not always. there are actual conditions which cause milestones to be met early. one example that comes into mind is aspergers syndrome. kids with aspergers read exceptionally early, and often the parents are elated that their kid is some kind of genius because they are reading at such a young age. only to find they become socially awkward and are issued a slashdot account at age 12.

back in the heydey of isca bbs, back in the mid-90s, there was a virus going around and if you got it it would install itself and monitor your iscabbs activity. if you got an IM with a certain codeword (which i will not type) from a fat chick, you would sleep with her. i got hit with it and it was the best worst month of my life.

all of the union, lobbying issues notwithstanding, who exactly defines bad and how exactly do you measure results? no child left behind was an attempt at quantifying the teachers task and failed miserably. teachers taught to the test and teachers were considered good if they got more kids to pass the test than their peers. this was at the expense of educating the kids. do you leave it up to the children and parents to define who is good and who is bad? take the math teacher who makes you do math problems like a a drill instructor makes recruits do pushups. is he good or bad? when you're in high school you dread the busy work, as do your parents who are forced to do your homework for you. but when you're a freshman in an engineering program, you may look back and realize that education truly is what's left when you've forgotten everything you learned.

Pigs are unusual as they can be infected with influenza strains that usually infect three different species: pigs, birds and humans. pigs are like influenza adapters.

i would concede your point IF these social network sites did not ensnare new members by requiring you to sign up to look at, say, pics of other people smiling gaily or throwing up after drinking too much.

back in the day we'd schedule our lives around television. an hour of your life was set aside to find out who shot JR. everything is on demand now. with the exception of American Idle, we'll get to it when we get to it. The viral nature of youtube clip popularity and the popularity of tivo'ing should put producers on notice -- consumers will come to you, not the other way around.

am i the only one that pines for anti-social applications? and in this case a desktop? i don't want a picture of me smiling gaily or puking my guts out on facebook. i don't want my professional qualifications smeared across the interweb. i don't want to 'tweet' my latest bowel movement to the universe. 1. write app to crawl the interweb and cleanse the world of references to your name 2. ??? 3. profit!

a few people have mentioned that you tend to not write sorting algorithms and data structures in this day and age. but it's still critical that they be understood so a developer can understand the trade-offs for selecting a particular library and also the requirements needed to interface effectively with the chosen algorithm. C++'s STL library does a very good job about being somewhat "in your face" about time complexity. Java's collection api, which is also a well designed library, is much less in your face about time complexity and the various trade-offs. Since I sling java code for a living, i'll whine about Java collections. #1. I have solved performance problems with large datasets simply by re-implementing the hashcode method on objects. When explaining that a hashtable (or hashmap in java parlance) degrades to linear time if the hash distribution isn't sufficiently sparse, i'm reminded that these concepts are new to the folks implementing systems on which multibillion dollar businesses are run. #2. explaining to folks why you have to override both hashcode and equals if you want to expect your stuff to work is equally as evasive as well as the following: #3. pointing out that you should re-put a stored object into a hashtable after you mutate because the hashcode may no longer be accurate. #4. explaining why when you iterate over a keyset for a hashmap things aren't in order, but when you use a treemap you are. #5. choosing a linkedlist for queue-like operations, choosing a treemap for natural-ordering, choosing a hashmap for good average performance. it would be nice if when these problems are encountered and unwound a lightbulb would go off and they said "oh! i remember this from CS-xxx class" but instead it's like.. "oh you're such a geek i bet you don't get laid much." i think we get in trouble when we attempt to make hard things easy. most un-zen-like.

wouldn't these bobbing nuclear power plants block sarah palin's view of russia from her house?

i was modded as a troll for pondering the disposition of the app i've been working on for 2 years -- as soon as i heard about the accelerometer i knew of a killer app. i have visions of tens of thousands of people shaking their iphones up and down... up and down... up and down.. and i started working. now i'm getting discouraged. should i just give up on my dream? go back to masturbating the old fashioned way? after all, my penis Just Works.

is that no product is going to want to be placed next to a monkey urinating in his own mouth.

does this mean that they're likely to reject my stroker port from the commodore 64? http://www.lemon64.com/?mainurl=http%3A//www.lemon64.com/reviews/view.php%3Fid%3D142