Heh, I lol'd .

But anyway, to go off on a tangent, where was the /. coverage of the Car2Go outage from Friday? The one caused by the meltdown of their "German-based" mobile carrier due to some network roaming bug? I assume they're trying to deflect the blame to T-mobile without directly impacting their stock price...
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.c...

Eh, you're not on the hook for paying taxes with a babysitter if it's under $1900/yr. or $1000 per quarter
http://www.forbes.com/sites/an...
So I guess if you have a pool of different babysitters, you're all set.

Though more likely what will happen is that we'll go back to the dark ages and live with family members who can take care of our kids for us instead of entrusting them to near-total strangers, and, like, maybe learn how to get along while living in close proximity of our in-laws and stuff. You know, like the way things work in the third world.

Nah, I'm probably expecting too much from US society.

Plus, there's plenty of alternatives in the Seattle area. Most tech workers get a monthly bus pass for free through their work. Since Seattle doesn't really have a "major" mass transit network yet, the bus service it actually pretty good (as long as you're commuting to/from Seattle -- good luck if you're trying to commute between suburbs). The city of Seattle paid for everyone to get Car2Go memberships, and ZipCar has a pretty good presence here too. The airport shuttles are great if I have more luggage than I care to lug on transit, and they're cheaper than cabs since you can share the ride with others on the van. I have and use all of these things, but never used a cab or any of these new unlicensed / unregulated cab-like services. That's just not how I roll.

Having lived in the third world, I think the only way taxi (and taxi-like services) will get cheaper is through a glut of competition through the right amount of regulation/deregulation (like the licensed taxis in Thailand, which are everywhere and you can summon them in minutes with a wave of your hand, yet metered so they don't rip off tourists as much as they used to), and shared jeepney services (like those used in Puerto Rico and the Philippines) which essentially work like airport shuttles. Both of these could be much improved and optimized with information technology, and large employers like Microsoft and Google already run their own intelligent taxi/vanpool services for their commuters and on campus, so it's likely just a matter of time before they start offering some of that publicly... if there wasn't so much competition from public transit.

Huh interesting points... I would have guessed that this might be a ploy for Apple to grab some of the military-industrial complex work. I've never seen apple junk in the defense sector before, but if they can get security officers to begin insisting on using US-sourced electronics, then Apple has a honey pot of high margin contracts to reap.

Still looking for a political solution? Look for the silver lining... if everyone KNOWS that the government is mining your communications for whatever ends they see fit, then that's all the more reason to apply technical solutions to the problem. We've been trying forever to get people to start encrypting their emails and stuff, this might be the thing that finally gets everyone to accept real technological measures for achieving encryption and anonymization on the internet.

I, for one, am kinda glad that this type of thing is out in the open so we can deal with it more effectively with technological measures... vs. before where we would say "well, I'll just conduct all of my communications out in the open since the Constitution said the government guarantees our privacy without their fingers crossed behind their backs"

Yeah, that was my first thought too... TFA is behind a paywall, so can't really scan for it, but I bet they included the Cash for Clunkers program as a mitigating factor... maybe even projections on how things could have been much worse.

I live in Redmond. Microsoft has enough coders. They just laid a bunch of them off. What they want are cheaper coders to throw at their projects. That's why they're working so hard to bring in lots of H1Bs. Many of the H1Bs are not earnestly brought here to do the work. They're just here to flood the market with tech workers to reduce tech wages for everyone.

Many of the MS H1Bs do end up leaving/escaping MS and working elsewhere in the region. Still, it isn't enough to get Seattle Tech wages down low enough (though they certainly are competitive vs. Silicon Valley wages). A big reason why Boeing has pushed hard to leave the Puget Sound region is because their engineering wages simply can't compete with the relatively high MS and Amazon wages for tech work.

OTOH, MS has done much to improve the quality of life here in Seattle, investing in infrastructure and museums and businesses and other perks to attract top programmers. Boeing has always sorta taken the opposite approach, opening their factories in the crappiest, drug-infested neighborhoods in a effort to keep costs down and making their quality-of-living investments elsewhere if possible.

I think by "Physical Games" they meant something more like sports.

But yes, my favorite video games often remind me of they physical games I used to play in grade school. Particularly Left4Dead (which was like some of the monster tag games) and perhaps some of the base capture modes in Tribes and Unreal Tournament.

Some of my favorite games:

1. Rabbit - variant of team tag where the person who's "it" has to hop on one leg and tag the other people, who are confined to a relatively small space.
2. Balloon - a good game for alleys, where one team is trying to get as many players through the alley while the other team tries to block them while only being allowed to move back on forth on successive lines across the alley.
3. Base - another variant of tag with two teams. The person who left their base last can capture an opposing player (this gets hairy to keep track of, but we somehow did it). The captured players can get freed if one of their teammates can touch them. The captured players can daisy chain themselves to reach out from the enemy base, so it's easier to free them the more that are captured.
4. Tee - teams have separate arenas, and take turns having one person be "it" and going in to the enemy arena to try to tag as many people as possible while audibly chanting: "teeeeeeeee......". If they run out of breath (or get tackled/wrestled by the enemy mob) before they can run back into the neutral zone, they get captured instead. They captured people are stored at the back of the enemy arena, but can be freed if tagged by their "it" guy.
5. Monkey in the middle - sort of like musical chairs, where everyone gets a base (a tree or column or whatever) except for one homeless monkey. They try to score points by trying to trade bases, but if the monkey manages to grab an empty base the loser becomes the new homeless monkey.

We played these games every lunch and milk break back when I was in an international school in southeast asia. Around 8th grade I moved back to the US, and was struck by how lunch was just for lunch, and no one really played anymore anyways. I always hated team sports in the US, because it always involved a lot of boring waiting for something to happen, or arguing about what just happened.

If there are any video games that are more like this, let me know... The closest I've really seen were things like Radar Rat Race (which was more or less a larger version of Pac-man). Even multiplayer Pac-man would be more interesting. In the Android world, the neatest thing I've seen was "Zombie, Run!" which lets you use your GPS to navigate around hordes of imaginary zombies.

Yeah, we have one of those too. She has the reading root / guest room right next to the man cave. And she does go nuts every time I turn up the bass.

Married 15 years. After I had spent the money on quieter fans, it turned out she just didn't like the look of the computer in the living room, with its wires and peripherals and stuff.

Go the man cave route with an extra room (or even a closet). You get to spend the money on bigger speakers instead of quieter fans. She gets to decorate the living room to her liking, and you get major points for being so accommodating. It will come in handy later when you have kids, so you can lock out all your little ones from the Dangerous Stuff, and it's even more handy later when you can let your bigger kids play in them while you and the Mrs. enjoy some sanity time in the nice living room.

The moral of the story is: don't be poor.