Let's not forget that Sony's Android watch has been out for quite some time now, and is slightly less clunky than the pebble too.
I don't know whether it's been rooted yet (by others than Sony...), but if it hasn't, it's just a question of time.

Me, I prefer to use a watch that does the primary function quite well - tell the time without requiring me to use my fingers, and no matter whether it's night or snow or direct sunshine or underwater or on a bike or I haven't given maintenance to it in months. It's just there, does its job, and I can depend on it doing so.

The capital S was not unintentional.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaria

In short, it's a symbol for a future utopia (or dystopia, depending on who you ask) where isolationism is taken to the extreme, and privacy laws are absolute. What you present to the outside world is what you want to present, and what you want to hide, you have the full right to hide. As long as you stay within the borders of your home and property.

As any Trekkie knows, it'll be transparent aluminum anyhow.

On the plus side, the erosion of an illusion of privacy in public will accelerate Solarisation. Our homes will eventually become our bastions, which we will rarely leave. There will be no need to, and too many privacy implications if we do.

That probably rules out getting Peter Davidson back then, eh? He's just wasted on Law and Order, and desperately needs a character role.

"At the wrong house" covers that, I think.

Didn't you know, "freedom" is whatever USA has at any given moment? As the liberties change, the definition of freedom changes with it. This is how we can say "land of the free" without choking on the words.

It's rather the opposite - you should mention it when relevant. What's verboten is to deny it, or use nazi symbols or slogans.

It seems to work somewhat too - while there still are individuals who preach hatred, there have been no organized atrocities against minorities in Germany after the war, unlike some other countries (better not named not to start a flamewar).

It doesn't. Germany has civil law, not common law.
Courts decide on a case-by-case basis whether the living law was broken, and a court has no authority to determine how it is to be interpreted, unlike in common law.

Yes, the one who broke the patent was the plant who made and provided copies of the patented gene without a license.
Since a plant cannot be sued, the responsibility is with the owner of the plant. I.e. the fellow farmers who sold the seeds without a right to transfer the license.

Anyhow, patents on life seems absurd. Life propagates - it's what it does. You cannot stop it from doing so through legislation. Large parts of the world gets this, and won't allow these kinds of patents.

The question is whether it happened on his land or not.
If your dog trespasses on his land, you are, indeed, responsible for what it does.

That depends, I believe, on what your market is. If it's Europe with extremely low tolerance for GMO, I would think the loss could be substantial. I wouldn't be surprised if there are European companies that won't or can't buy American produce at all due to the risk of GMO contamination.
Another potential problem is if you're in the seed business. Being able to put "GMO free" on your seeds might be a huge advantage which cross-contamination might kill.

Intentional homicide is just a small part of the picture.. The dead doesn't care about whether it was intentional or not; he's just as dead whether shot through planned murder, affection murder, manslaughter, suicide, by the police, or an accident.

Then there's the little problem that what each country defines as intentional homicide differs. Are executions by the government intentional homicide, for example? Or casualties of internal warfare? What about cops shooting suspected criminals? Or doctors turning off life support?

But anyhow, comparing the US shooting rates to the countries we are the most similar to, in culture and economy shows that the US is far from being one of the safer places, and our high rate of weapons allegedly for protection doesn't appear to protect us all that much.
When I moved to the US a generation ago, one of the things I had to learn was to fear guns. This was a new experience. And statistics say that as an unarmed person, I'm more likely to be shot by the police or someone legally owning a gun than I am of being shot by a criminal with an illegal gun. Chew on that one.

In that case, you SHOULD format your system drive, because you CAN.

And nothing of value will be lost.

Oh dog. The pebkac apologist. You cannot protect the user from all possible things programs might allow but were not designed to do.
You don't get a warning when you put a hundred thousand files in one directory. You don't get a warning if you enter a macro that fills in half a million cells in Excel. You don't get a warning if you start a render that may take fifty years to finish.
You do not get a warning for most of the things you can do that will bog down a system. That doesn't mean they were designed to do them for normal operations, or that it's a smart thing to do. Common sense is required, and common sense tells me that keeping hundreds of web pages with javascript, flash and whatnot loaded and parsed is going to slow down the system at best.

It's in the nature of general purpose computers to give users enough rope to hang themselves with. If users do, the solution isn't to bog down the system even more by attempting to check for every combination of things a user can do that might cause problems. At best, you try to make sure programs crash gracefully, and don't dumb and slow them down beyond reason, punishing users with common sense to protect those who lack it.

Just because you CAN do something doesn't mean you should, or that it's normal to do so. Having the freedom to do things without everything being controlled in detail is a great boon. But with it comes an equally great responsibility for your own actions.

If you're not confident in using a general purpose computer without causing problems for yourself, use a strong walled environment. You won't get as much rope.
Nor as many possibilities.