While I would agree that Hasbro and WotC don't expect D&D to contribute much to the bottom line (although I suspect it does better than we might think), I imagine the current value in the property is the IP. The ability to have in your legal filing cabinet a bunch of prior art from the 70s goes a long way to keeping competitors out of your stuff.

According to Polifact, Trump's four bankruptcies were all chapter 11s (restructuring to prevent liquidation). What caught my eye is the manner in which the bankruptcies were cleared - in three of the four, his personal hit was simply loss of shares in that company (he had to sell a yacht and airline as part of the '91 Trump Taj Mahal deal).

To my mind, that's *awfully* close to walking away scott-free - giving up shares in a failing business isn't really losing money IMO. And in some of the deals he was still left in charge or received licensing fees for use of his name afterwards. So, I think Trump is right in that it was a smart move... for him. He starts up these businesses, and if it makes money he owns a majority and cashes in. The four times it bombed out, he seems to be largely able to walk away and let someone else clean up the mess.

Makes him a smart businessman, but that's not exactly a skillset I'd like to see in a political leader.

"for some reason" - oh, to have a mod point for you. :)

I'd say calling a Canadian (which I am one) an American is about on par with going down to Texas and calling them Yankees. You might not get your ass kicked, but you certainly aren't making any friends.

Well, except when you automatically photograph them and store in a big ol' database till you need it.

If the US wants to force it's citizens to take an Internet Driving Test, fill their boots. But I wonder how they think they have jurisdiction to force the rest of the world.

Rents in those areas are hilariously high, and they don't need space for more than the 4 S anyway (sleep, shit, shave, and shower). So you can get the space you need, save money on rent without having to spend the money on commutes. The social side is just basic condo perks.

Now, here's hoping they don't skimp on the soundproofing...

Easy - because we started keeping score.

Used to be, the kid passed or failed on his own ability and merit. Then we got it into our head that there were "better" schools and "bad" schools and "good" and "bad" teachers. (Which I will conceded only in the sense that some kids and teachers are bad matchups for each other, just like employees and bosses).

Anyway, how do we find these folks? We start scoring, treating the kids like completely interchangable parts, and assuming that a teacher who passes less kids must somehow be "worse", which teachers with higher marks and pass rate must be "great". Fail too many kids? That's your fault, so maybe you won't get a raise or promotion or maybe we'll just find another teacher.

Go figure they start pushing kids along. (We haven't even tackled the classic problem of parents lobbying)

Of course, punting Bobby up a grade doesn't help Bobby, and now the new teacher gets handed a kid who's even *less* likely to pass the next year's material - which means the new teacher either has to take the performance hit or punt the kid himself. And that's why Bobby can't read.

So, we put in standardized testing to "prove" that kids all know the material, and tie it even more firmly to teacher's reviews. If I tell you your job is to do things A through Z, but I'm going to test you on only items A, E, I, O, and U - and the results of that test will directly determine if you have a job next year... how much time do you think you're going to spend on the other items in comparison?

Oh yeah, and meanwhile we're going to make you feel like a dirty union worker, make sure we penny-pinch any resource you might need (other than whatever the Government Flavor Of The Week is - seriously, my daughter's classroom looks like a tech wonderland, but there's a hard limit on how many photocopies the teacher can make), and then lambast them for not rejoicing in the glories of educating the nation's youth with sufficient exuberance.

So let me revise my earlier statement. I've never met a "bad" teacher in a classroom. Teachers who don't want to teach end up in other fields (I know a few in human resources, one was a project manager; and a few just get promoted to management) . I've met a few burned-out teachers in classrooms, though - burned out because they're spending their own wages to buy basic supplies (fun fact: all those helpful posters in your kid's classroom? Paid for by the teacher), burned out because the joy of teaching has been replaced by hours of standardized testing and reviews and a culture that now treats teachers as a cost centre to be minimized.

I'd have to double-check, but iTunes does have most of the seasons online - my issue was with the Season Pass (i.e. "watch the show as it airs"), because I was not getting the show anytime remotely near when it aired.

Barring that, the local library has a good back catalog to borrow from.

Of course, this didn't stop the school and police from releasing statements.

Also, if the kid had *actually* called in a "bomb", they would have pressed charges. And I'm up here in Canada - you would still absolutely evacuate the school. Even if you absolutely 100% positively *know* it's fake, you evacuate the school until the cops tell you it's fine. This was true a quarter-century ago, when a random kid at my school didn't want to take a test, so shoved some wires into a clock and labeled it "bomb". The school knew it wasn't a bomb, the cops knew it wasn't a bomb. But they still evacuated the school and treated it as a *possible* bomb, because (a) you never know, and more importantly (b) there's no harm in running the drill (both for the school and the police). It's only gotten more strict, too - my daughter's school will lock down if there's a domestic disturbance nearby, *just in case*.

And we're not even in metal detector territory up here yet. So when you tell me that they didn't evacuate the school, that tells me a *lot* about the level of threat they're perceiving. Namely, *zero*. If "suspicious device" percolated through the building for any length of time, there would have been a "fire drill" and the school would be emptied until someone qualified looked at it.

You're right that we don't have all the facts. The problem is that there's not an arrangement of facts that I can see that makes a lot of sense. And sadly, the closest is that this school and the cops screwed up. If they thought it might *possibly* be a bomb, they would have evacuated. If they thought the kid actually made a threat, they wouldn't have dropped the charges. Instead, we're in this weird world where the kid has a bomb that we know isn't a bomb, except we don't act like there's a bomb but we still punish the kid for pretending to have a bomb except that we're not saying the kid pretended anything so we arrested him because it was so serious except we dropped them right after.

Whoa - now we're saying the English teacher is an electronics expert and can recognize "unsecured components"? I don't know about you, but teachers that are electronics geeks teach science and computing and shop class, not English. (In the same way that your science teacher may not know a participle if it hit them in the adjective.)

But let's roll with this - English teacher has the know-how to know what this is (and more importantly, what it's *not*). Where do the police come into this? Why would this knowledgeable teacher not simply unplug it from the wall, give the kid five hundred words on "why plugging random shit into the outlet is a bad idea" and move on with the day? Where does this mystery bomb threat come from, if the kid says it's a clock, the teacher knows it's a clock (at least according to you, and that's not what the police were saying, btw), what magically made this a not-bomb threat?

This is why they don't want to give any records of how and when these are used (and I'll bet you they'll fight the release of anything resembling *details* even harder). Right now, they can zap you with the machine, and then have an officer (possibly even an officer who isn't in on the trick) investigate you for "suspicious activity". When they detain, search, and find whatever the X-ray saw, it'll be recorded as based on the officer's judgement. The X-ray won't be mentioned, meaning the issue will never come up. See "parallel construction".

Probably not. If you could prove that they were doing it to you - which you can't (see 1)

You don't know. And you can't complain, because you can't prove that they used it on you - and thus your rights haven't been violated. (see 1). Isn't this fun?

Because the police told you it was a necessary expense to fight terrorism. We'd explain why, but the three-letter-agencies told it was a national security issue and we signed some paperwork agreeing we wouldn't discuss it with anyone.

This will end when a politicians uses the terrorist card and the public openly mocks him for doing it. But given that "Soft On Crime" is still a working strategy, I think you're no-where near that point.

I used to buy the seasons from iTunes to watch with my daughter (because science!), until Discovery Canada started being insanely stupid with their release dates. OK, here's ep 1, next week 2, next week.. nothing? Oh, three weeks later is ep 3. (But we're already on episode 6? WTF?). The final straw was when the rest of the season dropped in one batch... after the *next* season had already completed airing!)

So, I may go back and get the seasons I'm missing to watch with the munchkin.

Also, the true star of that show is, was, and always will be Jamie. Sure, the other four are all fun and bouncy and screwing around. But Hyneman is the guy I'd pick to follow around for a day and buy a beer afterwards.

For being the brother who lost the coin toss, and thus had to stay home and be a NASA lab monkey to compare against his famous brother.

And no-one has asked *why* they "don't want to code"? It's in the sweet spot of well-paying without being construction/trades manual labor - you'd think a decent proportion of office clerk / admin ass't / secretary workers would love to move into that space.

And asking to pay afterwards is a great move - that's signalling that they're confident enough that women programmers will find jobs that they're willing to bet their own money on that market existing.

Which makes that guy terribly dumb - he was running it non-stop for almost two years, driving the same routine every day. (Yes, they used "sophisticated techniques" to find him - or, you sit with a cell phone and a video camera on the overpass for a week, and see which cars always show up when your signal drops. Not to mention that he wasn't bright enough to turn it *off* when the cops pulled him over.

Stupid crooks, ruining it for the rest of us...