind of the reason that euthanasia isn't legal. It's potentially very hard to prove (especially when the patient has some cognitive disability) whether or not it was in fact voluntary or not.

Well, if a substance is affecting your brain then it's gonna be either covalent or ionic. There's not really a lot of other options.

They'll just want to read our brains, electronically.

Of course, before they can read our brains they'd have to be removed and prepared.

Like, diced.

No it hasn't. A machine that will perform a given task correctly 9999/10000 times is 100x more reliable than a human that will only perform that same task correctly 9900/10000 times. A rare combination of factors that make the machine fail don't make it absolutely broken, any more than the human is "broken and no longer a matter of probabilities" if they make a mistake sometimes.

I'm not sure what metaphysical definition you're using for 'aware'. When a control system (biological or not) gathers information via a sensor and processes that information in a way that can affect the system's behaviour, then it's 'aware' of the thing that sensor measures.

As for the straw-man argument about the stroke victim, consider this alternate scenario: You've got a passenger in the back seat of your conventional, manual-controlled car and you're heading to the hospital. You have a seizure and lose vision in both eyes. You're "aware" that your video sensors have failed, and refuse to drive further. Would I, the passenger in the back seat, prefer to be perfectly safe with the car pulled over, or would I prefer that you kept going despite failed sensors (maybe with me shouting out "left a bit!" "right a bit!" to try and guide you)?

Yep. I have it on my manual Supra, touching the clutch or brake will drop it out so if you have to change gears you have to hit 'resume' afterwards to turn it back on with the same speed setpoint. Once you get used to it, it's a pain driving without it.

Oh right, I re-read your post and I see where you were going with it now. I concur. As for 'evil', I'm not sure I believe in any moral absolutes but I definitely agree with the sentiment that broken people do exist who have no place (or a very limited place which must be tightly constrained) in human society.

It's more a matter of there's nothing to make them certain that it *won't* work. Having something like this would be a significant tactical advantage, so it's worth a shot.

"You don't find him. He finds you."

Both of those were pressurised water vessel reactors. Read up on the design and it's literally insane, "hey let's make a nuclear reactor so that if it ever has a leak it is guaranteed to melt down and probably explode." That design was never not going to end badly. Discarding all nuclear power based on those examples is like declaring 4-wheeled vehicles to be permanently infeasible based on the Ford Pinto.

I haven't checked either, but I'd guess that the water will gradually absorb oxygen from the air until it reaches a livable level, at which point the surrounding ocean ecosystem will recolonize it.

The problem here is that decades of bad press for nuclear power have resulted in almost insurmountable political opposition even when it's clearly a technically superior solution to a whole bunch of problems.

Yeah, I'm of the firm opinion that a vehicle should have one driver. If it's the machine itself, that's fine by me. If it's me, that's also fine. But don't go half-and-half because then you have communication issues to deal with. Automatic transmissions are bad enough (although somewhat inconsistently, I do like cruise control).

As for the global warming stuff, it looks like some of the arctic methane ices are starting to be released due to warm currents going where they didn't used to. I think it's beyond just CO2 emissions now, things are going to get veeery interesting over the next 50-100 years. I should buy a boat. (I think it'll be a good challenge for the human race, though!)