All addictions come from "lack of self-control." "Willpower" is vastly overestimated as an influence to what we do. I'd almost go as far as saying it doesn't exist. People react to their environments. They repeat the same actions in the same places and circumstances that brought them pleasure in the past. They act compulsively and impulsively.
A study years ago put young children alone in a room with a piece of candy. They were told that if they didn't eat it, they'd get another one after a few minutes, and they'd have two candies. So the children would sit there. Those who did nothing but stare at the candy invariably ate it. Only those who distracted themselves somehow--by singing, playing games, or napping--were able to resist, and quite effectively.
Adults who function well are able to distract themselves from temptations with meaningful activities, or else they like the meaningful activities better. For instance, if I'm gardening, cooking, or doing artwork, I don't even think about playing games. But when I'm bored, it's all I want to do. Unfortunately, for some people games, drugs, or whatever provide the strongest reaction in the reticular activating system and that's what they get the most pleasure from -- so that's what they do to the exclusion of other things.
Second grade in French Immersion was fun. We weren't allowed to swear, of course, because Swearing is Bad. But we could say "phoque" all we wanted. I'm sure it annoyed the teachers, but I guess we all got off on a technicality.
Also, "pencil" = "penis." Which made life interesting, given that we weren't allowed pens.
Kids an insatiable hunger for scatological humour. If their parents are doing their jobs, the kids will learn not to swear in inappropriate situations. But even if kids don't understand what sex is, they know it's "dirty" and they find it funny. It may not be perfectly polite, but it's normal.
No animation capability yet, but yes to all of the others, as of ver. 3.08 (layers, PNG, alpha, layer modes).
I just heard about Paint.NET a few weeks ago, and I now use it more than Photoshop. Photoshop has superior text capability (Paint.NET rasterizes text and leaves it uneditable) and a kajillion other features that make it indispensable for serious work, but Paint.NET is much faster for things like adjusting color levels, cropping and resizing photos. Or gluing captions to cats. It's not a total replacement, but for some applications it might be enough.
I've tried GIMP a few times. It crashes constantly on both my desktop and laptop (both Windows), so it's useless to me. I give it a shot every few months to see if it's been fixed, but no luck yet.
A "bottle" episode is an episode that takes place entirely in a closed environment (like a ship or a building).
Shooting entirely on set helps avoid expensive special effects or outdoor shooting. Instead, they tend to focus on internal conflicts. Can be good or bad.
Over-the-ear headphones do help protect your ears from the cold. Frozen eardrums hurt. Earbuds can also be quite painful -- and fall out easily -- if your ears aren't shaped right for them.
Earmuffs are much better with music.
($15 JVC earclip-style for me. Better sound than any earbuds I've ever used.)
Livejournal has apparently been shutting down journals and communities with "questionable" subject matter, under pressure from an outside group. It's not clear how far they're taking it.
Since "you're welcome" means "I'm glad you've come" and "no problem" means "helping you did not inconvenience me," I have no problem with that particular bit of linguistic shift.
I now use "you're welcome" if I'm dealing with a guest and "no problem" if I'm helping someone (not strictly, but generally). That's the way of other languages too, for example, French: Bienvenue (welcome) - literally "well come" De rien (no problem) - literally "of nothing"
I can't find a real translation, but a book on Japanese I was looking through a while ago said "dou itashimashite" (you're welcome) meant something like "I did nothing" or "think nothing of it."
Government scientist is mistake. Womens in fact have brains bigger than small squirrel and smaller than biggest squirrel. Not to be generalize squirrels! They are of many size, like brains, only more so.
When I was a kid, just a few years before the internet mainstreamed itself, a different breed of "emoticons" were common, but no one had thought of calling them that. Happy faces, hearts, XOXOXO, and this particular drawing of a cute floppy dog were everywhere. Rather than just writing "Good job!" on your homework, teachers would use a stamp or a sticker to say it.
Obviously there's no need to write using punctuation marks on a piece of paper, but the basic motive of expressing emotion in writing has been there for a long time.
We really just copy the ones we see most often. I personally use both styles regularly. Plus ASCII hearts on boards that allow it. I used to be a bit into anime fandom, so maybe that's where it came from, but it's just another bit of vocabulary now.
George. Sweetie. You've worked hard, and you've earned a rest. It's alright. You can take a break. Let someone else write the script. We know you don't like actors, and that's alright too. Give some director the job of dealing with them.
I think that depends on the laptop and the books you're comparing it to. My laptop weighs 7 pounds (a bit of a heavyweight, but cheap!) and most of my college textbooks weigh about 2-3 pounds (yes, I weighed them). They're mostly bigger than the ones I had in high school, which I'd guess were 1-2 pounds on average. Add 2 textbooks + a full binder and you're looking at about 7 pounds, roughly the same as the laptop. (Not every class has a textbook, and not every textbook needs to be taken home or to school every day.)
Not every school book can be replaced by a laptop, either. Say I need a sketchbook every second day, plus a pencil case to go with it. I wouldn't want to read a Dickens book on a backlit screen, so add an 800-page novel to that. Obviously, I'm not going anywhere without lip gloss, hand cream, and a spare hair clip... I mean, really. It's raining, so I need an umbrella. Can't forget the power adaptor for the laptop, or the battery will be dead by lunch.
Add to that a lunch, a drink, gym clothes, and whatever else, and you're looking at 10-20 pounds easily.
I'm not saying computers in schools can't help these problems, but we are so not there yet. The screen readability is probably the first thing that needs to be fixed. I've saved a lot of money--at least $300 in the past 2 years, and a lot of time--by using Project Gutenberg (for example) for public domain texts. But my eyes were pretty tired by the end of it, and reading just isn't as quick or easy on a screen.
The other problem is getting e-texts (or educational programs) accepted and used by the teachers. All the teachers in the school who can use these things must or the benefits are negligible.
(Problem #3 is, how do you get the kids to use their computers for *school* instead of playing games, chatting, looking up porn, etc. But when did kids behave, anyway? Let it go already.)
You can write scripts that take control of other people's avatars. I didn't play for long before getting bored with SL, but usually this is used so people can click on objects and then their avatars interact with them. E.g., if you click on a chair you'll sit in the chair, if you click a bed you'll lie down, if you click a swing set you'll start swinging.
There are certain situations where your avatar can get "stuck" -- I got stuck between a hammock and a wall once and it took me about 5 minutes to extricate myself. Another time, I got stuck in a "dancing" script after clicking a button and then losing track of where it was, and couldn't stop dancing until I found the "off" button for the dance.
Usually, it's all fun, but scripts have a high potential for abuse if you make them hard to turn off.
It actually does worry me a bit. Not yet, obviously, but where will Canada stand in a century or so when China, Russia, and the US notice the big, resource-laden country with a suddenly hospitable climate..?
How about for a donation, you get a virtual tree-growing game or something, and the money goes to sponsor an actual tree planting or rainforest-buying program somewhere? A few dollars is enough to pay some kid on summer break to plant trees for an hour or so.
You could call it "SimForest." Pay-per-sapling. Premium prices for fancy trees. Runs on the desktop like a wallpaper. Lighting changes by time of day. Branches blow in the breeze...
Sorry. Getting distracted. Anyway, selling game content for charity isn't a horrible idea, but if it's just a feel-good thing and doesn't actually help, what's the point?
In concept, it's a good idea. One local evening news show here devotes probably more than half its time to sports, charity events, festivals, heart-warming "human interest" stories, and so on. When bad things happen, like car accidents or crimes or fires, they get enough mention that everyone knows what happened. National and world news gets adequate attention. But more time is spent on good things, because hey, good stuff actually matters to the people watching. The charity beach volleyball tournament that I could go to if I wasn't afraid of the sun is way more interesting to me than the dead porn star I never heard of and her poor kid.
On the other hand, the big news networks pick a Big Story of the Day/Week/Month, and covers it to death, follows up on old Big Stories, and pays lip service to actual *new* news. The news networks seem to adopt a soap opera model, cycling from one plotline to the next, careful to get all the juicy details out of it before wrapping up the loose ends and moving on. Every "expert" has to weigh in. It's news as entertainment.
I prefer the former model. However, that was the direction the station decided to take. It wasn't forced on them. There were no laws saying "Spend 12% of your time on sports, 8% on spelling bees, at least 5% on cute animals..." Who decides what's "positive" news? Is celebrity gossip "positive" or is it filler? Is a charity fundraiser run by opponents of the government "positive"? What if something really bad and worth covering happens -- do you sacrifice journalistic integrity to toe the line?
A lot of the blame being placed on video games comes back to Albert Bandura's 1961 Bobo doll experiment. In the experiment, Bandura showed that children would imitate violent acts if they witnessed them, but would not act violently beforehand. It's a widely quoted experiment and Bandura is a very highly respected psychologist who's made huge contributions to the field.
In the experiment, young kids were put in a room with a variety of toys. The control group were left to play with whatever they wanted. The experimental group had an adult walk in on them and punch a bobo doll after a period of time. The kids in the experimental group also went and punched the doll after they'd seen the adult do it, while the control kids didn't.
However, there are some major problems with taking that experiment and applying it to life. 1) The children did not know what a bobo doll was beforehand. If you've ever tried one of these things, they're essentially inflatable punching bags, weighted at the bottom. They bob around amusingly if you hit them. If the kids didn't know they'd bobble amusingly, why would they hit them? 2) The kids were young (3-6 years old), but old enough to know the bobo dolls were not alive. They were probably too young to feel much sympathy anyway, but they would have known the dolls weren't being hurt. It wasn't real violence. 3) The kids were too young to feel much sympathy. Young kids have to be told to be gentle because they don't understand that others can be hurt. Just because a young kid will imitate violence, it doesn't mean that an older kid will.
The experiment is widely used as "proof" that kids are influenced to act violently by media. It's very poor evidence. A follow-up study showed that kids who watched a video of a model punching the doll were less likely to imitate the behaviour than kids who saw it in person. There's no emotional component to playing a game or hitting a doll, other than desire for fun and excitement. Real violence, however, requires an element of anger or fear... or genuine mental illness.
What it the experiment really showed was simply that children learn by seeing other people do things, and that they are more influenced by adults of the same sex. Nothing more, nothing less.
I don't give games and movies a complete pass however. I once let some kids I was babysitting watch Batman (1989 movie) only to have the brother try to beat up his sister and jump off the back of the couch all afternoon. It was a pain in the ass. I'll never let a hyperactive 8-year-old boy watch an action movie again.
Slashdot Mirror
All addictions come from "lack of self-control." "Willpower" is vastly overestimated as an influence to what we do. I'd almost go as far as saying it doesn't exist. People react to their environments. They repeat the same actions in the same places and circumstances that brought them pleasure in the past. They act compulsively and impulsively.
A study years ago put young children alone in a room with a piece of candy. They were told that if they didn't eat it, they'd get another one after a few minutes, and they'd have two candies. So the children would sit there. Those who did nothing but stare at the candy invariably ate it. Only those who distracted themselves somehow--by singing, playing games, or napping--were able to resist, and quite effectively.
Adults who function well are able to distract themselves from temptations with meaningful activities, or else they like the meaningful activities better. For instance, if I'm gardening, cooking, or doing artwork, I don't even think about playing games. But when I'm bored, it's all I want to do. Unfortunately, for some people games, drugs, or whatever provide the strongest reaction in the reticular activating system and that's what they get the most pleasure from -- so that's what they do to the exclusion of other things.
A cruise ship? A really big hotel?
... ...Spoons-R-Us? ...no?
A spoon manufacturer?
Second grade in French Immersion was fun. We weren't allowed to swear, of course, because Swearing is Bad. But we could say "phoque" all we wanted. I'm sure it annoyed the teachers, but I guess we all got off on a technicality.
Also, "pencil" = "penis." Which made life interesting, given that we weren't allowed pens.
Kids an insatiable hunger for scatological humour. If their parents are doing their jobs, the kids will learn not to swear in inappropriate situations. But even if kids don't understand what sex is, they know it's "dirty" and they find it funny. It may not be perfectly polite, but it's normal.
No animation capability yet, but yes to all of the others, as of ver. 3.08 (layers, PNG, alpha, layer modes).
I just heard about Paint.NET a few weeks ago, and I now use it more than Photoshop. Photoshop has superior text capability (Paint.NET rasterizes text and leaves it uneditable) and a kajillion other features that make it indispensable for serious work, but Paint.NET is much faster for things like adjusting color levels, cropping and resizing photos. Or gluing captions to cats. It's not a total replacement, but for some applications it might be enough.
I've tried GIMP a few times. It crashes constantly on both my desktop and laptop (both Windows), so it's useless to me. I give it a shot every few months to see if it's been fixed, but no luck yet.
A "bottle" episode is an episode that takes place entirely in a closed environment (like a ship or a building).
E pisode
Shooting entirely on set helps avoid expensive special effects or outdoor shooting. Instead, they tend to focus on internal conflicts. Can be good or bad.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main.Bottle
Over-the-ear headphones do help protect your ears from the cold. Frozen eardrums hurt. Earbuds can also be quite painful -- and fall out easily -- if your ears aren't shaped right for them.
Earmuffs are much better with music.
($15 JVC earclip-style for me. Better sound than any earbuds I've ever used.)
Livejournal has apparently been shutting down journals and communities with "questionable" subject matter, under pressure from an outside group. It's not clear how far they're taking it.
http://liz-marcs.livejournal.com/
Yes, yes I am. Thanks for asking!
Since "you're welcome" means "I'm glad you've come" and "no problem" means "helping you did not inconvenience me," I have no problem with that particular bit of linguistic shift.
I now use "you're welcome" if I'm dealing with a guest and "no problem" if I'm helping someone (not strictly, but generally). That's the way of other languages too, for example, French:
Bienvenue (welcome) - literally "well come"
De rien (no problem) - literally "of nothing"
I can't find a real translation, but a book on Japanese I was looking through a while ago said "dou itashimashite" (you're welcome) meant something like "I did nothing" or "think nothing of it."
Ubuntu... sales?
Eh?
Government scientist is mistake. Womens in fact have brains bigger than small squirrel and smaller than biggest squirrel. Not to be generalize squirrels! They are of many size, like brains, only more so.
When I was a kid, just a few years before the internet mainstreamed itself, a different breed of "emoticons" were common, but no one had thought of calling them that. Happy faces, hearts, XOXOXO, and this particular drawing of a cute floppy dog were everywhere. Rather than just writing "Good job!" on your homework, teachers would use a stamp or a sticker to say it.
:D XD X_X o_O; >_< *_* :P ; )
Obviously there's no need to write using punctuation marks on a piece of paper, but the basic motive of expressing emotion in writing has been there for a long time.
We really just copy the ones we see most often. I personally use both styles regularly. Plus ASCII hearts on boards that allow it. I used to be a bit into anime fandom, so maybe that's where it came from, but it's just another bit of vocabulary now.
: )
George. Sweetie. You've worked hard, and you've earned a rest. It's alright. You can take a break. Let someone else write the script. We know you don't like actors, and that's alright too. Give some director the job of dealing with them.
We won't think any less of you.
I think that depends on the laptop and the books you're comparing it to. My laptop weighs 7 pounds (a bit of a heavyweight, but cheap!) and most of my college textbooks weigh about 2-3 pounds (yes, I weighed them). They're mostly bigger than the ones I had in high school, which I'd guess were 1-2 pounds on average. Add 2 textbooks + a full binder and you're looking at about 7 pounds, roughly the same as the laptop. (Not every class has a textbook, and not every textbook needs to be taken home or to school every day.)
Not every school book can be replaced by a laptop, either. Say I need a sketchbook every second day, plus a pencil case to go with it. I wouldn't want to read a Dickens book on a backlit screen, so add an 800-page novel to that. Obviously, I'm not going anywhere without lip gloss, hand cream, and a spare hair clip... I mean, really. It's raining, so I need an umbrella. Can't forget the power adaptor for the laptop, or the battery will be dead by lunch.
Add to that a lunch, a drink, gym clothes, and whatever else, and you're looking at 10-20 pounds easily.
I'm not saying computers in schools can't help these problems, but we are so not there yet. The screen readability is probably the first thing that needs to be fixed. I've saved a lot of money--at least $300 in the past 2 years, and a lot of time--by using Project Gutenberg (for example) for public domain texts. But my eyes were pretty tired by the end of it, and reading just isn't as quick or easy on a screen.
The other problem is getting e-texts (or educational programs) accepted and used by the teachers. All the teachers in the school who can use these things must or the benefits are negligible.
(Problem #3 is, how do you get the kids to use their computers for *school* instead of playing games, chatting, looking up porn, etc. But when did kids behave, anyway? Let it go already.)
You can write scripts that take control of other people's avatars. I didn't play for long before getting bored with SL, but usually this is used so people can click on objects and then their avatars interact with them. E.g., if you click on a chair you'll sit in the chair, if you click a bed you'll lie down, if you click a swing set you'll start swinging.
There are certain situations where your avatar can get "stuck" -- I got stuck between a hammock and a wall once and it took me about 5 minutes to extricate myself. Another time, I got stuck in a "dancing" script after clicking a button and then losing track of where it was, and couldn't stop dancing until I found the "off" button for the dance.
Usually, it's all fun, but scripts have a high potential for abuse if you make them hard to turn off.
Spider-Man
Spider-Man
Puts a hyphen before the "Man"
Swings around, sometimes cries
Spells it better than those guys.
Microsoft would buy the kidnappers' business out from under them, patent their methods, and within 10 years have a monopoly.
But then what's the point of September 19th?
And I would walk 200 hundred more just to be the man who walked 400 miles to fall down at your door.
Or draw an X in a little box. Whatever.
It actually does worry me a bit. Not yet, obviously, but where will Canada stand in a century or so when China, Russia, and the US notice the big, resource-laden country with a suddenly hospitable climate..?
You're mixing up real organelles with fictional something-or-others. Midi-chlorians.
This news saddens me. My love for Spider-Man knows no bounds, yet my hatred of musicals, travelling, and spending money is almost as great. Woe. Woe.
How about for a donation, you get a virtual tree-growing game or something, and the money goes to sponsor an actual tree planting or rainforest-buying program somewhere? A few dollars is enough to pay some kid on summer break to plant trees for an hour or so.
You could call it "SimForest." Pay-per-sapling. Premium prices for fancy trees. Runs on the desktop like a wallpaper. Lighting changes by time of day. Branches blow in the breeze...
Sorry. Getting distracted. Anyway, selling game content for charity isn't a horrible idea, but if it's just a feel-good thing and doesn't actually help, what's the point?
Blu-Ray will win because it has a cooler name. It evokes laser guns and space battles.
HD-DVD is just another dumb acronym. Who wants that?
In concept, it's a good idea. One local evening news show here devotes probably more than half its time to sports, charity events, festivals, heart-warming "human interest" stories, and so on. When bad things happen, like car accidents or crimes or fires, they get enough mention that everyone knows what happened. National and world news gets adequate attention. But more time is spent on good things, because hey, good stuff actually matters to the people watching. The charity beach volleyball tournament that I could go to if I wasn't afraid of the sun is way more interesting to me than the dead porn star I never heard of and her poor kid.
On the other hand, the big news networks pick a Big Story of the Day/Week/Month, and covers it to death, follows up on old Big Stories, and pays lip service to actual *new* news. The news networks seem to adopt a soap opera model, cycling from one plotline to the next, careful to get all the juicy details out of it before wrapping up the loose ends and moving on. Every "expert" has to weigh in. It's news as entertainment.
I prefer the former model. However, that was the direction the station decided to take. It wasn't forced on them. There were no laws saying "Spend 12% of your time on sports, 8% on spelling bees, at least 5% on cute animals..." Who decides what's "positive" news? Is celebrity gossip "positive" or is it filler? Is a charity fundraiser run by opponents of the government "positive"? What if something really bad and worth covering happens -- do you sacrifice journalistic integrity to toe the line?
A lot of the blame being placed on video games comes back to Albert Bandura's 1961 Bobo doll experiment. In the experiment, Bandura showed that children would imitate violent acts if they witnessed them, but would not act violently beforehand. It's a widely quoted experiment and Bandura is a very highly respected psychologist who's made huge contributions to the field.
In the experiment, young kids were put in a room with a variety of toys. The control group were left to play with whatever they wanted. The experimental group had an adult walk in on them and punch a bobo doll after a period of time. The kids in the experimental group also went and punched the doll after they'd seen the adult do it, while the control kids didn't.
However, there are some major problems with taking that experiment and applying it to life.
1) The children did not know what a bobo doll was beforehand. If you've ever tried one of these things, they're essentially inflatable punching bags, weighted at the bottom. They bob around amusingly if you hit them. If the kids didn't know they'd bobble amusingly, why would they hit them?
2) The kids were young (3-6 years old), but old enough to know the bobo dolls were not alive. They were probably too young to feel much sympathy anyway, but they would have known the dolls weren't being hurt. It wasn't real violence.
3) The kids were too young to feel much sympathy. Young kids have to be told to be gentle because they don't understand that others can be hurt. Just because a young kid will imitate violence, it doesn't mean that an older kid will.
The experiment is widely used as "proof" that kids are influenced to act violently by media. It's very poor evidence. A follow-up study showed that kids who watched a video of a model punching the doll were less likely to imitate the behaviour than kids who saw it in person. There's no emotional component to playing a game or hitting a doll, other than desire for fun and excitement. Real violence, however, requires an element of anger or fear... or genuine mental illness.
What it the experiment really showed was simply that children learn by seeing other people do things, and that they are more influenced by adults of the same sex. Nothing more, nothing less.
I don't give games and movies a complete pass however. I once let some kids I was babysitting watch Batman (1989 movie) only to have the brother try to beat up his sister and jump off the back of the couch all afternoon. It was a pain in the ass. I'll never let a hyperactive 8-year-old boy watch an action movie again.