I think I love you. I too went all-in with Google for exactly the same reason. Yes, I know they have a treasure trove of info on me - some given willingly and some mined behind the scenes - but I can't get too upset given what I get in return.

Also, I figured one questionably evil company stockpiling my data was better than two having at it, playing shadow-profile correlation games with each other.

As to why I need a smart thermostat, a few different people said it already - No need heating/cooling to human comfort whilst we're away, occasional fan circ is nice, and timed heatup / cooldown around sleep cycles is NICE.

Hey! The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence!

Was it "Cat from Hell" with Jackson Galaxy hosting and attempting to reeducate the kitties?

Wow, I know it must have taken a lot of courage to come out and take a stand against DRM here on Slashdot, but you just went ahead and did it, didn't you? Some day I'm sure there will be an epic song about this event which most of us won't hear because it's protected by DRM.

I've seen many claim that these medicines are turning kids into zombies. It gets tied with the issue of misdiagnosis.

My question is... If these medications are stimulants, doesn't "zombification" mean a correct diagnosis which needs a dosage adjustment? After all if the kid doesn't have the problem then wouldn't stimulants make then more active? Coffee calms me down but has the opposite effect on others. Shouldn't it be obvious if a kid is wrongly given stimulants?

I didn't take it as just an alternative suggestion, I took the comment "not just a fill in the blank coding exercise" as a denigration of the effort many people were putting into this. Its easy to make suggestions from the sidelines.

Did our ancestors imagine they were giving the Federal government the right to ban speech?

OF COURSE THEY DID. That's why several of the prominent political ones went to extra lengths in an attempt protect us from it, with their early amendments to the Constitution.

They terk oer bulbs!

I'm actually pretty impressed with the LEDs I've been moving to, though. Decently bright, natural colors and they seem like they'll last nearly forever. I guess over the course or their lifetimes they'll more-or-less pay for themselves. If you want extra heat, you can still get a plumber's torch or a radiant heater.

How about you volunteer a week of your time at a school and do what you want to do instead of telling me what to do and denigrating the tool I chose to do it?

I'm a professional software engineer and learned to code as a 10-year old in 1979. I think those 'fill in the blank' exercises you mention strip away all the syntactic sugar and illustrates the pure logic of coding. I also show the kids several real ruby programs so they understand the difference between blockly and real programming text.

I personally ran this last week with almost 200 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders, and will be doing it Monday and Tuesday to make up for snow days last week.

First, because their lab time is an hour and we also did a warm up and closing lecture, most kids didn't get to all 20 exercises in the first blockly set - we had perhaps 15 kids get all the way through it. Second, Most of the kids weren't patient enough to watch *any* of the videos, clicking through them to get to the next exercise. The dude from NASA in that last video talks for a while about the problem they just solved - it took about 7 seconds for the kids to get bored hearing about what they just solved, and they wanted to jump to the part where they could get their certificate at the end.

In my kids' school I had to prearrange to unblock access to all of this stuff as well. I'm sure there are plenty of schools that unblocked code.org, but not YouTube... so they could do the exercises but not watch videos.

We're afraid if they terk oer guns, some king will come in and try to oppress us again. As long as we have our guns, we're quite happy to live with a corrupt government that's happy to stack the deck in the favor of the wealthiest citizens in exchange for the funding to stay in power. We're quite happy to sit around and watch them dismantle all the social safety nets and worker's benefits that our grandparents' unions negotiated, and the only down side is one or two massacres a day. They're so common now that usually if only two or three people get shot, it won't even be reported on the national news. And we like it that way. Obviously. Anyone who tries to terk oer guns quickly finds themselves un-elected. After Sandy Hook, a couple of Colorado Democrats passed some legislation that stated something to the effect of if you were mentally ill you couldn't get a gun. One of them was recalled and another resigned because it looked as if the recall effort was going to pass. But hey, at least some king isn't oppressing us!

I always assume the mouse that came with the system comes pre-dead, pick it up by its tail and chuck it in the garbage. Then I plug in the Logitech trackball I've used since I discovered them (The one with the marble you control with your thumb.) I prefer the corded ones to the wireless ones, but it's getting hard to find the corded ones and the wireless ones seem to work just as well. The battery seems to last several months too.

I've found my mileage varies on how long they last. My old corded one lasted, I think about 8 years. The wireless one that replaced it died almost immediately, but the wireless one that replaced THAT is still going strong. They don't seem to give any indication of why they've died, either. They don't behave erratically or anything, they just stop working one day, and no amount of cleaning or battery changing will bring them back to life.

That patent should be running out soon. They introduced the trackpoint while I was working OS/2 support for them back in the early '90's. I believe that they'd been sitting on the patent at the time, as they didn't think it made a whole lot of sense on a PC keyboard. It was only after it was such a success on the Thinkpad that they decided to try a PC keyboard with one. Also as I recall, the PC keyboards weren't hugely successful either.

I found them to be nicer than a trackpad on a laptop, but more or less useless for gaming. You'd think it'd act just like a joystick, but I never could get the hang of controlling any of the games I tried with it.

I believe that there is something to be said for an age where there are potential scheduling conflicts between lunar probes.

Yeah, I don't think it's ridiculously unreasonable that a site meant to host software projects has a requirement that hosted projects actually be software projects.

But it doesn't. "Meet the projects that prove GitHub is a collaboration tool for all stripes". Well, all stripes except for collaborative satire against the wrong group of people.