I think the video and music (and other) industries are all looking at this wrong. They're putting millions of dollars into coming up with good ways of encryption - They're putting their heads against every bored hacker/cracker on earth. Why not just drop it? They wouldn't be paying all this money, and losing time/profits. Very soon you would have utilities out that would copy this stuff, but the average person, even-though freely accessible isn't going to copy anything when it involves using more than one complicated device (such as.. a DVD player and a computer), especially when they have to buy both for it to work. Try *convincing* your grandparents to go out and buy a CD-burner so they can get free CDs (tell them it's easily accessible, so on, just make them think that they get on, get music, and burn CDs).. Most older people I know still wouldn't do it, just based on the cost of buying the burner. I think that would be the way most people tend to think as well. And how many people STILL don't know how to make their VCRs stop blinking 12:00? Are these people just going to go from that to copying each movie they rent? If these industries just dropped the subject for a while, even if they decided to pick it back up on their next generation of products, people are lazy, and if they don't excersize having to go through a bit of trouble to copy stuff, people would probably just stop, except maybe a *few* people. No one would want to go from easily copying everything, to having to try hard to copy anything. The way it's evolved today is it went from records and such, which really couldn't be rerecorded at the time, to audio and video tapes, making it simple as can be to copy things, then for audio it's gone to CD, making it a little hard.. with the current next step of making it "hard" for DVD/DVDA, all it's going to do is let us take our knowledge of the previous step, and apply it to something new, while preparing us for the *next* step at the same time? Nice little never-ending cycle. Hmm, why not just take it down a few steps, so instead of going from 50-60 for their next "best" thing, we'd have to go from 0-60... it'd make it a little harder.
OK, as pointed out, you focus on the 'geeks' and other students with high potential for murder.. you weed out a group of 15 students at a school with high potential.. what do you do? Hmm. Well, now you've just alarmed the entire school, and you really can't do jack about preventing anything here, you just know it could be an eminant problem. Think of Y2K.. contrasting this with Y2k - it's a little problem. Well, a couple of idiots get ahold of it, gossip happens, everyone knows, it's blown way out of preportion.. That's really all that could happen under this system. Why not instead have profiling of school admin, counselors, and anyone else currently screwing people up. Counselors can't begin to do their job, they just flat out don't understand this, and instead they just alienate you more with stupid meaningless mumbojumbo.. why not find out who would be *good* at doing these jobs, throw out the current system of "well, you see, everyone at this school is x-race, we're required by law to hire someone of another race now. Let's hire joe over here, even though he's clueless..." I don't see this as a problem much at my current school, everyone there seems to have some level of compitance, but my last school they were horrible, they couldn't have possibly gotten to that position with skill and ability. Profiling needs to be done for educational officials - then you can expose who is best, get qualified employees, and at the same time, even *help* the actual problem instead of fueling it. Good idea me thinks.
In my personal opinion, I think these problems just kinda started, as a random thing, by now it's evolved onto a new level. Now instead of some kids actually being "pushed" over the edge, the standard of today, by the time I get out of high school, and I have kids, instead they'll be "shown" the edge.. Since I too will encourage exactly this same thing, I suspect that if this keeps up, from age 1 my kids will be targeted, and they'll know it. Basically, They will be told their whole lives that they have a high potential rate of someday blowing up a football field during practice and walking into school shooting - What do you think will be running through their minds? 'Well, I really feel like killing these *idiots!* right now. Dad says it's wrong, but everyone else says it's what I'm bound to do at some point or another.' Currently I have the 'my dad says it's wrong' planted in my head. Would that added factor of 'Im bound to do it' be what might someday push many kids - including mine - over the edge?
Keep us updated on your island, sounds good to me.
I'd have to agree with this one - running, especially XC is just not one of those 'jock' sports. I just got done with Cross country season, the first time I've been in it, and it's obvious to me that it has probably the smartest group in any sports. I'd even go as far as saying it has quite a few nerds in there, at least potential nerds;) Almost everyone in cross country tends to maintain at least a 3.5 gpa, most even 4.0 (not that grades in any way reflect intelligence, but when compairing that to say.. the football team, it's clear where the brains ended up;) We always had to tease, cause we were always talking when the coach needed to start, so he'd always mention that he could never imagine us in a class - Even though we would wipe away any competition academically, we would have been the strangest class on campus. Running is just different from the other sports
Well, reading all these posts, I've kinda thought a bit about things.. If you used to BBS, then chances are you want that feel back, the localness of the community, so on.. If your just new the internet, chances are that you love that you can talk to everybody all over the world, in one way or another. I agree that it's really cool having a local BBS, where you can dial in, and only people in your area hang out there, but the internet is about communication over long distances, with lots of people. I think of it this way: Telnet BBS's, online chat rooms, MUD/MOO/etc., usenet, it's all just a close, specialized virtual community. When you're there, it's like you live there - the same place where all kinds of people with broadly (maybe very close to-) the same interests as you live. It's just like a different life kinda. That's on one side, then the opposite side is RL -- Hopefully you know something about this. Then, in between is the dial up BBS. It gives you the togetherness of RL, but also combines in the ability to find people with more-or-less the same interests as you, and also give you the communication and sharing features of most internet communities. It's kinda a ratio of how much you like talking with people with your same interests, and how much you need to know people in RL... if nobody needed to know RL people, we'd all be connected to VR helmets, mounted in large buildings where all our waste and food was managed by machines.. But people tend to need a RL connection with people, it's just a matter of your RL:interest ratio. Eventually the internet will mold itself into exactly the right ratio, just like nature, it'll go back and forth, slowly getting closer each time, then we'll have it. Prepare for BBSs to come back;)
I for one think it's really funny watching this. Sitting in the other room typing this, I hear commercials about stocking up on food, y2k banking problems, on and on.. on the way in I saw a room full of McDonalds.. It's pretty funny. Of course, I can only imagine all the idiots tomorrow talking about it and asking me questions because they think I'm going to tell them something interesting (which of course I will.. )
Slashdot Mirror
I think the video and music (and other) industries are all looking at this wrong. They're putting millions of dollars into coming up with good ways of encryption - They're putting their heads against every bored hacker/cracker on earth. Why not just drop it? They wouldn't be paying all this money, and losing time/profits. Very soon you would have utilities out that would copy this stuff, but the average person, even-though freely accessible isn't going to copy anything when it involves using more than one complicated device (such as.. a DVD player and a computer), especially when they have to buy both for it to work. Try *convincing* your grandparents to go out and buy a CD-burner so they can get free CDs (tell them it's easily accessible, so on, just make them think that they get on, get music, and burn CDs).. Most older people I know still wouldn't do it, just based on the cost of buying the burner. I think that would be the way most people tend to think as well. And how many people STILL don't know how to make their VCRs stop blinking 12:00? Are these people just going to go from that to copying each movie they rent? If these industries just dropped the subject for a while, even if they decided to pick it back up on their next generation of products, people are lazy, and if they don't excersize having to go through a bit of trouble to copy stuff, people would probably just stop, except maybe a *few* people. No one would want to go from easily copying everything, to having to try hard to copy anything. The way it's evolved today is it went from records and such, which really couldn't be rerecorded at the time, to audio and video tapes, making it simple as can be to copy things, then for audio it's gone to CD, making it a little hard.. with the current next step of making it "hard" for DVD/DVDA, all it's going to do is let us take our knowledge of the previous step, and apply it to something new, while preparing us for the *next* step at the same time? Nice little never-ending cycle. Hmm, why not just take it down a few steps, so instead of going from 50-60 for their next "best" thing, we'd have to go from 0-60... it'd make it a little harder.
Maxx
OK, as pointed out, you focus on the 'geeks' and other students with high potential for murder.. you weed out a group of 15 students at a school with high potential.. what do you do? Hmm. Well, now you've just alarmed the entire school, and you really can't do jack about preventing anything here, you just know it could be an eminant problem. Think of Y2K.. contrasting this with Y2k - it's a little problem. Well, a couple of idiots get ahold of it, gossip happens, everyone knows, it's blown way out of preportion.. That's really all that could happen under this system. Why not instead have profiling of school admin, counselors, and anyone else currently screwing people up. Counselors can't begin to do their job, they just flat out don't understand this, and instead they just alienate you more with stupid meaningless mumbojumbo.. why not find out who would be *good* at doing these jobs, throw out the current system of "well, you see, everyone at this school is x-race, we're required by law to hire someone of another race now. Let's hire joe over here, even though he's clueless..." I don't see this as a problem much at my current school, everyone there seems to have some level of compitance, but my last school they were horrible, they couldn't have possibly gotten to that position with skill and ability. Profiling needs to be done for educational officials - then you can expose who is best, get qualified employees, and at the same time, even *help* the actual problem instead of fueling it. Good idea me thinks.
In my personal opinion, I think these problems just kinda started, as a random thing, by now it's evolved onto a new level. Now instead of some kids actually being "pushed" over the edge, the standard of today, by the time I get out of high school, and I have kids, instead they'll be "shown" the edge.. Since I too will encourage exactly this same thing, I suspect that if this keeps up, from age 1 my kids will be targeted, and they'll know it. Basically, They will be told their whole lives that they have a high potential rate of someday blowing up a football field during practice and walking into school shooting - What do you think will be running through their minds? 'Well, I really feel like killing these *idiots!* right now. Dad says it's wrong, but everyone else says it's what I'm bound to do at some point or another.' Currently I have the 'my dad says it's wrong' planted in my head. Would that added factor of 'Im bound to do it' be what might someday push many kids - including mine - over the edge?
Keep us updated on your island, sounds good to me.
I'd have to agree with this one - running, especially XC is just not one of those 'jock' sports. I just got done with Cross country season, the first time I've been in it, and it's obvious to me that it has probably the smartest group in any sports. I'd even go as far as saying it has quite a few nerds in there, at least potential nerds ;) Almost everyone in cross country tends to maintain at least a 3.5 gpa, most even 4.0 (not that grades in any way reflect intelligence, but when compairing that to say.. the football team, it's clear where the brains ended up ;) We always had to tease, cause we were always talking when the coach needed to start, so he'd always mention that he could never imagine us in a class - Even though we would wipe away any competition academically, we would have been the strangest class on campus. Running is just different from the other sports
Well, reading all these posts, I've kinda thought a bit about things.. If you used to BBS, then chances are you want that feel back, the localness of the community, so on.. If your just new the internet, chances are that you love that you can talk to everybody all over the world, in one way or another. I agree that it's really cool having a local BBS, where you can dial in, and only people in your area hang out there, but the internet is about communication over long distances, with lots of people. I think of it this way: Telnet BBS's, online chat rooms, MUD/MOO/etc., usenet, it's all just a close, specialized virtual community. When you're there, it's like you live there - the same place where all kinds of people with broadly (maybe very close to-) the same interests as you live. It's just like a different life kinda. That's on one side, then the opposite side is RL -- Hopefully you know something about this. Then, in between is the dial up BBS. It gives you the togetherness of RL, but also combines in the ability to find people with more-or-less the same interests as you, and also give you the communication and sharing features of most internet communities. It's kinda a ratio of how much you like talking with people with your same interests, and how much you need to know people in RL... if nobody needed to know RL people, we'd all be connected to VR helmets, mounted in large buildings where all our waste and food was managed by machines.. But people tend to need a RL connection with people, it's just a matter of your RL:interest ratio. Eventually the internet will mold itself into exactly the right ratio, just like nature, it'll go back and forth, slowly getting closer each time, then we'll have it. Prepare for BBSs to come back ;)
Maxx
I for one think it's really funny watching this. Sitting in the other room typing this, I hear commercials about stocking up on food, y2k banking problems, on and on.. on the way in I saw a room full of McDonalds.. It's pretty funny. Of course, I can only imagine all the idiots tomorrow talking about it and asking me questions because they think I'm going to tell them something interesting (which of course I will.. )