I always have plenty of stuff in my "buy it when I get a chance" list that I never pay for shipping from Amazon.

I used to wander through a lot of bookstores and book sales from colleges/charities/etc., but I don't any more, since I can pretty much always find exactly what I want by searching Amazon. In addition, I don't have to puzzle through the bookstore category system to figure out where a book might be. A great example of this is that I pretty much like everything that Isaac Asimov has ever written, but finding it all in a bookstore is painful. On Amazon, it's a simple search for his name.

Games where everyone always died in 3 minutes didn't get repeat players and lost new players because of word of mouth. You have to have at least some people who can play for a while to entice other players to spend their money.

Back in the day, Pole Position was one of the few games with a real limit to the amount of time you could play. Sure, there were a lot of games that could kill you in a few minutes, but those same games (Joust, Pac-Man, Tron, Robotron, Defender, etc.) could easily be played for 30 minutes on a single credit if you were good, and many hours if you were very good.

Today, a likely reason for the demise of the arcade is because there are very few games that offer the chance of a long play time. Many games have fixed times or are simply too hard to allow long play.

I have yet to find a rental car that didn't have adjustable mirrors. Do rentals where you live have fixed mirrors?

Once I adjust the rental car mirrors in exactly the same way (to avoid seeing the car), I don't worry about them again, as there are no other drivers.

Malware writers like this approach, too, as it makes you more vulnerable to drive-bys.

NoScript requires a one-time click to allow a domain. I don't find this to be much of a burden. If it is for you, you can use "Allow all this page", which will permanently allow JavaScript for every domain the current page references.

Most sites don't serve their own ads, so I can generally allow the site itself without getting ads. And, since NoScript has a "temporarily enable..." choice, I do that and only permanently enable sites that I use regularly.

For example, I allow slashdot.com and fsdn.com, but googleadservices.com, google-analytics.com, rpxnow.com, and doubleclick.net (which are all included into the /. pages) are all set to "untrusted".

If you can't remember where your car is in relation to where your mirror is set, then you likely also can't remember any of the other dozens of things you will need to know in order to drive.

Of course, I do have an advantage in that my mirrors are always set correctly when I enter my car, as it remembers me. If you drive a car that doesn't have such a feature and is driven by somebody that adjusts the mirrors differently, you might need that visible cue.

...for some people. I adjust my side mirrors so that I can't see my car, because seeing my car doesn't help me see other cars. I know exactly how much "off" the car my view is, and know that the tiny blind spot I create is covered by the rear view mirror inside the car.

The way I do it was considered correct by the SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) in 1995, but it is not the traditional way that has been taught for decades, and is still taught in many places.

There are many reasons to get up to the stop location (either the line or the car in front of you) as quickly as possible.

One is to clear the intersection you just left. Another is to get past the beginning of the left turn lane so that people who want to turn left (which may be on a radically different cycle than the straight through) can get into that lane. For the same reason, don't stop two car lengths from the line/car. Pull up close and keep your foot on the brake. If somebody rams you hard enough that you hit the car in front, then you likely have bigger worries than hitting the car in front.

Even where the lights are timed with the speed limit, if you get caught by one light, the only way to hit the green ever again is to pretend you're a drag racer.

And, the primary road with traffic lights where I live has them timed to about 5-10mph over the speed limit, so if I get caught by the red, instead of drag racer mode, I have to try "rocket car mode".

The fact that the group of people I hung around with when "Darmok" first aired used language similarly may be why we enjoyed it so much. For example, late at night, someone would point at themselves and say "Bonzo", which indicated they were going to bed.

Of course, we might also have just been drunk out of our minds, as we watched TNG and played a drinking game where one of the rules was if any character spoke the episode title, it was two drinks. With this rule, "Darmok" and "The Pegasus" lead to alcohol poisoning.

Take a look at the quality of output from:

x264 --preset slower --tune film --crf 20

You'd be amazed at how many of the bits on the average Blu-Ray are wasted. What's especially noticeable is that most Blu-Ray encodes are essentially fixed bitrate...it's not unusual to see credits running at 20Mbps. OTOH, there are movies like Lord of the Rings or The Rock, where 4GB/hour is required to keep up the quality due to the amount of action. Or, there are grainy movies, like Fast Times at Ridgemont High or 300. All of these automatically get the bitrate they need because of the "crf" option. These are balanced by movies like The Sixth Sense, with minutes long scenes where nothing moves but the actor's mouth.

OP said "ripped from media and compressed", which is exactly what I do with my Blu-Ray disks. I'm pretty picky about video quality, and I leave sound intact, and I average around 2GB/hour on my 600 movies. I don't expect most people would use a lot more bits per second than I do.

So, for 25000GB at 2GB/hour with an average movie being 2 hours long, you get around 6000 movies. Pretty easy math.

You can argue about my assumptions, but even at 4GB/hour (which is insane overkill if you use a good encoder like x264), that's about 3000 movies.

With scales, the only easy fraud is produce and the in-store bakery. Anything with a bar code is much harder, requiring a scan of a cheaper but same-weight code.

I suppose you could cut the bar code off of a box of pasta (often on sale for around $1/box) and palm it to scan for cookies, crackers, etc., of the same weight that sell for $3-4/box. Maybe the biggest overall gain would be something like a 1lb container of crab meat scanned as margarine/sour cream/etc., which would net you around $10/lb savings. Of course, if you are a saffron nut, you could scan pretty much any other spice and make out like a bandit.

Although some of the self-checkouts I see use the same area as a regular lane due to having the large collection area, the vast majority are 2:1 in terms of space, since they are half-length.

Even the Sam's Club (not a Costco member) that put in self-checkout did it this way. They can get away with it because most people who self-check have a smallish number of items. One of the local grocery stores made all their self-checkouts full length, but I suspect that's because they had about 15 total before the conversion of 6 of them to self.

The huge advantage of self-checkout is that you can absorb some rush without having to add another human cashier, especially if most of the use is "express". I always go to the self-checkout if I can (no alcohol or peel-off price reduction stickers) because I am faster than 75% of humans. I scan with two hands (one picks up item and scans it, pass to other hand which places on belt/output while first hand picks up another), and have found that the scales are fast enough that they can keep up with me. And, you don't have to wait for spoken prices on most...just keep scanning. The other day I had nearly 30 buffered speeches (two forms of price reduction on individual bagels when I bought a dozen..that's 36 bits of speech) that just stopped when I swiped my credit card.

How is adjusting the odds as people bet to keep the money on both sides as close as possible "doing math better"?

Essentially, it doesn't matter what the starting odds/spread/etc. are...the only thing that matters is adjusting the number as bets are placed so that bets are about even on both sides. Legitimate sports books don't make money by "winning" the bets...they make money by keeping a percentage of every bet, so their goals are to increase the total amount of money bet, while keeping the amount bet on each side about the same (assuming 1:1 payout...with different payout, then they would move the odds based on keeping the total expected payout the same as total intake).