There are certain things I wish I knew decades earlier. Some of them are things you can only learn by the school of hard knocks. Other things can be picked up in books.

Give her a list of books that she should read at certain ages. Not just fiction/science fiction, but books that made you think about the real world and how to live in it.

I know that I want my kids to read "The Boglehead Guide to Investing" by the time they take home their first paycheck. Being able to invest in the future is something that can start at a young age.

...and what do you expect?

If you want a proper "smart home" solution, you have to get an integrated package. Those aren't cheap and aren't things you can generally get via amazon.com.

I spent way too much on mine. But my outdoor lights turn on at 15 minutes before sunset and turn off at a random time between 10 and 11pm. I've got a couple thermostats which will warm up the first floor on weekdays to 66 degrees on weekdays half an hour before I go downstairs in the colder months. Also have a music system that can play any playlist off my server in any room of the house, or play a radio or internet radio station or even the audio of a TV station. Everything via physical switches or via a phone app.

Systems in the future will do more and cost less. Hopefully they'll be as secure and integrate as well or better than what I have now.

Is it worth it? Of course not. (Well, it may be worth it so that I don't have to turn off the outdoor lights when I'm already in bed. Because there's no way my wife's getting out of bed for that.)

Read that as SystemD bug.

On the one hand I was confused how systemD was involved in the launch.

On the other hand, I was happy someone was fixing bugs in it.

I was in an economics class with a good friend. The class was given an assignment in which they had to calculate some nonsense. The teacher said that any language code or pseudocode would be fine.

The friend and I were the only engineers in the class and apparently the only ones to use recursion to get to the answer. He used head recursion and I used tail recursion. Everyone else apparently solved it with itterative loops.

The TA knew my friend and I knew each other and threatened to report us for cheating. I told her to go ahead and show our code to the prof or even a CS prof. The logic that my friend and I were so different in the code that the fact that we both used recursion was the only similarity.

We hadn't cheated and kinda thought it was funny that it looked like we did.

Now, I wouldn't be surprised if we got our code scanned into some database and a computer said we cheated and we would have no recourse.

It's good for Linux Mint (any edition) to wait on systemD for now. Waiting for stability is always a good thing.

But... Linux Mint is the type of system where systemD would be best suited for. Desktop/laptop computers with a focus on the end user rather than server maintainers.

And I hope you stay so lucky. I am a physician and know how all my local hospitals do things. Perhaps your hospital is different.

The fact of the matter is: medical records are becoming more and more shared between different institutions. One of the local hospital systems near me is buying a $50million system that will integrate all records from the hospital, ER, physician offices, and pharmacies all into a single database so that mistakes in prescriptions don't happen. The other three hospital systems near me are spending an order of magnitude more for even more complex systems.

Very soon (5 year horizon) those databases will be shared with whichever ER or office you go into around the country.

Hopefully the records at your local hospital say that you:
1 - Are not allergic to PCN, just intollerant.
2 - Received Amoxicillin without any side effects.

In your case, the issue is this: If you have an allergy listed to an antibiotic, the treating physician will put it into the electronic medical record. The next time you get an infection, the computer will cross check your allergies before allowing the physician to prescribe an antibiotic to you. The computer will not just disallow penicillin, but also all penicillin analogues (ie: amoxicillin, ampicillin, etc), and all cephalasporins (there's probably twenty or more of them) since they cross-react with penicillin allergies.

The one allergy will knock out two entire classes of antibiotics.

On the other side, when you have a documented infection with a bacterial agent, the laboratory will take the particular strain you are infected with and see which all antibiotics the strain is sensitive to. The physician will then prescribe the antibiotic which the strain is most susceptable to, thereby giving you the best chance of beating the infection.

Obviously if you cannot take that particular antibiotic due to a documented allergy (or potential cross-reaction), the physician will have to prescribe something not quite as effective.

There's another problem. People who are intollerant to one medication are generally intollerant to many medications. You have to make sure you don't have a lot of allergies listed or you will end up being treated for an infection with 'big gun' antibiotics with more serious side effects.

Most of the time the physician will not even tell you how potentially toxic the antibiotic is, as it's generally not a detail physicians talk about. I've had a couple patients with dimished hearing for several months (at least!) as they were prescribed gentamycin for a simple infection because they were allergic to simpler antibiotics.

As was said many times before: States' Rights. Are they ever not embarrasing?

Sometimes I wish the states had no rights, and everything was controlled centrally. Seems a more efficient way to go. And if you distrust the federal government that much, the state governments won't protect you anyway.

I'm watching a lot less over-the-air and cable TV compared to 10 years ago.

I'm watching a lot more DVDs and streaming videos.

All in all, it's probably a wash or slightly more watching stuff than a decade ago.

Yes. I have the option to buy a 25BM/s line. The price is ridiculously high, however.

Residents in my neighborhood shouldn't be considered as having broadband since just about no one pays that much for internet (except my one neighbor who works in IT from home, and he deducts it as a business expense).

Hmmm...

Since /. comments seem to last forever, how about encrypting your data, running it through uuencode, and posting it?

I've been burnt or nearly burnt with new tech over the decades and consider myself a bit of an early adopter.

4K and UHD are interesting ideas, but I'm really not interested in replacing my entire hardware investment (including the current HDMI cables in the walls) just for a better picture. (Though the improved colorspace is somewhat tantalizing.)

Also, I've just recently gotten comfortable buying bluray discs in any quantity since I know I can rip them to my home media server. What sort of advanced copyright protection are the newer formats going to have? How many years of having to rely on a dedicated player? (I've just detached my dvd player from my TVs and likely will detach the bluray players as well.)

I'm not a fan of the false moderation because it's so obvious that it will be rampantly misused. (ie: Jennifer changed her status to "In a committed relationship". Flag: FALSE!)

I like the moderations /. uses. Would be interesting if a similar system could be made for a social site, with moderation points, etc.

(I'm not an Apple fanboy, I think. Of the 8 computers in my house, only two are Apple hardware, and one of them is > 5 years old.) The rest are either Acer or System76.

A lot of people buy Apple hardware because it's a known quality and (relatively) easy to get fixed. You (probably) know you're going to pay a little extra, but you know the build quality is generally consistently good and if there are hardware issues you can take it into an Apple Store and get it fixed fairly quickly.

It's fine for people that buy PC hardware all the time to say that a particular brand or model is good price and excellent quality. Most people don't want to do that much research for a laptop or desktop. And many have burnt themselves with buying something expensive and had it go bad in a couple years or need to be troubleshooted over the phone or mailed back due to some obscure issue. Better to drag it to the local Apple Store for many.

'Capable of' and 'allowed to' are two different things. I agree that it will likely be a decade or more before they're allowed to roam around on their own.

Capable of roaming on their own may be here now or near future. When Musk announced the driverless mode Model S, he mentioned that on private roads it could theoretically be fetched by the owner using his phone app.

What if it ran over a dog while on a private road? You know someone will sue. Until liability for that is cleared up, I'm thinking the driverless feature will be purposely be disabled when there's no one in the driver's seat.