Each time an electric bus approaches, you hear "Dooo - Dooo - Deee - Daaah - Daaah". =)

Britain runs on a very extreme form of capitalism, and British courts rarely punish British businesses for missteps. This is obvious from the word "perceived" in the ruling - "This was a revenge attack for a _perceived_ slight you had suffered." In other words, the company probably DID treat this man like shit - maybe a superior shouted abuse at him over some little thing - and the man, pissed by how he was treated, wanted to get the company back. Again, British courts rarely rule against British companies that engage in wrongdoing. As long as you make money for Britain's economy, you are a "good old chap just doing what business requires".

As far as the modeling of the guns goes, its a simple bunch of variables, timers and maybe the odd physics or virtual spring formula that determines how the "gun" behaves. You can even use a virtual physics 3D cube constrained by virtual physics springs to model things like gun recoil or shake. Not difficult. The physics engine (e.g. Havok, PhysX) will do it for you in realtime. All realtime 3D game engines made in the last 20 years can also shoot virtual "rays" into the 3D scene at any angle you want with a single line of code, and report back where and at what angle collision with a 3D object occurred. That is how the game calculates where the bullet goes and what it hits, often placing a bullet hole decal - a simple texture with alpha channel - to make bullet holes. It models a straight line with maybe a "bullet falling due to gravity over distance" offset parameter. If you want to get fancy, any game physics engine worth 2 pennies can also model the flight behavior of a bullet using a simple 3D cube with mass. You don't have to use completely straight rays, but rather fire a simulated physics rigidbody into the 3D scene. An interesting aspect is that in almost no games, bullets ricochet off stones or metal items, which can also be modeled very easily with "rays". You shoot a 1st ray into the scene, it hits something, then you shoot a 2nd ray at an angle from the impact point, and you've got ricochet behavior modeled. But COD, Battlefield and so on don't do this the last time I checked, even though its dead easy to implement. What would it do to gameplay? When you fight someone in a tunnel or hall or other interior, you wouldn't have to aim right at your adversary. Bullets could ricochet off the walls/ceilings and still hit an adversary. No idea why game companies like EA can't be bothered to implement this, as it is dead simple. Just take the code or physics mechanism that takes the bullet from gun barrel to target, and "re-shoot" the bullet from the impact point at an angle. Online play would actually be more interesting with this mechanic, and things like grenades already bounce of walls - if they can do that, they can do bullet ricochets as well.

Surveillance, surveillance everywhere. Every move we make tracked. Who pushes and simultaneously escapes this surveillance? The 1% of the top 1% of earners. I hate to play conspiracy theorist, but maybe this finally is the "New World Order" these inbreds have wanted to push on humanity for decades. The elites are unsurveilled and powerful. We plebs are watched 24/7. Information is Power.

If you show an AI trained on Apples and Bananas an "unknown" Pineapple, all it has to do is do is do a reverse image search using that image - Tineye, Google image search can do that. That more often than not identifies the image as a "Pineapple", and leads to millions of other images of pineapples the AI can train on. How do difficult is "IF NOT APPLE OR BANANA OR UNSURE THEN DO REVERSE IMAGE SEARCH"? Is the AI locked in a steel box with no internet connection?

You Slashdot score is (2) when it should be (5). Off to the Gulag with you. Please don't tamper with the CCTV camera that films you on the toilet when you are there. It is a patriotic piece of equipment, unlike you low-social-score underling. =)

... people would happily be using Win 10. Instead they turned it into a giant spyware turd that nobody trusts, so now everybody who has the means will be looking into creating their own national "secure" OS. This also means that most new commercial software will need to be far more portable than Windows software was. Just like state-of-the-art game engines can currently compile games to 4 or 5 different OSs, this new software will be Write Once Compile To Many. Or taking things even further, an open standard may emerge where software coded to that standard runs natively on just about any OS that supports it. Is this a good thing? For the end user, yes. For companies like Microsoft on the other hand it is the END of their closed OS tethered ecosystem. Who in their right mind will run Windows as their main OS if/when even 3D games are cross platform? That is Win 10's sole advantage right now - it can run productivity tools that you can find on other OSs, but the PC games ONLY run on Windows. Once that obstacle is gone, I suspect that few people will stay with Windows. The OS just has no tangible advantages that other OSs like Linux don't have. The new generations will probably prefer Android or iOS based PCs over MS's crapware in the first place. So this is probably the beginning of the end of Windows, save maybe for business that NEED to run Windows legacy software.

The Economist has spent decades championing and promoting the economic policies that have led to horrible economic inequality in the first place. Now they seem to be trying to downplay the economic damage that they - along with similar publications - have inflicted on the world's poor. Inequality is ultra-high right now, and getting worse, especially in developing countries where some people live in shanty towns without clean water, and others drive around in mini convoys of 500K luxury jeeps. The Economist is never going to come clean and say "all the economic policies we have promoted for 50 years were essentially harmful to the poor". This is a publication chiefly read by the wealthy and well to do in the first place. Bankers. Traders. Investors. CEOs and managers.

In the 21st Century, everything you can buy with money "leaks" your data to certain "power centres". Not a big surprise that the Telcos fuck up SMS 2.0 in the same way.