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Comment Speaking from a Recent BuckyBalls Customer (Score 4, Interesting) 475

I recently purchased 4 sets of BuckyBalls when they were recently on woot. I'm pretty pissed that I did now and want to show my support to Zen Magnets and buy a set of theirs. They seem to have much better quality from everything I have read and seen, and can attest to BuckyBalls "flakes" now coming off in my hand after using the magnets for about 2 weeks.

From what I have heard, this company BuckyBalls made about $500,000 in sales from the woot sale (woot actually bought more from BuckyBalls on the day of the sale because demand was so strong), and $250,000 in sales on the day Google changed its logo to honor the Buckyball. Seems they may have grown too big for their britches and feel a sense of entitlement now.
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TSA Worker Jailed In Body Scan Rage Incident 352

A TSA worker in Miami was arrested for aggravated battery after he attacked a co-worker for making fun of the size of his genitals. Rolando Negrin walked through one of the new body scanners during a recent training session and a supervisor started making fun of his manhood. From the article: "According to the police report, Negrin confronted one of his co-workers in an employee parking lot, where he hit him with a police baton on the arm and back."

Comment Re:Uploading a swf with a jpg extension? (Score 1) 355

According to the article, the SWF can still be executed under these circumstances, but that seems implausible to me. I would think that the browser would simply invoke the jpeg handler, fail to parse the image data, and throw an error.

I don't know if gif/jpeg rules are the same. But you can upload a GIF as a JPEG, and it will still render as a GIF, even though the file is itself JPEG. In fact, even some free image hosting sites exploit this "vulnerability". If you upload a GIF to tinypic, it will rename the file and place the .jpg extension after it.

Firefox and IE seem to have no problem deciphering this so I doubt it is something that the browsers specifically disallow.

Comment Re:Another shocker (Score 4, Interesting) 305

That's bullshit. It's luck. (And increasingly these days, the luck of having been born into the correct socioeconomic stratum.) The best we can do is to pursue opportunities to the utmost when they do appear and make the most of the luck we get in life.

Your statement reminded me of one of my favorite quotes.

I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it. -- Thomas Jefferson

Comment Re:I was homeschooled, my neighbors were unschoole (Score 1) 1345

Without a doubt.

I guess I should have added that the strangest part of my experience was that I think it is weird that a family where the father pulled in $100,00+/year, which allowed the mother to stay home and "home school" the kids, didn't think to prepare their kids to be able to do the same when they grow up.

Comment I was homeschooled, my neighbors were unschooled (Score 1) 1345

I have some first hand anecdotal evidence to present to the slashdot community.

From 5th-8th grade I was homeschooled (by choice) which in essence meant I read text books (A Becca publishing), as well as books outside of traditional text books, attended art classes, participated in tennis lessons, learned to play the trumpet, and picked up paintballing as well as maintened my own N64 fan website and learned the basics of HTML and web development.

I went back to the public school system for my high school years. At the time I had no interest in doing so, but I see the benefit it provided me now. For one, I got into college, learned to communicate with people "not like me", and even attempted, but failed (at the time) picking up girls.

My neighbors on the other hand, had 3 kids around my age and after seeing me "homeschooling" they decided it would be fun to do the same thing. Well, they didn't exactly push their kids to do anything beyond playing video games all day. I guess you could say they fit the definition of "unschooling", that is they did nothing to further their education and instead wasted away their time doing nothing "productive". They never ordered text books, or participated in any sort of standardized testing. After they were "done" with school, they didn't attempt to go to any post secondary school, and continue (to this day) to live at their parent's house.

Their oldest son (25) got engaged at 19, got a job working at a TV repair shop, and has no interest in furthering his education. He is currently living with Mommy & Daddy, along with his wife. The other two sons, have not attended college, and also still live at home.

By definition both me and my neighbors were home schooled, but I think I used home schooling as a means to learn outside the box, which to this day benefits me greatly. Whereas my neighbors used homeschooling to take their kids out of the system.

Not that this is any indication of homeschooling successes (or failures) but I am currently employed being paid well above average for my peer group. My neighbors, not so much.

One of my favorite quotes is by Mark Twain: "I never let my schooling get in the way of my education". I truly believe this, and try to follow it every day. Even though I also recognize the need to go "through the motions" of school, or the "normal" way to learn. However I don't let it stop my passions or what I believe in. I think homeschooling works on a case-by-case basis but I honestly think anyone who chooses to homeschool their kids without the intention of teaching them anything is doing them a huge disservice that will severely limit their future potential as in seen by my neighbor.

So I guess you could say, homeschooling works for some people, but horribly fails others. Next topic?

Comment Re:Netherlands here (Score 1) 102

The only spam making it past gmail in my account now are very simple plain text ads, usually with a single clickable link to a yahoo group. They are all formatted identically (text is centered) and usually the text and/or subject mentions watches, although not always.

I hope you hit the "Report Spam" button which helps with identifying future spams sent using pattern recognition.

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