Some book I was reading has a story about a pair of suit salemen in the 1930s. When a customer wanted the price of the suit, one would yell the question to the other. The other replied $42, loudly and had to repeat it. The one would then tell the customer âoemy brother says its $20â. The customer would quickly buy the suit, taking advantage his hearing loss.

The Brick use such a variety of dubious sales and payment practices, if I found myself with an unexpected discount, I would be afraid I signed up for some weird loan.

Half of the Brickâ(TM)s customers have no idea what the real price they are paying is.

Have you ever used a mac? Your great spouting of cliches suggest you havenâ(TM)t.
OS X is UNIX(tm) - not UNIX-like, UNIX-wannabe, etc... UNIX. http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3602.htm/
When did the shielding of lower layers become contradictory to UNIX philosophy?
Why do you think it is called a shell?

The point is to sell surveillance equipment; have you been asleep for a decade?
The invested parties - police, politicians, journalists, arms dealers and church leaders all have a problem: Crime is on a long decreasing trend, and nobody knows why!
The police, to justify monstrous budgets, love surveillance gear. On the odd occasion it is useful for something other than catching shady cops, it makes for great TV. Great TV makes for proud citizens; and easy budget cycles. Journalists love great footage, so they can collect paycheques without working for it.
Politicians love police (from a certain distance) since they lend a sheen of goodness to their creepy incompetence.

This makes for easy pickings for the surveillance industry to sell boatloads of worthless crap to incompetents who have been trusted with your money. The last thing they need is some bearded hippy pointing out that it is all a scam.

The earth is a fascinating place, with all its changes over time.
In that 20,000 years civilization has risen from nearly nothing to what we have today, despite us being virtually unchanged. The likely footing for this advancement is stability of food supply, which rests upon the stability of climate.

Tiring, I am sure, but critical none the less.

Google Subterrain was voted out by focus groups. The troglodyte minority was trounced by those smug hipsters with their Earth and Streetview apps.

Was your program dealing with dates or tenses?

They buy Apples to save money?

Cue the frothing idiot tax minions....

I saw a documentary once where people took an hallucinogenic tincture in one. Apparently you might regress into an ape-like form.
Its on my bucket list.

Not throwing money, focussing on the health and wellbeing of the people. In Haiti, that has been a success, due to the hard work of Haitians and international volunteers in providing health care, food, shelter and supplies.

The problem you are alluding to, that money for Haiti has been used by intermediary groups and governments as an in-and-out scheme to launder money and prop-up domestic business failures is quite different. The responsibility for first world corruption should remain in the first world.

Who would have thought? Well I guess WHO, CARE, Red Cross, Oxfam, ...
But, now we know the reason...

Combined with a fear of the sorts of people who like to arm themselves.

If I carried a condom with me everywhere, I would eventually feel depressed about not having an opportunity to use it. Would this nagging contrast between my imaginary magnetism and actual prowess change my behaviour? Would I take, or worse seek out, riskier opportunities to avoid facing the grim reality: I really have no need whatsoever to carry a condom with me.

U S A ! U S A ! U S A !

- need an emoticon for fist pump

When it is fully understood, it will be on the History channel. That is the nature of difficult problems. As it stands, the IR absorption by CO2 seems pretty well understood. The amount we have released is very well understood. Shy of one of the other variables changing dramatically, the course is pretty well set.
Other variables will change. There may be more volcanoes, throwing more co2 into the atmosphere. But there is nothing we can do to stop that, so all we have done then is to worsen the problem.
The sun might start providing less energy, or the soot from more volcanoes reflect more of that energy away from the earth. In that case, we may have thwarted a disaster with our CO2 pollution.

Standing by until we are 100% positive, ignoring all the best information we can collect, with a backup plan of hoping for an unspecified global event to save us is an intriguing strategy. Are there any situations in which it works?

We are getting rid of that ice as fast as we can.

Is there anything your software canâ(TM)t do?