Streaming media is by far the largest consumer of bandwidth.

This has nothing to do with their network infrastructure, and everything to do with the fact that they would like you to pay out of pocket to stream media on their network. With a 10gb monthly limit on my 4 user plan, if I go away on a trip and watch 3-4 netflix movies in HD, I've used up my entire monthly allowance, and then streaming becomes pay-per-view at $10+ per movie.

They are annoyed that they have customers who still have an "unlimited" plan, and they are effectively converting those users to having a usable 5gb plan.

Of course there would be. That's not the point, and not at all what I was talking about. General education ensures that a person at level 1 with aptitude for level 5 under perfect conditions, can get as close as possible to level 5. Or are you having trouble reading?

I'll feed this troll.

Appropriate general education ensures that we all have a chance to get to a certain level. Surely some people are more intelligent than others at baseline, but like most characteristics it needs to be exercised and developed... in the absence of education, it's easy to waste what you were born with, and that's what general education tries to prevent - the waste of intelligence. The other important role of education is to ensure that no matter what your level of education, you receive instruction sufficient to let you integrate into society.

You've got to be kidding me. Almost no drug gets anywhere near that. I'm happy with one log10 of leeway.

Just like bakers, farmers and chefs. They make money off the backs of HUNGRY people. It's time to end for-profit food-making and move to a sane single-payer system. Things should be like the military or government, and they would receive salaries. It's beyond time to remove the incentive of money for good treatment.

See what I did there?

Yeah. GPS road tax... sponsored by the NSA and your local police department that does not track you without a warrant.

At least helicopter daddy and blackhawk mommy give a shit about the Precious. Or do you prefer the absent daddy and welfare mommy? People DO go overboard... but I feel like the pendulum is starting to swing entirely too far the other way.

I AM a physician, and yes, whoever does the demonstration takes quite a bit away from the demonstration by being pretty horrific at suturing... like 2nd year medical student who hasn't practiced bad. If they are going to compare quality of tissue approximation between sutures and their glue, they should probably use proper technique. A plastic surgeon would have laid out 10 sutures or more into the same space, probably in half the time. I am sure there's a senior surgery resident out there who wouldn't mind getting a few hundred bucks to tie a few sutures on camera.

That being said, there are some structures in the body that are very fragile, and difficult to sew. Also, the elderly and the chronically ill have tissues that just fall apart, limiting the usefulness of many surgeries in managing their illness. If we could create seams that don't rely as much on tissue strength, we could probably operate on quite a few more people.

I once attended a seminar by one of the heads of emergency response from the city that's often portrayed as the world's biggest terrorism target. He was going on about communications equipment that is stored away for use after a low-yield nuke detonation. I asked the speaker whether the equipment and storage facilities are shielded against EMP. He asked me what "EMP" is.

I walked out.

There have been plenty of people who argued for banning the use of cash. In many EU countries I believe they already have a ban on cash transactions above 1000 euro.

You don't live in that kind of a society right up until the moment when you do live in that kind of a society, at which point it is rather too late to do anything to prevent it. Trust someone who lived behind the iron curtain - you don't WANT to know what society will be like if we keep heading in that direction. However small those steps are, they are not reversible.

Not anymore. I think we're long past it. We're like Wile E Coyote... we've run off the cliff, just haven't fully realized it yet.

Actually, it's worse than that. What will undoubtedly affect most people is not the power imbalance between the individual and the government as a whole, but the tremendous power imbalance between an individual and the lowest tier public worker that has access to that information. When your local policeman will be browsing your daughter's naked photos (that she took in the shower with her cell phone) while contemplating which would be better to coerce her into sex, her confession about cheating in French class, smoking a joint once a year ago, or going on a date with two different people without them knowing it; and when you find out, and the same person will threaten you with being arrested for anything he could make up he saw in the surveillance, put you on a watch list, destroy your life.... that's when you will realize how far the power separation has gone.

Take it from someone who was brought up in the Soviet Union - even the lowliest civil servant had power, and exercised it. There was no action without bribery, and there was not even a concept of freedom... not because of power coming from the top down, but because the system was so skewed at a traffic cop could pull you over, rob you, rape your wife, then kill you both, and if anyone witnessed it, they'd keep their mouth shut.

Power corrupts.

If you give someone absolute access to your information (even forgetting the concept that the latter will likely mean absolute access to making stuff up), you given them absolute power over you.