I would add that it also doesn't matter whether or not the cream of the crop includes females, although I see no legitimate reason it wouldn't. It isn't like you have to land a job at Google or some other huge tech company to be successful. I don't know a single programmer that was honing their craft at a young age unless you mean learning to think in a logical fashion. My Father has worked writing assembly code for mainframes for most of his career and all of the really succesful places he worked focused on hiring people based on practically everything other than their technical programming skills.

Muslim vs Muslim can still play into their favor if they can define it as one sect vs another. It may not be as effective as Muslim vs foreign christian invaders, but it could still be considered a win.

I'm not a fan of the Koch brothers but no one is all evil or all goodness and light. I disagree with the Koch's political spending, but we can still acknowledge the good some of their charitable giving does. As a parent of small children I've noticed that focusing solely on the negative behaviours does nothing to prevent it, while a more balanced approach seems to get better results.

It's been a few years but the US military used to require the flu vaccine every year. And it's not like you could just opt out and take an admin discharge.

Disney is for idiots and children. I don't think that being rich or poor has much to do with it. I've known plenty of poor people that spent far more than I would judge appropriate on trips to disney. Disney also employes a ton of poor people to work at their parks, and enough of them not being vaccinated probably helped spread the measles. I obviously am not a fan of disney, so maybe I'm a little biased, but trust me, they draw in customers from all social classes.

The advent of Netflix streaming among other services has really increased my TV watching. I went almost an entire decade without watching TV, I didn't even own a TV for seven of those years. Now I'll go months without watching anything then spend a month binging on Netflix or torrented stuff. There are even a few shows on the big networks that I like but won't watch during the season because I don't have the patience to deal with the release schedule and rationing of one episode every week at best.

I think it depends a lot on what kind of games and shows you are watching. And it also probably varies a lot based on how you watch or play. My brother and I always got picked on by friends when watching movies with them because we analyzed them a lot, instead of just passively taking it in.

I play some games when I want some mindless fun and others I want a mental challenge. Sometimes they can even be the same game just played a differently.

Reading can fall into the same boat. My Father always derided my literature choices because they were just frivolous stories in his opinion. Of course all I've ever seen him read is technical manuals and magazines. To him literary classics may as well have been comic books and vice versa.

Sadly in my experience none of that really works until the child does actually burn themselves. They may get sneakier about whatever behaviour it is you're trying to curb but until they hurt themselves they'll usually keep on doing it. Kids can be oh so smart and incredibly stupid all at the same time, I'm convinced it's part of their charm.

It depends. The state I live in forces all home schooling to be done through a religous institution. There are a number of churches that will gladly take your money to sanction your homeschooling, but there is no option for someone who doesn't want to pay that tax to a church to home school. I'll grant you that a lot of home schoolers are doing it to avoid evolution and whatever other things they disagree with. But I can tell you that all of the public high schools where I live are complete shit except the "Magnet" schools which are extremely competitive, focused on specific disciplines, and will give you the boot for a single non excellent grade or disciplinary action. So far as private schools go the same is true in my observations they are all tied directly to some religous institution or another. In the end if any one of my children doesn't seem to be able to hack it at the Magnet schools I'll probably relocate to anywhere else that doesn't have a completely broken school system.

My kids are vacinated for most everything they can be. But even if you look at measles, which is the current panic disease, the mortality rates are a joke. Something like 1 in a thousand cases in the years before vaccination was mortal. With modern health care I would expect it to be even less. The risk that non-vacinated kids pose is laughable at best, and it's not like vaccination results in 100% immunity anyways. If you're immune compromised, that sucks, but let's face it you are incredibly likely to die from something like the flu anyways. The massive amounts of public panic over that risk going up a few percentage points is completely unwarranted in my opinion.

I'm always bemused by the bad quality of live performances and recordings, and that's mainly because I've heard plenty of really good ones as well. I went to a concert once where 3 acts were playing. For the first and last act the sound guys seemed to be right on point, but for the middle act it was borked all to hell. That act needed the vocals to be louder than the instruments but as it was you could barely hear the singer at all.

A few years ago my wife was pretty into America's Got Talent and I'd watch it periodically with her because some of the acts were actually amusing. But several times they'd have a singer that sounded awful or at best mediocre, but the crowd and the judges went wild for them and praised them to no end. All I could figure was that the sound guys scewed it up and the recording didn't do the performance justice.

Sadly not really an option in all states. Where I live all cars have to be currently plated and registered. Even if you've had it parked in your backyard under a tarp for the last decade it in theory has to have a plate on it. That plate is also not supposed to be covered by anything, even those translucent plastic plate covers are a violation. That said though you could always just slap one of those white cardboard "tag applied for" things over your plate, and probably avoid detection by the automated readers or arousing suspicion.

I don't really know that it's all that unjustified of a paranoia. The California Legislature a few years back expanded the list of convictions that prohibited gun ownership. They did not notify registered gun owners which were affected by this change and instead started serving warrants with SWAT teams.

They chalked it up as plausible because there are historical accounts of it being done succesfully. They were not able to replicate the results but that of course doesn't mean it isn't possible. Using a thermal lance would probably work in some cases and not in others depending on the construction of the safe. In the Mythbusters case it took longer with the lance than they expected and the heat from the lance destroyed the contents of the safe. Their safe was also very leaky such that just filling it with water was problematic, meaning a lot of the pressure from the detonation was probably able to escape without doing any damage. Provided you can fill the safe with water without destroying the contents and minimal leakage, I'd give the method a good chance of success.

So what you're saying is that the internet has always been an internet of things? From its earliest implementation a terminal would sense input (usually from a human), relay that information if appropriate to a remote computer over a network. The remote computer would receive the traffic and respond in whatever way it was programed.

To me this is just another stupid buzzword/phrase just like the cloud. People, usually marketers just keep coming up with new words for things that have been around for a while in an attempt to drum up more business.

Meh, there really aren't that many social obstacles that I can see. I haven't had a cell phone for over six years and very rarely have I missed it, primarily when I'm at the store and can't remeber if we need something or not. That very minor inconveince is certainly not worth the excessive cost of a cell phone, in my opinion.

I did own a cell phone for many years mainly because I had the money and it was the cool thing to have. Looking back at it now though I really wish I had just saved that money and used it for pretty much anything else. I've a landline at home so telemarketers can call to annoy me, and so that family can contact me via voice if they really must. Actually now that I think of it my work requires that I have a phone number, I wonder if that means I can deduct the minimal cost of my landline as a business expense.