"Are they looking for keywords to be able to sell additional products, or partner with other sellers?"

Maybe, maybe not. Part of the issue is that we don't know. Worse, they could make a decision retroactive: Even if they aren't doing so now, they could decide to in future and process the logs of previous conversations. What we have here is a technology with a strong potential for abuse, and a clear commercial incentive for abuse. This should raise some alarms. The solution should be to set up some means - perhaps techological, perhaps legal - to preemptively block such abuse.

Suggested solution:
1. Learn digital signal processing.
2. Learn linquistics.
3. Learn advanced statistical modeling.
4. Learn machine learning.
5. Create an open-source voice recognition library of comparable or greater accuracy.

Or maybe a better plan:
1. Contribute money to hire someone who has done 1-4 to help improve the libraries that already exist - I can find a few on google, but they clearly aren't good enough.

It's nessicary at the current level of sophistication and viable price point. If computational capacity were cheaper, it'd be possible to put more of the doll's systems onboard. Maybe not everything, as any half-reasonable conversation is going to need a huge knowledge engine behind it, but the voice recognition at least, and some of the simpler query processing.

This is something of a trend in TV right now. More people streaming and using DVRs to skip has lessened the value of traditional advertising. Producers responded by turning to alternative forms of advertising - mostly product placement.

Also, men are reluctant to go into childcare because a man showing interest in that field is immediately suspected of intent to molest.

I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA had some secret 'blackmail files' for use in that situation. Everyone has something to hide if you dig deep enough, and the NSA knows how to dig. One thing that this whole subject has taught us is that just because something sounds like the paranoid ramblings of a consiracy theorist nut doesn't mean it can't also be true: The government really is reading your email and monitoring your phone calls, and they really have collected information on the pornograhy-browsing habbits of political figures outside of the US with intent to discredit those who are hostile to US interests. Is is that much of a stretch to think they would do the same to their own government? It would be easy enough to justify as the patriotic thing to do - removing from power a figure who, however well-intentioned, would be exposing the country to terrorist attack or even invasion.

His assumption was wrong in this case, but it is still a valid heuristic: The majority of US voters are consistant in their support for candidates of one party. They might grumble a lot about not really approving of the candidate their supported party puts up for them to vote for, but they'll vote for the party regardless. Voters without a strong loyalty to one party or the other are in the minority - and votes cast for anyone who doesn't have an R or a D after their name are effectively negligable in all congressional and presidential elections, though they may have some presence at the state level.

It's one of the flaws in the US political system: If you dislike the Ds but dislike the Rs more, the only sensible thing to do is to vote for the Ds in order to help keep the Rs out. The individual candidate isn't that important because advancement within a party is dependant upon alignment to party position, so there's a very strong incentive for individual politicians to vote always on party lines - effectively the individual serves only as a proxy by which the party may cast votes.

I grew up in the bubble, and knew I'd be good with computers - but I assumed that with programming being such a glamorous role, everyone would be getting into it. I aimed for a duller tangential field in networking.

My career still flopped, though. I'm too risk-averse, refuse to leave my very stable but low-paying entry-level job and try to move up the ranks because I fear I'd screw up horribly somehow.

I should have clarified that I was limiting the discussion to commercial uses. Commercial science means things like weather monitoring and resource surveys - things you do in LEO. There's absolutely nothing beyond geostationary that pays for itsself - that's why those missions you mention all had to be paid for with someone's tax money.

I'm not sure exactly what commercial uses there are for really heavy launches. Comms and science do not need to be so large. Only thing I can think of is a space hotel, and that's not going to be commercially viable unless you can bring the human launch cost down far enough for the moderately rich to afford a holiday there, rather than just the obscenely rich. There aren't enough billionaires around to constitute a sufficient market.

Before you start trying to warn us:
- The outside area has very little in the way of animal life, and almost all the 4-nitroaniline should be used up. The very small quantity released will break down safely.
- We're ordering filter mask too. Probably overkill considering how small a quantity we are using, but better safe than sorry.
- I've read the MSDS.

I know this stuff is toxic, precautions are being taken. There's no real purpose to this: It's just for fun and youtube hits.

Tricky, but no more so than the other steps of meth-making.

Chemistry supplies can be hard these days. I've just delivered some 4-nitroaniline to a friend, but I had to order it from some dodgy ebay seller in Ukraine - next we order the sulfuric acid. High-speed camera is ready to film. I think you can guess what we're planning to put on youtube.

Yes, we have a place out of doors and gloves to handle it - I know that stuff is really toxic.

You'd face objections from the family: They want their dead returned to them without any holes or gore. That's one of the main reasons fireing squad was abolished.

Justice has several purposes. Deterrance, protection, rehabilitation and 'retribution' - providing comfort to the victims. The problem is that there is another very negative element too: Collective vengence. The social desire to see those who offend society made to suffer. Worse, this can be counterproductive to the rehabilitation role: Programs aimed at educating prisoners are widely seen as 'soft on crime,' while there is widespread support for any policy that increases the difficulty released prisoners face in finding housing and employment. In large part due to this attitude, the prison system in many countries has turned into an industrial-scale system for taking minor offenders as input and turning them into hardened criminals with gang connections who, upon release, find themselves effectively unemployable and thus with a strong incentive to turn to serious crime.

The deterrance aspect only works for crimes in which the offender knows beforehand that they have a significent chance of getting caught.

Because it's too humane. The condemned doesn't just die peacefully, they die after a brief euphoria. For many people this offends their sense of justice: It feels like an evil person has gotten away because they didn't suffer sufficient pain to balance out their crime.