He already veered away from the books more than I would like. I understand that he must, because the books are very hard to adapt to film. I just hope he keeps that under control and sticks with Frank Herbert's vision, rather than injecting too much of his own.

Does the "fingerprinting" mentioned in the summary mean that the game stops working if I upgrade some hardware components? Or if I get a new PC and install it on that?

Well, yes, they ARE making it up as they go along. The universe didn't come with a handbook. Scientists have to try an infer the rules by observing the behaviors. At any given point, the sum total of all scientific theories still just amounts to "the best we've come up with so far."

There is no shame in not knowing why our models don't match our observations. Solving those mysteries is an ongoing effort, and it requires brilliance as well as data (and is in fact impossible to do if key data haven't been discovered yet). So, the "best we can do so far" models need placeholders for the things that don't line up.

The plan has always been to get rid of "Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" once we figure out what's really going on.

You seriously don't see the value in trying to understand how the universe works?

A lot of fans of the first matrix movie really didn't like any of the sequels.

These fans know that the sequels exist. But because of their distaste for them, they pretend that the sequels don't exist. They publicly insist that there was only ever one matrix movie, and it has no sequels.

That's "the joke." Especially when they say it in a very matter-of-fact way.

"The Matrix" came out a long time ago. I would say a sequel is long overdue.

We can't all be late adopters. It's logically impossible. Somebody has to be the early adopter in order to write the bad reviews and get the product fixed so us late adopters can then start using it.

So, I encourage people to be early adopters. It works out better for me that way.

But just as ffkom said, in this case, there was no reason to adopt at all. The idea was fundamentally flawed, and that should have been obvious.

It should have been obvious to everyone from the beginning that smart devices were a bad investment.

1. They give big corporations another opportunity to spy on you (obviously bad)
2. They insert big corporations in between you and your hardware, so the corporations can shut down if they find reason to (obviously bad)
3. They create new opportunities for updates to introduce breaking bugs (obviously bad)
4. They create new opportunities for hackers to gain control of your hardware (obviously bad)
5. Last but not least, they don't add any real value to what the hardware already does (net neutral, though if you pay more for this non-value-add its obviously bad).

Why would any rational person choose this?

But those post 9/11 provisions succeeded in making Michael Chertoff extremely rich, as well as the members of his "Chertoff Group" (he-and-his made money on every nude body scanner sold).

So, their true purpose was accomplished.

The only problem here is the expectation that a for-profit business will sacrifice profit opportunities in order to serve the greater good.

Individual people might do that sort of thing. But the sort of person who would do that sort of thing usually doesn't wind up as a key decision maker for a successful for-profit business. At least, not for very long.

According to this data, Brazil is the world leader in gun deaths, not the USA. USA is second place.

According to this data, the United states ranks 55th in deaths by homicide, regardless of the means used.

So that suggests that even though guns are commonly used as the means, overall USA has quite a low homicide rate compared to 54 other countries.

I will also point out that I found these stats with a near-effortless search on DuckDuckGo. You could have done the same before making your incorrect statement.

Yeah it's true. Though that ambiguity and difficulty of measurement sure doesn't stop people from creating the false impression that America is the world leader in mass shootings, and that it is a dangerous place to live because of this.

Inasmuch as we can gather meaningful data at all, America is one of the safest countries and mass shootings are quite a rare thing per capita.

Fun fact: USA has fewer deaths from mass shootings that many other countries.

Some data here and here.

If you fear dying in a mass shooting (apart from this being such a low cause of death that it vanishes from most tables), then America should be near the top of your short list of desirable places to live.

IQ is purported to measure intelligence potential, not intelligence achievement.

Someone with a high IQ could still be a complete idiot if denied sufficient education. And someone with an average IQ can still learn quite a lot if they apply themselves.

In theory one's IQ is mostly genetic and doesn't change as one ages, but way back when I was in college, in an elective psych class we read about evidence challenging this, involving attention-starved children having tested with low IQs only to have much higher IQs when tested again after having spent some time living in a better environment with more attention from adults and peers.

...am looking forward to the Butlerian Jihad.