If I had any choice at all, I would not agree to work for an employer who monitored every word I said with a machine, and evaluated my performance based on what the machine reported. Even George Orwell didn't anticipate this mechanized, comprehensive surveillance. Unfortunately, it seems to be possible now and employers are happy to take advantage of it.

Of course, protecting children is just a convenient lever to justify this giant overreach into everyone's privacy. The ultimate goal of these people is to minitor everything everyone does. Once the mechanisms are in place, they will be used. And they will eventually be used to their full extent no matter what assurances we are given at the start.

Your justification that the law will be easy to bypass if flawed, too. Passing laws that we know will be ignored or bypassed just destroys public respect for the laws that really are important. The new law is a bad idea from start to finish.

Apple's business plan from the beginning has been to make everything in their equipment as proprietary as possible so that users would have to come to them for repairs and modifications. If this was not true no one would ever come to them for hardware because of their inflated prices. I used their hardware for a short time in the 1980s but abandoned it then because of this problem. Nothing has changed that would make me want to try them again.

Free your self from all this irritating crap and ditch Microsoft. You all know the alternative.

Perhaps the lack of students will cause the universities to cut their tuition charges and compete with other schools for students. School fee increases have strongly outpaced inflation for many years now and they are due for a cut. It also would make me happy to hear about administrators at big schools being cut instead of professors and instructors. How many "Dean of Alumni Development"-type positions do these schools really need?

The bubble continues to be fed by all these AI-related companies trading stock with each other and pretending it is a real acquisition of value. Hang on, folks. It's going to be bumpy.

This warm standby will be very useful for anyone wishing to remotely activate your PC and, for example, turn on the camera or microphone.

People seem to have no shame whatsoever now and are willing to publicly beg for subsistence money. It's a pathetic commentary on our society that people have so little pride.

They don't want anyone else to be able to do it, I guess. Or maybe they don't want to invest in the satellite stuff for India because they already can track you with the hardware and infrastructure that they have.

I used to work for a very large Japanese electric company conglomerate. When some product was in short supply the internal customers were the first to have their supply cut. The company believed it was most important to keep the outside paying customers happy. It makes sense.

And the lights went off in 22 million homes.

This sort of thing isn't just a problem with Chinese vehicles. It's a problem with all new cars. They are all thoroughly wired up with locked-down, proprietary computer systems that monitor your every move and provide this data to the manufacturer, your insurance company, and any government agency that is interested. They allow your engine to be throttled or shut down completely by a remote operator. They allow the manufacturer to disable heated seats or other features in your car if you stop paying subscription fees. We need to provide an open-source car operating system that will allow car owners to control who is monitoring them, as well as allowing them to operate and repair the cars they own and not be captured by proprietary repair policies from vendors.

It always surprised me that people would allow an Internet-connected camera that they could not control into their house. I am surprised now that the TV companies are abandoning this rich and intrusive source of information about the people who buy their products, but I am pleased to see that it is happening. Maybe next they will remove the microphones that can spy on you from their TVs.

The best way to disable this irritating little pest is to switch to Linux. Set yourself free from the Microsoft and Apple gulags.

Microsoft cannot abide the idea of any person -- or, apparently, any company -- actually running things that Microsoft is unable to snoop into. They demand full access to everything in exchange for using their software.