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Comment Re:Terry is a coward (Score 3, Insightful) 838

I lost a son to suicide in 2009. It brought unbelievable pain and suffering to our family. My son was suffering from schizophrenia and I don't think that he had the "courage" to hang himself. He was just suffering too much with his treatment and his life. It would've been much better if he had waited and he had prepared us for such a thing. Terry is not a coward. He wants to go with dignity and he is thinking about the ones who love him too.

Comment Re:Wait, so my depression is good? (Score 3, Funny) 512

I got asked once, if I would prefer to live intelligently in a prison knowing I was in one, or stupidly in the same place not knowing what it was. I would choose the latter.

Well, I guess a dumb person wouldn't know how to answer this question because it's way too complex. Or it really doesn't matter, since you would be in a prison anyway.

Comment Re:What about suicide (Score 1) 512

I agree with your idea that drugs are only buying you time. That's why several studies concluded that medications in conjunction with talk therapy seems to work better than medication alone. Sadly, sometimes they don't buy enough time, or they might even interfere with the healing process, because a lot of young people die by suicide while on medications. There are several studies showing that people younger than 25 are at higher risk of suicide when taking certain anti-depressants. I know this too well because I recently lost a son that was taking prescribed medications under the care of a physician to suicide.
Software

Submission + - Collaborative software for pair programming? 1

DavidMatuszek writes: "I will be teaching Java again this Fall. Students work in pairs, but unfortunately (after the first hour) typically not physically together. I would like to find collaborative software that is (1) dead simple to use, because that's not what the course is about, and (2) free. Google Docs would do, but students will be sharing code--plain text--not RTF or HTML or Word files. Is there such software for plain text?"
Privacy

Submission + - Lost in the Cloud

Colonel Korn writes: Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain writes in an Op-Ed to the New York Times that the seemingly inevitable move toward the often locked-down cloud is stifling innovation and threatening our privacy:

"And many software developers who once would have been writing whatever they wanted for PCs are simply developing less adventurous, less subversive, less game-changing code under the watchful eyes of Facebook and Apple.

If the market settles into a handful of gated cloud communities whose proprietors control the availability of new code, the time may come to ensure that their platforms do not discriminate. Such a demand could take many forms, from an outright regulatory requirement to a more subtle set of incentives — tax breaks or liability relief — that nudge companies to maintain the kind of openness that earlier allowed them a level playing field on which they could lure users from competing, mighty incumbents.

We've only just begun to measure this problem, even as we fly directly into the cloud. That's not a reason to turn around. But we must make sure the cloud does not hinder the creation of revolutionary software that, like the Web itself, can seem esoteric at first but utterly necessary later."

Comment Re:user analytics (Score 1) 309

Even if this user analytics is able to capture the whole echosystem of the machine running the program, it would have to be able to capture things that are happening outside the computer reach. Sometimes the user executes several tasks outside the program to find out what they want to do with the program. There are written notes on the side of the machine, questions shouted to someone on the other desk, phone calls, that might be fulfilling things that the program is failing in provide.

Comment Re:Ya (Score 1) 677

In my experience here in US, the different tracks on each subject do very little into promoting or allowing creative thinking for the higher levels. All they do is to allow the student to spend more or less time with the rote learning given that they pass on the stupid standard, mandatory tests. So it's all about higher degree of compliance with the system. Most of the morons that run the offices of gifted and talented students could as well be replaced by computer programs that apply the tests and spit out the results to select who is gifted and who is not. In fact, I believe computers would do a better job at adding up the scores then most of these clerks.

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