As a counterpoint: what if he's on the swim team and has to be up at 5:30 am to make a 6:00 am swim practice every day? A 7:30 pm cut-off on electronics so he's asleep by 8:30 pm wouldn't be unreasonable.
123 karma · joined June 1, 2011
For #1, I see it as trying to preempt the "but it's my iPhone, I don't have to follow your rules!" argument. The last sentence I read as self-deprecating humor: read it with ;) at the end.
#2, this is doesn't seem unreasonable to me. Same as I wouldn't allow my son to have a lock on the door to his room that I didn't have a key to, I need to have access to his phone as well. Hopefully she'd only use that access in a serious situation (suspected bullying, suspected drug-use, etc). It could be she's always going through his things and never allows him any privacy, but this rule doesn't necessarily mean that.
#4: I see this as setting a strong boundary around when phone calls can be made. When I was growing up, it was very common to see calling late at night as being rude. I don't see this as not trusting his opinion but more as saying don't be on the phone late at night. 7:30 pm doesn't seem very late, but that's hard to say without knowing when they have to be up in the morning.
#5: Many schools ban phones or disallow their use in school, so not taking the phone to school seems reasonable.
#18: I don't see anything in here that says the rules are set in stone. In fact I'd read the last part as saying the opposite. The first part I read as trying to defuse anxiety around breaking the rules. My son often gets anxious when we set a new rule and worries that he'll break it. Letting him know that breaking the rules won't be the end of the world helps.
Presumably #11 trumps number #3. I assume they'd expect a common sense approach.
#1 and #6 don't contradict each other. If I let you borrow something from me and it was broken or lost, I'd expect you to pay for it. I think that's pretty normal.
Finally, 13-17 seem to be more aspirational than actual rules. 13, 14, and 17 could be replaced by: don't become so obsessed with your iPhone you ignore everything else. I didn't read 15 as an exclusion of the son's peer's music. More a suggestion to take advantage of the wide range of music available.
I don't see this as insane, but it's very hard to judge from the outside. We don't know the kid or the mom. It could be she's crazy overbearing or it could be she's just setting up reasonable rules for he son. Being a parent of a high-strung 10 year-old, I tend to read it as reasonable rules for a very smart, very obsessive young teen.
The article you linked said the chimps were teaching, but was rather vague about how. It seemed to be more focused on the nut cracking behavior, so it's hard to tell if they are actually teaching or just learning by example.
As with most other traits, it may be that it's not that other animals don't teach. Instead maybe it's matter of degrees: chimps don't teach much, humans teach a lot. The lack of altruism might explain why chimps mostly don't bother to teach other chimps, even though they have the ability.
It's true that both MMOs and F2P "games" will probably die before consoles. The problem is that Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo aren't adaptable enough and so the money is going to the platforms that have less restrictions. If new ways of selling games to customers appear, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo need to have a business model and a platform that will support it. They can't keep basing their businesses on selling Call of Honor: Medalfighter 4 for $60 and expect to survive.
However, it's not clear to me that Ouya is interesting to Gamestop yet. They aren't a publisher or a developer, so they can't make games appear on it. If the games show up, and people pay for them, they'll probably be interested in extended their digital distribution platform to Ouya.
The IBM the earned such derision from Microsoft was the IBM of the mid-80s and 90s. IBM steadily lost it dominance in computers (mainframes) to smaller computers (minicomputers and microcomputers). It seemed to be so mired in bureaucracy and their successful past that they couldn't do anything about it.
Microsoft of 2012 looks similar to IBM of 1982: their monopoly in computers (PCs) is threatened by smaller computers (smart phones and tablets). They are desperately trying to stay relevant, but are still stuck in their successful past (Windows) and can't abandon it. So as Mr. Hill said, it looks like they've become the thing that they hated so much.
For Android handset makers, they treat Android as the firmware for the device they are making. When they start on the firmware, they take the version of Android that they want, write the HAL, and then add their special stuff plus any carrier related crap they've agreed to. Once you're not selling that device any more, why would you bother to update the firmware? Users (and maybe Google) want to Android to be like iOS, but the handset makers are treating it the same way they treated their old internal phone OSes.
The bad news however is that most of the growth in family median income is not because wages are going up: it's because there are more two income families. I don't think it's bad that more women are working now and that they're making more money but I'm not sure it's really making us richer. What's missing from this study is any attempt to quantify the "free" labor that women were doing by being home for the kids and taking care of the house. If the extra money being brought in is simply going out to pay for childcare and a maid, we're really running in place, just faster.
You can see the same with with corporate IT departments: many of them decided not to upgrade to Vista. Why bother when Vista has marginal improvements with lots of bugs? Instead they stuck with the rock solid XP and waited until Microsoft (and the vendors) fixed things (Win7).
I expect corporate IT will view Windows 8 the same way: Metro is a big headache they'll want to avoid. They aren't going to be deploying Metro apps (at least not at first) and they'd probably disable Metro to avoid confusing users. If Microsoft is hoping to make Win8 the corporate standard, they'll have to do it via tablets. Presumably if everyone is using Win8 tablets, they'll eventually want Win8 on their desktop/laptop. Otherwise, I'd expect many IT departs to skip 8 and wait for 9.
1) Dot-com bust: Lots of people jumped into CS when it looked like being a programmer was a easy way to become a millionaire. When it became obvious that wasn't going to happen for most CS graduates and there was a glut of talent in the market, people switched to something else.
2) Outsourcing: Right on top of the dot-com bust was the trend towards outsourcing. There was lots of scary noise about how programmers were the next factory workers: gone overseas and never coming back.
3) H1-Bs: They hurt the supply of U.S. CS students by making wages lower which makes CS a less attractive major. (For the record, I'm pro immigration, but anti-H1-B. H1-B workers have very little ability to negotiate salary and companies like Tata abuse the H1-B system).
Issues #1 and #2 have more or less worked themselves out, so you'd expect that the current shortage will end as people start seeing CS as a good option again.
The only non-blog article I could find on this was from NRK in Norwegian: http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/norge/1.6944861. Translating through Google, it says the police only starting keeping statistics on rape in 2006 (?!?) and that there were 21 in 2008 and 11 in 2009.
According to Wikipedia, the Oslo metro area has 1.4 million people and Norway has a per capita rape rate of 20 per 100,000. So on average you'd expect something like 280 rapes per year in Oslo. Something here doesn't make sense.
Even pre-Internet, there was a problem with this: California law can't force businesses outside of CA to collect sales tax for CA residents. So if you bought something in another state, or from a catalog, you were suppose to report that on your income taxes and pay the appropriate CA sales tax. Of course, no one did, but it wasn't a big deal because there wasn't a lot of money in these sorts of sales.
With the Internet, more and more purchases are going to businesses that are out of state (e.g. Amazon). Since most people are habituated to having the sales tax included in purchases, they probably don't even realize they owe sales tax at all. Or if they do, they probably don't report it since no one likes to pay more taxes.
So now we come to this "nexus" problem. Currently neither Amazon nor its subsidiaries are in California, so CA laws don't apply to them and they don't have to collect sales tax for CA residents. This represents lost revenue for the state, but by changing the nexus rule to include affiliates, the state can get its sales tax laws to apply to Amazon and thus get more revenue. Amazon is resisting this because it will effectively raise their prices to CA residents (of course, CA residents were suppose to be paying that anyways).
What actually happens if the law is passed should be interesting. Amazon has said they will drop all of the CA affiliates if the law passes, just as they did in Illinois. However, New York passed a similar law and Amazon started collecting NY sales tax instead of cutting off its affiliates, presumably because the hit from having to collect sales tax was less than the money that would be lost from not having it's NY affiliates.
Additionally, the history of swipe sensors in laptops is a mixed bag as far as this sort of solution goes. They are in almost all laptops, but almost no one actually uses them. Most people perceive them as too much of a hassle compared to the standard username/password setup. Maybe if phones start holding data that people value more (like digital money) they'd be willing put up with the additional work of using the sensor.
The ultimate solution would probably be something that grabs the biometric data without the user having to do anything special. This would make it easier to use and more secure. Apple actually already has a patent on this: http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/27/recent-apple-patent-filin...