Last time I was there (a couple of years ago) you could fill your gas tank for about a dollar. There's also a guy standing there to fill your tank for you, who you generally give a tip larger than what it costs to fill it. Before going on a trip or vacation the common joke is who's going to pay for food and who's going to pay for gas.

Everything else however is damn hard to get and expensive. I wanted to get some blank DVDs to burn some movies and that was when I started to realize something really bad was going on there (other than the crazy pro/anti-government graffiti everywhere and steel bars over every window and door).

You'll still have to walk through it and spit out chunks of it? You suggest a dystopian quagmire. The "calming down" part I mentioned would be necessary to avoid that sort of pollution. We'd heal the place, then coexist with and balance it.

Awesome. Thought you were trolling for a second (that's how over-my-head your response was), but Wikipedia backs up the quantum dots reference. If civilization remains relatively cohesive for the next century the future will be pure ownage from our perspective. Someday we'll be at the cusp of extending life to near immortality. I think people will, in general, be calmer knowing they're not going to die of old age. A new renaissance for humans, and Earth.

"They smell very good and when they're cooked, many patients have described them as the most delicious mushrooms they've ever eaten."

Clearly this is proof of Intelligent Design. If I were God I'd definitely place these things everywhere they'd fit just to keep my people on their toes. Nature's land mines.

Ask anyone whose life has been saved by chemotherapy, like my mom, and she can give you her doctor's name. It's a blunt instrument, but it has its uses. Seriously though, I did couch my conjecture with terms like "could", "eventual", "perhaps" and "eventually". My thinking was that nanotech and related fields could someday find a way to identify and modify or destroy cells we don't want floating around in us (cancer, viruses, etc.).

Your suggestion about basically creating a DNA checksum of the original then comparing that to newly created cells, I imagine, would be the ultimate solution. Might even help out with long term space travel and such.

It sounds like this sort of research could be the eventual answer to "curing" cancer. As has been discussed extensively here on /., it's looking like there's really no cure but that it can perhaps eventually be treated so effectively that we'll think of it more as the common cold than the ultimate horror it is today.

It wouldn't be straight, but it would be straighter. I was thinking of automobile racing as an analogy. The straighter your racing line the faster you accelerate and the greater your top speed because less energy is wasted on lateral correction. Similar rules should apply to moving particles through a vacuum by electromagnets (or however they move them). I wonder if that would be a compromise between the advantages and disadvantages of linear and ring accelerators. It'd be insanely expensive, though, so I don't think it'll happen soon.

This will happen eventually, but there will be a lot of dirty genetic algorithms under the surface to make it efficient and it will still require seemingly endless tweaking with unexpected results. People will even call the software "stupid" and "unintuitive" as it crunches out insane iterations of what it thinks might meet your requests (based on non-scratched previous requests). Give computer science and AI another 100 years (shit; we'll all be dead), and you'll probably see some laymen programming away by giving directives to "Computer" like TNG.

Wouldn't the optimal path to increase the speed of matter as rapidly as possible be a straight line? Perhaps it's impractical, but they could conceivably build an accelerator that wrapped the surface of Earth. Go for the gold or go home. :)

My bad; I thought they were all called Dear Leader. Sorta like Big Brother, where he wasn't an individual but more of an idea. I feel bad for the citizens there. Apparently not even being a high-ranking official keeps you safe, as they recently executed some old man "by dogs". When the government uses "execution by dogs" as a political tool, you know you have some serious fucking problems!

If not, Dear Leader is going to get some serious f-bombs dropped on him by Linus and Richard.

As someone who's lived in Atlanta for the past 15 years, I have to agree with you on all points.

Seems this has been happening since May of 2013. More information may be found here:

http://slickdeals.net/f/6018544-rakuten-buy-com-customers-getting-fraudulent-credit-card-charges
http://consumerist.com/2013/06/06/heres-everything-we-know-about-the-rakutenbuy-com-credit-card-breaches/
http://dealnews.com/features/Have-You-Experienced-Credit-Card-Fraud-After-Buying-at-Rakuten-/748035.html
http://consumerist.com/2013/06/10/rakuten-is-taking-credit-card-fraud-complaints-very-seriously/
http://rakutenfraud.com/

It amazes me that despite the apparent breach their customers weren't notified or asked/required to change their passwords. The last time I ordered something from them was in 2010 and I'd forgotten I even had an account with them.

At least they didn't shoot someone then leave the goods laying there on the floor like idiots. Good for them, and go to jail. There are laws against that kind of griefing in this MMO.