I'll believe it when my phone can reliably recognize me.

"At most" is not nearly large enough of a phrase for T-Mobile to hide behind considering that throttled speeds on T-Mobile fall short of 128kbps by more than an order of magnitude. And to be clear, yes, I am talking bits here. Once my 5 GB is up I'm looking at speeds that top out at 10 kilobits per second, barely enough to load the Google home page (over 800 kilobits) yet alone browse to the T-Mobile website and feed more money to the beast. It's a stupid game to play, balancing cheap phone bills with the best of the worst service available. I assume T-Mobile fully understands this and enjoys seeing how well they can train me to use exactly 4.99 Gb every 30 days.
https://support.t-mobile.com/d...

Just put your lawn chair in the intersection when it's yellow.

I don't know which is more enticing, the $30/month landline phone plan or the 1TB virtual hard drive. Am I really willing to give up recording 3 extra TV channels if it means one of them can be HBO? With a 1 gigabit internet connection should I be concerned about filling my cloud drive in... 2 hours and 15 minutes?

It's not that more people should be technologically savvy enough to get a pre-paid mobile, set up a server, or delve into the not-so-underground world of pirated media. Those are cheap hacky solutions teenagers throw together because they're poor and because the spark of curiosity still invigorates them. We're adults, we've spent decades building up our purchasing habits and we'll never stop paying for phones that plug into the wall. $150/month is worth it (considering our adult-sized paychecks) to avoid having to tinker with another media center setup that won't synch with the tracker's RSS feed because the new scene release group insists on including an umlaut in the file names. The disappointment is that there is no mainstream option that comes anywhere close to competing with the hacks that teenagers set up in their free time.

You can YouTube and Spotify, Netflix and Prime, Hulu and Pander all that you want (though Google uses Vudu) and even with Skype and Hangouts both going on all the phones, tablets, and cloud connected laundry machines in your home, your online experience isn't going to be much different from any other 50-100 megabit internet connection. It's frustrating that we're reliant on the people selling digital phone service to dictate when the internet is ready to accommodate growth.

The claim is that the biggest failure of science (the kind that everyone loves, as quantified by Facebook "likes") is its contributions to diet and fitness, which could be summed up as: The health benefits of food and exercise fluctuates as a function of the current weather in Denver. The conclusion is, much like Coloradan weathermen, that science is justifiably not to be trusted. Adams is convinced that people, being good enough at pattern recognition to ignore the forecast yet not good enough to know whether to bring an umbrella or a parasol, are not able to discern which science to believe and which to deny. He suggests that since people should not change their skepticism, science must improve. It is a tragedy that Science (and I mean Science the way philosophers refer to truth and to Truth) cannot improve. It is a divine numbered process set in stone, and I personally do not feel confident enough to risk pulling a Moses just yet.

Despite some unnecessarily patriotic support for the human tendency to be personally irresponsible, a solution was seemingly lost with the greatest generation. [1] People as a whole never have, never will, and never should put faith in science (or even Science). Science will not work without skepticism, and it is meant only to convince the educated with evidence. The uneducated (that's the 99.983% of us who don't read Nature) may become educated or remain ignorantly skeptical. Those are unfortunately the rational options. It was earlier than the 1930s when evidence that smoking was deadly began to emerge, yet smoking rates increased dramatically. There were decades of unhealthy skepticism as tobacco funded studies and paid doctor-actors (think Phil and Oz, not Who and Quinn) muddled the issue. It was not until the Surgeon General took the authority to tell people the truth that the smoking trajectory began to reverse. [2][3][4] And that's the heart of it, it takes someone respected and trusted to become a meteorologist (Dalton, Celsius, Roker) and not a weatherman ([5]).

Science did nothing wrong. [6] Science is not to blame for the grievances of people who grew up without a smartass friend having ever haughtily parroted, "you know gravity is just a theory." Not because lifespans continue to increase [7] or because the US leads the world in quality of life measures. [8] It would be circular reasoning to use scientific measures to judge science itself. Science is not to blame because Science is not an authority and it should never be accepted based on faith. The people who don't read Nature have to rely on faith in authority to believe what is true, and they need an educated authority who will not let them get wet. The enemy is not Science. The enemy is the person we all respect, the person we trust, the person whose authority over us has mislead us for decades as our health declines and we join her in morbid obesity. The enemy is Oprah. [9]

[1] "Science failed my generation on the topic of food and exercise the same way science failed my parents generation with cigarettes."

[2] 1957 Surgeon General Leroy E. Burney declared reason to believe of a causal relationship between smoking and lung cancer.
1964 "Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General" is released to national attention.
http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/NN...

[3] http://trends.collegeboard.org... Readers of Nature are considerably less likely to smoke.

[4] http://www.ep.tc/realist/56/20...

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

[6] http://www.manolith.com/2012/0...

[7] http://www.inquisitr.com/33907...

[8] http://globalpublicsquare.blog...

[9] Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, Suze Orman, Rachael Ray, Jenny McCarthy
What problems have plagued the US during Oprah's reign? The mental health system is missing, healthcare had to be revamped, the economy bust, obesity is rampant, and Measles has returned.