This is even more off topic, but whatever... I actually tried to move to europe a few years back, it's not as easy as you'd want....You can't easily emigrate without a job lined up, and you can't easily get a job lined up without living in the country.

There's also the ugly bit about speaking the proper language.

Ideally, the US would split up into 2-50 subcultures based on binary social 'choices' and such preferences (eg: allowing a police state or not. etcetc) and then if someone was suitably inconvenienced by where they lived, they could move within the same country as soon as the significant inconvenience of moving was outweighed by the significant inconvenience of being stifled by the society you lived in.

That was my first thought. Why can't we point out loopholes in the tax code and get a portion of the proceeds from tightening the legal code?

Why can't we interface prosecutorial databases and law books to find statutes that haven't been enforced in several decades & argue for their dismissal?

Actually, that would make a pretty fun platform when it comes to running for an elected office.
      Find useless red tape & I'll work to eliminate it. Find tax loopholes & I'll close them.
      Show me the government's waste & i'll trim the fat. Go go crowd government.

I'm sure glad that HFT exists to help me reach my common price in the middle within 9 microseconds instead of two seconds. I was really pissed off in the late 90s when my stock order had cleared only a few seconds before my browser page had updated.

It's much better now that the order's cleared a few dozen milliseconds before the packet confirming placement of my order has made it back to me.

To liquidity, AND BEYOND!

I think it's a bit silly that they're able to sue without showing that any harm was done.

There are about four intermediate steps between HBO and my watching the TV show, and all of them are paying HBO the same amount regardless of if i download the show or not.

Authors don't sue libraries for letting people read their books for free (although, to be fair, i'm sure they've tried to).

Thanks for posting this so i didn't have to.

When law enforcement becomes too easy to do, it causes problems, because EVERYTHING is illegal in some way or another, and the only thing stopping the police from arresting everyone is that they have a limit to the number of man-hours they can invest, and they triage in a way that (at least for now...) most people consider reasonable.

For example, you can (probably) meet up with your local pot dealer without having to worry that the police have spent thousands of dollars putting a secret tail on him, because he's small potatoes and you're even smaller. However, if they could generate a free interaction network computationally by following the GPS coordinates of every person in the city thanks to their cellular telephones, it would only be a matter of time before someone put increased emphasis on enforcing the "war on drugs" and one enterprising cop did five minutes of datamining and got a bajillion arrests to add to his record.

If nothing anyone ever did was illegal, sure whatever, the police can arrest all the criminals in the world.
Unfortunately, the laws aren't like that. You probably did a few illegal things driving to work this morning.

Marketers shouldn't be paying for ads the way they are now anyway, because shotgun ads almost certainly don't work.

The ONLY time in my adult life that i've cared about an advertisement was recently when google informed me that there was a new bus route to a local airport while i was viewing my airline ticket info in gmail. That was certainly a targeted ad, and also the only 'effective' one among the tens of thousands of ads i've seen in the last few decades. Be about 10000x more targeted about advertising and i'll be about 10000x more interested in it.

If ads were more of an amazon.com-style "users who liked this site tended to buy product X" and less of a "PRODUCT X IS THE BEST THING EVER FOR EVERYONE EVER!", I'd actively LOOK at ads (sometimes)

It doesn't have to be free. They could charge the same amount that current ISPs charge without upsetting anyone. Then their $140B investment pays off after 233million people subscribe for one year. I know i'd personally even pay the entire 1 year up front.

TFA was written based on an interview that took place in April of LAST YEAR.

It shows a graph indicating that cost is decreasing too fast that is also based on data ending at the beginning of last year. Conveniently before 2012 actually happened, where the cost sat completely flat for 12 months and even increased in Q4 as Illumina released new (more expensive) reagents.
(updated image:) http://www.genome.gov/images/content/cost_per_genome.jpg

But first we have to reformat to get rid of the rootkit, and MY ENTIRE LIFE is on the hard drive.

My justification is that in 40 years of cable tv ownership, my parents have never once been a Nielson household.
In all the time that i've subscribed to cable (I usually keep it on just because the bundling is cheaper than internet), i've also never been invited.

Therefore, me watching TV on TV vs watching TV on the internet has no effect on anyone's bottom line, and it's significantly easier for me to

a) Not have to actually own a TV
b) Not have to own a DVR
c) Not have to manually fast-forward commercials
d) Be able to watch TV on my own schedule, and often (when on west coast) before the episode has aired.

The companies are just trying to double-dip with ala carte downloads, and they're not even offering it in a timely fashion or conveniently.

If you consume a million twinkies encased in a metal cylinder, you won't gain an ounce. You have to absorb the nutrients. The bacteria are most certainly a factor in how the nutrients get processed and eventually absorbed. With the right engineering, the metabolome could be designed such that you could eat forever without becoming obese. There's more than one way (or even two ways) to solve any problem.

It may be a colossal waste of human and natural resources to do that engineering, but that doesn't justify your point at all.
Try to be factually correct.

once all the jobs are actually automated and self sustaining,
we will no longer be unemployed: we will be unemployable.

Whichever aristocrat has the biggest robot army will take over the other robot armies and robot factories, and own the world. Why would he bother to share?

The damages to a Local Contracting Company for one bad review on Yelp are apparently more money than the average contractor makes in a lifetime.

Of course, 700k of that will go to his lawyer, so it comes out to a semi-reasonable amount.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/extremists