I don't think there's any question that Google or Microsoft could be required to provide email threads and other data. I think what was novel about the Alexa recordings was the realization that the data exists and that a conversation could be recorded without necessarily being aware that it was.

There is no such expectation with email - when you send an email there is no question that the recipient is going to have a record of it; and most people are clueful enough to realize that their email provider and the recipient email provider also have a copy.

The more interesting question is probably whether Waymo can get Google to provide email records and such without court involvement. Though if you're going to do that sort of thing like steal secrets from Google, you'd have to be pretty daft to host your email with Google.

I don't see why, if he drove the car. On the other hand, if he sat there while the computer drove, that's a different story.

And 99 Yen in Japan ($0.87 USD)? And 99 Pesos in Mexico ($4.62 USD)? And 99 Rubles in Russia? ($1.65 USD)

I don't think the name really has anything to do with it. The big worry about this technology is liability, and there is the idea out there that manufacturers are trying to be care ful about advertising what the car can and cannot do.

Tesla I'm sure makes it abundantly clear that the car needs driver attendance. But if you sit there long enough and the car continually makes good decisions, you are gradually going to become complacent and maybe start to think that it really can do more than you thought. This is when you get into trouble because the technology has made enough progress to be convincing but isn't quite all the way there.

The article claims that in 2017, about 600k deaths are project in the US due to cancer.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., the population of the world around 3000 BC (assuming this is roughly the Mesopotamian era) was about 14 million.

600k in a year back then would be roughly 4% of the population. This seems very unlikely. If you accept the premise that we are surrounded by carcinogens moreso today than back then, you would expect the cancer death rate to be lower back then. I would also suspect that other forms of death would be more prevalent than cancer.

Definitely... I've been to Florida in August (Orlando - not even as far south as Miami and the southern tip) and it is uncomfortable and disgusting. Will not go back in August.

Palm Springs, CA can be oppressively hot in the summer too, but that's not where tech is - Silicon Valley is pretty habitable all year round.

I come from up north and we get winter, which I tolerate OK, but my coworkers in the valley think I'm crazy.

Although unpopular among many here, in Canada we are moving towards a system of community mailboxes, which is essentially what you describe. Rather than a postal worker delivering mail to each house, there are banks of mailboxes where people get their mail (all their mail). You are issued a key for your mailbox so you can go get it whenever you want, and it is secure. Packages that fit inside the mailbox just go in the regular spot. There are also compartments for packages that are larger to accommodate larger packages. In this case, you receive a key in your mailbox and the box that your package is in. You retrieve your package, and then drop the key off into the mail slot again for reuse.

Works pretty well and for most packages, solves the problem.

In some respects yes, in others, not so much. Think about a corporate setting where within the context of an office people might leave their machines accessible on a regular basis. They go off to lunch, leave their laptop at their desk. Anybody can now go and grab their laptop, do a hard reboot and extract the passwords. Conveniently, a lot of people probably have filevault passwords that are the same as their network passwords. Now you have another user's network passwords and can do a whole bunch of things on their behalf.

How on earth is it okay, in 2016, to store plaintext passwords for a file encryption tool?

The other potential exploit for this is to bake it into commercially available Thunderbolt 2 devices. Bribe a janitor to leave stick 100 crafted VGA dongles in meeting rooms of the company you want to infiltrate and have the device send passwords either over the network or via some wireless protocol.

This was misfiled - it should be in funfacts.slashdot.org.

Another alternative is Nexus, which gets you pre-check as well. It costs $50 for a five year term. Isn't an intensive process either - you fill out some stuff online and then go in for a orientation session, and a few weeks later you get your card. Also helps at customs and immigration going into and out of Canada/US.

There's just too much volume to track all the content everywhere. That's why they install keyloggers that look for users hitting the Cancel button on posts over a certain length. If people are having second thoughts about something then you know it's the juicy stuff.

It happens all the time because if you've modded a thread the only way to post without reversing the mod is to do so as AC.

They did this with John Wayne too. He's not dead. He's frozen. He's gonna be pissed when they thaw him out.

Yeh... I came here wondering if that would be a clever way to achieve Physician assisted suicide.

I'm imagining a high tech looking front room and lab with a hidden door that leads to a crematorium. You could do it for the bargain rate of $20k per pop (less than the $37k listed in the article) and it would, for all intents and purposes, be the same.