This article is all about speculations on our megacity future, I was more interested in how he got the city that big.

I wasn't sure to which networks this was referring.

If there is a true free market in legal services, someone should go to them and say "I will be the lawyer in your losing case for only $500k in legal fees!"

I didn't see any evidence of Russia being involved, other than gross speculation. Meanwhile, the NYT article states the researchers believe the malware was produced by the same people who made Stuxnet and Flame. That points to the US and Israel, not Russia.

I don't see why they would bother. According to many of the folks here on /. Bitcoin is just a Ponzi scheme and it is sure to collapse any time now.

I think apex predators won't be able to position themselves as overlords. How would they recruit allies? There's just not enough cooperation among these sorts.

This is a great intersection of goals. Getting rid of coal power for cleaner alternatives has a lot of benefits even if you lend no credence to AGW.

The article doesn't specify why they need to replace the hand rather than just do a software reset. But my first thought was of all those stories a while ago about security on diabetic pumps, and I thought "Well now we know why there shouldn't be security on these devices"

At first I thought, "years of hard work"? How can this be when clones fill up the store in a matter of days? Doesn't seem like it is that much work. Then I thought, well perhaps designer spends years designing a game with all sorts of clever ideas then copiers use them all a few days after release. I have to ask, though, is this what happens? Surely a game must spend some time before becoming popular enough to copy, during which it builds a following and has first mover advantage. Copiers can't copy those advantages. It seems like it is still worth doing to many since folks are still making games for these platforms.

In the USA at least, as I was recently schooled on another thread, local monopolies are forbidden by federal law. Now exorbitant fees are a different matter.

Yes, that is my point. The current business model is not the only one. Who knows, maybe they would finance the things with different merchandising deals. No single person is capable of knowing everything that is or isn't possible. How much of the cost goes into the actors salaries? I don't know, but I'll bet there is a whole lot of wiggle room there.

I think you are wrong to suppose you are capable of predicting what is or is not possible. History is full of examples of people figuring out ways to do things that many others dismissed as impossible. I don't know what the field might look like either.

"as we currently know them" is the key phrase here. No one in the current production chain has any right to keep their job at everyone else's expense, any more than blacksmiths and farriers did. Now, would movies, good and bad, still get made if copying was perfectly legal? Yes, although the field would no doubt be very different than what we currently know.

Yes THEY are all retards, aren't they? Or at least, that is a major plank of the youtard platform.

Priceless!