Singularity, sure, but I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about current technology. How about giving homeland security blanket permission to track the location of everybody you don't like. Easily done using their phones.... You're a muslim/communist/dissenter and you choose not to carry your phone around? What do you have to hide? Also, how did you get on the shit list in the first place; you must have done SOMETHING...

If more than 3 of them end up in the same location, maybe send the FBI (or what the hell, the CIA) to "respectfully" check in on them... or hey, just record the conversation, while you already have access to their phones.

This is just one example, and no new tech is needed to implement it. Only an executive order, a friendly court, and some people willing to set it up.

I'm not saying this is what's going to happen; I'm just saying that in the worst case, everybody who knows how to do this will need to make a choice to either enable it or not. Sitting on the sidelines building cool shit and pretending it's both more important and irrelevant to current affairs is just not an option.

...I buy that this is how silicon valley will think about this whole clusterfuck... helped by the fact that hey, WE all have health insurance, and nobody HERE voted for that clown, and also [insert location] has a long history of basically being its own thing.

Which, if I'm honest, is exactly how I've been coping with W in power, and with half of my roommates having no insurance, etc. etc.

Also, don't blame ME, I'm not even eligible to vote! Blah-di-blah.

But what ppl forget when they say "don't distract us, we're transforming the world here, motherfucker" is that we have the technology to turn the entire world into something worse than 1984... And if the answer to the question "why shouldn't we" is too subtle to penetrate 50.1% of skulls, then suddenly the fact that we can do these things becomes part of the problem. Yay.

I'm looking forward to the way the shareholders will deal with the ethical dilemma of being paid to dismantle a free society.

At least since Apple decided not to go with "Liger"

The only thing that could have made your reaction more comical would have been if it came from the guy who makes the xkcd comics. His name is Randall. God you made me explain a joke. Please go away now.

Randall, is that you?

Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/538/

Dear God, you think THAT was a point worth making? That's depressing.

... are we maybe taking this "news for nerds" thing just a little too far?

Hello, Oompa-Loompas! :)

ANOTHER damn thing called a "kernel". Cause that wasn't overloaded enough yet.

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. I'm not a fan of invisible fences (or any training based on punishment), but some dogs are just naturally runners, and it's very hard to train it out of them because they escape during the one minute you're not watching them, and you can't punish them for coming back.

Invisible fences use simple operand conditioning; It doesn't matter if you know the "reason" or not as long as the stimulus is consistent. If you think dogs need explanations to not get screwed up, you're misapplying a piece of folk psychology that isn't even accurate for humans.

Many people lock their dogs up inside the house to prevent them from running away or messing up their garden. In my view that's much more cruel than making them learn that straying too far from the house is bad. Plus dogs are pretty smart, they get it very fast. I'm sure if you could ask them they'd prefer this to being locked in permanently or to being run over by a garbage truck.

No it's not. This may shock you, but a 2x4 is not actually a 2x4. It's a "1.5 x 3.5." And many have tried to convert Imperial Lumber Math to metric and were never heard from again, so tread carefully...

Wow, sounds almost as bad as piracy... If they really think PG is doing a "tremendous service" then what's the deal with the loaded language?

Yes, very subtle, grasshopper...

If VP8 ever gets widely used, I suspect we'll find out very fast...