I wonder if it could be used to help insomniacs. Sleep isn't exactly unconsciousness but still...

That's because the employee protection laws are too weak. People end up having to sue to avoid being screwed over. If the laws were in place there would be less need as everyone would know where they stood and companies would just do the right thing by default most of the time.

I think this has already happened. Most "creative" movies, TV shows and advertising are so derivative and trite that they could have been written by a hacked up Eliza bot.

Protectionism doesn't work. What you need is to make sure that immigrants are paid the same as local workers, so the playing field is level. That way immigrants become productive members of society and contribute back to it, rather than just earning barely enough to live.

They don't want to sell at "American" prices, they want to compete with developing nations directly. For American companies it's a race to the bottom.

The irony is that for everyone else it's a race to the top. Developing nations want to improve quality so they can charge more. Countries like Germany already produce top notch stuff and can charge a premium for it, while remaining reasonably priced.

Efficacy and safety are often the same thing. If you have cancer and I tell you I have a miracle cure that only cost half as much as proper medical procedures and you decide to take it, you will die of cancer. If I tell you I have a miracle diet pill that lets you eat as much as you like, you will get fat.

The summary is misleading. They can't smell the pornography, only the flash memory/hard drive. The idea is that if someone hides a memory device somewhere the dog can help them find it, regardless of what it on it.

Even so it seems a bit unlikely. Being able to separate a solid state memory device from any other random plastic/silicon electronic device is a stretch.

Give up 99% of it, still be insanely rich and make a name for yourself in history as the guy who fixed the world?

Look at Bill Gates. Used to be a complete dick in business, totally ruthless. Eventually had more money than he could ever spend and decided to do something interesting and good with it. Doing so did not really impact his quality of life, maybe even made it better as people are less hostile to him now in light of his charitable work.

The real problem is corporations. Individuals can do that kind of thing, but a group of people in a corporation can't.

It would be more like what is happening in Germany. Massive investment in wind, solar, wave and geothermal, but crucially also a massive investment in a new smarter grid to support it all.

I have no doubt that it will happen in Europe, but the US is going to find it hard. Things like subsidising residential solar are seen as un-American and socialist, even though it's fine to heavily subsidise companies building fossil fuel or nuclear plants. The grid is a money-making privately owned infrastructure, not something that is supposed to work for the public's benefit. In other words, the problems are all cultural.

They actually make good NAS boxes if you can find a board with some SATA ports. I also use one as a server for gathering weather data from my weather station and GPS for a local stratum 1 NTP server. Not as useful as the NAS but an interesting weekend project.

That's rather short sighted. If they are qualified and suited to the position it's worth getting them in to find out why they didn't stay very long. Maybe the company laid them off (last in, first out), maybe they had to move because of their partner, maybe the company was just terrible. You could be passing up the best candidate for no good reason.

A democracy normally has protections to prevent the majority demanding things that do undue harm to a minority.

Much of the tech is designed by other companies, which sometimes they buy. It isn't a product of their own long term r&d as such.