Isn't that how DeNiro's character in "Casino" ended up? I remember seeing a Saturday morning program with a half dozen such characters giving their throw-away recommendations to get subscribers.

PS: Gambling advice on a Saturday morning, but no cartoons? What the hell happened to Bugs Bunny, people?

Say it with me, people: "Black Sox!" Arnold Rothstein thanks you.

Betting IS on a parimutuel basis when there is enough time to establish a line from betting. Weekly college games have too short a horizon, so the bookies have to make a guess as to a good line, and try to lay off to someone elsewhere when the hometown effect is too big. Not necessarily in Vegas for Division I schools, but there are too many other games with too small a following. How do the British handle weird one-time bets like whether an upcoming royal wedding is going to blow up before the ceremony, or if the first Moon landing would beat the 1970 deadline?

Computer Science

This is a cab, not a bus. Actually, until driver-less is really a thing, a jitney service with all the money going to the ride-sharing company, rather than the drivers.

Self-driving cars promise safer roads, less traffic and increased mobility. Some autonomous vehicle proponents also maintain they will save time and money.

Yeah, and they made all sorts of promises of heroin solving the morphine and laudanum problem, too. And opiods are non-addictive, too.

Remember that you wrote it here, first, and watch the strip next year.

But that does sound like something that PHB might at least daydream of doing.

And you didn't read, either.

The wars that supposedly brought China to its knees were called the *Opium* Wars, partially because heroin hadn't been invented, yet (and probably not morphine, but I'd have to look up too much).

Cocaine IS legal in certain uses, such as eye surgery, just not for general uses, let alone recreational use.

That was opium, far less addictive than morphine, let alone heroin, that you are thinking of.

BTW, back to the topic, cocaine is legal for medical uses; it used to be the anesthetic of choice for eye surgery. Legalizing it for "headaches" or similar minor ills (let alone recreational uses) will bring back all the problems that were noted in 1890s to 1900s.

Well, it was thirty years out in the 1960s, so this is either progress or greater self-delusion.

And just to make things more complex, some reverse their names to make it "easier" for Western coworkers and correspondents. Mainland Chinese use the surname first pattern, but Taiwanese Chinese often use the Western pattern, just to make it hard for those of us who try to understand their differences.

When I was a sysadmin, we set up aliases of first_name "." surname for everybody, and gave people a two week window to request in ID *other* than first initial , last name (i.e., "jsmith" for John Smith) if there wasn't a namespace collision (or too long a name, Slavic and Greek surnames can be annoyingly long :-). Surprisingly, the only ones who commonly wanted their firstname as their ID were unmarried or soon-to-divorce women; men sometimes asked to omit their first initial, though.

Our company was not in Silicon Valley, though.

Worked until there were multiple me's on the Internet. I was in the whois database at the end of the era when people still used their real names, and I got emails for someone else with my name every 8 months or so, and supposedly my surname is about the 2800th most popular one in the US.

Even at AT&T, when I worked there, the only way to disambiguate common names was that the org chart was built into the internal directory pages, so if you knew where or in what division your John Smith worked, or who his boss or boss's boss was, you could look it up (obviously, thereafter it goes in your email client as a not-so-common alias, to save a five minute journey).

Where is this better country? Name it, or it isn't, and at best you are writing it because they hold your family.

But was the fraud by CenturyLink the holding company, or by all the subsidiary companies claiming to be their parent?

Clearly, some corporate lawyer, somewhere, may be earning his keep. The damned bastard.