That is certainly your preference when it comes to games. However, as a counterexample, I love the fiddly numbers in most games. In Starcraft, I had memorized the cooldown times, range, damage, etc. of every single unit. I could have run simulation battles on pen and paper... and I sometimes did. In Kingdom of Loathing (an MMORPG) I was part of a group that spent time working out the exact stats of every monster and the hit/miss percentages.

To me, numbers are fun, to you they are not. Yeah, you can make everything loot-based, but by having things being loot AND stats based, it makes more good numbers for me to crunch, which for me equals fun.

As a sidepoint, making everything loot-based would probably ruin the game due to twinking (giving new players super dooper loot)

'tis true. I have understood why perfectly for a long time, and I hate it.

I have never understood why news about kidnapped reporters is kept in the strictest confidence, whereas the media pretty much never offer the same to a member of the public who is not a part of the media fraternity.

There should be standards. Either kidnapping stories are reported widely, or they are not. I see no reason for journalists to have lives of more inherent value than anyone else. This would be like doctors giving preferential treatment to other doctors (eg. less waiting time in countries with socialized medicine) or teachers distributing textbooks only to the children of other teachers. This is not to say that it doesn't happen, but it is profoundly wrong.

Sweet, more room for p0rn. I mean, more room to store my philosophical musings about the world we live in...

Newspapers are filled to the brim with letters to the editor complaining that a certain "important" story was buried in the back pages by incompetent/evil editors. To some extent, these letters are correct: Often, important stories (in my view) are buried whereas the latest escapades of Paris Hilton make it to the front page. However, I do not have time to go through the entire paper, and I appreciate having a professional make a sort of triage estimate as to which stories are more important. Sure, mistakes are made, but I find that, in general, the important stories do appear on the front page, and it makes my reading experience that much better.

That said, I'm not sure why Kindle can't organize the stories like Google News, if I am interested in a story, it pretty much always appears in the top headlines. If necessary, they can license the technology from google, I'm sure they would embrace the partnership.

Clearly it should read:

($50/paying user)(5000 paying users) = $250,000

I believe that the average per user is $1-2 per month.

However, the average per paying user was something along the lines of $50. So the math would go something like:

($50/paying user)(5000 users) = $250,000

or

($1.50/user)(160,000 users) = $240,000

The problem is that we are overpaying our teachers.

(but, seriously, we give math and science teachers a starvation wage and provide them with little respect. Meanwhile, we pay football coaches 6 figure salaries and revere them as Gods. Are we really that surprised that we fail at math?)

The pilot would in all probability be getting fed the same bad data, and could easily come to the same wrong conclusions. The only difference is that the pilot has extra ways to screw up... his input paths could be faulty. Sick, tired, drunk, distracted or just plain old with failing senses could result in the pilot taking good data and destroying it before it gets to the processing unit, I mean... brain. Then, even when the processing unit has the information, the clock speeds are so slow that a real computer could play an entire chess games before the pilot actually reacts. And the outputs can also be messed up, the pilot means to output "climb" but his hand hits "nose dive" instead. Unlikely? Of course it is, pilots are well trained, but computers are trained even better. I would happily fly a plane without a pilot, especially if I could save a few bucks.

Also from the article

That is almost spooky. We need this guy to be running the country.

An unfortunate result. The last 30 seconds of most songs are not usually as interesting as the first 30 seconds.

I wonder if he tried mangling the first 30 seconds at all. For example, keep the first 5 seconds, mess up the 6th and 7th seconds, and then continue on. Or perhaps adding in a base line that would be hard to hear. Or something at the high end of the audio frequency spectrum, to annoy all those teenagers while I listen to my free music in peace.

While there are many comments referring to a good righteous assaulting of the genitalia of the evil male authorities involved, keep in mind that the actual search was carried out by the female school nurse and a female secretary.

This is no way condones the action, but I don't think that this case involved some guys getting their child pr0n fix.

Also, there seems to be a large jump here

1) You may have stronger-than-normal advil
2)....
3) Strip Search!

Something happened in step 2 that we are not aware of, I can't imagine a jump from step 1 straight to step 3.

Anyone who would aspire to a career in politics should find this very chilling I would imagine. Nobody cares that I wore a KKK costume to my last Halloween party, but I'm sure that the picture I posted of it would be worth a lot more when I am running for senate.

(note: I didn't actually wear a KKK costume)