In many areas (CA included) it's not legal to sell fruit once it's touched the ground. This farmer is happy to eat that fruit all year long.

We would also happily sell the scarred fruit and uglier fruit but it doesn't sell and has to be used in commercial products often times at a financial loss. By the time the fruit is graded it's been picked, washed & transported to a packing facility and they decide what happens to it not the grower. Farmers are paid losing money on this share of the crop and it's used to make commercial and industrial products (juices, oils. etc.).

This problem has many many levels but I like that this article took the approach of pointing out what we can do as individuals. Not to solve the problem in Yemen but to reduce our own personal waste. One aspect of this is to be less concerned with deficits in quality that will not impact the taste! If there's an increase in demand on ugly fruit less will be thrown out ...

Doesn't a bank have a legitimate need to know if they're dealing with someone on a landline, a mobile phone or a VOIP phone when deciding as part of an online transaction if they're extending that person a line of credit?

I'm not a shill. Our business does not depend on a phone reputation service but it does incorporate many different services including ip reputation services & device reputation services. These are essential for stopping fraud for the people who's credit cards are stolen and used at our site. Perhaps your naive for not realizing what's going on around you. The article describes the pervasiveness of the profiling that's been going with major brands.

How is this different than services like:

maxmind - ip reputation
iovation - device reputation / fingerprinting
threatmetrix - device fingerprinting

and many many other services that profile us in many other dozens of ways address etc....

As someone who works at a business who could not operate without this type of information I understand it's necessity. It's sad but it's necessary in today's world. Just like IP reputation, device, address reputation and many other things, a vendor, a provider, or person on the other end of the world can only know so much given a certain piece of information. It's incredibly valuable to know if someone is calling from a VOIP number when you're running a high risk business. Some times for some transactions you need to know if someone is coming in via a very well covered proxy. This information does not always come cheap and businesses have to evaluate which pieces they want and need to incorporate into their model. I would not be worried about it happening on a grand wholesale scale. The whole model is to hit people transactionally as the reputation evolves and to charge them each time.

I've had a similar situation except for both me and my wife did like to play games before kids arrived. We wanted to limit our kids exposure before 2 to too much screen time and wound up taking a huge break from video games for almost 7 years. Since Christmas we have all been having a total blast playing Lego Lord of the Rings. It's a great 2 player puzzle game, tame enough for kids to watch and play. My daughter is amazed to see my wife and I working so well at something together and she's gone from being scared of Gollum to really wanting to play him most of the time. We tried several games before this and had a hard time ever getting into anything. We did enjoy playing the portal series together. I recommend a good co-operative puzzle game if that type interests you and her. Working together and trying to figure something out is a great way to get anyone engaged.

This is a great letter recognition, word recognition and reading app for that age group that has a great variety of mini games that handle progression, fight boredom. I wish it had math because I think the quality is great.

Smarty Pants School

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/smarty-pants-school/id403824279?mt=8

While I'm happy to see this as an end user - they did have good applications as well. They were a great mechanism for tracking fraudsters across cookie wipes... The more savvy ones knew better but for those who didn't it saved us a lot of losses...