Even ignoring those in the house who don't always have a smartphone with them (young children, grandparents) and any visitor who isn't on your network, needing a smartphone to control most things is simply awkward in inefficient when compared to a dedicated remote control.

Which is why, if you're going to spend $10 on lottery tickets in a year, you may as well play when the payout is the highest.

I do agree that looking at the odds and the payout for anything where you can't get enough play to take advantage of the house odds is a fools game when it comes to making money on a regular basis. (And lotteries, with only 50% proceeds to the winners, is never in the players favor even if enough plays were possible to make the odds relevant)

The sibling post nailed it. It's not an investment and shouldn't be considered such. Here's why: at the beginning of the two years, if you put the money into the bank your chances of becoming independently wealthy are exactly zero. In fact, the chances of having enough money for a weekend getaway in something nicer than a Motel 8 in your home town are still zero. Compare that to the chance of your retiring in those two years on lottery winnings. Maybe 1 in 10,000 - about the same as you next long distance call you receive having the same last four digits. That's not much, but it's still undeniably higher than retiring on what's in that bank account.

You may as well put the same amount of money into a music streaming service and decide, at the end of two years, which version had produced the most money - because after two years the entertainment will be just a thing of the past.

Insurance is a losing bet. It's a $1 ticket with an 80-90% payback. The funniest part is that it's a bet you *do* hope to lose. Rather it's a business decision, a hedge, which does not always need to show a positive ROI.

In the case of a lottery ticket, it's not a business decision. It's a lark, an entertainment. It's also one of the only ways to become independently wealthy with almost zero work (12 minutes at minimum wage, less than 5 minutes of labor at average wage). For 99% of the people out there, it's the *only* chance they will have of becoming independently wealthy. And someone *will* win eventually.

While I can't argue that people are, as a whole, bad at math. In fact, they're even worse at probability than general math. But it's not necessarily a tax on people who are bad at math, it's a peek at a life they would never, ever encounter for themselves in the normal course of their lives.

The magic 8 ball could have told them that.

What does media exposure in America really do for them, though? Their base of power is over in the middle east. The only way they can possibly relish in our horrified reactions is if they open up access to American news media and the internet. That's the opposite of what they seem to want to do, however -- they are shutting down the internet and other outside sorces of information.

The way, I see it, these videos must be really for the benefit of their internal politics. They can't exactly brag that they've taken down an American aircraft carrier, but they can at least brag that they have done something horrific to an American hostage which paints them as having some kind of power.

An open media exchange would play to our advantage, not theirs. A world in which all the terrorists are posting their misdeeds on youtube and jeering us is a world where they are one or two clicks away from seeing how much more enjoyable our society is and hearing our counterpoints.

How do you to prevent your friends from posting the same information? Ordinarily, I wouldn't mind shouting from the rooftops that I am going to a party. I wouldn't even care if cops heard me. But if the cops are going to survey my friends' casual posts -- "Going to a party at Brent's!" -- and guarantee flashing lights out front once their algorithms pinpoint where it is, that a bit different. It's less like having a cop reading information you have put up on a flyer and more like the cops having wiretaps on all of your associates. Which would be fine, with a good reason and a court order. But I don't like the idea that by sharing our days in a normal way online we are all effectively spying on each other on law enforcement's behalf.

Welcome to 2006: http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...

Welcome to 2012: http://www.amazon.com/Actionte...

I don't think you understand, they want to stop storing explosives on ships. The ships will be carrying the explosives whether they are to be used or not. Will better diplomacy change how chemistry works? Unless you think a few stunning diplomats could render maintaining a defensive force unnecessary. In which case, you may want to check up on whether there are any other big military and/or economic powers with extra-territorial ambitions right now.

A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure...

why would you even want to stay here, right?

FAA can do anything they fucking want; nobody else in the world will give a shit. Do you really think if the Russian, Indian, or Chinese equivalent of the FAA pulled this that the US would take it in stride? Of course not. We'd claim they still don't have any right to reserve property on the moon.

And it would come down to who had the guns and is willing to use them. Which, to be honest, is all property rights really is anyway.

$20k a day, or $20k, once, on sales for a particularly timely topic?

$20k a day sounds great, $20k, once every 2-4 months, less costs and overhead, sounds pretty pedestrian.

They did NOT show that, from 3-4 transactions, they could provide your name, address and phone number, or even that if you have 3-4 transactions in a million transaction anonymized data set they can find out anything about you personally *unless they know you first*.

What they did is show that if they know that you, personally, had 3 to 4 types of transactions on specific dates (you went to a grocery store and a gas station today, and a restaurant yesterday), they could identify which anonymized data set you belong to. Their discovery requires specific outside knowledge not contained in the data.

This only matters if, say, a third party could identify specific purchases and dates - they could then comb the records and find the rest of your transactions on that specific card. IOW, someone has to be looking for you, and know at least something about you, to even start the search.

That's kind of the issue. There are people on the roof with significant firepower to take something like that down. Most of the incursions onto the lawn have been at night, when nobody of value is in the vicinity.

You'd be better off with a mortar mounted to the truck bed and lobbing a shell onto the lawn. It will be moving a lot faster and be harder to hit when incoming, and could deliver a larger payload. 50mph really isn't that fast.

Are you sure that includes all of DC and some of the surrounding Maryland and Virginia suburbs*?

*25km is 15+ miles. DC proper is 10mi x 10mi, minus the part across the river that VA took back.