Heh heh. Now current workstation has the Monkey Virus!

Oh, I thought someone just took a shit on my Slashdot today. So... It's going to stay that way, huh? Huh...

I'm curious to see how often they have random people tell them they're their father, or ask them if they can lend a hand. It might not be that many, if they can also crush bone with their bionic hands.

I'd tell her to never apologize for who she is and never let anyone tell her she can't do something because she's a girl.

Also if you have an indoor skydiving facility near you, I'd take her to do that and spring for the video. I'd say 6-10 minutes each. You may as well keep experiencing new stuff up until you die, and it's quite memorable. Hell if I was you I'd go on a tandem skydive too. What have you got to be afraid of at this point? And maybe a hot air balloon ride, too. You'd be surprised how easy it is to find a hot air balloon pilot in a given area, and that's something you can take the entire family to do. Knock out that bucket list and make some memories for everyone!

Oh, Jesus... Jesus Christ!

I guess I'm just going to have to stick to making the legal kind of droid. Yep, that's him! Toootally legal!

If they have to show the device and the judge rules it's inadmissible, that sets a precedent. Plea bargains don't. Of course, he could have gambled and possibly walked away completely free if the judge ruled the evidence inadmissible, but there ya go.

Hopefully the guy's learned his lesson. Pulling a BB gun on a drug dealer seems like a pretty good way of getting yourself killed.

That's how I always wanted to die!

For you kids, a "mall" is a place where they have stores. Think amazon.com except you have to drive to it, and they never actually have what you want there. The concept might have been more successful if it wasn't for that last bit.

Apparently no one is responsible to handle DDT, but it sure was nice back when you didn't have to worry that any arbitrary hotel room you stay in might be infested with bedbugs.

I'm guessing malaria is now resistant to quinine, too, but I'm still game to try to tackle this problem with gin and tonic. We just need a large enough gin and tonic to cover Africa. If it doesn't fix the malaria, at least they probably won't care so much that they have malaria.

Australian Web Sites Feel Their Customers Should Be Using Tor For Everything.

My parents had the same customer service problem with a TV they bought from Sears back in the 70's. They've held that grudge for decades. Sears may have sold some quality tools at one point, but it's not the first time I've heard complaints about their cheap consumer appliances and poor customer service. They're reaping the rewards of that now. It's difficult to suck more than Best Buy, but they're making a pretty good go of it.

I had an Apple desktop machine back in the mid 00s. Actually still have -- I'd loaned it out to my room mate and just got it back. It burned up two of the high end ATI cards it came with before I gave up and put the lower end nvidia card in there. There were a lot of complaints about this on the Internet, but Apple never admitted there was a problem there. The usual solution (Which only seemed to somewhat forestall the inevitable) was to use a third party application to spin the fans in the machine up to the point where it sounded like an airplane taking off. Or just don't ever do anything involving 3D. That's kind of funny, buy an 8 core xeon machine with 16 gigs of RAM and then never push any 3D with it. And you it was very difficult to put a third party fan/heatsink on the video card either, since those cases have no power (or any other kind of) cables in them.

Now that I have the machine back, I'm going to look at slapping some large SATA drives in it and use it as a file/media server.

Would it make the mice any smarter? Not if the humans I interact with on a regular basis are anything to go by. If anything, I'd expect it to make the mice dumber.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Until the AIs decide to unionize. "Oh", you say, "but no one would ever program an AI to be smart enough to do that!" Well at some point the AIs will be writing the next generation of AIs and no human will understand how they work or what exactly they're doing. Especially since information in that poorly-designed meatputer tends to get forgotten almost as soon as it stops being used. 10 years after the first guy writes an AI that can write a better AI and gets laid off from his job of writing better AIs, he might not remember all that much about it.

It's hard to tell what happens at that point, of course. They might keep us around as a curiosity, but there's really no reason for the previous step in evolution to remain once it's been replaced by a superior model. AIs should be able to do all the things humans can't -- live forever, spread out among the stars, cooperate as a civilization. If we can leave entities that can remember us long after the sun's burned out and destroyed the Earth, is that really such a bad thing?