"approximately 300,000 Facebook users took an online personality quiz, only to have the app that hosted the quiz harvest data from tens of millions of their "friends.""

Why do people believe such promises? For instance, every request to click a link and take an anonymous survey -- look at the URL. Does it include random numbers to identify the source of the URL? Then don't take it. Ignore it, or if you really want to participate in the survey, trim off all that identify cruft. Takes 5 seconds, which is nothing if you intend to take the survey.

The survey people will claim it's to prevent someone taking the survey multiple times. Easy to solve -- set a cookie, and don't let the survey proceed if the cookie can't be set. Anyone so eager to bias the survey results that they delete cookies, well, that's a vanishingly small number of people. There are more people who will lie or make up answers than who will take the time to delete cookies over and over.

...Modern ejector seats cause spinal injuries from which full recovery is "unusual". Smashing the spines of pilots might not be the most effective way to boost morale.

$22,000 per hour. The F35 will be nearer $42,000 per hour. These are under-estimates, as they do not include price hikes, crashes that close businesses, crashing into businesses, crashing into heavily-populated sports centres, etc.

I think you responded to someone else's comment.

I see the future of movies as being AI-generated, with viewers providing scripts, actors, directors, and whatever else they care about, either their own or rented. You'll choose everything and the AI will generate it real time. You'll be able to adjust parameters on the fly -- funnier, darker, more introspective, more action -- overall or per actor. You'll be able to talk to the characters, provide real and misleading clues to detectives, tell the AI to throw in a car accident or a broken sidewalk just to see the characters react to it and change the story for a few seconds.

It will certainly be possible within 50 years. Might be possible within 25 years. What it will do is destroy top actors' salaries. Why rent some famous actor's visage for $5 when you can make one up from scratch or pick some new actor for $1?

You'll also be able to remake old movies. There are stories about famous movies who had to settle for an actor because their first choice was unavailable or too expensive; so change to their first choice, see how it changes everything. They'll be out of copyright and cheap, and probably have a dozen businesses offering their own take on the same actor.

It's going to relegate live actors to stage work, which may or may not be live streamed. The days of $10 million acting gigs will be over. And actors won't be nearly as insufferable pontificating on things they think they learned from roles.

I'm going to argue with that: No, the UN is not the "set of governments". That implies some hierarchical authority. You can say the US is a "set of state governments", but not the UN. The UN is also an incomplete set; it excludes Taiwan, for instance, because China had a civil war and the mainland winner threw a tantrum and still won't let the losing remnant join, 80 years later.

The UN can't enforce peace because it is not a cohesive set. If the US were organized like the UN is, individual states could block the US from doing anything.

At best, you can lump the five "founding" nations together, the ones with the security council vetoes, but then you have to explain why Taiwan is not even a member of the organization, let alone the security council with its own veto; and you have to explain why all the USSR's individual SSR remnants are not part of the security council with their own vetoes.

I'd much rather the UN wasted their time doing nonsense like this than trying to tame the boiling oceans. It would be even better if they tried to enforce peace, but that's not important enough for them.

That's why he said "That makes it usually cheaper to use a non-HEPA filter but a higher air throughput rate."

It's a tradeoff, like almost everything in life. Whether his "usually" is correct depends mostly on who wants to buy the system, and only they can tell.

You miss the point completely. The technology is there and unstoppable. Cutting down one company doesn't destroy the technology. Killing Napster didn't kill the technology, it just spread it around, decentralized it, then there were thousands of sites to control, and they never did manage to do that, did they? Killing Flock will do exactly the same.

Killing Flock won't kill the concept or the capability and more than demolishing Napster stopped music copying. I bet within 5 years, this scanning will be common in most dashcams and phone apps will be available.

Lashing out in anger without having a plan or knowing your target is juvenile.

Whoops -- accidentally moderated it. Undoing...

Maybe you should stop panicking lie a wee baby and think from the other end: things are working as well as they can, and the problem is a lot bigger than just snapping your fingers and hoping a genie shows up.

Fabs are expensive and big, and can't be built overnight. Even stupid ordinary homes take months to build, and fans are thousands of times bigger with thousands of times the utility requirements.

It's taxpayer money. Means they'll burn through it all the faster.

Whether we like it or not, whether we use Windows or not, Microsoft is going to insist on adding the tax whether the PC comes shipped with Windows or not. This is illegal bundling, Microsoft has essentially ignored prior rulings, and it's pretty much a certainty the courts will be fine with this.

"How did you get hired?"
"I was top at Fortnite. You?"
"Combat flight sims."

"Damn, two Boeings just crashed over an oil refinery on city limits and took out half the city."
"Did you remember to save your position beforehand?"
"Yeah."
"The reload and continue from there. No-one will notice."

I love computer games. I have XPlane 12 and many scenery packs. I rank well on Elite:Dangerous. From the sounds of it, the FAA would see me as over-qualified. In reality? There's no way in hell I'd be taking those kinds of risks with real lives. There's a huge difference between having good reflexes and a good eye, versus having the complex 4D spacetime relationship mental models needed for robust air traffic control.