I'm having flashbacks to the KIM-1, a 1976 single-board computer with a keyboard (hex digits) and display (6 LED digits) and 1K bytes of memory. This has a bigger keyboard, a bigger display, more memory, a bit more software, and costs less, but it's basically the same thing, right?

Would have been a chance to catch up with current events.

And, as the Republicans used to repeatedly hammer us over the head with, Obama was a member of an organization that included Weather Underground co-founder Bill Ayers. While I'm no supporter of Bush, this kind of thing could get almost anybody.

The authors did say these might be a "failed experiment in multicellular life".

The reported video is from 2013, so NatGeo must have been reporting something else.

From an alternative story:

So in fact, another ipod could work, but it has to be trained first. A good backup of the training data should allow a new ipod to be set up quickly, but it sounds like they didn't do that.

I shudder to think how many insects die on America's highways every second (billions?), but that seems OK to most people.

The speed limit on I-70 heading out of the mountains into Denver used to be 55 mph, but most people drove 75 or more. It was changed to 65 about a year ago, and it appears to me that traffic has slowed down since then.

FIFY. Get real, self-driving cars aren't magic, and will still need to deal with traffic.

My wrists! Oh, the humanity!

Also, if you dig into their footnotes, you find that the median debt in collection is $1349, far less than the average (mean) that they so prominently feature.

Space travel is a big dead-end. Outside of sci-fi, nobody really wants to live in anyplace remotely as horrible as the friendliest of non-Earth planets. Think about the worst places on Earth: summit of Everest, South Pole, bottom of the ocean, middle of the Sahara. All of those places look like Eden compared to the nicest environment available within 10 light-years of here. Get real - we're stuck with our one Earth, and we should take care of it.

This result (which basically says that any planet with life has to look like ours) reminds me of an article I read long, long ago speculating on what ETs would look like. The author basically concluded that they'd have to look exactly like us, i.e. two arms, two legs, head on top with two eyes and a mouth and a nose, etc., and he had arguments for why each of these things was necessary. Of course, almost none of the thousands of other species on Earth look exactly like us, but that didn't faze him in the least in his application of logic...

Why does everyone always assume that life requires water, anyway? Couldn't there be a planet out there infested with silicon-based life forms who live at 300 degrees Celsius, or whatever?

When I was in grad school back in the 80's, I knew a guy who was researching AI. He complained that as soon as some technique was understood, people would say it wasn't AI any more, so as a result the AI profession as a whole never got much credit for advancing.

Reading a huge codebase is an unlikely way to spot backdoors anyway. After a few thousand lines the reader's eyes would glaze over, and anything subtle would be missed. This isn't as easy as looking for two-digit year fields a la Y2K reviews.

Besides, the Heartbleed bug should have been a clue that open source alone doesn't make security issues "transparent". Somebody has to both read and understand the code to detect these things, and an OS like WIndows is so huge that nobody can understand the whole thing. Even a relatively small, specialized module like OpenSSL slid by for years without anybody noticing the problem.