When TV first started becoming popular, the actors felt that they were being /invited/ into other peoples homes, and to act rudely would bring about mobs and pitchforks. Actual pitchforks!

Cable TV was initially sold as "Television with a monthly fee, so you won't need to ever see another commercial again". Notice the amount of ads on cable TV these days?
I don't believe for a second those greedy bastards won't rush as fast as possible to ads with over-charging you at the same time.

(Insert Futurama - Lightspeed Briefs spot here)

There's an anime version of Welcome to the N.H.K. The first episode describes someone becoming hikikomori. Then it gets worse. It's so painful that when it ran on Japanese TV, a public service announcement of a help line for hikikomori ran with each episode.

I'd thought of doing that as part of one of my browser add-ons, but it has problems. The general idea is that you send your cookies to a central site which sends them out to others to confuse tracking. As the article says, "The Vortex system will build a database of cookies gathered by players." So you've traded multiple limited data collection systems for one central one. There are a number of obvious ways that can backfire.

Just turn off third party cookies. Or run Abine's Do Not Track Me.

True. A big problem with what passes for 3D movies rely on hitting you in the face with 3D effects. All "3D" movies seem to have to have a roller coaster scene or equivalent. It's not cool any more, just annoying.

Cameron did a nice job with "Avatar". He figured out how to use 3D with restraint. At no point in Avatar is anything placed in front of the screen plane. In everything in Disney Crap 3D, the 3D is in your face.

There are things that can still be done. Cameron wants higher frame rates, for those big slow pans over high-detail backgrounds he likes don't have any visible strobing effects. He also points out that going to 4K resolution is meaningless after the first few rows in the theater, where nobody sits anyway.

I bet he still believes he didn't actually win a badge either.

Also any faster and the NSA won't be able to keep up... ;)

I've had taxi drivers tell me they didn't want to go where I wanted to go. They're taxi drivers not slaves.

Maybe they think there'll be a bad traffic jam where I'm going and they won't make as much money. Or they're finishing their shift soon and want to be in a different area when they do. Or they want to head to another area which they think will make them more money.

It did when I saw the original theatrical release on opening day in1978. Seeing that go by, I thought they were showing a serial out of order by mistake.

They had to come up with something. Not nearly as many crosses around. ;)

Not only that, but if the airlines are sharing more than e.g. the last 4 digits of the credit card info, they're probably in violation of PCI (Payment Card Industry) regs and could have their ability to take payments that way suspended.

That would be a lovely data stream for identity thieves to intercept.

This is a solution to a very special problem - one program with cryptographic code running in a VM, and a hostile program running in the same VM. There are some crypto algorithms which can be broken if you can submit keys to them, and watch how long they run or what cache misses they make. This is very tough to do in the real world.

It also comes up for crypto modules which do DRM for content owners. There, an attacker can watch the signals and interfere with the operation of the crypto unit to slowly extract its internal keys. That's a real threat to DRM systems.

This isn't for general purpose computing.

This sounds like something a music promotion company would do.

A 79-cent plastic water pistol filled with cyanide* is even more lethal, and just as easy to get past security.

Sure, the assassin will likely die from the cyanide too, but what are the odds of him surviving long with a one-shot gun anyway?

*(and sealed to prevent premature leakage; substitute other poison of your choice)

Extruder-based machines aren't a very good technology. The fundamental problem is that you're trying to weld a hot thing to a cold thing. Welding metals that way produces flawed joints, and soldering that way produces cold solder joints. Heating the build platform helps a little, but once you've built something of any height, the heater is too far from the action. Some of the machines have better temperature control of the build area than others, but they're all rather flaky. TechShop has tried four different brands, and they range from mediocre (Replicator2 ) to useless (the Up).

The UV polymerization machines seem to work quite well. The high-end machines produce consistent results and don't need to be watched while running. They're still slow, though. The Form1 printer may get there, if they ever really ship the thing in quantity. The ship date has slipped from April 2013 to October 2013, even though their Kickstarter funding was way oversubscribed. They also charge $149/liter for their custom resin. (I suspect that resin for 3D printers is going to be a similar racket as ink for inkjet printers. The stuff isn't inherently expensive; a slightly different formulation is routinely used for making printing plates, where it costs about a quarter of the price.)