but there are a few gems in it.

I kinda get what they are saying.

From own experience as parent with three kids:

child #1: no disciplinary method ever worked effectively, period (spanks, timeouts, taking objects or privileges away, etc). Currently this child has severe entitlement issues and feels nothing is her fault. She passes the psychopath test with flying colors. at 16, she's in psychiatric care after professing suicidal ideation and superficial attempts.

child #2. A thoughtful, empathetic and generous girl of 9 who sometimes floods emotionally and has big tantrums. She clearly has suffered from abuse from child #1. When she has tantrums, its like her neural pathways become scrambled and the only way to bring her back to rational behavior is with a quick spank, which seems to "reset" her system. After which she is rational, remorseful and loving again. Timeouts and take aways generally work.

child #3. a big hearted loving boy at 7 years old who is very physical and intense but also cerebral. Spanking does not work, simply sending him into an animal like rage as depicted in the article with hissing, biting, etc. The only way to snap him out of his tantrums is to get him to think about the puzzling nature of things at which point his higher level reasoning takes over from his reptilian brain.

All three children completely different. all of them super inteligent. all of them with ideas about how to fix things, inventing, or helping society.

Anecdotally alone, I would say spanking generally does not work as a discipline method, but can be helpful as a pysiological tool. Its all about teachable moments and above all repetition! Reinforce the neural pathways with the positive influence you want, over and over until it sticks.

For instance, the bedtime. You dont coddle them all night long but you dont just ignore the crying either... you just keep putting them back to bed. they know they arent abandoned, but at the same time they know (eventually) they arent going to "win". Its a lot more work. With a baby you make contact but then put him down. With an older child, you can rationalize a bit.

I read the charter.

And as crazy it seems, I kinda love it.

I mean, its not like I'd ever use such a machine for day to day work.

But, it could actually be pretty awesome as a learning machine or "toy" for young programmers. Kinda like the C64 it pays homage to.

Very interesting but abandoned low level protocol for distributed social networking.

Uses encryption and trust relationships which can be granted/withdrawn. There was a document describing it, but I cant find it on the net anymore, but the sourcecode is on github. It just needs somebody to set up an easy to access front end.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

If we're looking for a reason, I think this is the best one I've heard so far.

The thing about the media being the cause I think is wrong, that was just an effect.

The cause I think is spot on, that males are competitive and in general more solitary (damn that testosterone), and females are more apt to be concerned with social aspects. In the late 70's and 80s computers became much more accessible to those competitive loners (nerd stereotyping here).

Which is to say, its not that females can't do it, or that males are better at it (insert whatever you want for it), its just that they are quite possibly just not interested as much. Before the advent of Personal Computers, computing was mostly prevalent in an academic setting, which is more social..

I see I've been moderated funny but I'm actually not kidding. I've been deliberating over whether to get a new high end laptop or get a nice tablet and just move mostly to cloud services. Why bother setting up Web servers and databases etc locally when you can fire them up in the cloud? And I despise working with photoshop anyway, I just want to code..

I went through a similar transition from desktop to laptop.

It's time.

Still no new macbook pro...

Thats it, I'm out. I'll just get a Nexus 9 and a keyboard and move to the cloud.

Just need to breed hops to enhance the level of this flavonoid to high enough levels to be useful, and then brew a "smart beer" from it.

As long as it tastes better than Bud Light, it should sell like crazy.

Use your passion to either:

A) Leave.

B) Or take over.

Well of course there's a third option: stay and have your soul crushed. But who would choose that?

"one individual who would choose as his life's work the signaling, on a cosmic scale, of how he was getting along"

well, that certainly wouldn't be a problem for humans. There are already plenty of humans who make it their lifes work the signaling of how they are getting along. And if they could do it on a cosmic scale, they would.

It stands to reason that any sufficiently advanced alien race would reach a point where they invent their version of facebook. It also stands to reason that the invention of the social network is also probably the Singularity that marks the downfall of said civilization...

Give me something I can really use.

Like a mini fridge robot that brings me mountain dew so I dont have to walk 20 feet to the company break room.

Seriously people. Those engineers just aren't thinking outside the box.

Code more, obsess less.

That is, just crank out more code and learn from mistakes rather than always trying to make it perfect the first time and never finishing.

Also, not to listen to people who say your idea wont work. Give it a generation or two and you'll have the speed and memory to do it.

Well this seems like a fine "solution" to companies that are trying to get rid of net neutrality.

What if every big content provider started popping up such messages? Let the user know directly that their content is being delivered slower because their net provider is throttling the data.

As long as the content provider can accurately determine this is happening, then what can anybody do to stop them from saying it? Verizon can huff and puff about it but if its provably true can they legally do anything to stop it?

I bet people start caring about net neutrality real fast..

This is no different than people saying TV is bad and is ruining kids (which is true to some extent if you let your kid sit in front of a TV all day) which is nothing new.

The problem is parenting.

If you let your kid spend all his time (insert "watching TV" or "using a tablet" or "playing video games" or "reading comic books" or etc etc) then you're going to have a problem.

Same thing if you let him only eat his favorite food ("mac and cheese" or "drink sodas" or etc. etc..)

Everything is about balance and variety.

My kids get a little bit of game time on the iPad, and afterwards they frequently act like a drug addict who can't get another fix. And so we explain to them, a little bit is fun, but now its time to do something else. Shortly later, they are playing lego, or kinex, or drawing, or experimenting with random crap they found around the house, or gardening, or running with the dogs, or... and with just a little guidance and interaction from mom and dad they will do most of this on their own.

The problem is not , the problem is lack of parenting.

I agree to some extent about the 9 - 5 thing being in many ways bad.

I do exactly what you describe a few days a week.

The problem is that this makes it very hard to properly communicate with other people in your job setting. Nobody knows reliably when other people will be available, whether its for a meeting, or just to get some little bit of information. It works great if you are on a self directed task that lasts for the whole "day" and nobody needs you for anything. It sucks if you need 3 or 4 people to meet to discuss something.

I've also found that, with creator type people, they almost universally prefer larger blocks of contiguous work time in order to be efficient. So interrupting those work hours with other things reduces efficiency.

Clearly, sitting for 8 hours is not healthy. Personally, I could not possibly stand for 8 hours without my feet hurting horribly. Even 4 hours would kill me.

The ideal physical work envirionment would probably consist of a mix of walking, running, standing, squating, etc. IE, just like a human would have experienced while procuring food, defecating, mating, etc all day, in pre-civilization times (insert "evolutionary time" or "garden of eden" depending on your belief).

Thats hard to do for many lines of work these days (computer programmer, writer, artist, etc).

..is that it could potentially lead to a great one-liner in a movie:

While raising a shotgun and preparing to fire...

"I'm doing a Monte Carlo approximation.. on your FACE!"