We were setting up our new XBox and my kid said, "I'm going to say on my account that I'm 21 so I can get M rated games." The fact is, by the time kids are 10, they have figured out that they can watch anything or use any service just by changing their birthday.

Most kids aren't that interested in Facebook. That's something that their parents and grandparents use. They've cobbled together their own social media experience with platforms that I've never heard of. Some may want to be on Facebook, but apparently not my kid or any of her friends. That's something that Facebook is genuinely worried about. Their success is mostly built on inertia. If they don't grab the next generation early, those kids will go do something else and soon Facebook is reduced to MySpace.

I completely disagree. What you need is a critic that you reliably agree with, or at least one that you understand what they do and don't like. Critic aggregation, like Rotten Tomatoes provides, is a good indicator of quality for mainstream movies. It also pays to read some reviews to understand why they rated things as they did.

I wanted to like Bright, but it just wasn't very good. As a concept, I want to see more contemporary set fantasy (Shadowrun and similar fare). I want better writing and story telling.

The most fundamental thing to understand about how the FCC operates is that they are run by lawyers. Lawyers do not think like either engineers or normal people. They only think in terms of rules and rule frameworks, and they use language in these rule frameworks that is fairly decoupled from reality.

What I mean by this is that if you want to change the FCC, you need a lawyer that can translate your concerns into their language, and play their game for making rules and procedures. Right now, the ideology at the top is in favor of making rules that let ISPs do whatever they want. If I had a meaningful choice of ISPs for my home internet, I would actually agree with that approach. Unfortunately, I only have 2 choices, and they both already suck, so I'm in favor of minimal regulation telling them to not be total dicks.

I don't believe I said anything about giving a fuck about any company. I don't. I'm looking for return on investment. Likewise, whoever I bought my stock from either wants a different investment or they are looking to get cash out. That's why it's called a market.

Now, when you go out and work your 9-5 job at some big corporation, you're not being payed 100% of the value of your labor. The corporation profits off your work. This is a suitable arrangement because they have resources that let you be more productive than you would be on your own, and it's less risky than being self employed. I buy stock in the corporation so that I can profit off your labor. I buy mostly index funds, which are an amalgamation of hundreds of different corporations to spread my risk around. When I walk around downtown, I smile at all the people I see, because I know that their hard work is actually putting money in my pocket. That's why stocks are awesome. The future belongs to whoever owns it.

Bitcoin has essentially nothing in common with stocks. Stocks are ownership in a real world corporation that, ideally, pays regular dividends to share holders. The corporation has actual assets. Bitcoin is just numbers on a computer. It is effectively a currency, and while currency trading does occur, the currency markets are a great way to lose money. Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, but rather maintains its value by the utility it offers and the number of people who hold Bitcoin. This makes it very similar to any fiat currency, actually. At least investing in metals gives you something with intrinsic value.

But, whatever. Millennials can be as stupid as they want, it just means better returns for me. You do you, I've studied how rich people build and maintain their wealth, and I'm going to do that.

Nice try dude, but you'll never find the listening bug that the NSA has implanted in your head.

I see two major problems:

The low quality as addressed in TFA. Most of them weren't terrible, but they're not what anyone wanted. Good movies - Spider-man Homecoming, for example - did just fine. Reboots and sequels aren't inherently bad, if they're done well. Some have certainly used up whatever good will they had left.

The other problem I'm seeing from a lot of people is oversupply. They've already watched everything on Netflix and Amazon and Hulu and HBO. They've gone to the buffet and eaten so much there's no appetite left. In the last decade, I've been given every superhero movie I could have possibly asked for. There isn't anything left to look forward to. Instead of watching movies, I'm doing other things, like making pottery. And waiting for something that's actually worth watching, like The Tick.

In general, I suggest that studios once again become a little more selective about what they make, and most importantly, hire good writers. So much bad writing out there...

You must not have children. By age 8, some have both the ability and interest to learn programming, and many more by age 12. Here's the great thing - you don't actually have to do anything. There are so many resources out there to learn programming, they find them and share them with each other. It's fantastic watching them learn and grow and explore. My daughter is 14 now and it's just been a marvelous journey watching her develop.

My advice to all is simply, don't worry about it. My kid's school does hour of code before school once a month. There's no structure to it, just parents who volunteer their expertise to answer any questions the kids have. From there, the kids mostly help each other out and teach each other. It's brilliant and you can't devise a more effective program then to just let kids do their own thing.

As in all things, there is cost benefit analysis. Phones have reached the point that they are now effectively a 3 year device (while early smart phones were 1.5 year devices). The things holding back longevity are screens that get damaged and non replaceable batteries. Otherwise, the specs on a 3 year old phone are very good. The other thing holding back older phones is discontinued OS support. On the other hand, the battery and screen in my 2 year old Galaxy S6 are both doing great and the OS is still being updated. A couple of minor scratches on the screen and the battery holds a charge for a full day. I've had to switch to wireless charging because the USB connector on the phone doesn't hold the cable in anymore. What do I use the phone for? Email, web, calendar, and sometimes maps. I'm boring.

Comparison: desktop computers. 15 years ago, a new desktop computer was functionally obsolete after 2 years. Technology matured and hit a plateau such that my current home desktop is 8 years old and performs most tasks very well. Really, the biggest thing that drags it down are badly designed websites, and that's hardly my hardware's fault. I'm looking at updating it in the near future. While I would have only spent $500 max on a build a decade ago, in this case, I'm going to follow the Woz paradigm and use first class component for everything because I expect to be using the same computer for the next decade at least, barring any unexpected new advances in technology. My budget is about $1200, which will make it the most expensive computer I've ever bought.

In conclusion, if I were buying a phone today, I'd still buy something that was towards the higher end. I've had bad phones before, and they're miserable. On a 3 year time frame, buying a good phone is worth it. I'm not an Apple person, so I wouldn't get an iPhone. On the other hand, I'm not poor, so I have the extra $200 to spend on a phone that doesn't suck.

Which is why I favor spaces over tabs. There can be a mix of spaces and tabs and it will display in an unpredictable fashion. Spaces always display the same. Then again, I use the autoformat in my IDE, and I have no idea what that outputs (nor do I really care). I figure the boffins who created Visual Studio know more than I do, but I've been wrong before. I mean, I use the tab key, but I'd like that to just be shorthand for entering 4 spaces.

Hillary is going to win my state by a wide margin. My vote will not change the outcome of the election. As such, a vote for a third party candidate is an act of political speech. Furthermore, if that candidate gets enough votes (as little as 1%), it gives that third party automatic statewide ballot access in the next 2 election cycles, access to public funds, and many other benefits usually reserved for the main 2 parties. It is then, therefore, very much not a waste to vote for either Stein or Johnson.

What that says to me is that H-1B holders are being paid below market wages. I would assume this is due to their lack of mobility in changing jobs. The natural solution to me, it seems, is to replace the H-1B with a long term unrestricted visa. How many of those would be imported if they weren't indentured servants?

What would be more interesting is examining all the games that can be played at acceptable quality on an Intel i3 CPU with the stock Intel HD graphics. You'll find that it's really quite extensive.

Investing $150 in a solid mid-range GPU is not outrageous when you're spending $50/game and provides a huge boost. I've got a 6 year old CPU and a 5 year old mid-range GPU (total cost for the whole system was under $500) and it plays everything that I throw at it.

Now I'm left to wonder if the infamous Radeon mouse cursor corruption bug also exists on Linux. That damn thing has been around for more than a decade and I'm not buying another Radeon unless it gets fixed.

As the parent of a 12 year old girl, I can assure you all, kids today are not having trouble learning to code. They have resources today that I couldn't have dreamed of when I was their age, and they are using them. There are two major problems that I see happening: there are too many languages out there and no one works in text/console mode anymore.

Computers were text based when I was learning basic 3 decades ago. As such, BASIC made a perfectly sensible starting point. Instead, today, a web or mobile app requires knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, CSS, some backend language such as C# or Java, SQL, and probably some other things AI haven't thought of.

Really, if you want to bring back a version of BASIC that was reasonably accessible but could still write something resembling a modern app, bring back Visual BASIC 6.

But like I said, kids today aren't really having much of a problem. My kid and her friends are learning JavaScript and C# and C++ and I have no idea what else. There are lots of resources out there and kids are taking advantage of them.