Epic comment. I approve.

So long, concept of personal identity. I always figured robots would be the ones to have a shared identity. It never occurred to me humans might too.

Who will win control of cyberspace? Will it be Yahoo, Netscape, or America Online?

I just watched the whole thing. It's a feature on the potential of music videos and the viability of videodiscs (large optical (?) discs containing mostly music videos). The report starts off with some worry over a slump in the music industry, and briefly mentions home taping, but that's one of the few times it's ever mentioned. The entire rest of the report talks about what these new-fangled "music videos" are, and whether videodiscs can ever take off, considering people's limited patience for watching a few minutes of video over and over and over. It's interesting in its own right, but this Slashdot story is completely misleading. If the music industry is "worried" about a few seconds (literally) of incidental hand-wringing buried in a longer report about something else entirely from 30 years ago, these people are insane.

Unrealistic.

Holy hell. I thought I was the only one who thought of my weekends that way. On Saturdays, I'm like, "Why was I looking forward to this so much? I'm just sitting around, wasting time." And then ... Sundays. *shudder* The dread of Mondays kills any sense of freedom on Sundays, and turns the just-past Saturday into this magical day of wasted opportunity in hindsight.

I think I'd enjoy my weekends more if every Friday I was deluded into thinking I had a 3-day weekend ahead of me, and I didn't find out I had to go into work on Monday until Monday morning, when my alarm goes off. I might enjoy a Sunday, for once.

The GP brings up a legitimate concern. Preview needs to fix this. Your alternatives are kinda clunky and impractical. I don't mean to get snotty, but who modded this up?

I use a popular freeware image viewer called Xee. Does exactly what I need it to.

... the tags being "toy" followed by "story"

Reminds me of the early 1900s, when live orchestras would play during silent movies. Along came recorded movie sound, and thus pre-recorded musical scores to accompany them, and the musicians protested this invasion and the loss of their jobs. I was trying to find an entry about it on the Paleo Future blog, can't seem to.

Now ... we'll just tell them all backwards.

I wish I could mod this +infinity. Funniest thing I've seen on here in a long time. Well done, sir/ma'am.

I hate to hit you with this, but the overwhelming majority of the population, both male and female, consume porn to one degree or another, and it is the "moral" minority who consume it more voraciously than normal, healthy people who don't hold fucked up bronze age beliefs that sex is bad. (Amusingly, online porn purchases slightly decrease on Sundays.) The market Apple is appealing to isn't moral, it's just hypocritical, not unlike the stridently anti-gay politicians who frequently turn out to be gay themselves.

The majority may claim to be above porn, but this is the same majority who also claim to be above masturbation, contrary to every reputable study ever conducted, which finds that non-masturbators are a tiny minority, especially among men.

Sounds like you like it. I rather expect that most of Apple's shareholders will like anything that increases their profits. If that happens to be Steve Jobs' messiah complex, so be it. If, on the other hand, they thought there was a good way to monetize the iPhone's use to tap into the multi-billion-dollar porn market without hurting existing iPhone sales, then it would be Apple's moral responsibility -- your words, not mine -- to devote considerable resources to making sure that fisting videos were available with the tap of a finger, now wouldn't it?

But that's how morality goes, isn't it? Any time you hear someone talking loudly about it, you can bet you're dealing with a hypocrite.

I couldn't help being reminded of Civil Protection's technology in Half-Life 2. If you've played even the very first level, you'll remember the flying scanners that strobe you and take your picture: http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/City_Scanner

I suppose the drones described in the story are a combination of those scanners and Manhacks, except the drones probably can't fly too low. Of course, with miniaturization ...