My point is not that learning is bad, it's that excessive and forceful directed learning is bad. Summer should not be the time you use to try and force more learning on your child, it should be the time when you let them learn the most important type of learning in life... self learning. Play is just that, the beginning of self learning.

Not to mention it's important for kids to actually have fun... Sure every kid is different and learn in different ways, however it's implicitly true that every kid will be happier and the learning will be more natural if it's through their own inquisitive nature and not because some horrible strict parent says you must be good at school or your'e in trouble.

Kids need time to be kids, and when they want help understanding something or are interested in something, that's what you are there for. Of course the same goes for not letting them veg out on modern technology, letting them have fun doesn't mean be a shitty parent at the other end of the spectrum.

Do not twist my argument into one of pedantry, the semantic differences between "legal" and "moral" are not subtle, they are well defined concepts and not sensitive to the constant change that a language is subjected to. So let me be perfectly clear:

This is not someone misinterpreting a word, this is someone hiding behind the rules of others to avoid debating what is right and wrong. Rajesh De's argument is they had permission, the argument of the majority is their actions were wrong.

I challenge you to replace the words pertaining to legality in Rajesh De's quote and have it not sound like complete horse shit.

This. BASIC was the first language i learned, first on DOS then on an Atari ST... (I made the most of old computers when i was young when everything else was windows.)

All i can remember is having fun writing graphics stuff but hating the crudeness of the language, and i really didn't get very far. Picked up programming again so much later, maybe it was all BASICs fault... or maybe i just wasn't persistent enough, i duno. So i don't get what was good about BASIC either.

I don't have enough years behind me to compare to you, however i started a little late so just maybe it's possible to have a little wisdom...

It looks like you've moved from a stable slow paced background into a fast paced unstable area, even though it's true you should keep your skills sharp, web development is just a fast moving area and the latest hotest libraries come and go... even the ones that appear to be well adopted and around for a long time, for instance the best thing that came out of jQuery was it's query selector engine sizzle, now that CSS selectors have been added to the JavaScript DOM interface for quite a while now i often just don't bother with it as i'm not interested in the rest of the fluff in jQuery. Angular, same thing, directives, eventually that will be native look at Google's polymer etc.

I didn't know jQuery or Angular in depth when i started my job and i wouldn't say i knew them in depth now, sure i use them ALOT but i've just picked up the most basic and relevant parts to my every day job. What i have learned in depth and think will be useful when those libraries are extinct is language, concepts and techniques. There are also a dozen other libraries we've used that aren't worth a mention, they tend to leave a lot to be desired but perhaps they aren't works of art from a programmers perspective because even their author know they won't be relevant for long.

Libraries for web development come and go, some of them are better than others but then often the concepts they are based upon are just absorbed into the underlying technology. My advice is not to get hung up on the latest library, just get into the technology and understand the concepts, then picking up new libraries isn't that hard... because the landscape will change again.

I think probably for all the reasons above, the part i like the most about my work is just working with the plain languages available to me, once i've done my work there and happy with my code in it's uncontaminated agnostic little bubble i do the last part where i disgustingly sellotape everything together with ill fitting tools. I guess my code is as invested in those libraries as i am...

People who confuse or purposely use law as a synonym for morality are not to be trusted... The focus could not be more clearly on morality in this case.

This! and context switching is the same analogy I use, i'm not sure it's even an analogy, you quite literally have to context switch in your head. I hate multitasking, It feels like this stupid buzzword that pretentious people like because it makes them look capable...

When it comes down to the task at hand it will be performed better in almost all respects if you give it your full attention. I'm a single tasker all the way and ultimately we all are, multitasking just means jumping in and out of tasks in quick succession and the reality is that even with the time lost for those context switches your brain is not a CPU and it will not full save the context and not fully restore it, instead your head stays filled with multiple projects and and your capacity to be thoughtful and careful with your code greatly decreases.

But i guess that will only happen once it's obsolete and only of historical interest.

This (with more modest reservations and only brief investigation) holds far more weight than her presumptions, and i don't even like smart phones.

It's not exactly thorough from a statistical point of view to jump to her conclusion. There could be all kinds of reasons, for her localised increase in cases, even if the change is national.

I could easily pull a counter argument from thin air if no one is going to bother doing studies... for instance phones and increased internet access could be making children more likely to reach out for help when they would not have before.

Placebos are just that, lies... so the question is what the net positive impact of a particular placebo is. I guess homoeopathy has a net negative impact for the world...

Placebos administered by a professional are the least adulterated form of lie, you are told it is real medicine and it is not (nothing more). The potential negative impact is loss of trust in the person or organisation who administered it.

Placebos from a pseudo-science background on the other hand have a greater potential for weighing on the harmful side because they come with a huge back story that attempts to create a false sense of trust in place of reality. This has the potential to greatly mislead and confuse people.

for instance: i found this high end solid silver, gold plated, diamond encrusted ethernet cable greatly improved the quality of audio that i recieved from my super fast 28k fibrous broadband modem. I know all those nay-sayers... those common people with their primitive untrained ears, who don't encode their vinyl at 5.6448 MHz sampling rate because of that unproven "nyquist shannon sampling theorem", say the ethernet frame check sequence, CRC-32 and ultimately transport layer protocols mean that data transmission loss at the physical layer is completely invisible before it gets anywhere near the DAC.

Now i don't claim to know what all that stuff means, but i Dooo know that electrons are electrons, and electrons are like water and water has memory, and those other electrons know they are clones, and my ears can tell those electrons are not the original electrons from my 28k modem that's downloading my 5.6448 MHz encoded flac files over a TOR network to my $1 a year shared server located in some kitchen in Russia on top of which somone is making toast... you know how i can tell? i can smell the toast when i use my new high end solid silver, gold plated, diamond encrusted ethernet cable, that's how good it is, it acutally induces a state of synaesthesia.

high end solid silver, gold plated, diamond encrusted ethernet cable: better than crack cocaine.

I also heard on the pedoaudio forum that they are going to release a limited edition version that is made from conductible water with 10e-1073741824 percent gold aparently this makes it a billion times more conductive than pure gold and will sell for twice the price, with a limited edition of made from water blessed by the Pope.

I also have memories of my father from a younger perspective. I too would like to learn more about him from my perspective now, to ask questions and have conversations i would not have as a child. However... perhaps the fuzzy memories of a child are more flattering and leave the adult mind with some wonder compared with the more lucid and analytical memories created by your present self.

My dad is quite creative and technical in a variety of ways, he shared some of that with me when i was young, that provided great inspiration for me and gave me some happy memories of the time i spent with him. The silly thing is that he's still alive... but has always lived far away, now further than ever in an isolated part of another country above the clouds (literally not metaphorically).

I guess the nugget of wisdom to be extracted from this is: memories are good, so spend your time and effort being together. The better the time and the stronger the emotion - the more potent and lasting the memory will be.