There aren't any bad programming ideas that work.

It might have worked if a) they had named it anything but Google+, b) had made it actually a cool place to hang out, and c) they hadn't tried to ram it down people's throats!!!! The internet resists efforts to control it. Even Google isn't too big for that.

Here's a 100% effective ransomeware solution. When you fork out hundreds or thousands of dollars for your computer, fork out a $100 more and get an identical hard drive to what it has inside and a one-button disk cloner off of Ali Express or eBay for a few dollars. Weekly disk cloning kills ranssomeware dead. In the worst case scenario, you clone the drive with the malware on it but before it activates. In that scenario, you can still restore from backup and even if the OS is hopelessly compromised with malware beyond anyone's skill to remove, you still can access all your files.

Of course, the best solution is still not to run stupid software.

Thing is, you've carefully crafted your post so that it's almost impossible for anyone to try and tell you you're wrong. You make sweeping claims and hardly anything specific. So yes, you're going to get emotional "fanboy" type responses, because there's really nothing for a reasoned person to refute. I will take a stab at a couple things:

1) "The UI is terrible" - every time I get on an iPhone I feel hamstrung by the lack of a "back" button. Going back is almost as important as going forward, and every little iPhone app handles that differently because there is no consistent interface for it. Also, a back button makes linking between apps much easier, since one app can invoke another to provide a certain service and then the back button returns you to the first. The Android UI promotes cooperation and best practices between apps. Apple's UI can be described as pretty, but, well, absent.

2) App badging - I understand this to be the little number an app presents on its icon to show you how many messages, for example, are waiting. This is identical for every app that uses it, since all it is is a little number.

3) Updates: If anything, apps are updated far too frequently for my liking. I don't enable auto updates, which while it gives me much greater control does require me to vet every update and it is a considerable number.

The subject of this story is identical to the story itself. Both exist for the sole purpose of creating a discussion about what is otherwise nothing. To wit, the robot is no more responsible for the "harm" it inflicts than the tip of a knife is, or a bullet is. The discussion is useless, originating and ending in itself.

This just highlights why it's important to a) turn off auto update, and b) screen all updates as you apply them. It's more work up front, but will save you pain in the long run. Microsoft goes out of its way to make getting info on individual updates difficult. You can't (of course) get the info directly from Windows Update, you have to click on a link from there, and then sometimes follow more links before you can find out. And, in some cases, the real purpose is quite obfuscated in generic language and you then have to more general searches. Update days can take an hour or more of research. But it's worth it. My computer is clean from nagware.

To everyone who has auto update turned on, I offer the old scorpion and the frog adage. We all know who Microsoft is. Take the scorpion on your back and you will get stung. It's Microsoft's nature. And in this day and age where this kind of negative publicity multiplies exponentially, where desktop computing is being increasingly relegated to the back burner, and where there are other viable desktop alternatives, Microsoft really is killing itself too by stinging the frog carrying it. But, as they have aptly... and repeatedly... demonstrated, they really can't help themselves.

I would entirely justified completely ignoring the 124000 morons that voted for Boaty McBoatface. Why have the vote? They thought people would take it seriously and wanted genuine engagement. They, unfortunately, didn't count on the moronic factor.

Goes to show people will vote for anything. It's why the US is facing a Trump presidency.

Actually, maybe that would be a good thing. In four years those that remain in the smoking crater of the US will be an example to the rest of the world of what happens when you abuse your vote.

If you want to make the whole system irrelevant you don't need to dig or circumvent it. You trigger it. Over and over and over again, at the most remote places you can find. Get a tennis ball thrower and a hopper that can hold a gazillion balls, park it on Pakistan's side they aim it right at a beam. Have it set to shoot a ball every random interval between 1 and 40 hours. With a dozen of those bad boys, the whole system would be useless.

This is a design failure, not an implementation failure. Buy a book, get a book. Nothing wrong with that paradigm. More and more vendors want to grind content down to finer and finer granules, as it ends up increasing their profit.

Because emissions requirements are generally based on percentage of (bad thing being tested for) per litre of exhaust. "Fixing" the problem reduces the fuel economy, so even though the amount of bad emissions per litre of exhaust is lower, the total amount of fuel being burned is so much higher that the amount of bad emissions per amount-of-fuel-burned per kilometer is much higher since there is so much more exhaust total.

Really, though, the question wasn't "do you verify" or in "what (if any) circumstances should you verify" large files, it is "When verifying, I usually ....".

Correct. The telephone records were part of the case records - it is those case records which have been preserved. What changed was information that the crime could have been committed earlier, which if true, would have rendered the telephone call irrelevant as an alibi. When the information that the crime was committed earlier was discredited, the phone records in the case file became relevant to him again.

This is completely not a case of phone records being retained indefinitely.

AI-written "scientific" papers have been published too, but that doesn't mean that they are any good. Every year there is some story about how some new AI has autonomously done some amazing feat of natural-language something, and the stories laud that is has, or is just about to pass the Turing test, and yet under closer scrutiny it is inevitably something little advanced from ELIZA (linked for the younger crowd). Just look at Microsoft's latest bungle.

This will turn out to be either A) more an indictment of the award process than a validation of the "novel", or B) an "AI" that turns out to be rather specifically crafted to contain all the story elements with a little bit of a random mixing function.

An "AI" that writes one novel doesn't impress me. I could make an "AI" that writes one novel. I'll be impressed when one AI churns out three completely different ones with nothing more than a natural language sentence giving the broad story themes for each. I will call that AI.

...not to be downloading cam versions any more.

The version number almost says it all. How can you get excited about a new Firefox release with any feature, when it's just another rapid release. It could have true hard AI and no one would notice any more. It would get lost in the staggeringly mediocre array of non-features nobody wants, forced UI changes, broken addons, and developers that decide they know more about what people want than the users do.

Firefox adopted Google's rapid release cycle on a project that it was neither technically nor culturally suited for. One has to actually admire their dogged persistence to holding course in the face of what is an almost a completely unified chorus of "WHAT THE FUCK PEOPLE?!?!?".

I recommend Palemoon. A fork of the previous Firefox LTR, it has refused to add features unless they make sense, is compatible with most addons, and has its own growing body of its own addon developers that are quite loyal to the project for the simple reason that the project remains loyal to them. That's not to say that it's a static browser. Just one that took the best of what Firefox was and decided to continue in the direction of sensible goals and not alienating its user base.