Nature rewards us grandly for it. If "nature" didn't intend us to seek food and entertainment, our bodies wouldn't fill our junkie brains with dopamine when we do it.

My then 8 year old wanted to learn Lua script so he could build original content in Roblox. I tried to convince him to learn to code something easier to teach first. That was HARD, harder than I thought, to convince him to try to learn to think in code before he tried to code in Lua.

One night, he came out of his room long after bedtime crying and told me that earlier he copied someone's script into a level he made in Roblox, and now he was sure he was going to get banned because the game thought he was cheating

it was 10:00 at night and I loaded up his Roblox account, and edited the script right in front of him. It was something like this psudocode: wait(1 minute) display message("You have been caught cheating, your account will be deleted in 5 days") end

I changed it to display a stupid message like "If you see this it means you got trolled by someone who understands scripting"

He felt better, but more importantly he learned that "understanding scripting" is important and powerful... and that even his old dad who "just knows other scripting and not lua" is better than nothing.

Then he said... I guess you can teach me Javascript... then we started Khan Academy and he slurped it up like a hungry aardvark.
https://www.khanacademy.org/co...

Haircut, beard trim

I live in Texas, for as long as my corporate overlords allow it... so I am bitter.

Employees - Am I in the united states and an At-Will employment state, you are about to be let go

Am I in any G8 country other than USA, your country protects its citizens, and the corporation is required to notify you, and provide a reason if you will be let go.

aka "contribute."

Their reading lists had a large amount of overlap before. I think these jerks don't realize how precarious the situation of Science Fiction literary genre is... As it is most breakout authors are accidentally sponsored by Scientology, and major publishing houses will not take a chance on anything but space opera, someone with 150,000 blog and twitter readers, or licensed adaptations.

everything stupid and petty we do as a community puts another nail into that coffin. Having our most prestigious award turned into a poor downtrodden straight white male protest is a freaking deathblow.

Central Office / Remote Terminal

It is just a fancy way of saying that their routers at the end of the street are full.

I moved into nice apartments in Westlake Village, California. Called Verizon, had them hook up DSL. It was fast and worked well... for 12 hours.
My service was shut off.

I called and they said "Service is not available in your area.

I told them I had service yesterday, and they confirmed that I did, but that it was a mistake, and service was not available.

We went around and around, I finally gave up after 2 hours on the phone, vowing to sign up with someone else. No other service available, and since I was at the bottom of a valley, EVEN SATELLITE was not available.

After a few more days of phone calls and escalations, I finally straight up asked them "Is the CO/RT full and you didn't realize it until you hooked me up?" they admitted that yes it was.

I made a deal with my neighbor, bought her network equipment and paid her phone bill every month just for letting me use her wifi.

THEN to add insult to injury, I got a contract cancellation fee bill from Verizon in the mail, because I terminated my contract for DSL before a year was up.

Apple watch's medical features are a handy excuse to self-justify buying it... I am fine with it, I justified buying a PS3 for myself back in the day by saying "heck, I needed a blu-ray player anyway."

But we all know it is suspension of disbelief, and no serious consideration.

Go to the solar city website... I'll wait.

Ok now that you are back you probably know how solarcity works right? No? Weird because you'd think it is pretty simple.

Here is how it works, once you TALK TO THEM ON THE PHONE they will send you "do not disclose" paperwork that amounts to: You pay to install solar cells on your roof, then you pay to keep them clear of tree branches etc, then you buy electricity from the solar cells at slightly higher than municipal power rates, then you buy the rest of your power from the municipality or other provider at the normal price. Then they uninstall them 20 years later for free.

100% of tax credits go to Solar City.

I really don't understand why you would do this over green mountain or some other "renewable at a slightly higher price to make you feel better" kind of place. SolarCity is a complete rip, offering all of the disadvantages of a grid-tied solar install, with none of the advantages. For my particular area, the more power their solar cells would generate, the higher my electric bill would be.

woosh

I hate how much the McDonalds lawsuit is used to debase the legal system as frivolous "jackpot justice"

Her jury award was 2.7 million. The judge reduced it to 640k, but the parties settled rather than appealing more, presumably for less than 640k. The coffee WAS way too hot. 40 degrees (f) above industry standard, so hot it could cause 3rd degree burns in 2 seconds.

This case is trotted out as an example of how the little guy keeps the poor multi-billion dollar corporations at bay using frivolous lawsuits, when really it should be an example of how even when everyone agrees on the facts, even when the law is on the little guy's side, the corporation will bend them over and at the very least get more positive publicity than their piddly settlement money could possibly buy.

This is the story of how McDonalds nearly killed a woman, she sued begrudgingly because she couldn't afford her medical bills, she won, and somehow McDonalds is the victim.

Car analog - Is Hyundai better than Honda because they have better warranties? NO, of course not.

Excellent customer service when a failure occurs is worse than no failure occurring. A LOT worse.