Nearly 40 years ago one of my kids' Kindergarten teachers told me she was getting more and more kids in her classes that didn't know how to hold a pencil or how to use a crayon, and couldn't handle a simple over-sized 6-piece puzzle. Also more and more of the boys were just running out the door to pee in the yard instead of using the bathroom.

I'm certainly notified of any interesting developments in fields I'm interested in and follow, with links provided so I can follow up if I want to. It has to a large degree replaces newsgroups and mailing lists in those areas. I occasionally even "tweet" any new things I've done in those same areas, and have a handful (78 as of last check) of reasonably dedicated followers. While it's by no means a replacement for various blogs and forums I frequent, it's a good notifier that there's something interesting going on. Also helps when at conventions I want to find out which pub everybody in the other hotel is going to for the evening ;)

Oops... I hadn't even noticed that I wasn't logged in when making the previous comment! My eyes are getting worse all the time.

Use it as a hair rinse or setting gel. Works great, and believe it or not it doesn't leave an odor.

My father-in-law in Lubbock, Texas ate back-yard barbeque almost every day, and despised what he called "rabbit food" - that is, anything green. Grilled meat, mashed potatoes, and bread-and-butter and beer pretty much made up his diet. He died of stomach cancer before his 55th birthday. Anecdotal, yes, but the agony of the last few months of his life was educational, and the rest of the family has taken care to eat a better diet since then.

AdBlock rule |http://slashdot.org/*.mp3?*

Yes. Girls were not allowed to take certain classes. Girls in other male-dominated classes were harassed to the point of having to drop out of the class, thus reinforcing the position that obviously girls just can't do the work. The entire community would make it socially awkward for the parents of a girl taking an interest in "male" occupations. Frequently remarks were made about the only reason a girl would want to go into something like that was to chase the boys. Parents would forbid girls to study or even engage in such activities as a hobby. I was personally told that working with computers was "not something for girls to do", unless I wanted to take typing or data entry classes. My father slapped me when I pointed out that Ada Lovelace was a woman. Not everybody grows up in a liberal, open-minded environment - and I grew up in California. Look at the media. How often is it portrayed that women who are serious about any non-traditional feminine interests are either "butches" or "bitches".

/rdb - definitely not free, but a fascinating use of the shell and shell extensions as a database management system. Don't know if it's even still available. The NoSQL developer Carlo Strozzi said that he was inspired by it. Used to be at http://www.rsw.com./ An excellent white paper, "The UNIX Shell As a Fourth Generation Language" describes it, and there was a book too - "Unix Relational Database Management". I used it nearly 20 years ago for a retirement home's database when their DOS/dBase system broke down. Slackware Linux version 1 ran fine on their old PC. In fact, that was my first Linux kernel compilation.

Rather amusing. The six top recommended servers were exactly those posted above.

Thank you very much! Over the years I have gotten many useful apps and utilities from posts like this.

Well that was interesting. I don't know exactly what was going on, but when I changed by router's DNS from the default (ISP-provided) to one of these, there was a startling improvement in initial page load speeds for several sites that I checked.

All three of my boys learned to touch-type quite well playing the old Hero's Quest game. So there is definitely some benefit at least to the old text-based games. "Pick up rock" "Throw rock" and the faster you got at typing the better you took out the monsters.

Actually it is fully named "taregol hodu", meaning Indian chicken. If you can find any country in the world where there isn't rampant corruption and bribery and other shenanigans, I'd like to hear about it. Try reading the Miami news for a while.

Maybe because I'm a woman who got sick of being abused by men who never matured beyond puberty. I shall hope that you were joking here, but I've had to deal with all too many men who would say such things in all seriousness. Like my father, "that's not something for girls to do" or my school counselors, "you'd be more comfortable taking typing or home economics" - actually girls at that time and place weren't allowed in the woodworking or auto mechanics shop classes and the new "computer" classes, mostly data entry, were kind of iffy - or my first husband, "what do you need something like that for". The owner of the shop where I bought the parts to build my first PC told me to go home and knit booties for my grandchild. Six months later he offered me a job. Since then, I've been working with men - and women - who have respect for my capabilities as if I were a real person instead of a penis accessory.

I hired a woman with mental health problems to work in my computer shop. I told her that as far as I was concerned it was no different than if she were diabetic and needed to take medication to control her blood sugar. Unfortunately she did not keep her doctor's appointments, even though I ended up marking them on the shop whiteboard and reminding her, and she did not take her medication regularly. After eight or nine months, and some pretty unhappy clients, I had to let her go. She was very bitter and tried to cause problems. So I can understand why many firms might be reluctant to hire someone with such an issue.