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Comment Re:Prior art (Score 1) 480

The odds for finding a big bag of cash are probably better than winning one of these lotteries. However the payout for finding a big bag of cash is significantly smaller than winning those lotteries. A million dollars weighs around 20 pounds, so even a hundred pound bag would only have about five million dollars in it. The other difficulty of finding a big bag of cash is that it definitely belongs to someone else who is missing it. That previous owner is likely to be operating outside of the law on a routine basis and so keeping that money which you can't legally claim becomes more of a liability than windfall.

Comment Re:This is so hypocrite (Score 1) 400

Not really new by any stretch. It is part of our Puritan heritage at this point. The social media sites all have those policies so that they can censor what they find objectionable, they aren't the government so while we can ridicule them for it they aren't legally beholden to anyone to empower this kind of speech. That said this article is about a news agency, errr I mean entertainment company, hosting the video online. I haven't actually seen any links hosted by any of the social media web sites, and I wouldn't expect them to last long if they showed up there.

Comment Re:What do you have to offer others? (Score 1) 493

If his grades weren't stellar then an entire week of suspension could easily tank his grade for a semester if the timing was bad. Some teachers assign grade proportions differently but I remember a few in particular that pegged 30% of a semesters grade on an exam. If you are under suspension then you aren't usually allowed to make up any grading activities that fall in that time.

Suspension, in my opinion, has to be the most idiotic form of punishment in school. It only actually punishes kids that care.

Comment Re:Silk road (Score 1) 215

This strikes me as a great opportunity to use delivery via cheap drone. Although I suppose that would mean you'd need a delivery person of your own on the customers end which kills the advantage of an online seller. And it wouldn't have saved this guy anyways since he was busted picking up his product.

Comment Re:The reason it's thought of as a boy's field (Score 1) 254

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.

Comment Re:Wrong Koch (Score 2) 222

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.

Comment Re:Oh, some rich are a huge part of the problem (Score 1) 297

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.

Comment Re:Reality TV (Score 1) 244

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.

Comment Re:Not roughly, exactly (Score 1) 244

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.

Comment Re:Backpedalled? (Score 1) 740

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.

Comment Re:Backpedalled? (Score 1) 740

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.

Comment Re:Pfft (Score 1) 196

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.

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