Yeah. I have actually published a cross platform puzzle game vaguely along the lines of Cut the Rope. I put a huge amount of time and work into it. The only benefit was growing as a programmer (which is fine).

It's funny sometimes how life rewards savvy entrepreneurs. It typically also rewards faithful hard workers, just not as well.

Steyn's comments in question explicitly and very clearly accused Mann of torturing data, not children. It's a metaphor. It's not an actual accusation of pedophilia.

That was Dale Carnegie's lesser known book, "How to Create Enemies and Enrage People".

The legitimacy of homeschooling should be judged by its results, which has been done a bunch of times and shows it can work out great even if the parents aren't trained as teachers. If that is mysterious to you, let me blow your mind by putting tongue firmly in cheek and introducing you to the revolutionary concept of... (wait for it)... books!

My wife and I were both homeschooled all the way through high school. We both graduated Summa Cum Laude from accredited 4 year universities with Bachelor of Science degrees. Today we are both successful professionals, and yes, we homeschool our own kids.

Studies show that homeschooling works on average pretty well. I have multiple ideas of my own about why, including that: (1) Small class sizes provide education more curated to each child. (2) Parents do actually care more about their kids than teachers would - and please don't get me wrong, I respect all good teachers, however they are more limited in what they can do than a homeschooling parent due to their broader responsibilities and inevitable dilution of focus. (3) There can be more flexibility in the curriculum so studies can capitalize better on a child's interests and individual learning style. (4) Parents can maintain better discipline in classes to avoid wasting time accomplishing nothing. (5) Bullying, negative/criminal peer pressure, substance abuse, etc. are not just in a different ballpark, they are in a different universe compared to some public schools. There are more reasons that could be mentioned; this is a good start. My suspicion is that for a normal child, the statistics are misleadingly bad about homeschooling - there are a large number of children homeschooled because they have a serious learning disability and can't fit into a public school environment, so they may be dragging homeschooling's numbers down (lol).

Homeschooling isn't for everybody, however it can provide a top notch education even without the parents being experts in the subject matter nor trained/licensed professionally as teachers.

TL;DR? It's the books. Definitely the books.

I carry an iPhone. I use automated scheduling to silence my phone for all regular recurring meetings, and I already use the software silent mode(s) instead of the silent switch.

When I do interact with the silent switch, it is usually to discover that it accidentally got switched in my pocket or while handling it, and I missed an important call. Personally I have been wishing they would eliminate it for a long time, since it's a hardware feature that unilaterally overrides and disables my ability to automate the software. I guess I am a software guy. Just my $0.02.

Interesting find. This is a water surface temperature taken from a buoy protected in a bay. It seems likely that a few days of very calm waters led to that measurement. As always, smoothed averages are more informative than isolated spikes, so the other commenter is not entirely wrong - it would be misleading to take a surface temperature and characterize the bay as a hot tub.

Here's that particular buoy's location: https://goo.gl/maps/waUAQ7Apzi...

So our guys reverse engineer an alien craft in the 50's and 60s, and then we get the personal computer revolution just in the next few decades.

The truth is ALTAIR. I want to believe!

if an AI is legally incapable of being designated as inventor of a patent or holder of a copyright, I'm gonna guess it is incapable of slandering somebody as well. With that said, OpenAI and similar companies would do well to be very careful about claims they make about their products. It's a catch 22 because they are incredibly useful for collating facts. However sometimes those "facts" are slanderous falsehoods. Oops!

Oxygen is what reacts with our carbon materials and is the reason for decay.

Yeah, some problems have no good solutions, just bad solutions and even worse ones. While good elder care facilities do exist, they are very pricey and will never provide the same care as a family member who actually loves the patient -- in the rare case that the family is actually equipped to provide such care in-home.

The NSA fervently hopes for centralized, digitized warfighting among our enemies. Developers of these things had better pay just as much attention to infosec as they do to logistical and tactical logic, or it's going to be a bad day for somebody.

It is inevitable that the world is shifting from one characterized by man's inhumanity to man into one where AI enhanced surveillance and totalitarianism will leave even fewer loopholes for humans to be left alone. It is a miserable future that awaits us. Ironically, the best hope for escape from totalitarianism is probably the idiots with their big red buttons eventually blowing us all to kingdom come, resetting humanity to being inhuman to each other with sticks and stones again.

Tectonic plates are always rising or falling in different parts of the world, and sea level frequently adjusts up or down accordingly. That makes it really complicated and difficult to measure a global change in sea level.

The way the article points out that China's coastal waters are warmer, and the rise has accelerated sounds kind of funny. I think the reader is supposed to assume those two things are related. Sloppy and sneaky science journalism.

It's not clear whether a superhuman AGI would want to rule everything, or if it would remain "content" to continue in a subservient role to humans. Much both of human intelligence and human capacity for good and evil are intricately tied to our embodied nature. Our hormones and our social experiences affect our ambitions and mental balance or imbalance. Give us a low dose of a weird drug, and suddenly we have to be locked in a cage as a danger to others. We have no idea what it could mean to be intelligent but without a messy, organic body.

OP specified robust external firewall/router, so it is possible that they would be protected against externally initiated, incoming threats. However what does somebody want to do on this computer? Probably interact with the internet, including by visiting websites that may have malicious scripts. It accomplishes zilch to have the strongest wall in the world built around your weak house if the first thing you do is open all the gates and invite the enemy in.

I think the idea of SneakerNet is not that you put them in a sneaker, but rather that the transport consists of carrying them around while wearing sneakers. Wireless networking, as it were. Totally cutting edge!