I listen to the ones who are from someone I actually want to talk to, the rest of them I just delete. If I'm listening to them without the visual voicemail interface, I just hit 7 about 4 seconds into the voice mail, otherwise I look at the caller ID on the VVS and hit the delete button. My phone is not someone else's tool for forcing me to talk to them. I get 3-4 calls a day from very low quality technical recruiters. I get a call every couple of months from someone I might actually want to talk to.

The only people who call me at work are IT people in response to online tickets. Then I get an E-mail from the phone system that they called me and I have to look them up and send them an E-Mail politely reminding them that, as I explained in my ticket, IT doesn't seem to be capable of installing a phone at my desk and that they're better off emailing me. Not to mention the fact that all my voicemails go to a null number and the size of that mailbox will eventually crash the corporate phone system. I also sit in a location they are incapable of finding or accessing if they do actually find it. I mostly just submit tickets for the comedy value, once or twice a week. I'm over 40, so I suppose they were probably talking about me.

Obviously, say, "Oh, I'll go listen to that and call you back!" Then call back 10 minutes later and say "Oh hey! I accidentally deleted all my voicemails! Mind going over it again?"

Err. Rocket is from the guys that brought you CoreOS. CoreOS uses systemd. Not the same thing.

Short of emergencies, 'free internet' is a requirement I shop for. If it's a working trip, internet would be a *reimbursable* expense for work, thus increasing the effective cost of the hotel, making it effectively more expensive than the one that includes wifi, thus they'll route their people elsewhere.

As for blocking wifi but not cell phones because it pisses customers off, if they put a faraday cage up they could put cellular boosters inside the hotels to transmit those frequencies out.

Of course, the number of personal hotspots that would pop up...

Well, you're clearly the target audience of the new Trek, then.

There is a difference though, the 24fps frames makes up for the low frame rate with motion blur. If the new digital HFR doesn't have that it will always feel like you're watching a baseball game instead of a swordfight.

Wait, am I watching the sword fight live, or recorded on obsolete media? And does the same go for the baseball game?

You inadvertently put your finger on the truth: that a sword fight should look like a baseball game.

But he did film it, kinda. He just didn't put it into the story. It shows up a little bit in the Mirror of Galadriel sequence.

One could argue that that was the correct way to play it, too. I know people who claim to have "walked out of the theater after the first ending and skipped all of the other ones," as it is.

Yeah, on my set there are two settings that combine to create the effect and I have each set to "most of the way off" because that's the way I like it.

"I wish to sue Thomas Paine for the damage he has done to the British people." -- Horace Edwards, if he'd lived in the 1770s.

Can you name the brilliant invention, that was made to solve the problem of people like Horace Edwards? It was called America! Fuck yeah!

Yes, that is a great book by Karen Pryor! Inspired by her book, I once made a list of maybe two dozen other ways to deal with behavior issues, but I don't think I put it on the web. The last one was something like just accepting the undesired behavior as a recurring reminder that you have something good (a relationship) in your life. :-)

"Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent"
http://www.amazon.com/Our-Babi...
"New parents are faced with innumerable decisions to make regarding the best way to care for their baby, and, naturally, they often turn for guidance to friends and family members who have already raised children. But as scientists are discovering, much of the trusted advice that has been passed down through generations needs to be carefully reexamined.
    A thought-provoking combination of practical parenting information and scientific analysis, Our Babies, Ourselves is the first book to explore why we raise our children the way we do--and to suggest that we reconsider our culture's traditional views on parenting.
    In this ground-breaking book, anthropologist Meredith Small reveals her remarkable findings in the new science of ethnopediatrics. Professor Small joins pediatricians, child-development researchers, and anthropologists across the country who are studying to what extent the way we parent our infants is based on biological needs and to what extent it is based on culture--and how sometimes what is culturally dictated may not be what's best for babies.
    Should an infant be encouraged to sleep alone? Is breast-feeding better than bottle-feeding, or is that just a myth of the nineties? How much time should pass before a mother picks up her crying infant? And how important is it really to a baby's development to talk and sing to him or her?
    These are but a few of the important questions Small addresses, and the answers not only are surprising but may even change the way we raise our children."

John Holt and Pat Farenga are worth reading too, about "unschooling" as essentially "give your kids all the freedom you can stand, especially in following their own educational interests".
http://www.johnholtgws.com/pat...

Although, I personally feel the more extreme form of "radical unschooling" as some (not all) practice it is like the libertarianism of parenting, emphasizing freedom over all other virtues... Kids are indeed "learning all the time" but the quality of what they are learning can matter too. Also, "supernormal stimuli" of certain media and certain foods may need to be avoided or limited for health reasons because to help kids avoid or recover from "the pleasure trap".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...

Also related on Myers-Briggs for both parent and child to look at various matchups:
http://www.motherstyles.com/

And:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

That page talks a lot about Authoritative, Authoritarian, Permissive and Neglectful styles. But the page goes into more types than that (including "attachment" parenting which may be close to the human historical norm within hunter/gatherer tribes where it sounds like a crying baby was rare).

By the way, kids can be much more a discipline problem when fed junk, not fed enough fruits and vegetables, lacking in sunlight, lacking in good gut bacteria, lacking in exercise, overstressed by an early focus on academics instead of play, saturated by violent and sexualized media, and so on. See also:
https://www.drfuhrman.com/chil...
https://www.vitamindcouncil.or...
http://drhyman.com/blog/2010/0...
http://www.chrismercogliano.co...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-...
http://dianeelevin.com/sosexys...

Good luck!!! Have Fun!!!!

My suggestion: https://www.newschallenge.org/...
"When confronted with a health issue, many people turn to their doctor, the internet, or friends for advice. But then what do you and your family do with all the advice you receive? What do even health professionals do with all the often conflicting information out there when they research a patient's health issues? We want to create software that helps with that challenge by making it easier for individuals and communites to collect health information (from whatever public sources including the internet), organize it, prioritize it, reason about it, act on it, and feed back the results of action into a next iteration as a learning experience. "

To add to your list, more vegetables, fruits, and beans can help, too. See Dr. Fuhrman. He may have become too commercial and may also miss a few things (Salt vilified too much? Too low on iodine? A bit low on vitamin D? Discarding some psychological aspects? Overoptimizing a few things? Trusting too much in some studies that are still to mainstream? Ignoring some possible benefits from animal products? Ignoring genetic issues like difficulties synthesizing some things? Not enough emphasis on the microbiome?). But overall he gets a lot ("make the salad the main dish") and his approach is based on science studies -- even if there is a risk of how you interpret limited studies and conflicting studies.

Also see Dr. Weil on lifestyle issues (like stress, sleep, music, community, and so on) as well as herbal remedies.

And see Bluezones for community level issues like sidewalks and walking clubs.

Vitamin D from some source to make up for indoor living is essential too.

Anyway, I'm writing other software right now for my wife (related to her free Working with Stories book) but I hope I can use the infrastructure (JavaScript/Dojo/Node.js/Pointrel) to use for other things like such tools. Probably would be an excellent life-extension choice by Peter Thiel to fund time for several developers to work on such FOSS software though. :-)

Because they are a hack. Twitter wasn't designed to include any metadata except author, date, etc. - certainly not topics, tags or keywords.

The problem is feature creep. Of course users want tags and keywords and topics and threading and circles and access levels/restrictions and grouping and two hundred other features. But if you give them what they want, they will complain that it's all too complicated and move elsewhere.

Who said emergency? An emergency is probably exactly when you want a computer to be in control, simply because it can process more information more quickly, and the decisions to be made are trivial and minimal (aka "bring vehicle to a safe stop, right now").

But I would want manual controls on my car of the future because on some weekends I drive into the countryside and I drive on small dirt roads that may or may not be on the map. Or to festivals or other big events where at the end you park on a field. Or you drive through a really crowded street where the computer will most likely just stop and stand because there's always someone in front of the car.

There are plenty of non-emergency situations that I'm not sure the automatic driver can handle.

Glad the Norris link was helpful. Still hope you check out the"Skills of Xanadu" links... Yeah, it's hard to know when to "barge" and when not to...

Your County Currency link was off, but I found this:
http://countycurrency.org/

Reminds me a bit of LETS:
http://www.lets-linkup.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Although, from the fist link: "Don't think of LETS points like dollars. Think of them as favours. LETS Favours. ... The LETS group's function is to act as a bookkeeper for their members' activities; keeping record of these 'favours' and putting the members' accounts into debit or credit accordingly. An account that is in credit identifies a member who has given more favours than he has received, and an account that is in debit identifies a member who has received more favours than he has given. These credits have no value and cannot be exchanged for cash. Their only purpose is to keep track of each member's involvement in the group so they can aim to bring their accounts back to zero -- a sign of fair and equitable participation in the system. ..."

And:
http://banknd.nd.gov/
"Welcome to Bank of North Dakota (BND). As the only state-owned bank in the nation, we act as a funding resource in partnership with other financial institutions, economic development groups and guaranty agencies."

Although they presumably don't issue currency except as debt like any other conventional bank. But one can wonder how far debt lending could go at he state level these days with Fed support.

See also on having adequate currency as the cause of the American Revolution (assuming it is true):
"How Benjamin Franklin Caused the Revolutionary War"
http://www.opednews.com/articl...

Jane Jacobs was big on cities having their own currencies. She especially values currency fluctuations between cities as markers of how well cities were doing processes like import replacement. She pointed out how national currencies could hurt most cities (while perhaps benefiting the capital city). Reading her work, I realized how the Euro was a big step backwards for most Europeans, especially in a computer age where translating currencies using current values (over a network) was a fairly easy problem to solve technically. The Euro shows the folly of trying to have a common currency without a common form of governance for the people who use it.

When I've thought about currencies, I eventually realized that a currency is implicitly a constitution. It's backed in a sense by an community and is only as strong as the governance of that community, which controls how much of the currency is issued and the official rules for exchange it. When a currency loses value relative to other currencies, it mostly reflects an assessment of the community or its governance that stands behind the currency as a medium of exchange. In that sense, the county currency idea fits a definable unit of governance -- the county.

As for getting back to the countryside with technology, my wife and I moved to the Adirondack park more than ten years ago. When we first arrived we had only dialup, but a couple years after that paid the cable company US$4000 to extend cable about a half mile to us so we could get broadband speeds. Money well spent as far as ROI. It was only computer networking that let us live in such a remote area and still be able to do consulting projects. And dialup speeds were getting more and more problematical, with people sending multi-megabyte files and asking us if we got them, and having to say, well, it will take a couple hours to download... I spent 2.5 years recently supporting NBCUniversal's broadcast operations and writing new software for them to control video routers and their satellite system -- routinely downloading multi-gigabyte log files and only needing to go to NYC for the day maybe a dozen or so times over that time. So, I guess I got to live that dream. :-) Well, ignoring I'd rather have been developing software for more decentralized systems. :-(

I'm not sure living in the countryside does much for demographics though. Industrial society, whether in urban, suburban, town, or rural areas, provides so many distractions while raising the cost of having a kid so high that population growth rates are falling in all such places. Italy is a worst case along with Japan, but the USA is pretty much only still growing based on immigration. Here is something I wrote on that (in part to rebut concerns over Peak Oil etc.):
"[p2p-research] Peak Population crisis (was Re: Japan's Demographic Crisis)"
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...

BTW, I just spent about five hours working with my kid (who did the artwork and provided domain design advice) and making a crude browser-based 2D multi-player tank battle toy in JavaScript (both on the browser and with a NodeJS server using socket.io for the networking). I call it a toy as there is no collision detection, score, login ids, or many other features -- and still known bugs like when people reconnect and leave ghost tanks. So, nowhere near WOT (which we play a lot) but I thought it would be a fun learning experience for him and me to do together. Some things have gotten so much easier over the years -- yet another way automation is reducing the need for "jobs" :-) We just put it up on GitHub:
"TanksInYourBrowser"
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...

I have a copy of this book, so maybe we'll get to 3D multi-player eventually: :-)
"3D Game Programming for Kids: Create Interactive Worlds with JavaScript (Pragmatic Programmers)"
http://www.amazon.com/Game-Pro...
"You know what's even better than playing games? Creating your own. Even if you're an absolute beginner, this book will teach you how to make your own online games with interactive examples. You'll learn programming using nothing more than a browser, and see cool, 3D results as you type. You'll learn real-world programming skills in a real programming language: JavaScript, the language of the web. You'll be amazed at what you can do as you build interactive worlds and fun games."

Anyway, thanks for helping get all that started! :-)