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It is an essay by Paul Graham, not a book: http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

Sorry, the full title is "The Acceleration of Addictiveness" not "addiction".

From there: "What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating. ...
    Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly. ...
    But if I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to."

There is an argument I've seen elewhere that it is good to get hooked on "healthy" addictions while you are younger -- for example, the joy of helping others, or the splendor of walking in nature, or some challenging "hard fun" productive enterprise like metal working or playing the piano, and so on.

One of the values of conventional religion is it may steer us away from some self-destructive behaviors including addiction -- especially by peer pressure. One example of a such a long lived population:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventh-day_Adventist_Church
"The church is also known for its emphasis on diet and health, ..."

On "The Pleasure Trap":
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.healthpromoting.com/the-pleasure-trap
http://www.amazon.com/The-Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines/dp/1570671974

On "Supernormal Stimuli":
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/B0057DC3VY
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus

Thanks for asking and looking into this.

Just wanted to connect the point on people deciding what senses or body shapes/capacities to have to what we were discussed a couple days ago on: "Do-It-Yourself Brain Stimulation Has Scientists Worried"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3862853&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=44012505

Related themes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
http://xkcd.com/597/

Here is a fable I wrote about thirty years ago about a knight who becomes whatever he wrote in a book -- sort of like many self-defined Transhumanists aspire to:
"The Problems of Being Self Determining"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-problems-of-being-self-determining.html

I'm since thinking that the human mind/body/brain/spirit seems to act as if it has a bunch of layers, where there seem to be safeguards built-in to the lower layers (shaped by evolution?) which may limit the ease of radical changes which are sometimes (but not always) in practice self-destructive acts. Those lower layers may also be related to communications links with other humans, to maintain the functioning of the group (stuff like a sense of fairness, compassion, etc. as well as probably status issues too from another direction).

Which connects to this story on simulated universes, math and infinite convergences:
"I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility. Short story, Sam Hughes (2007)."
http://qntm.org/responsibility

I made artificial life simulations myself in the 1980s, and started thinking about the moral implications....

James P. Hogan has some related books too, like Entoverse, and Realtime Interrupt.

http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html
" Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction)
"In Larry Niven's Known Space stories, a wirehead is someone who has been fitted with an electronic brain implant (called a "droud" in the stories) to stimulate the pleasure centres of their brain. In the Known Space universe, wireheading is the most addictive habit known (Louis Wu is the only given example of a recovered addict), and wireheads usually die from neglecting themselves in favour of the ceaseless pleasure. Wireheading is so powerful and easy that it becomes an evolutionary pressure, selecting against that portion of Known Space humanity without self-control. Wireheading need not use an actual brain implant; the pleasure centre can be remotely activated by a small device called a "tasp" (important in the Ringworld novels)."

Also related about "Supernormal Stimuli":
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
"Our instincts -- for food, sex, or territorial protection -- evolved for life on the savannahs 10,000 years ago, not in today's world of densely populated cities, technological innovations, and pollution. We now have access to a glut of larger-than-life objects, from candy to pornography to atomic weapons -- that gratify these gut instincts with often-dangerous results. Animal biologists coined the term "supernormal stimuli" to describe imitations that appeal to primitive instincts and exert a stronger pull than real things, such as soccer balls that geese prefer over eggs. Evolutionary psychologist Deirdre Barrett applies this concept to the alarming disconnect between human instinct and our created environment, demonstrating how supernormal stimuli are a major cause of today's most pressing problems, including obesity and war. However, Barrett does more than show how unfettered instincts fuel dangerous excesses. She also reminds us that by exercising self-control we can rein them in, potentially saving ourselves and civilization."

And on overcoming "The Pleasure Trap":
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Like moths to the flame... Just because we can do something, does not mean we should. That said, people will do this. Not sure what the outcome will ultimately be, but the "natural selection" point above, to select for people who do not do this, may well come into play. And that may also be part of the adaptive evolutionary value of religion, to scare us away from some unhealthy things and attract us to some healthy things (whatever else one can say about specific dogmas):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_origin_of_religions

So, maybe the only people who will survive being overstimulated by electrical thunderbolts will be those with a deep abiding religious feeling that such a life is wrongly lived?

The best thing about Lisp IMO is the way it exposes the underlying mechanisms. This is most evident in its syntax and macro system, which makes you really think about scope and binding order and the full implications/uses/interactions between multiple lexical environments, but generic functions is another good example. Prior to Lisp I'd tinkered in C++ and Java and I'd always thought of methods as these vaguely functionlike things that were nonetheless quite different and inseparably tied to certain common OO paradigms. CLOS made me realize that a method is just a function that:

1. Is designed to always accept one object as an argument (silly and arbitrary limitation.)

2. Examines the type of its arguments to determine which version of the function to use. This is usually determined via a very rigid inheritence scheme, whereas CLOS treats everything as an object and allows you to specify completely arbitrary patterns to match, with the default behavior being to use the most "specific" (to the arguments' types) method available. Also, as I said before, you can chain together parent methods in arbitrary ways instead of having to choose to either overwrite or keep the parent method.

Regarding your question about the lack of Lisp dominance, the answer is both simple and sad. Programming language popularity is driven by a combination of novel coolness and the marketing powers that be, not merit. Also, "good enough" syndrome prevents many programming languages (and applications for that matter) from absorbing very minor, taken-for-granted features that newcomers will expect, so the learning curve becomes a lot steeper than it should be. In Lisp this takes the most obvious form of not giving noobs an easier sub-language that doesn't require constant use of parens. Lisp veterans recognize that explicit scoping is highly desirable in most cases and have trained themselves to read and type it easily, but this isn't of much consolation to a newcomer, especially if they are attempting to use an editor without proper paren matching or auto intendation.

You're probably right in Clojure being the future of Lisp, but this is a perfect (and very depressing) example of what I just explained. Clojure is inferior in every way to Scheme or Common Lisp except it runs on JVM and it has a few native concurrency features. The latter sounds nice but who the hell cares about native concurrency if your language is several orders of magnitude slower? Common Lisp has concurrency libraries. It is also a true compiled language and with proper declarations can made to run at around 50% the speed of well written C. The problem is, Lisp wasn't always so fast. It took decades to reach that point during a period when computers were really, really slow. (People actually needed hardware acceleration to run it at acceptable speeds: see "Lisp Machine") By the time it became fast enough, the cool kids had moved on, so the Lisp crowd had to sit back and watch the new generation painfully re-discover all of those amazing features like garbage collection, weak/optional strong typing, closures, etc. And they're still nowhere near where Lisp was a quarter century ago.

If you want to hear some more CL cheerleading and get a small taste of some of its powers that modern languages still can't touch, check out Paul Graham. His book On Lisp is available online now: http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html . If you find that interesting, Let Over Lambda is a very smug little book almost guaranteed to blow your mind: http://letoverlambda.com/index.cl/toc . Some of Hoyte's ideas seem demented, but others (especially regarding the role of syntax, referential transparency being overrated, and the right way to use lexical environments) are quite profound.

http://books.google.com/books/about/In_Defense_of_Childhood.html?id=hO9dPgAACAAJ
"The pressures of modern life are increasingly squeezing the adventure, the wonder, the physicality -- the juice -- out of children's lives. Virtually every arena of kids' experience is now subject to some form of outside control, and this is a serious threat to the unique spark that animates every child. Lamenting risk-averse parents, overstructured school days, and a lack of playtime and solitude, this book is a clear and compelling plea to save childhood."

The challenge of addiction will only get worse:
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/B0057DC3VY
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Xest makes some good points about reasons to be more optimistic. However, I've certainly been pessimistic about this myself in the past. Here is an excerpt from a satire I wrote about this and posted to slashdot over a decade ago in relation to an article: "MPAA to Senate: Plug the Analog Hole!" after sending a copy of the US Department of Justice who had asked for comments (I also sent a copy to Richard Stallman who said it made him laugh):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html
"My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary. The value of proprietary law should be obvious. Software is essentially just a form of law governing how computers operate, and all software and media content has long been privatized to great economic success. ... [Inaudible shouted question] Prisons? There are only a million Americans behind bars for copyright infringement so far. No one complained about the million plus non-violent drug offenders we've had there for years. No one complained about the million plus terrorists we've got there now, thanks in no small part to a patriotic Supreme Court which after being privatized upheld that anyone who criticizes government policy in public or private is a criminal terrorist. Oops, I shouldn't have said that, as those terrorists aren't technically criminals or subject to the due process of law are they? Well it's true these days you go to prison if you complain about the drug war, or the war on terrorism, or the war on infringers of copyrights and software patents -- so don't complain! [nervous audience laughter] After all, without security, what is the good of American Freedoms? Benjamin Franklin himself said it best, those who don't have security will trade in their freedoms. ..."

Sad it is all becoming a little too true, even with some progress on the drug war front.

As I've realized, the USSR had to guard its borders to keep people from escaping that often dysfunctional society -- and we've all been told that showed how bad a country they were. But the USA needs to guard its medicine cabinets instead to keep people from escaping -- what does that say about the USA?

Some books related to your points:

"War is a racket" on the profit-oriented ("fascistic") military-industrial complex
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html

"Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me" on cognitive dissonance
http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes-Were-Made-But-Not/dp/0156033909

In one of Freeman Dyson's books, like "Infinite in All Directions" he talks about the coming conflicts between government and individuals wanting to redefine themselves biologically, where drug use is just a first example of a more general issue.

On the accelerating problem of addiction to "supernormal stimuli", which is a much more general issue than "drugs":
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/B0057DC3VY
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

By the way, some health ideas to look into, including vitamin D deficiency and eating more vegetables and omega-3s, which can help in avoiding depression:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

When all else fails, somethign from Howard Zinn:

Disparity in wealth is a 'Good Thing'. I always pondered if it was the case, but Paul Graham wrote a particularly insightful essay about it. Article here.

While I have no love for those companies, I wonder if the answer to your questions isn't going to be obvious (and annoying). It's "known" here in the US, that Europeans are willing to pay more for the same goods, and thus we charge them more for the same goods. Americans are known for choosing to buy cheap crap that will break in a week because it's cheaper, therefore more reliable vendors have to go lower to make the sale. Going to the farthest extreme, the Chinese are known for stealing software, movies, etc. and thus to make a sale there the price has to be very low.

They call this "market based pricing", and I agree that it is actually quite a destructive practice, but I don't think it's illegal.

In US it is illegal since 1936: Robinson-Patman Act
Also this article is worth a look: Price Discrimination

And a quote from a 2001 essay of Paul Graham The Other Road Ahead

When they can, companies like to do something called price discrimination, which means charging each customer as much as they can afford. [8] Software is particularly suitable for price discrimination, because the marginal cost is close to zero. This is why some software costs more to run on Suns than on Intel boxes: a company that uses Suns is not interested in saving money and can safely be charged more. Piracy is effectively the lowest tier of price discrimination.

Read the Graham quote, and there at the end - "How can you get anything done in them, I think, without macros?" is probably something that people without Lisp experience are not going to grok just because there are other languages that have a thing called 'macros'. And then I look in the link (having not read that article in a while) and find Graham explaining the difference.

It kind of reinforces the point of the portion you quoted, the way you quoted it, leaving out the further explanation of what Lisp macros are. If you already know, you'll get it immediately - if you don't, you might well sit there and say 'But ... C has macros! C++ has macros!' and miss it completely.

Quite true; it was already getting to be a longish post. :-)
For the readers who may not know much about Lisp here are the next few sections: Graham's original essay is worth a read. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html. Quite thought provoking.
Any way, here's the bit on macros:

Many languages have something called a macro. But Lisp macros are unique. And believe it or not, what they do is related to the parentheses. The designers of Lisp didn't put all those parentheses in the language just to be different. To the Blub programmer, Lisp code looks weird. But those parentheses are there for a reason. They are the outward evidence of a fundamental difference between Lisp and other languages.

Lisp code is made out of Lisp data objects. And not in the trivial sense that the source files contain characters, and strings are one of the data types supported by the language. Lisp code, after it's read by the parser, is made of data structures that you can traverse.

If you understand how compilers work, what's really going on is not so much that Lisp has a strange syntax as that Lisp has no syntax. You write programs in the parse trees that get generated within the compiler when other languages are parsed. But these parse trees are fully accessible to your programs. You can write programs that manipulate them. In Lisp, these programs are called macros. They are programs that write programs.

Let's tie this back to the Fine Article: Checking in at 1979 (I don't see this in the article), I'd say Smalltalk has a good shot at being the first IDE:

Steve Jobs on Smalltalk
Steve Jobs had co-founded Apple Computer in 1976. The first popular personal computer, the Apple 2, was a hit - and made Steve Jobs one of the biggest names of a brand-new industry.
At the height of Apple's early success in December 1979, Jobs, then all of 24, had a privileged invitation to visit Xerox Parc. (emphasis added)

This is what Steve had to say about his visit to Xerox Parc.
"And they showed me really three things.
But I was so blinded by the first one I didn't even really see the other two.
One of the things they showed me was object orienting programming they showed me that but I didn't even see that.
The other one they showed me was a networked computer system...they had over a hundred Alto computers all networked using email etc., etc., I didn't even see that.
I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I'd ever seen in my life. Now remember it was very flawed, what we saw was incomplete, they'd done a bunch of things wrong. But we didn't know that at the time but still though they had the germ of the idea was there and they'd done it very well and within you know ten minutes it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this some day."

You say we've moved "beyond" Smalltalk ?
Away from it, sure.
But beyond? Unless you're Smalltalk fluent, how would you know?
I'm not saying that to be rude: please consider what Paul Graham said about how programmers rate languages; he expressed this idea very well in Beating The Averages: here is the relevant excerpt:

Programmers get very attached to their favorite languages, and I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, so to explain this point I'm going to use a hypothetical language called Blub. Blub falls right in the middle of the abstractness continuum. It is not the most powerful language, but it is more powerful than Cobol or machine language.

And in fact, our hypothetical Blub programmer wouldn't use either of them. Of course he wouldn't program in machine language. That's what compilers are for. And as for Cobol, he doesn't know how anyone can get anything done with it. It doesn't even have x (Blub feature of your choice).

As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.

When we switch to the point of view of a programmer using any of the languages higher up the power continuum, however, we find that he in turn looks down upon Blub. How can you get anything done in Blub? It doesn't even have y.

By induction, the only programmers in a position to see all the differences in power between the various languages are those who understand the most powerful one. (This is probably what Eric Raymond meant about Lisp making you a better programm

Oh, and it seems like a slow day on the Slashdot front-page, because it seems that nothing there, except this teaches us anything new about the world. See What business can learn from open source. Here's something a little better and new. Maybe you can improve it. :-).

There is a balance, but beware of absolutes. Killing could lose meaning regarding some potential technology advances (two easy examples from sci-fi are Neuromancer and Star Trek teleporters, but probably there are more everyday examples). And moral, laws and ethics in all man history (even today) had been pretty flexible putting killing as something right.

Regarding speed, think in i.e. "stealing" digital goods, as in making copies of something for your own use without making those goods unavailable for the owner, could put you in jail for many years or be sued for millons (and it happened already, several times). By now morals and ethics are adapting, while laws are clueless or used as a form of opression. Maybe Paul Graham put it better.

Yes, I guess Morris Berman is saying the USA is worse than China in that regard, and much worse than parts of Europe: "How, then, can excess be curbed in a free democratic system? For we can be sure that the intelligent frogs, who are really quite exceptional, are not going to be listened to, and certainly have no power to enforce their insights. True, there are certain countries -- the Scandanavian nations come to mind -- where for some reason the concentration of intelligent frogs is unusually high, resulting in decisions designed to protect the commons. But on a world scale, this is not very typical. More typical, and (sad to say) a model for many other countries, is the United States, where proposed "changes" are in fact cosmetic, and where the reality is business as usual. In the context of 315 million highly addicted frogs, the voices of the smart ones -- Bateson, Frank, Posner, Hardin, et al. -- aren't going to have much impact or, truth be told, even get heard."

So yes, Berman is saying the USA is worse than China in that sense (fascist in a corporatist sense, but more disorganized), but he is not the only one. For example here is something by Thomas L. Friedman in the NYTimes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/opinion/09friedman.html
"Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.
One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China's leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.
Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying "no." Many of them just want President Obama to fail. Such a waste. Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he's a centrist. But if he's forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be whipsawed by its different factions."

Of course, like people, every country has its unique mix of characteristics that can be strengths or weaknesses depending on the context... North Koreans, for example, may face less "pleasure trap" issues?
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Sad to watch this all play out as so much of the USA suffers for crazy ideological reasons (such as justifies the denial of access of health care and vegetables to a lot of the population). Even sadder to be stuck in the middle of this crazy ideological bubble while it does... Not that I have not tried to help move things to a higher level of sense (as have many others):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html

So little, so late... As Bucky Fuller said, wh

Yeah, and here are some applications that run in demanding environments, that were not written in C++, and that you would probably be hard-pressed to write in C++ (at least with the same results):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Analysis_and_Replanning_Tool

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFTW

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry

Hm, that's interesting -- demanding environments, high stakes, and no C++. This might be a clue; it is the experience of a team working in another demanding environment, that used some C++ code but mostly Lisp, who were not terribly impressed by what they saw with C++ (it seems like it was more of a chore for them):

http://www.paulgraham.com/carl.html

Of course, that was ten years ago. Times have changed; now C++ has r-value references and smart pointers!

I could maybe see their necessity 10 or 15 years ago, but statistical classification techniques are good enough these days that a blunt tool like a domain blacklist doesn't really make much sense. Heck, Paul Graham was arguing that seven years ago, and it hasn't gotten less true.

All the performance gains are immediately devoured to make life easier for developers with no benefit to users.

Nonsense:

http://www.paulgraham.com/carl.html

A move to a higher level of abstraction that was so beneficial to software users that the entire market was upended. That is not in any way an isolated case; the history of the software industry is full of stories of good abstractions beating the competition and improving the state of the art. Abstraction is why Unix won, and the Unix abstraction was immensely beneficial to computer users.

Even the best of C or C++ compilers are terrible at vectorization of code.

Yeah, and the best humans are terrible at allocating registers -- so bad, in fact, that the best C compilers ignore the register keyword. What do you think is more relevant to the general case: vectorizing multimedia operations, or allocating registers? Compilers are also better than humans at:

• Finding redundant or unreachable code
• Finding dead or otherwise unneeded variables
• Finding algebraic reductions
• Strength reducing transformations
• Boolean optimizations
• Reducing program size

...and numerous other optimizations that, like register allocation, are more generally applicable than SIMD. There has also been work on compiler optimizations that are utterly out of reach for even the most skilled humans, like probabilistic optimizations that have a negligible (with respect to some tunable parameter) probability of being unsound.

To put it another way, look at the Orbitz story, which is over a decade old now:

http://www.paulgraham.com/carl.html

On the one hand, you have hand-tuned assembly language. On the other, you have a program written in Lisp (a high level, compiled language) with some C++ mixed in (for managing memory). Orbitz was able to compete on speed, but more importantly, it was returning better results. It's not that the people who wrote that mainframe assembly language were idiots -- they were taking advantage of all sorts of special hardware features, they knew how to hack their machines better than anyone else -- it is just that the Orbitz algorithm was far too complex for efficient hand-rolled assembly code, at which point compilers are really the only choice. The mainframe guys were busy thinking about how to make use of special machine features in assembly language; the ITA team was busy solving the higher-level problem, and relying on their compiler to generate good assembly language code. This is a particularly telling line:

We disassemble most every Lisp function looking for inefficiencies and have had both CMUCL and Franz enhanced to compile our code better.

[emphasis mine]. They disassembled their code...and then improved their compiler when they saw problems. They did not hand-roll the code, they made the compiler do a better job of generating code. These are not lazy programmers, nor are they programmers who do not know how to use assembly language; they are programmers who understand that they have a tool that is far better at generating assembly language than they are, and that they have more important things to do with their time.

I deal with quite a bit of crypto code in my work. I have seen lots of hand-tuned assembly language, I dealt with code that took advantage of the AESNI instructions to perform very fast encryption. I am well aware that in small, highly specialized functions (like AES), humans are better able to utilize special instructions to improve performance. Those are niche cases, and the techniques used in those cases have very limited applicability (even SSE is fairly limited in its applicability, by comparison with the sort of code programmers write and maintain every day), and the techniques scale very poorly.

Depends on what you mean by 'coding'. Try a large software project with hundreds of source files, multiple geographically separated teams working on different modules. Obviously if you're working on your own or something small, vi or whatever you prefer to use would suffice.

Funny, whenever I see that on slashdot, by brain always translates it into something like...massive chip on my shoulder

Arguments over Haskell and other obscure languages being superior to the mainstream ones are exactly that, academic. Sure, go ahead and invent your own language by all means, but don't knock what's being used reliably for years. For another example, PHP is often criticized, but nearly every large website runs on LAMP or some combination thereof. You could do what Paul Graham did and build your entire application in LISP, but good luck finding people to maintain it.
And well, I'm quite happy coding in Java and Perl both as part of work and outside of it, while I respect the fact that theoretical computer science is what advances the field, supposedly better designed languages don't hold my interest.

The best technology doesn't necessarily translate into the most widely used technology, Microsoft is a prime example of the latter despite there being multiple arguably superior ways to implement operating systems and security models..

"The three assumptions for home schooling are that it is inherently preferable for a parent to stay home to be there for the kids if they are needed, and that school as it is now is a negative influence the children who parents want to bring them up in a morale world. The third, and more controversial, is that 12 years of schooling is overkill. "

There is a lot more complexity to this than that, although you make some good points.

I'd rather see a "basic income" for all than paying people to be responsible parents, neighbors, or friends.
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

Home-based and community-based education is often about reclaiming family and community from institutionalization.
http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."

It certainly is true that unhealthy habits may get passed from kid to kid in schools (they are probably the easiest places to buy addictive drugs, for example). There are other addictive and unhealthy things passed on too at schools, even if they may originate elsewhere:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.chefann.com/
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-Soon-Sexualized-Childhood/dp/0345505077

But public school can be seen as inherently immoral in part because it rests on a premise of unneeded violence through coercion.
http://www.educationrevolution.org/blog/educating-children-in-a-violent-world/

Contrast a "public" school with a "public" library, where many peopel throught the ages have learned a lot without someone grading them or monitoring everything they learned or forcing them to read certain books on a certain fixed schedule.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3a.htm
"One way to see the difference between schoolbooks and real books like Moby Dick is to examine different procedures which separate librarians, the custodians of real books, from schoolteachers, the custodians of schoolbooks. To begin with, libraries are usually comfortable, clean, and quiet. They are orderly places where you can actually read instead of just pretending to read.
For some reason libraries are never age-segregated, nor do they presume to segregate readers by questionable tests of ability any more than farms or forests or oceans do. The librarian doesn't tell me what to read, doesn't tell me what sequence of reading I have to follow, doesn't grade my reading. The librarian trusts me to have a worthwhile purpose of my own. I appreciate that and trust the library in return.
Some other significant differences between libraries and schools: the librarian lets me ask my own questions and helps m

See also "Black Swan Farming" http://paulgraham.com/swan.html

Just because there *seems* to be an objective benefit to knowing the number of available agents doesn't mean that knowing the number benefits your company.

http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
"Above all. what about the world today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an [institution]. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstances an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production. all the people's material wants usually can be easily satisfied.
The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."

However this could be fixed in our society with a basic income (and/or other changes):
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

Every age has its challenges. Twenty thousand years ago, there was no malaria (a side-effect of agriculture), no threat of nuclear war or bioterrorism or nanotech or robotics run amok, communities and familes were probably stronger overall than in industrialized countries, people ate more vegetables and so had little cancer, diabetes, gout, or heart disease, people got a lot of sunlight and so autism and allergies were probably very rare, people who "worked" did so directly for themselves and their families and communities without some complex bureaucratic supervision alienating them from what they were doing, education was very hands-on, religion was likely more a direct experience connected with nature and community for most people, the planet seemed like an endless vista for growth with free land everywhere relative to the number of people, addictions as a "pleasure trap" were harder to get stuck in, etc. etc.. Oh, sure, there were bad things about those times too. My point is not that such times were uniformly "better" (where would we be without twenty-thousand years of dog-breeding to create "man's best friend"? :-), just that the issue is more nuanced than you suggest -- some things have improved greatly, but other things have gotten worse in some ways for a large percentage of the population. Increasing addiction rates are just one sign of social stress and a dysfunctional economic system:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Consider as an example of a conflict between an old way of living an modern society:
"Christian Missionary Deconverted by Tribe"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr3q6Cid1po

And:
http://www.ishmael.org/origins/Beyond_Civilization/
"Civilization, in effect, represents an attempt to improve upon tribalism by replacing it with hierarchalism. Every civilization brought forth in the course of human history has been an intrinsically hierarchical affair--in every age and locale, East and West, as well as every civilization that grew up independently of ours in the New World. Because it's intrinsically hierarchical, civilization ben

The entity is not a citizen, but it is a vehicle for citizens to act collectively. Why should the citizens not have the right to speak collectively in this way?

Why should they have any such rights when they have protections (such as "limited liability") that people individually do not have? A right without an accompanying liability or responsibility is pretty much an additional right.

Preemptive strike: I know that limited liability is necessary in today's world to conduct business. But that is tangential to the additional power corporations possess over the powers of individuals. In our particular case, post "Citizens United", we are talking about political power.

People and corporations should have a right to seek wealth. But that does not imply that they have a right to turn wealth into political power. Paul Graham had a good write-up about this particular idea.

http://veganlunchbox.blogspot.com/2006/06/interview-with-dr-joel-fuhrman.html
"Most vegans fall short in that they follow the same suboptimal and outmoded nutritional recommendations as omnivores, utilizing grains or white potatoes as the major source of calories in the diet and wind up eating a diet low in high phytochemical foods such as green vegetables and raw nuts and seeds. They do not understand that 90 calories from a pretzel or white potato does not have the nutrient richness of 90 calories from a kiwi or red kidney beans. Without the knowledge of nutrient density they are eating in the dark and not optimizing their longevity."

Many become deficient in Omega-3s, Iodine, and B12. Of course, when a meat eater dies at 65 of a heart attack, we commonly blamd the the "genes". When a Vegan dies for whatever reason, we blame the "diet". In reality, it is an interactio of diet, lifestyle, and genes. As Dr. Fuhrman says, genes may give us "weak links", but whether they get pulled on is a function of diet and lifestyle.

We need a new term for someone who eats a lot of vegetables and other high-nutrient foods and avoids junk foods. Dr. Fuhrman coined the term "Nutritarian" for that, but it is not in widespread use. And as he says, eating lots of vegetables and a little meat is much healthier than a diet that is full of refined grains and processed sugar.

Thanks for your insightful post, including the humor and insights into psychology and health. :-)

On finding balance, see stuff on "the pleasure trap", which can make balance hard to achieve sometimes:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Humans were not adapted to a world full of refined sugar, refined starch, salt everywhere, easy-to-get fats, and so on. Our natural inclinations are geared to a world where such are rare and we have to work physically at a moderate level every day to get something to eat.

Yet the modern food industry profits from just giving us what our genes say we should have as much of as we can because it is historically rare. But now that is is not rare, it is literally destroying our health. And pleading for individual self-control goes against our genetically-based survival strategies to eat the richest food first. Thus in industrialized countries, we now almost all suffer from the "diseases of kings" from the past cause by such a diet -- diabetes, gout, heart disease, stroke, dementia, etc... And even autism in the case of people (especially pregnant women) who no longer need to go outdoors in the sunshine for many hours every day.

And sadly, on extremes and addiction:
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
"The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40. The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things. I don't mean to imply they're all to be avoided. Alcohol is a dangerous drug, but I'd rather live in a world with wine than one without. Most people can coexist with alcohol; but you have to be careful. More things we like will mean more things we have to be careful about. ... Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly. ..."

Maybe we need to find healthy addictions before the unhealthy ones find us?

You need to find someone to pick the right start-ups. Those people are rare, and unlikely to work for a city.

You need a pro-privacy, pro-free speach atmosphere, something that UK seriously lacks. (Cameras, libel laws, etc)

You need a good source of well educated people interested in science, not business.

You need a good place to live. Something that will attract smart people to live there besides the money. The UK is not sunny California.

Grow up.

Accept reality.

In 1980, she discussed with John Opel, a fellow committee member who was the chairman of the International Business Machines Corporation," her son's company. "Mr. Opel, by some accounts, mentioned Mrs. Gates to other I.B.M. executives. A few weeks later, I.B.M. took a chance by hiring Microsoft, then a small software firm, to develop an operating system for its first personal computer."

laundry list of Microsoft products

Yep - IBM never would have done the deal if Microsoft hadn't been a growing, successful company. Both were required. And if that IBM contract had been written differently history would also have taken a different track.

Being competent and being lucky aren't mutually exclusive.

My finger remembers hitting the key, so I'm going to go with "autocorrect" over typo.

The point, though, is that I'm very suspicious of McDonald's hiring a PR firm to let them do some marketing scumbaggery. Especially as many articles specifically went out of their way to mention both McDonald's and the fact that they banned it from their restaurants.

"... but first I need to address some of your other misinformation to put it in context. Patience."

Ah. I see. You are preparing even further ad hominem arguments. And you insist upon doing that FIRST, before addressing any actual issues I raised.

I expected nothing else from you.

You post a link on your own website to a page about "how to disagree" , and it is pretty obvious that on that same scale you can't bring yourself to do better than "DH1".

If you are old enough to remember what Microsoft was like around the late eighties and up until about the early-2000's, you would realize that they are no longer the force to be reckoned with that they were back then. Yes, they are still a very wealthy and profitable company, and will probably remain so for decades more, but they are no longer the force to be reckoned with that they were in the time I speak of. Back in those days Microsoft inspired such fear into the hearts of those in the software industry that before beginning a software venture people would ask: "What would Microsoft do in response to this?" and even the vaguest hint that Microsoft was getting into some field would be sufficient to dissuade the faint of heart from even getting started and risking competing with Microsoft head-on. Those days are long gone, and now the companies that have sort of inherited that mantle are Apple and Google (but it seems that even put together they don't have even half of the kind of terrifying aura Microsoft exuded back in those days). Their loss of this kind of power does not mean that Microsoft will cease being profitable or even that they'll stop growing, far from it. It simply means that they've become irrelevant to the leading edge of the software industry, just another stable, stolid, boring company like IBM or SAP.

This is what Paul Graham meant when he wrote that Microsoft is Dead.

If you are old enough to remember what Microsoft was like around the late eighties and up until about the early-2000's, you would realize that they are no longer the force to be reckoned with that they were back then. Yes, they are still a very wealthy and profitable company, and will probably remain so for decades more, but they are no longer the force to be reckoned with that they were in the time I speak of. Back in those days Microsoft inspired such fear into the hearts of those in the software industry that before beginning a software venture people would ask: "What would Microsoft do in response to this?" and even the vaguest hint that Microsoft was getting into some field would be sufficient to dissuade the faint of heart from even getting started and risking competing with Microsoft head-on. Those days are long gone, and now the companies that have sort of inherited that mantle are Apple and Google (but it seems that even put together they don't have even half of the kind of terrifying aura Microsoft exuded back in those days). Their loss of this kind of power does not mean that Microsoft will cease being profitable or even that they'll stop growing, far from it. It simply means that they've become irrelevant to the leading edge of the software industry, just another stable, stolid, boring company like IBM or SAP.

This is what Paul Graham meant when he wrote that Microsoft is Dead.

His writing sounds like it came straight out of a USA Today puff piece. I guess he hasn't yet learned to change the tone of his writing when posting informally online. (See http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

I think there's some irony there, but he's not too far off. Appears there's a place for physics/engineers in the financial sector. Not sure how big the market is, but the student whose fluid dynamics code we used went to work on Wall Street. Your mileage may vary, but it also looks to me like there are more satisfying lives than the life of an academic.

Crap. Here we go...

So I spent the last five years in two different grad programs and will soon be leaving with... an M.S... They were decent/very good programs and I was plenty smart, but spent most of ages 22-27 almost completely miserable for it. In short, I went because I was smart, capable, and loved the material, and I payed a pretty big price for it. It's a great thing if you can find a field that piques your curiosity like that, but I'd call it a necessary rather than sufficient condition for success in grad school. I like to get lost in equations and algorithms, and it just didn't dawn on me that I'd have to make such a desperate attempt to flaunt it and establish a name for myself. I don't have a big enough ego to think that the world revolves around my research topic much less me, and as silly as it sounds, I found myself sitting through presentations much more interested in the personality of the presenter than the content. Grown men (yes, usually men) spending their whole lives analyzing a particular wave mode? Are they passionate about it because it's interesting or because they're desperately clinging to something they can get funding for? It's a mind trip if you really sit there and analyze it. And the isolation. Hell. When I was most productive, it wasn't at all unusual for me to go three or four days without speaking to anyone. Probably wouldn't be so bad if you're of the female type. In the end, I decided that although nothing would technically prevent me from being a scientist and a good person, as stressed out, overworked, and miserable as I already was, and with no end in sight, the risk was just too great.

Sorry for the pessimism. I'll cut myself off there and refer you to a few sources I've found helpful:

worstprofessorever.com/
Former classics professor, now web developer/writer. Pretty awesome person. No longer an academic. You read that correctly. Not an academic. Awesome person. They're not incompatible, despite what some professors would like you to believe.

Demetri Martin On Puzzles And 'Important Things'
Because who doesn't love Demetri Martin? He made it most of the way through law school before dropping out and doing something that made him happy. I like his explanation around 10 minutes in.

Amazon.com: Winning the Games Scientists Play
I can't recommend this book enough. It's basically a book about how to advance your scientific career in the most efficient way possible. I picked it up randomly and got through half of it standing in the library stacks before I found myself too nauseous to continue. He starts off insisting he's only the messenger, but it's really pretty sickening that someone would attempt to codify and advocate everything that makes academia such a miserable place. Thing is, it's pretty much true. I love where he says that fake scientists with outside hobbies or interests that occupy too much of their minds should be identified and exposed with great pleasure. Wow.

Richard Hamming: You and Your Research
Yes, Richard Hamming of the eponymous window function! Advice on how to be a good researcher. "I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this."

Anyway, after all this, I figure someone who's not deterred in the least might actually

You write a good post. But you aim at the wrong subject. You should ask yourself: Why does Yahoo find themselves in this position in the first place? (hint: it has something to do with not giving customers what they want)

In addition to that, there were more fundamental problems with yahoo:

http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html

When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be. What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the company. They were already very visible when I got there in 1998. Yahoo had two problems Google didn't: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company.

It's an interesting read, from the inside, and not from some pundit looking from the sidelines.

Where's your blub, then?

Is the ultimate language Corrado Bohm's P" , which has less syntax than any other turing-complete language?

ad 2) But what does the finest Haskell help me if I can't access a CD, Bluetooth or a XMPP server...

See also, "scriptability".

ad 3) .... Also, this determines the amount of help and easy-to-access documentation. Which again makes a language popular or not.

And in the case of an Internet-connected language, it's so much more. I still use perl a lot, not because of the syntax (which is OK, but sometimes a bit frustrating) but because of CPAN (the module collection), CPAN the software to install it, the RPM guys who care to package all that for me, the CPAN admins who ages ago got contributors to sign their packages, the perlmonks guys who always are eager to help, and the community that is intolerant of inconsistent interfaces and crummy performance. And not only intolerant about such issues, but willing to help make it better. "Lazy with a capital 'L'," as Larry says.

I keep trying all the others and the new ones, but the lack of the above keeps me from jumping ship and becoming less efficient.

If I use a different language, it's only because it's really so much better of a tool for the job, and then sometimes I'll still use perl for glue (just learned a new DSL yesterday and used this model...).

C++ and Java aren't really old school, a better way to describe them is that they are LFM's. They're both dead-end and they both have brain-dead designs. C is good though.

My suggestion? Write your own Scheme/Lisp interpreter in your language of choice, and write macros to generate JavaScript. Or write a good JavaScript engine, because they all seem to crash and consume heaps of resources.

I really have to wonder if Yahoo should have accepted Microsoft's $45 billion bid, which Yang was roundly criticized for rejecting.

It should had, and Yang was a bone-head. Anyways, good riddance, and it should be soon reckoning time for Yahoo, which hasn't been a tech company in ages. It is now a limited set of marketing services, that's all, the AOL of tech has-beens. Paul Grahams provides some insights as of why of such fateful transformation: http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html

There's a talk from 1986 by Richard Hamming at Bellcore, about how to do great research, but it also ends up in a short discussion about the conditions there that led to UNIX:

http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html

The whole talk is really excellent, and there's this theme in it that the really great things come from some unexpected places, by the compounding of seemingly unrelated character traits, work habits and organization dynamics.

At the end in the Q&A, Hamming gets into a short discussion with the host Alan Chynoweth about the origins of UNIX, evincing from Alan a favorite quote:

"UNIX was never a deliverable!"

expanded:

"Hamming: First let me respond to Alan Chynoweth about computing. I [was in charge of] computing in research and for 10 years I kept telling my management, ``Get that !&@#% machine out of research. We are being forced to run problems all the time. We can't do research because we're too busy operating and running the computing machines.'' Finally the message got through. They were going to move computing out of research to someplace else. I was persona non grata to say the least and I was surprised that people didn't kick my shins because everybody was having their toy taken away from them. I went in to Ed David's office and said, ``Look Ed, you've got to give your researchers a machine. If you give them a great big machine, we'll be back in the same trouble we were before, so busy keeping it going we can't think. Give them the smallest machine you can because they are very able people. They will learn how to do things on a small machine instead of mass computing.'' As far as I'm concerned, that's how UNIX arose. We gave them a moderately small machine and they decided to make it do great things. They had to come up with a system to do it on. It is called UNIX!

A. G. Chynoweth: I just have to pick up on that one. In our present environment, Dick, while we wrestle with some of the red tape attributed to, or required by, the regulators, there is one quote that one exasperated AVP came up with and I've used it over and over again. He growled that, ``UNIX was never a deliverable!''"

You sir are one of the ripest marks out there. Marketers absolutely love guys like you who think they are mental supermen unaffected by marketing. Ask yourself how specific brands and models get on your list in the first place. It isn't because you saw a blatant advertisement, but rather because you've been subtly bombarded over a long period of time. You've been conditioned and just like pavlov's dog doesn't even realize when he starts salivating you don't even realize the effect it's had on you as you merrily make up your list confident in your own mental fortitude.

Start with The Suit is Back to glimpse the tip of the iceberg.

Catching Up with Math
Suddenly, in a matter of weeks I think, McCarthy found his theoretical exercise transformed into an actual programming language-- and a more powerful one than he had intended.
...
So the short explanation of why this 1950s language [Lisp] is not obsolete is that it was not technology but math, and math doesn't get stale. The right thing to compare Lisp to is not 1950s hardware, but, say, the Quicksort algorithm, which was discovered in 1960 and is still the fastest general-purpose sort.

Excerpt from: http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html
Emphasis added. See the "Catching Up With Math" section.
The link is a pretty cool read, but for the "tl;dr crowd" - don't even bother, just go back to twitter :-)
For the rest of you, it covers some interesting language differences - worth the read if you have even a casual interest in theory.

Although there is a lot of software in use written in Lisp, McCarthy's discovery has influenced programming far beyond that written in Lisp itself. This isn't surprising, since he set out to describe programs mathematically rather than simply create a new programming language. Paul Graham has enumerated the language features that originally made Lisp different. Most of them, including conditionals, recursion, and garbage collection are now commonly used by programmers who know nothing about Lisp itself.

According to Paul Graham, McCarthy discovered underlying principles of computing. If he's right, it would make just as much sense to say that McCarthy invented Lisp as to say that ancient people invented numbers. People gave names and symbols to numbers, but the concept is much more basic than an invention.

No, actually, McCarthy did discover Lisp, at least according to Paul Graham.

I think you mean creator or inventor. It's not like the Lisp programming language was just sat out in the wilds of Chile under a rock waiting to be found by an archaeologist.

No, actually, McCarthy did discover Lisp, at least according to Paul Graham.

It's not just the language that is important, it's the contributions Lisp made to programming language theory: "if", higher order functions, garbage collection to name a few things. See here for a list of things that the language pioneered.

The idea is that he discovered Lisp could be assembled from seven primitive operators, from which the rest of the language could be built. Though I agree that "discoverer" is a bit of a stretch.

I am quoting the key points on this topic from my last comment (with some emphasis added):

So the most intellectually honest statement is something along the lines of "$X can lead to a devaluation the currency, but it can also cause real economic growth, and it may of course also cause a mix of those two things".
(...)
All I'm really saying at that level is that it is in fact much more likely that the economy reacts by increasing Q, especially in the current situation where there is high unemployment and a large output gap.

If you read those statements as "increased demand does not increase prices, everything else being equal", then I feel that reasonable communication with you is no longer possible.

My hope is that this is simply you lashing out one last time because you fail to defend a point that is too much part of your identify. It's a shame, because I already told you that I would agree to a weaker form of the claim you originally made, and this could perhaps have led to a synthesis we could both agree on. Oh well.

On #7, Chinese is becoming the single most dominant language on the web (you just probably can't see it). Also, diversity can be good in big enough systems. Currencies work better generally when they are managed by accountable organizations; Jane Jacobs suggested that ideally each city should have its own currency; why not now, with computers it would be so easy to convert between them?

Cold fusion may be happening:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2011/10/17/hello-cheap-energy-hello-brave-new-world/

More of a problem is addiction to "supernormal stimuli":
http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X

We need a "basic income" and other changes (gift economy, better local subsistence with 3D printing, better participatory governmental planning) to deal with the changes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY

"but where would they fit?"

I think you might have missed the sarcasm, which is more obvious in the context of the whole book, sorry.

I feel pretty much anyone can be amazing given the right circumstances and environment.

But hey, even if things are a mess, we can at least try to do the basics for our own lives -- eat well, get vitamin D, develop mental disciplines that help us stay as positively engaged as possible, and so on.

Be careful too of making life too abstract -- there are pleasure traps but there are also pleasures that keep us rooted. We need both roots and wings.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html

It is sometimes the depth of our roots -- little pleasures, family, friends, hobbies, habits, spirituality, music, communities, and so on -- that keep us from blowing over in life's storms.

Or, from a different direction, as I quoted from the book version of "What Dreams May Come":
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"This is their composite mental image?" I asked. Soundless; hueless; lifeless.
"It is," he said.
"And you work here?" I felt stunned that anyone who had the choice would elect to work in this forbidding place.
"This is nothing," was all he said.

For me, the remarkable thing is that while Paul Graham wondered aloud about the hundred year language, the one we'd be using a century from now, he completely overlooked C and how long it had already remained not just relevant, but dominant. C was released in 1973, meaning it's nearly at the end of its fourth decade, and it's number 2 (and gaining!) on this month's TIOBE chart (from their summary: "Java lost almost 1% of its popularity in September. If this trend continues, C will be number one again next month."). Put another way, C is 38% of the way to a century of dominance, and there currently few if any signs of its imminent abandonment.

ESR once referred to C's "austere elegance" as something C++ lacks, and I think that neatly pins down what I like about C. I've personally been reintroduced to C over the last few years by the lower-level Mac and iOS frameworks (notably Core Audio), and it's truly nice for doing things like signal processing, where the formality and fussiness of higher-level languages and frameworks would just get in the way.

Also, trashing Steve Jobs doesn't help celebrate Dennis Ritchie's accomplishments, so can we drop that from the thread?

What a great post.

To keep thing going well, I hope you and your family are also getting the right amount of vitamin D and eating lots of vegetables, fruits, and beans (and some nuts, seeds, whole grains, and omega-3s and a multi-vitamin with iodine).
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/vitamin_D_recommendations.aspx
http://drfuhrman.com/disease/ChildrensHealth.aspx

Our indoor-oriented junk-food-promoting society is not that family friendly in those ways.

As Paul Graham writes:
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
"Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly."

Also related:
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Other resources:
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
"As codirector of the Albany Free School, Chris Mercogliano has had remarkable success in helping a diverse population of youngsters find their way in the world. He regrets, however, that most kids' lives are subject to some form of control from dawn until dusk. Lamenting risk-averse parents, overstructured school days, and a lack of playtime and solitude, Mercogliano argues that we are robbing our young people of "that precious, irreplaceable period in their lives that nature has set aside for exploration and innocent discovery," leaving them ill-equipped to face adulthood. The "domestication of childhood" squeezes the adventure out of kids' lives and threatens to smother the spark that animates each child with talents, dreams, and inclinations."

All the best in navigating through our family-unfriendly and child-unfriendly society. At least there are now tons of helpful resource on the internet, but it can take a lot of trouble to wade through them.