This beautifully illustrates why there should be some punishment for this type of behavior. He's obviously ignoring all prior art and forcing an already overloaded system to deal with this crap. Fine him.

The court said that parents should filter what their children see and do. Score one against the nanny state monitoring us for our own good.

I've not used it, but here's the link: http://hackety-hack.com/ Looks like more of a general purpose intro for beginners to Ruby and/or coding.

It's lightweight, portable, and has a ton of interesting projects for learning. Start here at http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/ Check out the "Try Ruby in Your Browser link" on the right hand side.

Whether you love or hate Ruby, you should look at how the Ruby community has sold itself. It's a language that's designed (according to evangelists) to be fun. Frameworks like Rails are about making the work fun. Again, I'm quoting pitches... but.... But it's interesting what kind of a community that sales pitch draws in.

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In other words, start off students with easy wins and clear syntax (like Ruby). Don't make them spend hours debugging pointer bugs (C/C++). There's plenty of time for that later. First get them hooked on creating. That's where the fun in programming is... making something new that actually works. I suspect most of us remember the first time we wrote a program that actually did something. That's the high, the rush, that we want potential programmers to feel. How easy can we make it get their first hit?

How can we do this instead of depending on their internal motivation? I'm sure we'll rope in a few that don't have the chops for it, but I bet we'll find a lot more who do but never considered the field because the barriers to entry were too high.

Palin's not running for office. Focus on the currently elected leaders instead. This article sums it up pretty well. http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/06/11/welch.palin.email/index.html

It's not like it's rocket science or anything.... ;)

We've allowed our bed to be made. Now will we continue to use services that require us to give up our privacy while we complain loudly at the loss of privacy? Come on everyone. Pick one.

Old news for anyone who's spent time around Apple users. Just saying. ;)

The old policy said our files were encrypted with mil-spec encryption, etc etc. Now they're telling us they'll turn our files over if asked.

Dropbox lied. No two ways about it. But this why you never store anything sensitive in "the cloud" anyway.

Drivers can be dropped into standard spots on standard Android releases and the same concept still holds. The various vendors are already testing this, they just load a ton of crap on top after they do the testing.

That's brilliant. Let Sprint put their crap Nascar apps and everything else on my EVO, but require them to have a button for an over the air plain vanilla latest Android install. Add tons of warnings, etc, but provide that button. I love it.

That would highly motivate carriers to ~add value~ instead of taking dollars from partners to shove crap on phones.

If you're not familiar w/the Arduinos, you'll have to return your geek license. ;)

Arduinos can be used so many different ways... here're a few things you can do with them:

http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Projects/ArduinoUsers

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/category/arduino

http://hackaday.com/category/arduino-hacks/

If you're not familiar w/the Arduinos, you'll have to return your geek license. ;) Arduinos can be used so many different ways... here're a few things you can do with them:

http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Projects/ArduinoUsers

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/category/arduino

http://hackaday.com/category/arduino-hacks/

The top hit on Hack-A-Day isn't a typical project. ;)