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And the customer -- when large enough, they can sway a vendor's maintenance priorities.

Or the anonymity, for that matter -- approaching a Google Street View car from any direction, probably results in enough images being captured of you from enough angles to turn your vandalism attempt into a scene from the Matrix. If they haven't matured out of that old-school kind of approach even today, a little technology may not be sufficient to get them to change their ways fast enough.

That's easy enough; assign a robot to each of the bible's books, put them all in an arena, and let them fight to the death. Last robot standing gets to set canon.

Joel Spolsky has a take on this problem, called Evidence-Based Scheduling, which tracks past estimates against their deliveries, and uses that to improve future estimates.

Only my opinion, but my corollary to this is that if you find yourself wasting time like this, make sure you tell yourself the truth about that. Your time is one of the only things you can't replace, and if you are truly forced to waste it in these situations, be kind to yourself and forgive yourself for the time you lost, and as soon as you can, don't throw years of good time after bad by thinking there's some benefit to it.

Only you can provide these things about you, so focus on providing them. And IMHO, the thoughts, views, ideas, hopes, dreams that you had, including the ones which nobody else really got when you shared it with them -- share them with her. It's part of what makes you uniquely what you are, and right or wrong, it's something she can keep with her and remember what made you you once you pass on. You can provide the specifics; she and others can provide their own analysis and conclusions later on.

In the future (and the present), you can look up public information on any topic, with varying amounts of research, so I'd worry less about that.

Great idea; I'd provide them as a text list, and save the video for stuff that benefits from nonverbal cues.

Yeah, how *do* they work?

Oddly enough, Saga depicts a war with costs along those lines. As a result, both sides "outsource" the conflict and have the native populations of other planets fight on their behalf.

I'm waiting for the sequel, where they learn from their mistakes and directly induce passive-aggression into the population instead.

Congratulations. I think you came up with the plot of the first sci-fi movie that nobody would bother to torrent.

Totally not necessary:

1. Wait until animal brains improve some
2. Have them pass the bar exam
3. Now the burden is on them to define and argue the appropriate legal rights
4. Continue to improve animal brains
5. Legal framework is now in place once they reach the appropriate level of intelligence
6. Prosper!

Done. Is it working? (In reality, I'm sure this example has multiple other factors to consider).

That's crazy talk -- I bet you sympathize with those cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

Pfft, big deal. There will always be work to do. Those roadrunners aren't going to catch themselves, you know.