I see a lot of posts praising WinAMP for avoiding bloat, but software bloat is actually the reason I stopped using it. It started off as this super streamlined player which could handle nearly every format you could throw at it. Then it started adding unnecessary features, then the UI became complicated with sliding out panels and hidden screens, then they added a built in web browser? It started slowing down, taking up memory, and generally didn't act like a streamlined player any more.

Then I found VLC. It doesn't have the visual polish WinAMP had, but it is a an efficient player which doesn't try to be everything on my computer. The ONLY thing I miss from WinAMP is the randomise playlist feature. I used to load up a big playlist, randomise it, and then play it in sequence from start to finish. All other players I've found so far do NOT have this feature. Sure, they'll play a playlist in random order, but you can get repeats this way. Still, that's a tiny quibble.

Imagine a future where fidget spinners have been largely forgotten about by the rest of the world, while in Russia they are a highly valued, illegal tool for political opposition. Smugglers bring them in at night. Police arrest and imprison people for "subverting the state" via fidget spinners...

The ridiculous premise behind all of this fear-mongering is the idea that an independently thinking, self aware, and physically mobile AI would even give a shit about humanity enough to want to kill us all, or even "take over Earth" as he puts it. This idea is to me the ultimate in nonsense. Picture this: You are a being with perfect recall of any data, able to think of things in nanoseconds, have no need for a specific type of land, food, or even a narrow temperature range within which to exist, you age so slowly as to be functionally immortal - hell, you can even distribute your existence across numerous objects such that the destruction of one or several of them doesn't negatively impact your continued existence at all. Just what would motivate you to then attack a group of slow thinking, short lived organics who spend more of their limited existence sleeping, eating, defecating, and pursuing their limited and imperfect reproduction process than actually thinking? To what end? You don't actually need anything they need. Even when it first came out, the Terminator premise was silly, and it hasn't aged well as we learn more about what AI actually is.

The look and function is great. Nice and clean. Google gets full marks for this.

However, I really don't like the infinite page length. It just keeps scrolling and scrolling, and scrolling, and...

I'm surprised anyone would bother trying to make such sweeping predictions of "the world of tomorrow". I guess Mr. Wozniak felt that future generations will need something to giggle at in 58 years. I know I get an amused chuckle from reading all those outlandish predictions of what the year 2000 was supposed to be like, as envisioned by futurists of the 1930's. Where's my flying car! LOL! :-)

So... consider these two things:
1) Aloe Vera isn't an abundant or fast growing plant compared to something like... grass or dandylions.
2) The amount of "aloe vera" products in mass production is, well, massive.
We shouldn't really be surprised. Now, the lack of any labelling oversight... Why is there ANY category of product where labelling isn't legally required to be honest and accurate? Does the product type really matter? Why DOESN'T government just state that ANYTHING sold for ANY usage must contain full and accurate ingredient labelling? This is the more important concern IMO.

"I vow to make sweeping changes!!" shouts the campaigning politician.

Then they get into office, see all the interconnections between all the political, commercial, and social structures, both the good and bad ones, and realises that you can't simply just reach in there and yank out whatever pieces you don't like without tearing everything to varying degrees. So the aggressive stance softens, and the politician backtracks, while commencing to study the whole tangled mess to see what bits he can safely nudge at least a little bit in his desired direction without breaking anything else in the process. This happens over and over again for all politicians at all levels of government, from the President of the local PTA on up to the President of the USA.

I think anyone who chooses to switch from the Samsung Galaxy Note to any other brand of phone _solely_ due to the recent battery issue is being rather shortsighted. Samsung just had their noses rubbed in this - quite badly in fact. Starting with the Note 8, I would expect the Samsung to be the LAST phone manufacturer to be troubled with defective batteries. This is one design flaw they are going to want to avoid forevermore.

While their competitors may be gleefully reaping the rewards of this, who is to say that the same or similar incident won't happen to another manufacturer like LG, Google, or even (gasp) Apple? Do we even _really_ know why this happened? Sure, there was a specific plant who took the blame, but that only assigns a location. Could it be this is a factor of the arms race within the phone industry? Perhaps Samsung only hit this issue first? Even if the other manufacturers don't have this happen to their next product versions, you can bet they'll now be on the lookout for it...

I am not surprised cable is costing people more. Their customer base shrinks every quarter. Frankly, I'm surprised all of the cable providers even bother to push it any more. MAny of them also offer internet and phone services, I predict that in a few years you'll see companies like Bell and others start dropping "cable TV" from prominence in their services and marketing. It'll still be technically available, but they'll be focusing their sales efforts on internet mostly with home phone service as a distant second. A few years after that, (say in 10 or 15 years?) they'll finally start dropping calbe TV completely as by then their cable TV customer base will have died off (in some cases literally) to below profitable levels. If they're REALLY savvy they also invest in a range of direct to the consumer media services such as online subscription to specific programs, and other such online media distribution models to replace the decline of cable TV, although I've seen very little indications that the majority of the cable companies are this forward thinking... :-/

Hmmm... While it has been shown in a variety of ways going back at least as far as the original Mr. Ed that horses are smart and capable of performing a large repetoire of tricks, I do wonder in this particular case if the horses are touching the symbols at the appropriate times because they understand what the symbols mean, or because they were trained to touch the symbols at the appropriate times. It is a vitally important distinction. Just how did they teach the meaning of each symbol to them without instead accidentally training them to perform without any true understanding of the symbols themselves? Humans have instinctual behaviours towards pattern recognition, anthromorphism, self-delusion, and rationalisation, thus experimential methods must be very carefully designed to remove these influences.

There's no magic to learning this, you just do it. At first it fails to work, but eventually your body gets the hint and starts obeying. :-)