They say in the video they could have dozens of them operating together. Did anybody else think of old TV shows, and prepare to panic?

The Rover, "a floating white ball that could coerce, and, if necessary, disable inhabitants of The Village, primarily Number Six."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rover_(The_Prisoner)

If they come back to Earth like that old Venus probe, we're in trouble.
http://bionic.wikia.com/wiki/Death_Probe
(Yeah, I remember these episodes of the Six Million Dollar Man from when they came out. I strongly suspect they were not as good as the Prisoner.)

"They delved too greedily" was for mithril in the Mines of Moria, the Arkenstone was buried in Tacoma.

Come now – "a tricycle can become deadly"?

Many, many more people run over their children in the driveway compared to the number of kids killed by their toys.

Cars are the number one cause of death for children after infancy. When we complain about people worrying about stupid things, this is what they should worry about. More than half of all kids are killed by automobiles, far more than any other cause.
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/810803.PDF
http://webappa.cdc.gov/cgi-bin/broker.exe (Center for Disease Control, fun interactive graphs about death and dying).

If a specific kind of car adds even more danger to this carnage, (hmm, a pun) I see no reason why they shouldn't be removed from the road. I'm happy to blame drivers, but I'd like to take dangerous tools out of their hands too.

Now, whether the issue of regulating the minuscule number of these exotic cars matters in the overall issue of traffic danger, is another matter. We should not focus on a few cars without looking at what measures would actually increase safety in general. But if these cars (and the people who chose to drive them) are costing other people's lives, I'm happy to take their keys away. Let them drive a tricycle, no?

Oh, sorry, read that wrong.

Eisenhower was talking about vast military spending, not helping poor people (or whole populations) with basic medical care. If the national debate was over whether we should have private military insurance, that would be interesting. "Sorry, no cheap oil for you, you didn't pay for your invasion insurance."

I know that was obviously hyperbole, but 100 years ago you might have been typing up a note on a not-yet-standardized typewriter and sending it downstairs using a pneumatic tube from whence it would be taken to a telegraph for longer distances. Wikipedia actually says the first teletypewriter was invented at that time as the cutting-est of the cutting edge tech, so things were ramping up for ongoing rapid change. In San Francisco a hundred years ago, ice for iceboxes was still being delivered by horse drawn wagons. Things have changed more in the last two-hundred years than in the entire history of the species.

To think that anything will be the same 100 years out is folly. The only clear prediction would be a "backward" progression where civilization collapses and our great grand-children are growing food with known pre-industrial tech and using busted hard-drives full of a century's worth of data as hand-mirrors. On the other hand, where tech might head if it "keeps going" is anybody's guess but it won't be the same as today.

I'd recommend trying the various ergonomic keyboards as well. A few centimetres change in posture or desk/chair height can make a remarkable difference too.

Unfortunately, trial and error have been my most successful way of finding solutions. I tried three different keyboards before getting one of the portable Goldtouch ones with the adjustable keyboard angle. It helped a lot, quite quickly. (My issue was with the tendons on top of my hands so ymmv.)

Good job to get working on this now, better than waiting years with further damage.

Octavia Butler would be a key (and mind-altering) example of one black woman's perspective on cultural as different from "hard" sf. I'd start with the Patternist series (available in one book) which blew my mind.

Ursula LeGuin would be a great one too.

And Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin, for it's handling of created language as resistance.

And for gosh-sakes the more-recent Perdido Street Station by China Miéville would surely be memorable, as would John C. Wright's Golden Age, the great hyper-punk masterpiece.

If words are created by usage, unschooling is a word. I was actually surprised that the idea was new to Slashdot. The term's thirty years old, and it seems so close to the "DIY" ethic often lauded here. I first heard about it when I saw the entertaining "Teenage Liberation Handbook" fifteen years ago.

I totally support parents choices and different kids' needs. My own eight year old twin daughters weren't doing badly in school, but one was starting to fall behind in math and spelling, and really having a hard time dealing with that emotionally. Our kids are nice and well behaved, so the teachers aren't able to offer special attention (they're not causing problems, you know?) So this year we're opting to support her to do better at home, and we'll see how it goes.

We're in Vancouver, Canada and they were in French Immersion, so we're getting them a Francophone art-teacher tutor. We read a lot, we're working on math, they are interested, I'm not worried as long as their mom and I have the privilege to spend the time with them. For now we're all giving it a try.

It's obviously not something every family can do, but it's not an idea to be dismissed. They invented public school so parents could work, (since child-labor laws made them hire adults.) It's hard to find time to really support kids' education whether they're in school or not. Some successful kids do well in school, some are bored but get through it, some (like Einstein) fail and might have done better without school at all.

I think it would be quite interesting to have all public officials tested for this abnormality. From president/PM to beat cop and judges. Gotta start somewhere.

I support your plan to take away rights, you go first.

I thought cocaine was schedule 2 because it has approved medical uses, like as an anesthetic during eye surgery? If it didn't, I'm sure it would be sched 1. And if they were reasonable, heroin might be sched 2 with usage as a pain med for at least terminal patients, but they might become addicts.

If by "we" you mean "the USA," then "we" are already the largest exporter of arms (mostly small arms) to the rest of the world. Most of these got to thugs and dictators who are all about killing starving people, our kind of customers. It doesn't seem to be working, if anything such policies destabilize societies and lead to higher population growth due to uncertainty.

Not like it's really relevant, but in court I once saw a man approach the judge and set his cell-phone down in front of himself on the stand. Then while answering the questions the judge asked, he said he didn't have an address or phone number!

I've always been curious what the judge would have said had they noticed the phone sitting there in front of the guy. But I was either not a snitch, or next in line and too nervous to say anything.

I believe anonymous violation of a law you believe to be unjust can be a valid form of protest. If enough people started flaunting copyright laws (or whatever other law) it would bring the issue to a head and cause a response or change.

Clearly the fact that upsets the RIAA etc isn't that downloaders are anonymous, it's that they're losing money. File sharing will have "won" when enough people do it, even if they don't have an ideology to back it up. Casual human behavior changes the world all the time. I don't know if it's good or not, but it does seem to be happening.