Because children never lose objects, even medium-sized ones. If Mommy is sick, the last thing the child will be thinking is "where did I put my green fun phone?"

The option of a panic button that is firmly attached somewhere (or, better yet, a panic button in every room, firmly attached) won't get lost, and the kid can be taught easily enough to hunt down the nearest one and smack it repeatedly.

I suppose you could strap the phone to the kid somehow, but it has to come off at some point so it's still not as reliable. You could combine the two ideas, and have the phone attached to a fixed object and easy to get to.

There's building off of others' work, and then there's just adding a veneer.

Using your scenario, what Elementary OS seems to do is to take a bread product created by someone else, already wrapped, and take the bread out to put in their own nicer-looking wrapper. They don't claim to make the bread, true, but what they add is a miniscule part of the overall product. They then say that people can pay the same price as the originally-wrapped bread, but it would be good to pay more. This is the veneer. (Incidentally, this is how a lot of store brands work, but the store brand is instead cheaper than the name brand.)

If they were building off of someone else's work they would use the bread to make a sandwich they sold or to make other derivatives with it (croutons, offer bags of crumbs to people at parks for duck feeding, some food-art project).

Not that the veneer is necessarily bad; if someone feels that it offers more value over the original product and would like to pay more, fine and dandy.

Yes, but you have to have substantial capital to use as influence in the commodities market and perhaps a connection to some mercenaries in an oil-rich country, primarily in the middle east.

Those in power all cry "Think of the children!",
None of them will cry "Think of the children's future!"...

Considering how much our federal government has tried to extend its power into other countries, I wouldn't be surprised if they start flying SWAT teams overseas or cobble them up from soldiers stationed at bases in the area.

If you can truly gain good gut flora from simply licking things (the idea sounds sketchy, but I don't know that it's impossible), then I would think there would be companies are paid by people simply to shuttle them around to where very fit people work (supermodel studios, sport start locker rooms) immediately after the fit people are done working and have them lick any and everything they can.

(Someone follows behind and gives the place a good cleaning to make sure a supermodel can't get the fat bacteria when she licks something.)

I don't understand why companies don't implement "status" blocks that a user can implement if they wish. It's pretty simple: An account has a basic status that depends on a few different criteria, but the main one is age. An account that is less than 30 days (and/or less than 10 posts/tweets/whatever) is a "newbie", between 30 and 90 days is a "beginner", etc. Once these guidelines are in place, give the users tools to set limits on interactions with these accounts. Someone who is the target of heavy harassment can completely block interaction with accounts less than 30 days old.

In the case of twitter, this means that someone like your prophetess can't just whip up a new account when their current one is blocked. This won't completely negate the trolls, as the dedicated ones can have accounts on standby that accumulate days, or someone can create accounts with the purpose of selling them to trolls, but it does greatly reduce the troll's impact with little effort on the part of the target. This does have the potential for collateral damage, of course, and that's something the target will have to weigh when deciding to implement such a block. If you want to get nuanced, there could be exceptions, like accounts less than 30 days that have at least five followers who have existed for more than a year won't be blocked. Twitter also tracks retweets, which give another possible venue.

Steam has a similar problem, with malware creating 0-day, 0-level, private accounts, friending everyone, and those who accept get a message to a virus that tries to hack their Steam account, spread the message, and transfer all your items to another account. It's annoying to block these accounts from inviting me every day, and it wouldn't have to be if I could put a limit on who could send invites ("must have >=1 game", "must be >=Steam Level 1", etc.)

Yes, that was my thought when I first read of the report, as well. (The Great Horse Manure Crisis, for those who don't know.) I don't think we'll get to the predictions of this report, because something will change drastically due to our road there. For horse poop, it was cars that didn't need to poop (well, not in the same way...) and didn't die on the streets to be left there (okay, that does happen, but they don't usually attract flies and vermin.)

I don't know what it will be for our congestion problem. Possibilities I see:
- Gas quadrupling in price
- Vastly improved public transportation
- Mass installation of fiber, making telecommuting or just satellite offices a lot more enticing
- An epidemic that wipes out half of all commuters, resetting the clock
- Discarding the idea of a 9-5 job, allow people to vary their work times and spread out commuting more
- Lowering the work week from 40 hours to 20, so people don't have to commute as much
- Average pay catching up with inflation, severely decreasing the need for a two-income home

While I agree in whole, there is one massive, massive difference that separates a corporation and school (and brings school a bit more in line with the GP's simile of prison): Ability to jump away.

When you're in school, especially in less-dense areas, you're stuck. Unless your parents have money and can send you to private/boarding school or have the time and ability to homeschool you, you probably have one and only one option. Even if you have multiple options, your parents have to do the process on your behalf, and even then the requirements to change schools might be beyond your grasp (and require there to be space at the other school.) So you're forced to go to the same school five days a week, where you know you'll get the same tormentors and same teachers and it becomes a minor form of hell. You know you'll get picked on, so you fear stepping through that door each and every day. It's psychological torment that doesn't end when the school day does. (I'm speaking from experience.)

With a corporation, your relative ability to jump appears infinite. The only absolutes that hold you there are A) no financial cushion to tide you over while job hunting and/or B) contractual obligations. Short of those, the only obstacle to leaving is yourself. Even if you don't change jobs, and you have tormentors at work, this does significantly less damage to your psyche because you have that option to walk away. Though you may never use it, having that emergency exit makes it a lot easier to deal with the day-to-day bullshit.

plus, could you imagine if every website was paywalled?

I can imagine various micropayment services popping up, where a user pays the company $X dollars and a site enrolled with it gets a small cut for every hit the user generates on their site.[1]

I can also imagine the cries of a thousand thousand people as their websites dedicated to clickbait and content re-posting suddenly go up in flames. And I will be there to hand out marshmallows and sticks to all who want to watch...

[1] Some of this is already happening, with things like Kickstarter/IndieGoGo/FundMe and Patreon leading the way. The former focus on large influxes for projects, and having another influx for each project or to continue a project past its original sunset; the latter focuses on small amounts at a steady pace, with users paying $1 and up per month to fund who/whatever and for access to supporter goodies. If ad revenue dies, one of these companies will have something out shortly to do the same for websites in general.

I used to have a firstname.middleinitial.lastname@gmail address, which I used exclusively for business correspondence... until some idiot in West Virginia started putting it as his e-mail address. I got a few details about him I shouldn't have, and eventually got his snail-mail address and sent him a short letter telling him to stop it. He may have (especially after I responded to an order receipt saying I didn't order anything and the guy used the wrong address, and they cancelled the order with the reason "ACCOUNT HACKED", lol), but by that time I was getting a ton of spam due to this idiot and abandoned the address.

I now use a firstname.lastname@{customdomain}.com address for business. Since it's my domain and mine alone, there's not a risk of that, and I still give a professional air for having something "above" a gmail.com account.

If that is truly the case (and what you say is something I agree with, but have no empirical proof to offer), then if the goal is to improve gender equality in a domain it would be best to focus on sub-sections that speak most to the qualities of the gender that turn them away from the discipline at large.

If females tend to stay away from programming because they are more social than males, that makes them an excellent fit as someone who gathers requirements. They need a good grasp on programming but don't need to live and breathe it, and their socializing allows them to much better get an idea of what the client wants versus what the client actually writes down.

Similarly, if males are about more individual/small group things, then in the domain of teaching they would be best doing AP classes that have a small headcount or tutoring that is one-on-one. In fact, a large complaint about public schools in America is that they leave behind those who take longer to grasp something while also frustrating those who breeze through the subject (which can lead to the student acting out). Focusing male teachers thus helps to solve that problem, and female teachers take on the larger classes, which tend to be more social (and having students interact can make learning far easier than if they have to sit and read or quietly do problems.)

(All of this assumes there are no other barriers to either domain for the given gender, of course, which we all know is not the case.)

Sounds pretty paranoid, I thought all of those guns in the US were supposed to be making you safer than Australia.

The best way to survive a bad situation, guns or no, is to avoid it in the first place.

Has the ACLU ever actively worked against gun ownership, though? They interpret the 2nd as applying to government-controlled military, not individual rights, but I don't know that they've tried enforce gun control. Here's a case where they defended a gun-rights supporter, though because of the violation of his civil liberties and not because of his firearms.

It's also a matter of domain rather than interest; where the ACLU doesn't take cases that could violate the 2nd, the NRA steps in. Why should the ACLU spend its resources on a battle the NRA can fight?

Similarly, I haven't heard much about the NRA working to protect free speech or the right to proper legal representation outside of fire-arm-related cases...

This one isn't too hard; the best way to "fix" this is stop using Verizon and supporting their horrible company. I had them for a few years and always had excellent cell service, but everything else sucked balls. I switched to T-Mobile's pay-as-you-go plan and have saved a ton of money without supporting the cellular devil.

(I realize that there are contracts etc., but seriously, if you can you should drop them like a hot potato.)