Okay, just close your eyes and it will all go away.

I mean, maybe you could say that it's African in that it is most prevalent in countries in Africa. But it is significant in Iran and Iraq, as well. You can check out this link I painstakingly researched: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

I would assume it means you need to have less stock on hand to do any particular job. Less money tied up in material, less money wasted because you aren't selling off the scrap for less than you paid for it.

That's what decriminalization means, and it only deals with half of the problem. 2 possible outcomes:

1) Drop in addicts is such that selling drugs is no longer profitable. Drug cartels go home, take up another profession.

or

2) The number of addicts drops by some percentage, leaving the other percentage of the addicts still buying from and still ultimately empowering some very undesirable people. In this case, you get to endlessly continue the war on drugs.



Or you could legalize, as in, make drugs actually legal, to buy, sell, use, make - and affordable to the point at which cartels can't make the kind of money they do now. If we're lucky, number 1 above takes care of this for us; if we're not lucky, the drugs remain a profit maker for cartels and the like.

Sure, it's only $8. But by that logic, everybody should just have Netflix whether they use it or not. GP likely has other things competing for his attention, probably including cable tv, at which point its a reasonable question of how much is too much.
There is a point at which media competing for your attention reaches saturation. After that, you can keep buying into services, but the time you spend on any one goes down and the overall value is diluted (unless you have some specific need from each service).

I would say the bigger problem right now is that people don't care enough, period. Your average person is going to want to use whatever is cheaper, or whatever they have now, and isn't aware enough to demand something better and isn't going to want to pay for it. Existing products and services don't have a lot of incentive to improve because the customers don't care enough. As long as competition keeps the playing field level, as long as noone tightens up their security, nobody has to spend money on something that doesn't directly generate revenue.

Consumers aren't going to drive companies to improve. It's going to take competitors trying to one up each other, to offer better service at the same price, to make people want to use their product. Until then, it doesn't matter that the consumers are infecting their computers and giving scammers their login information; the NSA is just going to be using their dirty backdoor tricks to get what they want (plus whatever exploits they copy from the scammers).

Once you have the scammers and the NSA back on a level playing field, then you can get back to status quo where the user is the biggest unseen threat.

I've been thinking along these lines for a few years now. Make the drugs legal, regulate them, and possibly even have the government sell them. Use taxes on drugs to fund rehab programs. Give sex workers a way to get out from drug induced slavery. Cut the head off the cocaine cartel by growing it here or importing it from someone else. Take a blow to the coffers of street gangs as well as more organized criminals.

The obvious number one downside is the potential for an increase in number of addicts. I never really had the answer for how to counter that. Social stigma? Government monitoring program on those who buy from the "drug store" that encourages rehabilitation? But maybe if you make the harder drugs extra affordable in an outpatient setting like you describe, it offers a way out for the addicts, while making it inconvenient for dabblers and college kids to get into the really nasty stuff. You could still sell (and tax, of course) the less addictive/destructive drugs, as you would alcohol and tobacco.

And bonus points if this reduces violent crime rates by people trying to get money to fuel their need.

I'm going to go with sad.

To this day I still do not understand what makes this such a difficult and complex issue to tackle.

I don't see why it can't be as simple as:
Spam call comes in, I dial a report number, telecom system flags the call and the origin. After 10 reports, 100 reports, that number is blocked. Further outgoing calls from the number are directed to a message to contact a fraud line to get the number reinstated. The longer a number has belonged to a legitimate company, the more immunity it is granted by the system to prevent abuses from angry consumers. The shorter the number has been in service, the more scrunity it is under.

Are the robocallers really able to shield their call origins from the telecoms? That just seems like such a ridiculous concept.

We had two articles touching on this in recent months, so: Singularity or no singularity? Will AI achieve consciousness/sentience in our lifetime/ever, why or why not, and what is your take on the implications of such a thing if you do think it is reasonably possible?

Cowardly little shit and major balls don't often go together.

Also, rouge agent steals your makeup, rogue agent steals your data.

A data recovery expert would be eager to tell you that a proper data shred is not done with zeroes alone...

I think you're looking at it from the wrong angle. For general purpose phone use, encryption is reasonable. But for the purposes of permanent deletion, why rely on encryption when you could just shred the data and be done with it once and for all?

The thing that gets me is that they concluded that a person with more positive items in their feed is more likely to post positive things.
This does nothing to evaluate the actual mood of the person - they might be posting positive things only to compete, or to give the appearance of being positive.

So have the plant operators put the extra energy in some batteries and stop crying about it already. In a 100% renewable system, you're going to need battery/fuel capacity for when the sun is down and when the wind doesn't blow. Store the energy when it's cheap and plentiful, don't run your plant full throttle, and move staff over to monitor energy storage. If there is really such a surplus, make hydrogen, get in bed with VW for a fuel cell vehicle, do something. I really can't believe that the best they can come up with is to pay someone to take it from them.

A lot of chinese food isn't real chinese food. It's Americanized chinese food. Though I share your sentiment that Changs and Pei Wei seem to turn the "chinese" food experience into something else, and not in a good way.