Since nearly every hospital bed has a TV with cable access, I think it's fair to blame the cable industry for a good percentage of rising medical costs.

Agreed, and they failed to compare their analysis of various computer process times (cache, memory, hard disk, network, etc.) to various human component times, starting with a single neural pulse. On the order of milliseconds, and as you say we can see many of them, simultaneously and serially, when we speak. We don't know how long it will take a spontaneously-arising artificial intelligence to create a thought, retrieve its memories, consider them, observe surroundings, etc., but we can assume it's at least some collection of nanosecond cpu cycles, not a single one; some collection of data fetches, not just one.

And speaking of Gibson, when I learned that William Gibson was told that his computer's storage consisted of a spinning hard-drive, an "antique victorian-style mechanism", as he put it more or less, and that he was told that after he wrote Neuromancer, then I learned that you can focus on writing or you can focus on tech, but choose one because both (or more) may mean each will suffer.

How can scientists, or even "spit kiddies" tinkering in the garage, be sure not to resurrect extinct proteins that do bad things in today's environment?

HFT works on every transaction and has zero risk for them. Tens of billions of dollars per year siphoned out of pension funds. OK with you? Not OK with me since it's know, can be fixed, but isn't.

HFT overcharges are fleecing the market to the tune of $50 million per day. Many billions per year. Adding no value, and tacking on % charges to each transaction. It's visible to those who trade, they can't fix it and the SEC won't touch it - justifies it, as this piece shows. That's how it's worse: we know it's going on and we're blessing it.

>>The problem is that large portions of the plant are radioactive...

Bingo, the fatal flaw of nuclear power. Those darn high-energy neutrons get randomly sprayed all over the place, and then large portions of everything around is radioactive. Haven't seen a design for a fission reactor that admits this, solves this, or even attempts to address it (hey, just "clean it up" when it's done - which means move all the radioactive stuff somewhere else and let it simmer in their back yard for 10's of thousands of years). Let's look then at renewables, shall we?

>>I don't think Joe Bloggs is the one trying to breach a US nuclear silo.

Profile fail.

Not sure what you expect from your government, but here in the USA we have a range of options, from bupkis, to the triad (personal savings, worker pension, social security, all of which were paid into), to whatever you can scrounge. If we can get the government to pay for anything beyond health care at 65, it would be both lucky and meager.

Yes - to phone calling and texting, we can now add real-time network analysis of the car to the list of dangerous distractions of the electronic kind.

Apparently this is a book about WWII approved by the NSA. I'm not surprised there is no new info here.

Let's hope Visa then sues Walmart for not paying a living wage or health benefits, forcing Visa, and everyone else, to subsidize the hundreds of thousands of Walmart employees with government services via higher taxes.

Seems like the NSA and CIA might be by nature beyond oversight. Their job includes assuming that the worst scenarios are possible, which then justifies any action to thwart them, including lying to their overseers in order to keep doing illegal things they think is necessary to prevent those worst possible scenarios. It's bureaucratic paranoia resulting in functional schizophrenia that makes sense within the hive mind but not within the greater public mind that employs them to keep us safe.

Next threshold: grateful for getting up in the morning.

Anticipate the convergence of the evolution in useful netlinked hardware with the growth of your target audience.

Shoot for One Google-Walker Per Senior.