Can you swap a male head onto a female body?

The possibilities are endless...

With reason, you're correct. I just remember posting something on here about how I was excited to take my daughter to see The Hobbit when it came out, and some guy basically accused me of being a bad parent for not reading the book with her instead. AFAICT it's usually the people who have no experience raising kids whatsoever who shout the loudest about how terrible a job other people are doing.

(Personal side-rant: raising kids (properly) is the hardest fucking job you will ever have, period. And that's even when you have a reasonably intelligent and normal kid. You'll be second-guessing and stewing over many decisions you make, when it comes to school, to discipline, just to the way you phrase answers to certain questions. And just when you think you've got it nailed, your kid ages by another year and a whole new set of issues enter the picture. That's why I get annoyed when people without kids get all up in my or other people's shit about it.)

Anyway, we cool? Starbucks at 5, lattes on me?

Let me grab some popcorn so I can watch all the people who don't have kids tell the rest of us parents how we should be doing it. Haha

Anyway, we don't have TV in our house so I let my kid watch a bit of Youtube now and then. She gets maybe two hours a week, maybe more. The frustrating thing has always been the "Youtube Wormhole" where any number of various suggested videos will pop up, and clicking through them can lead to you some odd places, as others have mentioned. It will be nice to know that there is at least SOME sort of "quality control" going on to help keep my kid going through the wormhole.

As for ads, it's all about teaching your kid what they are from an early age. My kid hates ads almost as much as I do and hits that "skip ad" button with surgical precision when it comes up. It sucks that she's growing up in the advertising age but without TV, and living in a pretty rural area, I think the occasional Youtube ad won't completely destroy her ability to resist consumerist urges.

...an inspiring piece on NPR I hear a while back, about a little boy or girl who'd lost his or her hand or finger or some other limb, and instead of being forced to spend $20,000 on some traditional prosthesis, was able to 3D-print the prosthesis for something like $20. Even better was that since the kid was growing, the required parts could be reprinted with ease to match his/her development. It was really inspiring and there are probably hundreds of millions of people around the world who could benefit from such tech -- I mean, *actually* benefit, because they can actually *afford* it.

Now, when I read articles like this and statements about "100 billion dollar IP losses" all I can think of is, fuck, are we really going to let intellectual property law squash the awesome potential for advances 3D printing gives us across a wide range of applications? I can only hope that there will be a significant movement of "open-source' designers who allow their product templates to be downloaded and printer for free, but the pessimist in me sees this as another opportunity for patent trolls and megacorporations to fuck everyone over and profit in the process.

Sorry for the slightly "jaded teenager" esque post, but anyway.

Go on, tell us what you REALLY think!

Many if not most people I know probably don't care *that* much about their browsing data being collected (the "I'm not doing anything wrong so I have nothing to hide" crowd). I think a good section of the population will just say "cheap? Sign me up!". AT&T probably stands to make much more from advertising than from the $30/month added fee, so they want to drive people to the advertising-based model to the greatest extent possible. The more expensive option is simply a disincentive for people -- they see a higher price and are forced to ask if their privacy is actually worth $30 a month extra, and many people will say no.

AT&T wins either way, unless the competing ISPs (I have to suppress a laugh when writing "competing ISPs" at all, much less using the plural form) can offer completely private service at a competitive price.

Consumers are actually that dumb. There are a lot of people out there who will gladly let every iota of their personal information be sucked up in exchange for a cheaper price.

You're probably right at this stage in the game, but I don't think that's the ultimate trajectory the tech is taking. Face it -- most people don't particularly care, or care very little, about how their data is being used.

*Very* few people commute on the shinkansen in Japan, and the distances you're talking about would run around $200 USD per day. I can't think of a single person I knew during my 10 years living in the country who commuted on the shinkansen. If such a commute became necessary a company would just foot the bill for a small apartment and relocate the employee.

Commuting by car is what is actually rare in Japan. In such an urbanized country, with such a robust public transport system, nearly everyone takes the train, or the subway, or the bus. Only in the boondocks do you find the majority of people commuting by car.

Two hour commutes on NORMAL trains, however, are not rare.

Gotta keep that prison-industrial complex well-oiled somehow, right?

Isn't it amazing how people will completely ignore the relative and essential merits of products and literally go deeply into debt just to buy something just because it is new?

Don't take this personally, but can you say "first world problems?"

Pardon me as I adjust my tinfoil hat, but convenience isn't the ultimate goal. I imagine the ultimate goal is to capture as much data as possible for a variety of uses.

Organizations can already access a wealth of data from mobile devices, enough to basically tell exactly what you're doing at any given time during your day. Unfortunately this doesn't work when you come home and plop your phone down on the counter -- when you're home, a great deal of your activity goes off-radar. Now just imagine if there was a way to track everything you were doing *inside* your home as well... hmmm...

And a little Peachtree USB to optical I run into the amp's DAC. Cost a total of about $1800 US. I buy CDs and rip them to FLAC; I would love to get a nice turntable and build a vinyl collection, but once you start down that road there's no going back. I'm content with being a poor man's audiophile.

...are also probably two car payments, a mortgage, and a credit card payment per month in debt. Half the people I know throw away many magnitudes more money in interest on their debt each month than I could hope to spend on lottery tickets.