Let me just say that, if you offer a trip to space as the companion event to drinking this water, I will drink and I will go. :)

What you need, son, is a homeopathic cure for your gullibility.

Evolution doesn't deal with life or death

You lack a realistic understanding of evolution, I'm afraid. Time for some remedial study.

++no

Not a bad thought, if you don't mind very expensive ammo...

Tho my first thought was to wonder how easily this could be misdirected by a competing targeting laser.

I had the thought that yeah, since mom is infected it could be a re-infection, but not necessarily through what I suspect you're thinking. Any accidental exchange of bodily fluids can suffice. Did mom have a cold sore and kiss the child on the lips? (Remember kids have potential breaks in the mouth due to new teeth) Might be enough.

Yeast with THC sounds like a perfect combination, get high while eating something baked and it could be any bread, a dope bagel, a funny muffin, a nostalgic croissant, the branding possibilities are endless!

Weasels that know corporate double speak are ruining everything though. You know we don't mourn the T-rex. We talk about the dinosaurs as being really big and dumb.

They were all psychopaths!! Lizard brains.

When the cockroaches are mulling over what our existences might have been like, they will all say that the weasels died out because of our stupidity and overconfidence. They'll say we were monsters, too. Big and dumb. Lizard brains.

The "scanner" portion of these devices is typically an embedded system that drives a hardware sensor, and speaks USB out the back side. You could probably open one up, solder a cable to the right points on the scanner board, and you'd have exactly the simple and transparent scanner you requested.

But because the business wants a truckload (no pun intended) of functionality out of these scanners, they need it to have more capabilities. First, it needs to be on the network, or it won't give them any benefit. Next, it needs to be multi-tasking so it can display alerts, etc. Its primary task may be to inventory the stuff coming off a truck, its other tasks may include assigning work items to line employees, displaying alerts on the supervisors' screens, punching the timeclock for breaks, and possibly even employee email. To a lot of businesses, a browser based interface lets them run whatever kind of functions they want, without the expense of continually pushing a bunch of apps out to a bunch of random machines. So taking all that together, embedded XP is one (bloated) way of meeting all that.

So while the scanner itself is simple, it's the rest of the hardware in the device that was infested with XP and other malware.

The American dream (before it was hijacked by the realtors in the USA) has died a horrific death as the government completely overtook over every function of the market and declared itself to be the legal dictator state completely dominating over the individual human being. The American dream was the idea that equal under the law individuals could pursue their own happiness on their own terms, where apart from regulating criminal conduct, government wouldn't have any authority to stop the individuals from attempting to build their own lives and businesses the way they saw fit. That dream suffered its first heart attack during Teddy Roosevelt, second heart attack during the Hoover and FDR, it was kicked in the balls in the fifties and then had a minor stroke when Nixon took the world off the gold standard. Now the dream is a dying, rotting, gangrenous corpse, that is being systematically shat on by every self proclaimed 'saviour' of the society and its values, by all the Marxists, socialists, fascists and basically brainless, dickless, heartless pigs that are happy simply to take another shit on the Constitution and smear their faeces all around them - a form of societal self degradation that periodically descends one or another population of humans into the dark ages throughout history.

So you believe that what Afghans want is your version of a welfare state, that rather than being left alone they want to be corralled into your personal version of 'free paradise'? Why not just LEAVE THE PEOPLE ALONE and not try to play either occupants or saviours?

This time only the bad guy died, but even him did not deserve capital punishment for a car jack ...

Nature -- specifically evolution -- disagrees. You don't get a vote.

So Tesla's anti-theft system is 100% lethal?

No, but evolution's anti-massive-stupidity system is pretty lethal. Less so nowadays, but... still.

"Hey, think I'll drive triple digits in a randomly active urban environment in a vehicle I'm not familiar with, while (justifiably) paranoid!"

That could be. Being long past draft age, I don't pay those aspects much attention. But the last time I heard of someone actually registering was when the draft was still active.

To this day, males 18+ must register. Those who do not cannot receive Federal financial aid, nor work as a GS or contract employee for the Fed.