This is true today, but it wasn't always true. I grew up watching and seeing smoking commercials and movies that glamourized smoking. Tobacco companies spent loads of money advertising and figuring out how to make cigarettes more addictive (like adding arsenic and cyanide), and more legal and dirty tricks. Tobacco companies are not blameless in the addiction of smokers.

Actually, the average life expectancy of a 65 year old is about 17.6 years (so 83.6 years old).

Rhe average life expectancy of a 70 year old is ~14 years (so 84 years old).

The average life ecpectancy of an 80 year old is ~8 years (or 88 years old).

The average life expectancy of an 83 year old is ~6.6 years (or 89.6 years old).

So smoking probably chopped six or more years off his life, and most people who live to retirement have a good chance of living to 83.

Actuarially speaking. Since we're geeks here and this is pure logical math, and Spock could appreciate this.

Nicotine is mildly addictive, but for years tobacco companies added some much more addictive poisons (cyanide and arsenic, among other things) to really hook people. Yes, it is a matter of mind over matter. If you want to quit badly enough you can, but withdrawal can be a very debillitating thing and not everyone has that kind of psychological strength to follow through. Although, pretty much anyone could have done the easy work to know smoking isn't good for you. Lots of things are bad for us, and we risk them anyway. It's human nature. We're pre-wired for risk-taking. Some brave soul tried eatting a tomato, a member of the very deadly family of plants known as nightshades. Ditto eggplants. Furthermore, there are many other species on the planet that override their instincts and can reason to varying degrees. You have a poor grasp of the biological diversity of the planet.

I reach you!

I am not Herbert.

He did LLAP \\//_

1. Communicate with your children. Let them know what is acceptable surfing and what is not. Teach them about the good and the bad of the Internet and how to recognize it. Be specific and thorough.
2. Use the Internet router to control their devices access. You should be able to write rules to limit them by the device.
3. Use controls on the pcs and mobile devices. For example on the PC you could use Timekpr.
4. You can log their activity.

What level of monitoring you use depends on many factors. Factors include, but are not limited to: your ability to trust your children, the trustability of your children to follow your rules, your level of paranoia.

Note on item #1. Communication is an ongoing two way street. This means you can't just sit down once with them and unleash them on the world. It means being a parent and actually being involved.

Be prepared for your children to eventually be able to break every control you implement.

Only you know can know what level of monitoring is right, and which is too little and which is too Big Brother.

Eventually they'll be able to figure out how to hack into your PCs or devices and bypass every measure you institute. At which point you should hire them to work for you.

Except he killed off Saruman at Orthanc, which pretty much excludes an actual Scouring of the Shire, which happened in fact in the book, but due to Sharkey's death at Orthanc, eliminates even an extended version addition. What Frodo saw in the Mirror was no the Scouring of the Shire, but the enslavement of the Shire by Sauron.

Two differnt things. Galadriel, "This is what will come to pass if you should fail."

A pretty accurate scene taken from the book.

Damn! I should have read this review before I took a 10 year old child to see this, who totally loved all three movies. She also read the book.

First let's clear the air a bit. The Hobbit is 303 pages long. The three movies are split fairly evenly in thirds of the book chapter wise, not page wise. The third movie covers seven chapters out of nineteen.

A lot of good and bad stuff added in. A lot of good and boring stuff taken out. Darker. Everything is darker it seems these days (except maybe the Night at the Museum series, which isn't saying much.)

What is with the Damn Spice Worms and where the Hell is Atreides?

I'm a true fan, having first read these stories at around 10 myself.

The sound was so bad in this movie, I couldn't hear most of the conversations. I'm very hearing challenged, but had my aid in. I never have a problem hearing movies in a theater, with or without an aid. Well until now.

The HFR gave me motion sickness headaches.

Loved Thranduil's mount!

Strange scene with the dragon slaying. It was ok, I guess.

With all that he did, would it have killed him to have put the final scene from the book in?

One review I read was done by an infidel. Who would have picked on a scene with a Hobbit picking up stones and slaying orcs with perfect aim? Only one who didn't know much about Hobbits.

As disappointing as TLOTR was, but I still enjoyed some of it, as I did TLOTR. This last one needs a bit more time in the edit room to remove a bunch of stupid, wasteful scenes. Almost as disappointing as when he killed Saruman off at Orthanc. WHAT!? No Scouring of the Shire?!! Sacrilege.

This will eventually make a fairly decent 45 minute movie.

Well, there's this old news.

lmgtfy

Then there is the XAML used for development now. Along that vein there is WPF, which is released in tandem with .Net, but is not actually .Net.

It may be they are not planning some new Next Big Thing, that will launch a whole new series of catch-up games like when they came out with .Net. However, I've been writing Windows applications since before the Windows 3.1 days, and have done my own share of following along as my code becomes obsolete as MS comes out with new development tools, and portation tools that simply don't work, requiring massive rewrites or writing new tools to do rewrites. Either way is a costly process. So, yes, I'm skeptical when Microsoft comes bringing Trojan Horse gifts.

It still is somewhat amazing to me, that time after time after time people fall for Microsoft promises and deals, only to find out too late, it was yet another Sun-Tzu Art of War trick. /.ers used to be smarter than this.

Just the same Old Microsoft trying to do the same Old Thing.

First thing, MS has been planning to kill off .Net for years. They have something else planned for the future. A minimal amount of research should uncover that. So opensourcing something they are going to abandon is no harm to MS, but makes an excellent decoy. While everyone is chasing after the .Net OSS, Microsoft will again be leaving the rest of the community behind to play catch up with Microsoft's Next Big Thing.

Secondly, first learn the first thing.

I don't trust anythong Microsoft says. Why do you?

It's not often I see an entire /. article written by a troll.

Well played sir.

I authored the previous comment; I didn't realize that I was logged out when I did, so it showed up as AC. But it's me.

1. I'm too busy to sit around thinking up additional words to throw in so I can score "mod" points

2. The people I like on Slashdot are too busy to read a bunch of additional words I only threw in so I can score "mod" points

3. It's not in my nature to waste words, or to waste time

Actually this particular councilman represents an extremely high-rent district--Manhattan's upper east side. I doubt there are many wealthier neighborhoods in the world. He's not doing this to 'score points', he's doing it to do the right thing.

Well said

Let me fix that for you:

Time and again history has shown the way to have a healthy middle class is to alleviate poverty on a grand scale.