It would cost me money to use 2FA

It'll cost you money to not use 2FA too. Pay now or pay later.

I get 2000 texts a month on my $30 plan - I use maybe 10 2FA messages in that time - hardly worth complaining about. Electricity costs money too!

But to the GP - password quality is part of good 2FA; one is not a replacement for the other.

More likely, someone could run a forklift into one of the massive Fluoride gas tanks and puncture it (the gas is used to surface polysilicon wafers), wiping out a couple of hundred people Union-Carbide-style.

That's a minimal risk and some precautions can be made. But the more relevant metric is that roofing jobs are among the most dangerous in the US. Solar installers on roofs will fall to their deaths (or severe injury), and that's a guarantee. There's no magic that keeps solar installers safer than roofing installers.

I'm guessing it will be about as deadly as coal, per megaWatt. Nothing nearly as safe as atomic power or hydro.

Well, robbery would be a bit tougher than general mayhem. In the foreseeable future you'd probably need a human in the loop, for example to confirm that the victim actually complied with the order to "put ALL the money in the bag." Still that would remove the perpetrator from the scene of the crime. If there were an open or hackable wi-fi access point nearby it'd be tricky to hunt him down.

This kind of remote controlled drone mediated crime is very feasible now. It wouldn't take much technical savvy to figure out how to mount a shotgun shell on a quadcopter and fly it to a particular victim (if you have one). That's a lot less sophisticated than stuff terrorists do already; anyone with moderate technical aptitude could do it with off-the-shelf components. I'm sure we'll see our first non-state-actor controlled drone assassination in the next couple of years. Or maybe a hacktivist will detonate a party popper on the President or something like that.

Within our lifetime it'll surely be feasible for ordinary hackers to build autonomous systems that could fly into a general area and hunt down a particular victim using facial recognition. People have experimented with facial recognition with SBCs like the Raspberry Pi already.

You can forbid states from doing this all you want, but as technology advances the technology to do this won't be exotic. It'll be commonplace stuff used for work and even recreation.

Potato, potahto

Not necessarily a tyrant. Any psychopath with money.

I'd use Watson as a great example of how deep learning systems won't make coding go away too soon. From the Wikipedia entry:

Watson uses IBM's DeepQA software and the Apache UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) framework. The system was written in various languages, including Java, C++, and Prolog, and runs on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 operating system using Apache Hadoop framework to provide distributed computing.

Any guesses as to how many lines of code and development hours are behind that stack? How about a guess as to how long it'll be before Watson is able to make useful contributions to a significant part of that software stack? Is it worth thinking about the hardware stack, or the effort put into curating the database?

Watson is, basically, a sophisticated search engine built upon a massive mountain of human effort.

Experience says that the more complex systems become and the more ubiquitously they're deployed, the more you need people who can build them, expand them, bend them and glue them into place. It doesn't seem to follow a curve like agriculture where productivity can continuously increase while labour contracts. It probably will turn that way, eventually, but I don't expect to be around for it.

They aren't exactly the same, because interstitial ads aren't just obtrustive, they're interfering. You can't simply mentally resolve to ignore them; if you want to continue you've got to either follow the ad or find a way to dismiss it. This presents the user with a Hobson's Choice: physically respond to the ad, or go back.

A lot depends on how motivated you are to get at the content. If it's something you've clicked out of idle curiosity, you'll back away. If it's something you really want to see you'll fight your way through. Since so much traffic on the Internet is driven by idle curiosity, the 69% figure doesn't surprise me at all. What would be interesting is to disaggregate that figure by types of target content.

Coding is likely to be obsolete in a few years - replaced by deep learning systems as those systems increase in capability, and so the last thing we should do is steer kids away from math and toward coding.

One of my computer science profs said that, pretty much word for word, when I suggested I wasn't interested in grad school. Except at the time "CASE" was the big buzzword.

From the rate of progress I've seen with these "make coding obsolete" initiatives, I expect I'll be well retired before that happens. And, even if they get something working, there's still going to be a job market for coders in gluing all these deep learning systems together.

That's what bribery is for ... no, wait - I mean PAC donations!

Obama's on the list. So is Dubya. And Clinton. And Bush Sr. And Reagan, obviously. And Carter. On and on.

One of the things that caused a lack of sleep for Jefferson was the long line of people at his door (at the original Whitehouse). Most of them wanted jobs or handouts; he didn't mind the ones who actually came to him with policy concerns.

Then again, his government was mostly limited and operating by the rule-of-law, so not too many people felt he ought to be murdered.

Oh, wait, you didn't need to pass a test for that.

I'm just trying to think how that would have been possible. I think back then there was a medical exception you could plead for. I didn't. I passed the 20 WPM test fair and square and got K6BP as a vanity call, long before there was any way to get that call without passing a 20 WPM test.

Unfortunately, ARRL did fight to keep those code speeds in place, and to keep code requirements, for the last several decades that I know of and probably continuously since 1936. Of course there was all of the regulation around incentive licensing, where code speeds were given a primary role. Just a few years ago, they sent Rod Stafford to the final IARU meeting on the code issue with one mission: preventing an international vote for removal of S25.5 . They lost.

I am not blaming this on ARRL staff and officers. Many of them have privately told me of their support, including some directors and their First VP, now SK. It's the membership that has been the problem.

I am having a lot of trouble believing the government agency and NGO thing, as well. I talked with some corporate emergency managers as part of my opposition to the encryption proceeding (we won that too, by the way, and I dragged an unwilling ARRL, who had said they would not comment, into the fight). Big hospitals, etc.

What I got from the corporate folks was that their management was resistant to using Radio Amateurs regardless of what the law was. Not that they were chomping at the bit waiting to be able to carry HIPAA-protected emergency information via encrypted Amateur radio. Indeed, if you read the encryption proceeding, public agencies and corporations hardly commented at all. That point was made very clearly in FCC's statement - the agencies that were theorized by Amateurs to want encryption didn't show any interest in the proceeding.

So, I am having trouble believing that the federal agency and NGO thing is real because of that.

Excuse me while I go find a pickup from 1980.