Unfortunately, what you describe is the result of a very long cultural history of completely misunderstanding mental health. Sometimes it was actually "Big Pharma ... marginalizing psychodynamic therapy or whatever", but more often than not it was simply cultural ignorance.

The first thing to realize about recovering from depression is that it's a long process, often never really ending. I know someone who has been in therapy for twelve years now, and has made remarkable progress, but still has the "bad days" when her husband has to pull her out of bed to get her up in the morning. I know another person with depression who is usually just fine until something reminds him of his triggering event, that happened almost twenty years ago.

I cheated my way out. I spent six years depressed, because that was a side effect of a medication I was taking. Once I was able to change medications, I was happy again within six months. Popular culture, though, would have you believe this was the normal case. Authors have used depression as a plot gimmick in fiction, and we've historically shunned anyone whose mental health wasn't outwardly perfect. People suffering from depression are told daily (often indirectly) that they should "snap out of it" or "get over it". They're expected to simply forget their sadness and be the perfect normal members of society that they think everyone expects them to be.

Getting help is the first step, but it will not magically fix everything quickly, and that must not be the expectation. Getting help starts the recovery process, but the bad days, the dark feelings, and the perpetual ennui will still be around for quite some time.

This is exactly right.

A person considering suicide usually doesn't announce to the world that they're thinking about it. They know their friends will all say the same "don't do it" lines, and some jerk will try to tell them that they just need a hug, and someone else will point out all the trivial good things they have in their life, which will just make them feel guilty for being depressed. Then there are the assholes, who are quick to point out how cruel the "real world" is, and in doing so they communicate that the person doesn't meet their high standards for living in their precious "real world", further reinforcing the depression.

Fortunately, it's hard to hide depression from a trained eye (or a trained algorithm). Writing styles change significantly with one's mood, often in consistent ways (on a per-person basis). If someone tends to write shorter posts and use stronger language when their depression worsens, it becomes a useful gauge for knowing how they're doing without asking. Interests often change as well, and especially criticisms. If a person stops caring about their adorable newborn cousin and starts obsessing about the size of their various body measurements, it may be cause for concern.

The other thing to note is that depression is a chronic condition. A quick post about how bad your day was isn't as alarming as a series of posts over the last few months saying that you just consistently feel melancholy. It can be described metaphorically as the brain being addicted to sadness, and the detection is similar. One night drinking too much doesn't qualify as an alcoholic, and a trip to Las Vegas doesn't make one a compulsive gambler. Rather, it's a long-term trend in bahavior, and again, an algorithm can easily detect that trend, where friends will likely only see the short-term changes. Friends are also likely to dismiss their concerns by rationalizing, considering it reasonable to be so upset, because of some bad thing that has happened recently.

Attention is the second best thing to help a person with depression. The best is to go beyond mere attention, and offer support. Detach the worthwhile person from their degrading affliction, and show that you care for them. Treat the depression as one would a broken leg or a bad cough. It gets in the way, but it's not the defining quality of the person. That distinction, once accepted, is the first step to recovery. Just like with an addiction, there are good days and there are bad days, but the slow progress eventually bears fruit.

AIs will be "born" as whatever they're programmed to be.

Humans are born with a natural predisposition to see actions as the result of a human-like being, with a stronger prejudice toward more-similar beings. That's wholly unrelated to whether such actions actually are a God's will, but it's how we are built. Similarly, a sufficiently-advanced AI could have preprogrammed knowledge that it was built be humans, or it could be left as a blank slate to form its own conclusions about the world. If we are to play the role of God, we can decide what our master plan is for our creations.

Then you've created an AI with prejudice, not emotion. Emotion is a fluid thing, as the result of several competing motivations, but that's unrelated to faith.

Faith is a free choice with a conscious acknowledgement of doubt. I choose to believe in the absence of a God, knowing that there's a chance I'm incorrect. Other people choose to believe in one or more deities, knowing there's a chance they are incorrect. Certain other folks have been born into a society that does not permit any other choice but to believe what society demands, so the choice may not necessarily be a free one.

For a robot to have faith, it must first actually understand what it is considering. It must understand what is observable and what is not, and it must understand what of its belief may be observable.

Free faith is a matter of knowing everything you can, and choosing what you want to think about what is unknowable. Yes, we can create AIs that are not free, but I don't see much achievement in that.

Many realism-emphasizing prosthetic hands are little more than flexible wires inside a synthetic skin. Controlling the position of the prosthetic fingers means reaching over with the other hand and adjusting them.

In other news, I have used two kinds of solar-powered flashlight. One was a lantern with a battery inside, so a few hours sitting in the sun (like on the bow of a canoe) provided several hours of light that evening. The other was a home-built contraption for getting a bit more light inside a cabin with no utility connections. It was a solar panel attached to a regulator and a few LEDs on a long wire. It didn't do much after the sun went down, but during daylight the cabin's window shortage wasn't as obvious.

I take it you haven't actually ever seen a good prosthetic limb, then... ...or you have, but didn't know it.

As the saying goes, you can fool all of the people some of the time, and that's what prosthetic devices are designed to do. The fellow diner lifting his glass to drink, or the empty hand of a pedestrian walking down the street, or the passenger on the opposite seat on a bus... How often do you actually look at their hands long enough to consider how perfectly their skin color matches your expectations? Do you interact enough with them to notice how their skin folds?

Common situations like that are where a more obvious skin color brings even more staring, questions, prejudice, and pity. Current skin doesn't work well enough to fool someone who's looking, but for most common occurrences, it's close enough to be ignored, and that's the desired reaction. Silver or black will have every child (and many adults) pointing and staring, which is usually not so desired.

Oh, oh, I've seen this one before!

In proper Slashdot form, I'm just speculating with no real information on the matter, but I think it something to do with a quantity of eggs being put in a particular number of baskets.

Living in Ohio, much the same.

The open blue sky is great for meeting cultural expectations, but it's not particularly special. Once you're used to the cloud, it's actually rather uncomfortable to go somewhere with directional sunlight.

This is pretty much spot-on.

I remember the last bubble well. Anything with a dot-com name meant it was on the front lines of technology, and the impending everything-online economy would wipe away the old brick-and-mortar businesses who couldn't move as fast as the upcoming technology. It turns out that economics didn't move as quickly as they thought. Companies still needed a business model, and the established companies were often able to move into online business just as quickly as consumers demanded.

Today's high-value tech companies are trying new business models, either hoping to capitalize on access to a global market or trying to sidestep inefficiencies in the traditional business. Some companies might still be little more than investors' dreams, but it's not a widespread trend.

This is a perfectly predictable ruling. Frankly, I'm amused that a lawyer even took the case to court.

The legal use of the term "imminent" doesn't mean "probably going to happen". "Imminent" means that, barring exceptional circumstances or luck, a particular result will happen before anyone has a reasonable chance to stop it.

Aim a loaded gun at someone and pull the trigger, and injury is imminent. Aim at a vital area, and death is imminent. Leave a knife in an unlocked drawer when a young child is nearby who could get the knife and harm himself... not imminent. In this case, the breach didn't cause any imminent harm. The culprit had an opportunity to not sell or use the data, so there's a break in the causality. From a legal standpoint, the hospital is not at fault for someone else deciding to steal an identity, even though they may have made it easier to do so with their lax security. In precisely the same manner, a gun dealer isn't liable for an apparently-benign buyer killing someone with a recently-purchased weapon.

That's really what the decision means. The hospital didn't directly cause the use of a stolen identity, so they're not at fault for that particular offense. There probably is still a HIPAA violation somewhere in this mess, though, and they'd be liable for that (because the administration would have made the decision not to implement strong enough security), but that's not the lawsuit in question.

The last consumer-grade Dell PC I bought came with a restore disk that was just a plain vanilla Windows 7 image. It didn't even have drivers. So, voila, perform a clean install right out of the box, install the drivers (from the included driver disks), and you've got a crapware-free Windows. (Of course, it's still on a consumer-grade Dell laptop, and that's a little harder to remedy. But like you say, you get what you pay for.)