AdamSmith

Well, there is some mixing of apples and oranges going on by those vendors. Those particular apps will still download and execute on your PC. With Adobe (don't know the particulars of Office in the cloud), the cloud is simply where the data will sync for all your devices -- PC, tablet, smartphone. What they are really doing of course is getting you on subscription. Smaller up-front payment than buying a perpetual license, but with annual renewal required at same rate, or higher whenever they decide to raise prices. Subscription models can make software companies a lot more money over time. Some high-end engineering software companies that made the transition have proven that (pioneered in that segment by Synopsys, Inc.; more recently Bentley Systems, Inc. and others). However there is a lot of debate now on Wall St. over whether Adobe cut off perpetual-license sales too soon. Especially with proliferation of cheaper and even free knock-off work-alike apps. Time will tell. As for the cloud proper, I love it. My most valuable business assets are my customer lists and contact lists, which for 10 years now I have entrusted to Salesforce.com, where they live entirely on the Salesforce servers, accessed by me with no local software other than any web browser. I could drop my laptop over the side of the Nantucket ferry with no effect on those lists, a situation I fervently wish for all my data and apps. Oh for the day.

Of course -- to catch those two shits I mentioned.

If I'm still around -- and dancing! -- at 105, I could give two shits what I look like.

Likewise. One of my favorite possessions is an autographed photo of him adjusting one of his monster models.

Haw! The whores make the story. Last time around, when I posted that story with attribution to Senator Sam but without the whores, you corrected me.

105-Year-Old Texas Woman Reveals Bacon as her Secret behind Long Life Staff Reporter First Posted: May 08, 2013 07:35 AM EDT A 105 year old Texas woman has earned a place in almost all headlines by revealing the most unlikely secret to her long life. (Photo : Youtube) Strangely, her key to longevity is bacon. Yes, you read it right; 105-year-old Pearl Cantrell loves to eat bacon and feasts on it almost every day. Her story, for sure, will be a subject of research for most health scientists. Pearl Cantrell, who's mostly referred to as the '105-year-old bacon woman', said in an interview with a local NBC station, "I love bacon and I eat it everyday. I don't feel as old as I am, that's all I can say." Resident of Central Texas, Cantrell, a mother of seven, has outlived three of her kids, as well as her husband. Her recent 105th birthday bash was a three-day affair that included more than 200 guests. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=WxamQBCwfWM Reports according to KRBC state that Cantrell's love for bacon grabbed the attention of the American meat and cold cut production company Oscar Mayer. A representative of the company was present at Cantrell's birthday. The spokesman reached her home in a Wienermobile and gave the 'bacon woman' a ride in the hot dog-shaped truck, gifting her tons of bacon, with more to come in the future. "We've seen a lot of stories on the road, but nothing quite like this one, so we're excited to be here," Abraham Luna, one of the representatives, told KRBC, of the 105-year-old bacon woman. "Pearl is an inspiration for the community, and her friends and family, so we had to make a special stop here for her today." Cantrell's daughter Anno says that her mother taught them to work hard and think about living everyday they woke up. She never spoke about dying. She is very active and still loves to dance. This story comes as a challenge to the latest study conducted by the University of Zurich, which clearly states that eating too much bacon elevates the risk for bowel cancer. http://www.scienceworldreport.com/articles/6715/20130508/105-year-old-texas-woman-reveals-bacon-secret-behi-long.htm

Another nice tribute... The animated life of Ray Harryhausen Horatia Harrod on the fantastical worlds of the legendary stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen, who has died at the age of 92. Image 1 of 4 Ray Harryhausen looks at the original models from his 1963 film 'Jason And The Argonauts' Photo: Getty Images By Horatia Harrod 11:08AM BST 08 May 2013 Ray Harryhausen and I came of age, cinematically, 60 years apart. Harryhausen had his epiphany at the age of 13, when his aunt, a nurse, was given tickets by a man she was caring for to "a movie about a gorilla". It was a day Harryhausen would never forget: at Grauman's Chinese Theatre, one of Hollywood's most extravagant movie palaces, creeping ferns decorated the cinema's forecourt, and live flamingos stalked the foyer. But more than all that, it was the night Harryhausen met King Kong, and discovered the extraordinary, painstaking art - stop-motion animation - that would dominate the rest of his life. "I find it all rather difficult to believe," he later wrote, "that in one afternoon a film about a giant gorilla had the influence to alter the direction of my entire life." Harryhausen had watched King Kong doing battle with plesiosaurs, pteranodons and pterodactyls, brought to life by Willis O'Brien, the greatest of early stop-motion animators. One of Harryhausen's lifelong friends was the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, who remembered the two of them making a pact: “We said, ‘We’re going to grow old but never grow up. We’re going to stay 18 years old and we’re going to love dinosaurs forever.’ ” I grew up in a different age, but had the same craving for fantasy, for other worlds. For me, dinosaurs loomed large too, but it was Jurassic Park that was the touchstone. Steven Spielberg, that film's director, and George Lucas and James Cameron, later pioneers of special effects, were all Harryhausen's heirs. All acknowledged their debt to him. "The first time I dabbled in clay," said Spielberg, "was to try and recreate some of the amazing characters that Ray created for those breakthrough pictures." The first of Harryhausen's films I saw was Jason and the Argonauts (1963), almost certainly on television, where his films have had a long afterlife. It was the skeletons that stayed with me, grinning evilly as they did battle with swords and shields; later, I watched The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), with , and his Fifties films, with paranoid B-movie titles like It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955) and (1956).http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=IXmRuJByoVs Related Articles Ray Harryhausen 07 May 2013 Nick Park's tribute to Ray Harryhausen 19 Apr 2010 Film-makers on film 22 Nov 2003 I met Harryhausen in 2010, in the grand Holland Park house in which he lived with his wife, Diana, a descendant of the explorer Dr Livingstone. We had spoken on the phone to make the appointment, and he'd seemed gruff, forbidding. He was a strikingly powerful looking man, even at the age of 89, but when we sat and talked and drank tea, there was a delicacy to his movements, and a stillness that I attributed to his long years of animating delicate creatures by hand. Harryhausen had been, he said, a "loner": "I preferred to work alone so I wouldn’t be talked out of doing certain things." When Harryhausen began, there weren’t any guides to stop-motion animation, so Harryhausen had to work out how to do it by himself. He got his father, a machinist, to make the metal endoskeletons and armatures for his creations, which he then covered in latex. His mother sewed the costumes. Later, he would cook his models in the oven, to the dismay of his wife. Somewhere in the house were his legendary monsters. He had tried to hang on to as many as he could, but was powerless to stop the rubber models from disintegrating. As he said at the time, "rubber is like humans: it’s fine material, but it will rot!" I don't think it's fanciful to say that Harryhausen's creations had heart. CGI animations are, beneath the surface, lines of code; Harryhausen's creations, brought to life second-by-second by hand, have the breath of life. They weren't realistic, but inhabited some other realm, of magic, perhaps. "Fantasy is a strange thing," he told me. "If you try to make it too real, you lose the effect of fantasy. So there’s a very strange line of demarcation there." It wasn't a surprise that Harryhausen was less than enthusiastic about modern movie-making, although he spoke fondly of Peter Jackson's Weta Workshop, and the artistry of Industrial Light and Magic. He had worked to tight budgets, planning each shot with an almost neurotic degree of precision. "Just by moving the camera to a certain level, you could save thousands of pounds," he said. "They don’t seem to care today. They spend $200 million on pictures, which is just pathetic!" Harryhausen's final film, the original (1981), starring Maggie Smith and Laurence Olivier alongside some of his most ambitious creations, was given a vicious review by Variety. Harryhausen was disillusioned; he quit the movies because he'd "had enough of darkened rooms." He had, he said, lost his drive. His animating spirit will live on all the same.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/10043240/The-animated-life-of-Ray-Harryhausen.html

Brilliant. Or, rather: Fascinating!

One of the greatest of the greats... Visual Effects Pioneer Ray Harryhausen Dies at 92By Duane Byrge | The Hollywood Reporter – 17 hours ago Visual effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen (Photo: Everett Collection) Animation effects wizard Ray Harryhausen, who pioneered many of the stop-motion techniques that have become today's industry standards, has died at 92. Revered for his cutting-edge effects work in the '50s and '60s on such fantasy classics as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts, Harryhausen developed the technique of projecting footage from the front and rear, one frame at a time. He dubbed the technique “Dynamation.” Ray Harryhausen's work in 'Jason and the Argonauts' Utilizing his Dynamation process, Harryhausen brought to life both mythological figures and pre-historical creatures in such films as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts where he created the famous skeleton swordfight. He created extra-terrestrials in such entertainments as Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and Twenty Millions Miles to Earth. In 1992, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences presented Harryhausen with ah honorary Oscar, a tribute to his visual magic. He was presented with the Gordon E. Sawyer Award, an Oscar statuette, given to an individual “whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry.” In those early years, he performed his stop-motion techniques on very low-budgeted projects. His effects created spectacular havoc in such disaster films as The Best from 20,000 Fathoms and It Came from Beneath the Sea. He re-created dinosaurs in One Million Years B.C. During the '70s, he created cutting-edge special effects for three films: Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger and Clash of the Titans. “They were considered B pictures because they were made on a budget. But we outlived many of the A pictures made at the same time,” he once noted. More recently, he produced MGM's Clash of the Titans (1981), which starred Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, Claire Bloom and Ursula Andress. Harryhausen considered his specialty to be creating “fantasy creatures,” where he would insert the monsters believably in the same frame as actual actors. “I don't do monsters you know. Monsters are associated with horror. I'm not interested in horror…I don't' want to deceive or frighten. I want to create illusions, fantasies, legends,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1981. Harryhausen inspired a cult following and was the subject of a 1986 documentary, Aliens, Dragons, Monsters and Me, directed by Richard Jones. Other films included: Valley of the Gwangi, 20,000 Miles to Earth, First Men in the Moon, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, Mysterious Island, Animal World and The Valley - Time Forgot. Of today's films and special-effects propelled plot lines, he was less than enthusiastic: “Now you have to sit through two hours of people dying…Today, everything's so graphic it's rather unnerving.” Ray Harryhausen was born June 19, 1920 in Los Angeles. As a child, he saw King Kong and was dazzled by the special effects, becoming as, he said, a "King Kong addict.” He was inspired by King Kong effects guru Willis O'Brien. As a child, Harryhausen paid a visit to O'Brien's home, showing him some amateur creatures he had created. Also,while in high school, Harryhausen joined a sci-fi club and met up with two enthusiasts who would become lifelong friends: Ray Bradbury and Forrest J. Ackerman. He was an avid photographer and attended Los Angeles City College where he studied photography and sculpture. He went on to USC, he where studied drama and art direction. After graduation from USC, he worked on George Pal's animated Puppetooons. He entered the service during World War II. After being discharged, Harryhausen began his movie career in 1949 with Mighty Joe Young, where his boyhood hero, Willis O'Brien,” was chief technician. In 1953, he was hired by Warner Bros. to be in charge of special effects for Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, where he implemented his split-screen technique to insert dinosaurs and other awesome creatures into the story backgrounds. He next worked on three science fiction films at Columbia, including The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, a documentary which was highlighted by his monsters interacting with the stars and buttressed by Bernard Herrmann's tempestuous score. In 1981, Harryhausen was honored with an exhibition and retrospective over an entire month by New York's Museum of Modern Art. He was later paid tribute by the American Cinematheque. In 2006, Harryhausen was honored with a retrospective of his works at the historic Byrd Theater in Richmond,Virginia. He was married to Diana Livingstone Bruce. http://movies.yahoo.com/news/visual-effects-pioneer-ray-harryhausen-dies-92-050000837.html

...or at least a few escorts we have bonked in common!

The insistence that each just doesn't understand the other pretty well seals it, I guess.

Agree it looks like it would feel like bonking a Fleshlight inserted into your partner.

It need not be a couple. More than one of my single friends has adopted that way. Again, if you are sincere, what are you waiting for? Some child needs you today.

Hito, if you are serious and not just being cutesy, get moving. The world is full of orphaned children who need you, and would love you as an adoptive parent.

You have me there.

Why do I feel like a foot fetish is normal but a shoe fetish is kinky?

My experiences along those lines were very similar, but with my ex's nephews and nieces. Great kids, loved them, they loved us because we were the cool adults with them; i.e., we weren't the parents.

Could be useful... Origami R.A.I Condom, For Receptive Anal Intercourse, Could Be World's First Specifically For Anal Sex (NSFW)Posted: 05/06/2013 2:43 pm EDT | Updated: 05/06/2013 2:48 pm EDT ORIGAMI Receptive Anal Intercourse Instruction from ORIGAMI Condoms on Vimeo. NOTE: The above video is graphic and may not be safe for work and other sensitive environments. A few weeks ago we introduced you to a brand new condom design that could revolutionize the way people have safer sex. Now the trend continues with another new condom prototype from Origami Condoms, the R.A.I. (Receptive Anal Intercourse) condom, which the company claims is the world's first to be specifically designed for this activity. As the instructive video above shows, the condom utilizes columns that expand and contract inside the body during intercourse. Origami's website offers two advantages to using the R.A.I. condom instead of a traditional condom: 1. Easy insertion method that positions and anchors the condom internally and 2. The tubular structure of the condom provides a natural internal liner for the penis in the internally lubricated condom. The site also states that the condom is "intended to provide a receptive partner with the initiative to use a condom without negotiation." Queerty notes that if the condoms are approved they could be in stores as soon as 2015. What do you think? Would you try it? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/06/origami-rai-condom-anal-sex_n_3224443.html

I mean as long as they STAY other people's. The point is being able to return them at the end of the day.

Sorry. As the post said, I want to leave 'em alone! Actually not true. What I do love are OPC -- Other People's Children.

Not sure I would have been much good at trapping & skinning aged 5, but nonetheless thanking my stars I grew up before every minute of a kid's day was programmed by the parents... Why parents should leave their kids aloneWhat if the best thing we could do for our children is just to leave them alone? Jay Griffiths on why modern parenting is making our children miserable Jay Griffiths The Guardian, Friday 3 May 2013 'In Europe and America alike, many kids today are effectively under house arrest.' Photograph: Joel Redman/Gallery Stock I felt as if I were an unwilling accomplice to torture. Echoes of the victim's screams rang off the varnished walls. The door, tight shut though it was, could not block the cries of panic. A baby, alone and imprisoned in a cot. The baby's mother was visibly disturbed, too, pale and tearful. She was a victim herself, preyed on by exponents of controlled crying, or Ferberisation – that pitiless system, cruel to them both. Controlled. Crying. The words speak of the odious aim: a bullying system controlling the feelings of a baby. The mother had been told the situation was the reverse, that the baby was trying to force her will on the mother, but all I could see was a one-year-old demented by abandonment. One American mother wrote poignantly on the internet: "Is Ferberisation worth my heartache or am I truly torturing my child? It seems like cruel and unusual punishment." The idea is that babies can be "taught" to stop crying by being left to cry alone. A parent will occasionally check on them, but will neither pick up nor stay with the infant. In time, the baby will learn that crying doesn't bring consolation and will cease the attempt. Parents are encouraged to schedule and limit the time they spend checking on the baby. Does the system work? Of course it does. That is hardly the question. The real issue is why would such a thing be promoted? Why would it ever be accepted? What does it reveal about modernity's priorities? And how does it suggest answers to the riddle of unhappy children? Cuddled, snuggled and tended, most infants, throughout most of history, have known the world unlonely. Among the Tojolabal-speaking Maya people of Chiapas in Mexico, children in the first two years of life are always close to their mothers, instantly appeased with toys or milk, to prevent them ever feeling unhappy. For infants under one year of age among the Aché people – forest nomads in Paraguay – most daylight time is spent in tactile contact with their mother or father, and they are never set down on the ground or left alone for more than a few seconds. In India and many other parts of the world, children may share a bed with their mother until they are five. Many parents' reasons for using controlled crying can be summed up in one word: work. Parents who want "routines" are keen on controlled crying, says Gina Ford, a famous British advocate of the system, and she comments that babies who have been forced into a routine will later adapt easily to a school routine and, one presumes, be more malleable to a workforce system. Yet whenever I have spent time in indigenous communities, I have never heard anything like the shrieks of fear and rage of the controlled-crying child. If an infant is satiated with closeness, commented the writer Jean Liedloff, then as an older child he or she will need to return to that maternal contact only in emergencies. Such an infant will grow up to be more self-reliant, not because of the scarcity of early contact (as the controlled-crying advocates argue) but precisely the opposite: from its abundance. By the age of about eight, the Aché children, who as infants were never alone, have learned how to negotiate the trails in the forests and can be fairly independent of their parents. In West Papua, I have seen how infants are held close and grow into children who are fiercely, proudly independent. When children are older, the desire for freedom seems unquenchable. I recently gave a writing workshop in Kolkata for street children who had been temporarily corralled into a school where they were clearly well looked after and, in the main, happy. They thirsted for the one thing that the school would not allow them: freedom. "They want the freedom they knew on the streets," a teacher said, "to go anywhere, any time." In spite of the troubles on the street – poverty, abuse, hunger and violence – the children "keep running away". Once out of infancy, Native American children were traditionally free to wander wherever they wanted, through woods or water. "By the time he is five, he is grown up, beaming with health… delirious with liberty," writes Roger P Buliard in Inuk, describing an Inuit boyhood. By about the age of seven, the boy handles knives and wants a rifle and a trap line, and from then on he "travels with the men, as hardy a traveller as any of them". When I spent some days reindeer herding with Sami people, I saw how the children were free not only out on the land, but indoors in the summer huts. They rummaged around for food, finding a strip of cooked reindeer meat or a freshly caught fish or a tub of biscuits, deciding what and when they would eat: a situation that averted that major source of family conflict – meal times. Autonomy over food from a very young age seems a feature of childhood in many traditional societies. The Alacaluf children of Patagonia fend for themselves early, using a shellfish spear and cooking their own food from the age of about four. Very young Inuit children may use a whip to hunt ptarmigans, lopping off their heads with a flick of the wrist. Travelling through the highlands of West Papua among the Yali people, I often saw village boys going off together, bristling with bows and arrows, to hunt birds, catch frogs and roast them in fires they would build themselves. Meanwhile, in England, an environmental play project called Wild About Play asked children what they most wanted to do outdoors, and the answer was to collect and eat wild foods, to make fires and cook on them. This is the sign of independence demonstrated by children everywhere, controlling their own food and their own bodies. It seems that modern Euro-American children have two unusual food-related experiences: first, they don't have early autonomy with respect to food; and second, they do experience eating problems. As for physical freedom, a few years ago I spent a day with children of the sea Gypsies, the Bajau people who live off Sulawesi in stilt houses set far into the water. The children were swimmers and divers, boaters and paddlers, rinsed with seawater night and day until they seemed half-human, half-otter. I asked what their childhood was like. The answer was immediate: "Children have a happy childhood because there is a lot of freedom." If happiness is a result of freedom, then surely the unhappiness of modern western children is caused in part by the fact that they are less free than any children in history. I was struck by the obvious happiness of the Bajau children: spending the whole long afternoon with about 100 of them, not one was crying, cross, unhappy or frustrated. I can't imagine spending an afternoon with 100 European or American children and not once hearing a child cry. In Europe, one country seems to have honoured the relationship between freedom and childhood happiness in a way that the sea Gypsy children would have understood: Norway. A land of lakes and fjords, a country that has enshrined in law an ancient right to canoe, row, sail and swim, to walk across all land (except private gardens and tilled fields) in a freedom known as Allemannsretten, "every man's right", the right to roam. In 1960, the American psychiatrist Herbert Hendin was studying suicide statistics in Scandinavia. Denmark (with Japan) had the world's highest suicide rate. Sweden's rate was almost as high, but what of Norway? Right at the bottom. Hendin was intrigued, particularly since the received wisdom was that Denmark, Sweden and Norway shared a similar culture. What could possibly account for such a dramatic difference? After years of research, he concluded that reasons were established in childhood. In Denmark and Sweden, children were brought up with regimentation, while in Norway they were free to roam. In Denmark and Sweden, children were pressured to achieve career goals until many felt they were failures, while in Norway they were left alone more, not so much instructed but rather simply allowed to watch and participate in their own time. Instead of a sense of failure, Norwegian children grew up with a sense of self-reliance. Danish children, the study showed, were over-protected, kept dependent on their mothers and not free to roam. For Swedish children, a common experience was that, in infancy, just when they needed closeness, what they got was separation and a sense of abandonment while, in later childhood, just when they needed freedom, what they got was far too much control. Norwegian children played outdoors for hours unsupervised by adults, and a child's freedom was "not likely to be restricted". They had more closeness than Swedish children at an early age, but then more freedom than both Danish and Swedish children at a later age, suggesting that closeness followed by freedom is likely to produce the happiest children. Unfortunately, in the decades since Hendin's work, as Norway became more centralised and urbanised, childhood altered. Norwegian children now spend more time indoors in sedentary activities, such as watching television or DVDs and playing computer games, than they do outdoors. The suicide rate is now far higher. In Europe and America alike, many kids today are effectively under house arrest, with 80% of them in the UK complaining that they have "nowhere to go". It's about four o'clock in the afternoon, you've got a couple of quid in your pocket but not a lot more. You've knocked off for the day and you'd like to be with your mates. The cheap cafes will be closed in an hour, you can't afford restaurants and you are not allowed in "public" houses. You tell everyone who will listen that you don't want to cause trouble – you'd just like somewhere that is dry, well lit and safe, where you can hang out and chat. So you go to bus shelters and car parks and the brightly lit areas outside corner shops. And then you are driven off as if you were vermin. The UK seems to be leading the way in how not to treat children. A plan to erect a netball hoop on a village green in Oxfordshire was blocked "because residents didn't want to attract children". In west Somerset, an eight-year-old girl was stopped from cycling down her street because a neighbour complained that the wheels squeaked. In one survey, two-thirds of children said they liked playing outside every day, mainly to be with friends, but 80% of them have been told off for playing outdoors, 50% have been shouted at for playing outside and 25% of 11- to 16-year-olds have been threatened with violence by adults for… for what? For playing outdoors, making a noise, being a nuisance. Saddest of all, it works. One in three of the children said that being told off for playing outside does stop them doing it. If there is one word that sums up the treatment of children today, it is enclosure. Today's children are enclosed in school and home, enclosed in cars to shuttle between them, enclosed by fear, by surveillance and poverty and rigid schedules. In 2011, Unicef asked children what they needed to be happy, and the top three things were time (particularly with families), friendships and, tellingly, "outdoors". Studies show that when children are allowed unstructured play in nature, their sense of freedom, independence and inner strength all thrive, and children surrounded by nature are not only less stressed but also bounce back from stressful events more readily. But there has been a steady reduction in open spaces for children to play. In Britain, children have one-ninth of the roaming room they had in earlier generations. There has also been a reduction in available time, with less than 10% of children spending time playing in woodlands, countryside or heaths, compared with 40% a generation ago. Younger children may be enclosed on the grounds that adults are frightened for them, and older children because adults are frightened of them. In the Amazon, I've seen five-year-olds wielding machetes with deftness and precision. In Igloolik, in the Arctic, I've seen an eight-year-old take a knife and carve up a frozen caribou without accident. In West Papua, I've known youngsters of 12 or 13 with such physical capability and confidence that, when asked to be messengers, they completed a mountain run in six hours – a journey that had taken me and the guides a day and a half. This is not only a matter of physical competence: the freedom that Inuit children traditionally experienced made them into "self-reliant, caring and self-controlled individuals", in the words of one Inuit person I met in Nunavut in Canada. It gave them courage and patience. Children need wild, unlimited hours, but this time is in short supply for many, who are diarised into wall-to-wall activities, scheduled from the moment they wake until the minute they sleep, every hour accounted for by parents whose actions are prompted by the fear their child may fall behind in the rat race that begins in the nursery. Loving their child, not wanting them to be lifelong losers, parents push them to achieve through effective time-use. Society instils a fear of the future that can be appeased only by sacrificing present play and idleness, and children feel the effects in stress and depression. In many traditional cultures, however, children are held to be the best judges of their own needs, including how they spend their time. In West Papua, one man told me that as children, "We would go hunting and fishing and just come home when we heard the crickets." In the children's tipi where part-Cherokee man James Hightower spent so many hours of his childhood, games might be played until four in the morning. "The Indian is not like civilised children," he recalls, "having a certain time to eat and sleep." (In his mouth, the term "civilised" is not a compliment.) "When we're working, we just don't have time to be bothering the kids," Margrethe Vars, a Sami reindeer herder, told me. She broke off to drag on her cigarette, so her words, imitating European parents, literally came out smoking: "Have you washed your hands? Now you must eat." She pulled a face: to her, children's freedom was not only a right but a relief all round. As the summer stretched out in one long day, the Sami children would be up all "night", and no one minded because every parent shared the view that children were in charge of their own time. So the early hours – bright with midsummer sun – would see the children revving up quad bikes, watching the reindeer, tickling each other or falling asleep. "Here we sleep when we are tired, eat when we are hungry," Vars said. "But for other societies, children are very organised. Timing is everything: when to eat and sleep, making appointments to visit friends…" She winced at the thought of the micromanagement. The Sami way produced powerfully positive results, not only in the reduction of petty conflict, but also in something intangible and vital. Their children would grow up more self-reliant, less obedient to outside pressure. For the Wintu people of California, so deep is their traditional respect for the autonomy of the will that it suffuses the language itself. In English, if you "take a baby" somewhere, there is a sense of implicit coercion. The Wintu language cannot say that: it must phrase it as, "I went with the baby." "I watched the child" would be, "I watched with the child". The Wintu couldn't coerce someone even if they wanted to: language won't let them. When a Wintu child asks, "Can I…?" they are not asking for permission from an individual parent, but for clarification about whether wider laws allow it, so a child does not feel at the mercy of the will of a single adult with rules that can seem capricious and arbitrary. Take a step back for a moment. Letting children have their own way? Doing just what they like? Wouldn't that be a total disaster? Yes, if parents perform only the first half of the trick. In the cultural lexicon of modernity, self-will is often banally understood as brattish, selfish behaviour. Will does not mean selfishness, however, and autonomy over oneself is not a synonym for nastiness towards others – quite the reverse. Ngarinyin children in Australia traditionally grew up uncommanded and uncoerced, but from a young age they learned socialisation. That is the second half of the trick. Children are socialised into awareness and respect for the will and autonomy of others, so that, when necessary as they grow, they will learn to hold their own will in check in order to maintain good relations. For a community to function well, an individual may on occasion need to rein in his or her own will but, crucially, not be compelled to do so by someone else. Among Inuit and Sami people, there is an explicit need for children to learn self-regulation. Adults keep a reticent and tactful distance. A child "is learning on his own" is a common Sami expression. Sami children are trained to control anger, sensitivity, aggression and shame. Inuit people stress that children must learn self-control – with careful emphasis. The child should not be controlled by another, with their will overruled, but needs to learn to steer herself or himself. Will is a child's motive force: it impels a child from within, whereas obedience compels a child from without. Those who would overrule a child's will take "obedience" as their watchword, as they fear disobedience and disorder and believe that if a child is not controlled, there will be chaos. But these are false opposites. The true opposite of obedience is not disobedience but independence. The true opposite of order is not disorder but freedom. The true opposite of control is not chaos but self-control. • This is an edited extract from Kith: The Riddle Of The Childscape, by Jay Griffiths, published by Hamish Hamilton at£20. To order a copy for £14 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846. http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/may/04/leave-them-kids-alone-griffiths