HK-47, opining on torture
"Droids tend to blend into the background, like a bench or a card table. Mockery: Droid, fetch this. Droid, translate that. Droid, clean out the trash compactor. Part of the love of my function comes when the ‘furnishings’ pull out tibanna-powered rifles and point them at the owners' heads."

I think this is mainly going to be an excuse for hotels to add a daily $7.99 (+ $1.39 tax) "Robot Fee" to your bill.

You sound like someone who's old. Or irrelevant. Were you one of those people protesting in front of air force bases in the 70's? Sure, a nuclear-armed Iran is a convenient boogeyman to wave around to scare the US public. Who's doing that? John McCain mostly. Let's apply our criteria to him. Old? Yup. He's practically yelling at the rest of Congress to get off his lawn. And irrelevant? Yep, pretty much. No one cares what John McCain thinks, except maybe some old people in Florida and Arizona and some irrelevant people at Fox News.

Nuclear weapons were a convenient boogeyman to wave around when you were a hippie in the 70's. "Oh, they're going to blow the world up unless we pour this goat's blood on the gate of the air force base!" Discounting the fact that making a nuclear bomb is really hard (Iran and North Korea have been trying for as long as I've been alive, despite the fact that the general concepts are simple enough for a teenager to grasp,) and making something to deliver it is also really hard. By the time you get done doing all that stuff, you may as well have just leveled a city with conventional weapons. We did a lot more to Japan with conventional weapons than we did with nuclear ones in WWII, by the way. But after all that, some very interesting politics come into play, which is why India and Pakistan haven't nuked each other. And you know, the longer a nuclear device sits, the less likely it is that it's going to work. Your nice pure plutonium core starts getting crapped up with hydrogen bubbles. And those things are already very finicky as Iran and North Korea are finding out.

So yeah, on a scale of things that are likely to kill you, nuclear war is simply not one of them. You're significantly more likely to be shot by a disgruntled co-worker or a road-raging jackass in a giant penis truck. His truck is very very big, his penis is very very small and he's angry! In fact if you asked 1000 random people if they worry more about dying in a nuclear war or to zombies, I'd be willing to bet most of them would say zombies. Which are fictional.

It's like an anti-social network! If you had some data you wanted to make sure no one would ever see, you could post it to Google+!

I saw some (i'm assuming) teenager post some angsty thing on a social page the other day and it occurred to me that we built this huge network that lets you reach out and speak to basically any other human being on the planet and people seem lonelier than ever. Odd, how that works...

Pretty much. No one cares about nuclear weapons since the cold war ended. Well, no one but old, irrelevant people.

Check out these facts about Finnish teachers, and weep (if you're American) (source):

I also remember reading that about 90% of Finnish teachers graduated in the top quintile of their class. In the US, that figure is more like 4%. American students of education typically get the worst SAT and GRE scores of all the majors. We cannot ignore these facts when we're comparing educational systems. In the US it's easier to get into med school than it is for a smart Finn to get into teacher school. The quality of the people who make it through means that pretty much every innovation they try is bound to produce satisfactory results, because highly their best and brightest are in charge.

Yeah, but why not? This sort of thing obviously undercuts national security by tying up our cops, making them complicit in some asshole's prank, and causing potentially deadly danger. And compared to the effort and expense of mobilizing and deploying a freaking SWAT team, it is a comparative trifle for the NSA to answer a call from the cops asking for the malicious report to be traced to its source.

This is one of those times when our government's all knowing, all access panopticon would actually be useful. Seriously, our cops can't trace the swatters?

The USA should already have started a massive water engineering project on the scale of the interstate highway system. We need to be able to reclaim much more water for regions that get too much in quick bursts and move it around the country as need arises. Clean drinking water is already starting to become one of our top concerns, and it's only going to get worse. We should be planning for it now and investing in our future, but no one is even talking about it.

I Misinterpreted The Rules

Maybe we do have something in common with India, after all!

Mental floss

You mean soon the computer will be a match for me in chess AND kickboxing?!

We could put it back. It'd be easier to build a store and forward network now than it was back in the day. Hell, you can still put your hands on uucp.

Just as I was planning to move to France and buy a house with a roof made entirely of stinky cheese! Guess I'm going to have to rethink my plans!

I usually buy a fairly high end system and use it for years and years before buying a new one, and the hardware still lasts with very few problems until I'm ready to buy a new one.

I did have two video cards cook themselves to death in a MacPro desktop a few years ago. There was a lot of chatter about that particular problem happening with that machine on the forums, but I don't believe Apple ever admitted anything.

My room mate had an awesome problem with one hard drive. Some part of the write hardware had failed on it, so you couldn't write to the disk, but it would still cache writes and report them back so it looked like you had. So you could format it and start adding files and then when you rebooted it, it would have its old files from before you formatted it. Figuring out what was going on there took a while, and a boot to a Linux live CD to attempt to dd over the device with nothing else in the way.