That's why I said "short of a major breakthrough". We've definitely amassed a large amount of knowledge on telemeres, stem cells, etc...
and I myself am hoping for one of these major breakthroughs and I hope to be young enough to be able to take advantage of it but
as it stands right now I don't even know of even any experimental treatments looking to halt or reverse the aging process which is
what we really need to do to get significantly past the 100 mark. My guess is that when/if it happens that it will probably first be
for premature aging or it's possible that it will be discovered by accident when we realize that some treatment for demetia or cancer
has allowed someone to reach 150. If it's the latter and we have to wait for someone currently alive to reach 150 before we
accidently discover it then unfortunately it will probably be too late for me and most of the people on this site.

Except that office is (by my definition) a power user. Probably over half of all phones sold (iphones included) are used
by people who use it primarily as a phone, might install 5-6 apps in the life of the phone (if they even know how to install an app),
will occasionally use the GPS, take a few photos, and never use 16G of storage.

Apple is pretty much saying that if you want to record videos, store your entire mp3 collection, or install dozens of apps then get the upgrade.

Based on current trends and short of a major breakthru there is no way someone born today will live to be 120-130.
We've gotten pretty good at extending the quality of life and even getting more people past the 100 goalpost but
we've made little or no progress on actually extending life to any significant extent. 100 seems to be the age that
no matter what you do and how healthy you appear to be that you start having multiple system failures.

Not quite. There are minority shareholder laws which prevent such things as creating a new company and selling all your assets to them for a dollar.
Those laws only go so far though. They don't prevent you from creating a new company and selling all your assets to them for their fair market value.
So basically, minority shareholder laws don't prevent majority shareholders from screwing over the minority shareholders but they do prevent majority
shareholders from COMPLETELY screwing over minority shareholders.

As a side note, many investment sites like the motley fool actually like when management owns a significant portion of the company as it
means that they actually have some skin in the game and are less likely to screw the stockholders over in other ways.

According to that definition then someone who is trained and never leaves the ground has more right to that name
than someone who pays $250k to be a passenger on a spacecraft. I don't think being called an "astronaut" should
be the goal but rather that you've been to outer space.

Personally, the description of what you're buying, to me, leaves a lot to be desired. Before I would buy a ticket,
I would want to know there was ample time to experience weightlessness and take pictures out the window.
Does anyone know exactly how long in space you're actually buying? It sounds like a quick up and back down
with maybe a few minutes of weightlessness. To me, that's barely worth it at free. I would want to spend at
least an hour if not 24 hours. Less than an hour and there are cheaper options like the "vomit comet".

You're trying to argue but I think you just proved his point. Considering that most phones in the USA are
still sold with a 24 month contract, having only 18 months worth of support is a complete joke. 48 months
should be the bare minimum but even then it's hard to argue against the fact that both sides are doing their
own version of "planned obsolescence". Some of this will happen naturally as newer systems are faster
but it's annoying when you are forced to upgrade just to maintain status quo. I had an older android
phone and eventually had to upgrade because many of the apps stopped supporting my phone.

Exactly. We really need to replace DNS with something that is distributed. Something closer to bitcoin.
Ideally there would be a way to register a new domain and then all the nodes come to an agreement and
after that point if there is a dispute then all the nodes can vote on who owns that domain. Something
outside the control of any one organization or country where noone had the ability to DDOS a dns
provider, make a website go dark by confiscating its domain, etc...

Waste most of it? Who does that? It could get wasted in the supply chain before it gets to my house but with a family of four, I doubt
I throw away more than 500 calories a week and there is no way that I come close to throwing away more calories than we eat.
The estimates I see are generally a 25-30% waste which isn't even close to "most of it" and even alot of that "waste" is in the
supply chain and isn't truly wasted but is instead feed to livestock or otherwise salvaged.

You're forgetting that all calories are not equal. American's consume a lot of corn in the form of beef and ethanol. If you include
the amount of corn required to make all the chicken, beef, and ethanol and also add in all the calories that could be grown instead
of tobacco, cotton, etc... then it's possible that the average american consumes considerably more than 5000 "equivalent" calories.

I think it was rockafeller that when asked by a reporter why he didn't distribute his wealth to the poor that he reached in
his pocket and gave the reporter 3 cents and said "here's your share of my wealth". The 1% are extremely rich but you're
right, evenly distributed across the remaining 99% doesn't really help much.

One of the interesting things about food is that no matter how rich or how poor you are you can only consume so much food.
Not for sure the exact range but everyone probably falls within a fairly narrow range of about 1000-5000 calories. Anything
outside of that range and you'll quickly die. Obviously beef consumes more corn than eating the corn directly and a huge
SUV probably consumes more ethanol than eating beef so a small rich family does consume more overall resources but when
it comes to just food the large poor family consumes alot more food. In times of overpopulation we could easily cut out the
beef and ethanol and have plenty of food to feed the world's population but it's doubtful that that would actually happen.

The only exception I know of in the USA is certain companies (like insurance companies, trucking companies, or life guards) that require passing
a certain test or having a particular certification. In almost all legitimate cases you can take the test from multiple 3rd parties and the test or
certification transfers to other similiar type job and even in those cases most of the better companies will pay you to take the test or provide the
training free of charge. I would be very reluctant to work at any job that required you to pay for your own background check, drug test, etc... as in
most cases either these companies are scams or at best extremely cheap.

You can still buy high quality stuff (like car door handles) but there isn't much of a demand for it
because most people aren't willing to pay the premium for the product.
As a raw material, plastic is basically free but a chunk of aluminum is only a few dollars so it's
not the raw materials. It's most likely that the equipment to manufacture aluminum molds is
much more costly than the equipment to manufacture plastic molds because even in places
where there is sufficient demand and competition you still see a significant price jump to get
metal vs plastic.

Ok, a figerprint scanner might be overly complicated but then why did you then proceed to invent
an even more complicated system using picture ids, payment cards, pin numbers, touch screens, etc..
Seems like your system is alot more complicated than a simple finger scan. Kids are notorious
about losing things among other reasons.

The main reason I would object to a fingerprint scan would be because I don't want the fingerprint to
go elsewhere and the precendence of getting kids used to giving away their biometrics.

Our school uses a pin number. In kindergarten they all learn a 6 digit student number then they all
type it in to eat lunch. They don't have problem with stolen pin numbers because it pops up the
name to the cashier who quickly learns the kids names. Might not work in a larger school but even
in a larger school if it said the name out loud then their classmates would easily recognise if it
said a different name.

This is exactly right. Their business model doesn't include tech support. I read somewhere that facebook makes something like
50 cents a month per user. You can't do much tech support for that. They would have have to completely change their business
model. I run a website with a completely different business model and we include a phone number. It's amazing how often we
end up having to diagnose 3rd party software whether it is a virus or a virus scanner that is interfering with our customer's use
of our website. We could tell them "not our problem" but then we would potentially lose them as a customer.

There are also plenty of "dual-use" trails which allow both bikes and pedestrians which don't seem to have a problem
with both coexisting on a single path.