For some locations this may be somewhat economical and provide some diversification risk mitigation. Saudi Arabia might like to import less food, use less water producing. It may not be a large paradigm shift anytime soon but economics with tech improving. Plenty is trying to drum-up business so their claims reflect optimism accordingly. Climate volatility and conflicts probably will help push further developments.

Hyperlinking already existed by the time Tim Berners-Lee re-invented for it the THIRD time.

I'm almost surprised you didn't include Ada Lovelace.

Part of the invention package is planting a novel idea into a viable context. Farmers figured out this trick 10,000 years ago. It's called soil. And guess what? Half of every tree is immune to lovers' penknives.

Context, the Rodney Dangerfield of being in the right place, at the right time.

Do you know how to use Google? No? The median income for full time farmers in 2018 is projected to be $119k. That is net income per household.

Did you take math since 4th grade? Do you seriously not know what "median" means?

Median income for American households is ~ $59k. That is about half what the median full time farming household makes.

Available only as a smartphone app.

There's likely a reason for that; to get permissions it would not get on a PC. No thanks.

I was too, but it also depended on what board you were on. After the enteral September if you set up your newsreader to not download any posts that came from an AOL account, the SNR was certainly better than today.

Of course I also only had 10 hours of off peak time per month on a 300 baud modem then too. Actually I probably had a 14.4 modem, by 1993. So it's a bit of a trade off since I can stream HD movies now.

Those who donâ(TM)t know about technology delete Facebook, those who have something to hide delete Facebook.

Apparently it is normal for around half of petition signatures to be invalid. The rules are the same as for voting, but the signature collection is people going door to door or standing on the street, so no enforcement at the point of collection. The people collecting the signatures don't care if you are visiting from out of state, underage, not a citizen, have already signed, or a felon, they just want to make the numbers.

It's blocked by Facebook.

Uninstall that and try again.

If that doesn't fix it, suspect that I'm full of shit.

So, any citizen has the exact same right of self defense - the right to use of deadly force when there is a reasonable belief of a significant threat.

So, do you believe that you can shoot anyone you see in a dark alley who sticks their hand in their pocket, and then claim self-defense? How about if you see a cop reach for his weapon, clearly visible on his hip - can you shoot him because he presents a threat?

If you haven't been living under a rock, you'd know that the House is also gerrymandered out the wazoo. The affirmative action in that case has been ensured by the district borders that have been mapped by optimization algorithms to look like Mandelbrot fractals.

Thanks for the reply. been looking for a decent speaker dock and will take an actual recommendation over 25 anonymous reviews online.

Seriously? The smoke had to cause all kinds of respiratory issues. It really must have been bad for the families of those affected. That's a serious decision. Do you freeze to death, or die from smoke inhalation. I think a simple sign on the fireplace would have taken care of it. You know, something like, "Open the flue before lighting fire!"

The Cupertino, California-based company said in a lengthy memo ...

Whoever wrote that sentence can be trusted on the subject of long memos.

A windbag dilettante would have merely written "Apple".

They are hedging their bets on the idea Facebook's time in the sun is ending. Social networks were folding before because Facebook became the de facto one. Now with a mass exodus possible, someone wants to be the "place everyone moves to".

If the King is dying, a new battle for the throne is about to begin.

So did authoritarian communism, doesn't mean that we want to push more of it even if it did lift the Russian surfs and Chinese peasants out of extreme poverty, increased their lifespan, helped cure terrible diseases and improved quality of life.

Most farmers don't have the resources to do a lot of watering unless that is just a requirement of the crop. I don't do any produce type farming but I can't think of a single friends farm that gets water other than rainfall. Sometimes you have a bad year but that's what crop insurance is for.

I think the Facebook's attempted sleight-of-hand here is they are claiming they are not selling the user data itself, they are selling the advertising space. The user data is being given to those clients, but Facebook is trying to pretend it's okay if it's a "complimentary service" and not technically billed.

How small do companies need to be to not try to make money or exploit people?

  I think advertising and user profiling are inevitable in a free market internet, because when a business can turn a profit while charging nothing for a service, they will beat any competitor who charges for their services. This is a fundamental flaw with our commercialized internet that needs to be corrected. I however think that technology can solve the problem.

Edge: A Conversation With Kai-Fu Lee [3.26.18]

After the boring stuff (a who's-who of artificial intelligence research, including one Bob Mercer) and the "~ ~ ~ ~" article divider, this one-way-mirror interview is all about the technological VC ambitions arising in China now.

Don't worry! This tech will be used by the globalists in the US government to conquer all the countries in the world. Imagine a game of Risk, and you get the idea. After the whole map has only one country's armies on it, there will be no further war. Ever. Pax Eternal.

Then the US will kneel before the UN or successor supranational organization and surrender its sovereignty, to become a province of a global government. This isn't some crazy conspiracy theory, it's the conclusion reached by elites that the post-Westphalian world needs to go. For more information, read Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time by Carroll Quigley Bill Clinton had him as a professor, and called him the most important influence on his life. You can read it free online here. The more high-tech war equipment we have, the more wars we can start, and the sooner we can achieve world conquest.

In their beginning, Amazon would intentionally order out-of-print books along with the one book they wanted, in order to get free shipping on their orders from publishers. So, doing something to intentionally take advantage of USPS isn't out of the question, IMHO.

Most mentally ill people are no danger to other people. This clown was.

There is no web version of it to use on a computer.

If I'm sitting in front of my computer already, I don't want to have to use my phone just to access a site.

I suggest you write a few code samples in your new language and convince people that it has something captivating about it. You don't need a working compiler to write software, only to run it. And if you have already told people what to expect the output is they don't need to run it to find out.

Here's an example of my new language

10 ask what I want
20 do it
30 goto 10

But seriously, if people see an elegant new way to solve a real problem they might go for it - eg. a way to tie in unit tests to the source code better, or a cool way to program in 3-d minecraft-like blocks

Er, what? We have essentially no laws preventing data collection. In fact, we've recently removed most of the few protections that we did have. We also have essentially no laws addressing physiological addiction other than gambling, most laws about addiction center around physically addictive substances - i.e.: Coke now has to remove the addictive chemical from cocoa leaves, so that their customers are no longer physically addicted to their product.

Which laws are you suggesting that they use in this case?

The fact that people want to lawlessly and casually infringe Constitutional rights is more than reason enough to have an AR-15

It is literally impossible for me to deprive you of your Constitutional rights. I'm not working for any government. If agents of the government wanted to violate your Constitutional rights, the AR-15 isn't going to be of any more use than a stick of chewing gum.

Actually, it's around 12 MN for the 551 version.

How often do you talk to the pharma companies?

Great! Seems that since the US Pharma industry is the best, and provides unparalleled healthcare we need to double down so that we can achieve even greater advances. You have proven that this is what is needed.

So health insurance has been a problem for years, and a positive feedback loop existed, where it was becoming too expensive fopr employers to provide insurance. This must be accelerated until no one can afford it. Then all will be healthy.

Sarcasm off now.

Part one is what happens when a medical industry is run soley for profit.

Yes - the pharmaceutical companies were awash in money, and yes, they did some good with it. But yes, they also picked things to cure that would in turn make them the most money.

This makes perfect sense in a business designed to make as much money from as many people as possible, for as long as possible. That is why we have maintenance medicines for things like strokes and blood pressure and cholesterol that people take every day of their lives. Yet these selfsame people often die of the problems caused by that anyhow - it's the perfect drug, may or may not work, may or may not die of a stroke or heart attack anyhow. But they are a full time income source.

The most awesome illustration of this is the new drugs to treat Alzheimer's. They do not cure you. They are only prescribed after you already exhibit the confusion and dementia of Alzheimer's. What they do perform is a slowing of the disease. You spend some more years demented, shitting in a depends, living in a nursing home. Their claim to fame is they prolong your death. MOre money for the Nursing home and the medicine providers, probably a coinkey-dink I've already told my family that if I ever become demented, if they put me on those meds, they better hope there isn't such a thing as ghosts, because I'll be a fucking angry murderous one.

Now to the financial aspect.

The situation was 100 percent unsustainable.

When the health care industry shifted to the new model back in the 70's, it set in motion a process that was once setting broken bones and normal life medical problems, to one of a huge array of maintenance medicines, and diagonostic machinery that needed people to use to amortize it. So insurance rates begin to climb.

It worked okay for a while. but eventually the rates were getting high enough that some outfits were dropping coverage, and those that weren't were increasing the employees cost at double digit rates and even more per year.

Then one of the most anti-capitalist anti freedom things happened. The pre-existing conditions evil. If you were working somewhere (or even had your own business) and had a problem - they would take care of it, but you were now stuck. If you left for another job, you couldn't get health insurance coverage. Or laid off. And if you had your own business, they'd do their best to get you to drop your coverage. My Wife's boss, who had a blood clotting issue, and his wife, who had some other problem, in 2005 were paying something like 50 K a year for health care.

So while it has become a political football, with a lot of people in a white hot rage about how the magic Negro from Kenya destroyed the country by using a healthcare plan of one of his Republican opponents, the truth is, the system was failing badly.

Allow me to illustrate the problem.

The cost of healthcare was rising quickly. A lot of people were losing their healthcare, or they were going bankrupt when the minimal plans they could afford wouldn't cover much.

But they still got sick. Lack of healthcare doesn't mean you are condemned to good health.

So where did they go? Emergency rooms. And they don't pay their emergency room bills. Which if you don't have insurance, that makes sense. Emergency rooms are the most expensive healthcare on the planet. Some bills are more than they make in a year.

But someone has to pay that bill. Guess who? I have health insurance, so I do. And if you have health insurance so do you.

The hospital simply raises the rates on everything else, so we get the 50 dollar bandaid. Or a friend who went for cataract surgery in one eye one year had the other eye done the next, and his bill doubled compared to the first.

And as more people were being left off health insurance, it was creating a positive feedback loop that would simply destroy the system.

In the last year of my demented mother in law's life, when she was confined to bed, that system milked almost thee quarters of a million dollars from her insurance and medicaid. In the last year of my fathers life, we went to the emergency room several times. I noticed that there were a lot of people there who didn't seem to have actual emergencies, and none looked well to do. I asked th edoctor about it. His response was "we're not going to turn these people away. If their arm is broken or they have bronchitis, or even a baby with diaper rash, they don't have insurance." I said "But this is expensive treatment." He replied, "Exactly".

So really, unless we plan on simply not treating a lot of people now, and almost no one later, the math is pretty simple. A positive feedback loop eventually destroys the system it is looping within.

It was said once, if we are able to talk about a problem, we already know the solution.

I've never heard that before, but it's wrong. People all around the world discussed the 1918 Flue Pandemic, but nobody knew how to cure it or even prevent it because we didn't even know what a virus was, let alone how to kill them.

So? He's a distance away, and draws a knife. Yell at him "Stop and drop the weapon or I'll shoot!" Just make sure it's an exclusive or.

ACES will be cool...*if* it gets eventually built.

Not to mention that it's likely that a hostage-taker would make a hostage answer the door.

It's literally the most advanced technology in the world. The idea that "why aren't all of them equally advanced" is so intellectually infantile I don't even know where to start. It's the sort of thought a seven-year-old would have.

The system was designed to give rural voters more weight in proportion to their population. It was put in place by wealthy landowners who were worried the more populace city dwellers would eventually demand more equitable distribution of wealth. This is also why Senators weren't elected at first.