You must be confusing P&G with PG&E.

In California, PG&E is a utility company and its business is to sell electricity.

Procter & Gamble, on the other hand, owner of the Duracell Powermat brand, is a branding company. Its business is to grow and sell brands at huge premiums, even if it means it has to massively overpay for preferential shelving placement in retail/coffee establishments.

Because make no mistake, Starbucks is getting paid for this. The real patron here is Proter & Gamble.

When I'm mixing languages, and I have to type accents, I type much faster and much more accurately on my phone than on my PC.

That's only because the virtual keyboard on my phone has mined my gmail archive, my sms history, my twitter posts, and my facebook posts, that it knows what I'm going to type before I type it. And here, I'm not just talking about word completion, or accent completion, my phone has enough data on me that if I start a sentence a particular way, it not only knows enough to complete the word I'm typing, but it also knows the next sequence of words I'm going to type next.

I'd argue that what you're talking about still represents a self-selected group of parents.

A single parent working two jobs for instance may not be there when a child has a question in need of an answer. And a single parent with little income and little education may opt to buy a television and an xbox simply to keep their child occupied and staying still.

Clearly, you haven't travelled much.

The blacks you find in Europe for instance are usually from the very elite of their home countries. Barring an historical reason, the rule of thumb is that the more difficult it is to immigrate into a particular country for a particular ethnic population that is far away, only the most connected, only the most educated, and only the richest out of all of them will be able to get in.

Not that I disagree with your main thesis, but I'd like to add one more point about Asian Americans.

Asian Americans are a self-selected group. Asian Americans represent a tiny fraction of all the Asians who have succeeded in crossing the Pacific ocean and successfully gotten into America. This makes them quite different from other populations who just had to cross a desert to get here.

For example, I have a Korean friend who boasts about his first generation family doing janitorial work and doing back breaking landscaping work to raise and successfully put all their children through some of the very top Universities in the United States, but if you probe his story just a little bit, you'll find that his family back in the days before they immigrated used to be part of the very elite of his home country. And yes, his family did lose every material possession coming to the United States and they did have to start over from scratch, which is no small feat, but at the very least, we have to admit that having made it this far and immigrating into the United States, his family was certainly not ordinary to begin with.

The procedure will be that the student is blocked from entering the main entrance and required to report to the nurse's office within 45 seconds for mandatory drug testing.

Until the result of the drug test comes back from the lab, the nurse will issue the student with a pre-scanned animal eye in a jar to act as a temporary key. Also the kid in the wheelchair, the student with a bad case of cross-eyes, and the tenured Professor with macular degeneration, will be given their own permanent animal eye in a jar for accessibility reasons.

Everybody else, they will just do as they normally do when security gets too difficult, and they'll just leave the windows unlocked and the back doors propped open, just to make sure that they can come back into their building/dormitory, and/or to give a way for their own friends to get in (thus nullifying any kind of security against unknown outsiders).

Good luck with that. Canada is one of the senior partners of the ECHELON program (a program that mandates the exchange of information).

And even then, the ECHELON program isn't abiding by any law, whether they be Canadian laws, British laws, or even US laws.

I agree with you. The average person probably doesn't care, but that doesn't mean he/she shouldn't care. Privacy is important to everyone, even if you're one of those persons who mistakenly believes that you have nothing to hide.

Divorces, custody disputes, false accusations, lovers' quarrels, medical sexual history, medical history, dating, underage alcohol consumption/sexting/sex, stalkers, job interviews, job-related credit checks and/or background checks (depending on the type of job and your local laws), salary negotiations, career promotions, college/school applications, car accidents, car insurance penalties, red-lining, profiling, red light cameras, speed cameras, identity thefts, arbitrary tax laws, IRS audits/penalties (if you don't live in the US, replace IRS with the relevant tax/customs authorities), collection agencies, filesharing, porn, sexual orientation, tethering, rooting your own device, netflix/hulu-specific throttling, recycling fines, arbitrary electricity/water consumption fines/penalties, housing association violations, neighborhood/city zoning/building violations, cigarette smoking violations, dog leash/breed violations, contrived political redistricting, poll tampering, etc.

And it is true, that as individuals, we may not care that much about each particular privacy-related issue, but as a whole and as an aggregate, we should care, because every single one of us is impacted by at least some of these issues and consequences.

I have a 3D TV without the glasses, but I still don't like it. I have it turned off by default.

If any of the other 5% of households are like mine, they will have it turned off by default as well.

Thankfully, help is on its way.

You mean when BT was privatized? What are "M&P grades" for those of us not from the UK?

That wasn't what I was thinking. I'm just surprised slashdoters still go to Church anymore.

Churches are just like movie theaters, they're an anachronism in this day and age, where you can watch sermons on youtube and paypal your way out of hell.

Watching an artsy movie by yourself during a senior Tuesday early matinee doesn't count.

If you want to experience what some of us are talking about. Drive to a bad neighborhood on a late Friday night, and go see the most idiotic blockbuster action movie you can find. It also helps if the manager of the movie theater makes minimum wage and there is extremely high employee turnover.

...and an artificial bolt of lightning that fries the offender by entering through his cell phone, going through his ear canal, and exiting his body through the rectum.

Those guys are idiots. This kind of PR is not cheap. They're spending all their newfound investment money on slashadvertisments and huffingtonadvertisements before they even made a properly functioning web site.