Before lowering the standard how about seriously enforcing what we have. It seems like when I read about a car into a house, through a storefront or killing a kid the story also mentions how many prior arrests and convictions the person has.

The local papers have run several articles about people having their licenses suspended or revoked and then walking out of court, hopping in their cars and driving away.

I occasionally listen to the police scanner and an astonishing number of people they pull over and run come back "suspended or revoked" yet I almost never hear that followed by "send the tow truck."

Moving the numbers around is meaningless if someone is driving with 10 prior convictions.

"If something cannot go on forever, it will stop," -Herbert Stein

The absurd comment about ...with an annual energy growth rate of only 2.3%... reminds me of the population growth people a couple decades back who claimed that if the population keeps growing at this rate, by blah-blah-blah date the population of earth will be expanding at the speed of light.

Conclusion, population will not continue to grow at that rate, energy growth will not continue perpetually at 2.3%.

Of course we may want to influence *how* things stop. Stopping a car by applying the breaks is generally preferred over accelerating full-speed into a cliff.

My daughter first played with Scratch a year or so ago. She is now eight and enjoyed the book when I got it for her a few months back.

It should be a good companion for a Raspberry Pi as Scratch is one of the front-and-center educational apps on the default Raspberri Ubuntu distro (though running it definitely shows the speed limitations of the Pi).

One advantage of a non-Internet-connected Pi, however, is that Sratch doesn't have to compete with the myriad distractions from Cool-math-games-for-kids to Barbie.

What do you mean by "most popular."

I'm tired of hearing that "everyone uses..." No, they don't. MySQL is pretty popular with the open-source web-crowd but this is the same crowd that respects the engineering behind PHP. I've encountered plenty of people in that arena who would rather roll their own data-checks and treat the database as barely more than a key-value store than use the capabilities of the database and have to deal with handling exceptions. Bring up transactions, ACID compliance, data-integrity and the like at a PHP users group and you get blank-stares. The get-rich-quick-with-a-cute-kitten-website crowd cares not for such things (as an overgeneralization - there are plenty of high-traffic sites such as Instagram, hi5, Etsy and MyYearbook that run on PostgreSQL).

So where do you find PostgreSQL? Salesforce, National Weather Service, Nippon Telephone and Telegraph, Federal Aviation Administration, Sony Online Entertainment, TD Ameritrade, State of Wisconsin Courts, Afilias, BASF, Flightaware, Skype (a contributor of many PG utilities), Fujitsu, Launchpad (Ubuntu)...

And PostGIS is *the* go-to open-source geospatial database.

I've found the PostgreSQL community to be wonderful with opportunities to contribute at all levels. Answer questions on the mailing-lists, contribute to documentation, help at users-groups, give a talk at a conference. One always welcome contribution is doing testing and submitting results/patches during commitfests - and this gets you more involved with the code.

As to employment, it sounds like you prefer PostgreSQL. As such, PostgreSQL is by definition the most popular database among places you are interested in working. Do what you love.

My daughter loved tux paint and still occasionally uses it to make a card, poster or board for a game she is making up. I mentioned it to a friend and his son now loves it. Definitely worth a try.

Well, that's one way to build up a DNA database. Didn't the spooks recruit a doctor to get Bin Laden DNA under the guise of vaccinations?

I have an antenna. I get better quality than many people I know with dish or cable. I spend more than adequate time in front of the idiot box as is - why tempt myself with more.

There are a few premium shows I want to watch - Mad Men and Sopranos for example. But I've watched entire series on DVD for less than the cost of a month of cable.

Savings depends on your plan but compared to many of my friends and neighbors I am saving over a thousand dollars a year in subscription fees alone not counting the cost of the box and the power to run it (many DVRs are power vampires on standby). That pays for a week or more camping at a national park. Or a weekend at Disneyland.

When I first got a laptop with wifi I loaded Kismet and took the laptop with me on some errands. My favorite: HoneyPot_comeGetSnarf.

I enjoy the Kamado [komodokamado.com] type of cooker.

It's low-tech in that you don't need any fancy apps to keep the temperature just where you want and you can make some really great food. If basic air-control is too low-tech you can buy one of these [rocksbarbque.com]. And yes, it is hackable.

But the KomadoKamado is high-tech in the dual-layer isulation and CNC machined parts. (And there are *plenty* of geeks on the forum).

Back in another life when I worked in law-enforcement the correct term to use was "traffic collision." This is how you will see it reported on the California Highway Patrol incident page: http://cad.chp.ca.gov/

A commenter on NPR today made an interesting point. There is a lot of talk about "first private..." but NASA has relied heavily on private industry since the beginning. Lockheed Martin, Morton Thaikol, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, Rockwell Colllins, Teledyne, Honeywell, Kodak, Perkin-Elmer.........

And Falcon launched from a government built/owned/maintained launch-site.

What *is* different is the accounting. Instead of a bevy of cost-plus contracts there is now a single-point fixed-cost provider which, surprise surprise, seems to be able to deliver at a much lower cost/kg.

And no, this does not detract from their accomplishment. Getting to space is still difficult and risky. Congratulations to everyone involved regardless of who writes their paychecks.

It really depends on your style. It's hard to beat a pen and paper. A friend had a professor who swore that mental stimulation required special rubbing of a couple wrist bones that could only be achieved by sitting down and writing.

For keeping the essence of certain types of meetings, as well as for individual brainstoriming, I've found mindmaps useful. Freemind is open-source and quite intuitive so I can keep track of the thread of the meeting and go back and edit it later.