all of my neighbors cars beeping every time they come home

There's less-intrusive noises, such as the white-noise "shhht! shhht!" that some garbage trucks make when reversing, instead of the obnoxious beep that carries for miles at 4am. Something like that would be OK.

the pac-man "wakka-wakka-wakka" sound.

I already have an universal computing device in my pocket.

Which is great, until it beeps or vibrates. Who could it be? Someone important? That email you're waiting for? Or just another spam message? Well, better take out the phone and see what's up. Repeat for 50 times a day. If this is you, then a smart watch is a handy thing. If this is not you, then you are not their target market, and good day to you.

Why would I want a device just for a single function?

With my pebble watch, it tells the time 24/7, shows messages, allows me to decline/accept calls, allows me to send "I'm busy" / "call me in 5", "I'll call you back", back to callers or messengers, lets me skip/pause/play tracks on my phone that's connected to a bluetooth speaker, etc etc. It also keeps a track of my daily exercise, sleep patterns and hear rate, and will buzz me if I'm being too slack, and that's when I go out and enjoy some nature.

Anyway, that's why a lot of people have these crazy things strapped to their wrists.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Companies: "Hey, let's litter public spaces with scooters for profit! Our users will surely Do The Right Thing and use and park them politely, haha. And we don't have to pay for storage, and we can hire randoms to charge them overnight for a pittance!!"

Users: "I don't own this scooter and there's no real repercussions for me dumping this thing anywhere! INTO THE FOUNTAIN IT GOES!! haha"

It's not quite a case of, "everyone will fuck over public spaces if they get a chance", but there's a high enough percentage of people that will do so, either to make a profit, or be lazy, or just to be dicks for lulz. And that percentage ruins it for everyone.

Let's see, there's basically only a few choices:

- Spend a lot of money and have someone directly alter the UI for you so that you can be productive with the software.

- Give a bit of money to a small group to change things in the hope that someday things might be different and you might be productive using this software, depending on whether the small group makes the changes you need/desire.

- Spend money on a product that you know works fine and you can be productive on right now as a result.

- Spend many hours learning a UI that doesn't follow industry norms, hours that could be better spent in productive work.

Which one would you pick to keep food on the table right now?

and nothing will be interoperable. ....unless you have the source code.

Frankly, I dont see this as a loss.

The problem with having a homogeneous computing environment is that CPU/etc exploits can have huge, far-reaching consequences. Having a variety of different architectures helps prevent this.

Oh, it's just a glitch? What an unusual word to describe the problem. I would expect a glitch to be a transient issue that goes away by itself.

Seeing as it won't go away by itself, it's actually a fault - in either the design or the installation of the wiring harness or it's connectors.

Pollution is a real problem. 12,000 satellites is a lot, more than twice the number in orbit today.

It's less than you think. Imagine 12,000 people running around the entire surface of the Earth. How often will they run into each other?

I think what he is trying to say is that anonymity means you can be careless with your message and generally not give a crap about accuracy or who you piss off. As it can't be traced back to you, you have no skin in the game.

Being held accountable in your opinions means that you are much more careful in phrasing your opinion. You have to ensure that your point of view is interpreted correctly, otherwise there are consequences. This - I believe - gives rise to more reasoned debate and a better signal to noise ratio.

And I totally understand the usual reasons given forth for anonymity. For example, in some places your life is in danger if your sexual orientation doesn't match certain values of "oppressive-regime-correct". But the bulk of communication doesn't involve those issues. Having your posts traceable back to you physically (as opposed to fire-and-forget) is a good moderator for your actions, and as you care about the responses it also forces you to try and figure out how to best interact with other people effectively. And I think that's what's missing in the bulk of online communication - there is little effort taken in getting your point across and actual communication of ideas and concepts suffers as a result.

Let me break it down to you: this disk isn't even going to be readable in 50 years.

Apollo retroreflectors are still in operation (well, good enough to bounce a laser off them anyway) and they're 50 years old and exposed to the vacuum on the lunar surface.

If the disks aren't directly exposed then micrometeorite erosion could take a few tens of thousands of years to get to them.

It took quite a lot of convincing for them to move on from the "perfection" that is the 3.5" screen. I expect a similar delay in moving towards anything foldable.

If they have the real-time metering you could simply shut off apartments that are over the allocated amount.

eg. all the charge (+ discharge) bays are connected to the building grid. There's an issue with outside power, and building management checks the charge on all the vehicles and decides to allocate 10% of the available EV power sources that are above 80% to the building supply.

They then notify the apartment owners that each apartment has X amount of kWh available for the duration of the outage and to limit their consumption accordingly. If the smart meter shows that they're over that, power is cut until the outage is over or building management decide to draw another 10%.

This is a communal system, but you could also make it an individual system which only allows you to draw what you have available in your EV's battery with, say, 2% skimmed off every connected battery for critical building functions.

how long it would take for 115,000 clients with distributed password cracking software to crack the exchange keys?

Certainly sounds like they've got a lot of motivation to give it a go, and a reasonable proportion of them would have access to decent hardware.

Not if SpaceX cuts a deal allowing the armed forces to have global internet access on the cheap, and word on the street is that the government is very interested in that.