The most amazing thing about this vaccine is that it's a tachyon based vaccine.
First the testing is Finnish, and now it begins.

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Indeed. I'm a big netbook fan, and good netbooks have all but disappeared. I dread the day my 2 current netbooks die because I fear I'll have nothing to replace them with.

The arrival of tablets and their touchscreen UI also have another nasty side effect: it's completely impossible to find a laptop with a matte (frosted, non-touchscreen) screen. All the screens out there are shiny and extremely nasty to do actual work with, because of reflections.

All this would be good and well if tablets could replace laptops (as in: buy a tablet, a keyboard and a mouse, and you have a laptop). Trouble is, you can't: their very touch event-driven UI makes using a mouse with them completely stupid - try hovering over something with a bluetooth mouse connected to a tablet: nothing happens. Keyboard locales too are handled catastrophically, since most of the work is done on on-screen soft keyboards.

So, tablets are great if used strictly as tablet. Trouble is, tablets aren't any good to do actual work, save for very specialized applications. And the tools to do real work have been killed by tablets.

That sucks...

Which begs the question: who are you stealing wifi from?

No it doesn't

A "car vending machine" is an automated garages, only instead of giving you your own car back when you insert your credit card in the slot, it gives you a rental car.

Not really an earth-shattering concept...

A great example of this that I've seen is: Shine a spotlight at the moon (from Earth) and sweep it across the surface. You can move the spot faster than the speed of light, thus the wave moves faster than c, but no individual photon moves faster than c, and no information is conveyed faster than c.

NASA is extremely good at burning through gigabucks doing design studies, 99.9% of which are never built. This is just another one of those designs. I'll be impressed when I see it strapped to a rocket and sent up.

Those roaming charges are going to be....
astronomical.

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No, they have the same size pools.
They just have really small bladders.

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Oh, and my reader's wifi, is never on.

I don't mean to sound like I have a tinfoil hat on, but all you're sure of is that you have instructed the software to turn the wifi off. That doesn't mean the software doesn't lie to you and keeps trying to connect without telling you.

Think I'm paranoid? Well, maybe I am, maybe I'm not.

That's called a comic book.

Don't buy e-book readers that force you to be connected to the internet, or only read proprietary file formats, or buy from online store.

My old Sony PRS-650 doesn't have hardware to go on the internet, and it reads whatever file I feed it, so I'm sure it doesn't snitch on me.

What you really mean is that you don't wish for this to happen, not that it can't happen for technological (or political) reasons.

No, what I mean is, technology that's simple or natural enough, or hidden enough, will be used regardless of the law because the law is unenforceable.

It's already forbidden to share copyrighted files but people do it all the time because enforcing the ban is vastly more expensive and time-consuming for copyright holders than getting around it for file sharers. If the **AAs suddenly had the powers to become truly nasty, as you describe, people would encrypt their files. If encryption became illegal, people who use steganography.

Worst case, ultimately, if the penalty for trying anything to share files on the internet was so stiff that people would truly think twice before attempting it, they'd revert to the sneaker-net. It worked perfectly well before the internet you know...

In the case of face recognition, how do you know if someone is recording you and processing the image? How do you know if a company does it secretly? If the law prohibits it, who's to say this or that guy does it anyway?

What about people are having problems with demencia? With a lot of people not wanting their names on the list, the demincia person will have trouble identify their friends, fellow workers, asociates or relatives and etc.

People with demencia live in nursing homes with carers that tell them who's visiting them. They don't walk around in the street with Google glasses on thinking "who the hell's this guy? Oh yeah it's Kevin. Thanks Google!"

It can't be opt-in. How could it be? Would you opt-in for something that lets you be tracked and recognized everywhere by anybody (and more importantly by evil corporations)? Would you opt-in to receive telemarketer calls at home? Would you opt-in to get spam emails?

Of course not: even if you only have doubts about something, your doubts make you *not* opt-in.

That's why every service that people don't want or don't like are opt-out only: for one thing, the bastards who foist it on us hope people will be too lazy to jump through the hoops to opt-out, and as an added bonus, the opt-out database itself can be mined and monetized.

In any case, even if you opt out, how will you know your mug won't be tracked anyway? Do you believe in corporate morals? Who's the overseeing body? The government? Do you believe in government morals?

Okay, then wear a niqab: technically it's not allowed in many countries (for the very reason that the police can't see your face), but it falls in the "religion" category, so niqab wearers often get away with it on the ground that society as a whole is supposed to show the greatest amount of tolerance for religious stuff for some reason.

With a garment like this, even men can wear one and become virtually undetectable.