Now he's writing policy for the White House, sadly.

First, the flippant comment:
I find it astonishing that in this day and age when apparently they can track everything I do, want, and own online without my permission, my ATM still asks me WHAT LANGUAGE I want to use? Seriously? After I've answered that once, it's done. I'm not changing my native language guys. Offering it subsequently is doing a favor only for the foreign-language dude that steals my card.

Second, the serious one:
a) the site itself is fairly vague and misleading:
"Yes! (You can be tracked!)
36.34 % of observed browsers are Chrome, as yours.
27.11 % of observed browsers are Chrome 39.0, as yours.
55.61 % of observed browsers run Windows, as yours.
39.77 % of observed browsers run Windows 7, as yours.
59.03 % of observed browsers have set "en"as their primary language, as yours.
5.51 % of observed browsers have UTC-6 as their timezone, as yours.
You have the only browser out of 24041 with this fingerprint."
I call bullshit on that. You're telling me I'm the only english-language individual running chrome on windows 7 in the UTC-6 timezone? Absolute nonsense.

b) when you pull the 'more details" then it starts to get more plausible, where the specific list of addons I use is rather unique, but they go down to asserting that my browser is 'identifiable' due to WebGL output - really, are vendors doing this to fingerprint my browser (as is implied) or is this more of a forensic "if I was stupid enough to send a ransom note from my browser, the FBI could eventually confirm that it came from my machine if they had physical possession of it and some weeks"?
That's two different contexts of "unique", surely?

As PT Barnum is reputed to have said (OK I know he didn't say it but roll with the anecdote): "There is no bad publicity."

I've thought for years that the news coverage ITSELF is the problem.

If these individuals didn't know that they'd suddenly gain the attention of millions this would be a far less appealing strategy for them.

Now, imagine for a moment that news services voluntarily refused to share (during OR AFTER the incident):
- the names/identities of the perpetrators
- their "cause"
- their demands
- any details extrinsic to the safety of the public.

This story would hit the news as: "A hostage-event is taking place at a location in Sydney's CBD; several people are believed to be held by an individual, and police are evacuating the CBD as a standard precaution."

I know, it's a utopian idea that news stations actually stop reveling in the carnage they get to cover, and there's no question that crazy-bad people would still do bad things, but it would certainly discourage attention-seekers.

"BR2: Blade Roller"

A geriatric and now wheelchair-bound Rick Deckard is called back to "retire" a collection of aging replicants whose superhuman abilities are wreaking havoc on cruise ships, nursing homes, and bingo parlors everywhere.

" The solution to climate change isn't finding ever-more-exotic carbon to extact and burn - it's to kill off 2/3 or more of the human population, and convince the rest that living in a subsistence-level squalor is worth it, in hopes that we are able to fix global climate into a steady state of conditions that it's never done on an epochal scale anyway.."

Fixed that for you.

It's one thing to say "this comet's water suggests (sample size =1) that cometary water isn't the water on earth". That says NOTHING about where the water actually came from, only where it didn't.

It's a pretty clear that "welp, we didn't find it here" *doesn't* therefore mean "it must be there" unless there are a total of two possible alternatives.

I haven't bothered to read the OP determine if the leap of logic is the OP's or the summarizer's.

Well, you guys wanted federal health care.

Please don't act all surprised when this information is used for all sorts of other purposes.

....smells suspicious - all the meme-generating about "utilities are terrified of renewables" from multiple sources and multiple directions makes me think that someone's laying the ground work to fight the eventual effort of "Ah, so, now that renewables are so fearsome, I guess we need to pull their subsidies".*

*to be clear, I would love to see the subsidies pulled from ALL power generation, conventional, nuclear, and renewable, and let's actually see which wins out in the marketplace as the cheapest (or, if not precisely cheapest, the best compromise for the bulk of the populace between cheap, sustainable, and clean). But that's a Pollyanna belief; I know there's too much money/power in power for it not to be gamed by every side simultaneously.

Bullshit. The 'moral relativist' argument doesn't work unless you presuppose that there IS a moral difference in the first place. "Wait, if you do this (torture) it means we aren't the good guys!!" ONLY applies if you believed that we were the good guys in the first place, which is the sort of Manichean simplification that the people upset about this like to keep pointing out in their opponents, ironically.

America isn't a magical special place on the hill. America is a country like any other that pursues its own interests ahead of any others, and if it doesn't, its political leaders should be taken out, strung up, and replaced with those who will.

Now you and I can argue all day long about enlightened self-interest and long-term self-interest and whether torture serves them or not, but that's a utilitarian argument, not a moral one. We might actually have a chance if coming to a constructive, non subjective answer.

Finally, as I saw above: "..Of course, if America decides that torturing other people is OK then America has pretty much lost any form of moral high ground, and should expect other countries to torture Americans with impunity...."
Please,: let me know if the many (or even one) instances where Americans weren't tortured because America stood on some mythological high ground?

If the MafiAA have objections to anytime someone vaguely considers making a safety backup of a piece of digital media, I have to imagine companies across the world are going to unite in objecting to a non-digital "bring us your thing and you can make a copy of it" policy?

It's a laudable research goal, more likely as a way to design surveillance devices that are somewhat less detectable than drones made of plastic and bits of metal.

In either of the examples offered, however, the ubiquity and cheapness of drones already suggests that they'll simply be treated as a disposable, no matter WHAT they're made of, unless - as is the constant hurdle for bioplastics in pretty nearly every field of potential use - they become somehow cheaper than normal plastics. In a wildfire or nuclear meltdown, nobody's going to give a flying (get it?) hoot about a dozen ounces of slagged plastic crashing to earth in the area.

Nowhere in the Economist article do they use the word "hack" because - again - some dipshit is using the word "hack" to mean approximately whatever the hell they want it to mean.

"Hack" != "use"
"Hack" != "terminate"
"Hack" != "amend"

Either send your editors back to junior high grammar, or maybe exercise some editorial judgement and stop this silliness.

My advice?

Try to get past the idea you're the victim.

You made a stupid choice, one that's had lifelong consequences. Unless you're in an exceedingly rare circumstance, you probably knew what you were doing was wrong (albeit maybe not as serious as you thought) and chose to do it anyway.

And seriously, you tell me what is a more primary function of the HR department than to catch and prevent the hiring of people with a demonstrated disregard for rules and structures that everyone else seems to be able to follow, particularly if that person wasn't perhaps forthcoming and contrite about it?

Instead of bemoaning your fate, I'd hope that you'd be volunteering your time with schools and youth organizations trying to explain to kids that yes, bad choices still do have some consequences. Honestly it sounds like you're too full of self pity to do that, though.

Yeah, it's totally unreasonable for stupid life choices to actually have consequences.

Well, you're in luck. One political party in the US (roughly 55-60% of the electorate) is committed to legislation and policies that mean nobody* ever has to live with the results of their choices.

* well, except for the people that made the right, usually harder choices; those stupid chumps are the suckers we make pay for everyone else's mistakes.

Yes, some science fiction is little more than cowboys & indians "in space", or a detective novel "in space", etc because the primary impetus for science fiction (and its claddistic cousin, fantasy) is rarely only about hewing to some speculative verisimilitude.
Of course a culture set in the far future would be almost incomprehensibly different; it would also use language in a way we are unlikely to understand. Does that mean that it should +always+ be written in some sort of incomprehensible syntax? I fail to see how that would be entertaining, for all that it would satisfy some sort of weird "purist" esthetic.

For that matter, part of the wellspring from which science fiction flows is precisely the universality of the human experience. By divorcing the story from current contexts like nationality or gender (for example), an author is free to paint on a whiter canvas, and highlight subtle story elements that might otherwise get lost. By insisting that future cultures be incomprehensible, he's denying science fiction one of its most compelling abilities to tell stories that matter to people today.