What's more, we need this one car to cover our actual needs, not just the weekday needs but our transportation needs 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, for several years to come until we've paid off the cost of that car. This means that yes, when we drive to the local grocery store, we only use 10% of the battery. Now, this is still a modest family car, not a massive truck that can pull a mobile home across the country on a single charge, but the discussion seems to be based on the presumtion that everyone just buys the biggest possible car for fun, which is probably not the case for most people..

The whole point is for the information to pass through the doctor's brain so they form a mental picture of the patient's health. Sure, leaving the job to a language algorithm is faster and frees up the doctor so he can generate more profit by seeing more patients, but let's at least be honest with ourselves that this is the singular motive. The one ending up with the short end of the stick is the patient who's still paying through the nose to see a real doctor but could have saved a lot of time and money just copy pasting something from one cloud storage bucket into another.

I guess they'll introduce mandatory background checks before you can buy a new doorbell then?

Microsoft has NO way of knowing when I'll be going offline or what files I will be needing when I do. This is just one more shitty idea piled on top of an already enormous mountain of shitty ideas wrapped with shit. How about instead Microsoft stops filling up my disk with useless untouchable and opaque shit and let me decide when the system is working fine or when to restore from an actual backup? No matter what kind of idiocy they implement into their operating systems or cloud services it can never replace the need for a proper complete backup. Added complexity only serves to make the problems even more complex.

Obviously, this researchers knows nothing about how coding works. More complexity means more bugs and even intentional "harmless" bugs (if such a thing even exists) can have unintentional side-effects that could be leveraged by an attacker. And now the team of coders working on a project should all agree that "oh these bugs are there on purpose so don't fix them, just test them properly to make sure they can't be exploited".... All because of the idea that we want to waste the time of attackers who, by definition, have unlimited time. Unlike devs.

Did you consider the possibility that some of us are professionals who get to clean up after other people, or did you just jump at the first conclusion that in your mind served to justify vomiting all over slashdot? I had the pleasure of dealing with ransomware twice this week on behalf of happy clickers because I work as a backup admin. I seriously doubt I'm the only one.

Because you DO have a backup, right? Sure, use AppLocker, firewalls, antivirus, antimalware, terminal server provisioning, storage based snapshots and replication all you want, those are convenient. In the end though, the only 100% safe defense against ransomware is the good old-fashioned backup.

Car manufacturers aren't doing enough to prevent terrorists from driving cars. Oil companies aren't doing enough to prevent terrorists from using diesel and petrol. Food companies aren't doing enough to prevent terrorists from eating food. Pencil manufacturers aren't doing enough to prevent terrorists from writing. Shoe manufacturers aren't doing enough to prevent terrorists from walking. I could go on but I won't. He probably will. Snowden has made a few more people aware of the fact that many people who work in law enforcement agencies and intelligence services think they have a right to ignore the law. Particularly the law in other countries.

An audiophile will think a $1000 amp is cheap, to others it's ridiculously expensive.

When will oppressive authorities understand that as long as it's mathematically possible to hide information from them, people will do whatever it takes to do so? There are no technical limitations to how well a piece of information can be hidden away and piggy-backed onto seemingly uninteresting or useless data; the only way to shut down unwanted communication is to prevent ANY AND ALL communication.

When I was a kid we all walked to and from school every single day. On the very first day, my parents walked with me. From 4th grade we were allowed to use bicycles. Those who lived more than 30 kilometers away from the nearest school were entitled to use public transport for free.

s/then/they;

I would go even further and say that the government is the last instance you should trust if you have any interest in privacy because then have a clearly expressed interest in denying you any.

Here's a thought. What if you accidently keep one bit of information that could be turned against you when out of context, and you diligently deleted the very documents that would have shown the redeeming context? If one of your employees step out of line and produces something that could be turned against you, then act on it. If the paper trail shows you did, then you have nothing to fear from sensible people. Never trust a company which goes to great length to cover up their past. Lawyers and media? Those will attack you anyway, with or without evidence. Stop feeding them.

If huge corporations started following some basic legal and ethical guidelines, they wouldn't have to worry so much about old documents getting leaked. If your business strategy is to f##k your customers and/or your partners, sooner or later you will pay for it, documents or no documents.