I don't want to be pedantic, but since we're all being pedantic, I guess I'll do it anyway. You're looking at the wrong codebase. The predecessor of Win2k (v5) was WinNT 4 (v4). The predecessor of that was WinNT 3.5 (v3.5). The predecessor of that Was WinNT 3.1 (v3.1).

WinME was based on the consumer codebase that (in inverted order) was Win3.x, Win95, Win98, WinME. The entire Win9X/ME series reported internal version 4.x but that had nothing to do with the codebase we run today. Again, Win95 was literally v4.0 and Win98 was v4.1 but the current kernel had its very own v4 (and v3) and WinME wasn't it.

If a nefarious entity has access to detailed records of what names are written on the plastic cups, as an intelligence agency you're already well-screwed.

Y'know, I wonder if they scrub the money involved for DNA before handing it over to the clerks...

No, it means two things:

1} You should reconsider the wisdom of having your household appliances connected to the Internet
2} You should wait for the appliances to have a Wifi modem instead, which isn't completely moronic

Seriously, why should anyone's fridge be consuming any neighborhood spectrum to communicate with a cell tower? Short-range grouping of devices onto one backbone - which more often than not is over wired connections - is far more efficient. But we all know spectrum is a renewable resource... we can just make more, right?

We've got something similar in my municipality with regards to garbage. A decade ago or so we opened a new landfill. Because of increased recycling and other diverted waste flows, the landfill is seeing reduced income, and has had to increase both tipping fees and what is charged to local towns for regular garbage disposal.

Okay, let's follow the logic. 19 of 20 people killed on the job in America are men, which means 1 in 20 people killed on the job in America are women. If we decrease the men's fatality rate down to the women's rate, we've got 1 in 20 people killed on the job being men and 1 in 20 people killed on the job being women. That leaves 18 in 20 people killed on the job being neither women nor men. Seems you're biased against asexual people.

Yes. I'm kidding.

But seriously, while I applaud your feel-good sentiment of "make working safe", it's not (entirely) realistic. The disparity is likely caused by more men doing dangerous jobs, for instance long-distance truck driving. You're inherently more likely to end up dead on the job if you drive 8 hours a day than if you sit behind a desk in an office 8 hours a day. It doesn't matter what you do for the truck driver safety-wise, that job isn't ever going to be as safe per-hour-worked as an office job. Sure, you could pad trucks in 50 feet of rubber foam, but that's clearly ridiculous as a safety measure. Effective but impractical.

Somewhere there's an acceptable balance between risk and reward? Here's the crux of my reply to you: how you do you know we're not already at that balance for most jobs in most places?

Don't know. Sometimes you think you've seen one thing but then it turns out it's something entirely different. That's the joy of learning. Our understanding (generally) improves over time.

Could be. Or not. I don't have the background to know if this paper is factually correct or not. But that's the thing about radio astronomy regarding things massively distant... you're not actually observing anything. You're taking in massive amounts of data then interpreting it. Sure, your eye does that when you look at a banana but it's not quite the same thing when you point a telescope at the far reaches of the universe and conclude "we've seen X". We've had a lot of cases recently where - for instance - some exoplanets have been found to not actually exist, because... reasons. It's all about how you interpret the data. If the math says that black holes cannot exist, perhaps you reinterpret your observational data and come to a better understanding of what you are seeing.

So you've got a part that costs X, and after two years the cost is reduced by 13%, meaning that the part now costs .87 times X. You can continue to use this part, offering either a 13% reduction in the portion of your overall price that is contributed by this part, or you can maintain overall price and reap slightly more profit. You can also decide to use two of this part to increase device capacity, and now your cost is 1.74 times the original X. You can now reduce your profits by keeping your overall price despite increased cost, or you can increase your product price and hope that purchasers absorb the change

TL;DR? 13% is a trivial cost reduction compared to doubling the cost while doubling the memory.

Or maybe it's just that the electrical engineer doing the circuit layouts was wearing a green shirt that day. Analyst Foo Kin Ublivius believes green shirts cause electrical engineers to be afraid of increasing memory quantities. Others believe memory in smartphones are made from the ground-up brain matter of orphans and restricting storage capacity allows Apple to save their orphans for more important things like assembling iPads.

Grab a cheap Mikrotik RB750 or similar and you'll find you have an out-of-the-box solution that's feature-rich, supported, and easy to use.

The "new" DownloadStatusBar addon which worked around the changes in (I think) FF29... well, it's broken again. Probably I can go Googling and find an update somewhere.

You say that. What if deactivating this "chip" requires a trip to the doctor? What if you get to specify the exact circumstances under which it is permitted to change modes and one of them is that you confirm you decision daily for six weeks? See, this technology could give you most of what you want, if universally installed.

True. But it does provide the capacity to "beat us".

Say rather "by industry". Including the word "our" is unnecessarily specific.

Great point. Except that digital entities can be duplicated with stupifying ease while us biologicals require decades of education.

By definition, adaptive code of sufficient complexity to be considered artificially alive won't be slave to anyone.

Again, by the time we've got code that fits the definition of artificial intelligence, it's no longer just an expert system.

Unfortunately, almost all of that evolution was literally trial-and-error, mostly error. We've got a whole bunch of DNA that is literally not expressed because it's useless. That evolution was about getting from primordial slime oozes to walking upright. The lessons "learned" in the middle about how to do photosynthesis while we were ooze-like isn't even vaguely useful to us. Also, aside from symbiosis with the AIs we're talking about here, we have nowhere to go. Evolution takes so long, a decent climate change on this planet and we're screwed where AI can iterate purposefully to solve its problems.

Soon? As in this afternoon? No, probably not. Soon as in within a decade? Again, probably not. But really, once we develop one instance of something truly self-programming and "intelligent", its complexity growth will be very rapid, just like all of our technologies have been. Just like... flight. The hard part was getting the first airplane off the ground. From there... space shuttles in very little time.

Insightful indeed.

As an outsider - Canadian - I see all of the things you describe. I think your theory is very likely right. Obama wasn't a twisted politician when he started. He had an agenda that was mostly in the favor of the average Joe. The problem I have with professional politics is that I realize you have to compromise to get anything done. If you want Bill A to be passed, you need the support of a lot of other people, and you may need to support Bill B to get the job done, though you don't like it.

It's selling your soul, bit by bit. In the end, some of the fights you were rallying for will cost you - and potentially the nation - more than you're willing to pay. The President isn't the Dictator-in-Chief. He's got rules to live by and the realities are that the office doesn't allow some of the sweeping changes Obama wanted... not alone.

So yeah, broken, depressed, dejected, and he probably views himself as a failure.

It's sad, really, because the nature of politics isn't his fault but his failures will be labeled as his.

To be fair, the real article title was too long...

Scientists Accidentally Grow Full Head of Hair On Man Who Was Bald For None of The Reasons That Would Make This Discovery Interesting To A Reasonable Number of People

Could you maybe make it easier on the world somehow? Maybe by going to war (again)?

I'd offer these as potential names that various factions could use:
The Kilt-Wearing Portion of the Formerly United Kingdom
Island Nation That Is Better Than Nearby Island Nation
Place That Didn't Invent Vodka Despite Plethora Of Potatoes
The Temporarily United Two Islands Which Hate Each Other But Hate That Other Island More
Why Do All Dwarves Have To Use Our Accents
We've Got Doctor Who
Yeah But Karen Gillen Is From Here

Start, Programs, Microsoft Office, Excel.

Alternatively, My Pictures, then some random folder that has anything more than 2 megapixel images in it.

Or some random CAD program. Or page-layout package.

My point, simply, is that you can actually make your own content by using this monitor as a monitor. Don't worry about if it makes a very good TV... it has other, more monitor-y uses.