We need to elect politicians that recognize the horrors inflicted upon incarcerated folks and their families and provide communication with family as a cheaply-provided right, not as a strange sub-contracted service provided within the silly prison economy.

One of the more surprising things I've discovered as a recent parent is how prominent tablets are as a distraction or learning tool.

I'm no exception. We bought our son a cheap, bulletproof Amazon Fire tablet, ratcheted the parental controls to the roof, and let him watch videos or play with it when he requests it (and use it as a helpful distraction when he gets bored in restaurants.)

I'm split on how to approach this. On one hand, I would have done anything to have this magical infinite learning device when I found myself bored as a child, but I also recognize that the content on it is more often than not designed for addiction. Our son is not yet old enough to understand even rough warnings of addictive behaviors, so we're kind of watch-and-waiting. We limit screen time per day, but as he gets older, and gets access to a web browser, I'm not sure how I feel about those limits in relation to traditional information sources.

I now gather that it is a collection of helpful packages constituting a framework, but distributed separately from mainline Java core packages.

Having worked on online learning applications since then, I still think that his was the best system for transferring complex knowledge in a classroom setting.

An example PDF that I found through a quick Google search: http://www.ittc.ku.edu/~jstiles/312/handouts/312_Introductio...

That metaphor is problematic in the case of the founder of a company facing charges of employee sexual harassment. At worst, let's use "sensationalist" or "disingenuous" coverage.

One of the things I've recently prioritized is the ability to run arbitrary queries (generally read-only) at some sort of REPL prompt, for debugging and investigative purposes. ORMs and their offshoots offer a great deal of support in that area because you can converse with an ORM in a domain-specific way without dropping into raw SQL. That can be a big advantage.

It approaches the pre-roll ad problems by having prominent "skip forward" and "skip backward" 30 seconds buttons, so usually two to three quick taps will bring me back to the content. It solves the speech speed problem by offering pitch-adjusted playback speed controls (so no-one sounds like a chipmunk.)

I assume those can be found in other podcast clients on other platforms, but I'm not familiar with them.