http://gethuman.com/ will often give you a decent number to get to an actual human in a lot of organizations. Biased to the US at the moment. The person on the AT&T number has actually asked in puzzlement 'how did you get this number?'. I have no connection with the site, but have had the occasional success with it.

And we've been doing it since at least the 1940s with everything from pharmaceuticals to fertilizer and hence it's extremely well developed and cheap technology.

That's how most of the '-contin' formulations work (eg oxycontin). You make tiny pellets of the analgesic, add a thin layer of wax to some, a thicker layer to some, a thicker yet layer to some, then make up a pill containing some pellets with no coating, and some with each of the increasingly thicker layers of wax. When you swallow the pill, the stuff with no layer goes into immediate effect (so you get fast acting relief). The acid in your stomach starts dissolving the wax around the rest, with the different thicknesses of wax acting to give a continuous release of the remaining analgesic. Different formulations have differing amounts of the initial uncoated analgesic.

All roadworkers carry a device which signals to self driving vehicles that they can't pass through this area? The truck either re-routes, pulls over, or wakes the human substitute driver up.

Note the poster said " Driving along the pacific highway south from Brisbane". The Pacific Highway is a large national multi-lane highway, not inner-city driving..

Thanks. Although I see (as others commented) that the right-click-to-measure version in new maps doesn't let you chose units (I'm a scientist. I need metric, even if what I'm measuring is in the US or Liberia).

Development of libreoffice on android *is* on the top of the priority list. Betas are available now: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwiki.documentfoundatio... and the open document foundation awarded a contract to two firms to speed up development in January (http://www.zdnet.com/article/libreoffice-for-android-coming-soon/). The android stable is supposed to be released at the same time as the next major libreoffice release.

Dammit, I use the 'measure' tool in classic all the time.

"Most terrorists are middle eastern."

Well that narrows it down to 205 million people. To catch the, what, 15 or so people from the middle east who have actually attempted or succeeded in committing terrorism in the US?

I've been using a keyboard from wasd keyboards with cherry MX switches for the past couple of years and have been extremely happy with it. Sole downside is no usb input (so if you use a wired mouse it takes up another usb slot on your computer). http://www.wasdkeyboards.com/

Glympse (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.glympse.com%2F) does basically the same thing as latitude as far as I can tell (I never used latitude when it was around but use glympse all the time).

Not at all. The halfwits who ordered and implemented that one should be in prison too.

It might only be 12%, but 3,480 is still a *lot* of guns. Just saying. And yeah, the ATF has made a murderous nightmare even worse and some people should be doing prison time for that one.

Keeping an eye on the Mexican cartel's major source of weapons seems like a half-sensible suggestion. And since it's at least half sensible, it's completely unsurprising the DEA decided not to actually do it.

In my experience "genius" and "brilliance" tend to necessarily involve the ability to monomanically focus on things in a way which, socially speaking, is 'self centered'. We socialize that tendency out of most people, and particularly out of women.