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I've trained a bird to carve images into a stone tablet, you insensitive clods!

Isn't the point of getting your music played on the "radio" exposure? How much money did/do artists make per play on normal radio stations? For less-well-known or niche artists, it might be difficult to have your music played on a local or regional radio station, let alone nationally. Pandora, Spotify, etc. provide a variety of artists with national exposure. I'd be interested to see if the artist in question has noticed a correlation between plays on streaming services and her album sales. Or, how about her social network presence. More listeners means more fans, followers, Likes. I've heard of performers using social networking to essentially pre-sell a venue for a live show. There are ways to make money, just have to be creative and innovative - defining traits for most artists.

I have digital phone through the cable company, but its still plugged into the wall so I'd say that counts. I'll consider dumping it just as soon as the telcomms get the whole "cellular phone service" thing figured out. Because dead zones, dropped called, and fluctuating coverage are not signs of a mature technology.

There are two corners in my house where cell phones work, meaning when I'm home I have to leave my phone in that spot and walk across the house to pick it up when it rings. And that superior level of service was only achieved by (grudgingly) switching over to Verizon. Previous carriers I used literally did not get service within a block of my home. This is mostly because my neighborhood is a notorious dead zone. On the bus home I've heard people cut phone calls short, telling the person on the other line "We're about to drive through [blank] and I'm going to get cut off . . ."

Cell phones are not new. My dad had one in the early 90's. You'd think after 20 years they'd have the basics figured out. ESPECIALLY at $40/month minimum.

This sounds like a reasonable goal. If my upstairs neighbors' kid is any indication, all this toddler-bot needs to be able to do is stomp around, slam into walls, and scream at random intervals.

This isn't really news. I'm pretty sure marine animals have learned to come up on land in search of food at least once or twice before in the past.

I wouldn't be surprised if the mayor and council or DPW chief of some small town arranged to have their water tower wired by some lowest-bid contractor just to show off to other local small towns. "Your town installed halogen street lamps in the commercial district? Well mine just put our water supply on the 'information superhighway'! Check it out, the password is '1-2-3-4' . . ."

Should we use these to decant Alphas or Epsilon semi-morons?

Did NASA's space network immediately encounter an existing alien network and go mad?

Math students don't memorize their sine and cosine tables anymore, law students can barely speak Latin, and these young hot-shot doctors barely know a leech from a hole in the ground! But the real trouble started when they put one of those fancy schmancy crank-operated pencil sharpeners in every classroom. When I was in school we sharpened our pencils with a small knife and it worked just fine. Guess these kids are too lazy to do a little whittling.

My younger brother has been looking for work for nearly 5 years. These "personality tests" and automated application systems are incredibly frustrating. Business managers won't talk to you, they just send you to their the web site to apply for a posted job. After half an hour of vague, logically inconsistent questions you've "applied" for the job. Nobody calls, nobody emails, and if you follow-up with the store they just shrug. And that's if you're lucky enough to be allowed to apply. Some web sites pre-screen you based on a few questions and actually prevent you from applying for the job at all.

Its frustrating for my brother and frustrating to watch. He's caught in the no experience/no job feedback loop and now its being run by machines. Does it really cost a business $5000 in losses for a supervisor to spend a day showing a new hire how to work a register, push a broom, and sign in and out for the day?

Interesting article, cool that Valve went right to the mainstream traditional media with their announcement. But, it was kinda cute reading the author's descriptions of Portal and TF2. I guess the Times simply doesn't have anyone under 40 working for them. Apparently Team Fortress is a game about an evil company that sells its customers faulty products.

Imagine an article covering a sporting event written by someone similarly oblivious to what's going on:
"Members of the Yankees team run to and capture 'bases' as part of an elaborate reenactment focused on battlefield strategies deployed during the Civil War . . ."

NJ to Brooklyn by car: 45 minutes
NJ to Brooklyn by mass-trans: 2-2.5 hours

MTA and NJT actively hates its customers.

We all know that the mice will just get a bunch of cats to chase them and then lure them into the mine fields.

Remember when you were in school and bored? You'd look around the room or out the window for anything remotely distracting because you didn't understand or didn't care about what was going on in the classroom.

Welcome to the current state of science journalism.