It seems to me that both of you (parent and grandparent) are trying to follow a beautiful and necessary impulse of being human: find and represent relevant information; say more with less. Unfortunately, this phrase is all about context, like 'easy'. What's easy for a man is difficult for another. What's good enough for one is unacceptable for another. Context, context, context. And now is when I realize one of you is an idiot and the other is someone who knows his language and can use it well. I'll leave it to you to decide who's the cromulent one.

And gentlemen, you are so funny: "ooohh booh hoo where are the ethical ISPs??? ohhh runs around ohhh *faints*"

I have four words for ya: I love these darknets YEEEAAHHHH

and developers :)

That is all.

If anyone wondered how VIPs, rich saudis and celebrities would skip TSA scanners, this is it. The $100 bit is just icing on the indignity cake.

On somewhat related news, the TSA has, after years of hard labor in the name of scientific advancement, succesfully performed an amazing feat of entanglement between the moral misery commonly found in South American countries and the dehumanizing indignity more commonly experienced by North Korea residents. The physical distance between the two local minima of human dignity is on the order of 14,000 Km, thus proving without a trace of doubt that advances in fundamental science are the sure way to the bright future that awaits those who understand how to pull human beings down to the level of animals, thus proving that the direction in which societies have been moving in the last, oh, twenty centuries, was WRONG. As proof of our sentiment, we reproduce (with permission) two paragraphs from TFA that surely convey our proud sentiment of the scientific feat:

"""
TSA says Precheck members are selected randomly for regular screening to enhance security. But that unpredictability irks frequent travelers. The agency doesn't make travelers go to the end of the regular screening line, however, but instead slips them into the front of the regular queue.

"I like Precheck, but it would be much more valuable to me if I were able to know before leaving for the airport whether or not I had Precheck approval for that day's flights," said Beth Allen, a University of Minnesota economist and frequent traveler.
"""

With the genuine, sincere and warm feeling that accompanies a job well done, we now leave the delightful news behind us, fully expecting the new developments in the field that shall bring americans rewarding and enriching experiences at the airport, while at the same time showing the path forward to other good-willed nations of the first world where the values of freedom reigns supreme. Good night, all good men of the Earth.

This article can't be about a real weapon. Microwaves, no matter how powerful, penetrate a few millimeters into the skin. In a crowd this can burn someone immobile but what about the other 9,999 'terrorists'? It's microwaves! A plank of wood would be an effective armor against this radiation. I don't understand.

Off topic but I very much agree with you on video. It's too big, inefficient, slow and overall stupid but it suits slackers. We leapt forward when we invented writing. Before that it was hand-waving and storytelling around the fire, which is what these morons with podcasts try to pass as 'new'. I don't watch video that could be transcripted and read in one tenth of the time. If something is video only, I pass. My time is for written material, thus avoiding the worst crap.

Even more offtopic: These last three weeks I've been working with video. I use avisynth because it has scripts: the 'program' is saved on disk and repeatable. If I was forced to use a UI and a mouse every little tweak and filter should be remembered and automation could not exist unless it was programmed into every tool used, which is unfeasible and the results of one step could be fed to the next which is even more unfeasible.

So the superaffluent will have their hovercrafted homes turned over and smashed against something in the hurricane accompanying the earthquake or will crash into some poor (pun intended) man's home that's not floating away in the flood accompanying the earthquake. Since the rich neighborhoods have surely CCTV coverage, it will be hilarious.

This invention needs more air/seaworthiness. After that, what could go wrong?

Breaking research! Blind people should be sleeping all the time!

Keep watching Fox News, citizen. We have always been at war with Eurasia!

The truth seems to be that the space program was failing left and right and only because the US sadly chose to play the fear card in foreign policy they decided to go head to head with the USSR and enter a race that would have been another Vietnam without the help of german rocket scientists. In nine years a man was put into space. That is not enough time to research space travel and learn by oneself, it's only enough to apply knowledge one already has. All of the surviving astronauts have since said very clearly that the Apollo 11 and the following spacecrafts were a death trap and this is not how the 'space race' was politically broadcast, so to speak.

I somewhat admire the US in the post-WWII era as a country that managed enormous wealth to benefit its people. Everyone able who could migrate from Europe went to the US, no wonder it became the better nation on Earth. My understanding is that it has been going down since. I look at the free press index and I despair to know about the human right violations that have occured on US soil after 9/11 and the ones you perpetrated everywhere outside US soil before 9/11. It's unpopular to say but you deserved it just like a playground bully deserves that someone teaches him a lesson; it was a pity that people had to die again and that you, again, chose to 'retaliate'.

The era of empires is over because they don't work. All have fallen. In recent history the USSR fell and the US is crippled by debt, inability to innovate where it matters (certainly not paper-trading in the stock exchanges) and other powers rising and we are going into a world with multiple focal points, interconnected to a point unimaginable in the 50s, more sophisticated, less dogmatic and maybe, one would hope, more benevolent. I am continuously surprised by work done outside of the USA-Europe 'axis' and you pointing your finger everywhere and calling everything 'copies' will not stop it from being. No one has a monopoly on wealth, science or understanding. Or stupidity, it seems.

> Every office printer these days has only one button. You press it briefly to do make a copy, you press it 5 seconds to clean the cache, you press it 10 seconds to print a test page ....

That's the coffe maker, son. Your printer is a white box labeled 'HP 4xxx'. Look for it at the end of the path people take back to their desks carrying DIN-A4 sheets in their hands. When you get there remember that the customary salutation to the gods of printing is is to open all drawers and then slam them closed again with a puzzled look on your face; the secretaries know that it makes their jobs jump ahead in the queue so they have to wait less. It sure can't hurt so go ahead and suit yourself. When your job finally comes out don't always return to your desk; that's selfish and disrespectful to the office ecosystem - you should give some thought to the important matter of office balance, so take your time to walk around and find the paper shredder. Yes, the genie working in the printer gets all the love but a good office worker would never forget to pay his respects to the ever underappreciated shredder genie. Feed him some or all of the sheets you got from the HP... they were free after all, weren't they? This will make him happy and help nurture the chain of office life, thus ensuring the good faith of all the actors involved. By taking these quick, easy steps you can indefinitely delay the return to your desk and to Gnome 3, thus preserving the purity of your soul. If someone (maybe your boss?) complains about anything tell them you can't get any work done and things will quickly go back to Gnome 2.

Ha-ha! Way to make a cherry-picked argument for your stupid world view. You only mention mediocre washouts. I see your Card and Niven and Clarke and raise you Dick, LeGuin, Bradbury. Now who's making 'sequels' and 'leaving the field'?

I don't see why you want to find a balance. Minds are diverse. Why do you want to find the perfect game, with graphics for everyone, with perfect ramp-up of difficulty, with perfect final stages, with perfect everything for everyone? At the pace games are designed today I guess you can only come up with a blockbuster by sheer luck. Google interviews with Shigeru Miyamoto. The amount of work that went into his games is too great for the average developer. I enjoy Sokoban, it teases me. It would make no money in today's Angry Birds world but that is of no consequence. I still enjoy it, so please make the games you want to see, someone will like them.

I'd say you got a fulfilling experience in the later years because of the meaningful application of the material. That feel of knowing more than the bare minumun is something a cultured mind enjoys: knowing the context, making connections, being involved, discussing with the teacher or your peers is much more enjoyable than rote repetition.

You may like this: http://www.amazon.com/Feel-Bad-Education-Contrarian-Children-Schooling/dp/0807001406/

> Online, you can put additional content, have links that go to the exact point in the video where a question is answered, break up the video into topics so that students can spend more time on topics that are most relevant to them. You can also have more interactive tools and such.

How interesting is this, good sir. Or, you could use this new thing that everyone likes better because it's superior. It's called writing. Good writing is even better.

Click on the spanish link at the end of the linked article and translate it. They haven't even begun. They are in the boasting phase. Also, they are dropping a ridiculously incestuous 'Linux of Extremadura' distribution, also done only to suck in public money and boast about 'putting extremadura in the world tech map'.

Oh, how do you love your dystopian futures. Do you think they make you cool or would be funny? How about this: all the devices we need get smaller and spend less power all the time. There are already energy efficient homes that cost three times as a shitty regular one and can generate all the electricity needed including heating/cooling. They are in Germany and everywhere you care to look. Beginning your working life with the intention of retiring in 20 years will be possible in the first world. It is possible now if you are not afraid of what your neighbours think (you already smell bad, don't you?). But seriously, personal power and efficiency will bring a revolution many cannot begin to imagine. The only other thing you need is food and information. So you can choose to become a wage slave, no matter how good you are, or you can alter your priorities and work towards self-enhancement during the best years of your life instead of hoping to 'have fun' when you retire and your coronaries are screaming little insults to you in their insult-rich coronary language. I envision a future where corporations will be smaller and financial independence will be normal. It is possible now if you want to take control of your life. Many are afraid of it, though.