If I only had the choice between the 8 minute assault or the 3 minute assault, then sure I'd choose the 3 minute assault. I'd even donate to that assaulter's campaign. He's definitely better than the 8 minute assaulter.
Of course that's assuming that I wouldn't do better by starting a revolution. I might overthrow you both by suffering a 10 minute beating once and then never again. But if the cost of revolution is too high -- a 20 minute beating, say -- I might decide that getting it for 3 minutes every four years is the better way to go.
If you have more than one monarch, it's called an Aristocracy. Which might make sense, as America did bud off from a Monarcy. So maybe in 200 years we've only gotten as far as Oligarchy, and a new sprouting of Democracy is on the way...
'Kyklos', meaning 'cycle' in Greek, describes the course of human political systems. In the days of the ancient Greeks the Kyklos was said to take the form of Anarchy->Monarchy->Aristocracy->Oligarchy->Democracy->Anarchy. No matter where on the cycle you start, human nature takes over and tames Anarchy, corrupts Aristocrats, steals power from the Oligarchy, and dissolves Democracy back into Anarchy again.
I'm not sure the old Kyklos works in the modern day, however. It seems to me that we started with Democracy, formed an Aristocracy out of that which has now corrupted into an Oligarchy. With people losing faith in the institutions of the Oligarchy (and thanks to the internet, able to spread their dissent and doubts), we may be headed toward Anarchy now. Or the internet may allow some leader to leverage his charisma and steer us into Monarchy. Either way, Democracy is long done and people have good reasons to worry about the future of America.
Yeah, leaving lights on all the time is a waste of energy. But if you're going to have a light that's on all the time (or nearly all the time; my living room lights are on from 4-midnight every day) it's best to make them CFL.
Yes, LEDs light up right away. But they're too dim for some locations, like a front porch or a bathroom mirror. They're also outrageously expensive, so I only buy them for fixtures where they work the best.
With the various types of lightbulbs on the market these days, I put together some simple rules for buying them:
1. Lights that are left on for long periods of time -- CFLs. CFLs last a long time if they are not constantly switched on and off, and they offer the best brightness and cost effectiveness. Nightlights, and my living room and kitchen lights, are all CFLs. They have lasted for years. The nightlight in my kitchen is on 24 hours a day, and I just changed it after 5 years of constant use. The trick to making CFLs last is to never turn them off.
2. Lights that need to be turned on and off frequently -- LEDs. The lifetime of CFLs is limited by how often you switch them on and off. If you need to switch a light often but don't care if it's a little dim, put an LED there. (LEDs are dimmer than other types of lights.) My bedroom and basement/laundry lights are LEDs.
3. Lights that need to be bright and/or that need to light up right away -- Incandescents. Yes, I still have incandescents in my bathroom and on my porch. Both locations need light that is brighter than LEDs can put out, and the light needs to come on immediately which CFLs are poor at doing. If I used either LEDs or CFLs in those spots there would be times when I would be stumbling around in dim light in a dangerous area.
You make a good point! (Unlike many others in this thread.) A little bit of methane is not as big a problem as the enormous quantity of CO2 we chug out. But if the methane clathrate sinks boil off there'll be an absolutely gigantic amount of methane in the air and all bets are off.
No, a gas with a short half life for greenhouse purposes is less dangerous. Its effect is linear, while carbon dioxide's effect is cumulative. We are still suffering from the CO2 put into the atmosphere before WW1.
That's why you don't hear much discussion of water vapor as a greenhouse gas. It's a very strong one, but its lifetime in the atmosphere is about nine days. That's not long enough to generate a good-sized weather pattern, let along enough to create a long-term trend.
But atmospheric methane has a lifetime of about 10 years, because it reacts with water vapor. It's a short-term problem, but it doesn't create the long-term trends that are making climate scientists nervous. In contrast, the lifetime of atmospheric carbon dioxide is almost 100 years.
It's the long-term trends that will kill people, not the short-term blips. Methane is a short-term greenhouse gas. It is a large fraction of the problem, but the majority of the problem comes from carbon dioxide.
"Okay, students. Today we're going to 'challenge evolution'. Open your tests and follow the instructions. Be sure to use the scientific method to prove or disprove all of evolution's theories and predictions listed.
Pencils down. What was the answer -- Billy? Yes, that's right, Billy, we have challenged evolution and proven that it is true using the scientific method. Isn't that an interesting result? Well done, everyone!"
Both of those examples are in consumer products where Sony is the underdog. They are happy to use common standards and formats when they are trying to compete with a more popular product. But in the products where Sony thinks itself king -- videos and games -- they ruthlessly use proprietary technologies in an attempt to make them the standard.
That arrogance is the root cause of Sony's problem. When they're at the top they act like monopolists, but because they don't actually have a monopoly the market goes bad for them. They'd have a lot more success if they competed fairly when they have both large or small market share.
In case it matters, I have a PhD in physics, my field is nuclear physics, and I have worked with ionizing radiation a lot.
Masters' in physics here with a similar background to yours.
My point is that the statistical likelihood of damage due to radiation depends upon its flux. For the same amount of incident energy, the flux you receive across your entire body is lower than if the same energy were collimated and aimed at your skull. The same number of photons in a smaller area increases the risk in that area. So saying that a dental X-ray has the same energy as a full-body soak in low-level radiation is deceptive. The dental X-ray is over a much smaller area, has a higher incident flux, and therefore has a larger chance to cause damage in that specific region.
The only thing I would add to the correct information that the GP related from his/her professor is that in addition to the possibility of causing cancer, radiation can also make you healthier, via a well-documented effect called radiation hormesis. The usual interpretation (which is hard to test empirically) is that the radiation stimulates your cells' damage-control mechanisms. At the very low doses we're talking about, the evidence from controlled animal studies is that the net effect on your health is positive, because the hormesis effect is orders of magnitude stronger than the negative effects of the radiation.
And this makes me suspicious of your credentials, because hormesis is an effect usually only talked about by snake oil salesmen. It's not a reliable effect, and there's a good bit of argument against it existing at all. Even if it does exist it is not something you want to play with, as a very small change of dose can drive your exposure from 'beneficial' to 'really dangerous'. If you're relying on hormesis to keep you safe then you are begging for disaster.
I'm a dental student, and I have been taught that - with modern equipment - exposure to radiation from 2 bitewings is about the same as half a day of ski holiday.
These comparisons are always misleading, because they ignore the density of the radiation received. Radiation from half a day of ski holiday is diffused over your entire body. The radiation from bite wing X-rays is concentrated on your teeth and skull. The concentration matters.
Let's use a better analogy. The energy at the focal point of a magnifying glass might be one-hundredth the amount of energy you get from standing out in the sunshine. But because that energy is concentrated into a small point, it will burn your skin.
We survive nature not because it isn't powerful, but because its power is spread out. That power gets dangerous when mankind focuses and purifies it.
So what you are saying is that we had better hope that none of the world's stalkers are smart enough to write this program for themselves?
Yes.
I know, I know -- that's security through obscurity, and it's a bad idea on the net. The problem is that you only need one smart person to build such an app, and then every bad person will be able to use it. But sometimes security through obscurity is the best we can hope to get.
I have heard this argument before -- that criminals are not smart enough to write these things for themselves, that if we ban the technology then it won't be available to the bad guys, etc., etc. Let's get real: the program is not the problem, the services that teh program relies on and the fact that people are posting every detail of their lives on those services is the problem.
People need some common sense, like that it is a bad idea to parade your life around on the Internet and that "trendy" is not equivalent to "great idea."
I agree with you that putting all your info on these sites is stupid, and people should be taught not to do it. But eventually someone is going to make an app to track cell phones, or recognize and track faces from surveillance cameras, or some other automatic technology that can help stalkers find someone. Location information is findable; the only thing that makes you secure is to make it obscure, by not allowing such apps to exist.
It's a two-stage problem. I agree with you that social networking sites are one stage that needs to be fixed, but the automatic collation of available information is another problem that we will eventually have to confront.
If you're already stalking somebody then this app doesn't give you any additional information.
But if you haven't chosen a victim to stalk yet, this is the app for you. It might as well be named, 'Who do you want to stalk today?'
People putting too much info into Facebook is a problem. But collating all the available information into one easy stalker's buffet is an additional problem that we hadn't seen until now.
I think the point is that nobody cares what you believe. But if your beliefs are such that you force everyone else to censor themselves around you, then yes, you will draw ridicule. The ridicule shouldn't come from teachers but I'm not surprised that happens.
I can't think of any subject that bog-standard Christians forbid from being mentioned in public. Homosexuals, maybe? The theory that Christ was a black man? No, I've seen fundamentalists discussing that in reasonable tones. The Albigensian heresy? I've never had a public conversation about that, I might have to try some day.
But a subject as mundane as birthdays? If your religion forbids them from being mentioned then I'll happily ridicule you, and you'll deserve it.
(Note: I'm an atheist. Feel free to call me a smug atheist prick, it won't offend me.)
I think you may not appreciate the limited scale involved in destroying this planet, nor should you put all your faith in explosions.
A supervolcano explosion is two orders of magnitude greater than any nuclear explosion...but the number of nuclear bombs we have is in the range of five magnitudes. (22,000, according to Wikipedia. That's roughly equivalent to about 2.2 Toba-class supervolcanoes.) It is also significant that while supervolcanoes emit all their energy at one point on the Earth's surface, a nuclear war will distribute explosive force across the globe, clustering only around population centers.
But explosive force is not what you need to worry about. Supervolcanoes are not radioactive. They can affect the weather and bring on a little Ice Age, but nuclear weapons can do the same thing while making all the ice and all the water poisonous.
On top of that add bioweapons, chemical weapons, pollution and climate change, and yes -- I am personally certain that we have the capability to destroy ourselves. It's a miracle we haven't done it yet.
"Future post-apocalypse self travels back to fix things/warn pre-apocalypse self." is a well-worn trope.
Not in cartoons for little girls. The inclusion of that adult trope in the childrens' show was a direct result of the vocal adult fanbase.
The root problem: The MLP fanbase is so huge and prolific that after a while it becomes almost impossible to do something without someone else having done something similar first.
This will be an issue at some point. It affected the Harry Potter franchise, where the fans explored every pairing of characters, so that J.K.Rowling had to put her foot down and pair everyone off in the final book. But I trust the creators of MLP to get a few original seasons under their belt before they have a problem colliding with the fan fiction.
The question isn't whether having an interactive conversation with your fans can work to your benefit. It obviously can. The question is whether it's sustainable over the long term.
You must not have read the same article. The fans created Derpy Hooves, who eventually showed up as a character with a speaking role, and who served as a minor plot point for the episode.
Similarly the fans created DJ-Pon3, Lyra, BonBon, and Octavia While they haven't graduated to speaking characters yet, Hasbro is making toys out of some of them, and their continued appearances on the show have little details that prove the animators are paying attention. So the fans are definitely influencing characters.
As for the plot, a recent time-travel episode had Twilight Sparkle give this dialogue to herself:
Past Twi: Wow, I look terrible. Is there some kind of epic pony war in the distant future? Future Twi: Actually, I'm from next Tuesday morning.
That's a direct riff on one of the most popular fanfics, the Fallout: Equestria series. I wouldn't be surprised if that fic was the genesis of the entire episode's time-travel plot.
I'll grant you that the MLP fan base is an aberration, and there probably isn't any other show as hooked into its weird fan base as they are. But the point of the article is that the MLP model may be the future of television. The pony model might take over the entertainment world soon.
Mod parent up. This is more than a rights grab by the police. It's an information grab by whatever company is doing DNA work for the police, and who probably lobbied hard to get this law enacted.
I can't say why kids aren't learning this stuff anymore, but they're not.
My girlfriend's sons are at the ages when they're looking for their first jobs -- they're 14, 16, and 18. I asked her what programming languages they know, and she said none. They've never programmed, at all. Not even a high school course in it.
By the time I was 14 I knew Atari BASIC, LOGO, and a little Pascal. I had already authored games and applications on my Atari 400. By the time I was 18 I was designing a relational database in FORTRAN using edlin for my father's insurance business. (I told my girlfriend this and she said -- and I quote -- "But you're a genius, hon." That's why I love her.:) But her kids are just as bright as I am, IMHO.)
On the other hand, kids today know applications. All of her kids have experience with Word, Excel, and Photoshop. Maybe that's all they need.
The signs are that programming expertise is going to become a far rarer skill in the next generation, but general computer literacy will be widespread. I think maybe that's a step forward. But I worry that it's not a good pool of talent to help us take another step forward in the generation after theirs.
Not quite. If you're against ketchup you're for handgun violence -- because ketchup can be used as fake blood. If you're against fake blood, you must be for spilling real blood, thus you're for guns and death.
If you're against mustard then you're officially in favor of banning colonoscopy bags. I'll let you do your own math there.
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If I only had the choice between the 8 minute assault or the 3 minute assault, then sure I'd choose the 3 minute assault. I'd even donate to that assaulter's campaign. He's definitely better than the 8 minute assaulter.
Of course that's assuming that I wouldn't do better by starting a revolution. I might overthrow you both by suffering a 10 minute beating once and then never again. But if the cost of revolution is too high -- a 20 minute beating, say -- I might decide that getting it for 3 minutes every four years is the better way to go.
If you have more than one monarch, it's called an Aristocracy. Which might make sense, as America did bud off from a Monarcy. So maybe in 200 years we've only gotten as far as Oligarchy, and a new sprouting of Democracy is on the way...
'Kyklos', meaning 'cycle' in Greek, describes the course of human political systems. In the days of the ancient Greeks the Kyklos was said to take the form of Anarchy->Monarchy->Aristocracy->Oligarchy->Democracy->Anarchy. No matter where on the cycle you start, human nature takes over and tames Anarchy, corrupts Aristocrats, steals power from the Oligarchy, and dissolves Democracy back into Anarchy again.
I'm not sure the old Kyklos works in the modern day, however. It seems to me that we started with Democracy, formed an Aristocracy out of that which has now corrupted into an Oligarchy. With people losing faith in the institutions of the Oligarchy (and thanks to the internet, able to spread their dissent and doubts), we may be headed toward Anarchy now. Or the internet may allow some leader to leverage his charisma and steer us into Monarchy. Either way, Democracy is long done and people have good reasons to worry about the future of America.
The metric of improvement will probably be its ability to kill all humans. It's an understudied area of AI that is full of potential advances.
Yeah, leaving lights on all the time is a waste of energy. But if you're going to have a light that's on all the time (or nearly all the time; my living room lights are on from 4-midnight every day) it's best to make them CFL.
Yes, LEDs light up right away. But they're too dim for some locations, like a front porch or a bathroom mirror. They're also outrageously expensive, so I only buy them for fixtures where they work the best.
With the various types of lightbulbs on the market these days, I put together some simple rules for buying them:
1. Lights that are left on for long periods of time -- CFLs. CFLs last a long time if they are not constantly switched on and off, and they offer the best brightness and cost effectiveness. Nightlights, and my living room and kitchen lights, are all CFLs. They have lasted for years. The nightlight in my kitchen is on 24 hours a day, and I just changed it after 5 years of constant use. The trick to making CFLs last is to never turn them off.
2. Lights that need to be turned on and off frequently -- LEDs. The lifetime of CFLs is limited by how often you switch them on and off. If you need to switch a light often but don't care if it's a little dim, put an LED there. (LEDs are dimmer than other types of lights.) My bedroom and basement/laundry lights are LEDs.
3. Lights that need to be bright and/or that need to light up right away -- Incandescents. Yes, I still have incandescents in my bathroom and on my porch. Both locations need light that is brighter than LEDs can put out, and the light needs to come on immediately which CFLs are poor at doing. If I used either LEDs or CFLs in those spots there would be times when I would be stumbling around in dim light in a dangerous area.
You make a good point! (Unlike many others in this thread.) A little bit of methane is not as big a problem as the enormous quantity of CO2 we chug out. But if the methane clathrate sinks boil off there'll be an absolutely gigantic amount of methane in the air and all bets are off.
No, a gas with a short half life for greenhouse purposes is less dangerous. Its effect is linear, while carbon dioxide's effect is cumulative. We are still suffering from the CO2 put into the atmosphere before WW1.
That's why you don't hear much discussion of water vapor as a greenhouse gas. It's a very strong one, but its lifetime in the atmosphere is about nine days. That's not long enough to generate a good-sized weather pattern, let along enough to create a long-term trend.
But atmospheric methane has a lifetime of about 10 years, because it reacts with water vapor. It's a short-term problem, but it doesn't create the long-term trends that are making climate scientists nervous. In contrast, the lifetime of atmospheric carbon dioxide is almost 100 years.
It's the long-term trends that will kill people, not the short-term blips. Methane is a short-term greenhouse gas. It is a large fraction of the problem, but the majority of the problem comes from carbon dioxide.
"This is fourth-grade science, Billy. We'll cover the impossibility of verifying scientific hypotheses in fifth grade."
"Okay, students. Today we're going to 'challenge evolution'. Open your tests and follow the instructions. Be sure to use the scientific method to prove or disprove all of evolution's theories and predictions listed.
Pencils down. What was the answer -- Billy? Yes, that's right, Billy, we have challenged evolution and proven that it is true using the scientific method. Isn't that an interesting result? Well done, everyone!"
Both of those examples are in consumer products where Sony is the underdog. They are happy to use common standards and formats when they are trying to compete with a more popular product. But in the products where Sony thinks itself king -- videos and games -- they ruthlessly use proprietary technologies in an attempt to make them the standard.
That arrogance is the root cause of Sony's problem. When they're at the top they act like monopolists, but because they don't actually have a monopoly the market goes bad for them. They'd have a lot more success if they competed fairly when they have both large or small market share.
In case it matters, I have a PhD in physics, my field is nuclear physics, and I have worked with ionizing radiation a lot.
Masters' in physics here with a similar background to yours.
My point is that the statistical likelihood of damage due to radiation depends upon its flux. For the same amount of incident energy, the flux you receive across your entire body is lower than if the same energy were collimated and aimed at your skull. The same number of photons in a smaller area increases the risk in that area. So saying that a dental X-ray has the same energy as a full-body soak in low-level radiation is deceptive. The dental X-ray is over a much smaller area, has a higher incident flux, and therefore has a larger chance to cause damage in that specific region.
The only thing I would add to the correct information that the GP related from his/her professor is that in addition to the possibility of causing cancer, radiation can also make you healthier, via a well-documented effect called radiation hormesis. The usual interpretation (which is hard to test empirically) is that the radiation stimulates your cells' damage-control mechanisms. At the very low doses we're talking about, the evidence from controlled animal studies is that the net effect on your health is positive, because the hormesis effect is orders of magnitude stronger than the negative effects of the radiation.
And this makes me suspicious of your credentials, because hormesis is an effect usually only talked about by snake oil salesmen. It's not a reliable effect, and there's a good bit of argument against it existing at all. Even if it does exist it is not something you want to play with, as a very small change of dose can drive your exposure from 'beneficial' to 'really dangerous'. If you're relying on hormesis to keep you safe then you are begging for disaster.
I'm a dental student, and I have been taught that - with modern equipment - exposure to radiation from 2 bitewings is about the same as half a day of ski holiday.
These comparisons are always misleading, because they ignore the density of the radiation received. Radiation from half a day of ski holiday is diffused over your entire body. The radiation from bite wing X-rays is concentrated on your teeth and skull. The concentration matters.
Let's use a better analogy. The energy at the focal point of a magnifying glass might be one-hundredth the amount of energy you get from standing out in the sunshine. But because that energy is concentrated into a small point, it will burn your skin.
We survive nature not because it isn't powerful, but because its power is spread out. That power gets dangerous when mankind focuses and purifies it.
So what you are saying is that we had better hope that none of the world's stalkers are smart enough to write this program for themselves?
Yes.
I know, I know -- that's security through obscurity, and it's a bad idea on the net. The problem is that you only need one smart person to build such an app, and then every bad person will be able to use it. But sometimes security through obscurity is the best we can hope to get.
I have heard this argument before -- that criminals are not smart enough to write these things for themselves, that if we ban the technology then it won't be available to the bad guys, etc., etc. Let's get real: the program is not the problem, the services that teh program relies on and the fact that people are posting every detail of their lives on those services is the problem.
People need some common sense, like that it is a bad idea to parade your life around on the Internet and that "trendy" is not equivalent to "great idea."
I agree with you that putting all your info on these sites is stupid, and people should be taught not to do it. But eventually someone is going to make an app to track cell phones, or recognize and track faces from surveillance cameras, or some other automatic technology that can help stalkers find someone. Location information is findable; the only thing that makes you secure is to make it obscure, by not allowing such apps to exist.
It's a two-stage problem. I agree with you that social networking sites are one stage that needs to be fixed, but the automatic collation of available information is another problem that we will eventually have to confront.
If you're already stalking somebody then this app doesn't give you any additional information.
But if you haven't chosen a victim to stalk yet, this is the app for you. It might as well be named, 'Who do you want to stalk today?'
People putting too much info into Facebook is a problem. But collating all the available information into one easy stalker's buffet is an additional problem that we hadn't seen until now.
I think the point is that nobody cares what you believe. But if your beliefs are such that you force everyone else to censor themselves around you, then yes, you will draw ridicule. The ridicule shouldn't come from teachers but I'm not surprised that happens.
I can't think of any subject that bog-standard Christians forbid from being mentioned in public. Homosexuals, maybe? The theory that Christ was a black man? No, I've seen fundamentalists discussing that in reasonable tones. The Albigensian heresy? I've never had a public conversation about that, I might have to try some day.
But a subject as mundane as birthdays? If your religion forbids them from being mentioned then I'll happily ridicule you, and you'll deserve it.
(Note: I'm an atheist. Feel free to call me a smug atheist prick, it won't offend me.)
I think you may not appreciate the limited scale involved in destroying this planet, nor should you put all your faith in explosions.
A supervolcano explosion is two orders of magnitude greater than any nuclear explosion...but the number of nuclear bombs we have is in the range of five magnitudes. (22,000, according to Wikipedia. That's roughly equivalent to about 2.2 Toba-class supervolcanoes.) It is also significant that while supervolcanoes emit all their energy at one point on the Earth's surface, a nuclear war will distribute explosive force across the globe, clustering only around population centers.
But explosive force is not what you need to worry about. Supervolcanoes are not radioactive. They can affect the weather and bring on a little Ice Age, but nuclear weapons can do the same thing while making all the ice and all the water poisonous.
On top of that add bioweapons, chemical weapons, pollution and climate change, and yes -- I am personally certain that we have the capability to destroy ourselves. It's a miracle we haven't done it yet.
"Future post-apocalypse self travels back to fix things/warn pre-apocalypse self." is a well-worn trope.
Not in cartoons for little girls. The inclusion of that adult trope in the childrens' show was a direct result of the vocal adult fanbase.
The root problem: The MLP fanbase is so huge and prolific that after a while it becomes almost impossible to do something without someone else having done something similar first.
This will be an issue at some point. It affected the Harry Potter franchise, where the fans explored every pairing of characters, so that J.K.Rowling had to put her foot down and pair everyone off in the final book. But I trust the creators of MLP to get a few original seasons under their belt before they have a problem colliding with the fan fiction.
The question isn't whether having an interactive conversation with your fans can work to your benefit. It obviously can. The question is whether it's sustainable over the long term.
You must not have read the same article. The fans created Derpy Hooves, who eventually showed up as a character with a speaking role, and who served as a minor plot point for the episode.
Similarly the fans created DJ-Pon3, Lyra, BonBon, and Octavia While they haven't graduated to speaking characters yet, Hasbro is making toys out of some of them, and their continued appearances on the show have little details that prove the animators are paying attention. So the fans are definitely influencing characters.
As for the plot, a recent time-travel episode had Twilight Sparkle give this dialogue to herself:
Past Twi: Wow, I look terrible. Is there some kind of epic pony war in the distant future?
Future Twi: Actually, I'm from next Tuesday morning.
That's a direct riff on one of the most popular fanfics, the Fallout: Equestria series. I wouldn't be surprised if that fic was the genesis of the entire episode's time-travel plot.
I'll grant you that the MLP fan base is an aberration, and there probably isn't any other show as hooked into its weird fan base as they are. But the point of the article is that the MLP model may be the future of television. The pony model might take over the entertainment world soon.
Mod parent up. This is more than a rights grab by the police. It's an information grab by whatever company is doing DNA work for the police, and who probably lobbied hard to get this law enacted.
That doesn't sound like a tactic worth using. Surely there is a third option better than either a minor drug charge or a vicious beating.
I can't say why kids aren't learning this stuff anymore, but they're not.
My girlfriend's sons are at the ages when they're looking for their first jobs -- they're 14, 16, and 18. I asked her what programming languages they know, and she said none. They've never programmed, at all. Not even a high school course in it.
By the time I was 14 I knew Atari BASIC, LOGO, and a little Pascal. I had already authored games and applications on my Atari 400. By the time I was 18 I was designing a relational database in FORTRAN using edlin for my father's insurance business. (I told my girlfriend this and she said -- and I quote -- "But you're a genius, hon." That's why I love her. :) But her kids are just as bright as I am, IMHO.)
On the other hand, kids today know applications. All of her kids have experience with Word, Excel, and Photoshop. Maybe that's all they need.
The signs are that programming expertise is going to become a far rarer skill in the next generation, but general computer literacy will be widespread. I think maybe that's a step forward. But I worry that it's not a good pool of talent to help us take another step forward in the generation after theirs.
Not quite. If you're against ketchup you're for handgun violence -- because ketchup can be used as fake blood. If you're against fake blood, you must be for spilling real blood, thus you're for guns and death.
If you're against mustard then you're officially in favor of banning colonoscopy bags. I'll let you do your own math there.