Just so you know, I am a Stay At Home Dad and have been nothing else for 20 years. When Marissa Miller pulled the plug on working at home it was this sort of half halfheartedness that she was shaking out of Yahoo's business model. If your are working, then work and give either your employer or customers your complete attention. If you find yourself unable to separate from your child then stay home. You can't do both. Don't lie to yourself and your child that a cellphone is a replacement for your being there. It's not. When I married my wife we decided that childcare was of paramount importance. Since she was a well paid professional and I was a struggling student (Yes, I got that lucky), I stayed home. The son went to school in the day and I went at night, or he stayed with family. Yes, Family! You didn't disturb Mommy; Auntie, or Grandma, or Uncle or me or whoever took care of what needed doing. There was somebody who's job it was, and is, to take care of my son. As more children arrived my duties - Think about that word for a moment - Duty; ... my duties have continued. And by the way, Yes, that means I finally didn't finish my degree. Instead, I am there for my children. Yes I've had to sacrifice to do that. My children are worth it.

A 4 year old is not able to handle a phone and is too young to be allowed to make the judgement of when to call you. They need to know to call 911 in an emergency and stay on until help arrives - unless there is a fire, then they get out! Go to someone trusted and have then call for help. That is it. They should be cared for 24-7 and their caregiver will make any calls needed. If you can't trust your child's caregiver to make every fucking decision that needs to be made get another caregiver or do it yourself ! A cell phone will quickly become a stick to bully whomever is the caregiver. "If you don't give me more ice cream I'll call daddy and he'll be angry at you"

Save your money and send your kid to a good school. I always recommend a Montessori if at all possible. You will learn that one of the first steps to raising a healthy, happy and independent adult is having them learn to separate. They start to learn this at about 4. Yes you go away, and yes you come back. At school they learn to operate as a member of a society with rules and responsibilities. With family you learn to be part of a family. A mutually dependent social structure. That means every member needs every other. This is what you want, to raise a good person.

Wow! Have you ever been to New York?

Hmm. I tried to post a link to this to my Facebook account using Firefox, but couldn't. I block ads and trackers (and Flash) so all of this web interconnectedness just stops working. Safari hung so I was left running this though Goggle's grubby little, but not doing evil, fingers using Chrome. I use Little Snitch (Do you?) I connected to the NYTImes.com and Facebook only, but 51 servers were called. Why? What oversight do any of these extra servers have? Who are they? Why do I have to provide a unique bar code to get a sale price at Walgreen's? The Supermarket? How is this NSA graph different then Facebook Graph Search?

And still, all of these posters want me to freak out over this. Why? What is that obvious thing I am missing?

If the internet is a commons then what expectation for privacy do you have? If you walk around in the street you can be watched. Anyone can go though your garbage once it's off your property. Someone can glance over the mailman's shoulder and see what mail you are getting.

To Quote Steve Fankuchen of Oakland CA on the NYTImes web site (Am I allowed to do this, or is this the private property of the New York Times Inc and must be defended with my many guns?)

I think the people posting on and on and on about their privacy need to grow up a little and realize what he internet really is not. Private or Free. The fundamental deal of the internet is that you give away your privacy in exchange for free data.

As noted IANAL

This only works if Rosa Parks was texting while driving the bus. I don't know of any particular civil right to text while driving. A cop seeing you provides all of the cause needed to check your records and see if texts were sent and received in the time span in question. Fiddling with the radio, or anything else, is harder to prove. This makes a texting ban enforceable. What else do you want out of a law?

I think you would get slapped twice. It's the cops word against yours. ASAIK IANAL the cop is automatically believed by the court. You have to disprove them. Also, simulating a crime just to distract a cop is a separate crime.

As for the law's logic. you can't ban being distracted, you can ban specific behaviors in specific places. You can get a ticket for putting on makeup while driving. You are operating a vehicle in an unsafe manner. I knew someone it happened to. It was the cops word against her's.

I run into endless cultural problems with texting. All my kids text by preference, even important stuff. I yell - I scream - I jump up and down, they promise to use better judgement. Two weeks later they are back to it. Maybe if I just ignored them they would change, but that just isn't me.

I was just driving in NY State and there are tons of signs up about the anti-texting law. Some of the rest stops had free wi-fi and some didn't. I don't think this will stop stupid young people from texting, that would require them to stop being stupid young people. But for the rest of us it may well help. When texts came in from my college age kid I found it hard to ignore them. Having my wife with me to read them and respond and tell me to stop dithering and drive was a great help.

These days when ever I drive with someone I give them my phone, it's just easier that way. If I'm alone I turn on Do Not Disturb and use a jawbone earpiece. Actually that isn't true, lot of the time I just turn off the sound and listen to the radio. I need to call out, not take calls. I spent twenty years driving without a cell phone. It can wait, really it can. Or, solve it yourself, You're a grown up now, you can do this.

CCC has proved that a targeted attack where the attacker has access to the person and the iPhone and a sophisticated skill set can overcome the finger print sensor on an iPhone 5s. So if I'm walking down the street and some thief takes my iPhone 5s I'm good to go. Walk into any Apple store or Internet Cafe, log in to my iCloud account and wipe the thing. Even if they knew how to do preform this hack, it would still take hours.

I can't tell you the number of times that I've had people watch me in dumb struck amazement as I switched out their ram in a few minutes. A new hard-drive in a ATX case is a ten minute job. I already have the tools and the knowledge. My point being these simple skills are not common, what CCC does is very uncommon even in the DIY crowd. A common person can expect to pay hundreds of dollars buying all of the tools needed and then days or weeks practicing to be able to do this hack.

Sorry, this proves that the fingerprint sensor is a good idea in it's context.

I'm more interested as to the details of why this myth oh homemaking came to be and why it is so persistent. I run into it on Stay At Home Dad forums, feminist forums, Slashdot. To me the persistent idea of the '50s homemaker is a meme while LOL-Cats are a fad. Or am I splitting the wrong hair?
 

Okay – I'll assume you're just trolling, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. I have lived that life for the last 20 years as a male and I'll give you, and the rest of Slashdot, some insights. Any ladies can chime in if I've missed or misrepresented anything.
In no particular order:

You exist for the sake of "The Other", who ever that may be. There are usually several. What you want and need doesn't matter any more. You service the needs of others - in every way that can be used - and *must* make that the source of your joy in life. Think about that one for a minute. You fulfill someone else's wants and needs and that *is* how your wants and needs are fulfilled. Having a want or a need that isn't fulfilling someone else's want or need isn't part of the definition.

It's a low level management gig. You have no control over what sort of revenue stream you have, but still have to get stuff done. You can't fire anyone, all you can do is quit.

It doesn't get more back office.

Children don't make for interesting conversation, are endless sinks of want's and need's, aren't grateful, and success in parenting is to make yourself irrelevant.

You are now officially stupid. In matters of any importance no one cares what your opinion is. All status in America and in the West stems from your JOB! Think abut that.

It is boring. How many time can you make the same set of healthy reasonable priced meals and sweep the same floor.

One of the points of Archaeology is to check the historic record. I will point out the Tuscon Garbage Project as an example. It plainly shows that what even honest people say and what they do ain't the same thing.

Also, more importantly, what people think happened, and that is what they record, and what really happened doesn't need to coincide.

For example at Mos Espa the history 10,000 years from now will show that this was a famous ritual space where the hero/demon Vader was born. But an Archaeological analysis will not find a community. They will find buildings that only make sense from a certain angle, are unique, just look like they work, but don't. There will be small temporary habitation that is concurrent with the time period. This will question the historical validity of the Hero/Demon Vader, but will be suppressed. The truth that Saint Luke, the companion of Christos, redeemed his father with the Force of Holy Ghost as given by Christos is undeniable. Those future Archaeologists will have to weigh the importance of their findings that Mos Espa was a theatrical film set, versus the fury of the inquisition.

So in the end the first problem with poor college science and math performance is poor elementary school education. I worked and worked through Calc 1 and 2 in college, enjoyed it, and got Cs. My professors were wonderful. I was working on a problem with her during office hours and she stopped, looked me in the eyes and said "What's 12 x 9?". I was flummoxed. She said that if I didn't know that the way I breathed it was going to be hard going. It's 108 (how many of you knew that before you read the answer?).

The second problem is that doing anything well at a high level is hard. That's the difference between one of us noodling away on a guitar and Eric Clapton. One of the issues in any discussion of education is the assumption that with the proper education we can turn out Feynmans and Claptons as needed. No, you can't. A poor education and stymie a genius, but it can't create one.

The third problem is motivation. It has to be the most fun you can have standing up. As a previous poster pointed out - do you really want to collect data for six days a week for 9 months and produce one little paper for your effort? If you learn to sing really well like Robin Thicke you can make a music video with Emily Ratajkowski strutting around naked in front of you. Edward O. Wilson watched bugs. He loves watching bugs.

  BTW as an example of the second problem - if you watch the blurred lines videos, the censored and the uncensored you'll note that Thicke, Pharrell and T.I. make it look easy and natural twice - differently. Then they did it again on The Voice TV show. That's really hard to do. No one seems to thing that all all I have to to do is pass some classes and I can do that.

"If you build it they will come" only applies to Baseball fields.

I saw an ad that stated that people don't want computers or programs - they want solutions. They have something they want to do and a way to get it done for a good price. The people in the server room care about what happens in the server room - so linux works there. Everyone else wants their stuff to work. The Linux Desktop developers never got this. They never produced a cheap reliable product that provided the solution to the customers problem. The computer is a means not an end.

You never saw, and still don't see, Fedora advertising themselves as:"The Solution to the home-user windows 8 issue. How Fedora will preserve your data, your photos, your music and make them easier for you to get to and enjoy - all without having to buy yet another computer! All this for $25!" Which is product people want.

Instead you get: If you're a nerd and want to polish your Geek Cred you can with Fedora! Join with other people like you who have already outgrown their 2XL tee-shirts and will ego stoke you for your subtle and elegant code styling. Which is an overly sarcastic look at a social movement.

Social movements and products are not the same thing. A computer desktop is a product.

I realized this at the last Linux Expo I attended at the Javits Center in NY (2002 - 2003?) when I left and bought the new Mac OSX at J&R. I think it was Panther. Two days I walked around and spoke to everyone. I needed to track my finances, have my wife log in and work from home, have my daughters play barbie and Carmen Sandiago, and have my son do his homework. The only one they could handle was the IBM terminal emulation. They also had demo's of the LOTRs movie renders and the Ice Age Movie renders. I think it was the Battle of the Helm's Deep. The IBM booth was near the SUSE booth and I was talking to two guys from the booths, and booth said the Linux Desktop was dead because there were no solutions to what I needed as a home user.

In NY CUNY has better then 50% Mac if you look around the lounges and the library, and it isn't Ivy League. Apple is benefiting from the issues of Windows 8, but it has issues all it's own. You see more and more Tablets of every flavor being used with keypads of various kinds.