Why are people getting so wrapped up, particularly adults, in the details?"

Because we just can't hear enough from you people who feel the need to interject into something you aren't interested in just to tell other people they shouldn't be interested in it.

"they don't get hungry,"
So these mythical device don't require energy? Interesting.

Ha, I kid, it' snot interesting, it's a pathetically narrow and ignorant view of current cutting edge robotics and AI.

"It's a machine."
and you are a chemical factory? so what.

"though are getting better and better at faking it"
now you get to let everyone know the difference between faking it and not faking it is. Good luck with that. Oh, please acquire a PhD in one of the appropriate areas before responding with you half baked 'idea'.

Well done,. you just describe all of science fiction.
From Heinlein needing a magical.. ,I mean, AI dimensional travelling car, to the Monolith.

Do you know what the difference between science fiction and fantasy is? Nothing.

7/8/9 should be about freeing the droids.

> Problem is that nothing can replace FB.

And nothing of value was lost.

Go ahead and keep giving your data to companies so they can profit from it.

Until companies learn to respect my privacy they will have my disrespect.

--
Only cowards use censorship

quality of *life*. Doh.

HFT is a symptom of a deeply broken system. We need to really start to recognise that profit isn't all and long term stewardship of our instituitions and systems is key to our long term quality of live. For everyone.

> I don't really see how they think they can prevent people

That's easy:

Only cowards use censorship.

Survival of a species means survival of genes, not individuals. Individual survival can be detrimental to species survival if the number of individuals becomes too large for its environment to support, in which case the species as a whole can become extinct.

Note also that civilization is new in both human and evolutionary terms (around 10,000 years old), so the jury is still out on whether it turns out to be something that helps with our long term species survival, or ends up being something whose short-term benefits were achieved at the cost of the species as a whole.

Some points: (1) All figures in the article are from organisations who are known for their exaggerated estimates (the article itself says that the figures are "inflated"); and (2) even if that were not the case, the 115,000 figure is for primates, the vast majority of which will have been monkeys that are specially bred for the purpose to ensure that they aren't carrying any diseases which could effect experimental results. Chimps are very rarely used as lab animals because they are slow breeders, and sexually mature chimps (without which they cannot be bred) require special enclosures and trained handlers, because pissed off adult chimps that get loose tend to rip peoples' faces off.

It should also be noted that vivisection and animal research are not the same thing at all, although the organisations who produced the figures would like us to think that they are. Biologists, geneticists, gerontologists, congitive and behaviour specialist, and various other types of scientist publish a large body of research every year which based on animals, many (but far from all) of which are in labs, but the very nature of the research precludes harming the subjects, either physically or psychologically. Given the history of the sources, I doubt that they even tried to filter out these types of research from their figures.

And the network already exists because it causes profit with other uses. Adding SMSes does not increase the cost of maintenance. So yes, SMSes are still actually free.

And do what? Do you actually read the license plates of cars you pass? And even if you do would you recognize that it was the same as a random string of letters and numbers of your phone?

As for the children- don't get me wrong, if I hear a child screaming "Get away from me, you're not my daddy" or "help I'm being kidnapped" I'll intervene. Short of that- do you stare at every little kid you see to check if they match the very vague description sent to your phone? Do you know the number of false positives and wasted police effort you'd cause if you did?

Nope, the AMBER alert stuff is useless. There's a point in emergency weather notices and major traffic conditions (flash floods, closed roads from earthquakes/rockslides, tornados, a bridge has collapsed, etc). There's a use for presidential (hey, we're at war and China is launching aircraft at us, you guys on the west coast go hide). The amber stuff is just feel good uselessness.

You're perpetuating a fallacy yourself. They aren't building a system to do this- the system already exists. So those fixed costs are already paid for, and would be paid for regardless of this service because it provides other profitable services. So the marginal costs are all that matters, unless we get to the point where the bandwidth used by SMS is enough to require additional hardware to be built (which for SMS is never going to happen).

If they had another way to monetize that small amount of bandwidth used you may have an opportunity cost of using the bandwidth in this. But the fixed costs don't factor in.