faxing is like email, except you can only send blurry black and white pictures of text. and it costs you money when you get spammed. (it's illegal to fax spam, but it still happened to me)

cancer isn't new.

back in the old days they would have called something like SARS a walking pneumonia, as sort of a catch all for a contagious pneumonia that sometimes progresses in an acute pneumonia. There could possibly been dozens of viral outbreaks like SARS in the past that we don't know about because virology didn't exist to identify the cause of such diseases. And it wasn't in fashion for doctors back then to give a collection of symptoms scary sounding acronyms.

have any buildings blown up or civilians exploded because of our "panicked overreaction" ?

While I am strongly against sacrificing basic freedom to stop some vague threat. I do believe that taking reasonable steps to provide public safety is not only reasonable but some organization ought to have it as their priority.

What I really hate about American culture is how we all tend to swing from one extreme to another. But perhaps that is just dramatic rhetoric and not what we really believe.

Which organization should have the top priority to protect the US from future terrorist attacks?

Which we hope one day will require a warrant.

There is probably no possibility that the NSA would be required to have a warrant, but I like to think the law enforcement aspect of the FBI makes it least somewhat plausible that a future court will start demanding it of them.

Google freely allows this. You can take their releases, which is mostly open source software, and build a product around it. If you want access to early releases, then you have to start playing by Google's rules, but even that is not so hard.

If you want to make a fork of Android and give it to partners you could do that with anything but the early preview releases. Fork Jellybean or KitKat right now if you want. If you want to stay on top of what Google is doing, you'll be integrating their future releases into your custom releases. Or you could ignore the work that Google does and go in your own direction. Add .NET support if you want, set the mail and search engine defaults to point to Microsoft. Most of the real proprietary stuff are the bits that various vendors provide and not too much around Google's, except some of the Java apps they bundle. Which I assume Microsoft would want to replace with their own version.

"...and a cheerful staff"

Then keep doing C. Many companies are hiring C developers these days, the mobile processor vendors are grabbing as many C folks as they can to support Linux device drivers (Linux is the basis for Android and ChromeOS).

If you don't like C, then find something you do like. There are even jobs out there for people who are into SmallTalk (mostly to do business logic in European markets). The new programming languages that get most of the media attention are interesting as well, but aren't the only jobs out there. And honestly if you haven't picked up on them now, you might find yourself a bit behind the competition when you go to apply for that dream job in Haskell, OCaml, Go or Rust. (or Python, Erlang, ...)

Sure, I doubt there will be any way for the automobile industry to stop freewheeling hackers from getting free stuff. It's not like we're dealing with an industry with government lobbies powerful enough to force tax payers to back one of the largest loans in history.

If you include extra costs into each car, then charge some subset of the total number of customers for those extra materials. Then that cost is going to be relatively high, and in nearly every case higher than simply customizing each car and paying the cost up front. So yes, consumers who want features get screwed or automakers stand to lose a substantial amount of money. Since we assume automakers aren't going to tolerate losing money, we can bet on us paying for it in the end.

Capitalism is all about finding ways to pass your costs on to the end user.

today? no.
eventually? yes.

quorn is not a grain, it's a fungus!

And I'm not sure why people have to be so literal when it comes to the predictions of a futurist. A selection of food protein derived from non-animal sources, generally processed heavily to provide it with a meat like texture. If you were in the 1960s you would probably assume algae was the future. But the core idea is about taking something that isn't meat and turning it into a trendy meat substitute.

Am I the only one who prefers Soylent Red over Soylent Green ?

you never been to whole foods? they have a hot deli bar and salad bar.

I counted it as a single license as well. Non-commercial drivers license + Class M1 endorsement.

Ever been to Whole Foods?

Tofu, Quinoa, Quorn, Seitan, Tempeh, ...