Well I envy my cat in the same way: he's happily living his life hunting mice in the garden, eating his food, sleeping and getting petted by yours truly, blissfully unaware of how the food gets in his bowl, how the mice come to exist in the garden, how he gets to sleep warm and cozy even in the dead of winter, what his purpose is and how his life will end.

Comfy, care-free and appealing though a domestic cat's life may be, it doesn't mean I want to be a cat though. I much prefer having a brain big enough to look at the world in a more profound way, even if it can be unsettling.

The great thing about religion is, if you look at it with a critical mind and a little bit of reason, it's fairly quick and easy to dismiss as pure fantasy.

Religion is the opium of the people.

Google *is* evil - and greedy. I use their search engine for one thing only: looking for commercial vendor sites to purchase something. They're good for that. For anything else - fun, interesting non-commercial things, there are better search engines out there. DDG, Blekko... heck even Bing come to mind.

I shall dub this network "The world barely keeping up with demand."

More like "demand barely keeping up with offering".

The truth is, consumers don't want to upgrade to the latest and greatest shit every 6 months in an economic slump.

It's like super high definition TV or Blue-Ray discs: people aren't finished investing in the previous generation technology that a new one comes along. Not to mention, the contents - movies and TV shows - are still shit, and people aren't interested in high definition shit anymore than they want low def shit.

In the case of 4G - and now 5G - it's even worse, because the price of data traffic over these networks hasn't come down nearly as fast as the available bandwidth has increased: it still costs a testicle per gigabyte, only with 4G, you lose a testicle in seconds instead of minutes. No thanks.

heavily regulation of Slashdot editorial skills.

search mydomain.com
nameserver 127.0.0.1

There, problem solved.
No need to say thank you...

It's the scourge of futurists everywhere: The space elevator can't seem to shake its image as something that's just ridiculous, laughed off as the stuff of sci-fi novels and overactive imaginations.

I've first heard of space elevators decades ago, and not once have I read or heard anyone saying it's a ridiculous or laughable idea. All I've heard is that it'd be a really great, smart and economical way to access space, if only a strong and light material could be found to prevent the cable from being several miles across in diameter at the base and collapse under its own weight. Where did the story's submitter get that from?

Which is to say, not much.

Yes but, Australia being upside down, the bottom is at ground level.

Hey should give all 450 million customers a $1 refund for the service outage that happened after the deal went through.

I'm not sure you realize what a "service outage" is. A power or water cut is an outage. Unresponsive Facebook or Whatsapp servers is a minor inconvenience at best, and might even be viewed as a life improvement event.

The word BULLSHIT jumps to mind whenever Facebook is mentioned.

You probably smell tapas too after the 50th trip.

More to the point, the way the world is going, a kid born today as a very high chance of leading a life of debt, unemployment, poverty, starvation, war, and whatever else the future has in store, before dying.

As far as we're concerned, my s.o. and I, the best time for fatherhood is never, as we reckon giving life today isn't really a gift.

More likely a sign of the effect of society on the decision of having a child: either the couple is poor and decides they can't offer the child a good life, or they're still student and they prefer to wait until they're done with their studies and have stable jobs and incomes... that sort of thing.