Well, still. Making you feel good because you bought your kid a toy that he didn't need is pretty terrible. I understand that's how marketing works, but if I bought my niece and nephew everything that marketing made them beg for, I'd be even more broke than I am now (and college has ensured that I'll be broke for a…

...that doesn't make sense. "People can be assholes now. They'd still be assholes with this system, so this system is a bad idea." Am I missing something?

Well, as a writer, I have knack for throwing jargon into places to make things sound smarter than they are. And since I was a bagboy at a supermarket for 3 years—I'm sorry, a "front-end service clerk"—embellishment is second-nature to me :D .

"What's your field of study?"

I bet $10 something like this will exist in Toys 'R' Us within the next 3 years.

Except for people like my mother who don't have smartphones, but are hard-of-hearing and so voice calling is useless...

And...those a-holes don't already do that with voice calling?

Actually, I'd prefer pinching to alt-click instead of tap-and-hold. The problem is in the "hold" part—when you have to perform sequences of alt-clicks, the holding introduces tiny but noticeable delays that can be annoying.

Somehow? It's not really hard to understand why voice recognition isn't widely used yet: it's just not accurate enough. Things like Siri are the best we have, and even though that requires cloud processing in order to figure out what you've said, it still is often incorrect.

It can react to all kinds of touching...

The basic backstory: Roanoke Island was a British colony in the New World. It was just a regular colony...until one day everyone there just disappeared. People coming in found no one, no bodies, no people. Everyone was just gone, and to this day no one is sure why. It's mysterious :P .

So...it's a ratcheting screwdriver with bits in its handle? Not a huge improvement, really; ratcheting screwdrivers already exist.

Except he was basically fine afterwards, so no herd thinning happened there.

Because I seeded. I've torrented tons of things on the campus connection, and only when I had something seeding did I get caught for the seeding thing. So...yeah, that.

Actually, I wasn't saying that about this particular depth. It was more in response to brotherbradshaw's comment "Wouldn't the most interesting sea life be living closer to the surface?"

Seeding is definitely a big part of the whole "getting caught or not" thing. I was recently admonished via E-Mail by my campus (whose connection I use) for supposed copyright infringement. The file they mentioned, though, was one I'd had on my computer for a while and downloaded on a different connection back home. I…

Maybe not compared to the depth of the ocean, but compared to the depths most people usually see, it is.

You're completely wrong, as in the opposite is true. We're used to the sea life up by the surface. The creatures deep underwater, far from light, are the most interesting.

Oh. Anthrax. I didn't realize you specifically meant that and were just talking about general bioterrorism.

Maybe not 10 minutes, but 2 hours is. Yes, I've had hiccup fits that last that long, and it's exhausting.