Maybe the anti-social introverts of the slashdot crowd are not the typical audience for facebook. For a lot of people, we don't mind having folks we knew 25 years ago in our friend list.

I have people in my list that I knew very well in elementary and pre-school. We drifted apart in middle school / high school but there is no reason I can't still call them a friend. Seeing a small tidbit of their life does not take much of my time and when we do meet again we are already somewhat caught up and have some reference to each other. These are folks I would not call or email, but would talk to and catch up with if I saw them at a bar or event.

Same goes for former college buddies. I have a few that I would email / call periodically, but a good many that facebook is plenty. But it also facilitates things like reunions.

Same for my students. Now I see students cycle through every few years. I knew them but we were never best buds. But it doesn't hurt anyone to see their facebook feed and know what they are up to.

Most people enjoy / appreciate that level of social interaction. Maybe that is why they were able to grow their user base and make millions and billions. Not just for farmville and privacy invasions.

My FB feed seems to be going that way. I don't know if people are dropping it, friends are blocking me, I am just losing interest, or FB is editing posts out with some algorithm. It is just not that interesting anymore.

Email took off and stayed established because it was an open interface and anyone could set up a server.

IM did well, but there were issues on the server side. At least you could write your own client. Later clients would handle a variety of servers.

I think twitter clients are fairly open, but you are still stuck with a limited server.

Where is social media going? G+ is a ghostland. I think twitter is too rapid/technically limited for a lot of people. There has to be a way to get decent interoperability for folks.

For years I have used rsync scripts.

My problem was syncing a desktop and a laptop. So I made upload_to and download_from scripts to sync as needed.

I also try to keep a third master backup copy on a different server so all three are synced.

One problem comes when trying to work on both desktop and laptop simultaneously. Just map a drive and modify files on one side.

Back in the TRS 80 / Sinclair days, you generally had to copy games from a magazine into the basic interpreter. Not really programming, but you learned something from it.

I also took a few courses in elementary school, but did not program anything for real until middle / high school.

After judging FLL Middle School robotics for a while, the lack of anything on the programming side scares me a lot. They all seem to use very simple programs without any real structure or even sensor feedback. It worries me.

Don't care how thick the laptop is. I currently carry a 19" dual HD 1080P 15 lb monster laptop that comes with a note saying "Not for use on lap." Seriously.

If you are going to make a monster, why not just put a real desktop keyboard in it. What is another 1/2 inch? Heck, go ahead and slant the keyboard and make it a whole inch thicker. What do I care? I used to lug a Compaq 40 lb suitcase around. That definitely was not for laptop use.

Does anyone have a suggestion for a laptop with deep key press? Most laptops and even a lot of desktops (apple) have very little key motion.

I know the Tandy Model 100 was pretty good, but that is a little dated technology-wise.

I think that is the only laptop I have ever seen with a real full-depth keypress keyboard. I sometimes wish I had picked one up...

I use LyX a lot. I always map a shortcut like ctrl-d to view-PDF so that a document preview is not very far away. Larger documents take a few seconds to render, bigger documents not so much.

It seems like you could write something to periodically export your lyx file to pdf and render in a side window, next to your editing window. How hard could that be?

Matlab has an interpreter too. And their latest editor is pretty slick, it lets you know which lines of code have syntax errors before you even try to run them. (warnings too). Plus memory trace and debug tools are pretty decent now as well. Not sure what python has along those lines, but I assume there are a few options.

If my math is close, if you double the g you cut the length required in half.

Still, a 500 mile long tube 20 miles in the air seems a bit silly.

10-20 miles long seems more reasonable, but the g forces get a little nutty.

Great book. One of my favorites.

For high g cargo it makes total sense, nothing too crazy required.

They assume 3g as a max. I bet you could do 6 pretty easy. Reading up, looks like if you are reclined it could be 10+ even for untrained folks.

I am not sure dumping them in the deep end of the pool is the correct idea either.

A lot of us learned because we had machines with basic that needed games. Get a magazine and type in a page or two of code and you had some garbage game to play. You see code and you get some reward, plus you appreciate the need for accuracy and precision.

Later, we moved on from rote copying to actually doing our own problem solving / coding. I know I had no context at first, I did not know what I could and could not do but it took years to learn.

It scares me that kids are growing up without any clue what is "under the hood" at all. No appreciation for the complexity of what is going on. Personally, that is why I promote FLL competitions. They get kids thinking about complex problems and using computers (and robots) to solve them. They can get something going with the simplest of instructions. If they want to dig in more, they can do crazy stuff as needed. And the payoff is there.

My PS3 does ok for movies and pictures. Plus it plays games and DVD / BluRay. And Netflix.

Why do I need one of these additional boxes? What am I missing out on?

This site is awesome! The Tech stuff just keeps getting better and better. I feel like I learn something every day!

Stupid Chrome won't allow you to make and exception to accept invalid certs.

My webmail provider won't get a valid cert, so I have to click through every time to get to my mail.

Firefox you can add an exception if you trust the cert. Chrome decided to not allow this, despite many pleas to do so.

I tried to manually add the cert, but something somewhere is wonky with my flavor of FC. Plus, who wants to run command line scripts to add some silly cert? Just give me a multi-click-through like firefox. From reading up, the FC folks blame chrome and chrome blames FC.

Stupid.