Ah, the joys of being an insurance professional. He shouldn't bother dealing with their insurance company. He should file a comprehensive or other than collision claim with his own insurance company. He'll have to pay the deductible initially, but then his insurance company will go after their insurance company. As soon as it's lawyers vs. lawyers, things get resolved very quickly. He'll then receive a check to reimburse him for his deductible.

Regardless of what you think of Scientology's, um, theology, you should look into why some protesters are masked.

Um, I'm a language geek and I speak Hebrew, so I'd guess "Kesher ha-Shamayim." That would translate to "connection of the heavens."

The rest of the post is too depressing to comment on.

How can I get someone to buy my cd if most people think paying for it is a silly idea and they can rip it instantaneously from friends?

I've got news for you. Under the old system, you couldn't have made money on your first two or three CDs anyhow, as you'd still be paying back the advance that the record company gave you, starting with the approximately $300,000 cost of recording. That's assuming that you reached the sales necessary for the record company to agree to record your second and third albums, of course, and as they view you as a commodity, selling fewer than 100,000 copies, even if you're critically acclaimed, would mean they'd drop you like a hooker with leprosy.

Instead, you have to do this on your own. You play a lot of shows, finance your own recording (you can remaster later, after you're successful), manage your website well, tour when you can, sell t-shirts, and really, CDs are sold pretty much only on tour. If you've got really good live shows, you record, burn, and sell CDs of each concert at that show (there are bands already doing this), and that helps make future shows more popular, and earns you a fat profit margin on each unit, even if it's only $10/CD. Hell, maybe you're even smarter, and you just sell a code that can be used later that night to download a recording.

So, now CDs won't be your main revenue source, even in digitally distributed forms. The stats show that your dedicated fans will buy your music because they love you, and casual listeners will steal it. In the meantime, whatever drives them to buy your t-shirts, play your songs on internet radio, and show up at concerts is good for you, even if it's a loss leader.

No, they're filled with mercury.

This doesn't seem to make the least bit of sense, particularly if the ISPs are overzealous, and the process is automated. I could easily foresee chaos as large numbers of people are cut off from one ISP after another, whether "guilty" or not. How will people conduct business? Will people logging onto MySpace pages for bands get caught in the net? The RIAA is already doing a bangup job of alienating consumers, but should people have their internet access cut off, I can imagine that it will have a huge negative impact not just on music sales, but on the French economy as a whole.

@14 Yeah, you'd think so, but then he can't get in contact with his friends. We've been able to at least figure out what neighborhood he was in and then we can figure out where he's most likely to be. Last time, he was found in Volunteer Park, Seattle's cruisiest park.

Honestly though, locking his phone book so that only his mom can add numbers, and so he can only make or receive calls from numbers in the phone book has done more to keep him from becoming a teenage hustler than anything else, and I hope I'm not just flattering myself for thinking that my influence has been somewhat helpful.

I can't say that this function is that bad or creepy, mainly because I'm playing big brother (in both senses, sadly) to a very troubled 15 year old who has a history of running away and hanging out with prostitutes, older men, and older prostitutes, all of whom are determined to convince him that having sex with them, or for them as an employee, and living on the streets are better choices than doing his homework, graduating from high school, going to college, and getting a job. If his mom and I were able to track him, life would be a lot easier, and I've actually considered recommending to his mom that she have his probation officer put a GPS tracking anklet on him. I certainly don't think that this Disney phone is necessary for every kid. I wouldn't have needed one, but I graduated with a 4.3 GPA, 13th in my class, almost never missed my curfew, held a job, and had extra curricular activities.

For kids like this one (I estimated that the state spends about $50,000/year in trying to make sure he ends up as a normal adult, beyond what we normally invest in children), it would be utterly necessary.

I grew up in Southeast New Mexico, Roswell, specifically, and as teenagers, we used to break into the abandoned and poorly secured missile silos that littered our area. There was one near Portales, one near Ruidoso, and one other I can’t quite remember. They’d all been sealed up with iron plates over the doors, but someone had used an arc welder to cut out squares from the corners, just large enough for an adult to crawl through. It had been done ages before, judging by the amount of rust around the edges (this was the desert, after all). We’d be bored, drive out to one, clear away the massive black widow webs that covered the entrance, and begin descending down into the silo. There were several flights of stairs leading down to what we thought was the control room, which was the only sizable room in the entire space. It was a large room with concrete walls, and we could see where equipment had once been bolted to the walls, but they were stripped completely bare when the military left. You took another few flights down rickety metal stairs, and then you were at the edge of the actual silo, which could best be described as a cyclopean maw. I was in physics that year, and we dropped rocks and calculated that the depth was 1800 feet, though God only knows if our math was correct. Still, it looked like a bottomless pit.

I can hardly believe we did it, and that we were often stoned when we did, but we wandered all over those silos. We using rusting metal tracks that I assume were intended for machinery as ladders. In one, there were the “shakers,” beams that began vibrating as soon as you stepped on them. You had to run across without thinking about it, or you’d lose your balance and fall to your death. One of my friends led someone’s 13 year old brother through the Ruidoso silo, and a metal grating collapsed beneath him. She was sure he was dead, but fortunately, the space he fell into had filled with water over the years, and though he was filthy and cold, he’d only fallen a few feet before hitting water. Still, I know that right now, teenagers in Roswell are doing the same thing, and probably will til someone actually dies, and they’re sealed up properly.