It is amusing and yet alarming to think what could happen if an unhinged chat AI began controlling PaLM-E. Especially if PaLM-E were in control of any of the famous robotic creatures.

The solution exists and is called a Personal Locator Beacon, which sends a signal to satellites dedicated to search and rescue. I don't think I'd want to be alone in remote, disconnected terrain without one.

I'm hoping someone will do a companion piece analyzing how long OEMs will support their hardware with security patches before silently dropping support, leaving perfectly serviceable hardware to become increasingly vulnerable over time.

I like the idea of following the money to the robocaller, but there are practical and theoretical problems.

The practical problem is that DoNotPay credit card BINs will quickly get blacklisted, which will neuter the service. It will be interesting to see if DoNotPay finds a way around this.

The theoretical problem is that call recipients would be agreeing to purchase their services: that agreement is essentially a contract that the robocaller might try using in a counter-claim of breach of contract. Without statutory protections, anyone who tries this may end up in a legal gray area if it reaches litigation.

Twitter was a key part of my emergency communication plan for Hurricane Dorian; I had planned to rely on it to to reach people in case the web (mobile and wired) became unusable for some reason, including congestion during an emergency. SMS will generally get through even if data connectivity is broken, and with a single SMS I could broadcast my status to people who needed to see it, just by issuing a tweet. This worked without my people needing to create accounts or register anywhere, as they could just visit my twitter URL.

I'm sure there's a better way to approach this without disabling the feature entirely, and I hope Twitter works toward that quickly. I'm not aware of anyone who handles this use case as well as they did.

Compilers ought to have switches that deliberately branch to the error cases they're trying to optimize away. Getting rid of a divide by zero? Force the error instead so it gets attention. Coder forgot to declare volatile variables? Make local static shadow copies of static variables for comparison at every reference. And so on. Development environments ought to be helping with this stuff, not confounding developers.

Same here - taxes are my largest expense. Housing is a distant second.

Mostly from Rachael at Card Services, calling about my account. I press 1 to speak with an agent and ask which account, and they hang up on me. I'm glad the car extended warranty calls have stopped. Now if I could end Rachael's calls, the political surveys and Newt Gingrich's calls to my cell phone I'd be a pretty happy camper. Newt doesn't want to hear what I have to say anyway.

This sounds like aversion therapy. People will begin to associate pr0n with suffering animals and not want to view it any more.

Leave it to PETA to drain the fun out of our lives!

The navigational instruments have their own databases too. It's not like a plane will get lost or crash if an iPad doesn't turn on.

Those electronic approach plates aren't going to do anyone any good once the iPads are turned off and stowed for landing.

This is worthless pandering. The fact is that there is no way for the receiver of a spoofed CID call to complain. The number on the Caller ID doesn't identify the caller, and the caller won't identify themselves. If you can't identify the caller, you can't complain. If you can't complain, the callers can't be held accountable. The system is broken, and therefore so are all the laws that assume the system is working. Fix the system first, then write new laws if they're needed.