Don't talk about your fraud on the record... It's not at all surprising that Comcast would do this, the fact that their alignment is apathetic/evil is well known; but it's pretty surprising how open they are about it.

Invoice fraud is a totally classic con; but it depends in part on knowing when not to push it. The target catches on and is angy; do you want to cause a scene and risk discovery or just offer an insincere apology, drop the issue, and move on to the next target? Especially given Comcast's current less-than-winning PR situation (you know it's bad when your cancellation procedure has an AOL guy driven to despair...) there is no way this call would be worth the risk, even if they'd made all the charges stick. Shut up, appease the noisy guy, and cram some befuddled old people or something.

I suspect that the odds of actually being charged are basically zero; but billing 'errors' made in very, very, questionable good faith start to look a lot like mail fraud if they aren't quite isolated incidents(especially given how added charges always seem to be more common than accidentally omitted charges).

I thought that the kinect, while nicer than the average cheapie camera in terms of optics and sensor, also used a fairly normal camera(well, one higher resolution visual band one for image and one IR one for depth) and that the real secret sauce was the IR laser device that projected the dot pattern on the environment for the camera to pick up and interpret. Am I remembering incorrectly?

Indium/gallium mixtures are the expensive, classy, mostly-nontoxic-ish low temperature alloy. The cheap seats skip the indium and add zesty cadmium instead. A great deal cheaper; but not for internal use.

Oral Rehydration Therapy. The preferred version is slightly more complex; but it's pretty much a sugar/salt solution in water, designed to replenish lost fluids without causing electrolyte issues if consumed in large quantities. Cheap and easy to do without much equipment or medical expertise.

You crazy end-times nutjobs... Everyone knows that Verichip(tm) brand subdermal RFID solutions are supposed to be implanted in the arm, not the hand or forehead!

It's pretty tricky to avoid the 'carry something around' requirement; but people seem to be good enough at that when they need to be.

I suppose the major mess would be all the phones and tablets that either don't have card readers or USB, or have USB but will never receive driver support outside of third party hacks. Smartcards and their USB attached analogs can handle the job but having accounts that you can't access from almost any mobile device will probably play poorly.

It does have that (though using a stylus still tends to involve enough contact with your hand to make cleaning relevant); but it is also a touchscreen device so depending on the don't touch it school of cleanliness is a bit of a waste.

Do they have matte screens that can handle having disgusting human finger grease smeared on them?

The glossy ones collect it; but at least can be wiped off. Getting fingerprints off matte screens tends to be more obnoxious.

I'm not sure that the incentives line up in this case: Alzeimer's tends to be expensive because of the amount of care and nursing people require as their cognitive state declines; but the pharmaceutical options are sparse. People would beat down your door for the chance to pay for pills what they now pay for nursing if you had something(even if it has to be taken twice daily forever) that was suitably effective. Anyone who could would likely pay more because the disease itself is so nasty. Seems like a very lucrative position for anyone except those currently doing the nursing.

On the plus side, if you are truly tacticool, the sheer mass of black-anodized widgets rail mounted to your gun will offer substantial stability improvements during fire..

It's not as nice as a sanitation system good enough to prevent the problem; but ORT is pretty good at keeping you from dying of it and a great deal cheaper.

There's also the fact that a fancy scope system designed to improve accuracy against relatively distant targets likely isn't worth the weight, much less the cost, for use indoors at very close range.

It's possible that there are some would-be snipers out there, currently restrained only by incompetence; but barring those this system isn't of obvious interest for most spree killing purposes.

It makes a lot more sense if you think of ornamental landscaping (and much of fashion in general) in terms of competitive display rather than pursuit of some specific aesthetic ideal. It is precisely because something is pointless and relatively resource intensive that it is a good competitive display. If it were purely utilitarian, or if it were trivial, everyone would have one. Lawns are also good for this because deficiencies in maintenance become publicly visible, in the form of various 'weeds' and irregularities of color or height, fairly quickly.

Unless the OR is pain waiting to happen for users with ordinary vision I'd imagine that the optics are designed to provide a comfortable apparent distance from the screen for viewers with ordinary eyesight. This would mean that a nearsighted user would still be attempting to focus on something that appears further away than close-in vision is suitable for.

Somebody comfortable at closer distances would likely require slightly less correction from the internal optics, since their comfortable apparent distance is shorter; but if the optics aren't designed that way that doesn't help them very much.

Unless your proposal involves turning the old people into soylent grey, there definitely is. It's a particularly slow and very, very, unpleasant way to die(not so much because of any gruesome physical symptoms as because gradual and relentless loss of assorted important congnitive functions is both terrifying and increasingly incomprehensible as you lose more of them) and makes the victim substantially dependent on caregivers some years before they otherwise might be. Very hard on the patient, very hard on their relatives, and quite expensive, often for a number of years.