It's been happening forever. In the 1500s, a Catholic Priest dedicated his efforts to attacking the mnemonics techniques used to memorize scripture--and everything else--because they attached lewd and base images to ideas in the mind. This happened after one preacher admitted he used an image of a naked virgin girl in a not-so-puritan situation to help remember some odd line of the Catholic bible. Having such thoughts in peoples's heads was unacceptable, entirely.

I've noticed about five people have responded, and some of them have user IDs in the millions. That's a pretty small cross-section; and I've had up to 50 responses to posts on Slashdot in under an hour, when I've really pissed the crowd off with some uncomfortable fact. I'm not taking much stock in the overwhelming rise of the majority rule of morning people here.

There is some evidence that 80% of the population awakens far too early, to detrimental effect on health. The idea has gained some traction slowly over the past decade or two; in the next 30-40 years, I expect we'll link circadian disruption by bastardized early-riser sleep culture to the high incidence of stupidity, depression, and psychosis leading to school shootings.

Sticking your child in front of a video game to parent for you is NOT engaging.

Children need independence. Independence doesn't mean mommy isn't around; it means they make decisions and mistakes on their own, and are able to move away from their parents and return by their own action--even if they're instructed when to do so. Such instruction is engagement, as is parents asking where you're going, where you've been, what you've done, and having food prepared for you when you get home.

We can extrapolate theoretically from here, but that's not the point. Above illustrates that parental engagement does not require your child to be chained to a desk with a single activity when not engaged by the parent. My argument was on this balance of time, and on the impact thereof in regards to independent social and environmental experience versus isolation with a single activity.

To compare: we could also talk about break time spent smoking versus break time spent walking around the building. If you bring a healthy diet into this discussion, you are babbling on about irrelevancies.

This is 2014, and we're in the decade of reboots. This is the reboot of "sit your kids in front of the TV to watch the Children's Channel" thinking. The glowing, phosphorus parent of the 80s, now back with less Big Bird.

Put your kids outside. Don't put them on the bicycle of the Internet; put them on a *real* bicycle. I walked the 1/3 mile to school when I was 6; I could bicycle 1.2 miles in that time, a good 10 minutes walking by myself, well out of sight of my parents. When I was 8, I had a bicycle with a coaster brake, and would disappear outside for hours at a time--by myself, since I had no friends. Sometimes I came back home after the older 5th graders beat the shit out of me for some Freudian satisfaction related to their small penises (too impatient for puberty I guess), I'm sure; but, for all the baseball bats and tennis shoes they applied, they never managed to put a bruise on me, so I made out alright.

This is all a bunch of wanting your kids locked in a room doing a single thing, in a place you know, with the ability to look in and verify they're still doing that one thing and nothing else, so that you don't have to show any concern. My massive internal simulator predicts, via armchair child psychology, that this will not provide a robust set of varied experiences for the child, and so will slow their mental growth and reduce their ability to thrive. History will prove me correct--has proven me correct--but I'm sure nobody will listen and, when it's all well proven that this actually happened, will instead find the next substitute single activity and claim it's different, somehow, and fail to predict the same result.

Protein. You want protein and fat to wake up. Even if sleep-deprived, whipping up a 3 egg omlette with bacon and sausage will get you back in shape. Massive stacks of flapjacks and biscuits are going to weigh on you and make you sleep (and make you fat, and give you heart disease).

Who the hell do you know is a morning person? That one dude at the office? How many people are awake like, "Ugh, fuck, too early for this shit, coffee..."?

They say it's DSPD. You won't sleep like a normal person, you stay up late, then you don't get up until 10 or 11. Yeah, right. And normal people enforce a bed time, drag their asses out of bed groggily, then come in and futz around for a few hours until about lunch, and suddenly become active.

Guess which behavior's normal?

Here in the United States, you could go to the peddler's market and have the chip in your Playstation replaced with an upgraded mod chip, with switch to toggle between mod chip and original BIOS.

No of course not. They'll just send a cruise missile into a populated coffee shop.

That's stupid.

If the terrorists changed their tactics, and you state that they've changed their tactics, you're revealing that the terrorists took action in response to finding out you've been monitoring them. If their new tactics made them vanish, made them hard to read (encryption), or did nothing, you would still notice: you'd notice them disappear if they completely beat you, or you'd notice their tactics change if their new tactics were just as ineffective as the old ones. As you say, giving terrorists information which they act on does help them, even if their response doesn't gain them anything; so saying in public that the Snowden leak helped terrorists, in any situation where they responded to the leak by change, is both accurate and not revealing.

If you confirm that the leaks haven't helped the terrorists, then you're only confirming that the situation hasn't changed. This would only happen if the terrorists didn't gain enough information from the leaks to make any changes--useful or otherwise--and thus you would confirm exactly what the terrorists know: that they don't know if there are any leaks, what the extent of the leaks are, and where those leaks may be. This is, again, unhelpful.

The report is a lie.

Terrorist groups have absolutely changed their behaviors and communications patterns to increase obfuscation and move attention away from their important operations. The United States National Security Agency, the US Military, and other terrorist operations have added increased layers of misdirection to better cover and draw attention away from their most critical activities.

Market share isn't growing slower; it's declining.

The liability shift from Visa's incredible marketing of the Visa Shield protecting you from identity theft with charge backs and banks calling you to tell you they're declining a suspicious gasoline charge in California after you've been using your card in Vermont all morning and since forever to "oh, someone else used your card? Well, sucks to be you. We can close the account and give you a new card number."

How do I turn this into a hot story to get the production crew salivating over running this on the evening news?

The US is the third world.

I want chip-and-sign. I Have stupid chip-and-pin, but I solved that by writing the PIN on the back of the card.

Oh, and this absorption chiller seems to provide 76% efficiency, versus 320% for a regular AC; but the cost is comparable, such that a $1500 unit would supply the same cooling.

Where I live, gas (heat) powered air conditioners cost less during the season to operate than electric ones.