Zero empathy? So, a psychopath? Hmmmmm. Apparently, you treat them like animals and hope for the best.

Unconditional Parenting would ask this: is your goal to get the child in the carseat at all costs (and not be delayed yourself), or to understand why your child is screaming, hitting, and/or running away? Which is more important to you, and why?

This is what I mean by "convenience" -- when we focus on getting what we want (child in carseat, no delay) and we debate what "works" (talking or spanking). And then we're surprised when kids try to manipulate us, trying out various tactics to see what "works" to get what they want out of us...

It's not like we haven't had melt-downs! But underneath all that blubbery mess, there are nearly always actionable reasons: hunger, lack of sleep, injury, bad experience, seemingly-irrational fears, miscommunication, expectation of alternate plans, unvoiced desires... and getting down to those, and addressing them (even if it's by just getting it out in the open, so you can be clear about why that's just NOT going to happen today) helps a lot -- not just in the moment, but every day after.
If my child is putting herself or others in immediate danger, I feel restraint is appropriate. But the goal is to get by long enough to then get to the meat of the matter. If there's an emergency, and I have to throw her in the car against her objections, well, I may very well have to do exactly that, and then discuss and work through it as soon as possible. But when she knows that -- in general -- she'll be listened to, and her desires and objections matter and will be fairly considered, it makes those emergencies a lot more palatable.

Right.

Your ability to have sex clearly prepared you for the task of raising the most intellectually complex life-form on the planet.
All you needed to know was passed down to you from your parents, who themselves obviously did a perfect job, as exemplified by your very existence.
Nobody else could possibly have a statistically clearly picture of how to raise kids, derived from thousands or millions of experiences, than you and your sole anecdotal self. Yet your child is so unique, so special, that you'll have to blaze your own trail, just for him!
We've survived this long, doing things the way we always have, why should we ever change? Let's not listen to the people trying to explain why, they can't possibly have a point.
Laws just enshrine what we already do, why should we ever decide something's bad and criminalize it? Won't that hurt someone's feelings?!
How you raise your kids, who are of course your property, will never affect the community, so how dare they politely cough and suggest you might want to consider maybe possibly thinking of alternate discipline techniques? Let's just go ahead and call them clueless wankers! (Muesli's not all that tasty, and sandals aren't all that comfortable, but I don't see the appeal as an insult.)
Why would anyone ever even bother suggesting an alternate approach that's inconvenient to you? Preposterous! Waste of time! Unless they have a solution that meets your strict laziness requirements, it's not even worth discussing, much less researching!

Knee-jerk, much?

Alfie Kohn, in Unconditional Parenting, argues that focusing on behaviors is insufficient. You can teach a child that if he gets caught doing X, he'll get a spanking, consistently -- and he may avoid getting caught, yes, but this doesn't address the underlying intentions. Kohn isn't opposed to natural consequences (touch fire, get burned) but kids catch on when you punish coming-home-late with taking away desserts, or whatever. Yes, it's a consequence, but only by your decree, which breeds resentment. He describes this as "doing to" rather than "working with". He's a parent, I'm a parent, I watch plenty of other parents, and I see a tendency to treat the symptom rather than the cause, to punish kids for being inconvenient rather than teaching them to be consciously considerate. I see these kids get punished (and rewarded!) all the time, yet develop no empathy.

I catch flak from the older generation, that sees me as "giving in" to my child if I so much as ask her (let alone discuss!) what she wants or why she did what she did, or insist she get a turn instead of letting grown-ups drone on forever. I'm sure it looks like a lack of discipline, to their eyes. It's not what they were taught, no, but unlike their generation, I've felt no need for time-outs or spankings to make my child "behave". She's a high-energy child, not naturally "easy", but my goal isn't to have a picture-perfect, authority-revering doll. I want her to think and care about others, and she does. It all flows from there.

Someone, somewhere, might find the book interesting. I wouldn't suggest not reading it.

Crowd-sourcing content is one aspect, but I'm very much looking forward to "subscribing" to a story and getting only updates after that -- as short as possible, whether they be corrections, links to related stories, or truly new information. I can fit a lot more news into my day if I don't have to hear/read the same context/intro information each time there's an update.

Less important to me is a "ask the author" system, by which readers can suggest directions for investigative journalists to take: how is this incident related to previous ones, what's the political context for this, does anyone have any proposed solutions to the problem, has anything changed since this story was posted 6 months ago, etc. I don't necessarily want to read opinions from fellow readers, nor post my own "facts" as a citizen-journalist, I just want to prod journalists into doing more of what they already do well.

Yeah, I was thinking this guy's got it all backwards. If MaxMind et al are already showing the right position, then the problem is the location returned by the W3C API call in his unspecified browser which depends on which location service his browser uses (possibly not the default), and whether his device is GPS-equipped.

In the absence of GPS, Firefox defaults to using Google Location Service (according to https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/... ), which is not one of the 4 "providers" listed at http://whatismyipaddress.com/ and could easily be the one database that's wrong, causing his confusion. I expect Chrome to do the same. IE may use a Microsoft-provided IP database, again separate from the four above -- I couldn't find confirmation of this.

For servers that don't rely on W3C javascript calls to get your location, it all entirely depends on which service they subscribe to, which you may not be able to find out. Short of submitting corrections to "all of them", you're just out of luck.

You might check NuoDB, as that's their target audience.

RAC was indeed pretty cool. We did have to fight with the Ops guys, though, over the advertised auto-retry feature, which was dangerous for multi-statement transactions, and the documentation (at least at the time) didn't make that clear.

Thank you! I'm seeing a lot of comments here about how wonderful it is to make the choice to be a stay-at-home-mom, how great it is for the kids, and how that's not less productive than a high-paying job. But I'm not seeing the equivalent for men, that there's a tough choice between "being a dad" (stay at home dad) and "being a man" (with a job), that each male should be encouraged to make the choice that's right for him without pressure from his employer.

Uh, Majel? http://en.memory-alpha.org/wik...

http://www.motherjones.com/pol...

you'll rest easy knowing that America's roughly 80 million gun owners already have the feds and cops outgunned by a factor of around 79 to 1.

Can we get verification on this? The CNN story doesn't so much as contain a picture of the flier, let alone corroboration that these were really distributed by ISIS. Is this like how, a few weeks ago, they were incorrectly accused of performing FGM? If this one is accurate, we should be able to get some evidence, if not necessarily proof...

You might want to read more of her stuff before you dismiss her. She's primarily using the analysis of trolls, as examples of bad behavior, to study what our culture considers good behavior, and the boundaries thereof. She asks questions like "why is it okay for Fox News to sensationalize tragic events for their own profit, but not okay for a troll to amuse himself doing the same?", or "what are the boundaries between dialogue, critique, trolling, and harassment?" She treats trolls as a symptom of a culture that permits (and sometimes encourages) the behavior. Not because we're "bad" as a culture, but because sometimes our values and attributes (free speech, devil's advocate, macho, narcissism, etc.) sometimes intersect in odd ways. I've not seen her claim that things are now worse than ever before, nor that anonymity has anything to do with it, nor that "online"-ness is even particularly important -- this is just an entry-point to a wider field of study about cultural norms and how/when we break/bend them.

I've recently watched my wife (C++ environment) deal with a new-grad (Java-based education.) It's true that pointers are a sticking point -- in the process of being taught Java, they get taught that pointers are bad and dangerous (all hail Java for solving the problem,) and can be made only barely tolerable by using auto_ptr, but really should just be avoided. Yeah, it's a problem, sure.

But the bigger problem we have with new-grads and junior-devs, in general, is the same problem you'd have in any field: they're green. They don't test well, or at all. They don't think designs through. They don't communicate well. They ask too many questions, or maybe worse, they ask too few. They try to fix things that aren't broken. They're bad at estimating task sizes (admittedly, people rarely get much better at that even after decades.) In an attempt to not suck, they reach out for best-practices and apply them zealously and inappropriately. They can't imagine how things will fail, or be abused. They spend too much time fixing small problems, and not enough time fixing big ones. And maybe worst of all, they're under the illusion that what they learned in school ought to prepare them for the workforce, when really it just gets their foot in the door.

We, as their seniors, are the ones that should be spending the time fixing their misconceptions, fleshing our their education, filling their minds with the horrors we've seen, and setting up their work habits. When they fail, it's because we fail to do these things, usually because we brought them in too late in a project, gave them too much responsibility, and are fighting a deadline. So we "just fix it" for them, and they don't learn from the experience, while we gain nothing in terms of productivity from having them.

But if I were to nitpick their education? Databases. Recent grads have little or no understanding of relational databases. Their thinking on organizing data, in general, is fuzzy at best, which impacts more than just database code, it impacts class and API designs, often crippling whole features with incorrect cardinality. It deserves more attention in school. The rest, we can fix in production. =)

http://www.wired.com/2014/04/o...

We can still break into the systems we "need" to break into, without keeping a full hand of all possible vulnerabilities. To reduce our overall exposure to risk, it makes sense to disclose most of these to vendors for patching, maybe some with a delay. Our government can buy up vulnerabilities from Exodus, then release them -- Exodus gets paid, we get somewhat better security all around, and the NSA gets a few last holes to work with.

There are situations where one could sue anonymously ( http://www.legalmatch.com/law-... ), and they should still have copyright protections ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/w... ) but proving themselves to be the actual authors and have standing to sue might be difficult?