Actually, the "pretend to be the cops, force the victim to pull over" thing has been done IRL on several occasions I've read about.

The major reason it doesn't happen often is risk relative to reward. Impersonating a police officer is not a good way to endear yourself to the justice system. You'd need a convincing cop car, and that isn't something you can just go out and buy. When robbing a truck, you can usually do that more easily when it's still waiting at a loading dock. If it's an armoured car, fat chance they're going to be taken in by a fake badge and phony traffic stop. If your object is murder or kidnapping, there are less conspicuous ways to go about it than flashing lights on the open highway.

Crooks are lazy, after all, and the desperate or chemically assisted ones don't have the money or patience to pretend to be cops, while the ones with the ability to pull it off are smart enough to be risk averse.

So an autopilot car or truck that reacts to the cops the way a driver would won't generate a rash of highwaymen pretending to be police. Robbing an automated truck would probably be best accomplished by paying the minimum wage box-jockeys who man the warehouse a bribe to let the crook sneak in and change the destination on the truck's autopilot.

Yep, it was a plot point in Richard Morgan's "Black Man" (re-titled "Thirteen" in the US to avoid confusion IIRC).

Car is on autopilot, bad guys want driver dead, they reprogram the car to stop on a deserted highway remotely. It's a little odd that nobody thought to include a manual override in the car design, but chalk that up to author fiat.

Look up "Banqiao dam failure" on wikipedia, or google it. 26k dead from flooding alone, more than 140k dead from secondary effects. Severe ecological effects and property damage as well. China's got a bad history when it comes to dams.

Even the most severe estimates for Chernobyl are a fraction as many dead, short and long term combined - the highest figure I've ever seen put forward was grossly inflated (the person posting it treated every additional cancer caused by the radiation as "fatal", see if you can spot the logical error there), and it still fell well short of Banqiao in deaths. Fukushima's repercussions aren't fully known yet (Chernobyl's are known because it's been twenty-five years), but there will be far fewer deaths than Chernobyl caused, even according to the people who think Tepco is downplaying the severity.

Other nuclear accidents have single digit fatalities (SL-1 comes to mind), or no fatalities at all. Three Mile Island was a zero casualty disaster, where nobody was killed or irradiated and the final cost was measured in dollar figures alone.

It isn't that nuke plants are intrinsically safe - they aren't. It's that we're so paranoid about nuclear safety we go out of the way when designing for failure, such that the actual damage done by a meltdown is a fraction of what it would be in a plant with few or no safety systems. If we built hydro dams the way we build nuclear plants they'd be incapable of killing anybody when they fail. But we don't. We don't built anything non-nuclear to nuclear-spec safety levels. Which means both the anti-nuke ninnies and the nuclear fanboys are wrong - the former for inflating the danger by pretending there are no adequate safeties and the later for pretending there are no risks.

(Crap, I just realized you might be talking about a different game; I responded as if you were replying to the GP about Arkham City, but now I suspect you were referring to GTA4. My bad if I misunderstood.)

Actually no, I'm gonna chime in here as another person who owns Arkham City and does not have a live account. Your statement is incorrect.

What happens instead is, you get prompted to log into GFWL, and can click "cancel" to just work offline. Save game still works, no features lost. You can't do online scores, but who cares, really? Dunno if it'll require a login for DLC, but I rarely bother with that anyway. And, just to be clear on this point, I'm currently a quarter way through the game, have never made a live account (I dislike Microsoft), have saved plenty of times and am playing a non-pirated, bought off of steam version of the game.

I don't know where you got your information, but it's either out of date, was never correct in the first place, or something got misunderstood along the way.

Actually, omnivores are all over the map in terms of taste. Pigs are tasty, bears are edible, but nobody's lining up to try crow-pie.

Regarding carnivores, I can vouch for the fact that sharks are indeed tasty.

Might want to amend your rules to say that scavengers aren't tasty, herd animals are delicious, and seafood is exempt.

Don't be stupid, the whole point of a strategic nuclear weapon is deterrence and/or nationalistic posturing. Hiding your capabilities does not further either cause. Delivery systems may have some secrecy about them to prevent the development of countermeasures, but the actual bomb yields are no secret.

Plus, you don't know if a design works until you test it, and you can't test a nuke without essentially letting every other nation with an intelligence agency know the yield, since the math for determining TNT equivalence isn't hard, and the detonation isn't subtle.

Further to that, most of the really big designs are older and outdated, as miniaturization became the focus (smaller bombs equals more warheads per missile/bomber). Meaning the bombs from the end of the cold war are actually lower yield than the ones from the middle.

In short, you're letting knee jerk "the government is hiding secrets" paranoia get in the way of common sense, and you don't know nukes.

You're undermining your point by insisting on antagonizing the religious. Which is unfortunate, because your first sentence is entirely correct.

In the developed world, the average number of children per woman is 1-2 depending on where you are. The women with no kids and the ones with three or more tend to cancel out. Replacement level fertility (i.e. the fertility rate of a stable population with no immigration or emigration) is 2.1 children per woman, roughly. Meaning that if the entire world enjoyed a first world standard of living, the growth rate would fall below replacement level and the population would begin to shrink within a generation or three. In truth, the only reasons the population of the developed world is still growing are immigration and inertia.

Why only two kids at most? Because that's all it takes to satisfy most people's desire for children, because people no longer rely on their children to care for them when they get old, because most pregnancies these days are deliberate rather than accidental, and because if your kids aren't part of the labour force, there's no economic advantage to large families. Kids are a huge burden in the first world.

In point of fact, a long term population study carried out in 2006 suggested that the global population would likely stabilize at around nine billion by midcentury, with rising standards of living being the deciding factor. This is still a problem, in terms of supplying energy to those billions without wrecking the ecology or exhausting finite resources, but feeding nine billion shouldn't be a stretch.

Since I can't imagine the average life expectancy skyrocketing outside of first world nations, the talk of "if people live longer lives, we'd run out of food" is bunk. At best, enhanced longevity would counteract the decline in population; more likely it wouldn't even do that, since we're not talking complete immortality here.

Doesn't matter in context. You're bitching about the wrong problem for the article.

Most of the time when a web based email account gets cracked it isn't that you set your password to "password". Instead it's that you logged in from a compromised machine, and someone got ahold of your actual password, whether it's "fido" or "1xe34v3tsAad". There's a damn good reason I don't check my email anywhere other than devices I know are clean.

(Had something like what TFA describes happen to someone I know; it took her forever to realize that what had transpired was that she'd checked gmail on a coworker's computer and said coworker had been grossly lax in terms of safety. When a scan was run on the box for the first time ever it returned over a hundred bits of malware, some of it serious. The coworker, incidentally, was a private secretary to a lawyer, so this was a "holy shit" moment if ever there was one.)

Think about it for a moment and you'll see why the perpetrators use malware and/or social engineering rather than, say, a dictionary attack; there's nothing google, facebook or yahoo can do about it. They can easily limit the number of login attempts, encrypt usernames and passwords, reject really common passwords during account creation, etc, but if some third party gets the correct password from an infected PC, then when they log in it will appear legitimate.

That isn't to say you shouldn't bother with strong passwords, but if you think having a strong password protects you from everything, you're fooling yourself. The solution here also requires security software and education about admin privileges and trusted vs. untrusted sources for "free" software as it's the likeliest vector for infection (presupposing for a moment that the user needs a windows box, and frankly half the time the answer to that is "yes" for a number of reasons).

You've got it the wrong way around.

The idea of winning a war by way of killing so many of the opposition that the rest will surrender or retreat is viable some of the time, but horrific. And truth be told, it doesn't work nearly as well in real life as it does on paper; people are unpredictable creatures at the best of times, and there are plenty of cases of soldiers or entire armies fighting to the very last, horrific fate be damned, rather than surrender. In particular populations and politicians may fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy i.e. "We've already lost N soldier fighting this war, we can't give up now, else they died for nothing." You can't expect to win a war if you assume your opponents are rational actors who prioritize self preservation, because that isn't always going to be the case.

The right way to do it, and in fact the way that's had a better track record of making wars end, is to destroy the ability of the enemy to make war altogether. For a protracted conflict, you get more bang for your buck destroying logistic, communication and supply capability than you do killing enemy soldiers in a fair fight. Any modern national military is only as capable of making war as they are capable of supplying, commanding and reinforcing their armed forces. Obviously this doesn't work in a guerrilla engagement, where supply lines may be nonexistent, or against a foe who hides among civilians. Iraq is a good example of where this strategy does and doesn't work; the official conflict ended rapidly, with the army defeated in short order (and without massive casualties; many Iraqi soldiers never even saw action), but the same approach cannot be used to maintain an occupation.

For a hypothetical conflict between two nations armed with robots, this form of conflict is even more likely; infantry forces require less logistical support than drone forces. In order to win, you don't grind your enemy's robotic forces into dust in a fair fight and you don't try to terrorize their populace into surrendering; instead you destroy their communications so they can't send in the drones, you destroy their factories, airbases, munitions dumps and whatever else they need to build and maintain their robotic fleet and you prevent them from doing the same thing to you. You don't have much chance of occupying a country with a robotic army any more than you can occupy a country with tanks, aircraft or warships; occupation pretty much requires men on the ground. This does mean that a robot armed nation might win a conflict without casualties, but must be prepared to suffer losses if they plan on conquering rather than letting their foe surrender and retain their own government.