Actually, I believe the $14,600 number is incorrect and that he's actually suing for something like $62,400 per employee.

Notice that $14,600/employee * 61000 employees ~= $890m, which is a far cry short of $3.8b.

Reading the article, the claim is for $200 per pay period per employee per claim. There are 12 claims and if we assume biweekly paychecks, 26 pay periods. $200 * 12 * 26 = $62,400 per employee. $62,400/employee * 61000 employees ~= $3.8b, which suggests this math is correct. It's certainly possible that the number of pay periods is wrong, but using 24 pay periods for twice/month paychecks produces ~$3.5b which is shy of the mark.

I've heard 3 strikes before and seems like a reasonable policy for an ISP to apply for disconnecting people, so I propose that ISPs disconnect people who have been found liable in 3 distinct cases for infringement (utilizing their internet connect). This allows us to use a well-known and authoritative method for determining what constitutes a strike. Furthermore, we should restrict it to copyright violations that have occurred in the past 3 years to allow people to reform their illicit behavior.

Carnegie Mellon has attracted a lot of major tech companies to Pittsburgh where they hope to pick up CMU graduates who are a looking to stay. It additionally is a significant source of start ups. Companies with offices in Pittsburgh include:

Google
Apple
IBM
Uber
Duolingo
Shoefitr
Dynamics
Safaba
etc.

Expected value is only a good metric for evaluating lottery tickets if you expect to win often enough that it'll average out over time. For this particular lottery where $2 buys you a 1/175m chance of winning $337.8m, it doesn't make sense to reason that you're paying an average of $0.07 cents to play unless you're planning to buy several billion tickets over the time period you care about. For this lottery, the entire point is the variance. If you buy a ticket you are paying a trivial amount of money for a small possibility of a life-changing event.

There are occasionally lotteries and people for which expected value does make sense:
http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/08/07/how-mit-students-scammed-the-massachusetts-lottery-for-8-million/
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/25/us/group-invests-5-million-to-hedge-bets-in-lottery.html

The police in the DC area appear to have very strong beliefs that children should be accompanied very closely by parents at all times. About a year ago, my wife and I were walking to the air and space museum with our 8 year old daughter and her 8 year old cousin in DC. We walked by a park and the children thought it would be fun to walk through the park and meet us on the other side. They were stopped in the middle of the park by a police officer who demanded to know where their parents were. They pointed at us, about 50 feet away. The police officer first demanded that we come meet him in the middle of the park to pick up the children and, after we refused, settled for escorting them the 50 feet to meet us.

We felt like the officer was acting ludicrously and a royal jerk. It's discomforting to see that this problem is more wide spread, so I hope these parents are able to get the police and CPS to back down. I completely agree that children do not magically become grownups on their 18th birthday, they need to slowly expand their boundaries and comfort zone over time as they grow into adults.

I would like to introduce Mr. Cicconi to a device called a 'Telephone', particularly a variant colloquially termed a 'landline'. Historically 'telephone' companies, such as AT&T, would sell users a 'landline' to which they could connect a 'telephone'. These services included a basic connection charge as well as usage charges. In the event that a connection was made form one 'landline' to another, the party that initiated the session was charged for the usage of the session. This is exactly the treatment that Mr. Hastings is proposing.

In particular, I would like to note that while some providers charged users based upon usage, other providers allowed for a fixed cost plan where the subscriber paid a flat payment independent of their usage. These sorts of unlimited plans are exactly what AT&T, Comcast, etc. are selling as an ISP to their customers now, so they have no business trying to extract usage fees from Netflix and they have no business telling us that we're asking non-Netflix customers to subsidize the connections of Netflix customers. We've paid the fees that AT&T, Comcast, etc. demand for unlimited usage, so they need to provide it without whining about how they're not getting paid twice for the same service.

I recently discovered the answer to this question. It's because everyone else has one. When you get rear ended on a bicycle by a car going 30mph, you are quickly accelerated from 15mph to 45mph and then wipe out. This has a tendency to break limbs, cause concussions, and do other damage. The only known defences are to ride somewhere else (which frequently means you can't actually get to the grocery store) or add mass. If you up your mass to 3000 lbs, then the acceleration and damage are minimal. I prefer to put that mass into the vehicle, but you can try adding 3000lbs in body fat if you want.

Go post your question on a forum for stay-at-home parents. They should have some pretty good ideas as they have a lot of mind-numbing boredom to deal with.

I agree with your point that the scale on the poll is pretty bogus as it amounts to 3 options staying at home, stating in the same metropolitan area, and travelling to another city. The differentiation seems pretty useless and the failure to distinguish between staying in the country or continent and travelling to the other side of the world is disappointing.

But to be fair, here are some examples on the east coast of the USA of cities that fall within the range. These numbers are the first result for directions on Google Maps, so the cities may be a bit closer if you consider actual distance instead of shortest driving directions:

Baltimore <-> Washington, D.C: 41 miles
Boston <-> Providence: 50 miles
Providence <-> Hartford: 87 miles
NYC <-> Philadelphia: 96.3 miles
Philadelphia <-> Baltimore: 101 miles
Boston <-> Hartford: 102 miles

If I were designing a security system for TSA, I would definitely consider printing a (possibly fake) screening status in the barcode in plain text. If you keep a database of what status you assigned to which boarding ticket, then you can more thoroughly screen (or arrest and jail indefinitely) anyone who changes the easily hackable obvious screening status on their boarding pass. This is much like a honeypot that folks sometimes use in network security. (For those who don't know, a honeypot is an easily hackable machine that serves no purpose except to be hacked so that an observer can find folks who are trying to break in.)

IANAL. One might argue that he qualifies under section (iv) on the basis that a pen and paper constitutes a 'recording device'. One might further argue that he qualifies under section (v) on the basis that converting his paper notes into electronic text constituted a transcription of the aforementioned recording. I think this is clearly nonsense and not the intent of the law, as these appear to be intended to cover those people employed by the court to perform these roles and not some individual who happened to engage in these practices while playing a role not on the list. I'd also note that (vi) explicitly limits itself to attorneys for the government and fails to gag attorneys for the witnesses. If note taking and posting is found to be illegal, perhaps we'll see a rise in demand for attorneys with eidetic memories.