I find most wars unethical - yet I have to pay for them.

It's lucky then that churches don't pay taxes, or they'd have to fund the wars the rest of us have to pay for - whether we agree with them or not.

It also sounds like someone in government can't write a contract that specifically forbid IBM from subcontracting the whole thing!

+1

Siri only seems to work when I'm using my bluetooth headset, possibly because it has better noise cancellation. She still gets it wrong though, so for numbers I call often I've created "fake" entries in my contacts list. I often call my wife on my way home from a job, so I tell Siri to call "ICE" which happens to be an acronym - In Case of Emergency.

Thing is, it doesn't take an enormous amount of intelligence to drive. Otherwise we'd have PhD grads driving trucks.

You can still buy dumb phones, but they are so commoditized now you can pretty much only pick them up in a super market, between the toilet paper isle and cleaning products.

Indeed. This is to an extent already happening. Look at the state of employment in America today. Thousands (?millions?) of people are vilified every day by working people for being lazy and not pulling up their boot straps.

For the long term, I would agree. But some people need to get rid of the weight fast, for example if they are to have elective surgery in the near future. Drugs like these (assuming they work) help get the weight down which would then make surgery safer. Long term though the patient needs to increase their exercise and watch what they eat. Plain and simple.

Because Google will do it for you?

I don't approve of my taxes being used to wage war on people we have no right waging war on. Guess what - don't have a say in that either.

Not true. My VOIP doesn't pay to receive calls. I don't pay to make long distance calls to US or Canada either.

My VOIP service makes it trivially easy to blacklist numbers on it's web interface. They also make it trivially easy to change number. So if I were in his shoes, I'd add a second number and give that to friends, family etc. First number is sent straight to voicemail so I can screen the calls, with a whitelist to transfer the call to the new number where I can remind people to change their phone books After a month or so delete the number the scammers are using.

If it's a number I don't recognize I let it go to voicemail. If it's important enough for them to call me, then it's important enough for them to leave a message.

As I understand it, that's the nature of Conservativism - that you are there to conserve the status quo.