Now there is a lot more mercury available to be put, in elemental form, into vaccines.

Once the soldiers learn how to disable the lockout it will become unwritten standard practice to remove the lockout before relying on it, all it would take is one incident where it got locked out due to a bug or other failure. Would you want your life relying on a weapon that would stop working if it couldn't phone home?

You forgot to mention, you will only run something else if the flaws in the original cost you more than the costs of switching to the alternative. Assuming the alternative can be proven to not have equivalent flaws. In most cases, this means people stay with the original and put up with the flaws.

It is a question of scope. An IE bug may or may not affect a million users, just to pick a number. Many of those run firefox or chrome. And each one needs to be exploited individually, through various mechanisms (bogus email, fake website/search poison, etc.) which have a low overall success rate. Compare this to Heartbleed, which could impact the same million users at a single point with a single operation.

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.