every 5th text was silently dropped :

Every 5th? Wow, that's good. With my T-Mobile service, most texts from AT&T are dropped. I suspect it is because my number was originally a Pacific Bell number and somewhere within AT&T is a database that still shows my number as one that is with AT&T.

Why in particular would it play U2? It ought to play whatever you were last listening to. It's not going to choose U2 (or anything else) on its own.

In the late 1800's sure.
But they were still bloodletting then.
And just discovering that keeping germs out of wounds/surgical sites/people would help them heal better/faster.
So, I don't know how much Doctors prescribing tobacco in that era means. :-)

My mom had a Dr recommend cigarettes to her. ( 1950's when she was a teen. )
So she would be "cool" and less anxious.
So, basically, irrational.

The reason we have ISIS is because we defeated Saddam Hussein without thinking much about what would come next.

I heard one theory that ISIS is really a creation of Bashar al-Assad. Before ISIS was around, the West was all for regime change in Syria. Now we are effectively supporting the dictatorship in Syria.

You are assuming rationality on the part of people.

Knock that off.

If people were rational, no one would ever start smoking.
Assume it is harmless. ( It's not, but for argument )
The benefit is non-existent to negligible at best, and the cost is too much.
Why would anyone start?

is "Race to the Bottom", not "competitive workforce". It's a matter of perspective really. You're one of the lucky winners. If you had the wind knocked out of you by a few more rounds of offshoring though things might turn out differently for you.

I didn't say humanity was going away. I said that a substantial amount of the population was going to be stuck living in abject poverty for 50/60 years until our economy somehow catches up and finds new jobs for them. This is what happened when the Industrial revolution hit. A whole lot of completely unnecessary Human suffering...

In my experience, it won't.

I reported to a small non-profit that their list of email addresses had leaked. I knew this because I used a unique address when registering with the site and I later started getting SPAM at that address. It might not have been a hack that caused my address to leak, but, irrespective of the means by which my email address had leaked, there should have been an investigation.

I reported it to the CEO, who passed it to the IT head, who basically could not get his head around the idea that there might be a problem.

it pretty much _did_ happen. There was a 60 year period during the industrial revolution when millions were put out of work and tossed to the wayside. There's a reason why Luddites existed. They weren't forward think people. They were Luddites for Pete's sake. They were living in the misery caused by a lack of jobs in their day.

The industrial revolution caused massive unemployment, and it took the economy 60 years to catch up and start creating new jobs. If you lived after that period things got better as new tech created new jobs. If you lived during that period and weren't born wealthy life was Nasty, Brutish and Short. I'd like to skip that cycle this time.

Oh and there's one other thing: we're better at automation this time. So there's a good time the cycle will last a _lot_ longer. e.g. instead of 60 years of poverty we might be looking at 100, 200 or more while we wait for Star Trek style replicators and massive population declines to fix things.

All of those would matter if you were trying to figure out *why* it evolved the way it did. That's not what they're doing, so none of that matters. It's the difference between the fact of evolution and the theory that explains it.

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If I don't respond to replies it's not that I'm ignoring them, it's because for some reason Slashdot doesn't permit it. I also can't change my sig, thus this tacked-on text.

If someone walks into a store that has a sign saying "No bare feet", they're not going to get served.

Oh, is that what that means? Damn. I had always assumed they were simply out of stock. I don't know what I was thinking.

Right, but the conversation that's being had around this is what are we going to do with all these people that we don't need anymore. Sure, we can say that the economy will catch up, but that might take 50, 60 years. In the meantime we'll have 2 or 3 lost generations who live in terrifying abject poverty. It'd be nice if this time around we did something about that...

They knew. Datapoint, 1944 movie "Thirty Seconds over Tokyo", cigarettes are referred to as coffin nails in carrier deck conversation between Van Johnson and Robert Mitchum.

I don't run red lights, or blow through stop signs.
I will make a left turn from the left lanes, as that is fitting, proper and legal ( where I am, anyway ).
Otherwise, I keep to the right and make sure I am predictable, and try to be courteous to all.

It is still dangerous.

I agree completely that a cyclist should obey the rules of the road. It annoys me when they don't, as a cyclist, as car drivers seem to take a "all cyclists misbehave, so I can run them over" attitude. But that is all window dressing. Riding a bike in traffic is dangerous because automobile operators, in general, don't look, don't see, and don't understand ( excluding a few that do, and a few that seem actively malicious*. ) I would expect you would know that from riding a motorcycle, I have noticed that cars seem to act the same there.

* I am alive today thanks to ( short list, there are others A, 2 metal posts I could ride between, but the car trying to run me down could not, and B, a curb that I hopped up that the car chasing me was not willing to try to get up ).
Note, just ridding my bike where I was allowed to.

The problem, even with a spinal cord cut intentionally and carefully, is that the surgeon has no way to know what connections in the head go to what connections in the body.

It sounds like he's simply hoping it all sorts itself out somehow. Or maybe that the brain could eventually remap everything. Seems unlikely. Especially within two years.