And exactly how surprising is this? Did anyone expect him to say what would boil down to "You're right; this is an unsupportable invasion of privacy; legislate my company out of business and eliminate all the work and value I've put into the company, as well as put all my employees out of work"? If he actually thought ubiquitous surveillance was bad, he wouldn't have created the company in the first place, much less worked to get Flock cameras used everywhere he could get agencies to buy and install them.

Since all of the climate-warning cutoff values — 3C, 2C, and 1.5C — were taken from papers where they were tossed out as aspirational goals, each with no scientific justification for that value over any other, although dire predictions were ascribed to exceeding these values, such as a 2022 study published in Science titled Exceeding 1.5C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points. The IPCC parroted the study: "Exceeding 1.5C could also trigger multiple climate tipping points — such as breakdowns of major ocean circulation systems, abrupt thawing of boreal permafrost, and collapse of tropical coral reef systems — with abrupt, irreversible, and dangerous impacts for humanity." (1.5C: what it means and why it matters) And since the UN has declared we've already blown past this critical temperature goal, we can sit back and wait for the catastrophes that we have been repeatedly told, in increasingly apocalyptic warnings, would happen once we inched past the 1.5C breakpoint. Based on the accuracy of the 1982 declaration by the UN that the planet would be facing an ecological disaster within two decades, its 1989 warning of a 10-year tipping point, IPCC chief Pachauri's 2007 declaration that it would be "too late" if action wasn't taken by 2012, and its recent retirement of the IPCC's RCP 8.5 (aka SSP5-8.5) warming scenario as "implausible" (despite having been used for more than ten years as the foundation of other individuals' and organizations' apocalyptic claims, some of which continue to be made despite their foundation having been pulled out from under them), though, I'm not expecting much from this UN announcement, either.

And the legislators somehow make the blatant assumption that forcing computers to announce "The user of this computer is underage" when queried would never be used by bad actors to more directly focus their attention on individuals identified as children.

You can thumb your nose at the renaming a bit by opening Google Maps, searching for 'Lake Ontario' or 'Lake America', then using the "Add a Label" function to label it something like "The Lake Formerly Known as Ontario", optionally with some obscure Unicode glyph as the icon.

Or go back to the origin of the name "America" and label it "Lago di Amerigo Vespucci", tell Trump that he's renamed the lake after an Italian, and see how long it takes him to have another tantrum and rename it again.

It's been done, and decades ago — Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis (1971). A new, highly-resistant plastic sold around the world for a variety of hostile-environment uses begins to fail in highly-public situations, causing deaths and panic. The company that created it was also working on a plastic that would decompose when exposed to a specific chemical, to address the buildup of plastic waste, and through the novel the characters come to believe that this is the source of the degradation of the supposedly resistant plastic. The actual cause is a scientist employed by a completely different company who, annoyed at the clogging of his pipes from plastic toys his kids throw down the toilet, wonders whether a bacterium could be created to eat the plastic and dissolve the obstructions; He comes up with a variant that does, but suffers a brain aneurysm, dropping the petri dish into the sink, where it breaks, releasing the strain into the sewers; it turns out that the decomposable plastic is a superfood for the bacterium, which mutates to eat more and more varieties of plastic, spreading first through the sewers and then elsewhere via all of the connected piping and wiring made from or sheathed in plastic.

What was the T-shirt slogan? Oh, yes — "Plants are not food. Plants are what food eats."

I have a shirt with the text "I don't usually test my code, but when I do, I do it in production." Seems appropriate here...

Maybe they're sticking with an adage I first heard years ago relating to hang gliding — "Never go higher than you're willing to fall." Although I would think that, with a conventional aircraft like this is, going higher would give you more options for how far you can go looking to put the bird down after it loses power. Maybe they're just worried about losing their Wi-Fi connection and having the control software turn off or something silly like that.

And having a database that can be queried by websites and online services to declare "The user of this computer is underage" can't possibly be used by bad actors to more reliably focus their attentions on children. ("What a wonderful idea! With the best of intentions! What could possibly go wrong?")

And there are other readily-available sources of information: for example, publications on the design and use of shaped charges, or binary explosives -- explosives made by combining two materials, neither of which is explosive on its own, such as Astrolite G, a mixture of ammonium nitrate and hydrazine, sometimes referred to as 'the liquid land mine'; you can pour it onto the ground to soak in and detonate it with a blasting cap or pressure-sensitive fuse. The Anarchist's Cookbook is, on the whole, not a particularly good reference, nor are many of its instructions particularly safe.

I don't know if it's still there, but the Science Center at the Reuben H. Fleet Space Theater and Science Center in San Diego used to have a device that was a good demonstrator of this. It had four double rows of lights, with two foot pedals and two twist handles, and a counter. It would randomly light one bulb in each of the paired rows, and by manipulating the pedals and handles, you could move the lit bulb in the other of each paired row; when you got all four matching, a counter would increment and the lit bulbs would be randomized; the goal was to get as many matches as possible before the timer ran out. Watching other people do it, I would regularly see results in the 8-15 range, with people laboriously matching one light, then the next, then the third, then the fourth, which seemed so inefficient, so I worked at it, not focusing my attention on any given light while I moved all four controls to an approximation of the correct matches before making fine adjustments for a match. After a bit of practice, I could get results consistently around 35-45 matches, and I'd usually wind up with a bunch of people watching me.

They're just sending out the bills a year early, due to an AI-based timing mistake.

As long as it includes macros to trigger logic bombs in the AI agents they control to destroy them utterly, it will have value.

Of course they're going to be obsessed with AI. Look at how much money they've dumped into it. They have to make it work, no matter how few of the individual users of their products use or want it. If it all turns out to have flushed billions of dollars down the toilet, that flushing is going to take managers' careers with it, so they're desperate to find a way, any way, to point to some AI-integrated 'feature' they've added and say "Here. This is where AI makes a difference."