I definitely second this one! The first time I had a deep fried turkey I was very skeptical until I noticed that it actually reduces the fat in the cooked bird while sealing in moisture, resulting in a final product that is flavourful, tender and quick! Besides, what can be more fun that standing around a big pot of hot oil, drinking beer and watching a turkey frying away. Just make sure you do it safely, there are a lot of things that can go wrong. Listen to the wisdom of William Shatner :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Even without wanting to move to a non-tech area or become management, understanding the business side of things gives insight into how/why decisions get made. It can also allow you to make calls as to which features you will implement when faced with a limited budget or other item not related to the technology. I have found it allows me to make better decisions based on pragmatic reasons and fight the fights that are really important, rather than wasting time on something that is technically not overly important but to a business person is apparently critical.

Take care to not let the business-think take over your mind though, you may wake screaming from the cognitive dissonance that seems to be a requirement for senior business people to operate.

Same here. We started with the Atari 400, an 8-bit system that had a membrane keyboard that may typing out BASIC apps from Byte magazine as appealing as banging your fingers on a wall for hours although I persevered and learned how to code at the same time :)

When we got the 520ST and later moved to a Mega2, it blew us away. A "huge" amount of memory, good CPU, MIDI support and integrate GUI. It was sad when Atari faded away as it seemed like a good balance against Commodore and Apple. Microsoft DOS/Windows seemed to primitive by comparison

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST

I definitely agree with this comment but I think that the bill being proposed is something that should be expanded far beyond patents. Allowing judges to force the plaintiffs to pay for an unsuccessful suit against the defendants in all cases would help limit spurious legal cases. If groups like RIAA had to pay when they lost the case against someone, it would go a long way to reduce these legal manoeuvres against people who cannot afford it.

During her Oceanography degree, my wife came up with a great analogy for ideas like this (she loves baking too, hence the subject of the analogy :):

Imagine you were baking a cake and added too much salt. You decide to fix this by adding more flour to balance it out. This means you need to add more egg and liquid to balance out the flour. Unfortunately you are out of eggs so you need to find a substitute. Your substitute throws the flavour off so you need to add more to fix that. Now you realize your container is too small so you have to find a new container to hold this....

It becomes a constant fight of trying to fix the imbalance created when you throw a complex biological system out of whack. The above post lists some possible consequences but there are more we have not thought of. Fixing a symptom does not cure the disease.

This is a complaint I have heard a lot in my programming career. In my own experience, most coders I have worked with are focused on functionality and simplicity; getting as much information out there in as straightforward a manner as possible. Often, this means "ugly" to non-CS people. Personally, I find Wikipedia easy to read and easy to navigate. Sure, it may not have graphics popping out everywhere or things dancing across the screen but when I hit WP, all I want is information.

Now, could it be better? Possibly. It is easy enough to create a new skin for it and give it some zip but I doubt the team would ever make it a default. WP is meant to be accessed on any device, through any type of connection (although it does have some issues in that department).

If I want lots of useless clutter, I will go to any number of large news organizations' websites.

My kids are 10 and 7 so they are in that range where the Internet is more than just pbskids or other sites. All I have and all I will ever have is Adblock which removes most of the annoying ads or things that could come onto the screen by accident. However, this is as much for the parents as it is for the kids.

Our take on this is that we need to teach our kids how to use the Internet safely and effectively. We cannot police them 24/7 and even if we tried, it would only serve as incentive to break through and see what is out there (prohibition makes things taboo and therefore irresistible to a curious mind). As they get older we help them understand the more complex aspects of humanity but just getting a good foundation has let them learn how to discern what they see for themselves. They have seen disturbing items on news sites which they have asked us about and have actively avoided afterwards because they just cannot deal with it right now (try teaching a 7 year old about suicide bombers or why people hate other people and you will see what I mean). We have also taught them to not believe the first thing they see and to try to verify from unrelated sources anything they read or see.

We are raising our kids to be adults; preventing them from being able to access the world and then tossing them into it when they turn 18 (or whatever age in your country) is not helpful for anyone.