My brother did something simple in his house. There was no wifi, only hardwired network connections. His kids had computers in there rooms but they didn't route to the Internet only the local LAN. The Internet-accessible computer was in the 'great room' where everyone could see what was being run on it. He's the only one with administrator privilege on the local LAN. He trained his kids to be aware of internet scammers, SPAM, etc. since they wouldn't be on the home network forever.

The shared phones didn't have a data plan but had unlimited texting, so the kids couldn't browse the internet on their phones. No, they didn't get smart phones until they went off to college.

This seems entirely workable so long as you don't have someone trying to subvert security in the house. It's much the same challenge that most IT departments face with a company LAN and the employee's phones/iPads/MacBooks/etc. being brought into the company's network. All it takes is some idiot marketing person to open a macro-virus on a Windows box with non-current virus scanning software, and the fun will begin. This "client" will have to nail down the home systems making sure they're all hardened and stay that way.

Smart phones are not currently part of this unless they are confined to the local LAN while in the house but I don't know of a way of enforcing that short of making the house a Faraday cage.

If the kids are running Windows laptops that leave the secure home LAN, this gets much harder.

Someone posted that they used Kickstarter to publish a book. I funded that sort of project to get a color copy of a web-comic. It's not due to go to press until later this year but I don't feel my $25 are ill-spent if I never see the actual book. The creator is taking some very good material, great art, and making a kickass comic for a specific audience (GLBT SciFi fans). What's on the web was well worth encouraging this guy to keep going, so funding an actual publish project or tipping him to do more doesn't seem like a scam to me. A youtube based musician wants to tour (getting out of his well-equipt basement) and funded his current east coast tour with Kickstarter. I didn't fund that but I would have funded a CD press if only to encourage him to keep recording stuff. He's quite good. So, it some sense to fund something like the original topic's VR glasses it doesn't make sense. To fund the next phase of manufacturing for cool stuff like 'Sugru', maybe. Small stuff that feels like stuffing $5-20 into a guitar case or tip jar, I think this works fine. If it encourages people to get stuff done rather than asking their parents for money to do something, I'm all for it. I don't think there are microloans here in the US like I hear mentioned in Europe on NPR.

A college senior graduating from a teaching credential program applied for a job in a school system. The school system saw her MySpace page which had a picture of her obviously at a part with a red Solo cup in hand. She wasn't underage as the picture was current. She was just smiling, having a good time. They withdrew their job offer. AFAIK, no action was taken by the applicant (I'd sue).

I asked a client who is an attorney but practices a different, specialized type of law. While it's OK for some places like Home Depot to require a drug test prior to employment, that still happens farther down the interview chain. I don't want some person in the store driving a forklift when they're intoxicated or impaired.

I can't see asking for FB or MySpace or any of the other social media site access as acceptable. LinkEdIn, as much as I hate them and how they work, is different. I don't think you'll see party pictures or any of my LOLcat pictures on a LinkEdIn profile. Just doing a Google search of myself shows my name in various news group posts even though I post with no-archive. While it's almost impossible to exclude 'the stuff on the Internet' from an employer's background search, omitting stuff like what's in your FB (I'm gay, jewish and my politics are none of your business) cross the line.

I wonder what would happen if the first thing they saw is "Thanks for logging access to my FB page. I now own your house and the assets of your company. Have a great day. And good luck finding a new job."

The same thing happened when Cisco was trying to sell new routers to Chase for their datacenters. They would buy the equipment if Cisco moved all their employee's 401Ks to JPMorgan Securities. A client hates not having his 401K under his control in Fidelity. I hate big banks.

PRIVATE PRACTICE, a tv show about a complementary medical practice in L.A. had an episode about a family of 'non-vaccinators' who returned from a trip overseas (India or Malaysia) with one of their kids very sick. The family sat in the waiting room for 5 minutes as the sick child eventually convulsed and died from measles. The pediatrician in the practice had delivered both of the kids and knew the mom didn't believe to vaccinations. The mom was in full-grief denial mode as only a sudden death can do. Meanwhile the staff is jump around canceling all the appointments for the next 48 hours and contacting all the patients that were in that day to make sure they and their kids were up-to-date for measles vaccine. The big issue of that show was that the mom didn't want to vaccinate the remaining child even though there was a very strong chance he would come down with Measles and it might kill him. Meanwhile these people are carriers and should have been quarantined. Why the LA Health department didn't swoop in and take over is beyond me, but I didn't write the show. The moral issue of the show was "when are the parent's beliefs about what's right for their child get overridden by what's medically advised. In the case of blood transfusion and 7th Day Adventists and other religious cults, the courts will intervene. In this case, the doctor risked their medical license by forcibly vaccinating the remaining child against the mom's wishes. If that case ever came to court, I wonder what a jury would do. The California AMA would probably award the doctor a medal for averting a cluster outbreak of measles. In any case, not having these kinds of patients in your medical practice makes life a lot easier. It's also why lots of doctors don't accept Medicare patients if they don't have to. Billing is a major headache.

There was a coffee shop next to a record store that got a lot of kids that would buy a single cup and sit all day listening to music and hogging the WiFi. Then the shop started playing classical music and the kids went away. Now normal people can sit and drink their coffee in piece and browse using the WiFi. After 30 minutes the password on the receipt expires and they have to buy another $5 worth of stuff. This was back in the late '90s. This phenomenon is not unknown.

I left Network Solutions some 10 years ago to go to GoDaddy. When I moved my web hosting, I switched to their registrar because it was easier. Except GoDaddy didn't make it easy. I had to call, talk to someone who's job it was was to talk me out of moving. I couldn't just close my account and move it. So, all their efforts to retain customers are just pissing off the ones that want to be done with them.

He's a family court judge deciding family law cases. With this sort of behavior publically posted, I wonder if a bunch attorneys who've had cases before this guy aren't going back now looking for grounds for appeal. Any abuse case that appears before this guy or anything with violence in it would be grounds for an attorney to ask the judge to recuse himself. He may not be fired, but he many end up doing traffic court for the rest of his career. If it's boring enough and at night, that might be a nice start. Maybe he'll just quit. But I doubt it. He's said he did nothing wrong. Maybe so. But it's prejudicial as hell.

The inbox file just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Or on more modern email systems, that directory just keeps growing. Either way, users with huge unread mailboxes in /var/mail give me gas. And if they delete one, you have to restore to the last backup which was last night and they loose everything else. Not a good situation. File your friggen emails. They go into your network storage which is backed up regularly (hopefully).

Google did a commercial for their email system recently. Someone was emailing baby pictures, videos, announcements, and other stuff about a baby to an email account. It was a Dad emailing to his daughter all the moments he profound in her life. My mom still has the 'baby book' that has a lock of my hair from my first haircut, my first tooth, and various other milestones in my life. It's over 50 years old. The google email account might be the digital equivalent. Plus the cloud backups and on-site drives (keep one in a safe deposit box that you change out quarterly).

A state legislator introduced a bill to require telcos to change "receives a phone book" from "yes" to "must request it". By the time it came up for a vote, some of those who'd previously supported the bill now were against it--even one of the bill's authors. Yellow Pages advertising is big business here in the US. Regional telcos are grabbing at anything they can to "monetize" and the ad revenue in phone books was a cash cow. I get a "real" phone book published by the telco and one that's purely ad driven that I toss into recycling straightaway. Once the Greens start slapping these senators at the ballot box, stuff like the phone book "opt-in" thing is going to have to go from city to city. Palo Alto and some neighboring cities have already banned plastic grocery bags, styrofoam cups, and containers. Telling the local phone company that they have to ask each of their Palo Alto customers if they want a phone book is just another issue. Unfortunately, yelling at a city councilman at a council meeting for caving to a lobbyist is easier than at a state senator at a local town hall meeting. And it gets more press.

When Wired first came out, I couldn't read it either. I flip through it while standing in line at FRYS only to put it back wondering who could read it. Seems after reading various books on aging that wired was targeting young eyes intentionally. Now that it's been out a while, the original crowd can't read it any more. Ironic. Appropriate. We should all send an email to their layout manager saying "GET OFF MY LAWN". I wonder who their revenues are doing with the original readers now to old to actually read the thing.

Yep. The iPad is an extension of the desktop. It's not happening yet, but I can envision a future iPad-like device (FILD) that has enough "limited" compute power and portability to allow for casual use around the house and about town. A friend has a MacPro tower but codes in Java from his MacBook because it's easier and he likes lounging on the couch with books open around him. If the FILD gets close enough to an authorized compute-server (like your desktop or the compute farm at the local coffee place), and it becomes part of the system with a display you can manipulate with fingers. Run whatever stuff on the compute-server with display and storage on the FILD. Then coffee shops wouldn't just have free WiFi. They'll offer power stations for laptops and paid access to their local compute server. You can use a laptop on battery to work for free or pay to use the coffee shop power and compute server.

Since this involved illegal computer access from an information provider (don't think Amazon's been classified as a telecom provider. yet.), why not involve the consumer fraud devision of the Washington State Attorney General. If a bunch of AG people and sheriffs descend on Amazon's offices with search warrants for "Any and all computers, disks, hardware, etc.", I think Amazon will take notice pretty quickly.

If you had to do any linear regression or error analysis, knowledge of statistics is important (e.g. being able to answer questions like "Is this a good datapoint or an outlier"). And Calculus is used to derive the formula for linear regression. I didn't touch it since I was an undergrad, but I still know and can use it. My sister-in-law who got the same B.S. in chemistry asked me why I remember this stuff when she was studying for a nursing degree. It trained my mind. Being able to do algebraic manipulation should be send nature to you. Do whatever you need to do to learn that cold. You'll need it for calculus and statistics.