LOL. You got me. I have nothing of a come-back :)

That would be a fine counter-argument if I had said that we were capable of keep going under cold or heat in ways all animals would die.. But I didn't, so...

I mean, c'mon. The context is clear, beasts of burden, cattle, foodstuff and prey, most of the stuff we compare against from the POV of being (or close to being) apex predators. Of course there are animals with better resistance to certain temperatures. Huskies and Polar bears >> us in the cold. Camels >> us in desert-like conditions.

But when you take the range of environments we were able to adapt since primitive times as a context, and we take the animals we domesticated and/or hunted/displaced, the generalization (from where I utilized the word "most animals") still stands.

As for heat, yes , we're slightly better adapted due to being able to sweat but that comes with a price - huge water consumption. Not very useful in a desert. Mr Camel solved the problem far better.

"We can survive bacteria, viruses and parasites and wounds"

So can most animals otherwise the most complex life would still be a sponge. And to use my dog as an example again - he can happily drink water from streams and puddles that would put me on the toilet for 2 days.

Don't get me wrong, I don't believe in ID anymore than anyone with an IQ greater than their shoe size, but as far as comparisons to other animals goes, the human body in the raw is pretty feeble. Even compared to our nearest cousin chimpanzees we're pretty hopeless physically - our muscles and bones are much weaker and they can survive falls from heights that would easily kill a human.

They can only make that claim if they have hard data that shows people in the past being more emphatic towards others. Without that, the claim is bogus.

There has always been compassionate people, before and now. And there has always been nihilistic, selfish people, before and now. Technology has nothing to do with it.

I started doing that a few weeks ago, and the benefits have been enormous. My setup is nothing fancy, just some props and books to elevate my keyboard and trackball, like this:

http://bit.ly/1j6DFbN

I got inspired by Marco Arment's DYI soda-can standing desk. I was struggling for a while thinking "what should I buy, how can do this". Arment's solution is so simple that inspired me to use whatever I had on my desk to put together a solution.

I'm thinking to build something similar with aluminum cans. But I do not drink soda, only beer, and I do not know if a standing desk made out of beer cans would be corporate appropriate :)

Anyways, my sciatica is not bothering me that much anymore since I started working standing. Once in a while I sit down (and I always sit down when I have to read a paper or report.) But I do most of my coding standing. The key part for me was to get a trackball for my set-up, to save elevated real-state.

In addition to the health benefits, I think coding standing helps me focus better. Entirely subjective of course.

Later, I plan to build a wood standing desk for my 5-year old daughter. I hope I can get her into the habit of doing more of her homework standing than sitting.

I don't believe in intelligent design either, but you are reaching waaaay too far up your rear when building criticism against ID. Saying the human body is absolute garbage is as dumb as saying God created the world in 7 days.

A person can buy a Maserati, but i said person doesn't change the oil and let water and particulate go into the gas tank, the car will turn into garbage. The car wasn't garbage. The owner was a careless fool at best (and a f*tard at worst.)

Human bodies are actually quite resilient, tuned by evolution to be cursorial predators. Capable of keep going under cold or heat in ways most animals would die. And that was already a fact before we eve invented clothing. Put the mind next to the body (which is what makes us human) then we have clothing, and a whole new set of capabilities emerge. There are plenty of historical footnotes of soldiers going on long after their horses, donkeys and oxen died of exposure.

We can survive bacteria, viruses and parasites and wounds. We die of infections beyond a certain magnitude, similarly to most other Eukaryote organisms. If our bodies are garbage, so are the bodies of all Eukaryote organisms. I guess the only Eukaryote whose body is not garbage is Superman, but he is an illegal alien from Krypton so he doesn't matter.

I've been unemployed three times in the last 15 years. Once during the dot-com bust (on and off for almost a year). Then in 2008 (6 days right before my first daughter was born) for almost 4 months, and then just recently (end of the year 2013) for three months.

I cannot imagine how bad it is to be unemployed longer than that, and I consider myself lucky that it was just a few months. But even if it is a few months, as you said, it is stuff like COBRA and other eventualities that get you.

On my last unemployment event, when I tally the amount of salary lost + expenses that I must pay no matter what (COBRA, children medical bills, food, housing), that pretty much tallied up to a $30K loss. My wife and I were very well prepared financially in terms of savings. But no matter what, $30K are $30K. It hurts.

Being out of work can pretty much amount to losing between $8K to $10K a month if we really analyze the situation. 12 months out of work is not unrealistic, regardless of talent, so I shiver to think at the very concept.

And the worst thing is that unemployment can (and will come) regardless of performance. In the job I lost at the end of 2013, it was just someone in accounting that cancelled projects at the closing of the year. Nothing to do with performance.

Shit happens, even in software, even if we have mad skills. Good thing that I learned my lesson during the dot-com bubble.

I've been living by a formula: expect to be unemployed one-to-two months for every year of continuous employment, and plan for it.

Now, I'm planning to bump it to two-to-three months per every year of continuous employment. The older we get the more that we have to bump that ratio, specially if we decide to remain technical as opposed to transition into management.

I downloaded the study by Chef (which amounted to a 3-page PDF), and there was no breakdown of the sample population by age, race/ethnic make-up, gender, marital status, location, degree and primary/secondary software skills. So, one has to wonder how much of a self-selection bias took place in this so-called study.

For instance, I cannot see a way by which a sample population of single men in their late 20s working as developers (or founders) at start-ups in Silicon Valley will respond the questionnaire in a manner comparable to, say, a mixed gender sample population of developers in their mid-30s or 40s working at established companies out of, say, Austin.

Also, regarding age, someone starting up today should not find it impossible to become, literally, a millionaire as in "having earned a million" by the time of retirement. To effectively be a millionaire - meaning having net assets worth a million or more (at current purchasing power) counting inflation, that is another thing.

The thing that made me scratch my head the most is that 2/3 of the sampled population believed their profession to be recession-proof. That strikes me as naivete (or stupidity) of youth/inexperience/arrogance.

The software industry is not recession-proof. It is recession-resilient for those who actively cultivate their professional network.

But recession-proof? Not. A. Chance.

Either this study is seriously affected by the Dunning-Krugger Effect, or it is an exercise in intellectual self-pleasure, or somehow Chef managed to sample a population composed by truly elite multi-discipline engineers, owners of very hard-to-get skills (like building software for radar systems or something.)

Sounds like parenting as always. Statements like X today is horrible imply that X was better before. Most of those statements are rather subjective, praising to some fabled (and false) good old days. Pretty stupid statements, but oh man, do they make a fine soap box!

How did we go from building blocks for 2-year old kids to standard lego blocks? You know there is a difference, do you? If not, please STFU. Just to help you and those who sadly do not know the difference:

• * Building blocks (suitable for toddlers):
  • - Like this: http://www.target.com/p/b-one-...
  • - Or like this (which I use for my 1.5 year old daughter) : http://www.target.com/p/mega-b...
• * Standard Lego Blocks:
  • - Like these: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

TFA is not claiming that. You are claiming that it does, though.

Anecdotes and conjecture are valid form of preliminary evidence with which to request further scrutiny of something.

Also, from personal anecdote (feel free to dismiss because ZOMFG anecdote!) kids at that early stage require specific stimulus to develop hand fine grained motor skills. Playing with sand, clay or building blocks (not standard lego blocks, but building blocks for toddlers) help do that.

Going into the (ZOMG!) anecdote: One of my nephews had a learning disability co-related to not developing hand fine motor skills, some type of proprioception problem related to ADHD/Asperger/Autism. He simply could not hold a pen without it falling off his fingers. Good fortune it was detected on time, and was put on specific corrective therapy to develop not just finger strength but the necessary coordination to do what he needed to do with his hands during that state of his body/mind development.

Feel free to dismiss this as you wish. Whatever gets your intellectual kicks.

With that said, I'm not against kids using technology. I was delightfully fascinated when I saw my older daughter (now 5) using my smart phone at the age of 2, and I'm fascinated how my youngest one (1.5 year old) fiddled her way into unlocking my phone (despite it being locked with a swipe-shape lock.)

But I keep my daughters away from technology if that precludes them from the other type of tactile-proprioceptive activities that have been developed over time to assist in their development: finger painting, puzzles, blocks, sculpting with silly putty, running around.

All those things are fun, but they are not just for fun. They have an evolutionary purpose.

There is a reason why kids play with soil instinctively. It is not just curiosity. It is the child mind and body instinctively seeking activities that trigger learning and development.

Replying to myself since we have no way to edit our previous posts - I would add that languages of the BASIC and XBase families (in particular VB and FoxPro) are/were more general purpose than either C/C++ or Java despite running in more restricted sets of hardware platforms.

Most modern Wirth-style languages posses syntax-level compiler directives to specify the calling convention. Heck, most modern languages either have such a capability, or an intermediary wrapper or stub generator to do that type of bridging. </itisasolvedproblem>

Uh, you are conflating "general purpose" with "platform availability". C runs in far more platforms than, say, Java, but, from professional experience as a C/C++ and Java programmer, I would not call C more of a general purpose language in the same way I would do so with Java.

Stop it. You are making too much sense.

Obviously yes. But also, and this is a very Japanese thing, to ensure people know how to build shit. From my short experience with Japanese culture, these people are not afraid to automate the crap out of things, but are afraid to lose what the government (and the nation) considers core competencies, from manufacturing to cultivation of rice. It is enshrined in their government's policies and in their ethos. I am not making this up.