Actually, there is now an iOS app of Starfall (just the alphabet portion)

In fact, she's not a fan of computers that have those old clunky "mice" anymore... Here's the best of the apps we've found:

Monkey Preschool Lunchbox https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/monkey-preschool-lunchbox/id328205875?mt=8

Of course, the "Cut the Rope" and "Fruit Ninja" games are good in there "can't lose" modes.

Starfall app (same as the website)

PBS.org (warning - essentially streaming video - you need to moderate use of this one!)

While it is true that government databases identifying the DNA of every citizen would reduce crime and increase convictions, it also means a great many other things. Here are two of them.

1.) Police would get very lazy very quickly. DNA would be used as the "de-facto" proof of guilt, in spite of the fact that DNA is shed by everyone all the time. An ex boyfriend gets accused of rape and since his DNA is there he's automatically guilty. A store gets robbed and the man who hasn't bathed in a week gets charged because his DNA is the "most prevalent" around the register. He probably should have used Dial.

2.) Just because our government is mostly benign now doesn't mean it will always be that way. When social and economic upheaval occurs a great many things can change. Imagine, if you will, a government run by neo Nazis. Suddenly they have DNA proof of, not only the Semitic groups, but all of their offshoot genetic cousins as well. Or perhaps someone develops a gene targeted disease and gets their hands on the government database. for my closing, one word: Gattica.

As to the man accused of rape in the Netherlands, I am curious if he was just trying to play innocent, trying to turn himself in, had forgotten about the rape, didn't think of the incident as rape at all, or if he is innocent and somehow got his DNA involved through some other means than direct collection from the victim. After all, it does seem a bit moronic to give one's DNA if one has committed rape (or any other crime) and hasn't been caught.

After reading a few dozen comments I am at least relieved to see that the number of people with no concept of how the patent system works are in the minority. In a perhaps vain act of charity I will offer up this tiny bit of essential knowledge to that minority in the hope that one or two will read it and gain some understanding of this (and other) patent issues plaguing innovators.

Patents are granted by people. People make mistakes. People can be bought. The granting of a patent does not in any way make the patent holder right, it merely grants them a legal basis on which to approach a court with a complaint.

Trials like the one being discussed here are most often the very first significant examination of the validity of a patent by others outside of the patent office. The rulings of the court are seldom challenged twice and they can have extensive and lasting repercussions on innovation around the world. Any hint of impartiality by the jury must be investigated since the entire industry can be affected by the decision. When making decisions that affect entire economies one cannot afford to simply assume anything.

This does not even touch on the issue that even a patent that has never had a win in court can be used to extort money from small companies. One can afford to run an entire law firm just on the income from businesses that have more to lose from paying for a legal defense than from paying off their accuser.

I never understood why Google Chrome chose to actually compile flash into their engine... until my Mac OSX 10.5 laptop was "depricated". Now it makes sense. There is a lot of money to be had forcing users to upgrade their OS because none of the software works any longer.

Firefox and Safari work fine and I'm able to download Flash updates, but Chrome no longer works without bugging me to death about Flash being too old. I literally have no choice but to manually enable each and every page every time one loads. As a Software Engineer I know there is no technical reason for this. As a business owner I know that there is almost no direct cost associated with allowing a user to use the external system flash instead of a compiled-in flash. In fact, the cost of ensuring successful build and delivery would be considerably higher when one must ship with a third-party product accounted for and shipped together with a binary distribution. Thus the only remaining reason is to help Apple convince users to upgrade.

I have a good bit more evidence that Google plays dirty against consumers, but I used to figure that it was just an inevitable symptom of becoming a big successful corporation and that at least their technology wouldn't suffer for it. I'm no longer convinced this is true.

There should be a criminal negligence investigation into this.

With at least eight full-lifecycle development projects under my belt as both a Software Engineer and a Development Team Lead I cannot even wrap my mind around the amount of irresponsible waste that would be required to throw away that much money.

Possibly, although I'm less pessimistic about their potential. I could see sites like WebMD and others revived a bit with this kind of "premier" EMR-interpretation service, although it would be entirely optional. As with other subscription services, customers will only pay if they feel the content is worthwhile, and a brand gets damaged if this is abused. For instance, use of TurboTax doesn't result in an influx of spam for dubious financial investments.

There are some obvious benefits, and a number of potential drawbacks to this trend. I personally would like to have electronic access to my medical records, however I'm concerned about what the implications would be for health care quality and costs. I work in a sector that is involved in standardization of medical records, so take this with 2 grains of semi-informed salt, and call me in the morning:

Benefits

• Some patients may have the interest, background, and temperament to actually improve their health by exploring their records and trends
• Physicians will be held to a high level of scrutiny (by the patients) on the quality of their EMR entries

Drawbacks

• Some patients may be confused or upset by what is in their records, costing more either in clarification or (in extreme cases) legal challenges
• Physicians may feel compelled to either "dumb down" or "soften" established clinical terminology (e.g. obese), making it less efficient (and more error-prone) for medical professionals to interchange information about the patient through the EMR

• In the longer run, assuming that patient portals to EMR data allow users access to the standardized EMR formats (a myriad of standards, really), I expect to see some new companies developing software to help patients interpret and track their healthcare (beyond what the portal provides). These sites would require patient approval, but would be free to analyze and recommend the EMR outside of the constraints of the "healthcare entity" policies. That is, the EMR is the raw "spreadsheet" of health statistics, and I would expect to see Intuit (Quicken) or Mint-like companies and services come along to make more sense of it.

Surely we can inject Red Bull instead of water, and get all our daily energy needs met!

I suspect my 8 year old, low-functioning ASD son would also not keep on a wrist bracelet, but I'm intrigued enough in this article that I'm going to buy him a cheap watch and see what he does. The form-factor may be an issue. Given my son's level of functioning (barely verbal), if there was a safe implant tech available (and affordable) that would let me track him within ~1/2 mile, and had a failsafe to start transmitting a locator signal to authorities once he exceeded the range of one of the families smartphones (or some device), I'd buy it, and I suspect many other parents of low-functioning ASD kids would as well.

I have been a software engineer for more than 12 years and a developer for more than 18. I have had jobs writing c/c++ (MSVC, Borland C++ Builder and gcc), Java & J2EE (J2SE RMI to Weblogic + Portal to Apache + Tomcat + JBoss), Perl (Catalyst + Mason) and Python (TurboGears 2.0 + SQLAlchemy). My resume reads like a pro athlete's scoresheet with well over twenty full lifecycle projects under my belt in all of my proficient languages.

All of that, and the simple fact is that it HURTS my job search instead of helping it. My varied career has lead to long term exposure to a language and some related frameworks which was then mostly forgotten as I picked up a new language and framework. I have no trouble at all taking programming challenges even if they are timed provided I have access to google or some API documentation but I simply don't remember the little nuances of any language I'm not currently working on.

This hurts me when some recruiter throws a timed competency test at me that reads exactly like a SCJP exam and expects me to remember the names of specific classes or language rules. Give me a couple of days, perhaps a week of working in the language on a practical project and I'd pick it all back up, but trying to sort it all on a per-question basis with less than 3 minutes to do it in and I choke.

Development is about learning algorithms and techniques, not APIs. Experienced developers know many ways of collecting, retrieving, updating and deleting data, breaking down complex problems into logical steps and then using experience to reduce the number of steps, reduce the number of times the required number of steps must be taken and breaking linear problems down into distributed tasks. A specialist in a given language is capable of coding faster in any given language than a generalist like myself, but then they only know techniques specific to their language of choice which reduces their ability to choose from multiple approaches to real-world problems. In addition, every problem is solved in terms of their language of experience rather than by pulling from the techniques discovered and improved upon by developers in multiple languages, apis and frameworks.

Hiring managers and other developers know this.

Recruiters and HR representatives don't.

Now if only a good business person could figure out how to code a business process that bypasses the filtering process put in place by non-technical recruiters so that hiring managers get presented with the best candidate for the position they need filled instead of the people who the recruiters think has the best chance of making them a pile of money.

For anyone who made it this far and is still reading: my personal technique for getting through this is to self-create projects in any and all languages and frameworks for which I expect to be interviewed and then just start coding the project. This generally means that I spend about a month looking for work while working 60-80 hours per week for free. The upshot is that I get an offer 9/10 interviews.

Way way way easier than 95% of my tests...
Pythonish pseudo code solution:
foreach ndex (limit):
    if not (ndex%3):
        if not (ndex%5):
            print "FizzBuzz, "
        else:
            print "Fizz, "
    elif not (ndex%5):
        print "Buzz, "
    else:
        printf "%d", ndex

The one I just did went like this:

Write a function that given a string of digits and a target value, prints where to put +'s and *'s between the digits so they combine exactly to the target value. Note there may be more than one answer, it doesn't matter which one you print.
Examples:
"1231231234",11353 -> "12*3+1+23*123*4"
"3456237490",1185 -> "3*4*56+2+3*7+490"
"3456237490",9191 -> "no solution"

This was the first of two questions, the second was a volume fill problem using string representation of graphical tiles as input and a printed matrix as a result to stdout. The test had to be taken with ANSI c using only STL. The test was timed and preferred candidates needed to present their coded solution and compiled example within 3 hours. Maximum time limit was 8 hours.

The original idea of copyright was, if I am not mistaken (and of course IANAL), was extended to physical objects after the infringement against Elijah McCoy. I know there is debate about this, and that's fine since the story provides a suitable analogy and that is all I'm going for. Also, please excuse my interchangeable use of patent/copyright. While I understand that copyright is generally for media and patent is for physical inventions, I am also under the distinct impression that either can be applied to any original invention, physical or media, given the proper conditions. Once again, IANAL so forgive my inevitable ignorance of the finer points to be considered along those lines.

The phrase "The real McCoy" is believed by many to have originated with his device for lubricating the wheel/break/drive-shafts of locomotive machine parts. The device was hugely popular but, like any good inventor, Elijah wanted to make it rich, so he charged a rather hefty price for his contraption. Very quickly, his fledgling company noticed similar devices attached to locomotives operating across the country. Many of them were substandard and some were even being returned to his company with complaints and demands for repair. The resulting legal battles are reported to have significantly strengthened copyright/patent law.

Disregarding the inevitable deluge of corrections I am bound to get for my summarized narrative of Elijah McCoy and his invention, my point here is that he created a MECHANICAL device that performed a function as-yet unrealized by any other manufacturer. His idea was good, and should have resulted in wealth for him but he had to depend on copyright to protect his invention. The copies were original works, crafted with iron or steel purchased from the market. They doubtless only looked at his design before making their duplicates.

They were only stealing his idea. That's the WHOLE POINT of copyright and patent... Protecting the RIGHT TO COPY.

I do not support the OP. You were trying to make money off someone else's idea. Invent a derivative work and I would support you all the way, but you're just a cheap hack attempting to siphon money away from someone else.

Not because you are wrong, but because you are so correct. We are software engineers, developers, networking specialists and system administrators. We know the businesses we work for far better than the fat lazy salary guzzling managers we are abused by. We understand politics with no trouble since we spend most of our lives doing our best to avoid the politics of our respective offices.

There is more than enough talent here to force those attacking the middle class to step back and listen. Instead of whining about getting screwed out of the just compensation we have earned, why aren't any of you proposing a way to fight back?