What the hell would be the point of an orbiting colony? The expense is astronomical (er, sorry...), the logistics are mind-boggling, and the huge technological barriers to colonizing another planet are flippantly brushed away with as-yet nonexistent sci-fi solutions. There's nothing to be gained by having humans living in orbit of another planet. None of the hinted-at scientific discoveries, no miraculous breakthroughs in materials science have occurred, nothing. The great advances made in astronomy and space exploration since the moon landing have been achieved with unmanned probes: this is the future of space exploration. Sending people up there is not beneficial in relation to its extremely high cost: hell, if huge amounts of gold were as close as orbiting the earth, there's no possible way it could even be cost-effective to retrieve it.

Oops, forgot I had started another thought and submitted. Anyway, the people who actively suppress advertising are still in the minority.

Vendors don't WANT to deliver advertising without tracking. Or, perhaps some vendors do, but marketers most assuredly will not allow this to happen. Tracking gives marketers an incredible amount of information, but they use that information not merely to advertise more effectively to you personally (although that is done too). By studying what works on you and what works on everybody else, and what doesn't work, they are able to dial in the broader strokes of general advertising to make it more effective on everybody. Comparisons are not possible if unidentifiable subjects cannot be distinguished between those who are influenced to buy and those who aren't. The people who actively

I jumped at the summary because my uncorrected vision is actually 20/1200. Without my glasses, everything is blurry as shit but I can distinguish large shapes. Colors blur together at the edges. I can navigate a lit room just fine, but I wouldn't feel comfortable driving: all traffic signs appear as just a blob of color. It would be a huge improvement over blindness.

RN here. There was old lady in a nursing home who had no memory of her husband having passed away several years before. Numerous times every day, she would ask when her husband would be in to see her... One inexperienced nurse explained to her that her husband was dead; she cried hysterically. A few hours later, she asked again when her husband would be in to see her. The standard answer is, "He'll be here a little later, honey".

To the contrary, the vast majority of people pay very little attention to actual data. Think about it: anecdotal evidence is well known by science to be the least reliable form of data, but nearly all of us will take the recommendation of a friend over a statistic.

Touche, my young son. Touche.

This "____-gate" shit needs to stop. Now.

The static ads stopped working. Don't you remember the good old days when static banners were all there was? And do you remember how you'd completely tune out that top section of every website?

Mandatory: http://xkcd.com/1197

My smartphone is configured to send all calls straight to voicemail if they come from restricted, unavailable, or unknown numbers. This wipes out the majority of them. I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to sending all numbers not in the contacts list straight to voicemail, but I haven't done so yet. In my experience, only people or companies who have a legitimate reason to speak with me will bother to leave a voicemail. Maybe a tiny minority of robocalls are configured to leave a recorded message, but all the rest automatically dump the call when they don't detect that a person has answered.

Because calorie restriction, unequivocally, does not work for weight loss.

Discarded pizza boxes are a good source of cheese.

I for one welcome our new drug-smuggling robot overlords.

See "Final Exit" method. As for knowing, though, you may be disappointed. Brain disorders are fascinating and terrifying. When reality doesn't make sense to your brain because of physical errors in processing, your brain simply confabulates whatever details it needs so that things do make sense internally. These confabulations are not amenable to outside reasoning or exposure to evidence that contradicts them. This is equally true with dementia disorders such as Alzheimers as it is with brain damage from trauma/stroke or psychotic disorders. What I'm getting at is that if you are afflicted, you may not retain the level of insight necessary to intervene on your own behalf: you might not be capable of understanding there's a problem.