As someone who was homeschooled off and on (and finished the last ~5-6 years being homeschooled and working part-time), I agree that the answer is "it depends" - this can't be overstated. It works for some kids and not for others, and probably some parents and not for others. I was perfectly happy to have my nose buried in books most of the time and I liked learning new stuff so it worked pretty well for me (and the part-time job in my parents' store gave me plenty of interaction with people of all ages, ethnicities, even languages). My brother, on the other hand, hated doing schoolwork and my parents struggled with him a lot just to get him to do the basics and I think he would have been better off in a more structured environment, realistically - plus, I think he really craved much more interaction with kids his own age than I did, so it was a lot harder on him to be at home and/or primarily around adults all the time.

So agreeing with the parent, the summary question is really strongly dependent on the actual people and kids involved. It probably wouldn't hurt to try out both options. Ultimately, whatever is making the kid happiest and encouraging him/her to learn the most is what's ideal, and I'm not certain that you can make that judgement without having tried both courses.

As other people have noted, the value of $40k or even $100k varies wildly depending on where you live. However, as I've already stated, my point wasn't about the actual numbers. I could have chosen "free" and "ten million dollars a year" if I was trying to suggest that these were the only two options.

And I "insinuated" nothing - I stated exactly what I meant: other people will weigh various factors that may or may not include the two I was using as an example in their decision of whether or not a particular job is worth their time. I have no way of knowing what the variables or the weights are in your or anyone else's calculations, which is why I didn't say "other people will choose jobs by deciding between altruism and greed depending on their personal value systems." If the original sentence made you or anyone else feel defensive, then perhaps you/they should examine why that is.

From my original post: "Personally, I'd rather work at a $40k/year job where I feel like I'm contributing to making the world a better place than a $100k/year job where I'm just enriching the company owner in exchange for all of my free time, but obviously different people will have different ways of calculating what's worthwhile to them."

By definition, a false dichotomy excludes other possibilities than the two presented, which I deliberately went out of my way to acknowledge in the original post. Both yourself and goose-incarnated are simply trolling.

Reading comprehension on Slashdot is seriously weak. I stated a personal preference between two hypothetical jobs for simple illustration of a point other than the one you're making, and nowhere did I say that those were the only choices available to myself or anyone else for that matter. The point that you and the preceding response make is irrelevant to the topic and to my point, which is that money isn't the only thing people consider when looking for a job and just waving high salaries at top-end developers ignores the possibility of soft factors playing a part in their decision-making processes.

The extremes were for illustration, obviously. If you read my entire post rather than cherry-pick, the point is that what works for one person isn't likely to work for someone else, and a company doing recruiting needs to realize that there's no "spend $x on solution Y and your team will magically appear" answer to the question posed. Unnecessarily pointing out that there are options in the middle doesn't change that.

As already noted in the comments, "this is your startup" doesn't mean much if I don't have a meaningful equity stake, but that's only one part of the equation. At least in my social circle, the most competent tech people are wanting to work for companies that are actually changing the world, and if your company isn't doing that, then the only thing it has to offer is money. If it's actually doing something interesting that affects the world at large, you'll have a better chance of attracting my interest even if the pay is likely to be lower.

If all you have is money and Wednesday beer nights and a pool table in the office or whatever, that's great, but that mostly just translates to "trying to keep you at the office as much as possible" usually, so that sort of cultural stuff is less interesting.

Personally, I'd rather work at a $40k/year job where I feel like I'm contributing to making the world a better place than a $100k/year job where I'm just enriching the company owner in exchange for all of my free time, but obviously different people will have different ways of calculating what's worthwhile to them. Also, obviously, family and location play into it - the "best pay" may not be in the most family-friendly markets, and you could easily make yourself unattractive to highly-skilled engineers with families no matter what your pay is like if your company is located somewhere with crazy real estate prices.

I'd just note that by "don't get it" I meant exactly this. By your own admission, you haven't tried any social media site whatsoever, and yet you feel qualified to handwave them all off as "bullshit" while making assertions that have little to do with social media ("1:1 comms" are rarely a part of what is basically a broadcasting service, for example - even younger people still use email or text messages for that more often than not).

You should try one sometime, if only to get a sense of how they actually work. The best ones are basically "RSS for people" - you subscribe to the people you want to hear from, and it helps you keep track of what matters to them. The worst ones are data-mining honeypots for corporations intent on selling every scrap of information they can extract from you. Most of them are somewhere in between.

...but almost all of the posts that hit it are private, posted by people who deliberately use G+ precisely because there's more plausible deniability about how active they are. It's anecdotal, but I've heard a lot of my G+ friends say that they've gone there either to avoid people they'd otherwise have to interact with on Facebook, or because circles are easy to use and they can pretend to be lurkers/have dead accounts there but they're really just not posting anything visible to you.

That said, I freely admit there are a ton of people not on G+. It seems to mostly be a hit with the 25-45 crowd, if my feeds there are any indication. Older people don't get it, and younger people seem to care more about Instagram than either Facebook or G+ at this point.

Isn't part of the reason we need lifeguards because often victims are either unresponsive or panicky? Lifeguarding is dangerous, sure, and faster responses are good, but just dropping rings on people in danger doesn't seem like it's going to help all that much. Maybe one day robots can do this sort of work, but right now humans are still the best, I'd think.

The last photo of all the cubicle-cars in a warehouse is pretty amusing. If you install a toilet and a bed in these things, you can just put food in and get work out - no need to let your workers "go home" or anything else that could compromise productivity - just keep them locked in their transparent cells and put them wherever you need them. Seriously, how can he look at his design and not think of prisons?

I wasn't going to post on this thread, but this is different from mainstream media how? I don't see a difference. You could say the exact same thing about your local or national news.

I was hoping someone would make this comment - I fully agree. It seems pretty arrogant to presume that just because we are so ignorant of our own internal mechanisms that we don't understand the connection between stimuli and behavior that there is no connection, but I understand that a lot of people like to feel that we are qualitatively "different" and invoke free will and all of these things to maintain a sense that we have a moral right to consider ourselves superior to other forms of life, whatever their basis.

Having RTFA, or scanned it, it seems like the authors are primarily concerned about issues of liability - i.e., if we anthropomorphize these intelligent machines and they hurt someone, we can't sue the manufacturer if their actions aren't firmly planted in the realm of the deterministic and thus ultimately some failure on the part of the designer/creator to prevent these things from being dangerous. Sort of stupid; I'm agnostic (more atheist, really), but this sort of thinking would have us make laws to allow us to sue $deity if somebody got hurt by anything in nature, by analogy, if they could. Pretty typical, though, of the modern climate of "omg think of the children" risk aversion and general need to punish _someone_ for every little thing that happens.

This kneejerk fear that you are "being recorded" in public places is irrational and stupid, and only a matter of decades away from being shoved in your face by advances in technology that you are probably not aware of (see http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/ for something thought-provoking). We forget or dismiss that we already are recorded, in a manner of speaking, by the human eye and the human brain whenever anyone else sees us, which is pretty much analogous to cameras and digital memory and is exactly what Glass does. I already refrain from acting in ways I don't want to be remembered by other people when I'm around people (or think I might be around people), and in my opinion this is no different. Personally I hate the idea of stationary hidden surveillance cameras or drones with cameras far more than I'm bothered by the notion that someone who looks at me can remember me tangibly or mentally, since in the long run I have no assurance that someone who's seen me can't someday have their brain imaged while remembering what they saw, and with hidden stationary cameras or drones I simply have no way of knowing that I've been seen in the first place.

I realize people will argue that memory is more fallible (then again, digital imagery can be manipulated) and currently can't be shared with other people (see prior paragraph) and somehow that's more comforting, but we will end up facing this issue as a species one way or another and as a result, Glass doesn't bother me in the least. If you don't want to be recorded, then disguise yourself or stay away from people you don't completely trust, because laws and feelings ultimately cannot -- and never could -- prevent people from remembering you or surreptitiously recording your image in the first place.

Posting late, but...

Slashdot doesn't give me mod points anymore, but if it did, I would mod this up in a heartbeat. I have lost track of the number of times I've skipped out on some popular video because there are no transcripts and I'm forced to watch a 30 minute talk that I can read in five minutes. It's incredibly painful, especially since with text, it's much easier to tell within a few seconds if the time is worth spending than it is with video, where a speaker will have barely said a sentence or two. The compression writing provides is incredible, and so important.

What I have hopes for is that speech recognition tools will improve to the point that we don't really have to choose/worry about this, because things will be auto-transcribed and if they make more sense to read than watch, we'll have the choice. This seems increasingly likely, so I'm not too worried about some "post-literate" world where we're stuck in a nightmare of having to watch people drag out every damn word while our brains are off doing something else in the meantime.:P

Slightly off-topic, but if you've ever tried to get a writing job for a tech blog/article site, they are running a business and will tell you straight up that what they want are articles that drive eyeballs to the site so that they can sell advertising and get paid. Your take is far too objective to be attention-grabbing.:)

(I briefly looked into writing for some of these types of sites and decided that this type -- more copywriting than analysis -- is not for me. Some people don't mind using screaming hyperbole and writing endless "List of N things..." articles, but it makes my skin crawl as a reader, so I can't bring myself to write it.)