They aren't bad at all. While I won't say they are "great", I enjoyed watching them and they certainly weren't a waste of my time.

You forgot the scare quotes around the word "fix".

Yes. Technically, MakeMKV is a ripper, not a player, but once you have a disc ripped, you can play the ripped file with the player of your choice: VLC, mplayer, etc. You can also stream it over your network, transcode it to take less space, etc.

No, no, this is delicate equipment. Unplug it, wait 30 seconds, and plug it back in.

Laika had to go somewhere.

With all those Venutian women that Bud and Lou left behind, I won't be needing underwear for long anyway!

"Only 115 of those cases were classified as a stereotypical kidnapping "

That's right. And there are hundreds of unsolved child homicides each year that may or may not be part of that number as they are only provided to the FBI on a voluntary basis. And the stats you listed were with regards to ONLY that number.

There's also the FBI's National Crime Information Center (NCIC) which currently has something like 50k active missing juvenile cases which are not part of that classification because of unknown variables. 115 per year is a low ball number by any reasonable observation.

In kindergarten, I walked over a mile to/from the school every day unaccompanied. So did all the other kids in the neighborhood.

I walked to and from school in kindergarten. Google Maps says it was a little bit over a half-mile. The only issue that came up was on the first day of school, when not knowing what the buses were all about, I ended up on one. It didn't take long to get that straightened out, and it only happened once.

I suspect the events described in TFA are a consequence (not necessarily unintended) of our hyperlitigious society...consider, for instance, the sledding bans that have been popping up like metastatic tumors all over the place lately, or that you can't get someone to build you a pool with a diving board.

"Kidnapping as we general think of it (a stranger taking a child with nefarious intent) is exceptionally rare. In the United States, there are some 100 incidents per year."

That's not really accurate. it's some 100 incidents per year that are IDd as "stranger kidnapping". There are hundreds per year on top of that which are unsolved child homicides that are not included in that statistic.

Maybe it's just chrome, but I've never seen this site as broken as it currently is. I had to reply to a comment, because the fail of css has all kinds of crap covering up the button to let me make a top level comment.

http://www.deseretnews.com/art...

"But crime experts warn that statistics about child homicides and how often such cases are solved are imperfect. Participation in the FBI's Supplementary Homicide Report program is entirely voluntary. Many police departments decline to report how many cases they've solved or how many cases involved juvenile victims."

You are only as good as the numbers you are given to work with. I'd rather go with reported missing numbers (which are more accurate) then try to whittle it down than look at numbers that aren't consistently or completely reported to the FBI. This is one of the issues I have with these numbers and reports of how the numbers appear today.

"Despite the fact that crime rates are less than half of what they were 20 years ago and that you were are far more risk than your kids would be? "

~150k reported missing in 1980 vs. almost a million last year. Granted, most of those are resolved, but the numbers suggest kidnappings aren't the same type of crime as gang, theft or violence. They are not going down. You've got about 800k which were juveniles (half of which were runaways). 200k of the other half were abductions by relatives. That leaves about 200k missing kids that weren't resolved quickly or at all.

" What distance is appropriate, then? I think it's much more an "either/or" - you are either too young or old enough to walk home alone. Distance is immaterial."

For a 10 and 6 year old? Across the street. With a parent or guardian waiting on the porch as they exit the school. Or any distance with an older kid present (say 13 or older). And distance is NOT immaterial. You cannot remove risk entirely, you can only reduce it. Distance adds time. The less time they are walking alone, the lower the risk.

"That said, the neighborhood/region may be more than safe enough. I know I wouldn't sweat it in many locales, but others I wouldn't feel safe walking alone..."

I mention that in my original post. However, I feel 10 is just too prime a target for a number of peds.

"It bears repeating though that it is also terribly unusual - more so now than it was in the '80s. We live in a far, far safer (although not perfect) world today then we did when we were kids by almost every possible measurement."

It's not safe enough. We have predators stalking our children. We wouldn't send them in to the hills alone with known mountain lions -- why on the streets? To do is is playing a type of roulette with your kids. Sooner or later green double zeros are going to come up and someone is going to lose their chips.

I'm not saying to disallow independence. What I am saying to to be "smarter" about it. The FA mentions that the children walked together. Great. That shouldn't happen until the eldest is 12 or maybe 13 and preferably there's more than just two of them walking home. Two -- and two that young is just too much risk. You'll never get the risk to zero, but somethings can dramatically reduce that risk.