I've got a therapist who is helping my kids, and I'm having a hard time justifying all the practices she is promoting. But since we are getting the input -- I've got to at least try what she recommends.

But the "put all the violent video games away -- it will hurt their minds" really irks me. I know too many violent brats who aren't allowed to even play with toy guns, much less violent games. There's no damn serious studies that link the two; as if violence arose with a First Person Shooter.

The main downside I do see to games and the smart phones is over stimulation. It's kind of like how some stimulant drugs work, and the user is no longer satisfied by real-world pleasures. There is value to "being bored." Figuring out how to entertain yourself or being lost in thought -- writing down a dream you had -- that's profile of future inventors.

It isn't cartoons or games in themselves that rot the mind. In fact, I'm fairly sure anything that forces you to react quickly improves the mind -- it's that doing it TOO MUCH instead of sports, and other more cerebral endeavors where you create the content needs to be part of someone's day.

I grew up with parents who didn't think you had to do much with the kids except feed them - and I'm raising my kids as if they were orchids. There needs to be a balance between these two extremes.

I agree with that -- because, really, how can we police them all the time?

The only real solution is to educate kids on good internet practices -- and most parents aren't using them either, nor know what to do, or what to teach.

There is a vacuum here and nature or spam will fill it.

As someone who is fairly tech savvy, it's getting harder for me to detect the scams. Just forwarded a decent sounding job opportunity because I knew someone it fit, and then noticed the same text for a different company -- because I've got a "tar baby" email account. All that stuff that I have to sign up for goes to the junk account and that one gets spammed. If I get a "job opportunity" there -- it's bogus. It's funny because if I didn't have a spam account, I wouldn't have seen the duplicate job with the same text -- and it's just luck because I don't read the spam for more than a second to identify its pattern.

Get a nicely configured MBP and be done with it.

It's the most common platform in research and academic settings for individual use these days, which means that there is a social dimension to the available support (i.e. people around you can help with problems). Meanwhile, the platform is narrow enough and the OS and hardware tightly bound together enough that one-off bugs and edge cases are exceedingly rare (which is not the case for Linux).

And Apple has very reasonable quality control in both hardware and software.

Having done a Ph.D. and dealt with the pressures and complexities that come therewith, I'd say that the overriding concerns should be reducing the PITA factor, keeping downtimes short, eliminating unexpected behavior and gotchas to whatever extent possible, and buying in to the largest on-the-ground support network (i.e. installed customer base) that you can find with identical hardware/software.

All of these things point to Mac for academic research settings.

You're absolutely right about incentives and grant money.

How you tied this to the Nobel Prize is beyond me, so let's drop that.

The incentives are all about grant money and outside (the campus) capital. As a result, the science takes a back seat to market economics, market-ing (both of corporate partners and of academic institutions themselves, which increasingly operate in a competitive marketplace for enrollments), management concerns, investors, etc.

This incentive structure is increasingly becoming the norm well beyond U.S. shores.

So the problem isn't that science is increasingly wrong, it's that scientists are increasingly doing labor that may *involve* science, but that is in fact product-oriented R&D driven by short-term investment timelines and economic and investor-friendly optics, and whether any of it is good *science* is secondary or tertiary to whether it's profitable, whether directly or indirectly.

Let the scientists go back to doing science first and money-making (whether to support their own tenure lines or to support corporate profits) second or even better, third, fourth, or fifth, and you'll find that the ship rights itself.

But obviously she liked the power more than she disliked the job conditions, and intended to ignore the job conditions anyway.

True of absolutely everyone in Washington.

Blah, blah, blah. You say that as if they are the first politicos to try and work around rules.

If you are going to refer to all the controversy surrounding ethics with the Clintons, do try and keep in mind that except for fooling around with his secretary, Bill Clinton and Hillary have never been found guilty of any of the charges.

So they had 5 court cases with a Federal Prosecutor, over a couple decades of bad press asking loaded questions, and furor over a tempest in a teapot like Benghazi.

Maybe the Clintons are not trying to be secretive, so much as paranoid. Maybe they worry that they might suddenly get an email saying; "Sent $100,000 to pay for Benghazi attack to Michelle Obama" in their sent email box.

By the time a forensic computer specialist can find the source of the doctored email, the Clintons will be defending themselves from another baseless claim.

Do you not remember who made all these different claims and why you aren't remembering that someone lied to you, but you remember that the Clintons are so corrupt?

I'm not supporting Hillary and I won't be voting for her, but she's just smart when dealing with Republicans -- not corrupt.

Maybe they just want to receive their emails and know that in the past, DNC servers and systems have been hacked. It's ingenious to say that their private system is automatically less secure than the government servers unless someone is an email security specialist and has knowledge of the two systems -- I'm sure someone on Slashdot will weigh in on this. ;-)

Perhaps with the record of Karl Rove and his operatives activities on Democratic servers -- I can definitely understand the Clinton's reticence to be on these same servers they've plagued. Doing the business of the state pre-supposes that all your communications are looked at by friendlies; not that everything you do is looked at in terms to set you up.

I can imagine a scenario where someone from the political opposition can read that you have a meeting with so and so, and can use that against you in some manner. As benign as changing the time of a meeting to making a fraudulent email and leaking it to the press.

Anything can happen if someone else with ill will controls the mail server.

Better to whether the small storm of criticism later, than be naive and pretend that political operatives won't do again what they've done to you in the past.
http://www.dispatch.com/conten...
Anyone remember Mike Connell? http://www.democracynow.org/20...
Former hackers were hired to create the original Diebold voting machines; http://www.dailykos.com/story/...
>> and Anonymous claimed they stopped the voting machines from being manipulated in the last election -- sounds like a quiet political cyber war is going on.

I'm sure to people not involved in politics, they think these are paranoid ramblings like Ross Perot claiming that the Bush crowd was pulling dirty tricks, tapping his conversations, and altering photos of his daughter; http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10...

Ross Perot is a man who used his own money and put is own neck on the line to retrieve kidnapped employees. Like him or not, he seems a bastion of integrity compared to the average politician.

Oh, and let's not forget that the RNC emails went missing;
http://freepress.org/article/a...
Rove's went missing;
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04...
And Iron Mountain lost emails -- and since their whole business model is storing sensitive data is probably one of the few things they've EVER lost;
http://fcw.com/articles/2014/0...

I'm not saying this to excuse a politician from not being transparent -- but I'd think we need to address the fact that dirty tricks are going on, and we need to make sure there are no man-in-the-middle attacks and manipulations of data.

"Using Metadata to find Paul Revere"
http://kieranhealy.org/blog/ar...

Paul B.

problems of epistemology, including in science.

Note that there are no shortage of facts whose veracity depends on nuanced facets of context and condition, some of which are disputed.

For example, fact or not: "Linux is a difficult operating system to use, and is a better choice for geeks and hackers than for regular users."

Or how about:

"Android is an operating system written by Google."

Or how about:

"The Bermuda Triangle region has seen an unusually high number of ship and plane disappearances over the years, and may be a particularly dangerous place to travel."

Because unless Google's algorithms are very, very nuanced in their approach, each of these is going to be seen as carrying high levels of factuality based on the preponderance of content out there, particularity in high-authority sources.

Of course, statements like the first and third are too complex for Google's rankings to evaluate and rank, and it can only work with very simple assertions on the order of "Milk is white," or "Obama is a Democrat," the it's going to do practically nothing (good or bad) at all for the rankings, since facts with this level of consensus are generally undisputed, even by those that promote falsehoods.

from gameability (in short, SPAM) to politics. Rather than punish above-board or non-predatory websites, it will punish both subversive and innovative thought that runs well ahead of social consensus. Sure, it will also eliminate willful misinformation, but it turns Google into an inherently conservative, rather than socially innovative, force.

Can't say I think it's better. Probably not any worse, but certainly not panacea.

Part of the problem is the CYA issue.

If you're writing the code, you sound like a laborer ("I have to..."). If it breaks, it's your fault and you're on the hook publicly.

If you present a third-party component in a meeting, you sound like a manager ("I propose that we..."). Once three or four other people in the meeting have concurred, if something breaks it's the third party's fault. A ticket or two are initiated, it's someone else's problem and everybody gets to cast blame somewhere beyond the walls of the company.

Rational behavior, regrettably.

I'd say "citation needed" but we only have rumor, innuendo and your word that the NSA is actually serious about going after real threats.

In the arena of creating laws based upon possible worst-case scenarios -- this one has to rank somewhere.

I agree with this. For most of criminal law, we judge based upon the INTENT of the DEFENDANT. The state of mind of the aggrieved party should be irrelevant unless the attacker knows it and that goes along with intent and premeditation.

"If I'm terrorized -- you must be a terrorist" is no way to run a civilization. A cynical person might believe that was the intent of the "stand your ground laws" and other shenanigans when large corporate groups like ALEC lobbied for them. What's wrong with self defense laws? It's not perfect, but should err on the side of; "Don't shoot people unless you have to."

I have no idea why people are arguing with you about this. The evidence (not least from the desktop computing industry) is everywhere, with catastrophically declining sales over the long term, offset by increases in mobiles and tablets—which, incidentally, Linux has already won, though in large part by leaving the distro community behind.

Linux could actually conquer the desktop in the end—a few years down the road when desktop computing is a specialized, professionals-only computing space. The users of other desktop operating systems are slowly bleeding off to mobile and tablet.

But this can only happen, ironically, if distros and devs stop trying to conquer the desktop in the present. If they continue down the path they're on, the long-term desktop community, which would be a natural fit for the Linux of yore, will probably be on some other OS. (MacOS? Surely not Windows at this point.)