Tell that to a woman walking home alone from work in a dark street. And imagine that woman might be, say, your daughter or sister or another loved one. You don't have a right to render them defenseless.

Here is your reason, but you're not going to like it, and I'll probably be modded down, even though the following is 100% factual - anyone here can confirm it by just plugging the census data and crime statistics into Excel:

http://comfortabletruth.blogspot.com/2011/01/fun-chart-of-day.html

If you normalize for demographics, the USA is just as safe as Europe. It really is that straightforward. Don't hate me for pointing it out, I'm not biased, the facts are biased, I'm just the messenger. Like I said, anyone can confirm this with Excel and a few minutes of research. We can argue endlessly about the reasons for this incredibly strong correlation, sure, but we cannot deny the story the numbers tell us.

I know Apple has a reputation for sometimes seeming a bit on the benevolent side, but I think they're making just a bit much of the "tone" being read into the message from its "terseness", and making too much of the message itself; I know a few people who run software companies and they're generally extremely busy people who deal with large volumes of e-mail and other queries continuously for years ... this leads to the habit, out of necessity, of cutting to the chase quickly and replying to things quickly and briefly. Add to that they "identified themselves as" a random Apple customer and not anyone particularly important, and it was just a short question, what did they expect? Also they didn't ask "officially, are you stating it will never support this" --- they just, having identified themselves as an 'Apple customer', asked "Will the wifi-only version somehow support tethering thru my iPhone?", which any reasonable person would've concluded was a customer asking not "Will the wifi-only ..." but "Does the wifi-only ...".

"Snow replied that when technologies are developed separately in parallel, the developers don't necessarily use the same terms for them."

Sure, and I invented cars 200 years ago, but I didn't call it a car so someone else got the credit.

The NSA may have a "deep staff of Ph.D. mathematicians and other cryptographic experts who work on securing traffic and breaking codes" but let's face it, government departments are not exactly known for being the most motivated of the various sectors, and that's further exacerbated if you know you aren't going to get credit for your work as opposed to being kept secret ... I mean, in academia, one of the major motivations for leading scientists is that they get widespread recognition for their work. I suspect the funding to maintain that "deep staff" of experts probably serves more to keep those experts from being more productive 'elsewhere'. And of course they have to maintain that they are 'ahead' if they want to keep getting funded year after year, so I'd take it with a pinch of salt.

And yet your odds of dying falling down a flight of stairs are thousands of times higher than being killed by a suicide bomber --- why aren't you more terrified of stairs?

Was that a lousy attempt a humor or a lousy attempt at a troll? I can't quite tell, but you certainly aren't making any serious points about philosophy; every one of your points is absurdly bizarre.

There's little reason to make an intelligent in the human sense of "intelligent" machine.

Little logical reason, perhaps. But humans have evolved an interesting thing called "intellectual curiosity". There are a million scientists and engineers out there who would gladly build it for no other reason than it's an interesting little puzzle to solve.

Actually, without joking, I'm not actually convinced that it's necessarily a bad thing if robots take over the world and destroy us. I know this probably won't be a popular viewpoint (for obvious reasons), but the fact is that humans are inferior, weak, deeply flawed creatures -- so logically, why is it a bad thing if we are supplanted by something that is far superior to us? Logically, it is a good thing if X is replaced by Y when Y is much better than X - it's only not a good thing if you happen to be X. But we aren't the ultimate end-point of the universe.

Robots will just effectively be like organisms, competing with us in the same evolutionary "space", so to speak. Darwinian evolution doesn't stop just because a creature is made of something other than weak blobs of billions of organic carbon-based cells. There will be many different robots, and evolution will kick in: The robots that happen to be best at propagating (which might include some amount of destroying other things) will survive and propagate the most.

A creature far more intelligent than us will be capable of taking the evolution of "life" (in loose terms, they will be "life") to new heights that we can scarcely imagine now ... far more intelligent, far more well-connected (borg-like intelligence), far more adaptable (more easily spread through space) - something far more profound and interesting will result. A similar analogy is how simple single-celled life forms gave rise to us. We now give rise to something else. There might still be humans around someday when robots take over, but we'll part of the cesspool (where we belong), i.e. we'll be about as interesting or useful to the creatures that really run the universe, as single-celled life forms are now to us.

Maybe the entire purpose of humans, our "meaning" and reason for existence, is just to create the much more advanced life forms that will replace us, and then step aside for the next step in the universe's evolution. And maybe the answer is not to fight it, but to bring it on in a carefully controlled way. We can't prevent it from happening - even if it's just for intellectual curiosity, someone will create advanced robots that we can't control sooner or later. At least if we control that process, we have a better chance of guiding it in a positive way. We always consider the destruction of humanity as a bad thing 'by default'. But let's face it - be brutally honest, people are crap things - I for one 'do' actually welcome our replacement by something far better.

The problem is a data glove is not a volume product; even if they could make them much cheaper, this will probably never be a mass consumer product. To make and sell an actual product involves a lot more than just the potential unit manufacturing cost of the tech (office space, marketing, software, distribution, HR, legal, accounting, engineers, managers, making drivers etc.) - unless you're talking about a home-made job, you have to add all that stuff into the price. Personally I doubt you can turn any kind of profit selling a five-sensor glove at $500 - the market's just too small - this company isn't going anywhere.

The primary reason for anti-biker hate is due to the simple fact that bicycles are much smaller than cars: this causes our primitive ape-brain's status/power-hierarchy analysis system to kick in. It's not based on rationality or logic, it's simply the fact that humans are just apes, and millions of years of evolution has hammered into our brains the primary importance of relative physical size in establishing and meting out dominance hierarchies. "Me big car, you little bicycle, oog oog".

It's simple, really, and once you realise it, it explains so much of the heated "debate" around what really ought to be a non-issue.

Bike riders don't pay for the roads

Wow, you're saying cyclists are exempt from paying taxes? Awesome, I'm going to become a cyclist.

For some reason the summary links to 5DT's MRI glove, which is specialized for use in MRI applications (no metal) and obviously costs more ... cheaper 'normal' glove is here.

You don't have to fully "re-engineer" it. It's a payroll system. You just implement a new one, check how much everyone's getting paid, and put that information in. Unless it has everyone on the planet it's not going to be that expensive.