If the school officials get it wrong (and lets face it school kids HAVE attacked their school in the past)
Yeah, because we all know all those stories about 11 year olds saying "Hey, I've got a cool science fair project" and it turning out to be a bomb. Yeah, those are some really common stories... Do kids sometimes attack their school? Yes, but with guns or concealed, rudimentary "bombs".
One of the reason the US medical bill is through the roof is that because if a patient demands X procedure while the doctor knows it is silly, he gets it, because else he might sue.
I take it you have never had a doctor who doesn't know his stuff do you? There are a lot of doctors who simply refuse to listen to their patient's complaints, many times leading to complications.
And as for the US medical bill, who pays it? The people who request to have it done. (Or at least they should) Meaning, who cares if Joe Sixpack demands 9 knee surgeries, Joe Sixpack or his insurance company is paying for them, not you.
BUT what if you can be sued if you get it wrong? Loose not just your life (and nobody thinks they are going to die) but every thing you own? (Silly? Count the doctors that smoke or drink or drive without a seatbelt but do have malpractice insurance.)
Because we all know of those many, many, many things that have happened A) In schools B) From an 11 year old C) with the 11 year old showing off their project. D) In the USA
There is a difference of someone finding a dropped bottle that looked like it, or finding it in possession of a student who won't explain what it is, and a fully cooperative 11 year old. This isn't Israel, it is California, terrorist and other attacks are so rare that they should hardly be considered.
As for the doctors, how many of them really have to -themselves- get malpractice insurance? Most of the time they tell someone else, "Hey I need some insurance" they do the research and come up with a plan, the doctor says "Hey, this sounds good" and signs the paperwork. As for smoking, a lot of them know that it is bad, but see the risk/reward benefit as being in their favor. As for drinking, a moderate amount of drinking isn't going to be a health risk and may actually be a health benefit. While going home drunk from a bar or party every single night isn't going to be good at all for your health, having a glass of wine with dinner, or the occasional beer isn't going to be a health risk. And many doctors who drive without a seatbelt do it in habit. While some of us who are younger can't remember a time when you -didn't- wear your seatbelt, a lot of doctors are from older generations where you simply just didn't wear your seatbelt.
If you are sued for millions if you don't follow the book, you follow the book. And if you don't you loose your insurance and the first court case could bankrupt you.
You -could- be sued for millions, if it -is- a bomb, which -did- go off, which -did- cause a loss of life or injury, etc. You know, I -could- be checking my mail and I -could- be run over by a car and I -could- sustain massive internal injuries which -could- kill me, yet I know the risk of that is very small. Its even smaller that an 11 year old child has a bomb, that would go off, that would cause injuries, that would get you sue and you would lose.
I think the main question is why would a glorified router have a GPS built-in? I can see no real reason for a GPS being in a router. Phones? Perhaps. Router? No.
The difference is benefits vs drawbacks. With the Euro, the county (especially the smaller countries) got a lot more buying power and therefore more wealthy for minimal risk. With switching from IE 6 the company will -lose- money, especially in the short term to change from IE 6 and get little in the long term. Why fix what isn't broken (in the eyes of management). All the management sees is that it would cost $10K to go from IE 6 to IE 7 for a savings of $0.
Also, people need to realize that 'terrorism' is being used by both sides of the fence. The best example, the 'national threat level' has never been set to Blue or Green. This is a system meant to make the citizens of their own country 'feel safe' but all it does is make people think, "Hey.. you gonna get blowed up real-good-like someday.".
The entire point of the "national threat level" is to give the government "justification" for continuing the "war on terror". Are we safer than before 9/11? Yes. Why? Because the passengers in flights now are going to overwhelm and take down any hijacker. Before 9/11, you generally did what you could to appease the hijacker, you landed somewhere, if you were uncooperative you might be shot to "make an example", but if you were lucky and cooperative you ended up alive. Anything beyond that is simply pure luck. The US does not have many attempted terror attacks, there are fewer successful ones. Look at how pathetic the "shoe bomber" and "underwear bomber" attempts were. But if we can keep people into thinking there actually is a threat when none really exists.
Re:HTML5 for the win? Sorry, that's not a codec.
on
YouTube Revamp Imminent?
·
· Score: 0, Troll
and there's no technological reason it couldn't work on Firefox -- only political assholes who refuse to implement such support, even in countries which don't respect software patents.
Ok, so how is it going to help Firefox and an open web by implementing that support? First off, how does it decide which version to download? Is the main version going to be the "crippled" version without support or with support of proprietary add ons? What happens if someone downloads Firefox and gets sued because of the patented codecs? I don't think Mozilla wants headlines saying "Patent Troll sues user of Firefox" because already there are some people who think anything other than IE isn't a browser and must be a virus!!111!1!1 And a lot of these people are rather high up in business management and prevent tech guys who know what they are doing from giving their users a decent, secure browser.
And lets go beyond desktop browsers for a second, how many of us have other devices that have a web browser? Game consoles, music players, cell phones, and even set-top boxes have browsers. If we set a good, patent free standard, their web browsers can have it built in without having to pay for a costly license thus increasing the use of the standard. Think about images, there are a lot of images that would be great as an SVG, but due to some browsers not supporting it (like IE) it has little use. If the video codec specified that videos should be a in a free format, IE would almost have to use a free format if it supported HTML5, or miss out on video sites coded to the standard.
Re:HTML5 for the win? Sorry, that's not a codec.
on
YouTube Revamp Imminent?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This is like the open source proponents who mentioned Ogg Vorbis a few years ago as a solution to DRM, and it's clear now that DRM-free watermarked MP3 is the winner in the marketplace today.
A lot of the reason why people wanted OGG so badly is because OGG easily worked on Linux. In the days before Ubuntu, Fluendo and easy codec installation, finding, installing and using an MP3 codec was generally difficult and legally questionable. Now that it is really easy to install an MP3 codec in most Linux distros, people have toned down on the OGG evangelism for music.
Ideally, HTML5 standards would use an open, patent-free standard for use with video. The point of standards is to allow different systems to communicate effectively, the fact that it is open is a requirement of any standard meant for benefiting users. Right now, Theora is about the only major codec that seems to fit the bill.
Yes, Apple may be first in the broad market, but there has been multi-touch for a very long time in many electronics, but generally it faded out by the start of the '90s. On the other hand, eye tracking isn't used hardly at all, in anything. Basically, Apple revived dead technology (Captive touchscreens and multi-touch) to make their phone.
I don't see how this post is a troll and I think its actually quite insightful myself. Whenever you have government involved in education, it generally fails. Look at public schools for one example. Public universities usually aren't too bad because they don't get 100% of their funding from the state and have to be decent or no one will go to them and they close.
Chances are, it isn't that they got in trouble but are simply covering their rears against some idiot student expecting the professor to know that one of his 2,000 students is disabled and wants to sue because the professor doesn't have psycic powers.
I don't really think that Apple will use eye tracking... yet. Why? Because there aren't enough existing products out there. The vast majority of Apple's products show up when there are 1 or 2 other early products out there that Apple can improve on. Eye-tracking isn't used in any major way yet and so I don't think Apple will use it quite yet.
A) E-paper or normal paper trail. Lets say you live in Iran and want to know about governmental abuses, even if you have the money that $1 to WikiLeaks would look quite suspicious.
B) Copyright infringement. A lot of Wikileak's documents are under copyright, right now it doesn't mean much because the content is too emberrasing for people to claim it as their own, and they are non-profit. If they start "selling" the content, businesses may start the threats...
Is this a real tech boost or just places finally needing upgrades? When Vista was found to be needless for both the consumer and business market, most consumers cut spending much in technology and businesses cut any jobs upgrading. When the recession hit, they still had little reason to upgrade. In previous years, major changes happened, compare the speed boost from a 1995 Pentium to a 1999 Pentium III. Now compare a Pentium Dual-Core to a Core 2 Duo, is there really that much of a difference in the 4 years between a 2006 Pentium Dual-Core and a Core 2 Duo? Yes, if you are a gamer it might make a lot of difference, but for most tasks, you wouldn't notice the extra speed, especially when comparing a Pentium to a Pentium III. So when the hardware is good enough, the upgraded software terrible, who wants to spend the money to upgrade? Now, new hardware advances combined with software people don't completely hate (Windows 7) is giving people reason to upgrade.
It depends what "sooner" means. If sooner is 1-2 days, perhaps it wouldn't be too bad, but a week or more would have bad effects because of outdated information. The "mainstream" news tends to not focus on one topic too long unless it helps their agenda meaning that an important article might fade from public eyes quicker than it needs to be leaving it lost in a multitude of links.
Doesn't having a subscription model kinda defeat the other point of WikiLeaks, that is that anyone can download, analyze and verify the sources? Wikileaks is a good source so you can actually check out the real information itself rather than worry about all the crap surrounding it. For example, the leaked climate e-mails, you had some sources saying it without a doubt proves that global warming is nothing more than a myth with falsified data to support it, and others saying that the e-mails told really nothing. Most of the sources didn't publish the e-mails so how does an informed person decide which is right? They go to the source.
While a subscription might be easy for journalists and other people who are making money off of Wikileaks to subscribe to, what about dissidents of an oppressive government who want to see for themselves abuses that the government did? What about the general citizen who wants the source? A subscription model fails and will simply lead to someone making a less-secure mirror of Wikileaks with all the files and such and Wikileaks loses.
Now, when someone would search for these, my post might come up (yeah, unlikely, but I suppose its possible) same with the Android marketplace. If I put on a description "This app lets you use Twitter" its no different than an app that says "This app lets you sign in and pay bills online using your Bank of America account". Only for the banking one Google would flag it, not censor it, but would say that its not made by the company. Though I don't have an Android device handy, I don't think Google would forbid me from putting trademarked words in app descriptions (or even titles) making phishing easier.
The fact that something is trademarked might be a problem to a legitimate small, medium or large sized company, but for an individual person running a scam, it doesn't mean anything.
What if the Android market would reserve a few words for only legitimate organizations? For example, apps would need to be certified to appear in an online banking part of the store, and there would be no certification other than Google contacting the company and making sure this is the app they made. For example, if someone submits an app with "Bank of America" in the description (or something) the Android market puts a big red heading saying This app was not developed by Bank of America, do not give out sensitive financial details over the app? It isn't restrictive because it still is open development yet it weeds out phishing apps.
However, there is balance. Look at Ubuntu's repositories, they rarely really "reject" any applications and everything in there is more or less malware free. I can see there being a market for trusted repositories in Android also.
I don't really expect this laptop to last that long, but in general, cheap laptops have served me a lot better than expensive ones. For example, a few years ago I spent all my birthday money to buy a nice $700 Dell laptop, it was pretty good for its time (512 MB of RAM, early Pentium M, nice case design, and a high-res screen) and ran fast... until 6 months into using it the power cord broke, not much of a problem, I sent it in and they sent me a new one. About 3 months after that, the motherboard died. Thankfully I had the extended warranty and they replaced it. About 3 months after that, the replacement power cord they got me broke. When I called, they said that my warranty had expired and they had discontinued my laptop but they gave me the name of a third party supplier of power cords and told me the exact name of what I needed so I bought it and the cord worked for about a month. Then when I came home one day after letting it charge for an hour I smelled a burning smell and all the plastic on the tip of the cord had melted and my motherboard died. As my warrenty was up I just said "screw it" salvaged all the parts I could and used my aging desktop for a while until I bought one of the first EEE PCs and then later this Toshiba. Even if this Toshiba (which is now 6 months old) breaks in a few more months of use and I replace it with another $300 laptop, I still saved $100 compared to when I bought a "good" laptop.
...You are on Slashdot. You are not the norm. The fact you are even on this site shows that you are more inclined to use a computer than other people your age.
As for TV, the quality of programming has gone downhill, even news shows are nothing more than glorified tabloids. Networks that used to have interesting programming has shifted to more crap. Discovery is more about blowing stuff up than explaining science, the History channel seems to be nothing more than WWII and explosions.
I worry that young people won't be able to summon the capacity to focus and concentrate when they need to
Doesn't -every- older generation say that? First it was that comic books were killing novels, next it was MTV killing attention spans, now it is multitasking.
The thing is, most young people have no real need to focus and concentrate. With the increased importance placed on education, both high schools and colleges are passing more students because you need a degree to be successful. Just think, a hundred years ago a high school education was all most people needed and people could still be successful without it. Today most people need at least some college or vocational training to do almost anything.
With jobs, it is collective blame, no one person takes the fall usually a small team will take it. There are few occasions where young people really need to focus.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say that if they want to use his code and have him bend over backwards for it, they should be obligated to pay him.
My question is, what did they search for to get this result? And shouldn't they have checked who it was before they used it?
If the school officials get it wrong (and lets face it school kids HAVE attacked their school in the past)
Yeah, because we all know all those stories about 11 year olds saying "Hey, I've got a cool science fair project" and it turning out to be a bomb. Yeah, those are some really common stories... Do kids sometimes attack their school? Yes, but with guns or concealed, rudimentary "bombs".
One of the reason the US medical bill is through the roof is that because if a patient demands X procedure while the doctor knows it is silly, he gets it, because else he might sue.
I take it you have never had a doctor who doesn't know his stuff do you? There are a lot of doctors who simply refuse to listen to their patient's complaints, many times leading to complications.
And as for the US medical bill, who pays it? The people who request to have it done. (Or at least they should) Meaning, who cares if Joe Sixpack demands 9 knee surgeries, Joe Sixpack or his insurance company is paying for them, not you.
BUT what if you can be sued if you get it wrong? Loose not just your life (and nobody thinks they are going to die) but every thing you own? (Silly? Count the doctors that smoke or drink or drive without a seatbelt but do have malpractice insurance.)
Because we all know of those many, many, many things that have happened A) In schools B) From an 11 year old C) with the 11 year old showing off their project. D) In the USA
There is a difference of someone finding a dropped bottle that looked like it, or finding it in possession of a student who won't explain what it is, and a fully cooperative 11 year old. This isn't Israel, it is California, terrorist and other attacks are so rare that they should hardly be considered.
As for the doctors, how many of them really have to -themselves- get malpractice insurance? Most of the time they tell someone else, "Hey I need some insurance" they do the research and come up with a plan, the doctor says "Hey, this sounds good" and signs the paperwork. As for smoking, a lot of them know that it is bad, but see the risk/reward benefit as being in their favor. As for drinking, a moderate amount of drinking isn't going to be a health risk and may actually be a health benefit. While going home drunk from a bar or party every single night isn't going to be good at all for your health, having a glass of wine with dinner, or the occasional beer isn't going to be a health risk. And many doctors who drive without a seatbelt do it in habit. While some of us who are younger can't remember a time when you -didn't- wear your seatbelt, a lot of doctors are from older generations where you simply just didn't wear your seatbelt.
If you are sued for millions if you don't follow the book, you follow the book. And if you don't you loose your insurance and the first court case could bankrupt you.
You -could- be sued for millions, if it -is- a bomb, which -did- go off, which -did- cause a loss of life or injury, etc. You know, I -could- be checking my mail and I -could- be run over by a car and I -could- sustain massive internal injuries which -could- kill me, yet I know the risk of that is very small. Its even smaller that an 11 year old child has a bomb, that would go off, that would cause injuries, that would get you sue and you would lose.
So whats next? Having to get permission to type a paragraph? To post in forums? To update Facebook? To post on Twitter?
I think the main question is why would a glorified router have a GPS built-in? I can see no real reason for a GPS being in a router. Phones? Perhaps. Router? No.
The difference is benefits vs drawbacks. With the Euro, the county (especially the smaller countries) got a lot more buying power and therefore more wealthy for minimal risk. With switching from IE 6 the company will -lose- money, especially in the short term to change from IE 6 and get little in the long term. Why fix what isn't broken (in the eyes of management). All the management sees is that it would cost $10K to go from IE 6 to IE 7 for a savings of $0.
Also, people need to realize that 'terrorism' is being used by both sides of the fence. The best example, the 'national threat level' has never been set to Blue or Green. This is a system meant to make the citizens of their own country 'feel safe' but all it does is make people think, "Hey.. you gonna get blowed up real-good-like someday.".
The entire point of the "national threat level" is to give the government "justification" for continuing the "war on terror". Are we safer than before 9/11? Yes. Why? Because the passengers in flights now are going to overwhelm and take down any hijacker. Before 9/11, you generally did what you could to appease the hijacker, you landed somewhere, if you were uncooperative you might be shot to "make an example", but if you were lucky and cooperative you ended up alive. Anything beyond that is simply pure luck. The US does not have many attempted terror attacks, there are fewer successful ones. Look at how pathetic the "shoe bomber" and "underwear bomber" attempts were. But if we can keep people into thinking there actually is a threat when none really exists.
and there's no technological reason it couldn't work on Firefox -- only political assholes who refuse to implement such support, even in countries which don't respect software patents.
Ok, so how is it going to help Firefox and an open web by implementing that support? First off, how does it decide which version to download? Is the main version going to be the "crippled" version without support or with support of proprietary add ons? What happens if someone downloads Firefox and gets sued because of the patented codecs? I don't think Mozilla wants headlines saying "Patent Troll sues user of Firefox" because already there are some people who think anything other than IE isn't a browser and must be a virus!!111!1!1 And a lot of these people are rather high up in business management and prevent tech guys who know what they are doing from giving their users a decent, secure browser.
And lets go beyond desktop browsers for a second, how many of us have other devices that have a web browser? Game consoles, music players, cell phones, and even set-top boxes have browsers. If we set a good, patent free standard, their web browsers can have it built in without having to pay for a costly license thus increasing the use of the standard. Think about images, there are a lot of images that would be great as an SVG, but due to some browsers not supporting it (like IE) it has little use. If the video codec specified that videos should be a in a free format, IE would almost have to use a free format if it supported HTML5, or miss out on video sites coded to the standard.
This is like the open source proponents who mentioned Ogg Vorbis a few years ago as a solution to DRM, and it's clear now that DRM-free watermarked MP3 is the winner in the marketplace today.
A lot of the reason why people wanted OGG so badly is because OGG easily worked on Linux. In the days before Ubuntu, Fluendo and easy codec installation, finding, installing and using an MP3 codec was generally difficult and legally questionable. Now that it is really easy to install an MP3 codec in most Linux distros, people have toned down on the OGG evangelism for music.
Ideally, HTML5 standards would use an open, patent-free standard for use with video. The point of standards is to allow different systems to communicate effectively, the fact that it is open is a requirement of any standard meant for benefiting users. Right now, Theora is about the only major codec that seems to fit the bill.
Yes, Apple may be first in the broad market, but there has been multi-touch for a very long time in many electronics, but generally it faded out by the start of the '90s. On the other hand, eye tracking isn't used hardly at all, in anything. Basically, Apple revived dead technology (Captive touchscreens and multi-touch) to make their phone.
I don't see how this post is a troll and I think its actually quite insightful myself. Whenever you have government involved in education, it generally fails. Look at public schools for one example. Public universities usually aren't too bad because they don't get 100% of their funding from the state and have to be decent or no one will go to them and they close.
Chances are, it isn't that they got in trouble but are simply covering their rears against some idiot student expecting the professor to know that one of his 2,000 students is disabled and wants to sue because the professor doesn't have psycic powers.
I don't really think that Apple will use eye tracking... yet. Why? Because there aren't enough existing products out there. The vast majority of Apple's products show up when there are 1 or 2 other early products out there that Apple can improve on. Eye-tracking isn't used in any major way yet and so I don't think Apple will use it quite yet.
Sure, but there are a lot of problems with this:
A) E-paper or normal paper trail. Lets say you live in Iran and want to know about governmental abuses, even if you have the money that $1 to WikiLeaks would look quite suspicious.
B) Copyright infringement. A lot of Wikileak's documents are under copyright, right now it doesn't mean much because the content is too emberrasing for people to claim it as their own, and they are non-profit. If they start "selling" the content, businesses may start the threats...
Is this a real tech boost or just places finally needing upgrades? When Vista was found to be needless for both the consumer and business market, most consumers cut spending much in technology and businesses cut any jobs upgrading. When the recession hit, they still had little reason to upgrade. In previous years, major changes happened, compare the speed boost from a 1995 Pentium to a 1999 Pentium III. Now compare a Pentium Dual-Core to a Core 2 Duo, is there really that much of a difference in the 4 years between a 2006 Pentium Dual-Core and a Core 2 Duo? Yes, if you are a gamer it might make a lot of difference, but for most tasks, you wouldn't notice the extra speed, especially when comparing a Pentium to a Pentium III. So when the hardware is good enough, the upgraded software terrible, who wants to spend the money to upgrade? Now, new hardware advances combined with software people don't completely hate (Windows 7) is giving people reason to upgrade.
It depends what "sooner" means. If sooner is 1-2 days, perhaps it wouldn't be too bad, but a week or more would have bad effects because of outdated information. The "mainstream" news tends to not focus on one topic too long unless it helps their agenda meaning that an important article might fade from public eyes quicker than it needs to be leaving it lost in a multitude of links.
Doesn't having a subscription model kinda defeat the other point of WikiLeaks, that is that anyone can download, analyze and verify the sources? Wikileaks is a good source so you can actually check out the real information itself rather than worry about all the crap surrounding it. For example, the leaked climate e-mails, you had some sources saying it without a doubt proves that global warming is nothing more than a myth with falsified data to support it, and others saying that the e-mails told really nothing. Most of the sources didn't publish the e-mails so how does an informed person decide which is right? They go to the source.
While a subscription might be easy for journalists and other people who are making money off of Wikileaks to subscribe to, what about dissidents of an oppressive government who want to see for themselves abuses that the government did? What about the general citizen who wants the source? A subscription model fails and will simply lead to someone making a less-secure mirror of Wikileaks with all the files and such and Wikileaks loses.
This seems a lot like http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/09/07/27/1514209/English-DJ-Claims-Wi-Fi-Allergy which was proven to be a PR stunt in http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/09/07/31/1528241/Wi-Fi-Allergy-a-PR-Stunt
Under trademark law doesn't mean crap on the internet. I'm going to fill this post with trademarked words.
Nintendo, Sony, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Philips, HP, AMD, Intel, Final Fantasy, Square-Enix, Wii, Pepsi, Coke, Compaq, Logitec, Halo,
Now, when someone would search for these, my post might come up (yeah, unlikely, but I suppose its possible) same with the Android marketplace. If I put on a description "This app lets you use Twitter" its no different than an app that says "This app lets you sign in and pay bills online using your Bank of America account". Only for the banking one Google would flag it, not censor it, but would say that its not made by the company. Though I don't have an Android device handy, I don't think Google would forbid me from putting trademarked words in app descriptions (or even titles) making phishing easier.
The fact that something is trademarked might be a problem to a legitimate small, medium or large sized company, but for an individual person running a scam, it doesn't mean anything.
What if the Android market would reserve a few words for only legitimate organizations? For example, apps would need to be certified to appear in an online banking part of the store, and there would be no certification other than Google contacting the company and making sure this is the app they made. For example, if someone submits an app with "Bank of America" in the description (or something) the Android market puts a big red heading saying This app was not developed by Bank of America, do not give out sensitive financial details over the app? It isn't restrictive because it still is open development yet it weeds out phishing apps.
However, there is balance. Look at Ubuntu's repositories, they rarely really "reject" any applications and everything in there is more or less malware free. I can see there being a market for trusted repositories in Android also.
I don't really expect this laptop to last that long, but in general, cheap laptops have served me a lot better than expensive ones. For example, a few years ago I spent all my birthday money to buy a nice $700 Dell laptop, it was pretty good for its time (512 MB of RAM, early Pentium M, nice case design, and a high-res screen) and ran fast... until 6 months into using it the power cord broke, not much of a problem, I sent it in and they sent me a new one. About 3 months after that, the motherboard died. Thankfully I had the extended warranty and they replaced it. About 3 months after that, the replacement power cord they got me broke. When I called, they said that my warranty had expired and they had discontinued my laptop but they gave me the name of a third party supplier of power cords and told me the exact name of what I needed so I bought it and the cord worked for about a month. Then when I came home one day after letting it charge for an hour I smelled a burning smell and all the plastic on the tip of the cord had melted and my motherboard died. As my warrenty was up I just said "screw it" salvaged all the parts I could and used my aging desktop for a while until I bought one of the first EEE PCs and then later this Toshiba. Even if this Toshiba (which is now 6 months old) breaks in a few more months of use and I replace it with another $300 laptop, I still saved $100 compared to when I bought a "good" laptop.
...You are on Slashdot. You are not the norm. The fact you are even on this site shows that you are more inclined to use a computer than other people your age.
As for TV, the quality of programming has gone downhill, even news shows are nothing more than glorified tabloids. Networks that used to have interesting programming has shifted to more crap. Discovery is more about blowing stuff up than explaining science, the History channel seems to be nothing more than WWII and explosions.
I worry that young people won't be able to summon the capacity to focus and concentrate when they need to
Doesn't -every- older generation say that? First it was that comic books were killing novels, next it was MTV killing attention spans, now it is multitasking.
The thing is, most young people have no real need to focus and concentrate. With the increased importance placed on education, both high schools and colleges are passing more students because you need a degree to be successful. Just think, a hundred years ago a high school education was all most people needed and people could still be successful without it. Today most people need at least some college or vocational training to do almost anything.
With jobs, it is collective blame, no one person takes the fall usually a small team will take it. There are few occasions where young people really need to focus.
Gah, I meant netbook.