>Kids growing up with unfettered access to the internet is the grand experiment here. We have 150,000 pre-internet years of mankind as the baseline. I don't need scientific proof to default to the traditional exposure of kids to the internet.
For the vast majority of that period in the vast majority of places on earth (basically for 99.99% of all the kids who ever lived in that time-frame you cite) kids would see far worse things than what's on the internet by looking out the window. Heads on spikes, bodies rotting on public gallows, and people dying in the street from the black plague.
In fact - the "sheltered" kids idea is the grand experiment - it's really only existed for about 70 years, post world war 2 in wealthy countries. Prior to that it was actually not POSSIBLE to shelter children in any way from the harshest realities of life - not to mention considering the average child-mortality rate, every single kid in the world up to about 1950 had buried at least one sibling by the age of 10. They didn't die from seeing the bad stuff either - they died because disease was rampant and medicine was weak. Our great-grandparents may have had seven to ten kids but only two or maybe three would grow up to have kids themselves. From the 1950's onwards people started having fewer kids because most of them actually grew up. On average the size of a family is the same.
Or do you think all those parents lied to their kids all those years about where little Timmy and little Sally and little Penny all went off to ?
Life is fucked up shit. It's beautiful things too. But you gotta raise kids to live in a world of both.
>Because you have to live in this society. Social norms are a pretty important thing to learn, even if you chose to ignore them.
If you choose to ignore them, how does it make any difference if you learned them or not ? Teach your kids to be tolerant - pull that one off and you've made great kids, anything else good is a bonus, but pretty much EVERYTHING else they can learn from a parent is NOT good.
>Again, most of your comments apply to older children - and I tend to agree. A 7-year-old shouldn't watch Jaws unless you want them to refuse to get in the water when you hit the beach.
You think they apply to older children - I'm pointing out that they don't. That at 7 I did most of the things you won't let your kids do, and it did me no harm. The idea that a 7 year old can't walk the streets would seem ludicrous to most parents of just one generation ago, because it is.
>Look, if you get off on people shitting on one another, I'm not going to get all PC and call that normal. Again, normal doesn't exist. There's no such thing. The only UNNATURAL sexual choice is abstinence, everything else is normal. I don't have any desire for that particular fetish - but I understand why some people do. There are plenty of people who judge me for being bi, same with my fiance, though women who are bi get judged less than men. Quite a lot of people judge us for being polyamorous. I believe children should grow up to know that a family is any group of people who love each other, that's the be-all and the end-all of it. What consenting adults like to is their business - but pretending that they all like the same thing, that's judgemental and wrong, and thinking your child shouldn't know about such people is harmful to your child.
> It's certainly not reflective of the "real world" in any way that is important. If nothing else, you're shielding them from the reality that there are people who enjoy things you don't get.
> It's hard to imagine what I would gain by letting my 1st grader cruise the internet unrestricted. A ten-year-old is another matter.
A kid who trusts you for guidance, and who won't when they get confronted with these things blame you for hiding them from him and leaving him unprepared.
>I also reject your claim that my kid will be harmed by a filtered internet. The internet, in the form we are discussing, is only about 20 years old and the rich media part is younger than that. Almost anyone over 30 grew up with no internet at all, and most people over 40 grew up with no computers at all. Were they all "harmed"? Real life is still the best way to get exposure to real life. The internet is not a basic human need by any stretch.
Being shielded from anything that exists is harmful. In the 80's when I grew up - that was the parents who pretended to their kids that my country wasn't at war, that their older brothers and fathers and uncles weren't busy dying. A few years later it was the ones who pretended those people died as heroes, who pretended to their kids that it was a just war and we were not on the wrong side of it (it wasn't and we weren't). Then those kids grew up to be able to read newspapers - and learn what really happened... instead of being able to understand their parent's remorse - now they saw their parents are people who had supported evil and still did.
Every experience I have had has taught me one thing: there is never a time when hiding things from a kid is a good idea. Everything you hide will come back to bite you in the ass.
>As for a seven year old. Seven! I won't let my seven-year-old out of the house alone - why the hell would I let her surf the internet alone and unrestricted?
In the year I turned 7, I went to school for the first time. On the first day, my mom drove me. On the second day my older cousin showed me the route to ride on my bike. From the third day, I went and came back every day - by myself for the next 12 years. In the afternoons I played cricket in the streets with the kids from the neighbourhood. My sister who was 5 at the time, played with us, and travelled to school the same way after she turned 6 as well (and we rarely travelled together because we couldn't stand each other). This was in 1987 - and my country was, for all intensive purposes, in the middle of a civil WAR at the time - and it was still okay.
When I was 9 I took the textbook my dad had used when he learned BASIC as part of his engineering studies and wrote my first hello world. I came running up to my dad and said "Daddy, daddy, I wrote a program that can write my name over and over and over ! " He looked at me, he smiled, and he said: "Nice going ! Now go write one that can do it exactly 5 times and then stop." I said: "I don't know how to do that." He said: "You figured it out this far, go find out how to do it." I did. That was, to my mind the single best parenting experience I ever had. My parents encouraged me to explore and learn and discover. They figured even if there are risks (and there were some, at the age of 11 I managed to blow the whole computer up because I was trying to build a robot I could control with programs and I wasn't very good at soldering) it's better that I learn and discover and grow. Indeed in the worst case scenario (as unlikely as it is) it would be better for me to have lived a short life filled with discovery than a long one lived in fear.
>Think about it for a moment: is it acceptable to let a seven-year-old browse an adult video store? If you say "yes", I suspect you'd be on the fringes of society. I do say yes, and while I may indeed be on the fringes of society, has it ever occurred to you that perhaps it's the fringe at the FRONT ? Progress always looks like insanity by those who fear to question the status quo.
> Yet the same content in the video store is easily accessible via the internet.
Which is convenient because unlike the video store, the government cannot interfere with my belief that letting my kids see it is not only NOT harmful, but actually GOOD for them.
>Should a seven-year-old be brought to a movie that is R-rated for violence?
You think violence and sex are the same thing ? I know a LOT of parents who don't agree. My dad when I was about 12 took a tape of the then most erotic mainstream movie ever made (Basic Instinct) and carefully taped static over the violent scenes, then let us watch it because he didn't think the sex would harm us. He was PISSED when I watched "The Terminator" at age 14 because of the violence, he didn't care about sex though. Personally - I'm not concerned about violence either - again, violence is a real problem in life. I would rather raise my children to be aware and wary off violence than to pretend it doesn't exist.
I turned out pretty okay and I earn double his salary at half his age.
>but it has also filled a role as a niche entertainment medium for people with "deviant" tastes.
There is no such thing as "deviant", nor is there such a thing as normal. As long as you believe in the existence of either you are a bad parent by default - because the BEST thing a parent can do is help their children discover their own, true, identities and be proud of whatever that turns out to be. The WORST thing a parent can do - is anything else.
> You may very well be right that my kid won't be affected by this stuff, but I won't let my kids be the subjects of this uncontrolled experiment
I didn't say your kid won't be affected, I said he will be HARMED by being kept
I first heard the quote as a child attributed to Lenin. But I don't think the truth of it's meaning is much altered by the miss-attribution. Still, thanks for the information, I know better now.
You're not a parent. You're a fucking a prison warden !
>My kids don't have a computer. I had one at age 7. By age 9 I wrote my first computer program. I'll be damned if I won't give my kids even the OPPORTUNITY to do that.
> I wouldn't let them walk the streets (even in my nice neighborhood) alone, why would I let them wander the internet alone?
I walked to school every day (sometimes I cycled), alone. Sometimes with friends. By the time I was your eldest's age we liked to walk out at night, climb an unbuilt-up mountain to the other side of town and go catch the late night movie, then head back home - all on foot. We'd get home to my place around 4am on Saturday mornining, make coffee and all pass out in a big heap in the living room. My mom was used to walking in on Saturday mornings and finding 5 or 6 teenagers from around the neighbourhood in her house asleep on the floor. She was very happy that we chose HER house to fall asleep in.
Counter-claim: "You kids have it lucky in one sense. The virus gave you one good thing and it is this. Our parents hid things from us. They told us only as little as possible about sex and let us figure our own way forward. Dealing with guilt because I happened to be gay on top of all the other big mysteries. We spent our entire lives wondering if we ever really learned to do it right. Scared of it. Guilty about it. The virus changed that- you have to know everything, it's the only way we can protect and save you now - by telling you all, letting you see all, by not hiding anything. It's the only way to save you now that one of the STDs is lethal, it's the only way to beat the virus - and the bonus, the one good thing about it is - you won't be like us. You won't be afraid of sex, you won't be nervous that you're doing it wrong, you won't be nervous that you're attracted to the wrong sex - you'll realize that whatever you're attracted to is what is right to be attracted to. You'll have better lives than we did because of that."
Pieter Dirk Uys - South African HIV/AIDS activist - from a speech he regularly gives at schools. During the same talk he demonstrates the use of a condom - by putting on one a very realistic penis-shaped dildo, because too many kids got infected after thinking if you roll a condom over a banana and put it beside the bed you're having safe sex...
Here's the thing - the guy I'm citing, and the people your study cites are all talking about the SAME damn change - but I agree with him, it's a change which can and must be managed for the positive. It's positive potential far outweighs it's negative risk. Either way, managed it must be- because it's not possible to go back. Too many innocent lives are at stake.
>Is that acceptable? I doubt many of them discussed their relationship with their parents, and I doubt their parents had that kind of relationship
No it's not, but the kind of things you blame I think have nothing to do with the issue, the same existed when I was a teenager and the internet didn't exist then. So teach your boys to respect woman, teach your girls to be confident and self assured - and you yourself should buy her her first vibrator.
> Notice that they end with ".UK", I'm in Europe too.
UK is really not representative of European culture in general. I don't live in either but I've visited both many times for extended periods.
> What is a problem is when outside influences (pornography, media, etc) normalise certain behaviours, which pressures teenagers into doing things they don't want to do.
So teach your kids about body-ownership. Teach them that conformity is evil and it's important to be true to yourself. Then if your daughter WANTS her ass spanked then she will do so without spending years feeling guilty about it - and if she doesn't want it (or maybe wants to DO the spanking) she'll have the courage and confidence to look her puppy love in the eyes and say so. That's what I want to give my daughters, I want to raise little Tiffany Achings.
You raise a point, still the massive left-over anger from completely clashing with my dad over how one should live your life was so huge by 21 that when I felt he was making a mistake in a decision about a much younger sibbling - we had a fall-out so big I didn't even visit my parents again for 6 years.
What if one of them, or me, had died in that time ?
Now 14 years after I left school - we get along fine, I live my life exactly the way I said I wanted to when I was 14, the difference - now my dad cannot tell me not to. I knew he had good intentions, boys who die their hair pink on one side and blue on the other have a harder time getting jobs in his world-view (but I don't have that problem because I have a sufficiently impressive resume that employers really don't give a damn what I look like - especially since my work isn't customer-facing).
Over the years, he even came to adopt some of my ideas - especially in terms of artistic expression and the need for that to be uncensored even by yourself.
We got along great until I hit puberty, then we didn't actually get along at all again until I was so old and successfull that he stopped trying to tell me how to live. Now I can happily ask his advice about many things - things where he has experience I lack (I bought my first house a few months ago, he's had a few - of course I had him help me go over the contracts and check that the deal was above board and the house was really what it appeared to be).
I also grew up enough that when a while ago he said to me "maybe you should stop with the tattoos now, it's getting a bit much" I didn't get angry - I just smiled and ignored it. But I didn't have that capacity at 18 - I had a sense of who I was, but I didn't have a decade's worth of proof that it can work, I had nothing to back me up then - just stubbornness to drive me forward.
So sure, kids hating parents mostly work out after a few years... I would rather not have such a few years with my kids - because I don't know that I, or they, will be around long enough to see it end.
> Newsflash: Even the best kids don't always listen to what mommy and/or daddy tell them.
That's the point. You cannot deal with that issue by trying to stop the kids from having the CAPACITY to disobey. Not unless you want to raise a few agoraphobics anyway...
So really what you're saying is that adblock-plus will protect your kid against everything you're actually concerned about ?
There you go then, asker - you have your answer. Censor the ads, what they find themselves by going there deliberately you're better off explaining than trying to lie about.
>Do you also suggest I remove all the "child safe" lids on the various poisonous things in the house?
Are you suggesting that seeing the goatse guy is comparable to drinking poison ? You mean your kid will actually die if he gets his first goatse too soon ? Sorry dude, we all had to live through our first goatse, so will your kids, nobody has died from it yet. That makes this a very bad analogy.
>FREEDOM OF SPEECH!!!, AMEN!!, but not to my 9 Year Old.
And thanks to generations of parents like you, democracy doesn't really exist in the USA anymore. If you raise them that way at any point in their life, you pretty much rule out the possibility that they will suddenly become mavericks who change an industry or leaders who change a society - or even just actively participate in such movements.
Think you can teach them to be good, free people later in life ? The Soviets had one thing right: "Give me a kid until age 7 and he'll be a communist for life." Well give you a kid until age 7 and he'll apparently be a scared consumer the rest of his life.
>I've seen no evidence to support your conclusion that it's unlikely they'll be hurt by it. So we're even there.
No, you're not. See you're the one who is making a prediction. In scientific terms - that makes you the one who has to provide proof. He is denying that there is any grounds for your prediction.
Of course, the real truth is, most parents define "their children will become sexual beings who are ultimately sexually active with their own natural kinks and pleasures" as "harm".
Here's my advice dude - go stand in the mirror and say to yourself: "One day my little angel will have a great time being somebody else's dirty, dirty girl... or possibly his/her mean dominatrix"
Then say it until you make peace with the fact and stop being scared of it. You'll be a much better parent afterward.
Aaah yes, because fetishism is a sign of mental illness... No, it's not, the fact that some shrinks haven't caught up to the times is not my problem. The vast majority of people have fetishest fantasies, many are comfortable expressing it and live happier lives because of that.
The fact that more and more people reach that level of comfort at an earlier age is not a bad thing, it's a GOOD thing.
Let me put it this way - me and my wife are planning to have children, we already decided that our habit of being naked around the house will not change. We will not suddenly start hiding the handcuffs and spanking paddles lying about the house, we will not suddenly put a lock on the play-room door and order them never to enter it - we'll just tell them "when the door is closed, you cannot come in."
Many people think that raises HEALTHIER children. In many cultures, that is how ALL children are raised (most of Europe).
In Dutch culture for example it's common for teenagers to have a sit-down with their parents when they feel ready to have sex and discuss it with them - the young couple asking for advice (not just practical but on the whole thing) before going ahead. It's also normal practice to get consent, along with good advice.
The Netherlands boasts one of the lowest teen pregnancy rates in the world. And get this bit: 70% of American's regret the timing or person with whom they had their first sexual experience according to studies. In the Netherlands, only 15% would like to change anything.
If I do that sum - I would say it evens out roughly, I may even have come out slightly ahead.
If I weigh in the increase in income at my next job - which was at least partly possible due to the extra qualifications I had earned then I come out way ahead, if I add that up as a percentage of my income increases over the next 12 years... then I'm massively ahead. That said, I have pretty much doubled my income once every 3 years ever since.
Software isn't invented, it's discovered. More-over I am not in fact looking at the end product alone. I am saying that if this end product runs on a computer that tells me something ABOUT the idea- it tells me the idea is mathematics, because absolutely nothing that isn't mathematics can run on a computer.
Patenting a programming idea is no different from patenting a faster process by which to do multiplication in your head. Indeed any and all programs ever written CAN be executed in your head - it takes a great memory and it's very difficult to do with a complex program, but every programmer runs every algorythm in his head as he writes it. Of course, you can mentally utilize physical inventions as well (by imagining how they'll work), but the difference is - that you cannot then turn them into something a computer will run (at best a computer can draw a similar picture). But if a computer is capable of running it, then it is mathematics and nothing more - because nothing else CAN run on computers. A computer is just a universal Turing machine. Universal Turing machines PREDATE computers - but prior to them they were only done as a thought experiment. You could do one made up of people and typewriters though - that's how the first one was designed to work, In that method it's not really practically useful for anything -but it could indeed run any computer algorithm we use today. Their invention didn't even intend to be used as the basis of a real thing, they were invented as a way to study mathematics at it's basic foundational levels. Computers just used the same concept to create a tool that could do mathematics automatically.
That is still what they are and what they do.
So the end product isn't fooling us the way you think. We have an attribute of what you're trying to patent - it can be executed by a computer, and from that we can determine with absolute accuracy that it must be a purely mathematical process. That is not patentable.
Having said that, I have extreme doubt about whether anything at all is invented, I tend to think that it's *all* just discovered, with maybe one or two odd exceptions in a millennium. So I don't actually think a patent system is very justifiable at all. But I am prepared to at least accept the possibility that in many cases a patent system can be beneficial (or at least, more beneficial than harmful to society) - it is also a fact that software is simply not one of those cases.
Go study computational theory. I'm right, you're wrong, and shouting won't make you less wrong.
You sir, are an idiot, and I won't waste my time replying to you further. Clearly, you fell for the presentation too. Or you have a vested interest of some sort, or some other reason for the biggest case of cognitive dissonance outside the catholic church I've ever seen.
Either way, talking to you is a waste of time.
I'll just leave you with this. Probably 90% of the algorythms that programmers use every day was created by Donald Knuth. Nobody knows more about the nuts and bolts of software development than he does, hell he created most of the damn nuts and a good chunk of the bolts to. Donald Knuth also knows that software is maths and have testified to that effect in court. You cannot get a more expert witness. There isn't one. The only people who could possibly claim to be more experts on software than Knuth are all dead, on the other hand they are also - all of them - people who knew that software was maths, hell most of them were mathematicians. In the end - a computer is nothing - yes NOTHING more than a universal Turing machine, and guess what. Turing machines are MATHS.
Well employers here will only call the references you cite - probably for the same reason, but if at least some of those were not your direct managers they won't be impressed - and they won't hire you if those managers say they wouldn't hire you back.
That varies of course, for a long time mine included a customer I did a big project for while consulting - anybody who signed off on your work and can attest that it was good work.
It's the law that is wrong here, that's sort of the point. The law is supposed to reflect the reality, not dictate it. The law prohibits the patenting of maths. The law allows the patenting of software. Software IS maths. So the law is self-contradictory. Because although software is maths, it doesn't LOOK like maths, in fact we've spent many decades doing all in our power to make look less like maths - going back all the way to Grace Hopper. But that was just presentation, we didn't change what software is, only how it looks. In the same way that a fractal map is mathematics - is a mathematical formula, but doesn't look like, but you can write it out in the original formula that does.
If you're going to argue that the fractal map is really a picture of what the formula represents then I can argue that so is the written formula- mathematics is abstract, how you represent it is not actually important and does not change what it is.
But the law got tricked by the appearance, so the law is wrong, and thus the law ought to change. It's an understandable mistake -the appearance is deceptive, deliberately so - thousands of very smart people have spent decades working on the deception because it makes the maths easier to do - but it's still maths and the law is still wrong.
Or you need to get a fricking dictionary and look up what the world "embodiment" means.
A physical thing can embody a non-physical thing, it cannot happen the other way around and the idea of one non-physical thing embodying another non-physical thing is a sentence without any sense. It has no meaning. It's basically gibberish.
Copyright covers the EXPRESSION of an idea, nobody said it had to be a physical expression. Expression and embodiment are not synonyms - in fact they are practically antonyms.
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>Kids growing up with unfettered access to the internet is the grand experiment here. We have 150,000 pre-internet years of mankind as the baseline. I don't need scientific proof to default to the traditional exposure of kids to the internet.
For the vast majority of that period in the vast majority of places on earth (basically for 99.99% of all the kids who ever lived in that time-frame you cite) kids would see far worse things than what's on the internet by looking out the window. Heads on spikes, bodies rotting on public gallows, and people dying in the street from the black plague.
In fact - the "sheltered" kids idea is the grand experiment - it's really only existed for about 70 years, post world war 2 in wealthy countries. Prior to that it was actually not POSSIBLE to shelter children in any way from the harshest realities of life - not to mention considering the average child-mortality rate, every single kid in the world up to about 1950 had buried at least one sibling by the age of 10. They didn't die from seeing the bad stuff either - they died because disease was rampant and medicine was weak. Our great-grandparents may have had seven to ten kids but only two or maybe three would grow up to have kids themselves.
From the 1950's onwards people started having fewer kids because most of them actually grew up. On average the size of a family is the same.
Or do you think all those parents lied to their kids all those years about where little Timmy and little Sally and little Penny all went off to ?
Life is fucked up shit. It's beautiful things too. But you gotta raise kids to live in a world of both.
>Because you have to live in this society. Social norms are a pretty important thing to learn, even if you chose to ignore them.
If you choose to ignore them, how does it make any difference if you learned them or not ? Teach your kids to be tolerant - pull that one off and you've made great kids, anything else good is a bonus, but pretty much EVERYTHING else they can learn from a parent is NOT good.
>Again, most of your comments apply to older children - and I tend to agree. A 7-year-old shouldn't watch Jaws unless you want them to refuse to get in the water when you hit the beach.
You think they apply to older children - I'm pointing out that they don't. That at 7 I did most of the things you won't let your kids do, and it did me no harm. The idea that a 7 year old can't walk the streets would seem ludicrous to most parents of just one generation ago, because it is.
>Look, if you get off on people shitting on one another, I'm not going to get all PC and call that normal.
Again, normal doesn't exist. There's no such thing. The only UNNATURAL sexual choice is abstinence, everything else is normal. I don't have any desire for that particular fetish - but I understand why some people do. There are plenty of people who judge me for being bi, same with my fiance, though women who are bi get judged less than men. Quite a lot of people judge us for being polyamorous. I believe children should grow up to know that a family is any group of people who love each other, that's the be-all and the end-all of it. What consenting adults like to is their business - but pretending that they all like the same thing, that's judgemental and wrong, and thinking your child shouldn't know about such people is harmful to your child.
> It's certainly not reflective of the "real world" in any way that is important.
If nothing else, you're shielding them from the reality that there are people who enjoy things you don't get.
> It's hard to imagine what I would gain by letting my 1st grader cruise the internet unrestricted. A ten-year-old is another matter.
A kid who trusts you for guidance, and who won't when they get confronted with these things blame you for hiding them from him and leaving him unprepared.
>I also reject your claim that my kid will be harmed by a filtered internet. The internet, in the form we are discussing, is only about 20 years old and the rich media part is younger than that. Almost anyone over 30 grew up with no internet at all, and most people over 40 grew up with no computers at all. Were they all "harmed"? Real life is still the best way to get exposure to real life. The internet is not a basic human need by any stretch.
Being shielded from anything that exists is harmful. In the 80's when I grew up - that was the parents who pretended to their kids that my country wasn't at war, that their older brothers and fathers and uncles weren't busy dying. A few years later it was the ones who pretended those people died as heroes, who pretended to their kids that it was a just war and we were not on the wrong side of it (it wasn't and we weren't). Then those kids grew up to be able to read newspapers - and learn what really happened... instead of being able to understand their parent's remorse - now they saw their parents are people who had supported evil and still did.
Every experience I have had has taught me one thing: there is never a time when hiding things from a kid is a good idea. Everything you hide will come back to bite you in the ass.
>As for a seven year old. Seven! I won't let my seven-year-old out of the house alone - why the hell would I let her surf the internet alone and unrestricted?
In the year I turned 7, I went to school for the first time. On the first day, my mom drove me. On the second day my older cousin showed me the route to ride on my bike. From the third day, I went and came back every day - by myself for the next 12 years.
In the afternoons I played cricket in the streets with the kids from the neighbourhood. My sister who was 5 at the time, played with us, and travelled to school the same way after she turned 6 as well (and we rarely travelled together because we couldn't stand each other). This was in 1987 - and my country was, for all intensive purposes, in the middle of a civil WAR at the time - and it was still okay.
When I was 9 I took the textbook my dad had used when he learned BASIC as part of his engineering studies and wrote my first hello world. I came running up to my dad and said "Daddy, daddy, I wrote a program that can write my name over and over and over ! "
He looked at me, he smiled, and he said: "Nice going ! Now go write one that can do it exactly 5 times and then stop."
I said: "I don't know how to do that."
He said: "You figured it out this far, go find out how to do it."
I did.
That was, to my mind the single best parenting experience I ever had. My parents encouraged me to explore and learn and discover.
They figured even if there are risks (and there were some, at the age of 11 I managed to blow the whole computer up because I was trying to build a robot I could control with programs and I wasn't very good at soldering) it's better that I learn and discover and grow. Indeed in the worst case scenario (as unlikely as it is) it would be better for me to have lived a short life filled with discovery than a long one lived in fear.
>Think about it for a moment: is it acceptable to let a seven-year-old browse an adult video store? If you say "yes", I suspect you'd be on the fringes of society.
I do say yes, and while I may indeed be on the fringes of society, has it ever occurred to you that perhaps it's the fringe at the FRONT ? Progress always looks like insanity by those who fear to question the status quo.
> Yet the same content in the video store is easily accessible via the internet.
Which is convenient because unlike the video store, the government cannot interfere with my belief that letting my kids see it is not only NOT harmful, but actually GOOD for them.
>Should a seven-year-old be brought to a movie that is R-rated for violence?
You think violence and sex are the same thing ? I know a LOT of parents who don't agree. My dad when I was about 12 took a tape of the then most erotic mainstream movie ever made (Basic Instinct) and carefully taped static over the violent scenes, then let us watch it because he didn't think the sex would harm us.
He was PISSED when I watched "The Terminator" at age 14 because of the violence, he didn't care about sex though. Personally - I'm not concerned about violence either - again, violence is a real problem in life. I would rather raise my children to be aware and wary off violence than to pretend it doesn't exist.
I turned out pretty okay and I earn double his salary at half his age.
>but it has also filled a role as a niche entertainment medium for people with "deviant" tastes.
There is no such thing as "deviant", nor is there such a thing as normal. As long as you believe in the existence of either you are a bad parent by default - because the BEST thing a parent can do is help their children discover their own, true, identities and be proud of whatever that turns out to be. The WORST thing a parent can do - is anything else.
> You may very well be right that my kid won't be affected by this stuff, but I won't let my kids be the subjects of this uncontrolled experiment
I didn't say your kid won't be affected, I said he will be HARMED by being kept
Quick, somebody call Commissioner Gordon ! We need to get the batsignal lit !
I first heard the quote as a child attributed to Lenin. But I don't think the truth of it's meaning is much altered by the miss-attribution.
Still, thanks for the information, I know better now.
You're not a parent. You're a fucking a prison warden !
>My kids don't have a computer.
I had one at age 7. By age 9 I wrote my first computer program. I'll be damned if I won't give my kids even the OPPORTUNITY to do that.
> I wouldn't let them walk the streets (even in my nice neighborhood) alone, why would I let them wander the internet alone?
I walked to school every day (sometimes I cycled), alone. Sometimes with friends. By the time I was your eldest's age we liked to walk out at night, climb an unbuilt-up mountain to the other side of town and go catch the late night movie, then head back home - all on foot. We'd get home to my place around 4am on Saturday mornining, make coffee and all pass out in a big heap in the living room.
My mom was used to walking in on Saturday mornings and finding 5 or 6 teenagers from around the neighbourhood in her house asleep on the floor.
She was very happy that we chose HER house to fall asleep in.
Counter-claim: "You kids have it lucky in one sense. The virus gave you one good thing and it is this. Our parents hid things from us. They told us only as little as possible about sex and let us figure our own way forward. Dealing with guilt because I happened to be gay on top of all the other big mysteries. We spent our entire lives wondering if we ever really learned to do it right. Scared of it. Guilty about it. The virus changed that- you have to know everything, it's the only way we can protect and save you now - by telling you all, letting you see all, by not hiding anything. It's the only way to save you now that one of the STDs is lethal, it's the only way to beat the virus - and the bonus, the one good thing about it is - you won't be like us. You won't be afraid of sex, you won't be nervous that you're doing it wrong, you won't be nervous that you're attracted to the wrong sex - you'll realize that whatever you're attracted to is what is right to be attracted to. You'll have better lives than we did because of that."
Pieter Dirk Uys - South African HIV/AIDS activist - from a speech he regularly gives at schools. During the same talk he demonstrates the use of a condom - by putting on one a very realistic penis-shaped dildo, because too many kids got infected after thinking if you roll a condom over a banana and put it beside the bed you're having safe sex...
Here's the thing - the guy I'm citing, and the people your study cites are all talking about the SAME damn change - but I agree with him, it's a change which can and must be managed for the positive. It's positive potential far outweighs it's negative risk.
Either way, managed it must be- because it's not possible to go back. Too many innocent lives are at stake.
Then you don't know what a mathematical formula, is, what a Turing machine is, or what a program is.
Hint: all three are different forms of the same thing.
http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20091110152507492
http://silentcoder.co.za/2010/08/why-computer-programs-should-not-be-patentable-in-easy-to-understand-terms/
Among those things: a simple, testable proof of my claim. Unless you can refute my proof with evidence, I win.
>Is that acceptable? I doubt many of them discussed their relationship with their parents, and I doubt their parents had that kind of relationship
No it's not, but the kind of things you blame I think have nothing to do with the issue, the same existed when I was a teenager and the internet didn't exist then.
So teach your boys to respect woman, teach your girls to be confident and self assured - and you yourself should buy her her first vibrator.
> Notice that they end with ".UK", I'm in Europe too.
UK is really not representative of European culture in general. I don't live in either but I've visited both many times for extended periods.
> What is a problem is when outside influences (pornography, media, etc) normalise certain behaviours, which pressures teenagers into doing things they don't want to do.
So teach your kids about body-ownership. Teach them that conformity is evil and it's important to be true to yourself. Then if your daughter WANTS her ass spanked then she will do so without spending years feeling guilty about it - and if she doesn't want it (or maybe wants to DO the spanking) she'll have the courage and confidence to look her puppy love in the eyes and say so.
That's what I want to give my daughters, I want to raise little Tiffany Achings.
You raise a point, still the massive left-over anger from completely clashing with my dad over how one should live your life was so huge by 21 that when I felt he was making a mistake in a decision about a much younger sibbling - we had a fall-out so big I didn't even visit my parents again for 6 years.
What if one of them, or me, had died in that time ?
Now 14 years after I left school - we get along fine, I live my life exactly the way I said I wanted to when I was 14, the difference - now my dad cannot tell me not to.
I knew he had good intentions, boys who die their hair pink on one side and blue on the other have a harder time getting jobs in his world-view (but I don't have that problem because I have a sufficiently impressive resume that employers really don't give a damn what I look like - especially since my work isn't customer-facing).
Over the years, he even came to adopt some of my ideas - especially in terms of artistic expression and the need for that to be uncensored even by yourself.
We got along great until I hit puberty, then we didn't actually get along at all again until I was so old and successfull that he stopped trying to tell me how to live. Now I can happily ask his advice about many things - things where he has experience I lack (I bought my first house a few months ago, he's had a few - of course I had him help me go over the contracts and check that the deal was above board and the house was really what it appeared to be).
I also grew up enough that when a while ago he said to me "maybe you should stop with the tattoos now, it's getting a bit much" I didn't get angry - I just smiled and ignored it. But I didn't have that capacity at 18 - I had a sense of who I was, but I didn't have a decade's worth of proof that it can work, I had nothing to back me up then - just stubbornness to drive me forward.
So sure, kids hating parents mostly work out after a few years... I would rather not have such a few years with my kids - because I don't know that I, or they, will be around long enough to see it end.
> Newsflash: Even the best kids don't always listen to what mommy and/or daddy tell them.
That's the point. You cannot deal with that issue by trying to stop the kids from having the CAPACITY to disobey. Not unless you want to raise a few agoraphobics anyway...
So really what you're saying is that adblock-plus will protect your kid against everything you're actually concerned about ?
There you go then, asker - you have your answer. Censor the ads, what they find themselves by going there deliberately you're better off explaining than trying to lie about.
>Do you also suggest I remove all the "child safe" lids on the various poisonous things in the house?
Are you suggesting that seeing the goatse guy is comparable to drinking poison ? You mean your kid will actually die if he gets his first goatse too soon ?
Sorry dude, we all had to live through our first goatse, so will your kids, nobody has died from it yet.
That makes this a very bad analogy.
>FREEDOM OF SPEECH!!!, AMEN!!, but not to my 9 Year Old.
And thanks to generations of parents like you, democracy doesn't really exist in the USA anymore. If you raise them that way at any point in their life, you pretty much rule out the possibility that they will suddenly become mavericks who change an industry or leaders who change a society - or even just actively participate in such movements.
Think you can teach them to be good, free people later in life ? The Soviets had one thing right: "Give me a kid until age 7 and he'll be a communist for life."
Well give you a kid until age 7 and he'll apparently be a scared consumer the rest of his life.
>I've seen no evidence to support your conclusion that it's unlikely they'll be hurt by it. So we're even there.
No, you're not. See you're the one who is making a prediction. In scientific terms - that makes you the one who has to provide proof. He is denying that there is any grounds for your prediction.
Of course, the real truth is, most parents define "their children will become sexual beings who are ultimately sexually active with their own natural kinks and pleasures" as "harm".
Here's my advice dude - go stand in the mirror and say to yourself: "One day my little angel will have a great time being somebody else's dirty, dirty girl... or possibly his/her mean dominatrix"
Then say it until you make peace with the fact and stop being scared of it. You'll be a much better parent afterward.
Aaah yes, because fetishism is a sign of mental illness...
No, it's not, the fact that some shrinks haven't caught up to the times is not my problem.
The vast majority of people have fetishest fantasies, many are comfortable expressing it and live happier lives because of that.
The fact that more and more people reach that level of comfort at an earlier age is not a bad thing, it's a GOOD thing.
Let me put it this way - me and my wife are planning to have children, we already decided that our habit of being naked around the house will not change. We will not suddenly start hiding the handcuffs and spanking paddles lying about the house, we will not suddenly put a lock on the play-room door and order them never to enter it - we'll just tell them "when the door is closed, you cannot come in."
Many people think that raises HEALTHIER children. In many cultures, that is how ALL children are raised (most of Europe).
In Dutch culture for example it's common for teenagers to have a sit-down with their parents when they feel ready to have sex and discuss it with them - the young couple asking for advice (not just practical but on the whole thing) before going ahead.
It's also normal practice to get consent, along with good advice.
The Netherlands boasts one of the lowest teen pregnancy rates in the world. And get this bit: 70% of American's regret the timing or person with whom they had their first sexual experience according to studies. In the Netherlands, only 15% would like to change anything.
If I do that sum - I would say it evens out roughly, I may even have come out slightly ahead.
If I weigh in the increase in income at my next job - which was at least partly possible due to the extra qualifications I had earned then I come out way ahead, if I add that up as a percentage of my income increases over the next 12 years... then I'm massively ahead. That said, I have pretty much doubled my income once every 3 years ever since.
Software isn't invented, it's discovered. More-over I am not in fact looking at the end product alone. I am saying that if this end product runs on a computer that tells me something ABOUT the idea- it tells me the idea is mathematics, because absolutely nothing that isn't mathematics can run on a computer.
Patenting a programming idea is no different from patenting a faster process by which to do multiplication in your head. Indeed any and all programs ever written CAN be executed in your head - it takes a great memory and it's very difficult to do with a complex program, but every programmer runs every algorythm in his head as he writes it.
Of course, you can mentally utilize physical inventions as well (by imagining how they'll work), but the difference is - that you cannot then turn them into something a computer will run (at best a computer can draw a similar picture).
But if a computer is capable of running it, then it is mathematics and nothing more - because nothing else CAN run on computers.
A computer is just a universal Turing machine. Universal Turing machines PREDATE computers - but prior to them they were only done as a thought experiment. You could do one made up of people and typewriters though - that's how the first one was designed to work,
In that method it's not really practically useful for anything -but it could indeed run any computer algorithm we use today. Their invention didn't even intend to be used as the basis of a real thing, they were invented as a way to study mathematics at it's basic foundational levels.
Computers just used the same concept to create a tool that could do mathematics automatically.
That is still what they are and what they do.
So the end product isn't fooling us the way you think. We have an attribute of what you're trying to patent - it can be executed by a computer, and from that we can determine with absolute accuracy that it must be a purely mathematical process. That is not patentable.
Having said that, I have extreme doubt about whether anything at all is invented, I tend to think that it's *all* just discovered, with maybe one or two odd exceptions in a millennium. So I don't actually think a patent system is very justifiable at all. But I am prepared to at least accept the possibility that in many cases a patent system can be beneficial (or at least, more beneficial than harmful to society) - it is also a fact that software is simply not one of those cases.
And all of them, are still maths. If they were anything else - then they wouldn't be able to execute on a CPU.
They are very well disguised as other things - but that's all it is, disguises.
Go study computational theory. I'm right, you're wrong, and shouting won't make you less wrong.
You sir, are an idiot, and I won't waste my time replying to you further. Clearly, you fell for the presentation too.
Or you have a vested interest of some sort, or some other reason for the biggest case of cognitive dissonance outside the catholic church I've ever seen.
Either way, talking to you is a waste of time.
I'll just leave you with this. Probably 90% of the algorythms that programmers use every day was created by Donald Knuth. Nobody knows more about the nuts and bolts of software development than he does, hell he created most of the damn nuts and a good chunk of the bolts to. Donald Knuth also knows that software is maths and have testified to that effect in court.
You cannot get a more expert witness. There isn't one. The only people who could possibly claim to be more experts on software than Knuth are all dead, on the other hand they are also - all of them - people who knew that software was maths, hell most of them were mathematicians.
In the end - a computer is nothing - yes NOTHING more than a universal Turing machine, and guess what. Turing machines are MATHS.
Okay, even more interesting.
Well employers here will only call the references you cite - probably for the same reason, but if at least some of those were not your direct managers they won't be impressed - and they won't hire you if those managers say they wouldn't hire you back.
That varies of course, for a long time mine included a customer I did a big project for while consulting - anybody who signed off on your work and can attest that it was good work.
It's the law that is wrong here, that's sort of the point. The law is supposed to reflect the reality, not dictate it.
The law prohibits the patenting of maths.
The law allows the patenting of software.
Software IS maths.
So the law is self-contradictory. Because although software is maths, it doesn't LOOK like maths, in fact we've spent many decades doing all in our power to make look less like maths - going back all the way to Grace Hopper.
But that was just presentation, we didn't change what software is, only how it looks. In the same way that a fractal map is mathematics - is a mathematical formula, but doesn't look like, but you can write it out in the original formula that does.
If you're going to argue that the fractal map is really a picture of what the formula represents then I can argue that so is the written formula- mathematics is abstract, how you represent it is not actually important and does not change what it is.
But the law got tricked by the appearance, so the law is wrong, and thus the law ought to change. It's an understandable mistake -the appearance is deceptive, deliberately so - thousands of very smart people have spent decades working on the deception because it makes the maths easier to do - but it's still maths and the law is still wrong.
Or you need to get a fricking dictionary and look up what the world "embodiment" means.
A physical thing can embody a non-physical thing, it cannot happen the other way around and the idea of one non-physical thing embodying another non-physical thing is a sentence without any sense. It has no meaning. It's basically gibberish.
Copyright covers the EXPRESSION of an idea, nobody said it had to be a physical expression. Expression and embodiment are not synonyms - in fact they are practically antonyms.