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.

Not necessarily a tyrant. Any psychopath with money.

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.

do you have the line by line breakdown on expenses? I dont but id really love to see what it is, see what that 800 million is buying

having said that, WHY isnt there a breakdown, line item, for all costs that our government spends?

the IRS will freak out if i miss one little thing but they spend trillions a year and most of us have no idea where our money is actually going

completely missed the point however sure, if you wanna spend your money to try and take money from others, so they can not even give it to you... i see no good reason you should not be able to do so

I was referring more along the lines of how one can opt out of paying the political donations portion of their union dues, i should be able to opt out of non essential taxes and if people want their 5 million dollar new court house, instead of making everyone pay when the old courthouse is doing the job just fine, let people crowdfund it and not raise my taxes.

extrapolate that to NASA, wars, social engineering policy etc.

Its allowing us to put our money where our mouths are

I dont expect taxes to pay for a lot, taxes should be for the basics needed. crowd funding is giving us a chance to do it different, back the things we want done without being forced to pay for the things we dont

the IRS should look into this

i have a similar method of shopping. First i figure out the type of product im looking for. followed by hours of research before pulling the trigger. In this instance i simply could not find what i was looking for after a week and the ads helped me

or maybe you missed the last sentence where i said "when done right"

or your just an AC and i dont know why i wasted my time replying

thats not entirely true. some ads are welcome

I recent got a new car (well new to me) and one of the things i want to do is get fitted seat covers as the interior is an off white and i am....well a slob

so after looking for a few weeks i havent found anything that fits my needs (fitted, not leather or fake leather, and well made)

well I noticed some ads all of a sudden starting to show up for fitted car seats and eventually i found what i was looking for because of google ads

I will admit it is the first time ive found it useful, but when ads are done right, they are not a bad thing

i didnt know the term either, but after looking it up i agree

when I am on my phone there are 2 types of pages that if i get them, i refuse to go to again

sites with popups that dont get blocked by adblock, no i dont care about what you are trying to sell me, show me what i asked for

the other is "list" sites, where they have a list that might have 10 photos and no (or very little text) yet they want me to load a new page for each item on the list. It is even worse if i can go to the site from a desktop and not have the page split over 10 pages so why do it to me on mobile? I know why (ads) and I dont care. I dont want to a - waste my time clicking next after i look at each slide for 5 seconds, and B i dont want to waste my phones data package on a bunch of ads, that take up more data than the content im looking for to begin with!

as long as they dont plan on releasing him (they said they dont know if they can) it shouldnt be an issue. simply print a larger one as needed

i take it you are not american

they want to mandate free birth control we should have free access to law information

the cost should only be related to procuring and making paper copies (like foia)

therefore post it online, and everyone wins (except the extortionists)

if i recall correctly, didnt powell get in trouble because of his email issue?