Every time I hear about teaching kids to program, it's all about the videogames. Kids like videogames right? So they should like programming them right? Wrong. How many young girls make their own makeup out of egg whites and whale barf (It's none)? How many boys are just chomping at the bit to build an injection molding machine so they can make a super soaker (none again)?

Why not use programming to let kids solve problems they hate, do work they don't want to do. Just like in the real world, I hate correcting spelling errors in a million documents, but my computer doesn't mind.

I bet johnny would be thrilled to discover that he could write a computer program to do his math homework, and I bet he'd be a lot better at the math as well, since he would have to exactly encode every step of the solution in an algorithm (as opposed to a mix of wrote memorization and guessing that often goes on in math classes).

Statistics too, is the perfect place for programming in schools. No one in the world performs any meaningful statistics without using computer programs, so why should students? It's way more important that they understand what a t-test is for and where to use it than that they know exactly how to compute it by hand and the proof for why it's valid.

Who cares what publishers (or many authors for that matter) think about what's good for reading? Publishers have shown time and time again that the little they know about e-publishing terrifies them. They just want to stick their head in the sand and go back to paper, they latch on to any tidbit of evidence that people might not like e-books or e-reading. They do all they can to minimize e-book sales to protect their paper business.

If publishers were smart, they could get way more people reading way more books, and make a lot more money off it. They need to get over their fears about e-publishing and move fast before piracy becomes the norm in the book world, just like it did in the music and video world.

What's the purpose of a movie? Makin' Monay. Plain and simple.

If making money is the purpose of movies (which it is, investors don't pump millions into movies to NOT make money), then it seems clear that the best movie is the one that makes the most money.

You can argue it any which-a-way, and I'm not saying movie's aren't works of art, but much of the great art that's ever been made was done so the artist could get paid.

Who cares about character development and a great plot? Sometimes those things fill seats, sometimes it's awesome explosions. Saying things like "without the special effects that would have been a bad movie" is like saying "Without the dead jesus, the Pietà is just some lady sitting there, pretty boring." I think even the marketing and promos for a movie should be considered part of the movie. It's all part of the performance and experience for the audience.

OF COURSE they track you to provide targeted ads, how else do you think they stay in business? Do you think they have a gigantic infrastructure just for your personal pleasure? While I fully support forcing facebook to divulge all the info they store on you (i.e. that gigantic PDF they'll send you on request), I also have no problem with them doing just about anything they want with data they collected. If you find that so incredibly repugnant, don't use facebook at all.

This story to me is about the same as the headline "Pfizer dodges questions from senator that it 'sells drugs' to what they call 'patients'"

Or perhaps "INTEL refuses to deny that it makes computer processors!"

Obviously there's a price discrimination problem here. I you look at those millions of pirate downloads and don't think: "If only we could somehow sell the game to some of those people at a lower price, we'd make a ton more money". It's like a grocery store not stocking off-brands and getting mad when people shop elsewhere. If you cut the price in half and three times as many people buy the game, it's a big win.

With some in-game product placement you could even make money off the pirates "Dear Pepsico, if you buy ads in EA EXTRAVAGANZA 2012, your placement will be viewed by all 10 million purchasers, as well as millions more pirate downloads."

It seems like you'd have to be pretty dumb not to view millions of pirate downloads as a money making opportunity, it's not only free for the pirates, it's free for you, no bandwidth to serve the game to them, no support costs at all, and they're running your software on their machine.

I see a lot of suggestions on how to avoid coding which seem silly to me. High schoolers that are interested in making games are probably smart enough for a little coding, and it'll do them a lot of good. It certainly doesn't even rule out other people (visual and sound design, etc) as often the design takes as much or more time than the coding.

I really like pygame, it's:
a) python
b) fairly straightforward
c) engine-less
d) cross-platform
e) free and requires only a text editor (I like komodo edit for python, it has the best python auto-complete I know of)

It's not really the thing for a 3d game, if that's your goal (which seems out of the question) you'd need an engine probably. It does a great job of 2d games, and has no inherent 'game engine', which I like, because kids will learn about a lot of the things that an engine is doing under the hood. Have some kids design sprites and levels and sound effects, have others code up games. Writing little platformers and rogue-likes is pretty straighforward.

Every fMRI story I read is summarized basically by "Guy 1 puts Guy 2 in fMRI and now ALL THE SECRETS OF THE BRAIN HAVE BEEN REVEALED AND WE CAN CONTROL LAZERS WITH OUR MIND".

That would be like saying "I looked in a telescope and NOW I AM EMPEROR OF SPACE"

fMRI is a painfully inexact technique, and sample sizes for fMRI studies are generally very small (either very few subjects or few trials compared to a non-MRI study), because of the expense of MRI time and the difficulty in finding subjects who will actually do what you tell them to do (think about this, concentrate on that, for an hour, in an MRI, without moving at all). Add onto that the incredibly poor spatial and temporal resolution (relative to the speed and scale of the brain), the incredible noisiness of the results, the fact that fMRI measures blood flow (NOT neural activity, although the two are certainly closely related).

A good analogy might be looking at a CPU with an infrared webcam and trying to figure out how it works. With very careful investigation you could certainly figure some stuff out, but it would be extremely difficult and slow, and you'd never be able to get beyond a certain level of detail.

Bottom line, while fMRI studies can be very useful, it takes lots of corroborating studies to make any firm statement about how the brain works, and you certainly would be hard pressed to say you 'decoded' anything about the brain in just one study.

Plus, they could make a digital frontier to reshape the human condition

"How to get into big college debt for no good reason"

I suspect almost every state in the country has an in-state college or university with a perfectly good comp sci program that costs 10's or even 100's of $k less than an 'elite' school. The notion that the name on your undergrad degree could possibly be worth as much as a house is ridiculous. Worry about where you go to grad school, what classes you take, what grades you get, not where your undergrad is.

If you get a scholarship that makes going to MIT super cheap, the more power to you. All you need to consider when going to an undergrad program as far as I'm concerned is education quality/cost. Undergrad isn't about getting a big name, or having famous professors, or any of that. In grad school, those things can really matter (doing cutting edge research? need cutting edge professor. Learning how to code assembly for the first time? Probably any nice professor will do.). In undergrad, usually you pay more for those things and don't really learn much more. Probably a lot of programming teachers at community college do a better job than a lot of college professors. And they certainly run a lot cheaper.

Really, the best thing to do would be, in my mind:
1) pick a school you're interested in and think you can probably get into (maybe pick two or three)
2) Figure out how many credits they will let you transfer in, and then go to a community college for every last one.
3) Save thousands of dollars, by a car or save for a downpayment on a house
4) Transfer into Big University and get your degree
5) Get the same job as the chumps who went to Elite University
6) Look at your $0 debt in the bank, then look at Mr. Elite University's $100k debt and have a good chuckle.

All audience members will also be provided with a life-like latex cast of steve's balls to gargle.

It's so silly to condemn tech companies for doing business with "Bad Guys." It's not our (US citizens) job to be world police, and part of that means we don't get to decide who's a big bad government and who's all good (I.E. it's stupid to say any non-white/non-christian-based/non-democratic government is evil). One mans political dissident is another man's terrorist. Sure in some cases it's pretty clear cut (humorist writes funny cartoon about scary dictator who wears funny hat and gets thrown in the slammer), but in others, not so much, and it's not our place to decide. Either we should disallow all foreign sales of arms/surveillance tech/etc or permit it to every country. My preference would be to disallow, since selling things like that merely empowers rich people the world over to screw poor people, but either way, I think neutrality is more important.

Ebook lending is so dumb. It's a silly method to try and bring back the good ole days when people couldn't pirate your stuff because it was a big stack of dead tree. Now it's just some bits, and it's super easy to copy, so copy the hell out of it and sell it at a low price that reflects the ease with which it can be copied. I could pirate videogames, but instead I buy them on steam, because it's easier and better. They aren't just providing some alternative to piracy, they're providing a *better* alternative, and that's why I want to pay for it.

A nice organized ebook store with low prices that tracks what I've purchased is *better* than just pirating them and stashing them on a disk somewhere and loosing them all when that disk dies.

Publishers and people like amazon (amazon, to be fair, does an ok job already) need to think about what they can provide that is better than piracy. Ebook lending is not better than piracy, it's annoying and confusing and sucks.

Dart may be the new hot turd on the block, but no one uses it, and probably no one will for some time to come, languages take time to pick up speed and mature.

If you're a decent programmer applying to a job that isn't going to suck, they won't care about what languages you know. Part of being a good programmer is learning any new language by yourself, very quickly. If you want to lean a nice easy language that is actually useful, my personal pref. is python, but perl, js, ruby, etc are all good. If you want a more mainstream language, learn java, big companies like lockheed martin and oracle do almost all their application development in java nowadays.

Also, on the topic of teaching yourself, you'll never learn to be a good programmer unless you have some need to do it to solve some problem (it can be a made-up problem). The best thing to do would be to make up something you want to build, pick a language and attack it until you have it working. Make a text-based dungeon crawler, make a console calculator, make a thing that updates your twitter every time you poop. I would highly recommend taking some classes, not so much for the programming (although it'll help), but to learn about algorithm design and computer architecture, especially if you don't want to just build websites your whole life like a chump (no offense to website builders, I do some of it too, I just hope not to forever).

At the end of the day though, if your fortunes are tied to what languages you know, you are a bad programmer and you're going to be out of a job sooner or later. If my boss asked me to learn fortran, I'd be writing some fortran by the end of the week. Once you learn a couple an get to know more about what's going on under the hood, it becomes obvious that languages are just a nice frosting over the same cake. And cake is easy to eat.

Why is the gut american reaction "Look at those dirty Chinese copying our technology, they're just stupid copycats"

Why don't we instead think "Man, look how quickly they innovate on technology because they aren't locked down by stupid IP law, we should fix our IP law to help innovators (help them not fear being sued to death for improving a product and making a buck and some jobs)"

The fact of the matter is, if we don't "steal" IP (and by steal I mean share and protect inventors and innovators in a reasonable fashion, with sensible time limits and timely filings and better restrictions on what is patentable/copywriteable), some other country will, and they'll be the ones making the cash at the end of the day.

In what way is this different that replacing the D-cell on my 4th grade science project with a solar cell?

PS.
Fun science project that one was