There's no need to announce it's an AI. Anyone who's worked phones for customer service before can tell you that when a call is handled quickly and efficiently odds are pretty good it wasn't an actual human. The lack of whiny insistence that they get an appointment during a time that's not available, asking the same question in 3 different ways, and otherwise ignoring what the person helping you is saying will be immediate clues that it's an AI. I would *love* if all the people that call me for tech support would let an AI handle the call instead; it would eliminate a whole lot of frustration and wasted time.

These guys are lifelong city-dwellers right? "...with one always 100 feet away from you." Good luck with that anywhere outside of a major city.

I've read that the labor costs involved in building an iPhone are roughly betweeen $12.50 and $30 per unit. (http://nextshark.com/real-cost-of-iphone/) I suspect Apple can afford to absorb that extra expense or pass it on to the consumer without a huge loss in sales if those figures are accurate.

H1B visas are being horribly abused to get cheaper labor that of course is readily available locally. They simply do shady things like create job requirements that are custom tailored to exclude any local workers. As far as refusing to train your replacements goes, they often make getting a severance package conditional on training your replacement. I'm sure most of them would love to tell the university to cram that request but when you have bills to pay that's a really tough stand to take.

While it's good to read that his prosthetic isn't useless due to the loss of an inexpensive device, I really hope there's some way to lock out that old iPod Touch from his hand. If the thief realized what he had stolen he could cause some mischief with it. Presumably his identity is unknown since he hasn't been caught, which means he could get close enough without being noticed. So unless the limb can be programmed to ignore the old device, could the thief just get within range of the prosthetic and cause the poor guy to unwillingly and repeatedly flip everyone around him off or otherwise mess with him?

I'm curious if that 35% includes stupid old collections accounts. When I was a teenager I had a card that I didn't manage well but finally paid off. Got the statement that said it was paid off and everything. Cut up the card and moved on. A couple of years later I got a call from a collections agency saying I owed a few hundred on that card. According to them it was from a roughly $20-$30 balance and then late fees, penalties, etc. I never kept copies of the statement saying it was paid off, and at the time I could afford the few hundred they wanted anyway so I felt justified in ignoring them. The statute of limitations on credit card debt in my state is 4 years. I just got a collections call about that debt a couple of weeks ago. 21 years after the fact. O.o I laughed at them and hung up, but seriously, they're trying to collect on a 2 decade old debt... You've gotta wonder how many people give in and make payments not knowing there's no way for that old of a debt to ever hit your credit.

I wonder if different Costcos have different suppliers for those as well... I also have bought a bunch of Feit CFLs from Costco, and they're actually why I haven't jumped aboard LEDs yet. I've gone through boxes of them and they've all lasted roughly a year before they fail or are just too dim (even after their now excessively long warm-up time) to keep using. I've kept using them simply because when they have the instant rebates they're too cheap to pass up. They've kept me from trying LED because I and especially my wife are nervous about that initial cost when the supposed long life efficient bulbs we've been using for years now have been so disappointing...

I bought a few boxes of the cheap CFL bulbs made by Feit Electric at my local big box store years ago. They typically last about a year before they get too dim, too slow to get bright(ish), or just flat out fail. With the instant rebates they're still cheap enough to be worth buying. The problem is they've made my wife gun shy about spending the money on LEDs. They're all advertised as lasting 20,000 hours, but the CFLs were supposed to last 10,000 and never came close to that in the real world, and the LEDs still cost way more. At this point I'm just going to replace the bulbs as they burn out in some smaller fixtures where I don't need to buy 8 at a time to keep matching color temps and hopefully see the better results that we were *supposed* to see with CFLs. If those CFLs had been decent and had lasted as long as advertised and not quickly succumbed to the slow start or total failure we'd have started using LEDs years ago...

Who votes them in? The masses that go to the polls and vote for the guy that has the right letter after their name on the ballot or has the right opinion on a matter not up to a politician...

If I saw you kicking somebody out of the theater I was in for cell phone use, I'd make it a point to only go to your theater for every movie from then on... Yeah, you might lose a few customers that get butthurt over there being consequences to breaking the rules - twice - but I suspect you get a lot more repeat and loyal business than you lose.

Jammers would probably not be illegal if they respected property boundaries. I totally agree that you should be allowed to do what you like on your property. But you may *not* do what you like on *my* property. Running a jammer on yours will likely kill the signal on mine. So install any passive blocking you like. Once you go active and affect people around you, that's where you're stepping outside the bounds of personal freedom. Using your example you say that people may die due to the small delay while someone steps outside or disables the jamming device. But what about situations where your location isn't the one doing the jamming? Does stepping outside get you closer or further from the jammer? There certainly will be no way to disable the device since you have no idea who's even running it. That small delay suddenly can get pretty significant...

Because it would be impractical to expect businesses to do a decent job of checking just how far their jammer causes problems. What'll happen is they'll install a jammer, throw a couple of signs on their front door, and call it a day. Meanwhile the businesses on either side that don't want jamming have lost their signals, as well as a random swath of the parking lot, nearby road, etc. The entire reason these businesses were discovered was because the jamming wasn't limited to their premises. The fact that the FCC had to triangulate their location implies that the complaints were not of a "Business XYZ is jamming my cell" nature, but more of a "somebody on this block is jamming my cell".

Unfortunately, if sexism were to be defeated, what it would really mean is that some people would simply have to work a little harder to be offended than they have to now. We live in a society full of people that live to be offended just so they can "take a stand". If you won't provide them with a legitimate cause to take offence, they'll simply carefully inspect everything you've said and find a way to twist something into the cause they can rail against.

Now get it back...

Ha, I would *love* to see Kim Jong Un on TV announcing that "She touched my pepe, Steve!"