In his rage and frustration my son told me that the easiest way to solve the problems was to copy and paste the problem text in to google.
This would reliably return the general formula for solving that problem
Isn't that what physics is? Applying the right formula? I don't think much is gained by having students memorize formulas anyway. In real life you just look up general formulas on google/wikipedia/wolfram and apply them to your specific problem. I suppose it's useful to be able to derive certain formulas as a method to gain greater insight into patterns and ways of thinking, but I don't think this depth is commonly required in high school.
If it were my kid, I'd rather he knew how to google formulas and apply them to specific problems than have a bunch of formulas memorized. People naturally memorize things if they use them enough. Rather than having kids memorize specific formulas, I think it's more useful that they memorize the best way to find specific formulas (i.e. google, wolfram, etc). That's much more efficient.
I have a bunch of physics formulas memorized because I used them a lot. The ones I don't use a lot I just look up when they are needed. If I forget one, it's not a big deal. If I forget how to look up formulas (not sure how that would happen) I would be screwed.
So how do you know when to and when not to ignore warnings? You said this is a case of NK crying wolf, but at the end of the story the boy finally gets eaten. So when NK is finally serious we are going to just ignore them because the were crying wolf before?
My point is that you can never know for sure who is a real threat. All you can do is make educated guesses. It is also counterproductive to treat every remote threat as a serious threat (e.g. building bomb shelters for an NK attack, or shutting down airports for idiots joking about bombs). Instead we should be focusing our attention on objective assessment of the seriousness of threats (e.g. figuring out Japan was a serious threat, or figuring out if/when NK becomes a serious threat).
Shutting down an airport is a giant waste of time and money. We should not be doing this over some idiots comments to TSA unless there is a good reason to believe he is serious. The TSA doesn't care if they need to shut down an airport. If anything, defusing fake threats makes them seem seem more relevant, but in reality its very costly.
You can have a "CD imge" (i.e. a read only boot image) stored on an SSD, and boot a live Linux distro that way. It does all the same stuff (e.g. creating a temporary read/write union filesystem based on a readonly file system), but just way faster because it would be reading from an SSD instead of a CD.
Also if you have a lot of ram, you can load the whole OS to RAM. It takes a bit longer to load, but is ultimately faster during use. This loading process should go much faster from an SSD, but maybe you won't even need this option if you have an SSD.
I am pretty sure you can also do this with windows also, but I've never done it, so I can't give any first hand experience.
Another option would be network booting. I am not sure it would go much faster than a CD, (certainly slower than an HD or SSD) , but it might be cheaper because you wouldn't need to buy an SSD, HD, or CDROM.
North Korea is saying they are going to pre-emptively strike the USA with nuclear weapons. Why aren't we all building/hiding in bomb shelters right now?
Maybe I should create a website that has the following terms of service: "Any legislators who voted for this stupid law are forbidden from accessing this web site. If you voted for this law, you are now in violation of it and are now a criminal who belongs in jail", and then send them all links to the site to all of congress.
Our politicians are usually too stupid to realize the effects of their shitty decisions until they are subject to them.
Obviously no legislators will actually be going to jail for this, because we enforce laws subjectively (e.g. why minorities end up in jail for drug possession, while 1/2 the crowd at a DMB concert can smoke out with no problem). If only there was some way to get politicians to be subject to the bad end of subjectively enforced laws.
Yeah, yeah, it's really dumb to suggest you have a bomb at the airport. But, in reality, if a terrorist was trying to detonate a bomb at the airport or on a plane, they wouldn't tell anyone. The whole reason for the overreaction from the TSA is because they think if there really was a bomb they would look extra dumb if it turned out the terrorist told them about the bomb and they still didn't find it.
If some guy says he has a bomb, but he clearly doesn't, he's either an idiot or trying to create a distraction. By closing down the airport, you either allow his idiocy to cause real damage to the economy and inconvenience people. If he was trying to create a distraction, you allowed him to succeed.
Obviously if someone might actually be a real threat, you do what needs to be done to keep people safe. But in every single one of these cases, it seems that it could be ascertained fairly quickly that they pose no real threat even if they suggested they might. I don't mind questioning these idiots in the back for a few hours, but let everything else continue normally.
5400 rpm models use less power than 7200 models. In a notebook everything is about power usage and physical size, and I guess speed too.
I have 4TB 5400 rpm drives in my raid because my network is the bottleneck for speed anyway, and the cooler the drives run, the better (there is 5 of them).
What differentiates a core belief from a non-core belief? A belief that can't be changed? A belief that is not based on any other beliefs?
What if a Nazi has a core belief that Aryans are superior? Would we be bigots for thinking less of him for his core beliefs?
I see no reason to put *any* beliefs in the the "what we are" category. We are free to change our beliefs in a way that we are not free to change our gender, sexual orientation or ethnicity.
Actually the big bang theory says nothing about anything coming from nothing. It just states that everything in the universe was in a very dense state at some calculable point in the past. It makes no claims about whether or not that stuff existed before the big bang.
All current scientific theories break down (i.e. don't apply) at the moment of the big bang. If a hypothesis like M-"theory" pans out, then maybe we will finally have a scientific theory that explains the universe in a way that includes the big bang, rather than just everything after the big bang.
What about pulling out the old Flying Spaghetti Monster? That seems to me to be the best tool in combating these sorts of claims. You can explain to people about the rules of provability until you're blue in face or you can ask them to disprove FSM. Both arguments get you to the same result, but FSM gets you there quicker in true "reductio ad absurdum/proof by contradiction" fashion that is easier for the masses to digest.
*The* book of genesis is not a physical artifact, and therefore *can't* be in a museum. Various historical physical manifestations of this book can and should be in museums, but *the* book of genesis is an idea not a thing.
The only reason to preserve it would be the same reason to preserve any idea. "Why not." If for some reason we could not save every idea (e.g. we ran out of harddrive space in the world) and some ideas had to be sacrificed, I would definitely sacrifice the Bible before a sacrificing single scientific breakthrough or even any really good novel.
and as two opposite things can not both be true, it is by definition wrong
According to what authority? The law of noncontradiction? What proof is there that this logical axiom is true? None, by definition of a logical axiom, it has no proof
God on the other hand, by definition is all powerful and inerrant. The Bible is his literal word, and also by definition inerrant. The inerrancy of God takes precedence over some insignificant proofless logical axiom, which you foolishly assumed everyone would agree to.
You're gonna have to do better than that to get $10000 from this guy. I suggest stealing it from him.
I suppose you'd have to accurately define "thinking less of someone". Is it possible to think less of someone without being a bigot? Under what situations?
I think Christians believe in things that are obviously wrong. They are either willfully ignorant or just stupid. That said, I don't think any less of them.
Does the above statement even make sense?
I could have said something that was a bit more respectful (e.g. leaving out the pat about ignorance and stupidity), but I'd still be thinking it. Are we not allowed to believe anyone is stupid (i.e. that everyone is of equal intelligence lest we be labelled a bigot?
I think the OP wants to have the data encrypted so that in the event he inadvertently captures video that could implicate himself in a crime (e.g. speeding, running a red light, etc), that this information can only be unencrypted and accessed with his consent if the data is confiscated.
I think the best solution (although I am not sure if this product exists), is an SD card that has hardware encryption built in to it. This would be ideal because it wouldn't require the camcorder to know anything about the encryption and you could use any camcorder. Also, the process for decrypting is the same regardless of which OS it is interfacing with (camcorder or desktop). This might be something like an Ironkey, but with a different way to enter the decryption key. Since there "OS" on the camcorder is probably can't run 3rd party applications, you'd need to enter the key from you would need some physical way to start and terminate an authenticated session like a removable dongle with an LCD and buttons.
I could not find anything like this after a quick google search, but no doubt, such an "invention" is already patented by someone or something even though it is completely obvious and I just thought of it in less than a minute.
The reason that there isn't encryption in camcorders is not because of authoritarian governments Encryption is not illegal, Camcorders are not illegal. There is no reason that a company could not make such a device and sell it in the western world.
In fact, COTS encrypted USB thumb drives are used by defense contractors to encrypt sensitive data all the time.
The reason that there isn't encryption in camcorders is because it would be more expensive and there isn't a large demand for such a device. It is precisely a niche market.
You can already record digital video and simply move it to an encrypted storage device, and delete the original data. The amount of people who need this data to never exist in an unencrypted state, not even a few minutes or hours is very small (i.e. a niche market).
Everyone just breaks these sorts of rules whenever they feel like. It just provides an excuse to attack other countries shrouded in contrived legitimacy. If we want to attack a country for hacking into a dam we'll do it. If other countries want to be mad at us or even retaliate, they will do that. Pretending that we are just following some coherent rules is a joke, and this should be transparent to everyone.
Here is how this works:
1. We do what we want. This is the most important part. Example countries like Axistan are there for our benefit.
2. We invent rules giving us justification for attacking other countries and removing justification from other countries to attack us. Example A: Axistan is bad because they cyber attacked our hospitals and dams. We need to destroy them. Example B: Axistan attacked us for cyber attacking them, but since we attacked just about everything except their hospitals and dams, their retaliation was unjust and therefore they are the initial aggressors and now we must destroy them.
3. We pretend these rules are fair and implicitly agreed to by all other countries. Any country that would not agree to these terms is surely an evil country that gets what's coming to them anyway. So even though Axistan never agreed to this rule, we can still punish them for violating it.
4. When it doesn't work out the way we expected, and we need to break our own rules, that's ok because we still have all the guns, and the American people have a short memory. Oops it turns out we needed to cyber attack one of Axistan's dams. That's fine we'll just invent some reason why it was justified. You mean Axistan somehow managed to cyber attack us without hitting any hospitals or dams? Well lets just invent some reason why it actually broke our rules and lets attack them anyway.
All of this political bullshit is designed to trick a gullible American public that those in charge are righteous in our actions. I think this is giving far too much credit to the average American's ability to think critically. We can skip most of this show and dance. It would be less insulting to the intelligence of all involved if we just said "We're taking your stuff because we want to and we are bigger."
In a lot of ways we never really evolved past the politics of the playground. We just wear suits and use expendable high school kids with m-16s and m-1 tanks to pick on the other kids. We are a bully. But that's the way the world is. There are no adults to make us play nice or punish us. We're all bullies or victims or both. It's lord of the flies on a macro scale.
'But Twitter could have swarmed journalists with instant analysis about the obvious shortcoming. That kind of accurate, instant analysis of Powell's presentation was posted on blogs but ignored by a mainstream media enthralled by the White House's march to war.'
Why would "journalists" be able to ignore blogs but not twitter? Journalists even now can choose not to have a twitter account and ignore twitter just fine. Aside form this, journalists aren't supposed to be weather vanes, they are supposed to be journalists. They should be investigating claims made by spokespeople and questioning them without the public forcing them to.
I think this idea that twitter could have caused journalists to question the rush to war is completely the wrong way to look at the situation. The right way to look at it is this:"
Twitter could have maybe exposed to the voters the fact that people in the MSM are not journalists at all, but merely unwitting cogs in a propaganda machine. I am assuming most of the self serving politicians that voted for the war would have thought twice had their jobs been on the line.
The goal shouldn't be to make the MSM better through social media. The goal should be making the MSM obselete by using social media to help people realize that there are more and better sources of "news" than traditional television channels and news programs.
While I loathe the idea that many people might choose one channel of information over another based on whether it can be consumed from the couch rather than a desk, it won't matter because soon general purpose computers attached to televisions providing content rather than simple cable boxes will be ubiquitous.
If you get big enough, governments all over the world will expect kickbacks as the cost of doing business in their country. This happens in every country including the United States. The difference between the US and China is that our government spends a lot of time and effort dressing up bribes in the form of legislation and enforcement, while China doesn't see the point on providing anything but the most shallow cover for such activities.
If you are not prepared to play ball with lining the pockets of the local government officials, be prepared to have all kinds of regulations and fines passed against you while your competitors are given subsidies and tax exemptions.
I realize the kid is 12, and my intention wasn't to belittle his desire to learn to program. I love programming and I think it's great when a kid wants to learn how to do it. My purpose was to attempt to demystify how it is possible that a 12 year old kid can produce an iphone and android app in 12 weeks (something which can take teams of professional programmers funded by millions of dollars months or even years to accomplish depending on the app). I am sure he's a bright kid, but this isn't completely ridiculous, like a 12 year old kid becoming a nuclear physicist or brain surgeon.
You make apps with little to no substance. This app sounds like it would take me an hour to write. I'll bet you could find a instructional app like this as an example of how to play multimedia files in an application on w3schools.
This app is basically just the software incarnation of a lame joke based on a tired premise.
Normally I would assume the father did 100% of the work, but thought it would be cute if the kid got all the credit. If the kids didn't admit to his dad helping, I might be tempted to believe that it was exactly the level of app I would expect from a 12 year old kid.
Hard as it may be to believe, people in general are getting smarter. It's not that people are smart, it's that they used to be even more stupid in the past. Also the stupidity of people used to be limited to their neighborhood before the ubiquity of internet access.
It only takes a few smart people to keep society going. It defies intuition, but it is demonstrated in real life on a daily basis.
Slashdot Mirror
Math is about simplification, but simplicity is subjective.
1/2 is simpler than 2/4, but not if you have something like this: 2/4 * a + 3/4 * b + 1/4 * c
maybe all this would be simpler as: (2a + 3b + c)/ 4 or maybe not it depends on the application...
In his rage and frustration my son told me that the easiest way to solve the problems was to copy and paste the problem text in to google. This would reliably return the general formula for solving that problem
Isn't that what physics is? Applying the right formula? I don't think much is gained by having students memorize formulas anyway. In real life you just look up general formulas on google/wikipedia/wolfram and apply them to your specific problem. I suppose it's useful to be able to derive certain formulas as a method to gain greater insight into patterns and ways of thinking, but I don't think this depth is commonly required in high school.
If it were my kid, I'd rather he knew how to google formulas and apply them to specific problems than have a bunch of formulas memorized. People naturally memorize things if they use them enough. Rather than having kids memorize specific formulas, I think it's more useful that they memorize the best way to find specific formulas (i.e. google, wolfram, etc). That's much more efficient.
I have a bunch of physics formulas memorized because I used them a lot. The ones I don't use a lot I just look up when they are needed. If I forget one, it's not a big deal. If I forget how to look up formulas (not sure how that would happen) I would be screwed.
So how do you know when to and when not to ignore warnings? You said this is a case of NK crying wolf, but at the end of the story the boy finally gets eaten. So when NK is finally serious we are going to just ignore them because the were crying wolf before?
My point is that you can never know for sure who is a real threat. All you can do is make educated guesses. It is also counterproductive to treat every remote threat as a serious threat (e.g. building bomb shelters for an NK attack, or shutting down airports for idiots joking about bombs). Instead we should be focusing our attention on objective assessment of the seriousness of threats (e.g. figuring out Japan was a serious threat, or figuring out if/when NK becomes a serious threat).
Shutting down an airport is a giant waste of time and money. We should not be doing this over some idiots comments to TSA unless there is a good reason to believe he is serious. The TSA doesn't care if they need to shut down an airport. If anything, defusing fake threats makes them seem seem more relevant, but in reality its very costly.
You can have a "CD imge" (i.e. a read only boot image) stored on an SSD, and boot a live Linux distro that way. It does all the same stuff (e.g. creating a temporary read/write union filesystem based on a readonly file system), but just way faster because it would be reading from an SSD instead of a CD.
Also if you have a lot of ram, you can load the whole OS to RAM. It takes a bit longer to load, but is ultimately faster during use. This loading process should go much faster from an SSD, but maybe you won't even need this option if you have an SSD.
I am pretty sure you can also do this with windows also, but I've never done it, so I can't give any first hand experience.
Another option would be network booting. I am not sure it would go much faster than a CD, (certainly slower than an HD or SSD) , but it might be cheaper because you wouldn't need to buy an SSD, HD, or CDROM.
Only law enforcement can be guilty of entrapment.
North Korea is saying they are going to pre-emptively strike the USA with nuclear weapons. Why aren't we all building/hiding in bomb shelters right now?
Maybe I should create a website that has the following terms of service: "Any legislators who voted for this stupid law are forbidden from accessing this web site. If you voted for this law, you are now in violation of it and are now a criminal who belongs in jail", and then send them all links to the site to all of congress.
Our politicians are usually too stupid to realize the effects of their shitty decisions until they are subject to them.
Obviously no legislators will actually be going to jail for this, because we enforce laws subjectively (e.g. why minorities end up in jail for drug possession, while 1/2 the crowd at a DMB concert can smoke out with no problem). If only there was some way to get politicians to be subject to the bad end of subjectively enforced laws.
Yeah, yeah, it's really dumb to suggest you have a bomb at the airport. But, in reality, if a terrorist was trying to detonate a bomb at the airport or on a plane, they wouldn't tell anyone. The whole reason for the overreaction from the TSA is because they think if there really was a bomb they would look extra dumb if it turned out the terrorist told them about the bomb and they still didn't find it.
If some guy says he has a bomb, but he clearly doesn't, he's either an idiot or trying to create a distraction. By closing down the airport, you either allow his idiocy to cause real damage to the economy and inconvenience people. If he was trying to create a distraction, you allowed him to succeed.
Obviously if someone might actually be a real threat, you do what needs to be done to keep people safe. But in every single one of these cases, it seems that it could be ascertained fairly quickly that they pose no real threat even if they suggested they might. I don't mind questioning these idiots in the back for a few hours, but let everything else continue normally.
5400 rpm models use less power than 7200 models. In a notebook everything is about power usage and physical size, and I guess speed too.
I have 4TB 5400 rpm drives in my raid because my network is the bottleneck for speed anyway, and the cooler the drives run, the better (there is 5 of them).
What differentiates a core belief from a non-core belief? A belief that can't be changed? A belief that is not based on any other beliefs?
What if a Nazi has a core belief that Aryans are superior? Would we be bigots for thinking less of him for his core beliefs?
I see no reason to put *any* beliefs in the the "what we are" category. We are free to change our beliefs in a way that we are not free to change our gender, sexual orientation or ethnicity.
Actually the big bang theory says nothing about anything coming from nothing. It just states that everything in the universe was in a very dense state at some calculable point in the past. It makes no claims about whether or not that stuff existed before the big bang.
All current scientific theories break down (i.e. don't apply) at the moment of the big bang. If a hypothesis like M-"theory" pans out, then maybe we will finally have a scientific theory that explains the universe in a way that includes the big bang, rather than just everything after the big bang.
What about pulling out the old Flying Spaghetti Monster? That seems to me to be the best tool in combating these sorts of claims. You can explain to people about the rules of provability until you're blue in face or you can ask them to disprove FSM. Both arguments get you to the same result, but FSM gets you there quicker in true "reductio ad absurdum/proof by contradiction" fashion that is easier for the masses to digest.
*The* book of genesis is not a physical artifact, and therefore *can't* be in a museum. Various historical physical manifestations of this book can and should be in museums, but *the* book of genesis is an idea not a thing.
The only reason to preserve it would be the same reason to preserve any idea. "Why not." If for some reason we could not save every idea (e.g. we ran out of harddrive space in the world) and some ideas had to be sacrificed, I would definitely sacrifice the Bible before a sacrificing single scientific breakthrough or even any really good novel.
and as two opposite things can not both be true, it is by definition wrong
According to what authority? The law of noncontradiction? What proof is there that this logical axiom is true? None, by definition of a logical axiom, it has no proof
God on the other hand, by definition is all powerful and inerrant. The Bible is his literal word, and also by definition inerrant. The inerrancy of God takes precedence over some insignificant proofless logical axiom, which you foolishly assumed everyone would agree to.
You're gonna have to do better than that to get $10000 from this guy. I suggest stealing it from him.
I think Christians believe in things that are obviously wrong. They are either willfully ignorant or just stupid. That said, I don't think any less of them.
Does the above statement even make sense?
I could have said something that was a bit more respectful (e.g. leaving out the pat about ignorance and stupidity), but I'd still be thinking it. Are we not allowed to believe anyone is stupid (i.e. that everyone is of equal intelligence lest we be labelled a bigot?
I think the OP wants to have the data encrypted so that in the event he inadvertently captures video that could implicate himself in a crime (e.g. speeding, running a red light, etc), that this information can only be unencrypted and accessed with his consent if the data is confiscated.
I think the best solution (although I am not sure if this product exists), is an SD card that has hardware encryption built in to it. This would be ideal because it wouldn't require the camcorder to know anything about the encryption and you could use any camcorder. Also, the process for decrypting is the same regardless of which OS it is interfacing with (camcorder or desktop). This might be something like an Ironkey, but with a different way to enter the decryption key. Since there "OS" on the camcorder is probably can't run 3rd party applications, you'd need to enter the key from you would need some physical way to start and terminate an authenticated session like a removable dongle with an LCD and buttons.
I could not find anything like this after a quick google search, but no doubt, such an "invention" is already patented by someone or something even though it is completely obvious and I just thought of it in less than a minute.
The reason that there isn't encryption in camcorders is not because of authoritarian governments Encryption is not illegal, Camcorders are not illegal. There is no reason that a company could not make such a device and sell it in the western world. In fact, COTS encrypted USB thumb drives are used by defense contractors to encrypt sensitive data all the time.
The reason that there isn't encryption in camcorders is because it would be more expensive and there isn't a large demand for such a device. It is precisely a niche market.
You can already record digital video and simply move it to an encrypted storage device, and delete the original data. The amount of people who need this data to never exist in an unencrypted state, not even a few minutes or hours is very small (i.e. a niche market).
"The ATF doesn't yet consider them as much of a concern."
Translation: There is literally nothing they can do about it.
Everyone just breaks these sorts of rules whenever they feel like. It just provides an excuse to attack other countries shrouded in contrived legitimacy. If we want to attack a country for hacking into a dam we'll do it. If other countries want to be mad at us or even retaliate, they will do that. Pretending that we are just following some coherent rules is a joke, and this should be transparent to everyone.
Here is how this works:
1. We do what we want. This is the most important part. Example countries like Axistan are there for our benefit.
2. We invent rules giving us justification for attacking other countries and removing justification from other countries to attack us. Example A: Axistan is bad because they cyber attacked our hospitals and dams. We need to destroy them. Example B: Axistan attacked us for cyber attacking them, but since we attacked just about everything except their hospitals and dams, their retaliation was unjust and therefore they are the initial aggressors and now we must destroy them.
3. We pretend these rules are fair and implicitly agreed to by all other countries. Any country that would not agree to these terms is surely an evil country that gets what's coming to them anyway. So even though Axistan never agreed to this rule, we can still punish them for violating it.
4. When it doesn't work out the way we expected, and we need to break our own rules, that's ok because we still have all the guns, and the American people have a short memory. Oops it turns out we needed to cyber attack one of Axistan's dams. That's fine we'll just invent some reason why it was justified. You mean Axistan somehow managed to cyber attack us without hitting any hospitals or dams? Well lets just invent some reason why it actually broke our rules and lets attack them anyway.
All of this political bullshit is designed to trick a gullible American public that those in charge are righteous in our actions. I think this is giving far too much credit to the average American's ability to think critically. We can skip most of this show and dance. It would be less insulting to the intelligence of all involved if we just said "We're taking your stuff because we want to and we are bigger."
In a lot of ways we never really evolved past the politics of the playground. We just wear suits and use expendable high school kids with m-16s and m-1 tanks to pick on the other kids. We are a bully. But that's the way the world is. There are no adults to make us play nice or punish us. We're all bullies or victims or both. It's lord of the flies on a macro scale.
Why would "journalists" be able to ignore blogs but not twitter? Journalists even now can choose not to have a twitter account and ignore twitter just fine. Aside form this, journalists aren't supposed to be weather vanes, they are supposed to be journalists. They should be investigating claims made by spokespeople and questioning them without the public forcing them to.
I think this idea that twitter could have caused journalists to question the rush to war is completely the wrong way to look at the situation. The right way to look at it is this:"
Twitter could have maybe exposed to the voters the fact that people in the MSM are not journalists at all, but merely unwitting cogs in a propaganda machine. I am assuming most of the self serving politicians that voted for the war would have thought twice had their jobs been on the line.
The goal shouldn't be to make the MSM better through social media. The goal should be making the MSM obselete by using social media to help people realize that there are more and better sources of "news" than traditional television channels and news programs.
While I loathe the idea that many people might choose one channel of information over another based on whether it can be consumed from the couch rather than a desk, it won't matter because soon general purpose computers attached to televisions providing content rather than simple cable boxes will be ubiquitous.
If you get big enough, governments all over the world will expect kickbacks as the cost of doing business in their country. This happens in every country including the United States. The difference between the US and China is that our government spends a lot of time and effort dressing up bribes in the form of legislation and enforcement, while China doesn't see the point on providing anything but the most shallow cover for such activities.
If you are not prepared to play ball with lining the pockets of the local government officials, be prepared to have all kinds of regulations and fines passed against you while your competitors are given subsidies and tax exemptions.
I realize the kid is 12, and my intention wasn't to belittle his desire to learn to program. I love programming and I think it's great when a kid wants to learn how to do it. My purpose was to attempt to demystify how it is possible that a 12 year old kid can produce an iphone and android app in 12 weeks (something which can take teams of professional programmers funded by millions of dollars months or even years to accomplish depending on the app). I am sure he's a bright kid, but this isn't completely ridiculous, like a 12 year old kid becoming a nuclear physicist or brain surgeon.
You make apps with little to no substance. This app sounds like it would take me an hour to write. I'll bet you could find a instructional app like this as an example of how to play multimedia files in an application on w3schools.
This app is basically just the software incarnation of a lame joke based on a tired premise.
Normally I would assume the father did 100% of the work, but thought it would be cute if the kid got all the credit. If the kids didn't admit to his dad helping, I might be tempted to believe that it was exactly the level of app I would expect from a 12 year old kid.
Hard as it may be to believe, people in general are getting smarter. It's not that people are smart, it's that they used to be even more stupid in the past. Also the stupidity of people used to be limited to their neighborhood before the ubiquity of internet access.
It only takes a few smart people to keep society going. It defies intuition, but it is demonstrated in real life on a daily basis.
"I want a divorce, and I am taking the kid(s) that didn't invent this stupid app. You can have Ethan."