Perhaps the police should stop behaving in was that make non-criminals scared of them. The number of dangerous criminals in society is really very small. If this app is downloaded more than a few hundred times that would indicate that more people than just hardened criminals want to keep tabs on cops. Just the download counter for the app could be read as a social barometer of public trust.

Also, the watchmen don't like being watched? Tough shit. You want more power than the average person, you had better get used to extra scrutiny too.

Now they're just marketing doublespeak.

So true. When I saw the blurb about the 'charms bar' I immediately imagined an exclusive hipster cereal bar in San Francisco that exclusively served lucky charms cereal with organic unpasteurized milk. The flatware was reclaimed 1890s mining camp tin spoons, and the maitre'd was dressed like lucky the leprechaun.

I suppose we have that dumb fuck Balmer to thank for this....

This also looks a lot like a slightly unpopular kid going and beating up the most unpopular kid to make everyone else like them more.

Pedophiles are like Nazis: They are widely assumed to be completely and thoroughly evil and thus worthless human beings. If you are going to pick a group to engage in vigilante activity against this is just about the perfect one, because who is going to going to stand up and say 'that's not right'. Unlike other extremely unpopular groups like Human traffickers or actual no-Nazis, pedophiles are not generally gun toting violent lunatics, so the risk of being murdered in retaliation is pretty low.

If you want to break the law to try to uphold the law, this is a logical choice, I guess.

Arguably, he did too good of a job: the players are all too human, and Jar-Jar is too fluid and well-executed for the movie.

Wait....are we talking about the same movie...? Are there some other SW prequels that I haven't seen? I have honestly, in the last decade of listening to SW critique, never heard anyone say, 'the players are all to human'. I saw a bunch of bland, stiff characters shoveling awkward lines at each other in front of a green screen. I am genuinely intrigued why you think this, because I have honeslty never heard this before. If you are trolling, masterfully done sir.

If there is another set of 'secret' prequels that are only for SW fans, please tell me. I know the secret SW nerd handshake....

The Transformers franchise was directed by Michael Bay, n00bsauce.

But then you have to just remember how awful JJ's Star Trek movies were.

Some people have this opinion, but I think if you took a survey, most would agree with the statement that Episode 1-3 was much worse than The ST reboot. I'll take whatever JJ has in store after more of Lucas's awful writing.

Currently the US estimates that it spends $5 Billion on health care costs associated with heroin use. In addition it is estimated that heroin costs about $11 billion in lost productivity.

If all those drug users were not doing drugs, it doesn't mean that they would automatically be leading healthy, happy lives. However, I'll take that number at face value for the sake of argument.

So we have a number that represents the cost to society. Now prove to me that it would cost society that same amount or more if it was completely legal and unregulated. I am willing to give you odds that the cost of enforcement, legal expenses, incarceration, and health care cost for will always exceed the legal costs. The lost productivity will probably be equal either way, health care costs will be slightly less, since it will be easier to get pure, consistent quantities, and then there is all the other costs that make it way more expensive to regulate.

Then there are the moral costs of propping up narco governments and essentially providing price supports for organized crime. Cheaper, Ha! Lost productivity my ass....

John McAfee says a lot of things and does a lot of things that seem pretty 'remarkable'. Either he is having one hell of a interesting life, or he is a pathological liar. It seems pretty convenient that he cannot even give this mystery group a name.

North Korea has a well established history of aggressive, belligerent behavior, and this sort of thing sounds right up their alley. John is going have to cough up a lot more evidence than his good word that an agency with thousands of people and billions of dollars in hardware devoted keeping an eye on a rouge nation is wrong.

One thing that is going to likely cause some real problems: I think that many large cities rely on water supplies that are refilled via melting snow packs, providing a steady and predictable clean water supply. If snow packs and glaciers are radically reduced or eliminated, the water supply becomes much more seasonal, and supplying potable water for large numbers of people becomes...problematic.

Just one question for the deniers....When the mean temperature is up ten degrees globally and humanity is tanking it because of massive environmental change and crop failure, you won't be upset when we lynch you for being the liars and shills who prevented proactive fixes from being implemented, will you?

Ten years out? As a veteran programmer and AI enthusiast, I'd say it was more like a century. We cannot build a computer that can model a bug's brain activity, let alone something a million times more complicated like a human brain. And that doesn't even get us to the 'superhuman intelligence' category that people are afraid of.

Worrying about Killer AI is like worrying about the Sun burning out. Yeah, it might happen eventually, but it isn't even worth considering right now...

HOA to homeowners: ELIMINATE!

The device is claiming it can alter your mood by attaching to your head.

I'm pretty sure you'll find that meets the definition of 'medical device'.

I think that the thread is getting lost because nerds are arguing over what is or isn't a medical device, which seems sort of tangential to the real question: Is the mood altering effect anything more than the placebo effect? I am a little dubious about the benefits of running a low voltage current into the side of your skull. Wait, lets go back one step further, is there even any medical theory that would suggest that adding additional current to a person's brain would do something positive?

This whole thing sounds like some decided to lick a 9 volt battery and stick it to the side of your head for a healthy mark up charge....

I agree that more diversity in the software ecosystem will cause critical bugs to have less impact to the world overall, and will hopefully drive competition to make the offerings more efficient and stable. However I think that this is a straw-man and the real conclusion we should draw is this:

When you write code, you are going to screw up. If you aren't writing bugs that people notice, you aren't working on anything worthwhile. While the bugs that were found were costly and dangerous, the question is were these found quicker than a closed source solution? Were they fixed faster than a closed source solution? Is there anything that can be done to allow quicker roll back or disabling of vulnerable features? When you write code, you need to design for failure, because it will happen and plan so that the recovery will be as quick as possible.

Adding additional software library offerings will only add stability in the sense that one particular vector wont affect as much of the Internet, but you introduce more surface area for attackers to poke at, and more vulnerabilities overall. Given the challenges to write really solid code, I think I'd like to have fewer, but really well vetted open source software solutions. Of course, I am not correct in this opinion, as there are no 'right' decisions here.

Scalzi sounds like a moron who should stay away from game theory - selling books has always been a zero sum game. He just doesn't understand that for the old method the sum was the sum of all money that all readers spent on all books. It was a unknowable total to be sure, but it was still a finite sum.