20 year copyright term limits are very reasonable. The current term limits + options to extend are absolutely unreasonable, and they drive people to rebellion.

I mostly agree with you, and I definitely favor shorter copyright terms. But I doubt that 20+ year-old works make up a significant chunk of online piracy. People are largely downloading recent movies, games, and music, and limiting copyright to 20 years probably won't put much of a dent in it.

I can see where the GP is coming from. I suppose it depends on your definition of productive -- there are lots of things in life that can produce feelings of accomplishment and satisfaction even if you don't make any money at them (playing music, studying martial arts, hobby coding, etc). I personally classify those as "productive" activities.

Gaming can be a good way to relax or kill time if you're bored, but in the long run I don't find it as rewarding as my other hobbies. On the other hand, if I'm a bit tired/unmotivated, and have a good game at hand, it's easy to spend all day playing it. But at the end of the day I'll be less happy than if I did something "productive".

They expect my software to run on Windows, so I'm stuck with it. Otherwise I'd gladly be free from the pain and suffering of Win32 development.

At home, I boot to Windows once in a while for Netflix Streaming, but otherwise I'm on linux.

I'd find something for him to do that *doesn't* come easily -- it would probably have to be something outside the academic realm, maybe a sport or martial art.

Why? Because eventually, he's going to outgrow his genius and reach a point where he needs to study and work hard in order to succeed. That seems to be the point where most child prodigies burn out. Their whole ego/self worth gets tied up with being "smart" and succeeding effortlessly -- when they fail, it can be devastating, and they may decide that they're not so smart after all and give up.

If he experiences some failures early on, he can develop the resilience to keep working when things get tough. There's a lot of evidence that, in the long run, success has a lot more to do with effort and focused practice than innate talent.

He did put forth a plan, and it's been analyzed by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, which is where the $2.2 trillion figure comes from.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/2chambers/post/budget-office-says-reid-plan-would-cut-deficit-more-than-boehner-proposal/2011/07/27/gIQAWPwncI_blog.html

The plan put forward by Harry Reid this weekend has about $2.2 trillion in spending cuts and *no* additional revenue. It's basically everything that the Republicans asked for at the beginning of the negotiations, and they *still* won't vote for it.

I was like 10 or 11, IIRC. The older kids picked on me, and on the first day, one of the counselors yelled at me, made me cry, and called me a sissy. That's right, I was bullied at nerd camp. ;-)

But otherwise it was pretty cool. I think I did programming for the whole week. When they figured out that I had a handle on BASIC, they taught me Apple II assembler, which was pretty exciting at the time.

there is no "open" command on the Ubuntu CLI (on Apple's this is like a double click, it open the file with the program it is associated with), this is both obvious and easy (you already have the associations if you have a GUI double click);

xdg-open is the command you're looking for. It should be available on any modern distro. There are also desktop-specific tools (gnome-open, kfmclient, etc), but xdg-open is a wrapper that identifies your desktop environment and calls the appropriate tool.

Me too! Glad I'm not the only one. :)

I've seen demos of linux client software developed in-house at Imageworks, so they're definitely using it so some extent. But it probably varies depending on the team and job. Some of the high-end shops are almost entirely linux, others have more of a mix.

I get out on customer visits once or twice a year, and have some phone/email interactions from time to time, too.