I don't know how it works now, but my understanding is that in the past, you only got mod points if you were generally in the middle of visitation frequency. If you visited too little, or you visited too much, then you didn't get mod points. I believe the theory was that CmdrTaco didn't want people at either extreme. So either you haven't been visiting as much, or they changed the algorithm.

They're called Eneloop. They rock. I was skeptical, too, but they're similar to Alkalines, and they discharge very little over time: http://www.amazon.com/Sanyo-eneloop-Pre-Charged-Rechargeable-Batteries/dp/B004UG41XW/ref=pd_cp_e_1

I didn't say it was unparseable, I said it was madness. Computer languages are not primarily designed for the computer, they're designed for human beings, and having a single common symbol represent two commonly used ideas is dumb. I don't particularly like it in English writing, either.

First think about decimal points, and then think about the lexical madness of also using periods as an end-of-statement indicator. They made the right choice.

e.g.:
int a = 5..
int a = 5.2.
int a = 5.b = 5.6.
etc...

Whoa, Rob is gone? That's far more interesting news than this story.

That's like saying if I don't own the blueprints for my toaster, then I don't own the bread.

You know, my 11-year-old son said something kind of interesting last night, on this subject. This month's article in Scientific American is about multiverse theories, and he asked me (paraphrase), "If the universe is contained among a bunch of other universes, and the universe is expanding, isn't it possible that the other universes are exerting pressure on our universe as it's expanding?"

I'd never really thought about that before, and it may be an unanswerable question (along the lines of, "what are the multiverses contain in"), but I thought that was an intriguing thought.

This shows there was huge curiosity. I created a Google+ account to see what was there, but have no intention of moving from Facebook where everyone already is. Google+ has a slick interface, but no real deep improvement to where my entire circle of "normal" friends would ever go there. A social network is a natural monopoly. That's going to be a tough nut for Google to crack. (And Facebook's privacy features are fine, if people bother to use them).

Are you going to explain to your child's future bosses that he can not be expected to act in an appropriate (as deemed by the authority figures of that space) manner because he is just too gifted?

And something else I want to say about this. In my experience, the people who are most successful in the world are NOT the ones who learn to go with the flow and "do whatever the teachers tells you to do." The latter kids are the ones who grow up to be cogs in the machine, because that's what cogs do -- do whatever they're told to do.

While I do what's necessary to get my kid to get his work done, I'm also proud that he's not just a cog in the machine, and that he DOES have his own thoughts and desires, and doesn't give a crap what anyone else thinks about what he should or should not be doing. While it's very difficult to raise a kid like that, his attitude will serve him well when he's out in the world, and he wants to make happen what HE wants to make happen. Most people seem to sit around waiting for permission to pursue their dreams, and that's definitely not a problem my kid will ever have.

As a teacher, I can say that your last paragraph is a (not "the") problem.

*sigh* No, that was NOT a problem, and your "blame parents first" attitude IS a problem. I never used myself as an example with my kid. My only point was that I understood how he felt. If teachers are not the problem and my kid being broken is the problem, then why would he do well for some teachers and fail with others? It's because the other teachers are not good teachers. A good teacher finds a way to work with all types of kids.

You're making assumptions that are not warranted. I am not making excuses for my kid, I am simply stating the fact that he is different. I'm guessing you were one of those stepford kids that love school -- most teachers are (which is why they're teachers). But not everyone is like that. For some people, school is a boring, torturous hellhole that must be endured, and will NEVER be a fun, pleasant place for any extended length of time. So the training here is getting him to endure hell (though, of course, I don't phrase it that way). Enjoying school is seemingly not an option.

Out in the real world, we can choose the environment we want to work in. I don't work for authoritarian assholes because I don't do well in that environment, while other people do well in that structured "do what I tell you to do" kind of environment. I've been very successful, despite not fitting in with the authoritarians. My kid will need to find his way in the world just like me and everyone else.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw

My son is the unreasonable man, and it's my job to get him to survive in the world that he finds himself. But public schools don't make that very easy.

Parental education is a better place to start with reform.

I don't mean this to sound snotty (really), but I'm guessing you don't have kids in public school (correct me if I'm wrong).

Public school works pretty well if you have "Stepford Children" that love school, but if you have any sort of square-peg kind of geeky kid who dislikes the overly structured nature of school, good luck. No matter how involved you are, the school hates you and doesn't give a crap about your kid except to get him to shut up. Some individual teachers aren't like that; we had good experiences and they found ways to engage my "different" kid. But some of the teachers and all of the administration became enemies when we couldn't do a personality transplant on our gifted, bored kid.

Now, some reading this will roll their eyes and say, "See!? It proves that you had a troublemaker and you didn't do crap to discipline the little bastard!" Which is not true at all. My kid was never a troublemaker, but he was a dreamer and wanted to spend his waking thoughts on his designs for building things. Some teachers saw his gifts, worked with him, and he did well. Some just refused to engage him unless he toed their Authoritarian line, and there was clearly something wrong with him.

Of course, my sympathies are with my son, since I was the gifted, bored student who despised school as well. But I was constantly involved in trying to get him engaged, and the school was very, very, VERY difficult to work with. And this was one of the better school districts in the country. You don't realize how broken everything is until you run up against the problems.

The reactionary media have done such a good job at smearing 'teachers unions' that right wingers will use that very name as reference to a belief structure claiming that America is better off with teachers who live in poverty. Without unions, there would not be a blue collar middle class.

That's like saying that without buggy whips, there would be no modern car industry. While technically true (we had to have buggy whips to get horse-drawn carriages, which led to horseless carriages), it's not really relevant to the present day. Unions have long outlived their usefulness, and are often very harmful now, particularly the teacher's union that flat-out shields abusive teachers. I'm not one to throw around the word "evil" a lot, but if anything is evil in this world, it's the teacher's union. It is a terrible, horrible organization.

Now companies don't want to hire except when the person is perfect.

That's a symptom of oversupply of labor, not a structural change. With unemployment so high, if I'm looking to hire someone, why would I hire someone who needs training if I there are 10 people in a line with high experience who are competing for the same job? When demand outstrips supply, you'll see this trend reverse, as it did during the dot-com boom of the 90s, where any fool was being hired as a "web developer".

...wow, you really are brainwashed.

Well, to be perfectly precise, itsdapead's statement should have been, "The tablet-that-doesn't-totally-suck market was created out of nowhere by Apple less than 18 months ago."

But most reasonable people knew what he meant.

I don't feel like rehashing this YET AGAIN, but I will only say that I've used both, and in my experience the snobbery against MySQL is misplaced and is based on knowledge a decade out of date. We moved our database platform from PostgreSQL to MySQL a few years ago for various technical reasons and it has worked out well. Like I said, I don't feel like rehashing this yet again, my only point is that PostgreSQL and MySQL are roughly comparable, and each has advantages over the other (in MySQL's case, some significant advantages).

(and I refuse to be dragged into this yet again! :) But I felt like I had to throw in something.)