I started reading this post and thought INTJ myself. Googling says Zuckerberg is an INTJ, Steve Jobs an ENTJ, with a whole lot of non-Mastermind opinion on what the President may be.

Personally I buy 2-5 of everything so I don't need to worry about changing my 'look.' It's obvious that I care about my 'look' since I took the time to determine what it was, but beyond initial determination I don't care. Having multiple copies of clothes enables the 'same' shirt or pants with regularity without resorting to wearing dirty clothes. Were I to wear a pair of shorts 2 days in a row at home, who the hell notices? It's not any different than choosing profile images or appearance of an Avatar; Aside from shaving and general cleanliness, I don't ever need to think about my look while being readily identifiable and presentable at all times.

It's not the clothes that I'm concerned about. There are far larger matters at stake every day of our lives as one day we will die, and the best that we can hope for is that we leave a better world for friends, family and other people to live in.

This area isn't so gray, nor is it of significant proportions such that there is a need to make a mountain out of a mole hill.

I can misuse gasoline (or a number of other things) as easily I could a firearm, but that doesn't mean we should prohibit the sale of fuel at the gas station because people can tap their credit card and go home to make dangerous/explosive materials.

Making guns illegal or difficult to access isn't going to stop anybody who is truly committed to atrocity. People are going to suck; Try to make the world a better place anyways.

I don't think it is fair to trivialize the earlier Cisco exams, as whether you think CCNA and CCNP are simplistic or not, the fact of the matter is that you still need to know what you're doing when you take the exam. I've seen numerous people cheat their way through CCNA prep courses only to bomb on an actual Cert exam because they were a fail on doing anything beyond reaching Global Config.

CCIE? That's an expensive item to keep current, and those with the capability probably wouldn't be paying for that renewal themselves. A CCNA is much easier on the pocket for the individual, and due to the degree of difficulty/knowledge required I can probably rely on anyone with an active cert to have a clue or seven.

Whether the Trauma of FGM is a billion times worse than Male Circumcision is irrelevant, they're both forms of amputation. Cutting off a part of my body without my consent falls under my personal opinion of mutilation, and I will always feel a slight resentment towards my parents for making that choice with my body.

Saying that the US allowed Assanage to leave Sweden is like saying the US allowed Roman Polanski 30 years to board a different plane or leave the airport whenever he saw a US security detail waiting to pick him up.

As for conspiracies, why would the UK threaten to raid an Embassy, raising future doubt over the sovereignty of other Embassy situations? The UK is potentially willing to damage relations with Ecuador and other countries by violating the sanctity of an Embassy to pursue a rape case that disregards content from the original police incident reports. I'm not going to quantify the weight of the evils of rape versus other injustice, but given the circumstances, this is a pretty weak reason to cause an international scene. Neither of the alleged victims behaved much like a victim for the initial police reports, and as adults who consented to at least most of their evening & partying with Assanage, this is a far cry from taking advantage of an underage girl (child) as in Polanski's case.

So why the red notice from Interpol? Is Assanage a ranking member of a drug cartel, an arms dealer, or a sex Trafficker?

"Who decides that Julian Assanage is harmful?"
It seems to be the US Government...

Don't get caught.

I think a more important question is "Will I be able to keep my APM up in Starcraft 2?"

I am a full time student who also works 40+ hours a week, entirely by computer. Due to the nature of my work my arm is often physically exhausted from the amount of utilization of my mouse on a daily basis, decreasing my desire to use a computer for studying or personal time. I find that I am able to save myself a lot of physical frustration as well as find convenience in mobility by instead utilizing my tablet to read School books and other documents. I can hold it in whatever position I need to view it comfortably, navigating with ease in nearly any location I like with simple finger swipes; I can't say the same for my laptop or desktops.

My situation isn't atypical, either in supply of hardware to have such options or in the nature of work/life for most people, but that doesn't mean that it won't become the norm as the technology becomes more affordable and available. It might not be for everyone due to a number of factors, but I am able to accomplish a lot more reading on a daily basis due to the versatility/mobility provided by a tablet.

A proctor is irrelevant if students have crammed most of the answers in their heads such as you might find for CCNA course work. Most of the answers are the same for each test all throughout the course, the Final Exam for each portion being randomized from a bank of questions that are easily found via search engine.

The saving grace for something like that however is when the students go to take the actual Cisco cert and can't pass the practical portion because they can't remember anything past getting to Global Config.

You're erroneously linking interest in athletics to interest in colleges. While there are those who base their college choices on sports teams, for many people it is still about the Education and the Experience.

My freshman year at USF was also the inaugural year of our football team. I remember the commentary going around the campus newspaper about the money we were being offered by UF and FSU to play their football teams (not a prayer of winning). The whole thing would have been an embarrassment to our school for losing all season if we'd accepted offers like those, and looking back I still don't think that being offered the equivalent of 1/3rd of UF's CS department so that they could've won one more game in a season was a valid expenditure on their part, even for advertising "Look at us, we're the Gators! We aren't computer literate but we stomped all over that first year newb football team. They use computers, look what good it did them!"

I haven't read a fresh copy of 2600 in a very long time, but in picking up a random copy off the shelf (Fall 1998) there is an article on page 15 called 'Back Orifice Tutorial.' The article went on to describe basic social engineering skills and methodology for operating this software. There were are also several other articles of interest such as 'Screwing with Moviefone' and 'Screwing with Radio Shack & Compaq' in the particular issue, all of which seemed like they were aimed at script kiddies. As you mentioned, there are articles about undocumented functions of electronics and old school technical breakdowns, but by and large those articles probably aren't what were driving 2600 sales numbers. (After all, Emmanuel Goldstein did get name dropped by Cereal Killer in Hackers, and there was never a cooler movie than Hackers)

As far as the typical definition of hacker, things change, then CISCO makes it course material so that the next generation believes it.

It's not about the cheap aspect of it so much as about being prudent in taking the occasional high risk via lottery and keeping most of my assets in more conservative holdings.

If you're not setting the Annuitized jackpot as the benchmark, there have been at least 6 instances where the jackpot was over $200 million with the cash option according to wikipedia. You're also not taking into account multiple drawings per week over a given number of weeks. The lottery didn't hit $200+ million on Tuesday and go away the next Friday. Maybe I don't have 180 single instances over 15 years where it was 200+ million, but even if we lowered it to the chance of winning $100 million, or $10 million, it is still not something to scoff at for $180.

You're right, I did not factor in a split in prize $, but I'm still feeling $1.7 million for $180.

Not wrong, I'm just accounting for the spread of $180 between 10 companies and the costs associated for buying from each of those 10 companies separately as opposed to a singular investiture. If you bought your stock at the lowest price in '97 and had nothing in fees you might hit $8k. No fees in 97? Nah...

I thought it was general investment advice, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered mentioning that I didn't think it was stupid to spend a few dollars on Mega Millions when the jackpot was high. As I was washing dishes yesterday I concluded that aside from the aforementioned dissent about high risk investments, I don't otherwise disagree with you. It was all about this:

My point is that those who occasionally play the lottery in the hopes of winning obscene amounts of $$$ aren't 'throwing' their money away, and that the lottery is fiscally sound for the occasional high risk investment without the overhead of fees. If Apple had a Direct Stock Purchase plan or something similar, than investing $25 a month or whatever would be simple for most users, but it's not that simple. Picking up a lottery ticket at the grocer/gas station/news stand? Simple.

Having spent and lost $6 on Mega Millions so far this year, I don't feel like it's been a waste so much as an equal opportunity, non rigged (probably, less dangerous than insider trading anyways, and zero dependencies aside from splitting with other winners), chance to make gobs of money off what is essentially throw-away penny stocks acquired without fees, only I don't have to wait more than 2-3 days to see how things turned out before I win/lose.

Much better? How does spending $1 on a random lottery ticket once or twice a month on the chance that I win $100+ million whenever the lottery peaks prove to be a poor choice? Even if I spend $12 a year, that is still more equitable in the dreams of achieving a beyond lucrative return than the purchase of (insert high risk stock here) + fees.

The stock splits shouldn't be considered as abnormally large or beneficial, especially to anybody who didn't have a large number of shares. The last split in 2005 was at $44 and isn't properly comparable to a split when the value is of several hundred dollars. It took almost 3 years for the value double from that point, so realistically unless you had lots of money to throw around in the first place, Apple was not an overly smart bet for the casual investor back in 1997.

You would've had odds somewhere around 1 in 5-6k that you would've won the lottery if you spent a total of $180 in $1 increments on lottery tickets whenever the jackpot was over $200 million. That is significantly less than the fees you would've paid investing (varying by your broker/how you purchase), and is negligible in impact to your overall portfolio for a 15 year time span.

Understanding that it is High Risk investment, and being generous and saying that an investor got in and purchased $180 in stock divided amongst Apple and those 9 other failed companies you mentioned, an investor may have made up to $3k, which if you were diversified as you mentioned and lost out everywhere else, being generous again might leave you at ~$2k.
That's not bad for having picked Apple, but their rise in value is a) not typical for even well performing high risk ventures and b) not so overly amazing in that 15 years for the casual investor that I would've passed up a 1 in 6k chance of winning $200+ million. Were I to up the amount of tickets I bought, it would take awhile in comparative stock purchases before Apple ever matched the 1 million mark, whereas my odds of winning a lot of money, much less the jackpot, would've improved significantly. All the while I wouldn't be paying fees, having to monitor my other diversified stocks to see how they were trending, or if the companies were still in business.

Telling people to throw money at High risk investments instead of the lottery isn't necessarily any smarter fiscally, and in either case should only be done with a small portion of an investment portfolio, if at all.

I read this article back in December in Time which said that had you redirected your lottery spending to stocks over the 10 years ending December 2010, your annualized return would have amounted to -1.54%, according to Standard & Poor's.



As for Apple, that is a horrible example for investors as they've nearly lost all their money at several points. Jobs took their dividend away (though that appears to be coming back) because he was so worried about cash reserves, and were it not for people going crazy over the iPhone & iPad, Apple wouldn't have seen this fiscal turnaround in the last 10 years. At the time, investing in 1997 would've been a horrible idea for most users, and most of their current value has been from market growth since late 2010.

Being realistic, instead of listening to anybody that doesn't have the prosperity that comes from massive investments (Warren Buffet), people should go buy 'The Intelligent Investor', maybe get a subscription to Barron's, and watch the market for a year to figure out what is going on...while buying the occasional lottery ticket.

It's not even a matter of not supporting your local organic farmer.

There are a lot of seed providers out there who partially source their product from GM seed. A few people buy seeds and plant in their yard, cross pollinating other yards over time and so forth until it spreads down the road a few miles to your local farmer. You can spend $50 buying local at the farmers market each week and still go home and stick it to them because you had a few plants of your own on the side.

Here's a nice little page I found awhile back on the subject. It has lists comprised of GMO free purveyors as well as those that utilize GM seed at least partially in sales somewhere on the planet. Of course, even if an individual goes the length of buying non modified seed, they're just as susceptible to x-pollination as the commercial farmers are. The GM seed doesn't even need to be from the same crop. It's all well and good till you find your Squash seeds from last year were the result of pollination by your neighbors GM Zucchini.