It really depends on what group of humans you're talking about. The Pacific Northwest, for instance, was so abundant in biological resources, that the work week was less than 20 hours. That left lots of time for art, showing off, and other social pursuits. It was a pretty comfortable existence.... until the Haida came around to bust your ass and take slaves.

The link you're looking for is here: cliqueclack.com.

And Nadia was actually a hermaphrodite, haunted by the vision of the man she could have been.

Sometimes 'good enough' really is. I'm typing on a netbook that I was going to hackintosh, but this model doesn't run snow leopard, and win 7 is good enough for basic web dev. Maybe someday I'll liberate this thing with Mint, but for now it's good to work on a variety of platforms.

You know what? I agree, except for the homework point.

Homework is irrelevant. An inefficient learning environment needs homework to keep up, the kid doesn't need 10 hours of learning a day to learn a few things.

The parents aren't teaching their kids curiosity. They aren't teaching them focus. The kids aren't getting a sense of goals or meaning from the prospect of learning. Likewise, the curriculum fails at this too.

Most homework is obviously make-work or catch-up. It's no wonder it isn't valued. Gatto has a pretty good take on this. Motivation comes from the context as well as from within. There is all kinds of meaning in how work is presented to the kids, and just because they don't put it into words, they can often see through the crap.

The crux is that inefficient learning environment. Blame apathy at home, sure, but blame misguided curriculum too, blame Taylorism that depersonalizes the kid, blame culture, blame admin, but mostly blame the educational system overall, its ideology and inequalities and denial.

Here in British Columbia, the good teachers (who actually manage to get full time work, frak you union/management collusion) generally have to work about a 60-70 hour week, plus be available for phone calls. The work load can get insane, because a good teacher is working HARD during those hours... I've put in long hours at various jobs, but there's usually way more 'down-time' or light load work in a week than a teacher gets.

This is all for a lower middle class income until your seniority gets big. Time off in the summer amounts to about 3-4 weeks or less since there's always professional development and prep.

The general public just has no idea.

On top of that, a good teacher deals with intense frustrations over curriculum, bureaucracy, feckless parents, and lack of support for special needs... most spend an inordinate time with 'classroom management', meaning discipline.

The thing is, good teachers will work for enough to live on, because they will do the work anyway, that's what makes them a good teacher. What they really want is the ability to properly teach without burning out; i.e. adequate prep time, smaller class sizes, more support staff targeted at the 10% of the class that takes 90% of the attention, and fewer overall hours. Burnout turns good teachers into indifferent, bitter staff working for that pension.

You no buy.

First, just the shred of doubt will have some effect on your well being. Not just through stress, but through placebo effects.

Second, this is a relatively new risk of exposure for the species and investigations into it are relatively weak. Seems like a good time to deploy the Precautionary Principle.

Buy an apt exposed to trees or a view, instead.

Browser support is a lot like a warranty condition for the site. Manufacturers/designers have to set the bar somewhere.

I smell a car analogy:

I'm shopping for tires. I can get a 100Km warranty on a new set, so long as I agree to rotate the tires every 10Km, for free. Without some minimal diligence on the part of the user, the warranty is void, as the user has abrogated their duties towards security.

Likewise with a simple free browser upgrade.

If a client has specific needs, that's part of the contract, no? However, since IE6 is demonstrably less safe and secure, technically inferior, and more costly to support, there has to be extra justification and expense to support it... somewhat like an extended warranty.

I know you're trying to be funny, but very few of the not-very-many IE6 users do so voluntarily. Three main types of IE6 surfers:

group 1: corporate drones chained to an intranet app by an IT department that is underfunded or underdeveloped... many of them shouldn't be surfing your site anyway, even on their lunch break, because 'the workplace is not a democracy'

group 2: hapless technophobes who don't have a nerd nephew to replace their winME install with something modern, and since they don't know any better, they just keep browsin' -- and pretending this computer thing is an appliance, the way it was marketed to them

group 3: total douches who mess with the user agent for fun or actually like IE6... or like me, run it in a VM for testing purposes, then browse with it just for kicks

You contradict yourself. I find this interesting: an abdication of power and responsibility, in an independent minded nerd.

If you have to manually install all apps, why do you need Apple to lock down your phone for you? Wouldn't a thorough and reliable certification process for approved apps be enough? You could simply ignore all the uncertified apps, and only choose the app-store supplied software, and achieve the same result.

The rest of us, who have landlines and can risk hacking around with our handset, could install uncertified apps as we see fit, and risk bricking through our own incompetence, instead of through Overlord Steve's malice.

You can have your lockdown, we can have our limited freedom on what could be a great platform, Apple still gets profits.

Jailbreaking may be trivial to you, but not to most, and not without risk and violation of contract.

To all those (not you) claiming that the Apple appopoly is merely about security and compatibility, imagine a simple system of certification, where apple would put its stamp of approval on apps that meet a certain set of standards, only distribute certified apps, and make it very clear to the customer that it will only honour warranty issues when certified apps are used. Then we could have third party app repositories, with more or less acceptable compatibility and security standards, and a reasonable degree of openness.

Of course, the network carriers have their own concerns here, but they could impose their own restrictions, too, to protect themselves.

There could even be caveat emptor warnings included in the app install process that checks on an app's certification status. We'd still have the hardware manufacturer lording it over users and developers through the certification process, but it would be a lot less feudal.

Oh! I always thought that WASP was defined as "someone who gets out of the shower to pee."

Way to keep up the Nerdly stereotypes! But the fact is that the whole future of networked computing is based on designed information, and that's where the liberal arts impacts the future of the web etc.: good design through aesthetics and smart human interfaces. Plus gud grammer and proofreeding.

The raw feature list is less important than the presentation abilities... as they pertain to joe user.

"Magical", though, that's just the Reality Distortion Field in full fail mode.

people in black turtlenecks watch movies, not network TV

Teh Cloud is worse than useless in a power outage or road trip or inside a faraday cage-like-room... give me redundancy, please!

it probably has a PVA (etc.) screen that has a wide viewing angle so putting it on the desk and typing should be serviceable, but typing on a screen is an enormous compromise anyway

bluetooth = 3rd party devices like a roll-up keyboard, etc.