Have an even mildly intelligent system that assumes of the first field is not a recognizable protocol it must be the address? It wouldn't be that hard. Computers make guesses about what we want all the time. Pretending for a moment that I have an earlier version of Firefox without the Awesome Bar (which is actually just a more advanced version of what I'm talking about anyway), and I type "slashdot" into the address bar. Firefox sees that I have typed an invalid url and says:
"Hmmm. He probably wants to use http since I'm a web browser. Most of the urls in the world end with ".com" so he probably means http://slashdot.com/"
It then tries that url and I get to/. If http://slashdot.com/ isn't a valid url, it also looks at slashdot.org (which in this case would also work) and slashdot.net. It also tries all three with "www" in front of them if none of the bare urls work. Finally, it tries all the valid country code TLDs for the country it believes itself to be in. It may even try all of that for the ftp protocol too, I'm not sure.
Since most operating systems and even a lot of software have a list of protocols that they recognize, it would be trivial for a browser to look at a url and decide whether the first field is a protocol it can deal with or not, then act accordingly.
As several people have said, I think it depends on the game, and on how the game designers and advertisers handle the ads. If you want to have real ads in your virtual Time Square, on the walls of your baseball stadium in a sports game, or on your stock cars, I can see how that would work. If you want to have product placements in your "set in our time or the immediate future" RPG/FPS I can also see that working. There would have to be an understanding with the advertisers, your ads are not immune to game effects. If the stock car is being slowly disintegrated because of "realistic race damage", the ads don't get a by. Your Coke can't be the only clean and shiny thing in a zombie game. If Times Square gets blown up in the game, so do the ads. If the ads are there for "realism" then they need to be realistic. I also don't want a goblin run McDonald's stuck into all the capital cities in Azeroth. If it doesn't fit the game you're just going to have to do without the ad revenues.
I'm both a Democrat and an Obama supporter (Feel free to read my comment history if you think I'm bullshiting to make myself sound more sympathetic, it goes back years and is pretty firmly liberal throughout), and I agree. If it was 7 or 8 years from now and Obama was coming out of office having accomplished some of the many things he has promised to do, I would be behind this 100%, as it is I was fairly shocked. As a side note, I wouldn't be surprised if the man himself were shocked. I mean this is one of the greatest awards a man can receive, and it's wording is distinctly results oriented. Give him a chance to get the results, then give him an award.
Symbian has been steadily losing market share, and doesn't (to my knowledge) have a "Next Gen" platform as of yet. Certainly they're a big (huge) player in the market, but they're kind of ancillary to my point about new stuff. I didn't honestly know that Nokia had a new OS coming out. Good to see though, it's nice that there's a consumer electronics market that actually has some healthy competition in it.
I think you will find that Slashdot is made up of more than one person, and that the opinions expressed here are often variable. Surprisingly enough, all of the thousands of people that read a story, and the hundreds that often comment on a story do not agree on everything. See any story or post that mentions: "Apple", "Microsoft", "iPhone", "Linux on the Desktop" for examples of this fact.
I'm not contradicting you, just curious. Is that phones or smart-phones? I'm willing to believe that Nokia owns the phone market, but the smart-phone market seems like a three horse race between HTC (Android and Win Mob), Apple, and RIM; with Palm eating up some of the rest of the pie. Nokia doesn't seem to be a big player (at least from the anecdotal evidence of "stuff I see people using")
Yeah, but how much longer for 7? There are no fewer than 4 next gen smart phone platforms out there that MS is slowing but surely losing market share too. The iPhone OS, new Palm OS, new BB OS, and Android are all in the wild, and the worst of them is considered better than Win Mobile by most people at this point. I mean, stop gap measures are nice and all, but it seems that the time for them past a year or two ago. When it was just the iPhone, MS had time. Especially since the 1.0 iPhone OS was clearly not appropriate to business uses. Since them Palm and Black Berry, both big players in the business phone market at one time (RIM of course still is), have released their own attempts, and Apple has done a lot to improve business functionality. Android hasn't made a big splash in business yet, but it's improving too.
How much longer before MS has past the point of no return and releases its brilliant new mobile OS to a market already saturated. Even if Win Mobile 7 really is a good answer to the competition (and that remains to be seen) it won't matter if everyone has already standardized on something else before it hits the market. You gotta figure that if they're bothering to release 6.5, 7 is at least 6 months to a year out. There's always going to be a baseline of "OMG Windows, Yay!" IT managers out there who'll buy whatever MS gives them, but if they lose the rest of the market they've got problems.
[US Transportation Secretary Ray] LaHood also announced that his department would ban text messaging altogether
Oh! Look! There was a baby in that thar water after all! Seriously, texting is a useful mean of asynchronous communication between workers who are not at their computers. Why ban it entirely? I totally agree with the driving ban, but a blanket ban just seem like someone trying to brown-nose to his boss without really understanding the purpose of the boss' new policy. I can see it now:
President Obama and his senior staff are in a meeting:
President: So on our latest driving while distract push, did everyone implement the "no eating while driving a government vehicle" rule? *General noises of consent come from the various secretaries and czars* Secretary of Transportation: Not only that sir, We've completely banned eating at the DoT! I myself haven't had a meal in... ew.. I don't... feel *Secretary of Transportation collapses on the floor*
The same way people in raid guild do what they're supposed to in raids even though it's only a game and raid officers can't do anything to you really; or members of Civil Air Patrol follow military customs and courtesies toward their officers despite those officers having no actual UCMJ authority; or people in SCA listen to the nobles of their "Baronies" despite those people not having any real world authority. When you join a group or a project, you agree to abide by the rules of the group or project. If you eventually find that you can't, you generally either leave or are forced out. if the project lead on a properly managed project asks you to do some boring grunt work, you either do it or find a new project and someone else will be asked to do the work.
If the project is generally fun or personally beneficial for you to work on, you'll do the grunt tasks you're asked to do, because otherwise you'll eventually be off the project. If the project wants to keep it's user base (and most do) it'll fix as many problems as it can to keep the users happy.
Except it's not quite that cut and dry. Your analogy isn't awful, but it isn't quite right either. It's more like you're a contractor that has been working for a firm that doesn't use nails. Maybe they use glue, or screws, who knows. Suddenly some higher up decides that nails are a great new way to hold things together. You might have worked with nails at a previous job, or just read a about them on the Internet; but at any rate you're pretty sure that pneumatic hammers are totally the way to go if you want to drive nails. Sadly, your boss isn't so sure. Pneumatic hammers cost thousands of dollars and hand held ones only cost a few bucks. How many of the "nails" are we going to be driving? How much faster are these expensive auto-hammers than the much cheaper ones? If you've worked with nails and pneumatic hammers before, you might be positive that the upfront cost will be WELL worth it, but your boss has never used either type of hammer (we'll leave the carrot out of the picture for now).
In most cases where IT is implementing new software one of two things is going on. Either they've never worked with the type of technology involved at all (the contractor who was trying to figure out "nails") and have no idea what the best choice might be, or they've used the technology before, but are used to a specific implementation (A contractor that has always used hand hammers and is reluctant to move to pneumatic hammers). It's a lot more rare (not unheard of mind you, but rarer) for a company to replace its pneumatic hammers with hand hammers (or carrots).
I think the thing people are missing here is that our stereotypical "top-flight" admin is not going to hear about the new Hyper-V deployment, throw up his hands and walk out onto the street. He's going to hear about it, argue against it, tell his boss it's a bad idea, and eventually, if the decision was particularly horrid or part of a pattern of bad decisions, start looking for a new job. After he finds a new job (which given the economy may take a bit longer than usual, but *will* happen if he really is that good), then he'll walk out.
Bad management decisions don't result in an immediate loss of talent (unless the bad decision is firing the talented people of course), they result in a gradual drain of talent. Whether you've lost all your good people in a single moment of terrible decision making, or lost them over the course of the last year as they got frustrated and left, you've still lost them.
True. I did briefly touch on bias, and said that a biased program, even if it is strictly accurate is bad. As I've said in a couple of other places through this thread, I don't actually think this program is a good idea, nor that it's authors don't have a (not so) hidden agenda. Quite the opposite, I'm sure given the topic and the authors that the whole thing is full of bias and inaccuracy. What I object to is why the OP dislikes the program. "I'm morally opposed to copyright, and therefore don't want my children to learn about it" is essentially the same argument that people use to try to keep evolution out of the classroom. Had he said "I don't trust this organization to present this information fairly and accurately" I'd have jumped right on by. Between the way he phrased his objections, and his signature (which is essentially making the same argument on another topic) I felt the need to say something.
Your point is valid, but since the two situations don't exactly correspond the bullet points couldn't either. 2.2 is probably less questionable than 1.2, I'll agree, but I think I added enough extraneous "phear" to 2.2 to make them reasonable comparable.
I think that's an entirely different question than, "you shouldn't teach this because I disagree with it", which is what the OP was saying. there is an argument fro teaching the basic of copyright law as part of a high school civics class, but I agree that this is probably unnecessary in elementary school. There are much better things to spend time on.
You're both right an wrong. There's certainly a moral message of "Segregation is wrong" / "Racism is wrong" in those type of lessons, but it's more interpretive than it is direct. We did a similar lesson when I was in middle school. 6 Kids were given "privileges" for a lesson. They got to talk and play as much as they wanted, were given soda and sweets, and generally made better than the rest of us. It was only a one hour class, but it still felt miserable. The last ten minutes of class were spent discussing how this related to racism and classism. At no point did the teacher ever out and out say "segregation and separate but equal are bad". She didn't have too. The message was in lesson. For those of us not privileged it was manifestly not fun. For those in the privileged group it was manifestly obvious that the rest of us were not having fun.
The idea wasn't so much to make the moral statement "Racism is bad", it was to personalize the *fact* that being treated badly or differently makes *you* personally or *your friend* personally feel bad. It's left to the student to then make the jump to the moral idea that "treating people badly or differently makes them feel bad and is therefore wrong."
You are essentially completely missing the point of public services. Let's take an example of three couples. Each of these couples has two children. The first couple is rich. They make (for the sake of really easy numbers) $1,000,000 a year. The second couple is well off. They make $100,000 a year. The final couple is poor. They make $10,000 a year (OK, that's unlikely, but I'm trying to keep the numbers easy). They all live in your new Utopia.
The first couple has lots of money, they can afford the best of everything: They have multiple private security officers working for them, send their children to the best schools, and have two licensed vehicles that they've paid for the right to drive on the road. They don't pay police, school, or other service taxes. Other than the roads, they contribute nothing to the public coffer.
The second couple has enough money, but not enough for the good private services. They are protected by the public police and their children are educated by the public schools because they can afford the police and school taxes, and they can manage to keep one car on the road so they carpool everywhere. They have some problems though: by definition, being cheaper and with no one to true "general fund" to absorb the overhead, the public services aren't as good as the private ones. After all it simple math, if the school tax is 10K per student, and the privates schools charge 20K by definition the private schools have twice as much to spend per student. Same with the police. With only one car, they can't always get ends to meet just right, if someone has to go home sick, both of them do. Life is OK, but it isn't great. They pay a flat 10K each for school tax (per kid), police tax, and the car. Other ancillary government service fees add up to another 20 K a year. This leaves them with 40 K of money to actually live on and the government takes 60k from them. 60% taxes wasn't supposed to be a part of the utopia, but since the rich people don't pay ANYTHING into the school fund or police fund or the rest (except the road fund, not even they can afford to put private roads everywhere), it has to come from somewhere. Thankfully they only need to pay for what they use (which is pretty much everything, because the private version cost even more).
The third couple is essentially screwed. Paying the school tax, or the police tax or any thing else would break them. Their kids don't go to school, and the police don't patrol their neighborhood. Their neighborhood of course becomes a breeding ground for crime, because there is no education and no police presence. Illiteracy rates are phenomenal, if you're lucky your parents can teach you to read, but after a few generation the likely hood that your parents even know how is pretty small. No government service paid for means no real health department or trash pickup. In addition to becoming a breeding ground for illiterate criminals, the neighborhood is a health hazard to the rest of the city.
In total, in this scenario the government has collect 80K from our three couples. 60 from the middle class couple (more than half their income) and 20 from the wealthy couple (a negligible amount). If you want to poor couple to get any services at all (and we pretty much have to if we want to avoid total societal collapse), the money is going to have to come from somewhere. Since the rich couple doesn't get charged for services they don't use, it'll have to be a surcharge on the middle class couples taxes. So either no services at all for the poor, or the middle class couple is losing even more of its income. Since there is no way the middle class couple can carry themselves AND the poor couple at the same rate of service as they could carry just themselves, the services suffer even more compared to the private services. Let's say there's a 10% "carry the poor people" fee on any tax you already have to pay. Now the rich couple contributes 22K over all, and the middle class couple contributes 66K. We'll even say that t
Nicely done you have completely taken what I said out of context, and neatly twisted its meaning. I said in no fewer than two places in the post that schools should not be making moral judgments at all, but should be presenting facts. As accurately as possible. Let's look at both subjects that seem to irritate you and see how schools should handle them...
Masturbation: 1) "Current research shows that masturbation is a normal/healthy activity" - Fine. It accurately states a fact. Current research does in fact show that.
2) "Current research shows that masturbation is a normal/healthy activity, and you shouldn't feel bad about doing it" - Questionable. The first statement is certainly true, the second is getting on to possibly making a moral call. I would generally support it, because the first statement supports it, and frankly I think masturbation is perfectly normal and healthy. I can see where some parents might object.
3) "Masturbation is fine, any family or religious figure that tells you otherwise is wrong." - Bad. The school is usurping parental and/or religious authority. If the schools in the UK are actually saying this or something like it, then I don't support their program, despite agreeing with their aims.
Copyright Infringement: 1) "Copying music and movies and sharing them with your friends is illegal under most circumstances in most of the Western World" - Fine. It's an accurate statement of facts. More details explaining exceptions might be good, but on the face of it this statement is accurate.
2) "Because copying music and movies and sharing them with your friends is illegal under most circumstances in most of the Western World, you should not do it. You could be arrested or fined and your parents could get into trouble." - Questionable. It gives advice, and presents a "scare" scenario. Again though, the second statement follows pretty logically from the first, and you can in fact be arrested or fined. There's nothing really inaccurate here, but I can see where some parents might object.
3) "Copyright infringement is wrong and evil and should be punished where ever it's found out. Always tell on anybody you find doing it." - Bad. Makes a moral judgment call, and gives questionable advice about how to behave.
It's pretty simple. If the school is giving out facts, and the facts are accurate then the school is doing its job. I never defended this as a good program. In fact I say quite clearly that it seems to be giving out biased or incorrect information. My objection is not to the fact that you don't like it (I don't think it's a good idea either), my objection is to the reasons you dislike it. Your essential argument could be used to completely shelter children from any information you, as their parent, don't want them to have. It's the same essential argument used against the teaching of evolution. If school curriculum are based on withholding everything that any individual parent doesn't want their kinds to know, pretty soon there won't be any curriculum. By the time you accommodate the pacifists that don't want their kids to know wars existed, the right wing Christians who don't want their kids to know other religions exist (not to mention half the biology and physics curriculum), the anarchists who don't want their kids to know laws exist, and the prudes who don't want their kids to know sex exists, you might as well cancel education after 6th grade once kids know how to read and add most of the time.
Really? Seriously? So everybody who doesn't have kids can opt of school taxes too, right? Since we shouldn't have to pay for what we're not using? Also, can I opt out of police taxes? I don't really like laws, and I don't want to pay for their enforcement. Oh, if I promise not to drive can I opt out of road taxes?
This post is infinitely LOL'able. First you can already "opt out" of public schools. Private schools are a thriving industry in the US, and every state makes at least some provision for home schooling as well (though some are less generous than others). Of course you have to pay for the private schools, but this is always the case when you choose to use something other than what is provided for you.
If you were advocating vouchers to defray the cost of private school, I could at least see where you are coming from, but exemption from certain taxes? How do you know what taxes pay for schools? How do you enforce this? In most districts schools are paid for from a combination of property levees and the general fund (which comes from a combination of things: Sales taxes, fines and fees for minor crimes and government services, other property taxes, state funding, all kinds of things). Many people who send kids to school rent and only pay property taxes indirectly, how do you help them? What about general fund taxes? Can you tell stores to charge 1/2 a point in sales tax less for people who can prove their kids are in private school? Knock $10 off speeding tickets for people who can prove it? What about people without kids at all? Do they get the same treatment? Are you going to raise the taxes on people who choose to use public schools? You'll have to when all this funding dries up. Again how do you handle renters? Keep track of who has kids in Public schools and charge their land lords more property taxes? That'll fly I'm sure.
This is the way public services work. We all pay some money in and everything the government does with it doesn't necessarily benefit everyone. My taxes go to pay for the road improvements in north Huntsville. I don't go to north Huntsville, but I don't get exempt from the taxes. Next year those same monies might be used to improve a road I do use that some other tax payer never does. I pay for a police department I've never had to call... doesn't mean I'd like to get rid of them, just I haven't personally needed them. Education of children is a service that may not benefit everyone directly (I don't have kids), but every time I go to McDonald's and the kid behind the counter knows how to make change for a ten, I can thank a school somewhere.
one of my other lessons was - if you discover that the times tables can be done by adding numbers together, on no account let your teacher know. Another two weeks of detention for working something out rather than rote learning it
Wow. We were told that multiplication was a function of addition when we learned the tables, I'm fairly shocked not only that you weren't, but that you got in trouble when you figured it out. The correct way, IMO, was the way my elementary school teacher explained it: "Multiplication is simply addition of the same number to itself "multiple" times, and you *can* figure out 3x4 by simply adding three together 4 times. This can be really cumbersome with larger numbers though, so we memorize the multiplication table to make things easier. It may seem hard to memorize all of this, but it's easier than having to add "8" to itself nine times every time you want to know what "8x9" comes out to." Of course that's not a quote, and I'm sure she used simpler words, but that's the gist. Give the theory, then explain the practical way to do it if the practice varies from the theory: Education 101.
UK Gov't Health tells kids to masturbate;Parents are angry. But when you have a monopoly, customer opinions don't matter
Your sig and your post both present the same essential argument, and both suffer from the logical fallacy. I seriously doubt that the Uk government is telling kids to masturbate. I full believe and wouldn't even be surprised to hear that the UK government is telling kids something along the lines of "Current psychological research shows that masturbation is natural and/or healthy". The first is giving advice, the second merely stating a fact. Moreover the second is stating a TRUE fact. Whether or not you believe that masturbation is natural and/or healthy, the vast majority of current research shows that it is. Your moral judgment on the act itself cannot stand in the way of a simple statement on the current state of research *about* the act. You are perfectly free, at home, to tell your children that masturbation is a sin, and that they should not do it. The schools can, and should, present data about what the most current science on the matter says. Schools should not be in the business of teaching morals, but they are in the business of presenting scientific data to students.
The same fallacy applies to your post about what RIAA is doing. While what the RIAA curriculum is teaching might be counter to your moral beliefs (i.e. you may believe that all information should be free and copyright laws are an abomination), unless it is factually inaccurate it doesn't matter. Schools are again not in the business of presenting moral arguments, they are in the business of presenting facts. In this case legal facts. If the facts are wrong (and in this case is seem that they are, if not wrong, certainly biased) then we should object. If the facts are right, and the curriculum does not stray into making moral declarations, then the fact that we'd like those facts to be different doesn't change anything. Objecting based on the idea that we'd rather our children didn't hear these facts is silly.
This. I haven't really watched TV at all in the last few months. Once the new season of the shows I like start I'll probably play less and watch more TV. Plus my wife and I are temporarily separated (not, like, about to be divorced separated, she got a job in another city and had to take it) and she plays to so we can actually be "together" when we play better than we could be otherwise. I used to say that I played 10 or so hours a week, right now it's more like 20... *shrug* with the wife out of town and nothing good on TV, well I can only ready so much before I get a headache. Between playing with her, and my other friends in guild, this is a better time sink than most ATM.
I played on a PvP server in vanilla WoW for a while... You're right, it was great fun! There's nothing as great as having a level 55 corpse camp you in Ashenvale because killing level 19s in one shot makes him feel manly. Then eventually just having to log out and come back later to finish your quest, because he just. won't. leave. and you have no recourse, since he's orders of magnitude more powerful than you no matter how much skill you have. Did I mention that this was back when servers were regularly overpopulated? Sometimes it took 20 minutes to get back in! Ah good times. I don't know why I moved to PVE server.
Battlegrounds and flagging assure that if you're doing PvP, you want to do PvP. They also ensure that the PvP you're in is either a) reasonably fair, with a reasonably equal number of similarly leveled players, or b) a choice you made to let the other side potentially gang up on you because you chose to flag (and can choose to unflag when you're tired of the lvl 55 asshole.) World PvP would be fun if people had any sense of honor or fairness, but too many people don't. Playing on a PvP server was incredibly frustrating at the early levels.
This isn't Die Hard. You are not invincible. One on one fights should be close, and one person should not be allowed to dominate. How do you think the 3 people you deck feel who have come over thinking they have as fair a chance as anyone else at getting somewhere? More to the point, what the hell does it matter if you win or not? You already have the elite gear, be it PvP or raid. You don't need the Marks to get the purples.
Ehh... if you continue reading his post you'll see you're agreeing with him. He thinks the leveling nerfs were a good thing and made the game more fun for everyone. It's only an extra paragraph, reading it would not have been that difficult.
It also levels the playing field for newer players. The fact was, back in the day, if you hit 60 say... three months before BC came out, you were NEVER, EVER going to be able to raid. Since it took weeks of working with a good guild to get to beginning raid gear, and good guilds weren't going to take n00b 60's, you weren't going to be able to catch up. Ever. BC reset progression, but within six months or so it was reestablished, and people who hadn't made 70 within the first few months and had a guild to raid with, were again locked out of the end game content. This was the beginning of the badge and heroic instance gear. Suddenly if you were willing to do enough harder 5 mans you could at least get the beginnings of something that would take you to end game. Thus you started to see some casual guilds and even PuGs doing Kara and Grull.
Everything since then has refined this policy to make it so that even casual guilds can at least see what the inside of Ulduar or Trial of the Crusader looks like even if we'll never defeat 25 man Yogg on hard mode. I'm happy. I can play a few hours a day, a bit more on weekends, take a few days off here or there, and still get to see the end game content. Being Shiny isn't a huge deal for me, except as it puts me in position to play more aspects of the game. I may never have gotten to see MC or Sunwell Plateau when they were new, but I'll probably get to fight Arthas in Ice Crown. Maybe not the day the patch is released. Maybe not on 25 man hardmode. But I'll get to see the fight, before the expansion makes it obsolete.
I live in Alabama. There are at least 7 mixed races couples in my Apartment complex that I am aware of, and since I only know a small fraction of the people in my complex the actual numbers are doubtless much higher. Feel free to do what you must.
Slashdot Mirror
Have an even mildly intelligent system that assumes of the first field is not a recognizable protocol it must be the address? It wouldn't be that hard. Computers make guesses about what we want all the time. Pretending for a moment that I have an earlier version of Firefox without the Awesome Bar (which is actually just a more advanced version of what I'm talking about anyway), and I type "slashdot" into the address bar. Firefox sees that I have typed an invalid url and says:
"Hmmm. He probably wants to use http since I'm a web browser. Most of the urls in the world end with ".com" so he probably means http://slashdot.com/"
It then tries that url and I get to /. If http://slashdot.com/ isn't a valid url, it also looks at slashdot.org (which in this case would also work) and slashdot.net. It also tries all three with "www" in front of them if none of the bare urls work. Finally, it tries all the valid country code TLDs for the country it believes itself to be in. It may even try all of that for the ftp protocol too, I'm not sure.
Since most operating systems and even a lot of software have a list of protocols that they recognize, it would be trivial for a browser to look at a url and decide whether the first field is a protocol it can deal with or not, then act accordingly.
As several people have said, I think it depends on the game, and on how the game designers and advertisers handle the ads. If you want to have real ads in your virtual Time Square, on the walls of your baseball stadium in a sports game, or on your stock cars, I can see how that would work. If you want to have product placements in your "set in our time or the immediate future" RPG/FPS I can also see that working. There would have to be an understanding with the advertisers, your ads are not immune to game effects. If the stock car is being slowly disintegrated because of "realistic race damage", the ads don't get a by. Your Coke can't be the only clean and shiny thing in a zombie game. If Times Square gets blown up in the game, so do the ads. If the ads are there for "realism" then they need to be realistic. I also don't want a goblin run McDonald's stuck into all the capital cities in Azeroth. If it doesn't fit the game you're just going to have to do without the ad revenues.
I'm both a Democrat and an Obama supporter (Feel free to read my comment history if you think I'm bullshiting to make myself sound more sympathetic, it goes back years and is pretty firmly liberal throughout), and I agree. If it was 7 or 8 years from now and Obama was coming out of office having accomplished some of the many things he has promised to do, I would be behind this 100%, as it is I was fairly shocked. As a side note, I wouldn't be surprised if the man himself were shocked. I mean this is one of the greatest awards a man can receive, and it's wording is distinctly results oriented. Give him a chance to get the results, then give him an award.
Symbian has been steadily losing market share, and doesn't (to my knowledge) have a "Next Gen" platform as of yet. Certainly they're a big (huge) player in the market, but they're kind of ancillary to my point about new stuff. I didn't honestly know that Nokia had a new OS coming out. Good to see though, it's nice that there's a consumer electronics market that actually has some healthy competition in it.
I think you will find that Slashdot is made up of more than one person, and that the opinions expressed here are often variable. Surprisingly enough, all of the thousands of people that read a story, and the hundreds that often comment on a story do not agree on everything. See any story or post that mentions: "Apple", "Microsoft", "iPhone", "Linux on the Desktop" for examples of this fact.
I'm not contradicting you, just curious. Is that phones or smart-phones? I'm willing to believe that Nokia owns the phone market, but the smart-phone market seems like a three horse race between HTC (Android and Win Mob), Apple, and RIM; with Palm eating up some of the rest of the pie. Nokia doesn't seem to be a big player (at least from the anecdotal evidence of "stuff I see people using")
Yeah, but how much longer for 7? There are no fewer than 4 next gen smart phone platforms out there that MS is slowing but surely losing market share too. The iPhone OS, new Palm OS, new BB OS, and Android are all in the wild, and the worst of them is considered better than Win Mobile by most people at this point. I mean, stop gap measures are nice and all, but it seems that the time for them past a year or two ago. When it was just the iPhone, MS had time. Especially since the 1.0 iPhone OS was clearly not appropriate to business uses. Since them Palm and Black Berry, both big players in the business phone market at one time (RIM of course still is), have released their own attempts, and Apple has done a lot to improve business functionality. Android hasn't made a big splash in business yet, but it's improving too.
How much longer before MS has past the point of no return and releases its brilliant new mobile OS to a market already saturated. Even if Win Mobile 7 really is a good answer to the competition (and that remains to be seen) it won't matter if everyone has already standardized on something else before it hits the market. You gotta figure that if they're bothering to release 6.5, 7 is at least 6 months to a year out. There's always going to be a baseline of "OMG Windows, Yay!" IT managers out there who'll buy whatever MS gives them, but if they lose the rest of the market they've got problems.
[US Transportation Secretary Ray] LaHood also announced that his department would ban text messaging altogether
Oh! Look! There was a baby in that thar water after all! Seriously, texting is a useful mean of asynchronous communication between workers who are not at their computers. Why ban it entirely? I totally agree with the driving ban, but a blanket ban just seem like someone trying to brown-nose to his boss without really understanding the purpose of the boss' new policy. I can see it now:
President Obama and his senior staff are in a meeting:
President: So on our latest driving while distract push, did everyone implement the "no eating while driving a government vehicle" rule?
*General noises of consent come from the various secretaries and czars*
Secretary of Transportation: Not only that sir, We've completely banned eating at the DoT! I myself haven't had a meal in... ew.. I don't... feel
*Secretary of Transportation collapses on the floor*
Too much of a good idea is no longer a good idea.
The same way people in raid guild do what they're supposed to in raids even though it's only a game and raid officers can't do anything to you really; or members of Civil Air Patrol follow military customs and courtesies toward their officers despite those officers having no actual UCMJ authority; or people in SCA listen to the nobles of their "Baronies" despite those people not having any real world authority. When you join a group or a project, you agree to abide by the rules of the group or project. If you eventually find that you can't, you generally either leave or are forced out. if the project lead on a properly managed project asks you to do some boring grunt work, you either do it or find a new project and someone else will be asked to do the work.
If the project is generally fun or personally beneficial for you to work on, you'll do the grunt tasks you're asked to do, because otherwise you'll eventually be off the project. If the project wants to keep it's user base (and most do) it'll fix as many problems as it can to keep the users happy.
Except it's not quite that cut and dry. Your analogy isn't awful, but it isn't quite right either. It's more like you're a contractor that has been working for a firm that doesn't use nails. Maybe they use glue, or screws, who knows. Suddenly some higher up decides that nails are a great new way to hold things together. You might have worked with nails at a previous job, or just read a about them on the Internet; but at any rate you're pretty sure that pneumatic hammers are totally the way to go if you want to drive nails. Sadly, your boss isn't so sure. Pneumatic hammers cost thousands of dollars and hand held ones only cost a few bucks. How many of the "nails" are we going to be driving? How much faster are these expensive auto-hammers than the much cheaper ones? If you've worked with nails and pneumatic hammers before, you might be positive that the upfront cost will be WELL worth it, but your boss has never used either type of hammer (we'll leave the carrot out of the picture for now).
In most cases where IT is implementing new software one of two things is going on. Either they've never worked with the type of technology involved at all (the contractor who was trying to figure out "nails") and have no idea what the best choice might be, or they've used the technology before, but are used to a specific implementation (A contractor that has always used hand hammers and is reluctant to move to pneumatic hammers). It's a lot more rare (not unheard of mind you, but rarer) for a company to replace its pneumatic hammers with hand hammers (or carrots).
I think the thing people are missing here is that our stereotypical "top-flight" admin is not going to hear about the new Hyper-V deployment, throw up his hands and walk out onto the street. He's going to hear about it, argue against it, tell his boss it's a bad idea, and eventually, if the decision was particularly horrid or part of a pattern of bad decisions, start looking for a new job. After he finds a new job (which given the economy may take a bit longer than usual, but *will* happen if he really is that good), then he'll walk out.
Bad management decisions don't result in an immediate loss of talent (unless the bad decision is firing the talented people of course), they result in a gradual drain of talent. Whether you've lost all your good people in a single moment of terrible decision making, or lost them over the course of the last year as they got frustrated and left, you've still lost them.
True. I did briefly touch on bias, and said that a biased program, even if it is strictly accurate is bad. As I've said in a couple of other places through this thread, I don't actually think this program is a good idea, nor that it's authors don't have a (not so) hidden agenda. Quite the opposite, I'm sure given the topic and the authors that the whole thing is full of bias and inaccuracy. What I object to is why the OP dislikes the program. "I'm morally opposed to copyright, and therefore don't want my children to learn about it" is essentially the same argument that people use to try to keep evolution out of the classroom. Had he said "I don't trust this organization to present this information fairly and accurately" I'd have jumped right on by. Between the way he phrased his objections, and his signature (which is essentially making the same argument on another topic) I felt the need to say something.
Your point is valid, but since the two situations don't exactly correspond the bullet points couldn't either. 2.2 is probably less questionable than 1.2, I'll agree, but I think I added enough extraneous "phear" to 2.2 to make them reasonable comparable.
I think that's an entirely different question than, "you shouldn't teach this because I disagree with it", which is what the OP was saying. there is an argument fro teaching the basic of copyright law as part of a high school civics class, but I agree that this is probably unnecessary in elementary school. There are much better things to spend time on.
You're both right an wrong. There's certainly a moral message of "Segregation is wrong" / "Racism is wrong" in those type of lessons, but it's more interpretive than it is direct. We did a similar lesson when I was in middle school. 6 Kids were given "privileges" for a lesson. They got to talk and play as much as they wanted, were given soda and sweets, and generally made better than the rest of us. It was only a one hour class, but it still felt miserable. The last ten minutes of class were spent discussing how this related to racism and classism. At no point did the teacher ever out and out say "segregation and separate but equal are bad". She didn't have too. The message was in lesson. For those of us not privileged it was manifestly not fun. For those in the privileged group it was manifestly obvious that the rest of us were not having fun.
The idea wasn't so much to make the moral statement "Racism is bad", it was to personalize the *fact* that being treated badly or differently makes *you* personally or *your friend* personally feel bad. It's left to the student to then make the jump to the moral idea that "treating people badly or differently makes them feel bad and is therefore wrong."
You are essentially completely missing the point of public services. Let's take an example of three couples. Each of these couples has two children. The first couple is rich. They make (for the sake of really easy numbers) $1,000,000 a year. The second couple is well off. They make $100,000 a year. The final couple is poor. They make $10,000 a year (OK, that's unlikely, but I'm trying to keep the numbers easy). They all live in your new Utopia.
The first couple has lots of money, they can afford the best of everything: They have multiple private security officers working for them, send their children to the best schools, and have two licensed vehicles that they've paid for the right to drive on the road. They don't pay police, school, or other service taxes. Other than the roads, they contribute nothing to the public coffer.
The second couple has enough money, but not enough for the good private services. They are protected by the public police and their children are educated by the public schools because they can afford the police and school taxes, and they can manage to keep one car on the road so they carpool everywhere. They have some problems though: by definition, being cheaper and with no one to true "general fund" to absorb the overhead, the public services aren't as good as the private ones. After all it simple math, if the school tax is 10K per student, and the privates schools charge 20K by definition the private schools have twice as much to spend per student. Same with the police. With only one car, they can't always get ends to meet just right, if someone has to go home sick, both of them do. Life is OK, but it isn't great. They pay a flat 10K each for school tax (per kid), police tax, and the car. Other ancillary government service fees add up to another 20 K a year. This leaves them with 40 K of money to actually live on and the government takes 60k from them. 60% taxes wasn't supposed to be a part of the utopia, but since the rich people don't pay ANYTHING into the school fund or police fund or the rest (except the road fund, not even they can afford to put private roads everywhere), it has to come from somewhere. Thankfully they only need to pay for what they use (which is pretty much everything, because the private version cost even more).
The third couple is essentially screwed. Paying the school tax, or the police tax or any thing else would break them. Their kids don't go to school, and the police don't patrol their neighborhood. Their neighborhood of course becomes a breeding ground for crime, because there is no education and no police presence. Illiteracy rates are phenomenal, if you're lucky your parents can teach you to read, but after a few generation the likely hood that your parents even know how is pretty small. No government service paid for means no real health department or trash pickup. In addition to becoming a breeding ground for illiterate criminals, the neighborhood is a health hazard to the rest of the city.
In total, in this scenario the government has collect 80K from our three couples. 60 from the middle class couple (more than half their income) and 20 from the wealthy couple (a negligible amount). If you want to poor couple to get any services at all (and we pretty much have to if we want to avoid total societal collapse), the money is going to have to come from somewhere. Since the rich couple doesn't get charged for services they don't use, it'll have to be a surcharge on the middle class couples taxes. So either no services at all for the poor, or the middle class couple is losing even more of its income. Since there is no way the middle class couple can carry themselves AND the poor couple at the same rate of service as they could carry just themselves, the services suffer even more compared to the private services. Let's say there's a 10% "carry the poor people" fee on any tax you already have to pay. Now the rich couple contributes 22K over all, and the middle class couple contributes 66K. We'll even say that t
Nicely done you have completely taken what I said out of context, and neatly twisted its meaning. I said in no fewer than two places in the post that schools should not be making moral judgments at all, but should be presenting facts. As accurately as possible. Let's look at both subjects that seem to irritate you and see how schools should handle them...
Masturbation:
1) "Current research shows that masturbation is a normal/healthy activity" - Fine. It accurately states a fact. Current research does in fact show that.
2) "Current research shows that masturbation is a normal/healthy activity, and you shouldn't feel bad about doing it" - Questionable. The first statement is certainly true, the second is getting on to possibly making a moral call. I would generally support it, because the first statement supports it, and frankly I think masturbation is perfectly normal and healthy. I can see where some parents might object.
3) "Masturbation is fine, any family or religious figure that tells you otherwise is wrong." - Bad. The school is usurping parental and/or religious authority. If the schools in the UK are actually saying this or something like it, then I don't support their program, despite agreeing with their aims.
Copyright Infringement:
1) "Copying music and movies and sharing them with your friends is illegal under most circumstances in most of the Western World" - Fine. It's an accurate statement of facts. More details explaining exceptions might be good, but on the face of it this statement is accurate.
2) "Because copying music and movies and sharing them with your friends is illegal under most circumstances in most of the Western World, you should not do it. You could be arrested or fined and your parents could get into trouble." - Questionable. It gives advice, and presents a "scare" scenario. Again though, the second statement follows pretty logically from the first, and you can in fact be arrested or fined. There's nothing really inaccurate here, but I can see where some parents might object.
3) "Copyright infringement is wrong and evil and should be punished where ever it's found out. Always tell on anybody you find doing it." - Bad. Makes a moral judgment call, and gives questionable advice about how to behave.
It's pretty simple. If the school is giving out facts, and the facts are accurate then the school is doing its job. I never defended this as a good program. In fact I say quite clearly that it seems to be giving out biased or incorrect information. My objection is not to the fact that you don't like it (I don't think it's a good idea either), my objection is to the reasons you dislike it. Your essential argument could be used to completely shelter children from any information you, as their parent, don't want them to have. It's the same essential argument used against the teaching of evolution. If school curriculum are based on withholding everything that any individual parent doesn't want their kinds to know, pretty soon there won't be any curriculum. By the time you accommodate the pacifists that don't want their kids to know wars existed, the right wing Christians who don't want their kids to know other religions exist (not to mention half the biology and physics curriculum), the anarchists who don't want their kids to know laws exist, and the prudes who don't want their kids to know sex exists, you might as well cancel education after 6th grade once kids know how to read and add most of the time.
Really? Seriously? So everybody who doesn't have kids can opt of school taxes too, right? Since we shouldn't have to pay for what we're not using? Also, can I opt out of police taxes? I don't really like laws, and I don't want to pay for their enforcement. Oh, if I promise not to drive can I opt out of road taxes?
This post is infinitely LOL'able. First you can already "opt out" of public schools. Private schools are a thriving industry in the US, and every state makes at least some provision for home schooling as well (though some are less generous than others). Of course you have to pay for the private schools, but this is always the case when you choose to use something other than what is provided for you.
If you were advocating vouchers to defray the cost of private school, I could at least see where you are coming from, but exemption from certain taxes? How do you know what taxes pay for schools? How do you enforce this? In most districts schools are paid for from a combination of property levees and the general fund (which comes from a combination of things: Sales taxes, fines and fees for minor crimes and government services, other property taxes, state funding, all kinds of things). Many people who send kids to school rent and only pay property taxes indirectly, how do you help them? What about general fund taxes? Can you tell stores to charge 1/2 a point in sales tax less for people who can prove their kids are in private school? Knock $10 off speeding tickets for people who can prove it? What about people without kids at all? Do they get the same treatment? Are you going to raise the taxes on people who choose to use public schools? You'll have to when all this funding dries up. Again how do you handle renters? Keep track of who has kids in Public schools and charge their land lords more property taxes? That'll fly I'm sure.
This is the way public services work. We all pay some money in and everything the government does with it doesn't necessarily benefit everyone. My taxes go to pay for the road improvements in north Huntsville. I don't go to north Huntsville, but I don't get exempt from the taxes. Next year those same monies might be used to improve a road I do use that some other tax payer never does. I pay for a police department I've never had to call... doesn't mean I'd like to get rid of them, just I haven't personally needed them. Education of children is a service that may not benefit everyone directly (I don't have kids), but every time I go to McDonald's and the kid behind the counter knows how to make change for a ten, I can thank a school somewhere.
one of my other lessons was - if you discover that the times tables can be done by adding numbers together, on no account let your teacher know. Another two weeks of detention for working something out rather than rote learning it
Wow. We were told that multiplication was a function of addition when we learned the tables, I'm fairly shocked not only that you weren't, but that you got in trouble when you figured it out. The correct way, IMO, was the way my elementary school teacher explained it: "Multiplication is simply addition of the same number to itself "multiple" times, and you *can* figure out 3x4 by simply adding three together 4 times. This can be really cumbersome with larger numbers though, so we memorize the multiplication table to make things easier. It may seem hard to memorize all of this, but it's easier than having to add "8" to itself nine times every time you want to know what "8x9" comes out to." Of course that's not a quote, and I'm sure she used simpler words, but that's the gist. Give the theory, then explain the practical way to do it if the practice varies from the theory: Education 101.
UK Gov't Health tells kids to masturbate;Parents are angry. But when you have a monopoly, customer opinions don't matter
Your sig and your post both present the same essential argument, and both suffer from the logical fallacy. I seriously doubt that the Uk government is telling kids to masturbate. I full believe and wouldn't even be surprised to hear that the UK government is telling kids something along the lines of "Current psychological research shows that masturbation is natural and/or healthy". The first is giving advice, the second merely stating a fact. Moreover the second is stating a TRUE fact. Whether or not you believe that masturbation is natural and/or healthy, the vast majority of current research shows that it is. Your moral judgment on the act itself cannot stand in the way of a simple statement on the current state of research *about* the act. You are perfectly free, at home, to tell your children that masturbation is a sin, and that they should not do it. The schools can, and should, present data about what the most current science on the matter says. Schools should not be in the business of teaching morals, but they are in the business of presenting scientific data to students.
The same fallacy applies to your post about what RIAA is doing. While what the RIAA curriculum is teaching might be counter to your moral beliefs (i.e. you may believe that all information should be free and copyright laws are an abomination), unless it is factually inaccurate it doesn't matter. Schools are again not in the business of presenting moral arguments, they are in the business of presenting facts. In this case legal facts. If the facts are wrong (and in this case is seem that they are, if not wrong, certainly biased) then we should object. If the facts are right, and the curriculum does not stray into making moral declarations, then the fact that we'd like those facts to be different doesn't change anything. Objecting based on the idea that we'd rather our children didn't hear these facts is silly.
This. I haven't really watched TV at all in the last few months. Once the new season of the shows I like start I'll probably play less and watch more TV. Plus my wife and I are temporarily separated (not, like, about to be divorced separated, she got a job in another city and had to take it) and she plays to so we can actually be "together" when we play better than we could be otherwise. I used to say that I played 10 or so hours a week, right now it's more like 20... *shrug* with the wife out of town and nothing good on TV, well I can only ready so much before I get a headache. Between playing with her, and my other friends in guild, this is a better time sink than most ATM.
I played on a PvP server in vanilla WoW for a while... You're right, it was great fun! There's nothing as great as having a level 55 corpse camp you in Ashenvale because killing level 19s in one shot makes him feel manly. Then eventually just having to log out and come back later to finish your quest, because he just. won't. leave. and you have no recourse, since he's orders of magnitude more powerful than you no matter how much skill you have. Did I mention that this was back when servers were regularly overpopulated? Sometimes it took 20 minutes to get back in! Ah good times. I don't know why I moved to PVE server.
Battlegrounds and flagging assure that if you're doing PvP, you want to do PvP. They also ensure that the PvP you're in is either a) reasonably fair, with a reasonably equal number of similarly leveled players, or b) a choice you made to let the other side potentially gang up on you because you chose to flag (and can choose to unflag when you're tired of the lvl 55 asshole.) World PvP would be fun if people had any sense of honor or fairness, but too many people don't. Playing on a PvP server was incredibly frustrating at the early levels.
This isn't Die Hard. You are not invincible. One on one fights should be close, and one person should not be allowed to dominate. How do you think the 3 people you deck feel who have come over thinking they have as fair a chance as anyone else at getting somewhere? More to the point, what the hell does it matter if you win or not? You already have the elite gear, be it PvP or raid. You don't need the Marks to get the purples.
Ehh... if you continue reading his post you'll see you're agreeing with him. He thinks the leveling nerfs were a good thing and made the game more fun for everyone. It's only an extra paragraph, reading it would not have been that difficult.
It also levels the playing field for newer players. The fact was, back in the day, if you hit 60 say... three months before BC came out, you were NEVER, EVER going to be able to raid. Since it took weeks of working with a good guild to get to beginning raid gear, and good guilds weren't going to take n00b 60's, you weren't going to be able to catch up. Ever. BC reset progression, but within six months or so it was reestablished, and people who hadn't made 70 within the first few months and had a guild to raid with, were again locked out of the end game content. This was the beginning of the badge and heroic instance gear. Suddenly if you were willing to do enough harder 5 mans you could at least get the beginnings of something that would take you to end game. Thus you started to see some casual guilds and even PuGs doing Kara and Grull.
Everything since then has refined this policy to make it so that even casual guilds can at least see what the inside of Ulduar or Trial of the Crusader looks like even if we'll never defeat 25 man Yogg on hard mode. I'm happy. I can play a few hours a day, a bit more on weekends, take a few days off here or there, and still get to see the end game content. Being Shiny isn't a huge deal for me, except as it puts me in position to play more aspects of the game. I may never have gotten to see MC or Sunwell Plateau when they were new, but I'll probably get to fight Arthas in Ice Crown. Maybe not the day the patch is released. Maybe not on 25 man hardmode. But I'll get to see the fight, before the expansion makes it obsolete.
I live in Alabama. There are at least 7 mixed races couples in my Apartment complex that I am aware of, and since I only know a small fraction of the people in my complex the actual numbers are doubtless much higher. Feel free to do what you must.