...Or worse, with bifocals?

When something like this becomes available, it'd be awesome even if it was only used for watching a movie on an airplane, but I worry it would be worthless for people who have an eyeglasses prescription.

Then so does the mugger, if the victim is taking risks by walking around alone in a dangerous neighborhood.

It also stretches credibility to argue that a computer bug is equivalent to an "agreement".

Or are you saying that the fault lies with US citizens for not taking below-minimum wage jobs payed under the table?

It kind of boils down to "Why won't blacks work?"

Racism is a canard -- I can't believe that someone who is "racist" would reject an English-speaking, native-born African American for a low/unskilled job yet be perfectly willing to hire (at some risk), an illegal immigrant who can't speak English.

What's really damning is that people may be rejecting blacks specifically because they make poor employees based on actual experience.

From a macoeconomic standpoint, there clearly is a demand for low-skilled labor, otherwise millions of illegals wouldn't be here working. While some employers may be engaging in mere economic discrimination (wanting to pay less for labor), in aggregate if there was a demand for N units of work for W units of wages, there still should be employers wanting to accept some lower level of additional employment for the same amount of wages (ie, hiring some differentially lower number of native workers for the same amount of pay, just getting a lower total amount of increased production from the reduced number of hires.

I do think that blacks are mostly rejecting work because of low pay, but the problem is they are competing with people from the third world with drastically reduced expectations ("Wow! Food and water that won't give me dysentery!"), which is one of the big reasons to reject "open migration" -- nobody, including the middle class, can compete with people willing to live lifestyles only marginally better than third world.

But there is also a sense that they won't work.

What value was created by this errant trading algorithm?

The closest planet would be Mars and it's 4-20 light minutes away, which means 8-40 minutes round trip. At that rate, you'll be playing postal chess no matter what. The moon is somewhat more practical with 1.3 light seconds so 2.6 seconds round trip but it's probably still way too high for FPS, RTS, car races (did we crash?), fighting games (did the kick hit?) or MMORPGs (did you slay that monster?), you're probably looking at turn-based games of various sorts from chess to TBS. At least it's not intersteller, that 8.4 year round trip means you wouldn't finish one chess game in your life time (unless it's the fool's mate).

Well, if you're in Norway then 800-900,000 people use it daily and 2.9 million occasionally to access their bank and various other public services through BankID. They are moving away from Java now after all the security issues, it was announced in April but hasn't happened yet so with this I expect Firefox usage here will drop like a rock.

And how exactly would encryption and signatures make sure the content is not spam? As long as email costs nothing but the electrons they'll continue to carpet bomb us with spam.

The solution must be some form of whitelisting, not blacklisting system. Mailing lists and outgoing mail addresses are trivial, the question is incoming mail from previously unknown sources. Personally I'd suggest doing a hash collision to burn CPU time, implemented like this:

1) Server auto-replies with a mail that says you aren't whitelisted, sending the requirements both as email headers (for automated calculation) and in the body as well as a link to a hash calculator.

Example using "user@fromdomain.com" to "user@todomain.com":

Hash-algorithm: SHA1
Hash-collision-strength: 25
Hash-base: user@fromdomain.com->user@todomain.com

2) You either
a) Go to a website that uses javascript to calculate the answer
b) Use a local application to calculate the answer
c) Have a email client that does this for you
c) Have a webmail provider who does this for you

Hash-solution: user@fromdomain.com->user@todomain.comA3BHG
Hash-value: 007afcd67d58c76d786c

3) Hash is verified to be a 25 bit crash with 00000000000000000000, message is delivered and sender is whitelisted.

Some nice things:
1) No protocols need to change, one server can start
2) The sender only needs a CPU to do the work
3) Difficulty is adjustable based on server/account settings.
4) It could eventually become entirely standard and automated.
5) The sender must exist and receive the response
6) You can do it even for non-existing email addresses
7) One base per sender/receiver pair, no easy way to cheat
8) The whitelisting is only valid for that sender, not all the spammer's friends

The obvious downsides:
1) Some people won't figure this out or won't do it, you might have to use a regular email if you absolutely can't afford to not miss any mail. However, the market for "semi-public" email addresses to use in forums and mailing lists should be huge to get it off the ground and eventually it should become something your email client does in the background.
2) Lots of unnecessary burned CPU time (but less than SPAM filters today? maybe not)

Of course I can see this creating a whole new set of problems as trolls impersonate official responses. Wikipedia would have to manage official accounts and on which pages they have permission to act in that capacity and given the ever changing nature of Wikipedia that might not be so easy. Okay so Sony can make official responses on the Sony page, what when someone makes a page called Sony BMG copy protection rootkit scandal, does Sony get to make an official response there? What if they're unfavorably mentioned in a list of items, does everyone involved get to make their official responses on that page? It's one of those ideas that sound nice in theory but I think would get messy and unmaintainable in practice.

Just because you have two different set of incentives that lead to different inefficiencies don't make them equal. It's hardly news that capitalism rewards cutting corners, anything that makes 99 managers look good and one fail utterly and catastrophically will happen because taking the slightly slower and safe road is punished as is hurts the department's bottom line while averted catastrophic risk is "invisible". The same translates down to employees, getting results here and now is rewarded over doing it the "right way" Meanwhile in the public sector you're not rewarded for cutting any corners but you are punished for lack of proper process, so the safest bet is for everyone in a position of authority to bury it in bureaucracy and for employees to follow the process without taking any shortcuts. They're more like extremes on each side.

Just to take one example, reorganizations in the private and public sector. The private sector was "Here's your new department, here's your new boss and here's your new goals". If you don't like it, tough. Granted my actual work duties didn't change much, but still it came rolling out like a steamroller and I don't recall us being involved at all. In the public sector? The process has taken months with employee representatives, union representatives, all-hands meetings, lots of formalism and honestly at this point I'd just like someone to decide something so I could get back to doing real work, which I suspect will hardly be affected by this at all. Because it's more important that nobody can complain about the process later than getting the actual reorganization done and maybe taking some flak for a quick and dirty solution.

Now I picked an example where my employer would probably agree with that description and say they do want it that way, but I have others which I won't badmouth in public where it seem the production of the documents proving the process was followed are more important than the actual qualitative execution of that process or making the promised deliverables or keeping the set deadlines. In contrast the private sector was always flying by the seat of one's pants, oh there were plenty corporate rules but they rarely let them get in the way of business. If you can deliver on quality, schedule and budget ask for permission now or forgiveness later. At the end of the day they tend to just look at the bottom line, unless shit hits the fan. In which case duck and try to get another middle manager job at another company.

By your own previous logic, money can never be "wasted", just redistributed.

Every dollar that the government collects in taxes or creates out of thin air is redistributed back into the private sector.

Psychology. A lot of people will stay on the base model and pat themselves on the back for $100 well saved. The people who want more space will by sold up to the 64/128 GB model and pat themselves on the back for getting so many more GB/$. I think the subset of people who are:

a) certain 16GB won't be enough
b) certain 32GB will be enough
c) willing to pay $100 extra for the privilege

is in an extreme minority. People have no idea what NAND prices are, they just need to feel good about their own choice and the easiest way is to give them a bad choice to make it look good against. So raise your hand everyone with a 32GB model ;)