It looks like what will change is that the orangutan will live in a wildlife sanctuary rather than in a zoo.

Whether that is significant or not depends on the difference in quality-of-life (for an orangutan) between living in a cage (or small zoo enclosure) vs living in a larger outdoor environment. I'd imagine that the orangutan's quality of life will improve significantly, but that's only a layman's guess since I don't claim any expertise on orangutans. I suppose the test would be to give the orangutan the option of either lifestyle, and see which one she seems to prefer.

I'm not sure about how that was decided, but I will note that an older definition of the word was "A temporary bed made from [straw] bedding arranged on the floor, especially for a child". Perhaps they envisioned the wooden frames as temporary beds for products to rest on?

The line of customers to the $50 battery-swap option will definitely become less steady, yes. Unless you think that there aren't any people who, given the option, would choose to keep the $50 rather than spend it? Granted, these are Tesla drivers we're talking about here, but still ;^)

Okay... next question is: how much would it cost to hire the necessary people to do what was done to Sony? I'm guessing that would be in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars, possibly up to a million?

Given the amount of money North Korea spends on nuclear weapons development, I don't see any reason why they wouldn't or couldn't spend a relatively small amount on this.

I can't quite see why this is being made out to be such a scandal. So she asked a colleague if a black guy might be interested in films starring black characters. Okay, it's a bit naive, but scandalous? Really?

It's not like she said anything insensitive to Obama; she merely asked a colleague for advice about how to act appropriately. I'd think that recognizing your ignorance in advance and correcting it would be preferable to ignoring it and then blurting out something stupid/embarrassing to the POTUS.

I'm probably missing some critical detail, but to me it seems like the only thing she's guilty of is not having enough experience interacting with black people in a social context. That's a weakness, to be sure, but if it's a sin then it's a sin that a lot of other people are also guilty of. I think this is a pretty good example of why people are so reluctant to enter any discussion about race -- anything you say can and will be used against you in the court of public opinion.

How hard is it to hire a team of hackers to do the hacking for you? I imagine even North Korea is capable of throwing some money around.

Of course, real gas stations don't give away free gas to customers who are willing to wait half an hour. If they did, that might cut down considerably on the number of people who were willing to pay $50 to fill up their tank in 3 minutes, and make the "steady line of customers" scenario less likely.

Apples, oranges.

Because that's how the information gets from (wherever it is stored) to (the people who need to access it). The Internet is popular for a reason, and that reason is that it helps people get things done quickly and cheaply.

The alternative, of course, is to have the information and the people physically co-located, so that they can access the information only via an isolated network (or by physically sitting at the computer the information is stored on).

However, the benefits of remote access are so great that in many cases it's seen as being worth the risk of allowing it. Whether or not that assessment is correct or not depends on an estimate of how secure the networks are, but also on an estimate of how aggressive, competent, and numerous any hostile intruders will be. Clearly it's possible to get both of those estimates wrong, but I'm not sure that a knee-jerk response of "pull all the Ethernet cables and return to the 1950s" is going to be a practical solution either, as doing so would likely cause as much disruption as an actual attack.

I'm not sure what the solution is, but probably one good practice would be a lot more red-teaming -- i.e. if your network is vulnerable to intrusion, it's much better to learn how a friendly intruder got in (by asking him) and fix the hole than to pick up the pieces after a hostile intruder nuked your network.

If that's their biggest problem, they are in better shape than I thought.

And indeed, some of us are. If you drive an electric car and live near a nuclear power plant, you might be one of them.

Ad hominem attacks are tedious, so for the sake of argument let's take it as given that I'm both. Now that we've got that out of the way, I'll ask again: how are Uber's high prices ripping anyone off? Does anyone actually pay those prices? If so, why? Is Uber pointing a gun to their heads?

I've always kind of wanted a bank account with built-in credit-card functionality. No overdraft fees possible, rather you pay credit-card style interest when your balance is negative, and earn bank-style interest when your balance is positive.

Of course, this is unlikely to be offered for just that reason... to the banks, overdraft fees are a profit center :(

Nobody is being forced to pay Uber's prices. There are still taxicabs in Sydney, are there not?

You don't give Apple programmers enough credit -- the USB transfer routine includes a surreptitious Bitcoin mining thread. That's how Apple builds up its cash reserves.

Is the latter action illegal? If so, under what circumstances?

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any particularly compelling reason why company X should be required to permit a competitors' software to make use of the company X's servers.