The new URL is http://www.exonome.com/fj/phkl/.
Please use the new URL. The owner of the site of the old URL would probably rather not be slashdotted.
Incidentally I know the guy who did this, he's utterly cool. You should check out some of his other stuff at http://www.exonome.com/fj/ such as ToriAntiTori and Virginity At Last. (ObDisclaimer: I had a hand in the latter.)
Given Congress's track record of passing laws relating to computing which, in about 100% of cases, clearly demonstrate the fact that the people who wrote the law have no concept of how the Internet works and are responding solely to what corporate lobbyists are telling them, I'd rather if Congress would keep their dirty mitts off of this issue.
Yes, it sucks to essentially have to barricade your computers from the rest of the world and not be able to trust any external entity to help you effectively, but I'd rather have that than more weird laws making more innocuous actions criminal offenses for no apparent reason.
IT could easily get me to the supermarket or the subway in a lot less time than it takes me now, and wouldn't aggravate my asthma as much as walking uphill in dry winter air.
So, why am I not supposed to think this is "affordable"?
Re:holes in katz's story:
on
Message from Kabul
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Also, where the heck is this guy getting the bandwidth to download movies? A movie in DIVX format is about 600 megs and requires a pretty hefty processor to play (better than anything commodore would have made). Other formats, even if done at lower resolution and less intensive on the processor, would be less compressed so a movie would still be pretty big.
Bluntly, 90 minutes of video was no laughing matter to try and get onto a computer five or six years ago, the general technology level of the best stuff in afghanistan citizens' hands today.
Rather than drooling over an iPod, I would expect they would be amazed that such large disks are sold at consumer prices, let alone for stick-it-in-your-pocket-and-go use. I wonder if any "ancient commodore" model can even address such a large disk.
No, I agree with the posters that think there's something very odd about this story. I think I'll take it with a grain of salt, like the rock of gibraltar.
I think it's a very pretty story to think "Oh, we freed the Afghanis, now the first thing they're doing is rushing to be just like us," but given the details it strikes me a lot more like propaganda than reality.
Example. A movie is ultraviolent, but has no sex. It warrants an X rating. According to your post, anyone (including people that like ultraviolent movies but hate sex) will not go simply because the movie has an X rating, regardless of content, which is simply not true. If someone likes ultraviolent content and knows a movie has it, they will go regardless of what rating the movie is.
If it's rated X, they can't go to it, because theaters won't show it. Forget about studios and distributors for a minute (which is absurd, because they're an integral part of the process, but nonetheless) and just think theaters: theaters do not show X-rated movies regardless of their merits or whether the public would like them.
How is that not censorship?
And when you say:
People don't avoid movies because they are X-rated, they avoid them because they don't want to see a movie that warrants an X rating.
How do you know? Studios have never been willing to distribute X-rated films in this country, and theaters have never been willing to show them. With no data to work on, how can you make that assumption? That's the same excuse the studios give for not making X-rated films, and I don't believe it when they say it either.
Counterexample: Pretend a film is rated X due to sexual content, and I, as a parent, understand that my (imaginary) 16.75 year old son is mature enough to see whatever he'd like to see. Imagine I actually manage to live near the one theater in the country showing the movie.
He can't see it. The theater won't let him in, with or without me, under any circumstances.
Theaters won't show X rated movies because people won't go to X rated movies. Why won't people go to them? Because they're X rated. If they weren't X rated, would there be a market for their same content? Yup. Therefore, they're being censored.
Read my post again. Maybe you'll get it this time.
I'm not stupid enough to fail to understand that governments get involved with ratings when people start making a stink about it. What I'm saying is that ratings systems aren't an appropriate or effective way of solving the problem, and lead to censorship.
What would I do? I believe that advertising materials for films and video games should accurately reflect the content - basically, demand truth in advertising. Everyone claims they need ratings because they need to be able to know what's in the movie/game. Okay, then do something that accomplishes that. Don't use a ratings system, the ratings say absolutely nothing about the content, they just make a value judgement for you based on criteria which have nothing to do with you personally. Use a content descriptor code - like the Geek Code.
Neither the movie ratings system nor the video game ratings system tells you anything about the content of the material being rated.
Parents who use ratings to choose video games (or movies) are failing to fulfill their parental responsibilities: they are deligating the job of choosing content for their children to someone else. Moreover, they are allowing someone else to decide on what factors to base the decision without having any knowledge of their child.
And if you really believe that "ratings don't force anything on anyone", you're obviously not thinking about the effect it has on the people who create the material being rated. See my previous posts on the subject.
Okay, let's pretend for a moment that you're disturbed by sexual content. You go to the movie theater, and as you're standing outside you notice that the movie they're showing is rated PG-13.
Should you see it? Does it have sexual content? How can you tell?
The ratings systems in current use don't tell you what's in the content, just what age some bureaucrat thinks it's appropriate for. That PG-13 movie could have got that rating for swearing, or violence. Or it might be all about sex.
Ratings tell you nothing at all about what is in the content the rating applies to. If you want to be able to select based on actual content factors, don't ask for ratings, ask for content descriptors. If you want encoded content descriptors - V for violence, S for sex, etc - sure, that's nice, ask for it. But don't tell me that you can successfully use ratings to find the content you want.
Rating systems seem never to just kinda happen. They don't even seem to happen from consumer demand - consumers seem perfectly happy to buy things without ratings, and product producers (be it movies, video games, or cheese) don't feel enough consumer demand to care.
Do you refuse to buy Velveeta because it doesn't have a cheese rating? A simple, short code to tell you what it has in it, in three letters or less? No, you read the label, look at the description of the contents IN ENGLISH and decide if you want it. Do you let somebody at the National Cheese Board decide for you if the cheese is appropriate for people with your lifestyle? No, you make the decision yourself.
Ratings systems get imposed by the government. Oh, sure, the ratings systems the United States has on video games and movies are called "voluntary", but the systems were put in place when congress told the industries "put in a ratings system or we'll regulate you." I think that's enough of a threat to scare any industry into compliance.
Now look at what happens when the ratings system gets imposed. Does the industry go on behaving normally, and simply stick the rating onto the boxes of the products they would have been making anyway? No. What happens is, they turn around and stop making anything with the highest rating.
How many movies have there been rated PG-13? Too many to count. How many were R before there was a PG-13? Too many to count. How many have been NC-17? Two. How many were X before there was an NC-17? I'd have to check, but I know it's hardly any. How many video games are on the market with the M rating? Plenty. The AO rating? I think there are one or two for the Playstation 2, and hardly any for any other system.
Is this because consumers don't want movies or games with the sort of content that comes with these ratings? No. Is it because, by nature, hardly any games or movies would get these ratings anyway? No. Look at what happened when Hollywood introduced ratings: the kinds of films they made went immediately from mostly films target marketed at adults, about the sorts of relationships adults really have, to being all gee-whiz-mom bubble-gum-and-soda-pop dumbed down unrealistic (but unobjectionable) garbage in which it was forbidden to show a toilet or a couple's bedroom with only one bed. Look at what happened when the videogame ratings were imposed: companies pulled games off the market rather than rate them.
No, the real reason is twofold: First, because the content producers know that many consumers look at the rating and DON'T THINK, and automatically reject anything with the highest rating, even if an actual inspection of the content would cause them to buy. This is because consumers regard ratings not as information but as WARNINGS, and react accordingly. Secondly, because the sort of right-wing fundamentalists who are usually the strongest backers of ratings systems get all upset if the studios produce a too heavy ratio of adult-oriented material to children's material and start calling again for the industry to be regulated.
What would an educated parent do? They'd examine the actual description and consider what they know about the actual content and, in concert with their knowledge of their child, make a determination of whether they think the material is appropriate for their child. They would understand that ratings are merely guidelines made up by some bureaucrat who is going for the lowest common denominator and carefully erring toward higher ratings, and take ratings with a huge grain of salt accordingly.
However, hardly any parents are those educated parents. Just because you understand what a rating is and how to use it doesn't mean almost anybody else does. Most people follow the ratings blindly, so an NC-17 for a movie or an AO for a video game is the kiss of death. It's the scarlet letter.
Now, explain to me how it's "not censorship" to either force a product to be labeled with something that you know from the outset will mean "FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T BUY THIS" to most consumers, or to impose ratings on an industry when history shows that it will make the industry censor itself? Isn't forcing an industry to censor itself just the same as censoring it yourself?
I think it's a perfect expression of the mindset which leads to censorship through "ratings" that my original post got modded-down. I said I want to see children protected from censorship and it got labeled a "troll", but I was neither trolling nor being facetious.
As a child I wasn't really afraid of violence - I knew that I lived in a safe place and it didn't worry me. I wasn't afraid of sex, my parents had explained that and I just wasn't interested until I hit puberty. Swearing didn't bother me, my father was a marine, I grew up knowing how to swear with the best of them. But I was deeply upset that I knew that I was only getting to see such censored, filtered material as the lowest-common-denominator would approve of for me to see, and that the movies I got to see (there were no video game ratings at the time thank God) were being selected not by my parents, but by some bureaucrat who didn't know me, because my mother blindly followed the ratings system.
My parents weren't stupid, they're about as smart as parents come, but they were too culturally indoctrinated to know to question the ratings system yet. I'll never forget my first R-rated movie. My mother actually grabbed me and covered my ears when people on screen started swearing, and put her hand over my eyes when anything was happening which she guessed might lead to something she might not want me to see. She later said she was sorry and there hadn't been anything she wouldn't have let me see or hear, but she was so terrified by that R rating that she didn't feel she could take the chance.
I'd like to see today's children grow up without that foolishness. I'd like to see a generation of kids who hits 18 and is connected to the world, knows how to cope with it, and understands how adults behave. I'd like to see a generation that doesn't have to take a few years to act childish while they learn all the things their parents should have taught them instead of hiding from them. I'd like to see the censors get a taste of their own medicine.
I really think it's time that we all need to make a real effort to protect the children...
Protect them from growing up in a world of censorship and enforced lowest-common-denominator morality.
Re:Even if it's undamaged you might be screwed.
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How Not To Ship Computers
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· Score: 3, Interesting
This sort of thing happens all the time at my house, and it's not just UPS - it's also the postal service. My house has three apartments and two front doors. The doors have package delivery instructions in the window. UPS and the postal service routinely ignore the instructions.
The postal service frequently leaves packages on the front porch in full view of the street. The house is on the most major street in town, in the most densely populated city in the US. Sometimes they leave all the mail there, too, even though we have mail slots. There's also almost always someone home in the house who can receive a package.
I got angry about it and called the post office to complain and they blew me off, telling me they're allowed to do that. So, I called the postal police. (Did you know the postal service has not one but three internal police agencies?) I took my time and called each one and said, in the most innocent voice I could manage, that I don't know what the rules are and I don't know if they were the right person to be talking to but it just doesn't seem right for them to leave our mail on the front porch in full view of the street in the most densely populated city in the country and then tell me it's okay because it's "a secure place", and could they please help me? (Imagine me trying to flutter big eyelashes over bambi eyes here.) The postal police got all indignant on my behalf and told me they'd look into it - all three branches.
None of them ever told me which one was the right one to be talking to, but it *did* get me a phone call from the postmaster, who sounded nervous and promised to make the problem stop happening. The postal service still leaves packages on the porch, but where they can't be seen from the street, and I haven't found the general envelopes-and-magazines mail on the porch again since.
UPS doesn't seem to give a damn. They just leave the packages in plain sight. We've had packages ripped open and robbed, or just stolen entirely. We just tell whoever was shipping to us and then they have to deal with UPS.
This week I received a package via UPS, and they left it on the porch. They clearly were trying to do something "non-obvious"... so they took my recycle bin and put it on its side and placed the package behind it... so from the street it looked for all the world as if a child had made a clumsy attempt at hiding a package on the porch. (They could have just put it in the corner of the porch which isn't visible from the street, but no...) Of course I was home at the time, and they didn't ring my bell.
Airborne is the only delivery service that seems to do a good job here. They ring the doorbell, wait for me to answer the door, and get my signature, every time.
Well, I should say that I deeply respect your ideas in this matter, and if we could get *everyone* to just stop buying CDs for a while that would be the thing to do. The truth is, I just don't see the number of people we're going to get enthused about the idea of a boycott as being very big. As some of the other responses on this thread indicate, even slashdotters seem to be unable to resist buying RIAA-endorsed (for lack of a better description) CDs.
And I'll admit to buying DVDs... but only after I got a player with selectable regions and no Macrovision (I hate Macrovision because my engineer tells me it could make my TV wear out quicker) and got a copy of DeCSS so I can do a format conversion on the data should I ever need to.
I think, however, the idea of "If it doesn't work, return it" is one that most Americans can live with.
I know what you mean about keeping receipts though: I used to toss the bag, plastic wrap, and receipt in the trash barrel outside Tower Records. Not any more, I had to exchange a defective disk once and ended up only getting it because the cashier who sold it to me was still there and remembered me. (It was like an hour later.) These days I keep the bag, receipt, and plastic wrap until I get it home and try it in my Mac.
More importantly, return the darned unrippable CD's! I was horrified to see people on here saying "yeah, I have this CD and I can't rip it..."
If you can't rip it, it's defective and you should have the store replace it. If the repalcement can't be ripped there's something wrong with the production run and you should demand a refund.
If every slashdot user stopped buying CD's today, the industry would note a certain percentage downturn in sales and mark it up to the economy.
However, if every slashdot user returned every unrippable CD we get to the store/vendor, the stores would start wondering why the hell certain CDs are getting returned all the time and start complaining to the labels. Then the labels would have their sales channel angry with them and would be more likely to have to do something about it. A returned CD is an expense to the store: they have to store it until they have a batch to go back, and then return it to the label and wait for a refund or credit. If they start getting a lot of returns on one album they'll pull it from the shelves. (Hasn't that already happened once with Tower Records?) The stores will put up with much less nonsense than the labels are willing to either deal with or create.
And, of course, we could have the correctly mastered CDs which give us no problems, which really we have no gripe with in the first place.
I do, however, also recommend learning about your local musicians and independent musicians who may pass through your area. In the last year I've bought maybe a dozen CDs, just about all of which were purchased directly from independent musicians, and I must say I'm much happier with that music than with any of the commercially produced garbage they play on the radio these days.
Europe is a big market, but not big enough to justify the cost of maintaining two product lines in order to behave in America and be anti-competitive in Europe. Remember that duplicating effort is expensive. Remember how PC manufacturers moved the "off" buttons from the front of all their computers to the side or back when Sweden mandated it, because they wanted to be able to sell computers in Sweden but didn't want to have two product lines.
Moreover, two other factors are involved: the european government, and other companies.
If Microsoft continued to behave badly in Europe after being forced into submission in the US, the European government would no doubt act. Also, other American companies would likely turn around to the American courts and say "see! Look! They're still misbehaving in Europe, and that's costing us customers there!"
However, first we have to see if they actually get any penalty or restrictions, or if they get handed a license to kill.
The problem with this suggestion is that even if Microsoft must publish a detailed document describing the file formats used by each of their products the day they release the product, it won't matter. They'll still have the lead, because they can *implement* before they release the product, and then everyone else will have to try to catch up. Meanwhile businesses will buy the Micro$oft product for fear of not being able to read a client's document.
In order to be able to compete, potential competitors have to have access to Micro$oft's file formats before the products are released.
You realize, of course, that this means there will be an abnormally large percentage of hotel rooms in the area with laptops in them, and thieves will know it...
I wouldn't go to any conference that required me to leave my laptop in an unattended room, particularly if I knew people like maids had keys.
The truth is, short of a strip search and body cavity search of each and every attendee, there's no way they can ensure people won't bring something dangerous into the conference. If they want to try a few basic security procedures like metal detectors and xrays to help ensure that ordinary everyday lunatics don't come in with guns and big knives, sure, that's nice. Anything else is pointless excess.
The problem I have usually observed with scope and cost estimations is that they're usually done and signed off on before a programmer is consulted, and in cases where this isn't true, the programmer is usually some sort of generic programmer/manager type person who isn't expert at any of the specialties that will be required to complete the project.
Once the programmers get their hands on the project, they discover that they're being asked to deliver the moon on a silver platter, carved into nine pieces and wrapped in a red velvet ribbon, to be delivered next wednesday.
I can't remember how many projects I've been handed which I immediately looked at and said "this will go past deadline and over budget: who estimated this thing, anyway?"
I even remember one where the schedule had all programming scheduled concurrently with the design and planning, so once we had a spec for what we were going to do we were supposed to have it done already. Design and planning changed constantly, so I didn't get to start programming until I was supposed to be finished.
In the end, what I'm saying is that problems in delivery (past deadline or over budget) are usually because appropriate programming team members weren't consulted for an estimate in the first place, not because they estimated badly.
In a well analyzed and properly planned project, you still can't tell when the compiler (or interpreter or virtual machine or web server or database server...) will suddenly manifest an unknown bug and you'll have to go scrambling for an alternate way of doing things.
From many years of coding and project estimating, I can say pretty accurately how long a project will take (assuming it's largely known methods and tools) before starting, but I've also learned to add a pretty large fudge factor. The pre-fudging estimate is usually pretty accurate assuming nothing goes wrong, but something always goes wrong, and all I can do is hope that the fudge factor is big enough to cover all the times things go wrong on the project.
If you can plan your projects to the point where "the actual coding stage is little more than data entry", you're obviously never innovating or doing anything really creative.
I am my daughter's censure. When she surfs the web, I sit with her. When she does a google search, sometimes I will not let her click on one of the resultant links. On several occassions I've had her leave the room so I can check out a site first.
Now, what are you teaching her about how to deal with the sort of material you have chosen to censor? How is she going to know how to react to it when she encounters it when you're not there to censor it? She will eventually encounter it without you there, even if she has to wait until she's 18 to do it. You would really rather prevent her from seeing it now and prevent her from having the benefit of your wisdom on the topic?
I talked to my aunt about it once. She's a conservative Christian, and I figured she'd be as conservative as possible about her children's use of the net, and I was concerned about it. I was surprised: she lets all three kids use the net uncensored... but not unsupervised. She'll let them look at whatever they want to, but they have to do it when and where an adult family member can see them to provide guidance about what they're looking at. She told me she knows her children will all have to face the world without her someday, and she wants them to have the knowledge, ability, and background to help them deal with it well.
Consequently if one of her kids accidentally encounters adult material (which is a far less common thing than people make it out to be, but it can happen) they're merely uninterested and just find another page to look at.
There is one case where I think the government should come down hard, fast, and without mercy. I want to hurt those scumbags who use urls that are common variations of sites kids might go to, but are really porn sites, e.g. whitehouse.com and disny.com.
Thank God we have the constitution to stop people like you.
The net is like the world: not designed for small children, but capable of being useful to them. If you want your children to be able to use the net, you have to supervise their use of it yourself, just as you supervise your child living in the world. If you can't take the time to fulfill your parental responsibilities regarding the net, you shouldn't let your child on the net. It's not everybody else's responsibility to make sure your child is safe and/or not exposed to what you don't want your child exposed to by changing the net, just as it's not our responsibility to ensure that your child is always safe everywhere on earth by eliminating all sharp objects.
And I'll remind you of something else: it is not only your responsibility as a parent to protect your child and see to their well being, but also to see that they aren't a nuisance to everyone around them and that they are socialized properly. So, even if you could get perfect censorware software (which we know can't exist, but let's pretend), it would still be your obligation to monitor your child's internet usage to ensure that they don't annoy everybody else on the net. So, why should we go changing the net to accomodate your tastes given that it's your responsibility to be there anyway?
If disny.com is a porn site, though, you might contact the Disney company about it, which might take perfectly legitimate (and constitutional) legal action of their own about the matter, such as for trademark violation.
I had a very similar experience. My powerbook was failing, I called Applecare. They said they thought it was the 3rd party RAM I had installed, that I should take it out and see if the problem recurs and call them back. I took it out, the problem recurred, I called them back, and they overnighted me a box and overnight return slip. No arguments, no problems. I sent it to them on monday afternoon at 4pm. I got it back wednesday at 9:05am. All the Apple people were knowledgable and helpful.
When I buy a computer, I expect it to work correctly. If things happen like "the hinge keeps breaking", I expect the manufacturer to do whatever it takes to make it right for me, even if that means giving me a brand-new top-of-the-line laptop a year later. If the company takes care of me properly, they get a loyal customer in return, and I tell my friends. Apple did well by me. So, I stick with them.
Unfortunately $400 is about twice as much as I'd want to pay for something the size of a pack of cards.
Hmm. Sorry you feel that way... I guess you wouldn't pay $500 for the Canon Digital Elph camera, which Macworld just recommended strongly. I have one, I paid $430 for it, I'm delighted with it, and given the same decision to make over again I'd choose exactly the same thing. I believe it's selling well.
I won't be buying the ipod until Apple makes it play Ogg Vorbis files (which I want because I feel they offer substantially superior sound quality to MP3), but I'll be keeping an eye on the product in hope that they'll upgrade it.
yes they run rather warm, etc.. but they're also not meant to be used for such long periods of time (granted, it should be expected in quality testing, but still) in such a small enclosure.
Everyone is saying this and I have to take issue with it.
For long periods of time, this isn't a good idea. I can think of two or three friends just offhand who like to just turn off the TV and leave their console game running for hours or perhaps even days and then come back, turn on the TV, and pick up where they left off. In the current case, he just forgets to turn it off on a regular basis. In several previous cases it related to games that either didn't have a "save" function or it didn't work as well as they would like.
As for the size of the enclosure... they should figure that out before they make the enclosure. The kiosk/demo machines are there to demonstrate the product. They're there to show me why I should want to buy the product. If they can't make a kiosk that doesn't cause the product to malfunction, I have three ways to think about it:
I have no way, as an outside observer, to know whether the problem is a bad kiosk or a bad product, so to save myself from buying a $300 dud I must assume the latter.
These people are supposed to be engineering a piece of what amounts to being computer equipment. If they can't even produce a decent kiosk for it to work in, why should I trust them to be able to do a good job of engineering a decent console?
If the console has such tight tolerances, perhaps it is best to avoid it in the first place.
I'm not concerned about an occasional crash. Frankly, practically everything in my life has a computer in it these days, and many of them crash once in a great while. I even had an iron crash once - yes, an iron, a hot metal thing that makes clothes flat. It crashed and got cold, insisted that it was hot, and wouldn't respond to the controls, and I had to "reboot" it by unplugging it and plugging it back in.
I've had console videogames crash before, no problem. What worries me is that it sounds like the Xbox crashes too often.
That said though, much as I hate microsoft and won't purchase one myself just because they made it... let's see what people say about it when it actually comes to market before we pronounce it a dud.
Slashdot Mirror
The new URL is http://www.exonome.com/fj/phkl/.
Please use the new URL. The owner of the site of the old URL would probably rather not be slashdotted.
Incidentally I know the guy who did this, he's utterly cool. You should check out some of his other stuff at http://www.exonome.com/fj/ such as ToriAntiTori and Virginity At Last. (ObDisclaimer: I had a hand in the latter.)
Given Congress's track record of passing laws relating to computing which, in about 100% of cases, clearly demonstrate the fact that the people who wrote the law have no concept of how the Internet works and are responding solely to what corporate lobbyists are telling them, I'd rather if Congress would keep their dirty mitts off of this issue.
Yes, it sucks to essentially have to barricade your computers from the rest of the world and not be able to trust any external entity to help you effectively, but I'd rather have that than more weird laws making more innocuous actions criminal offenses for no apparent reason.
Hmm...
IT costs $3,000.
So does an Apple Powerbook G4.
A car costs $20,000 and requires insurance.
IT could easily get me to the supermarket or the subway in a lot less time than it takes me now, and wouldn't aggravate my asthma as much as walking uphill in dry winter air.
So, why am I not supposed to think this is "affordable"?
Also, where the heck is this guy getting the bandwidth to download movies? A movie in DIVX format is about 600 megs and requires a pretty hefty processor to play (better than anything commodore would have made). Other formats, even if done at lower resolution and less intensive on the processor, would be less compressed so a movie would still be pretty big.
Bluntly, 90 minutes of video was no laughing matter to try and get onto a computer five or six years ago, the general technology level of the best stuff in afghanistan citizens' hands today.
Rather than drooling over an iPod, I would expect they would be amazed that such large disks are sold at consumer prices, let alone for stick-it-in-your-pocket-and-go use. I wonder if any "ancient commodore" model can even address such a large disk.
No, I agree with the posters that think there's something very odd about this story. I think I'll take it with a grain of salt, like the rock of gibraltar.
I think it's a very pretty story to think "Oh, we freed the Afghanis, now the first thing they're doing is rushing to be just like us," but given the details it strikes me a lot more like propaganda than reality.
If it's rated X, they can't go to it, because theaters won't show it. Forget about studios and distributors for a minute (which is absurd, because they're an integral part of the process, but nonetheless) and just think theaters: theaters do not show X-rated movies regardless of their merits or whether the public would like them.
How is that not censorship?
And when you say:How do you know? Studios have never been willing to distribute X-rated films in this country, and theaters have never been willing to show them. With no data to work on, how can you make that assumption? That's the same excuse the studios give for not making X-rated films, and I don't believe it when they say it either.
Counterexample: Pretend a film is rated X due to sexual content, and I, as a parent, understand that my (imaginary) 16.75 year old son is mature enough to see whatever he'd like to see. Imagine I actually manage to live near the one theater in the country showing the movie.
He can't see it. The theater won't let him in, with or without me, under any circumstances.
How is *that* not censorship?
Congratulations, you just made my point for me.
Theaters won't show X rated movies because people won't go to X rated movies. Why won't people go to them? Because they're X rated. If they weren't X rated, would there be a market for their same content? Yup. Therefore, they're being censored.
Read my post again. Maybe you'll get it this time.
I'm not stupid enough to fail to understand that governments get involved with ratings when people start making a stink about it. What I'm saying is that ratings systems aren't an appropriate or effective way of solving the problem, and lead to censorship.
What would I do? I believe that advertising materials for films and video games should accurately reflect the content - basically, demand truth in advertising. Everyone claims they need ratings because they need to be able to know what's in the movie/game. Okay, then do something that accomplishes that. Don't use a ratings system, the ratings say absolutely nothing about the content, they just make a value judgement for you based on criteria which have nothing to do with you personally. Use a content descriptor code - like the Geek Code.
Neither the movie ratings system nor the video game ratings system tells you anything about the content of the material being rated.
Parents who use ratings to choose video games (or movies) are failing to fulfill their parental responsibilities: they are deligating the job of choosing content for their children to someone else. Moreover, they are allowing someone else to decide on what factors to base the decision without having any knowledge of their child.
And if you really believe that "ratings don't force anything on anyone", you're obviously not thinking about the effect it has on the people who create the material being rated. See my previous posts on the subject.
Okay, let's pretend for a moment that you're disturbed by sexual content. You go to the movie theater, and as you're standing outside you notice that the movie they're showing is rated PG-13.
Should you see it? Does it have sexual content? How can you tell?
The ratings systems in current use don't tell you what's in the content, just what age some bureaucrat thinks it's appropriate for. That PG-13 movie could have got that rating for swearing, or violence. Or it might be all about sex.
Ratings tell you nothing at all about what is in the content the rating applies to. If you want to be able to select based on actual content factors, don't ask for ratings, ask for content descriptors. If you want encoded content descriptors - V for violence, S for sex, etc - sure, that's nice, ask for it. But don't tell me that you can successfully use ratings to find the content you want.
Rating systems seem never to just kinda happen. They don't even seem to happen from consumer demand - consumers seem perfectly happy to buy things without ratings, and product producers (be it movies, video games, or cheese) don't feel enough consumer demand to care.
Do you refuse to buy Velveeta because it doesn't have a cheese rating? A simple, short code to tell you what it has in it, in three letters or less? No, you read the label, look at the description of the contents IN ENGLISH and decide if you want it. Do you let somebody at the National Cheese Board decide for you if the cheese is appropriate for people with your lifestyle? No, you make the decision yourself.
Ratings systems get imposed by the government. Oh, sure, the ratings systems the United States has on video games and movies are called "voluntary", but the systems were put in place when congress told the industries "put in a ratings system or we'll regulate you." I think that's enough of a threat to scare any industry into compliance.
Now look at what happens when the ratings system gets imposed. Does the industry go on behaving normally, and simply stick the rating onto the boxes of the products they would have been making anyway? No. What happens is, they turn around and stop making anything with the highest rating.
How many movies have there been rated PG-13? Too many to count. How many were R before there was a PG-13? Too many to count. How many have been NC-17? Two. How many were X before there was an NC-17? I'd have to check, but I know it's hardly any. How many video games are on the market with the M rating? Plenty. The AO rating? I think there are one or two for the Playstation 2, and hardly any for any other system.
Is this because consumers don't want movies or games with the sort of content that comes with these ratings? No. Is it because, by nature, hardly any games or movies would get these ratings anyway? No. Look at what happened when Hollywood introduced ratings: the kinds of films they made went immediately from mostly films target marketed at adults, about the sorts of relationships adults really have, to being all gee-whiz-mom bubble-gum-and-soda-pop dumbed down unrealistic (but unobjectionable) garbage in which it was forbidden to show a toilet or a couple's bedroom with only one bed. Look at what happened when the videogame ratings were imposed: companies pulled games off the market rather than rate them.
No, the real reason is twofold: First, because the content producers know that many consumers look at the rating and DON'T THINK, and automatically reject anything with the highest rating, even if an actual inspection of the content would cause them to buy. This is because consumers regard ratings not as information but as WARNINGS, and react accordingly. Secondly, because the sort of right-wing fundamentalists who are usually the strongest backers of ratings systems get all upset if the studios produce a too heavy ratio of adult-oriented material to children's material and start calling again for the industry to be regulated.
What would an educated parent do? They'd examine the actual description and consider what they know about the actual content and, in concert with their knowledge of their child, make a determination of whether they think the material is appropriate for their child. They would understand that ratings are merely guidelines made up by some bureaucrat who is going for the lowest common denominator and carefully erring toward higher ratings, and take ratings with a huge grain of salt accordingly.
However, hardly any parents are those educated parents. Just because you understand what a rating is and how to use it doesn't mean almost anybody else does. Most people follow the ratings blindly, so an NC-17 for a movie or an AO for a video game is the kiss of death. It's the scarlet letter.
Now, explain to me how it's "not censorship" to either force a product to be labeled with something that you know from the outset will mean "FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T BUY THIS" to most consumers, or to impose ratings on an industry when history shows that it will make the industry censor itself? Isn't forcing an industry to censor itself just the same as censoring it yourself?
I think it's a perfect expression of the mindset which leads to censorship through "ratings" that my original post got modded-down. I said I want to see children protected from censorship and it got labeled a "troll", but I was neither trolling nor being facetious.
As a child I wasn't really afraid of violence - I knew that I lived in a safe place and it didn't worry me. I wasn't afraid of sex, my parents had explained that and I just wasn't interested until I hit puberty. Swearing didn't bother me, my father was a marine, I grew up knowing how to swear with the best of them. But I was deeply upset that I knew that I was only getting to see such censored, filtered material as the lowest-common-denominator would approve of for me to see, and that the movies I got to see (there were no video game ratings at the time thank God) were being selected not by my parents, but by some bureaucrat who didn't know me, because my mother blindly followed the ratings system.
My parents weren't stupid, they're about as smart as parents come, but they were too culturally indoctrinated to know to question the ratings system yet. I'll never forget my first R-rated movie. My mother actually grabbed me and covered my ears when people on screen started swearing, and put her hand over my eyes when anything was happening which she guessed might lead to something she might not want me to see. She later said she was sorry and there hadn't been anything she wouldn't have let me see or hear, but she was so terrified by that R rating that she didn't feel she could take the chance.
I'd like to see today's children grow up without that foolishness. I'd like to see a generation of kids who hits 18 and is connected to the world, knows how to cope with it, and understands how adults behave. I'd like to see a generation that doesn't have to take a few years to act childish while they learn all the things their parents should have taught them instead of hiding from them. I'd like to see the censors get a taste of their own medicine.
I really think it's time that we all need to make a real effort to protect the children...
Protect them from growing up in a world of censorship and enforced lowest-common-denominator morality.
This sort of thing happens all the time at my house, and it's not just UPS - it's also the postal service. My house has three apartments and two front doors. The doors have package delivery instructions in the window. UPS and the postal service routinely ignore the instructions.
The postal service frequently leaves packages on the front porch in full view of the street. The house is on the most major street in town, in the most densely populated city in the US. Sometimes they leave all the mail there, too, even though we have mail slots. There's also almost always someone home in the house who can receive a package.
I got angry about it and called the post office to complain and they blew me off, telling me they're allowed to do that. So, I called the postal police. (Did you know the postal service has not one but three internal police agencies?) I took my time and called each one and said, in the most innocent voice I could manage, that I don't know what the rules are and I don't know if they were the right person to be talking to but it just doesn't seem right for them to leave our mail on the front porch in full view of the street in the most densely populated city in the country and then tell me it's okay because it's "a secure place", and could they please help me? (Imagine me trying to flutter big eyelashes over bambi eyes here.) The postal police got all indignant on my behalf and told me they'd look into it - all three branches.
None of them ever told me which one was the right one to be talking to, but it *did* get me a phone call from the postmaster, who sounded nervous and promised to make the problem stop happening. The postal service still leaves packages on the porch, but where they can't be seen from the street, and I haven't found the general envelopes-and-magazines mail on the porch again since.
UPS doesn't seem to give a damn. They just leave the packages in plain sight. We've had packages ripped open and robbed, or just stolen entirely. We just tell whoever was shipping to us and then they have to deal with UPS.
This week I received a package via UPS, and they left it on the porch. They clearly were trying to do something "non-obvious"... so they took my recycle bin and put it on its side and placed the package behind it... so from the street it looked for all the world as if a child had made a clumsy attempt at hiding a package on the porch. (They could have just put it in the corner of the porch which isn't visible from the street, but no...) Of course I was home at the time, and they didn't ring my bell.
Airborne is the only delivery service that seems to do a good job here. They ring the doorbell, wait for me to answer the door, and get my signature, every time.
Well, I should say that I deeply respect your ideas in this matter, and if we could get *everyone* to just stop buying CDs for a while that would be the thing to do. The truth is, I just don't see the number of people we're going to get enthused about the idea of a boycott as being very big. As some of the other responses on this thread indicate, even slashdotters seem to be unable to resist buying RIAA-endorsed (for lack of a better description) CDs.
And I'll admit to buying DVDs... but only after I got a player with selectable regions and no Macrovision (I hate Macrovision because my engineer tells me it could make my TV wear out quicker) and got a copy of DeCSS so I can do a format conversion on the data should I ever need to.
I think, however, the idea of "If it doesn't work, return it" is one that most Americans can live with.
I know what you mean about keeping receipts though: I used to toss the bag, plastic wrap, and receipt in the trash barrel outside Tower Records. Not any more, I had to exchange a defective disk once and ended up only getting it because the cashier who sold it to me was still there and remembered me. (It was like an hour later.) These days I keep the bag, receipt, and plastic wrap until I get it home and try it in my Mac.
More importantly, return the darned unrippable CD's ! I was horrified to see people on here saying "yeah, I have this CD and I can't rip it..."
If you can't rip it, it's defective and you should have the store replace it. If the repalcement can't be ripped there's something wrong with the production run and you should demand a refund.
If every slashdot user stopped buying CD's today, the industry would note a certain percentage downturn in sales and mark it up to the economy.
However, if every slashdot user returned every unrippable CD we get to the store/vendor, the stores would start wondering why the hell certain CDs are getting returned all the time and start complaining to the labels. Then the labels would have their sales channel angry with them and would be more likely to have to do something about it. A returned CD is an expense to the store: they have to store it until they have a batch to go back, and then return it to the label and wait for a refund or credit. If they start getting a lot of returns on one album they'll pull it from the shelves. (Hasn't that already happened once with Tower Records?) The stores will put up with much less nonsense than the labels are willing to either deal with or create.
And, of course, we could have the correctly mastered CDs which give us no problems, which really we have no gripe with in the first place.
I do, however, also recommend learning about your local musicians and independent musicians who may pass through your area. In the last year I've bought maybe a dozen CDs, just about all of which were purchased directly from independent musicians, and I must say I'm much happier with that music than with any of the commercially produced garbage they play on the radio these days.
Europe is a big market, but not big enough to justify the cost of maintaining two product lines in order to behave in America and be anti-competitive in Europe. Remember that duplicating effort is expensive. Remember how PC manufacturers moved the "off" buttons from the front of all their computers to the side or back when Sweden mandated it, because they wanted to be able to sell computers in Sweden but didn't want to have two product lines.
Moreover, two other factors are involved: the european government, and other companies.
If Microsoft continued to behave badly in Europe after being forced into submission in the US, the European government would no doubt act. Also, other American companies would likely turn around to the American courts and say "see! Look! They're still misbehaving in Europe, and that's costing us customers there!"
However, first we have to see if they actually get any penalty or restrictions, or if they get handed a license to kill.
The problem with this suggestion is that even if Microsoft must publish a detailed document describing the file formats used by each of their products the day they release the product, it won't matter. They'll still have the lead, because they can *implement* before they release the product, and then everyone else will have to try to catch up. Meanwhile businesses will buy the Micro$oft product for fear of not being able to read a client's document.
In order to be able to compete, potential competitors have to have access to Micro$oft's file formats before the products are released.
You realize, of course, that this means there will be an abnormally large percentage of hotel rooms in the area with laptops in them, and thieves will know it...
I wouldn't go to any conference that required me to leave my laptop in an unattended room, particularly if I knew people like maids had keys.
The truth is, short of a strip search and body cavity search of each and every attendee, there's no way they can ensure people won't bring something dangerous into the conference. If they want to try a few basic security procedures like metal detectors and xrays to help ensure that ordinary everyday lunatics don't come in with guns and big knives, sure, that's nice. Anything else is pointless excess.
The problem I have usually observed with scope and cost estimations is that they're usually done and signed off on before a programmer is consulted, and in cases where this isn't true, the programmer is usually some sort of generic programmer/manager type person who isn't expert at any of the specialties that will be required to complete the project.
Once the programmers get their hands on the project, they discover that they're being asked to deliver the moon on a silver platter, carved into nine pieces and wrapped in a red velvet ribbon, to be delivered next wednesday.
I can't remember how many projects I've been handed which I immediately looked at and said "this will go past deadline and over budget: who estimated this thing, anyway?"
I even remember one where the schedule had all programming scheduled concurrently with the design and planning, so once we had a spec for what we were going to do we were supposed to have it done already. Design and planning changed constantly, so I didn't get to start programming until I was supposed to be finished.
In the end, what I'm saying is that problems in delivery (past deadline or over budget) are usually because appropriate programming team members weren't consulted for an estimate in the first place, not because they estimated badly.
In a well analyzed and properly planned project, you still can't tell when the compiler (or interpreter or virtual machine or web server or database server...) will suddenly manifest an unknown bug and you'll have to go scrambling for an alternate way of doing things.
From many years of coding and project estimating, I can say pretty accurately how long a project will take (assuming it's largely known methods and tools) before starting, but I've also learned to add a pretty large fudge factor. The pre-fudging estimate is usually pretty accurate assuming nothing goes wrong, but something always goes wrong, and all I can do is hope that the fudge factor is big enough to cover all the times things go wrong on the project.
If you can plan your projects to the point where "the actual coding stage is little more than data entry", you're obviously never innovating or doing anything really creative.
What's a contemporary gaming console without a good golf game?!?
Fun?
And that's not counting the machines that pretended to have some use other than gaming, the "home computers".
What's one or two more? It's not like we can't shove them in milk crates and stack them in the back of a closet when we're not playing with them.
I am my daughter's censure. When she surfs the web, I sit with her. When she does a google search, sometimes I will not let her click on one of the resultant links. On several occassions I've had her leave the room so I can check out a site first.
Now, what are you teaching her about how to deal with the sort of material you have chosen to censor? How is she going to know how to react to it when she encounters it when you're not there to censor it? She will eventually encounter it without you there, even if she has to wait until she's 18 to do it. You would really rather prevent her from seeing it now and prevent her from having the benefit of your wisdom on the topic?
I talked to my aunt about it once. She's a conservative Christian, and I figured she'd be as conservative as possible about her children's use of the net, and I was concerned about it. I was surprised: she lets all three kids use the net uncensored... but not unsupervised. She'll let them look at whatever they want to, but they have to do it when and where an adult family member can see them to provide guidance about what they're looking at. She told me she knows her children will all have to face the world without her someday, and she wants them to have the knowledge, ability, and background to help them deal with it well.
Consequently if one of her kids accidentally encounters adult material (which is a far less common thing than people make it out to be, but it can happen) they're merely uninterested and just find another page to look at.
There is one case where I think the government should come down hard, fast, and without mercy. I want to hurt those scumbags who use urls that are common variations of sites kids might go to, but are really porn sites, e.g. whitehouse.com and disny.com.
Thank God we have the constitution to stop people like you.
The net is like the world: not designed for small children, but capable of being useful to them. If you want your children to be able to use the net, you have to supervise their use of it yourself, just as you supervise your child living in the world. If you can't take the time to fulfill your parental responsibilities regarding the net, you shouldn't let your child on the net. It's not everybody else's responsibility to make sure your child is safe and/or not exposed to what you don't want your child exposed to by changing the net, just as it's not our responsibility to ensure that your child is always safe everywhere on earth by eliminating all sharp objects.
And I'll remind you of something else: it is not only your responsibility as a parent to protect your child and see to their well being, but also to see that they aren't a nuisance to everyone around them and that they are socialized properly. So, even if you could get perfect censorware software (which we know can't exist, but let's pretend), it would still be your obligation to monitor your child's internet usage to ensure that they don't annoy everybody else on the net. So, why should we go changing the net to accomodate your tastes given that it's your responsibility to be there anyway?
If disny.com is a porn site, though, you might contact the Disney company about it, which might take perfectly legitimate (and constitutional) legal action of their own about the matter, such as for trademark violation.
BBEdit.
What? You don't want to use a mac? I didn't think this was a religious war...
I had a very similar experience. My powerbook was failing, I called Applecare. They said they thought it was the 3rd party RAM I had installed, that I should take it out and see if the problem recurs and call them back. I took it out, the problem recurred, I called them back, and they overnighted me a box and overnight return slip. No arguments, no problems. I sent it to them on monday afternoon at 4pm. I got it back wednesday at 9:05am. All the Apple people were knowledgable and helpful.
When I buy a computer, I expect it to work correctly. If things happen like "the hinge keeps breaking", I expect the manufacturer to do whatever it takes to make it right for me, even if that means giving me a brand-new top-of-the-line laptop a year later. If the company takes care of me properly, they get a loyal customer in return, and I tell my friends. Apple did well by me. So, I stick with them.
Unfortunately $400 is about twice as much as I'd want to pay for something the size of a pack of cards.
Hmm. Sorry you feel that way... I guess you wouldn't pay $500 for the Canon Digital Elph camera, which Macworld just recommended strongly. I have one, I paid $430 for it, I'm delighted with it, and given the same decision to make over again I'd choose exactly the same thing. I believe it's selling well.
I won't be buying the ipod until Apple makes it play Ogg Vorbis files (which I want because I feel they offer substantially superior sound quality to MP3), but I'll be keeping an eye on the product in hope that they'll upgrade it.
Everyone is saying this and I have to take issue with it.
For long periods of time, this isn't a good idea. I can think of two or three friends just offhand who like to just turn off the TV and leave their console game running for hours or perhaps even days and then come back, turn on the TV, and pick up where they left off. In the current case, he just forgets to turn it off on a regular basis. In several previous cases it related to games that either didn't have a "save" function or it didn't work as well as they would like.
As for the size of the enclosure... they should figure that out before they make the enclosure. The kiosk/demo machines are there to demonstrate the product. They're there to show me why I should want to buy the product. If they can't make a kiosk that doesn't cause the product to malfunction, I have three ways to think about it:
I'm not concerned about an occasional crash. Frankly, practically everything in my life has a computer in it these days, and many of them crash once in a great while. I even had an iron crash once - yes, an iron, a hot metal thing that makes clothes flat. It crashed and got cold, insisted that it was hot, and wouldn't respond to the controls, and I had to "reboot" it by unplugging it and plugging it back in.
I've had console videogames crash before, no problem. What worries me is that it sounds like the Xbox crashes too often.
That said though, much as I hate microsoft and won't purchase one myself just because they made it... let's see what people say about it when it actually comes to market before we pronounce it a dud.