It strikes me as concession packaged up as stand-offishness. But it still reads like concession. If you don't trust the chip, don't use the chip. Why all the song and dance just to say "well we're still relying on the chip, by the way" at the end? Can anybody say "sugar coat"? I would take them to task over it, if I had some kind of bargaining power of my own. I would say, "if you claim you don't trust the chip, then either you don't utilize the chip, at all, or I in turn don't trust your routines."

The games rely on varying layers of compromised or compromiseable browser attachments and plugins. If you are concerned about your system security, then they definitely aren't the games for you. Requirements range from Adobe Flash to Unity Engine.

I gave it a thorough testing today. Granted, it's still all in BETA stage. But I'm not griping about the stupid bugs.

The whole thing sucks. The five different games are basically five different kinds of problems. There's organic chemistry, atomic chemistry, programming logic, and I didn't play the other two games but they appear to be shrouded versions of real life n-body or other computational problems.

So here's the deal. This shit takes a long time. These games get very complex very quickly. I can see myself playing one game a day, maybe an hour at it. The programming logic game works for that, it doesn't take an hour to solve their largest BETA puzzles. By the way, they don't have real actual DARPA programming troubles being made into puzzles just yet. The puzzles there are static and are meant to test the system and see what user feedback is generated.

But then you go into the folding prion game, and it sucks. The tutorial is incomplete and it's a total side-swipe at Scientology. Why the fuck would you actively seek to alienate Scientologists from your defense industry website? That's stupid as hell. They shouldn't be trying to offend anybody, period, let alone Scientologists.

And the folding prion problem has to run some kind of simulation or something in the background when you choose to eliminate molecular pathways (in the guise of more or less Dianetic engrams). And the wait times can be several minutes. And the combinations of splitting molecular bonds and removing molecular pathways quickly arrives at exponentially large numbers. And you apparently have to get them done in the right order. So you could, yes, spend two hours at one problem and not arrive at a solution. How the hell is that a game?

Furthermore, the time you just spent and/or wasted on the "game" was shrouded in the mysteries of some stupid, silicon-valley wank mythology that was made up from the seat of their ass. So you don't learn anything factual about things like prion folding or variable bit widths or stack leaks or whatever. No, you just learn some made-up Californian crap about "the storms that devastated Aeryth" or "Gee these plugs and gizmos aren't hooking together correctly, get the thingamabobbers all the same color for the point!"

So what are you doing? Wasting your time ten-fold. Don't do it. Fuck these people. It seems like a good premise but they obviously handed the work off to the entirely wrong group of people.

The only people this will be interesting to is disabled children who have real difficulties socializing out of doors and who spend inordinate amounts of time chair-bound in front of the computer, or autistic people, or absolute 100% genuine geeks who are totally oblivious to things like the value of time well spent or what the meaning of "quixotic" is.

These puzzles are definitely interesting. I had a chance to get on and play the preliminaries of the pipe game about two hours ago from a college terminal. I get home to continue my "work" and the site is 505'd. I'm guessing it may have been simply slashdotted. If that's the case, then I've lost a bit of confidence in the project.

It sort of reminds me of that scene in "Sneakers" when the guys roll by to get the box back from the "NSA", and the building is being torn down. Which raises the question, if I can imagine using a site to quickly test a population sample's IQ and then to run like heck with the results, then is there a feasible reason to do so?

And I'm tired of the tired old bullshit about all white people being racists. I'm white -- did I pipe in with racist comments about the Mexicans who are dying (or dead) of radiation poisoning because they stole radioactive samples and are too stupid to read the boxes warning them there's radiation inside? Noooooo!

So you are also an official racist!

God, I get so sick of this anti-white liberal bullshit act, always running off at the mouth like all white people deserve to be collectively punished, attempting to justify anti-white racism with every dribbled epithet. It's becoming more and more apparent every day that "anti-racist" is really a code-word for anti-white.

You can get some PVC pipe of a nice, wide gauge. Then slice it in thirds, 120 degrees each section. There are PVC paints you can use to make these whichever color is available. You might need to rough the surface of the PVC, first. If you want them plain white, there are ways of removing the colorful print. Use the round, ooh-ah PVC sections instead of the flat, painted-aluminum (or plastic) trays. The round surfaces should reflect the light below in a more eye-pleasing way. Still suspended from the ceiling, though.

You could buy a lot of smaller gauge PVC and run the cables through that. Do yourself a favor and cut the sections in half, and hinge them on the side away from the wall so you could still open them up section by section if you had to. Attach the PVC to the walls with washers and bolts at stud points. Close up the hinges and latch with whatever. You could paint it bronze and it's be kooky, steampunk style stuff yeah.

You could do real steampunk style, and buy metal pipe instead of PVC. You could have this cockamamie maze of pipes running up and down the walls, over the chairs and desks, and arriving at lamp posts (actually lit by flickering LEDs, not actual gas! Hah! Haha!) which the office workers discreetly plug their computers and other devices into.

You could get simple tin foil (food grade) and wrap the cables up in that. I have no idea how this will affect their performance in terms of temperature. But they'll be shiny.

You could get some plastic mesh and spray paint it silvery, double the edges and run your support wires through the doubled up holes. The mesh should theoretically be able to support a bunch of wires (maybe triple fold those edges). The cables would show but hey, they're colorful.

You could just support the bundled up cables themselves "naked" to the eye. It would be a bitch to get at the cables and take any down without taking them all down, but there they'd be. A person looking up could see how the network is "shaped". It would be like a magic trick.

You could support all of the cables on a bunch of really, really tall hat racks with allll kinds of crazy hats hanging from them, along with all of these network cables. People would wonder if they could have a hat, purchase a hat, or add their own hat to an empty prong. You could just deny them the satisfaction all day, and come across as WAAAAY more smugly superior than they.

Get a bunch of fake Christmas trees and throw out all the stupid false needles, just leaving behind the weird wire skeletons. Put a bunch of them together in a giant matrix of wiry voodoo. Thread your cables through this, along with strands of blinking LED "holiday lights". Put the giant borg in a really obtrusive location so everybody will question THAT, and nobody will care about how unappealing or inconvenient it is to have the cables snaking to and from this thing to various other locations.

You could build a glass ceiling and snake the wires around like crazy and make it all topsy turvy, artsy fartsy with your artistic talent glass ceiling existing purely for art's sake. Clients and other visitors could be invited to throw little peastones at it, to give it character.

Did you remember to say it out loud while you typed it?

Also, it's no good if you don't hack into the mainframe first.

OP was right. I don't know where you came from with all the other stuff, but it didn't originate in OP's post.

The whole purpose of flooding the market would obviously be to make it a cheaper skill. You can package that up any way you want it, but the end result is the same.

Consider the Zuck. He's duplicitous and shrewd as hell. He supports relaxed immigration laws because it will provide a cheaper work force.

Right, so let's get right to wasting kids' time and confusing the hell out of them with this ADHD style bullshit. I call shenanigans. This is all about having a younger audience for marketing, not at all about educating the new generation at an earlier or faster rate.

Yeah but the article is *about* something real. Something really stupid!

This approach to having a generation of coders on the way seems like throwing the teapot in the ocean to fill it. And throwing a torch in after it to make tea. And saying you're being efficient because you picked a rainy day.

These kids are going to be watching these presentations, going "huh?"

Kindergarten is, remember, that "grade" before 1st grade. It's not even an education-oriented grade. The point of kindergarten is to establish social awareness and really basic, proper conduct. Kids are given rudimentary handwriting, the most simple math you can imagine ("2+1 = which is it, kids, 3 or 4?"), how to recognize shapes and colors, and really basic spelling and syntax. "C A T that's a cat." Etc.

The other function of Kindergarten is to observe whether a child has any behavioural, emotional, psychological, physical, social, or learning troubles. Maybe the child has a disability. If so, this needs to be found out early before attempts at education really begin in earnest.

NOWHERE in any of that do you find any foothold for something like symbolic instruction. The idea of doing a Ruby lecture in front of kindergarten students brings to mind -- for me, personally -- one specific thing: that pairs of highly intelligent parents are at a higher risk for conceiving a child with autism. Why is that? Because of a dominant trait?

I mean, how fucked up in the head do you have to be to try and teach your kindergartner computer programming? Aren't you more concerned about social awareness and making sure they know it's okay to use a public restroom? I think any parent who is nodding sagely at the concept of having Mark "Does He Still Kill His Own Food Or Was That Bullshit" Zuckerberg has some real generalized problems with the sage center of their brain.

"The Accompanying Angry Birds Tutorial"? Really, folks? Your kindergartner is really prepared for velocity vectors and derivatives? I think you miiiiiiiiiight just have your head up your ass on that one. I doubt most parents putting their children through these lectures have any idea what it's about except "programming".

It's like a primate, knee-jerk reaction. "Oog. Oog. Program. Programming. Oog. Programming. Good. Oog. Good for. Oog. Good for Baby Too."

If these are particularly small wings, I suppose that all of these nano spikes might provide some kind of static energy lift similar to what was recently discovered in spiders.