My God! Clean? Coal? Must be virtual.!

Follow the science not the money...

I totally agree. As an elderly IT guy I take precautions. However I supported a friend who had memory issues and limited technical skills. I had to write down his passwords and keep them because he could not. He went through several Facebook and email accounts he could not recover.

Service providers need to devise special arrangements for the elderly - there will be more and more of such users in years to come. OS providers (especially MS) need to provide simple, stable desktops that never reconfigure themselves and totally confuse elderly users!

Giving special consideration to the elderly is not a new concept!!

According to wikipedia some particles far exceed escape velocity. If life exists there then it may have been 'exploring' for a long time if only as spores... good sf story here!

Absolutely. Plus we can reread them in 5yrs, 10yrs... And they are still there in the event of power failure and other tech failures.
Not that we don't need ebooks. Both is better.

How does an observer tell the difference between AI-controlled and human-controlled device? May be armed, may not. May have passengers, may not. How can an observer know for sure? Control may be switched between human and AI.

Want to be able to specific more about the source e.g. newspapers only, blogs only, academic only, published in 2007 and so on. Ads I can ignore.

Exactly. Our home PC runs Linux most of the time so all guests use that. Some do not know the difference between Linux and Windows anyhow... :)

So why not dump POTS and route it all via DSL to the exchange?

Desk phones (in small businesses) and home phones are in serious need of a digital upgrade. The copper line is still a major asset in most places for use by DSL so why not upgrade the phone to a digital device which can offer many of the services offered by cheap cell phones such as text messages? Much could be done even without additional power. Options like a wireless hub could be added etc etc. Why do telcos not push this as standard? It would surely make better use of their resources. What am I missing here?

Makes legal sense? Don't know enough to comment BUT I support the principle that political leaders must be accountable for their actions... and ignoring / downplaying global warming is a serious action in my book.

How about a fairly accessible mandatory wipe option being required in new models? Might require SIM to be taken out first. Not too hard surely. Probably easier to do in Europe though ... cell phone companies would need pushing.

Make a whole lot of sense to me... could use more of the same in other areas.