Uhh, I hate to break it to you, but it's a slot machine. It -is- a scam. Lottery games should be played for entertainment purposes only and not investment. The same sort of entertainment you get from going to an arcade for hours on end: the thrill of pushing the buttons on the screen/controller.

They pay out a fixed percent, and the lottery commissions work extremely hard to ensure that the percentage is perfect. I can't imagine a casino being any less stringent, or being more fair, than a government-run lottery commission. On the flip side, most of those lottery machines run Linux, and watching a dmesg scroll across one of their screens is quite enjoyable, especially when you enter its test mode and play the ogg files on it that make up the background tracks, or watch the game load a series of png graphic sprites. That "Walk Like An Egyptian" song sure does get stuck in your head after a few hours of it though.

Why would Los Angeles want people's hair?
(:

The floppy did grow a bit, it was just too little, too late. Don't you remember the Superdisk LS-120 Zipdisk killer? It was a whole 20 MB bigger than an Iomega Zip100, and then Zip released their Zip250. So awesome I almost switched back from Zip because it was backward compatible with regular 1.44 MB floppies. Sadly, it was too late, I replaced my Zip drive with a 4x CD-RW as the Zip250s were coming out. Later the Zip 750 came out which beat out my 640 MB CDs but at too great a cost. I was almost sorry to see both those magnetic technologies react too slowly to optical media. Sure they had Jazz drives that offered gigabyte storage, but optical had won due to lower costs and nearly ubiquitous compatibility.

Now we see the wheel rotating again where Flash media is a better deal than optical media, and opitcs are reacting too slowly to electronic media. I mean, even if every PC had a blu-ray player, and blu-ray disks were only $5 each, I think at this point people would prefer the small form-factor, reliability, and reusability of their microSDHC cards in USB readers and Lexar Jumpdrives.

Would you kindly mow it for me then? I think I left a Commodore out in the back 40 somewhere...

You "rounded" roughly 304,059,724 people...to 3 million? I think you'd have to have over a billion people in the US before you could write off two orders of magnitude as a "rounding error". But yes, I agree, your estimate for being hurt by the reactor is correct enough, although 0/300 million does sound better to me. I'll toss my vote in for putting the next reactor in my city, please! Oh wait, my State had one, then decommissioned it at a freaking -loss-, and a 30 years later I get a check for $40 remunerating me for the trouble. While it worked it single-handedly generated 12% of Oregon's power. From a single reactor! Goodness I hate knee-jerk politics that interfere with our nation's ability to do rational things like operate its existing power plants.

If you give him a Bluetooth headset he's going to ask for a latte.

I thought it was Catholicism where you had to buy indulgences?

Well, it isn't really a "GNU" project, it is GPLed, but I think Gnome would be better called a GNU project. Afterall, Gnome exists because of KDE's non-GNU-friendly license.

So if any of the DEs were to be labeled as BSD, I'd say it's KDE.

Just sayin', there's a fun history here, and thinking of KDE as a GNU project is a funny thought.

I guess I just don't like reboots.

• The new 007 "James Bond" isn't suave or debonair, let alone imposing.

• The new Indiana Jones was a joke, and I don't look forward to seeing Shia LaBeouf wielding a whip and Fedora.

• The new Batman, although intensely entertaining, just wasn't Batman anymore.

• And of course, JJ Abram's gratuitous lens-flare, "rapid-zoom", and "camera shake" tour de force was best left on the cutting room floor and I doubt I'll watch another Star Trek: Cloverfield Edition coming from his portfolio.

Get off my lawn!

It would seem that I shouldn't toss my 2 cents in if I'm going to watch a show Season-by-Season on DVD. Especially not if I'm only on Season 3 out of a potential 5. Shoot, I guess I've gotta get busy with watching more television!

Surely you meant to say Dunder Mifflin Paper Company? Heaven forbid Michael Scott ever become anything more than middle management!