(Why did my autocorrect suggest Hadrian’s chicken?)
The history they taught you in school was wrong. The wall was built to keep out the chicken.
"Sorry, guys, but I gotta bail."
She got the name Omelas from reading a road sign for Salem, Oregon backwards.
The Doctor Who episode The Beast Below presents a similar dilemma, except with the option for amnesia.
Technically, you could say we're the ones who set since it's the Earth's rotation causing the change.
California also isn't an island, but it's named after a fictional island in a Spanish novel, and was once thought to be an island.
EMP, MRI, or what about anti-nanobots? If you can program nanobots that kill people with particular DNA, couldn't you program nanobots that target other nanobots? I would assume they hadn't yet built in a self-defense protocol for the nanobots since they were cutting edge and not assumed to have any countermeasures yet. Anti-nanobots seem just as plausible as DNA targeting nanobots.
Die Another Day was meh, but I really didn't care for Skyfall and No Time to Die. The plots were too contingent on inorganic and out of character details. Q wouldn't be stupid enough to plug a USB drive into an MI6 networked device found on a known hacker supervillain. The convenience of the targeted DNA nanobots just magically being declared to have no solution without anyone doing any testing of theories was unbelievable and just revealed the obvious "we need to kill Bond in this one so come up with a reason for him to die nobly" pitch meeting pitch. It ruined the suspension of disbelief entirely. I feel like they just tried too hard to keep upping the stakes and outdo themselves that it just got ridiculous.
There was a 1995 movie with Sean Astin, Christopher Plummer, and a number of other names you might recognize. It greatly changed and expanded the short story. Only the premise of the handicaps and the enforcement of "equality" was really the same. https://youtu.be/G1LE-E_Yn_Q?si=wYkQ33bd4oy16eR2
An adaptation that was truer to the original story called 2081 was made in 2009: https://youtu.be/dEgOuZzjI8o?si=rlkbINXmqlCFOl15
Sounds like the Mechanical Turk which was run by chess players moving the "automaton."
So much of the wow factor of new technologies is just marketing hyperbole.