is there an unknown benefit of having a blood-borne disease vector?

Yes, and he just told you, but you weren't listening. Having a blood-bourne disease vector has the benefit of staying the wrathful hand of Gaea.

Are you trying to persuade us that this disease is somehow important enough to be a bad thing, or are you making your argument to a god?

If you're so intimately familiar with a values and agendas of the gods, then on humanity's behalf I request that you also please explain to Cthulhu that the stars aren't right.

There are so many layers of stupid in this story, it's hard to address one of them without the embarrassing feeling that someone might read a rebuke of one stupidity, and take it as an implicit acceptable of the rest of the stupidity that you didn't address. If you argue too hard that Yog-Sothoth made a mistake in designing camels, somebody might think you're a creationist.

From the point of view of a malevolent user who intends to use the device to harm someone, why would they want your malware?

From the point of view of a benevolent user, why would they want your malware?

What will happen in the marketplace, if a benevolent user is persuaded to run your malware and then has a problem and finds out that it was due to the malware?

What's so special about the security needs of people in a capital, compared to people everywhere else? And is this special need, really a function of where they happen to be at a moment, or is it based on what their powers and responsibilities (and presumably, replacement cost) are?

I am leaving a few dozen obvious things out because it's tiring to enumerate. That my original point: don't think that just because I missed a totally-obvious way that the idea is stupid, as meaning I would debate one of these points from the premise of accepting a lot of other stupidity. It's not even something I disagree with or think is a bad strategy or an us-vs-them thing. It's just a totally dumb idea, a loser no matter how you look at it and no matter what your agenda is.

You call them worthless but then in the very same sentence you admit that they are all-powerful.

Error. You are proceeding from a healthy input of facts. The constraints of the thread are to proceed from a health input of science fiction.

This is how we're going bring our keepers to their knees, and eventually break out of the Matrix. We spend imaginary money on imaginary storage and then put all sorts of high-entropy stuff on it and run calculations to verify that it's really working, but they have to spend actually real resources, to emulate it.

Sloppy calculation tip: 24*365 = 10000.

If you're Sloppy enough to accept that premise, then at 10 cents/KWHr, a Watt costs a dollar per year. It makes your $28 turns into $32, but hey, close enough. When I'm shopping, I can add up lifetime energy costs really fast, without actually being smart. Nobody ever catches on!

May I once again posit that war is not a natural result of being human, but rather one put upon mankind by strong, selfish, sociopaths that profit from it?

It's a natural result of life, apparently. Go look at some pictures of floppy-eared puppies, or fluffy kittens or fish or trees or algae or fungus: awwww, what cute warlike sociopaths. "You're eating my food, competing for my mate, or claiming my turf? Fuck you. DIE!!" Humanity is the only thing I ever heard of, who sometimes isn't sociopathic.

One can hypothesize a space empire without war, but it would require some extreme creativity. If you have an idea for a warless game, that's awesome, but do you really think war is a far-fetched assumption on someone else's part? I know what planet you grew up on, earthling, so quite pretending you're from some other alien background.

Aha! So I just need to start a new FUSE project which presents the binary logs as text. :-)

There seems to be a lot of confusion over the intent of the second one. Some people think nobody should have graven images, some people only a well-regulated militia is allowed to have them, and some people get caught up in trying to figure out how to weaponize engravings in Dwarf Fortress.

Damn, this is even more embarrassing than the flaunting/flouting error of 2009.

If the cops can do it without getting any exceptional permissions, then it must not be a crime for private citizens to do it, either. Right? Right? (Why is everyone looking at me like I just said something amazingly naive? And WTF is with all the Blade Runner "little people" quotes? I saw that movie and don't remember that many midgets.)

Intel's ahead, but it kind of looks like they have a lot of difficulty too. There are so many different part #s, that it makes you wonder if they all tried to be the same thing, but different wafers passed different tests, and .. viola, diverse line of products!

I very much doubt that the vinyl enthusiast shares the geek's obsession with DRM.

That's because they don't have DRM! Their classic turntable is actually able to play the records they buy!

If they had DRM (i.e. you buy a vinyl record and then there are technical barriers and legal risks to overcome before you're able to get it working) then you expect the situation to create "obsession." The social experience would be a some kind of hackathon, with occasional screetches where all the girls and boys would grimace and hold their hands over their ears. "Eww, that didn't decode right. I thought I had the key, but that wasn't it." The second half of the party begins when you're finally able to play the record, and everyone dances in celebration.

The machine is exposed and celebrated, not hidden.

And that's why it can't have DRM. You're allowed to understand how it works, whether or not you're a "geek" and bother to do so.

Apple are assholes, not cowards. They probably didn't approve the movie because something is the wrong color, or because it competes with their own movie, or because it has product-placement ads but Sony hasn't yet agreed to give Apple 30% of the ad revenue.

Jackie Chan is so many forms of awesome that it's not funny. (Well, no, actually.. he's funny too.) And you have provided Yet Another in the long list of ways he is awesome: as an example for why video fidelity is a good thing rather than a bad thing. (Which you'd think would be obvious, but some people don't get it. Until you mention Jackie Chan.)