Imagine your insurance company or govt agency disintermediates all of the humans in their customer service chain, and leaves us with AI capable of making decisions tasked with doing so. Shudder.

Every so often an event makes the news that somebody in the TSA has been busted for stealing out of luggage. Did you observe or suspect these sorts of shenanigans were happening while you worked for them? Are these one-off bad apples, or is it the TSA's informal wage-boost bonus system?

I've used Splashtop on my tablet for years very happily. Both on home network and over the internet. Just looked and found that there are free/non-commercial clients that run on PC hardware too... I've tried them and they work as well as they do in the tablet context.

Splashtop works, but isn't free. I do find it is smoother and less buggy feeling than the free VNCs. There's supposed to be a google chrome RDP plugin too, but I've not played with that yet.

Sounds like somebody stole your debit card that pulls from your bank account. That is different and more of a pain than a credit card. IF you were missing payments on your house and utilities and such like, the money was gone... not a disputed charge against your account, but actually gone. That sucks. But is not relevant to credit cards as such, which won't take your money away if you dispute the charges.

How can they open source the code, then flog it to somebody else who claims "complete ownership"? What license did they release the open source branch under?

Better literacy leads to a better ability to spot the poorly written bogus come-ons that get you infected when you click on them? I just can't believe it.

Can I count the classes I took from Prof. CowboyNeal?

That's a nice idea for you. But it seems to be one way only. As an American whose ancestors came here 200+ years ago, there are huge hurdles to me deciding I want to go to any other country to learn to do anything they do well. If Grandad had come from Ireland or Germany, sure I'd be a repatriating expat... but I'm sorta stuck. If I wanted to go to Germany and work for an old-world distiller or brewer, things I'm not bad at here, I'm SOL. You want open borders, open them both ways. Maybe I'd happily let you take my seat at the American table, if somewhere else would let me go there without buying my way in to the tune of $.5M or so.

This needs more attention. Congress needs to be forced to think about this.

Install a VM with a godawfully infected version of Windows 98 on it and turn them loose on it... for the lulz.

There are companies out there like Support.Com that pay about double minimum wage for North American English speaking tech-literate folks to help tech-clueless folks do stuff like install printers and fight off viruses. Maybe you should look into that angle.

I don't believe that this is the end... More books in the series are anticipated.

Hmmm... antitrust fun and hilarity will surely ensue.

Even so... who is going to go to the expense to produce 3DTV programs? Selling a few early adopters 3D TV sets, regardless of their usability, isn't going to sell 3D cameras and post-production tech to all the TV studios. This "feature" has years to mature or wither on the vine... because there's not going to be content that uses it for a long time to come.