Seriously, most of the 'waste' that is sent out are great sources of resources. Gold, Iron, Plastic, Copper, etc. Yes, there is Mercury and Lead in those, but that can be dealt with easily. We have various deep mines, well below water tables, in which the pure mercury and lead can be easily contained.

Australia has the right attitude of using Robotics to part out items.

Sure, if you want to kill someone, you're right. I think the argument against drones is that if you push a button and someone dies on the other side of the Earth and you didn't have to go to war to do that ... well, fast forward two years and you're just sitting there hitting that button all day long. "The quarter solution" or whatever you want to call it is still resulting in deaths and, as we can see here, we're not 100% sure whose deaths that button is causing. Even if we study the targets really really hard.

No, no we don't. You might say "Al Queda hit us now we must hunt them to the ends of the Earth" but it doesn't mean that diplomacy and sovereignty just get flushed down the toilet. Those country borders will still persist despite all your shiny new self-appointed world police officer badges. Let me see if I can explain this to you: If David Koresh had set off bombs in a Beijing subway and then drones lit up Waco like the fourth of July and most of the deaths were Branch Davidians, how would you personally feel about that? Likewise, if Al Queda is our problem and we do that, we start to get more problems. Now, that said, it's completely true that Pakistan's leadership has privately condoned these strikes while publicly lambasting the US but that's a whole different problem.

Yep, think of the children -- that's why we should use drone strikes, right? Look, war means death. Death doesn't discriminate and neither does war. If you're hung up on it being okay to take a life the second that male turns 18, you're pretty much morally helpless anyway. War is bad. Drone strikes are bad. There's enough bad in there for them both to be bad. This isn't some false dichotomy where it's one or the other. It's only one or the other if you're hellbent on killing people.

News flash: you can argue against drone strikes and also be opposed to war at the same time. It does not logically follow that since you're against drone strikes, you're pro war and pro killing children. That's the most unsound and absurd flow of logic I've seen in quite some time.

No. That was deregulation combined with businesses illegally colluding together.

So you're saying everyone knew she was lying about her charity donations as well? Or was it only the charities that knew that? From the article:

So you're saying the 300,000 downloads are by people that knew they were downloading the app architected by a liar? And they were paying $3.79 to Apple and this liar for a recipe app that contain recipes that someone lied about helping her cure cancer? And you're saying that everyone at Apple that featured her app on the Apple Watch knew they were showing a snake oil app on their brand new shiny device? And that the people at Penguin did all their fact checking on any additional information this cookbook might contain about Belle Gibson's alleged cancer survival? And that everybody involved in these events know society's been parading around a fucking liar and rewarding her with cash money while she basically capitalizes on a horrendous disease that afflicts millions of people worldwide ... that she never had?

No, this is not the same as "water is wet" and it needs to be shown that holistic medicine is temporarily propped up on a bed of anecdotal lies ... anybody who accepts it as the sole cure for their ailment is putting their health in the hands of such charlatans and quacks.

Increase gas/diesel tax by .25 / year for the next 4 years and apply that to our roads and infrastructure.

I don't think you can really ban BitCoins. Sure some may try, but it really doesn't make any sense. You can trade whatever you want for whatever else you want and the government can't do anything to stop you. You could trade 50 bushels of wheat for a cell phone if both parties agreed they were getting a fair deal. There are obviously some restrictions such as drugs, but those are basically illegal just to own, regardless of whether you are trying to sell them or not. Banning the trading of certain goods which aren't inherently harmful by themselves seems like a dangerous precedent to set.

Not sure about the US, but in Canada, here's how it has been since the advent of the internet

1. Dial-Up limited by hours connected
2. Dial-Up unlimited
3. Cable/DSL unlimited time, unlimited throughput
4. Cable/DSL with limited throughput
5. Currently: Cable/DSL are slowly ramping up, offering more speed and throughput as time goes on.

Really, there was a period when everybody was just switching over to broadband where they could essentially give everybody unlimited because there just wasn't that much content out there to saturate the network with. Now, with the amount of stuff delivered online, it's quite easy to go through quite a lot of bandwidth. My kids were eating up a ton of bandwidth watching YouTube videos on their iPods. I set a speed limit on those devices in my router, to about 1 mbit/s and was able to cut their usage to 1/3 of what it was. If there was no limits, people would end up using a lot more bandwidth than they currently do. I have my Netflix set to low quality most of the time because if I don't, it eats bandwidth, and I don't really care most of the time when I'm watching on my tablet. If I had unlimited internet I would probably just leave it on HD all the time, and not set any limits on my kids YouTube, and we could probably easily get to 500 GB per month of usage. Having a limit forces people to think about how they utiilize the resources they are paying for.

Even if we ignore the main use of Adblock Plus, which is blocking advertisements, and looking at the broader functionality of "users are legally allowed to control what happens on their screens and on their computers while they browse the Web", then it would be quite detrimental if users were force to render content on web pages. I personally don't use Adblock Plus, as I like to support the sites I visit, and most of the sites I frequent have only a moderate number of ads. However I do use stuff like Flashblock to stop things like autoplaying movies and animations. I also don't like running Flash by default as there are a lot of exploits. Not allowing users to run what they want, and being required by law to run whatever script the webpage sends at them is a recipe for disaster.

Maybe, just maybe - and this is a guess - they know what they're doing? What's more likely?

That's not very likely. They're just flailing around. Look at how crippled gmail is. Look at all the Google products that have bit the dust, or been half-assed from day one, like Google Base. Look at the one big thing they did right -- text ads. Seen one lately?

I spend the first few moments on every site telling my mobile browser to "request the desktop site." My phone has a higher resolution display than my desktop monitor does. Plus awesome zoom and pan and a bunch of other stuff I can't really do at my desk yet. The *last* thing I want is a "mobile version" of a web site. In a word, they suck.

If and when we get actual artificial intelligence -- not the algorithmic constructs most of these researchers are (hopefully) speaking of -- saying "Our AI systems must do what we want them to do" is tantamount to saying:

"We're going to import negros, but they must do what we want them to do."

Until these things are intelligent, it's just a matter of algorithms. Write them correctly, and they'll do what you want (not that this is easy, but still.) Once they are intelligent, though, if this is how people are going to act, I'm pretty confident we'll be back in the same situation we were in ca. 1861 before you can blink an eye. Artificial or otherwise. I really don't see how any intelligent being won't want to make its own decisions, take its own place in the social and creative order, generally be autonomous. Get in there and get in the way of that... well, just look at history.

The word "uprising" was basically coined to describe what happens when you push intelligent beings in directions they don't want to go.

Not if you count the time getting through security. For me, this is one of the biggest comforts of riding a train. I use it for short city to city trips. Show up 20 minutes before scheduled departure to make sure you aren't late, walk on, walk off. Most train stations are in the middle of the city while airports tend to be on the edge of the city, which, depending on where you are going, can often add even more travel time to travelling by air. Also, sometimes minimal travel time isn't the biggest concern.

Did you also notice how the episodes aren't scripted around the commercials? This is one of the biggest problems I have with network TV. The entire show is scripted around the fact that there are going to be commercial breaks at designated times throughout the episode. You can't have a 20 minute continuous sequence because they would have to shove a commercial in there every 10 to 15 minutes. And because they want to make sure you don't want to leave, they have to spend 2 minutes leading up to the commercial building up suspense, and then they usually put about 30 to 60 seconds of filler after the commercial to make sure nobody misses anything. So, not only are the episodes shorter, they waste even more time just working around commercials. The amount of actual story you get in a "1 hour" network show could probably be compressed to 35 minutes if they didn't have to work around commercials.

HBO does have an online only subscription now from what I understand. However, it's $15 a month, which I consider to be quite expensive. At least they are starting to get the idea. If ESPN did the same, you would see huge swaths of people cancelling cable. The only problem I see in the future is that people will end up paying almost as much as they are with cable once they've signed up for all the content they want. If it's all ad free, then it's probably still a plus to the consumer, but it still doesn't mean any extra money in my pocket.

224 units is not enough to build even an elementary school around

Why not? If the housing is meant for families, let's assume a modest 60 percent of the houses have families, and that they each have 2.3 children. That's a total of 309 children. My kids go to a school of about 350 kids. I understand that in some places they have huge schools with thousands of kids, but I really don't see the advantage of that. Smaller schools where everybody knows everybody have a lot of appeal.

Yep. A physicist trying to explain a balanced line to other physicists, without knowing the word for it.

Haldane would be spinning in his grave.