Shit, shit! Who the fuck is shooting us?

Oh well, fire missiles!

I first misread the last category of banned clothing as "huge genitalia", which made me wonder what had been seen in last year's booths.

This can't be the first time. Florida has clearly been suffering from the effects of "dummy bombs" for at least a couple of decades.

On the other hand, the continued use of durable petroleum-based plastics means that every Lego brick can also maintain its potency as an indoor land mine for decades!

Cryptography, maybe. Publishers of recordings will probably end up using digital signatures to discourage alteration.

It could be a boon for the mainstream press. For better or worse, clout and public trust could win them back the influence they've been losing to social media and the blogosphere.

That won't help. The producer of the deep fake can just say it was recorded at some time in the past, before that careful logging began. Even for something allegedly more recent, a little vagueness about the exact time and date could make it difficult to disprove.

Video and audio recordings are quickly eroding as standards of proof, much in the same sense that still photos have. Soon, we won't be able to trust their authenticity much at all. Strange times indeed.

This detail is something that seems to be missed by a lot of people. It's obvious that a war against your own government isn't likely to be winnable- but that isn't the point.

Armed conflict is loud, ugly, and newsworthy. We live in a connected age; word of an incident can travel around the world almost instantly. The government has better weapons, but gunning down citizens in the street is perhaps the quickest way to diminish any perception of legitimacy that a government has.

By contrast, someone governing an unarmed populace can simply make dissidents disappear without incident. That is the kind of tyranny that we are protected from by the Second Amendment.

Admittedly, this is still an improvement over the current state of affairs, in which identity information of University students/faculty/staff is somewhat regularly distributed to scammers and spammers free of charge.

C-Rap... very nice.

I also prefer to spell "Country Music" without the "o". :)

That's assuming you'll even be able to find non-brand replacement parts. Figure that the wear and tear on an autonomous vehicle should be even more predictable than current service intervals, and these vehicles can drive themselves in for service. Manufacturers and their dealer networks stand to win back a much greater share of vehicle service and repairs than they get now. With that shift, independent mechanics may become a thing of the past.

...And that's the "benign" version. Before we get to that point, my guess is that automakers will increasingly push leases and similar arrangements over actual ownership, to the point that it becomes a matter of managing "their" fleet, not servicing "your" car. Magnuson-Moss compliance won't be an issue; you won't have a say in who does the work because you don't own the vehicle. There could also be upsides to this model, e.g. after a wreck the company might just send you another (refurbished, but otherwise equivalent) car instead of making you wait on repairs.

I agree wholeheartedly with your sentiment, but I also acknowledge that you and I are both mortal. The people who insist on driving "manually" will die off eventually. We can only hope to enjoy it that long, instead of being forced off the roads early by a human driver ban.

Insurance companies may be our friend in that regard, fighting such legislation while they cling to life.

It's hard to say without knowing what the specific limits are.

Would an advertisement for an anti-malware product run afoul of this new policy, given that the ad is straightforward and not waving an alarmist "Your PC is infected" message at the user? technically that's not an ad for support, per se, but an actual software product.

I can also understand the existence of "legitimate" third party tech support services, but I'm not sure how many use cases there are for such a service to be advertising itself via a search engine. That really seems like it'd be mostly scam/trojan territory.

If Microsoft isn't overzealous about the rule, it's possible that any disruption of legitimate business would be minimal. However, I'd not be surprised if some fake AV peddler tried to take MS to court over it.

Amusingly, the Windows 7 installation on my dual-boot Asus system has been trying and failing to install this update for a few weeks now, presumably because GRUB is in the way. :)

Two people conversing in person tend to be more receptive to the ambient noise level, and will moderate their volume accordingly. For normal conversation, that means they're generally not going to be too obnoxious to those around them.

Cell phone conversations throw that off. The lack of visual feedback from the listener, and distraction of the speaker, combined with people's general tendency to speak into cell phones at an almost-yelling volume, means that cell phone conversations are often overly loud and irritating in public spaces.

No, if only for the simple fact that the existing "legal limits" clearly aren't stopping them, if that is the case. More legal limits won't help matters.

Indeed, though, the thought itself is scary- whether the goons are trying to obtain greater powers of surveillance, or just trying to legitimize what they are already doing...