This "AI" seems to be severely lacking in training, in that no superior/invincible force (e.g. a party simulating law enforcement) showed up and demonstrated the downside to taking certain actions.

Dammit, can't anyone make some stylish cyber-shoes? That looks like shit! Anyone who goes around upskirt-snapping with shoes like that, is going to get laughed out of the ballroom by all the snobs.

Is it ok if I show up in regular glasses, but where an always-on LED is attached to the one of the corners? (I understand pervs are falling out of popularity, but that doesn't mean we need to abandon the whole aesthetic!)

Do we really have to reinvent the wheel every damn time?! It used to be that you just got Voight-Kampff tested, and the administrator of the test would sign your PGP key. WTF was wrong with that?!

My first reaction is that if one company is selling at half the price, that company will go bankrupt at twice the speed since every transaction was already a money-loser. Customers are absolutely the worst thing for these "businesses."

But is revenue really significant? I can see how neither reducing the price to $0 or increasing their price to 10x what it was, might not really have much of a different impact on the bottom line, compared to all the debt.

Make IBM Great Again: go back to .. leasing computers?!

Nobody remembers or cares that a B-2's toilet cost $23k, so the Pentagon is updating to a newer, better form of government waste that kids today will better understand.

Malware is any software that runs on your computer but is intended to serve the interests of someone else.

Calling it malware isn't so much inaccurate as it's unspecific. Not all malware is adware, but 100% of adware is malware.

This is what the communists want...everyone destitute. They do not care, period. But not for the reason you think. Any pension or 401k would be wiped out too. Millions would starve to death, or be killed because they were rioting becuae they were starving. Mao and Stalin and their cronies became the new rich and middle class, while everyone else suffered. Why? Greed.

Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

I don't think Google should be required to provide anonymized search data to rivals. Firstly, that's effectively their intellectual property.

Oh, I wouldn't worry about that. I'm sure the others will do something transformative with the data.

^ there it is, a peasant hot on the rage rat wheel ðY

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

What a weird ... hey, wait, I think I figured it out!

You're looking at it from the point of view of the bank robber, aren't you? (Instead of from the point of view of all the people who didn't rob the bank but still somehow had their locations leaked to the government.)

Did I guess right?

I'm imagining devices going by a conveyor belt, and a worker with a wirecutter is making a brief snip on each of the devices as it travels by.

The boss walks up, and the snipper guy asks "Is it true? Is the customer canceling?"

The boss briefly nods but then shakes his head. "Yeah, they're canc--no, I mean they still want the devices. They just don't want the snipping anymore. They say go ahead and leave the warrant-detection-and-lookup circuit live."

"Good. I never really understood what I was doing here. They're still weren't required to check the sensor anyway, so why disable it?"

The boss explained, "so we could charge them for the snipping."