Nah, it usually takes the elderly far, far longer than 20 minutes for their children to get back to them.

Don't we say the same thing about desktop Linux vs. Windows?

The difference being it's easier for these two to co-exist, but really, I don't think we'll see a mass extinction in the near future.

Bad ideas never die. They just go dormant for ten years, then emerge from the ground like mindless locusts.

We also call the phenomenon "Everything old is new again."

Unnecessary replies?

This is /., are there any other kind?

Here's the thing everybody seems to lose track of -- it's usually religion attacking science, not the other way around.

Sure, there are some high-profile atheists who happen to be scientists (e.g. Dawkins), but ultimately religion's threat to science is display of bloody teeth and claws. Science's threat to religion lies simply in disproving, without malice or particular attention, its concrete claims about the universe.

New doesn't necessarily equal dangerous, but it also doesn't necessarily equal benign, either.

I just want to know what I'm buying, and that plenty of somebody elses have done guinea pig duty first.

That's a fine principle, except that all consumers of food have a vested interest in changes to diet. You can eat organic all you want, if wind-bourne pollen from modified crops is fertilizing the neighboring organic fields, you'll wind up eating something whose health effects are not all that certain. And yes, in many cases anti-GMO folks are concerned when there isn't reason to be; but this is our food supply we're talking about, and a precautionary principle is in full effect.

Besides, self-regulating industries are prone to misrepresenting health effects when they have financial interests at stake. CF Vioxx... It's all well and good to say "let the market sort it out," but market solutions are ex post facto -- you don't know to punish a bad market actor until they've already dumped a billion barrels of oil in your gulf (and that's assuming that you, as a lowly, non-media-empowered consumer, can even break through the asymmetries of information in the first place). Regulations can be over-cautious and even misguided, and they can certainly fail; but they are much more effective than free-market actions in preventing the disaster before it happens repeatedly.

I mean, sadly, that's part of the dilemma of Free Software -- it makes it harder to bootstrap, because all the low-hanging fruit gets eaten. There's no more incentive to solve the manageable problems, because someone else got there first, so it's harder to learn; and what's left is the stuff that you have to really know your stuff to work on.

One thing you might try is debugging. It's a nightmarish job (or at least it is if you aren't patient and methodical in your free time, the kind of person who scores baseball games in the stands and then keeps the sheets), but you'll by necessity learn a ton about both coding and the CS stuff that's involved in a big project...

Problems.

If you want someone interested in something, give them some practical application. Find a problem that the son could solve using programming.

The ideal problem would be one that's intuitive enough to create a useful partial solution without a gui or too too much heavy lifting, but that's deep or broad or potentially complex and extensible enough that he can keep coming back to it and adding refinements, then maybe putting a front-end on it, tidying up edge cases, etc. Something that will encourage him to develop his skills and move beyond the basic stuff into the complex stuff.

There is nothing so blessed in the world as a problem.

That's because what I'm saying is true.

Deregulation of the banking and finance industries has greatly destabilized the market and non-financial businesses. While it's improved banking profits (naturally) -- to the tune of bankers, hedge funds, etc. making up nearly 30-50% of American profits at their peak -- it hasn't really resulted in improved market conditions for any other businesses, and has given us roller coasters and now the Great Recession.

Markets are wonderful tools, when used with appropriate safety guards and adult supervision.

Oh please. Separation of business and state is what got us into this mess in the first place. If we still had the effective financial regulations of the pre-Reagan era, things would still be going great.

You're assuming there are industries that don't treat people -- ahem, sorry, "human resources" -- as more than cockroaches, or something to be exploited and then the slag dumped somewhere else.

You Europeans and your better lives. ...are you hiring?