The "freeriders" in the summary don't include those that "test it, and give feedback, find bugs, suggest improvements". If someone's doing that, then they're a helpful part of the development process. The text in the summary that describes freeriders/freeloaders is:

Obviously, that can't be talking about people that submit bug reports and suggestions.

I'm in southern California, and I have a similar experience. I work 40 hours, and it's enough to finish everything that's required of me. In the 6 years I've been employed here, there've been maybe a dozen times that I've had to go over a 45 hour week. When I hear some of the work stories that people talk about, all I can do is thank my lucky stars that I don't live somewhere like SV, because I wouldn't have lasted long with those kinds of workdays.

There are lots of interesting and/or frustrating problems to work on at home too. If TV's all you can come up with, then you aren't even trying. My work is within a fairly constrained field. I have a lot of ideas for things that I don't have the opportunity to do at work, and when one becomes sufficiently interesting, I find time to write it at home instead.

I go to work to do the things that my employer wants done. I go home and do the things that I want to do. It works out nicely.

I noticed a similar tendency in my own behavior. There are two things that I've done about it. First, around an hour before bedtime, all the electronics go off. Pull out a book of whatever you like to read for recreation. Force yourself to start reading, but don't force yourself to keep reading, because then it will feel like a chore. The deal is that you can read as long as you'd like, but when you put the book down, the light needs to go off too. Second, almost everyone has some kind of creative endeavor that they can pursue on their computer. In my case, there are a small number of programming projects that I've started. Writing software requires long periods of concentration, and if you're working on something interesting, then you'll have more incentive to stick to the project.

If you're unhappy with your level of concentration, then find something you enjoy concentrating on. Then when you're obligated to do something tedious, you at least have the attention span to properly apply yourself to the task.

Good to know, thank you.

A new study reports
molecular evidence

Because fuck using URL shorteners when they're unnecessary. It's better to know at least the domain that a link will take you to.

DRM is a source of bugs. Removing it can have significant benefits beyond piracy. When games usually came on CD/DVD, it was my standard practice to download a No-CD crack after I bought the game, so that I could be lazy, and avoid digging through the CD pile to switch games.

The equivalent today is perhaps playing a game without an available internet connection. I'm not in that situation often, but a few times a year, I am. Then again, that usually means I'll just switch to the cellphone instead.

No, the device worked as well as it did before, but with some improvements (a shell to log into wirelessly, compiler, normal contents of binutils, alternate appstores, customized UIs, etc).

Closed hardware is certainly shittier than open hardware, but exaggerating the point is counterproductive.

It's not sold as a computer, but it can be made into one. I turned my iPod Touch into a little remote-accessible Unix system with some compilers and such. I'd be surprised if you couldn't do the same with the current crop of hardware.

I can also buy an off-the-shelf hard drive and modify it for use in my Xbox; that doesn't mean that Microsoft supports the use of hard drives that they didn't supply. In a similar sense, I've got a 10 year old iPod, and I got to ride along as the first reverse-engineered libraries were designed. It worked fine during certain stretches of time....when Apple wasn't repeatedly changing the on-device database format to break compatibility with non-iTunes song management. My iPod Touch was worse; none of the open software ever reached feature-parity with iTunes, in terms of managing that device.

Just because someone figured out how to circumvent Apple's lock-out measures doesn't mean that Apple didn't do something anti-competitive.

Rote memorization gave me a list of facts to play around with in my head, and it became the basis of the mental math that I use now. If we studied math without using numbers, then I can see how the memorization would've been unnecessary. Then again, I don't see that having a practical application in most people's lives, since concrete numbers are all that people generally deal with. In any case that comes to mind, learning math itself isn't directly useful, while learning arithmetic most definitely is.

I had to learn cursive in grade school around 1993. My cursive was never pretty or fast, and three years of writing purely in cursive ruined my printing. I've never understood people saying that it's faster and easier. I've had the opposite experience.

Damn straight. Literacy either. I can't think of a single time in my life where I would've literally died if I couldn't read. Chuck it; useless. All the times that it would've helped, I either had someone else there to tell me what I needed, or I had a device with text-to-speech functionality.

I don't know. Do people that you primarily communicate with using mailed letters deserve to be called friends?

You've got a system that's simultaneously a detailed rolodex, a scheduler/calendar of events, a shared photo album, a mass e-mailer, an instantaneous communication system, and somewhere to make announcements that are visible to selected groups of people. For no direct payment of money. Oh, and it spies on you all the time and occasionally sells the results to its friends. Except for that last point, everything else is a useful feature. Whether the trade-off is worth it depends on individual preference, and the individual's acquaintances' preferences when it comes to communication.

Platformers, shmups, fighting games, lots of puzzle games, and many non-RTS top-down view games work better without a pointing device. Some of them work just fine with digital buttons, some are better with some kind of analog control (but still not a mouse).