I think Psycho Pass' premise presents a really interesting moral scenario. If you had a system that could always detect violent criminals (non-violent criminals are simply locked up), is it a reasonable thing to use deadly force against them? What does that do to society? It's very death note-esque. If you like sci-fi anime then I would recommend giving it another look and try focusing on the potential utilitarian morality of the premise rather than its immediate distaste.

Ah, that makes sense, thank you!

The amount of information that the Chinese has been able to gather on American war assets is both astounding and disturbing. I'm sorry, but defense contractors need to get their act together and start removing computers from internet connected networks. Seriously, every computer that holds defense secrets should NEVER have been connected to outside networks! Who thought that was a good idea? Unfortunately, by this point I really wonder what more information the Chinese could hope to gather. They certainly have enough technical specifications to not only close the technological gap by years and certainly billions of dollars. Potentially more damaging is the ability to look for holes and weak points in our defensive and offensive systems. Knowing the flight profiles of missiles, their ranges and capabilities could theoretically allow the Chinese to make weapons that bypass these capabilities. I really hope we don't get into any sort of shooting war with the Chinese...

Just is troubling is that if the Chinese can hack into supposedly secure defense networks, our civilian networks must be easy pickings. China could insert malicious code to take down American businesses or even utility networks. What would we consider such actions? A declaration of war? What if China simply passed along military or civilian backdoors to other countries, what a mess that would be...

I wonder if the NSA spent less time spying on American citizens it might be able to find decent ways of purging hacked systems and getting better security to contractors, businesses, etc.

Hmmm many things! Besides the obvious answer of invest/save the money. Go to a used book store and buy loads of books. There are some places which offer old paperbacks for a dollar or two. Find some new authors or new genres or a book that teaches you something new. I recommend anything by Asimov if you want excellent science fiction (that's personally where I would spend my money).

If you play PC games then wait for the steam summer sale and buy 2 or 3 triple A titles for really cheap. You can easily get hundreds of hours out of them which works out to some great bang for your buck.

If you want something interesting and unique, visit kickstarter or etsy and find something that catches your fancy. I like investing on kickstarter, a good project will keep you engaged in its progress and is a good lesson in delayed gratification.

If you're feeling curious, buy some old electronics/junk/etc and take it apart. Give yourself two tasks, one, understand as much as you can about what you took apart and two, then build something new with the disassembled bits and bobs. Make some art or a flickering light or little gizmo that spins.

If you have plenty of 'things' already then give it to charity or the homeless. They will appreciate any amount and you'll feel better having given to those genuinely in need.

While on the topic of badges, is there anywhere that explains what one needs to do to get a badge. At the moment I have two dots out of eight but I have no idea how I got those or how I get more.

The video just makes every single line of the song so powerful. There's something indescribable about him actually singing about space while in space that drives home the fact that he is on humanity's frontier moving at thousands of kilometers per second.

I find it very weird that this article speaks as though Google is the only company that will ever sell self-driving cars. There are universities and companies all across the US researching self-driving cars. I sincerely doubt that in 20 years every self-driving car will be run by Google. I also think the author makes an important assumption, that self-driving cars will collect data on you and you will have no ability to turn it off. First off, the car's can drive themselves without a data connection, what are the car's supposed to die the moment they go on back country roads with terrible network coverage? Second, Google's cars currently produce one GB/second. If all that data got uploaded, Google's servers would implode (atleast on today's tech). Sure, one day, Google may collect every bit of info from every drive you take, but then you ought to be able to find a competitor that won't.

@flagamuffin, Google most certainly does care about this data though and will certainly try to get access to it. It's an advertisers wet dream, you can know where people are at what time and for how long. Taco Bell would pay a fortune just to take a peek at data that could tell them what percentage of customers from which parts of the city go to each particular taco bell at what time. If Google could combine that data with other information from emails or its other advertising streams that's a lot of data that can be used to fine tune advertisements and target them. Privacy is not something to be gotten rid of on a whim, why would you want the government or a company knowing more about your personal life than your best friend? They won't keep things a secret. They won't know or care about you as YOU only as a stream of data that they will use to their advantage either monetarily or for power. If the government wants to gather information on us (CISPA, wiretapping, etc) to prevent terrorism, doesn't that mean that in the eyes of the government we're all suspects? That mentality worries me greatly.

I think that driverless tech is a huge revolution that can fix a lot of issues including traffic, time wasted during commutes, and lowered emissions/better mpg from forming car "trains" where one car breaks the wind and hundreds may follow behind it. It's some pretty amazing technology that will produce innovations in all sorts of computer imaging and decision making.

I wish it was something more widely talked about. The issue isn't just measures of our economy its also how our economy works. For example, if a vandal goes around and smashes 100 windows, guess what, the economy grows! Replacement windows must be made which means workers and suppliers get paid extra and everyone starts buying a little bit more. The problem is that certain costs lie external to the economy. The true cost of those new windows isn't reflected in their price. The pollution it causes and (if the product uses toxic chemicals) the negative health impacts are not accounted for by the company. If the company can use 1 dollar per hour labor it will, even if those factories pollute more and its workers die from accidents/health issues. If no one ever accounts for these issues then the only way the company can make money is to sell new and more products. If external costs are internalized (like cap and trade programs, etc) then products that are environmentally sound and longer lasting can compete against cheap, polluting products. The other option is an informed consumer base that can account for all these different factors when they make purchasing decisions but that's difficult.

This sounds awesome! Just wanted to show interest in the idea and say that I'll be reading the books and hopefully contributing to the discussions!

It's incredibly frightening when you factor in that most/some of these disposed electronics end up in developing countries where they get melted down for metals. Melting plastic and heavy metals without any protection is pretty horrific. I try to hang onto technology as best I can, reselling and reusing whenever possible. I think at this point every TV at my parent's house has an old computer hooked up as a media server.

I wish you luck in starting the society! There are a lot of different options there from competitive groups that built autonomous subs/planes/cars/etc to people you just like to tinker with arduinos and such. At my university we have a society dedicated to building things, whatever the students want, so we've built a wind turbine (30 feet tall) and are starting on a hovercraft. If you're at any sort of technical institution I can't imagine it will be hard to find loads of interested people.

Wow, I wish that law existed here... I bet my university throws out loads of stuff I could salvage and build into robots (totally not designed for world domination). Large institutions are huge boons for finding random free things. The German ministry of Education even threw out 190,000 euros worth of computers. Could you imagine finding hundreds of computers that work perfectly and just need a new HDD and OS?

I don't think I've ever walked past trashcans and not wondered what would be inside. If I'm alone, sometimes I do take a peek. Some people throw out the most amazing stuff! My family has trash-picked 5 TV's and a working PS2 (poor kid) among countless bits and bobs and pieces of furniture. I love playing the mental game of "What could I make with that person's garbage?" Sometimes I just think about making a giant cardboard fort but sometimes I come up with interesting things out of it.

I like that idea, I've always felt rather limited in my knowledge of great books so I'd love to experience some new books, especially outside my comfort zone (scifi).

I am glad that hardware experimentation is on the rise with arduinos/pis and rapid prototyping. As a current CS major I love my arduino (still need to pick up some servos for it) for being able to do embedded systems really easily. I hope these open source projects become foundations for all sorts of things.

Also, I'm perfectly ok with 99% of users only ever using computers for a few things. I just don't want to see that limiting my ability to use computers however I want :P

While I agree that most serious people will continue to "roll their own", the fall of traditional desktops does have an impact on those who will always make their own computer as well as on traditional consumers. From a practical standpoint I imagine it will mean more expensive components as fewer people buy them. It could also mean less competition as manufacturers leave the desktop market for mobile computing, and with less competition less innovation. Already most important new technologies in displays like OLED are almost entirely found in mobile platforms. It will be interesting to see when graphene or photonic or any other next generation chips begin to become available where they appear first, in desktops or in mobile.

However, honestly, I'm not too worried about the practical hardware considerations, desktops will always have at the very least a market among gamers (like you pointed out). I'm more concerned about the general trends towards convenience and simplicity over freedom and deep content creation of which mobile computing is both a symptom and promoter. Cellphones especially, but mobile computing in general, wants to present information as quickly and as succinctly as possible. Consumers have bought into this as instant gratification and convenience are very nice. But we have bought it at a price, at least thus far, by getting devices we intend to replace every year or two, by getting locked into disparate ecosystems, by getting sound bites instead of a reality of complexity. There are certainly many apps and new OS's that try to combat this, but I can't shake the feeling that a society on mobile technology maybe sees more, but grasps less. This is all very cynical of me of course, and being a PC gamer makes me (probably very) biased.

It makes me sad to see desktops begin to go by the wayside. It's not so much a matter of what one can and can't do on tablets or smartphones, its that people rarely OWN their device like I OWN my PC. I built it and I can do whatever I want with it and no walls stand in my way. Buy a smartphone on contract and suddenly walled gardens everywhere, locked boot loaders and locked stores and apps where communities wall themselves off. Even if you buy a tablet off contract where you can load whatever you want, the device itself will still be obsolete much faster than a PC which I can keep upgrading for years.

It's incredibly frustrating to see 3D printing, arduino, etc which promise to free us from typical manufacturing paradigms coming along, and also see electronics (and the internet), once a bastion of intellectual freedoms, begin slipping under new regulations, contracts, walled gardens, etc. I want to really own the things I own. I want to be able to run the programs I want to run on the OS I want on the hardware I choose!

Sigh...

This is mostly speculation --> Unfortunately I imagine that since most of these brands are predominately franchised (maybe not?) that if Yum brands ever raises wages it won't reduce franchising fees. Being a franchiser is difficult and they often owe money to investors as well as paying fees which means that they don't have much of a profit margin to cut into. This means more part-time workers or other workarounds to ensure that the total being paid to workers is still the same.