IANAL, but I think that's only possible if your kid goes to college before he/she turns 18 and is still a minor, but at 18 your rights to that information end. Your kid can probably request that you have access to their grades, but you can't demand it from the school without their consent. And it's probably just easier to ask your kid for the grades.
Access to information about an adult should only be granted by that same adult. You can't get the police to send you any speeding tickets they might get, you can't get a hospital to send you a transcript of the blood workup they had done at their physical, and you can't get their school to send you their grades. Unless, of course, you get power of attorney or there is some special circumstance (severe injury, mental retardation, etc) that makes you their legal guardian.
If you, as the parent, are paying the bills, you are well within your rights to ask your kid for those grades. If they refuse, you can tell them that the next semester is theirs to pay for, and good luck, and don't let the door hit them on the ass on the way out. But you can't expect the world to report their activities to you any more. They's all growed up now, and responsible for theyselves. And they have a legal right to privacy. Even from you.
The Terminators are designed to go into the resistance's bunkers and kill them.
I think that's the point. It would be horribly inefficient to send something that looks human into a bunker to kill all the humans there, when you could expend a lot less effort and send a swarm of 1,000,000 things the size of a housefly who could simply fly in through the air vents, burrow into their necks and sever their spinal cords rather easily.
It's also a good thing Skynet never figured out vision beyond human-normal, because a Terminator with infrared, ultraviolet, or deep-scan RADAR capability would completely eliminate the need to infiltrate human encampments in order to discover them.
And it's a damned good thing that Skynet never developed any form of nerve gas that they'd be immune from but would simply wipe out any human populations, and just gassed the crap out of any suspected human settlements from 20,000 feet.
It's a good thing they never introduced a sequel that showed Skynet mastering any form of living-liquid-metal technology or any of these other technologies that could have made such a plot hole possible, because that would have completely ruined the whole premise of the story.
Hell, it's a good thing they never discovered how to send back more than one Terminator at a time, or taught them to use computers so they could quickly figure out which "Sarah Connor" to find first.
Dude, that's so old-school. I use RAT (Redundant Array of Tweets). My data is backed up... 140 characters at a time.
I'm thinking of upgrading to a system with a larger packet size. RASC (Redundant Array of Slashdot Comments) might work, but I'm afraid of having my pr0n collection marked "insightful".
I somehow doubt that, though maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part. I don't think there's a vested interest in locking you into their specific "cloud" like Apple or Microsoft might have.
Nokia and many of the big players in the phone market don't seem to want to get into the full-time job of hosted apps. They sell feature phones, not "integrated user experiences". Even Blackberry is into selling feature phones with one really locked in preloaded corporate feature (BES and security) but allowing a lot of openness in the areas that they don't really want to control.
My feeling (or maybe it's just a hope) is that this won't change anytime soon. Apple and Microsoft will sell units because people want an integrated, controlled, generally reliable experience within a set of defined boundaries. Blackberry will sell units because businesses need security for their data and no one does it nearly as well as RIM. Nokia will sell units because there are people who want feature phones that they can play with.
The only real oddball here is Google. Frankly, their decision to use an open source platform surprised me. They have the "World's Greatest Cloud" and the most vested interest in locking the crap out of handsets and subsidizing them to get them into user's hands so they can collect lots of juicy data and sell lots of demographics and ads. Maybe they'll just make their offerings on their own phone so attractive that most people will just go with them, but sell plenty of units to modders who want to play around with them too. It seems to me that they have the least defined model - "people who love control over their hardware but trust Google.";)
Yes, this isn't really an antitrust issue. The iPhone/iPod/iPad do not have an exclusive in any market area, and it's really easy to find alternatives if you don't like what Apple is doing with their lock-in.
The Nokia 5800, for example, is nearly as good as the iPhone in many ways, and is better in others. Around $250 can get you an unlocked phone (no contract required) with WiFi (so you could skip the data plan if you wanted to) and qualifies you for the AT&T $15 data plan instead of the $30 one the iPhone requires if you decide you want data on the go. Plus it's got a 3 megapixel camera, a second camera on the front for video conferencing, and the usual things you expect in a phone like a replaceable battery, mass-storage support, upgradeable memory, etc.
The point is not to directly compare the two handsets as much as to demonstrate a specific example of why Apple does not have an exclusive lock-in on the touchscreen smartphone market. Blackberry and many other companies have their own entries in the ring, many of them are very capable units, and all of them except Apple currently allow pretty open development policies. So if openness is a criteria for you, Apple isn't the right answer for you. If you like the way Apple is doing things, then there's an Apple for that. You have a choice, therefore antitrust law should not apply.
If and when Apple exceeds 80% smartphone market share, is required in order to perform some function that no other device can replace, and/or starts telling developers that they cannot port the same product they submit to Apple to any other platform, then we'll talk about "Antitrust". But I don't see any of that happening any time soon.
As it stands, from what I can see, Apple is just nannying their users and annoying their developers, which (IMHO) is bad for their product and bad for their brand, but is their decision to make since there are plenty of other (arguably better, though that depends on your priorities and personal preferences) smartphones on the market.
Before the 1970's mandatory reporting laws did not exist. That doesn't mean that molestation did not exist, or that it went unreported all the time.
The bigger problem back then was probably many parents failed to report family or unrelated cases of child sexual assault out of fear it would hurt their kid more to have it publicized, or hurt the family in general.
Exactly. This is precisely what the mandatory reporting laws that GP referred to were meant to counteract. Before the 1970s, many parents, teachers, etc might have bee reluctant to get involved. After the 1970's, the risk of not getting involved (and therefore being charged with a crime in not reporting the abuse) started to outweigh the risk of getting involved.
Society has become more aware of the problems, because more people are reporting them, because mandatory reporting laws exist. That doesn't mean there is more molestation, only that you see more of it in the news because covering it up is not only harder, it's now a crime.
You're right, for some families it's going to be very hard, maybe even impossible.
I know of a number of people who are on the treadmill, though, and still have $150 a month cable TV bills, iPhones with data plans for every member of the household over 12, day care costs, and a car for every driver in the household.
Lose a car or two, lose all the cell phones, lose the cable bill, and lose the child care costs, and in a lot of families you have exceeded what the second breadwinner makes in savings.
Thinking about things in those terms is hard, because we all like our own car, and instant communications, and TV. All of those things pale in comparison to the quality of time spent with the kids, allowing children to be children, good food on the table for their growing bodies, and imaginative play for their growing minds.
Getting off the treadmill requires making compromises that a lot of families don't want to make. Dropping cable, losing the cell phones for the kids, stripping the family cell phone of its data plan, possibly reducing the number of cars, running a budget, focusing on buying the kids fewer things that are better-made (durable over stylish or disposable), and taking up frugal shopping as a near-profession.
Finding a nice shirt at a thrift store or getting a bag of clothes off Freecycle is a triumph, not a cause for shame.
We've come to equate having nice, shiny, new things with being successful. The compromises involved in getting those nice things are starting to impact our lifespans and the health of ourselves and our children.
We, as individuals in our society, would be well-served by reevaluating our priorities on an ongoing basis and see if what we are doing is what we feel is honestly best for ourselves and our kids, or just what is easiest or makes us look successful to those around us.
I don't want the government to make these decisions for us. It's not their place. But if we want the freedom to make decisions, we're well-served by thinking about those decisions and making thoughtful choices. Freedom to choose means that not all parents will want to do this, but those that do will be more committed to it.
I love potatoes, but the real nutrition is found in the skin, and is only really all that nutritious if served lightly cooked.
Cutting the skin off, slicing it, and frying it in cheap oil to make sure any remaining nutrition is killed turns the nutritious potato into pretty much a complete disaster.
But, yeah, potatoes are great. As potatoes. Not as chips or fries.
Don't get me wrong, I adore fries and chips. Love 'em love 'em love 'em. What's not to love? I could easily scarf down truckloads of both (nom-nom-nom!!). I eat them occasionally, and it's really hard to keep my portions down when I do, so I treat them as the "special treat" they are. I don't hold any illusion they are vegetables in the nutritional sense of the word.
Every Friday after work, I go to my local brewpub and order myself a couple of large tankards of fine brew, a freshly-made hamburger loaded with Stilton cheese, and a big pile of french fries. That is the one meal a week I allow myself fries and skipping the veggies.
You gotta eat right, but you gotta live, too. It's just terribly unwise to make them a daily staple of your diet.
P2P means "Peer to Peer". That means your computer makes a direct connection to other users who seed or leech you. In order to do that, you need to give your IP address so they know who to talk back to. IP addresses resolve to a host, which can always identify your ISP and in rarer cases can identify your username on the ISP (this is thankfully very rare any more).
I wonder how shocked the poster of this article would be if he realized that every web page he visits gets the same exact information?
I'm with you on that, most of our meals are prepared at home from fresh ingredients.
But there is also the "rat race treadmill" to contend with.
When I was a kid, it was the norm for one parent to work. They bought the kids a few toys, and by and large they chose those toys carefully because there wasn't a lot of money for those toys to be replaced often. So they chose durable, and they chose generic (a toy that can be used to play more than one thing, so it's not obsolete when the next movie comes out, except we didn't have movies to tell us when our toys were obsolete).
With less money coming in, but a parent free to do things at home, you focused on buying food and preparing it because (to your point) it is cheaper.
Now, both parents work in a lot of homes. There simply isn't time to prepare quality meals day-in-and-day-out, so they do what they need to do, and that means frequent eating out. And Mickey D's is a lot cheaper and more convenient than a restaurant that serves decent food. Plus, it's full of sugar and stuff your kids want to eat, so once they set foot in there once they'll want to go again and again.
They have less free time, so they use TV and movies to fill their kids' time so they can get stuff done. They also buy their kids more toys (partly because the kids are told they "need" it by the movies, partly because it's a form of attention and they know they lack the time to give their kids the attention they really deserve).
So what the hell, it takes 5 minutes to get a meal at Mickey D's, and you're busy, and the local restaurant takes forever and would cost $10/person more, and it's what the kids are wanting and you don't want to spend that precious time with them arguing over food... I think you see where this is going.
It starts a treadmill cycle because the extra expense means they "need" the extra income.
Drop one job, learn to budget with the remaining income (which probably means dropping Cable and not buying some gadgets, and certainly means buying fresh food and reserving eating out to a rare occasion). Spend the time you save with your kids.
I'm not saying it would work for everyone. But it would work for a surprising number of people who think it wouldn't.
Change that to "any day ending in 'y'" and it's a good start.:)
Seriously, I'd be totally on board with a total ban on children's television, except for a few teensy pesky facts:
1. Businesses are, in general, smarter than the government. If such a ban were to be passed, it would be a waste of effort.
2. Not everyone is on board with the whole "television bad for young brains" thing. So this would be a government mandate that parents would simply find a way around, and the result would be probably even more harmful.
Banning plastic toys is going to have a simple workaround for parents who want their kids to eat fast food unhealthy crap but whose kids also want the plastic crappy toys based on the repetitive imagination-destroying movie they just watched.
The parents will take the kids to the restaurant, feed them the crap, then go to the dollar store and buy them the toy.
If you think the food is bad, ban the food. Better yet, educate the parents on why the food is bad.
Kill your television. That's probably good for $100 a month. Take half that money and spend it on quality toys, and the other half and buy the ingredients for a really good meal once or twice a week. Take some of the TV time you've saved, get your kids in the kitchen, and make a mess making a great meal together out of fresh, tasty ingredients.
Don't ask the government to do anything. They aren't good at stuff like this. They are good at defending you from threats. They are good at ensuring your food and water supplies are safe. They are good at maintaining the roads, the sewage system, the communication system, and other important infrastructure. They are good at keeping people handy in case you have a fire or someone is breaking in to your house. They are usually pretty OK at providing a decent education to your kids. Recent events aside, they are even usually somewhat adequate at protecting you from being cheated by your bank or businesses.
They suck at parenting. It's far too personal and complex for a blanket law to even start to help.
The problem with that is portion control. We give my daughter a small portion of meat and the main meal, and the portion of fresh vegetables she needs to eat for the meal. When she's done eating everything she's given in the first round, we know she's eaten a healthy meal and she can have seconds of whatever she likes. If she's not hungry enough to finish the meal, she's at least had a decent amount of vegetables.
As often as not, she wants more vegetables, or a portion of everything. But if she wants more meat or bread, we at least know she's had a healthy portion of the stuff she needs to be eating.
We eat the same way ourselves. Vegetables first, maybe with a small portion of whatever the main meal is, then we can have seconds of whatever we want.
But it's tough for some parents to understand that kids have smaller stomachs and burn off lots of calories, so they won't eat a lot at mealtime but they NEED to snack a lot. Healthy snacks are incredibly important.
As the parent of a seven-year-old child, I've also found that Disney/Dreamworks/Movies/TV in general is as bad for her developing mind and attention span as McDonalds/Burger King/Wendys is for her developing body, so we moved out television into the basement a couple of years ago, canceled our cable subscription, and spend the savings on good-quality solidly-built toys and dolls for her to play with, and healthy food for her to eat.
In the time not spent watching television, I've taken up woodworking and carving and many of her toys were things I made for her, or we made together down in my workshop. She has a small set of woodworking tools herself, and makes her own things as long as I'm there with her. I don't know what they are supposed to be, and I don't ask, because she turns them into what she needs them to be while playing with them. That's what a child's imagination should be.
I can not expect the Government to regulate any of this for me in any meaningful way. I'd love if everyone raised their kids the way I want to raise mine. I'd love to ban the disposable plastic toys that destroy any sense of gratitude and appreciation for what you have by ensuring that everything you own breaks in a month and needs to be replaced, and destroy any sense of imagination by being specific to a movie that you "have" to play with "like the movie intended". I'd love to ban the movies and TV that destroy the attention span and squashes creative imagination and replaces it with regurgitation of repetitive images that have been passively delivered. I'd love to replace processed sugary empty bad-fat-laden fast food with healthy prepared meals. But would you appreciate it if I banned your Disney movies because science has shown them to be unhealthy for your child? Probably not so much.
My Government is not going to be able to do this for me. I honestly wish they could, but they won't be able to. These are all decisions I need to make, or they are a government mandate that gives me no respect for the information behind them. It'll just be the government telling me what to do, not informing me so I understand the reasoning behind decisions I need to make for my child.
If they try to regulate things the way I want, it won't be the way you want them, and, the law of unintended consequences will ensure that some aspect of the way I want to raise my child will be interfered with, and the law of businesses having more influence in government than I do will ensure that the businesses will get enough exceptions to make the law useless for its intended purpose anyway.
I love that you want to feed your child healthy food, and that you recognize that the plastic stuff is making them eat unhealthy. Why are you thinking about banning the plastic stuff? Kill your television so your daughter becomes unaware the plastic stuff exists, and choose healthier restaurants. You're doing what's best for her body and her mind that way, and the crap food industry will have to change if enough people just do it.
The fact that you care enough about your daughter's developing body to want to feed her well makes me want to find you and give you a big hug. But I don't think the government can force this on everyone, and if they try it'll just mess things up further.
First, let me say this. I'm totally on board with Jamie Oliver, love what the guy is trying to do, etc etc. I think his "revolution" show is only vaguely based on the reality of the people he's covering, but he's gotta sell ads for his network so he can keep buying food for his family, and it doesn't detract from the good that such a revolution could do.
Having said all that... Here's a tip: If the kid never learns that McDonald's meals come with toys, the toys cannot be used to sell the food.
But the shitty plastic toys are as bad for brain development as the shitty fatty food is for body development. And the shitty mind pablum TV that the shitty food and the shitty toys are advertised on is even worse.
Stay away from the King, the Clown, and the young girl with the red pigtails. There is absolutely nothing inside those four walls that your kid needs, or that is in any way good for your kid.
We don't need laws against using plastic crap to sell crap food. We need to make good healthy food as affordable as crap food, and show people how easy it is to feed it to their kids. We need to get rid of the plastic crap and go back to durable toys that last and foster imagination and free play. We don't need our congresscritters to pass "Save the Children" laws to do this for us, because those almost always backfire.
(Example from the show: like making Jamie take his pasta-and-vegetables off the food line because it didn't have enough vegetables, then stating that french fries DO count as a full vegetable when it was replaced with prepared crap).
Slashdot Mirror
IANAL, but I think that's only possible if your kid goes to college before he/she turns 18 and is still a minor, but at 18 your rights to that information end. Your kid can probably request that you have access to their grades, but you can't demand it from the school without their consent. And it's probably just easier to ask your kid for the grades.
Access to information about an adult should only be granted by that same adult. You can't get the police to send you any speeding tickets they might get, you can't get a hospital to send you a transcript of the blood workup they had done at their physical, and you can't get their school to send you their grades. Unless, of course, you get power of attorney or there is some special circumstance (severe injury, mental retardation, etc) that makes you their legal guardian.
If you, as the parent, are paying the bills, you are well within your rights to ask your kid for those grades. If they refuse, you can tell them that the next semester is theirs to pay for, and good luck, and don't let the door hit them on the ass on the way out. But you can't expect the world to report their activities to you any more. They's all growed up now, and responsible for theyselves. And they have a legal right to privacy. Even from you.
NOBODY needs a porn collection that big.
You're forgetting backups.
The Terminators are designed to go into the resistance's bunkers and kill them.
I think that's the point. It would be horribly inefficient to send something that looks human into a bunker to kill all the humans there, when you could expend a lot less effort and send a swarm of 1,000,000 things the size of a housefly who could simply fly in through the air vents, burrow into their necks and sever their spinal cords rather easily.
It's also a good thing Skynet never figured out vision beyond human-normal, because a Terminator with infrared, ultraviolet, or deep-scan RADAR capability would completely eliminate the need to infiltrate human encampments in order to discover them.
And it's a damned good thing that Skynet never developed any form of nerve gas that they'd be immune from but would simply wipe out any human populations, and just gassed the crap out of any suspected human settlements from 20,000 feet.
It's a good thing they never introduced a sequel that showed Skynet mastering any form of living-liquid-metal technology or any of these other technologies that could have made such a plot hole possible, because that would have completely ruined the whole premise of the story.
Hell, it's a good thing they never discovered how to send back more than one Terminator at a time, or taught them to use computers so they could quickly figure out which "Sarah Connor" to find first.
Veggie Tales.
Ah, so you've finally taken my advice and started cleaning those up. Thanks.
No, what I meant specifically was "(Score:5, Funny)".
Glad I could assist in the steam cleaning of your nasal cavities.
Just another service we offer in addition to sarcasm.
Dude, that's so old-school. I use RAT (Redundant Array of Tweets). My data is backed up... 140 characters at a time.
I'm thinking of upgrading to a system with a larger packet size. RASC (Redundant Array of Slashdot Comments) might work, but I'm afraid of having my pr0n collection marked "insightful".
Yes, 640 petabytes should to be enough for anybody.
I somehow doubt that, though maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part. I don't think there's a vested interest in locking you into their specific "cloud" like Apple or Microsoft might have.
Nokia and many of the big players in the phone market don't seem to want to get into the full-time job of hosted apps. They sell feature phones, not "integrated user experiences". Even Blackberry is into selling feature phones with one really locked in preloaded corporate feature (BES and security) but allowing a lot of openness in the areas that they don't really want to control.
My feeling (or maybe it's just a hope) is that this won't change anytime soon. Apple and Microsoft will sell units because people want an integrated, controlled, generally reliable experience within a set of defined boundaries. Blackberry will sell units because businesses need security for their data and no one does it nearly as well as RIM. Nokia will sell units because there are people who want feature phones that they can play with.
The only real oddball here is Google. Frankly, their decision to use an open source platform surprised me. They have the "World's Greatest Cloud" and the most vested interest in locking the crap out of handsets and subsidizing them to get them into user's hands so they can collect lots of juicy data and sell lots of demographics and ads. Maybe they'll just make their offerings on their own phone so attractive that most people will just go with them, but sell plenty of units to modders who want to play around with them too. It seems to me that they have the least defined model - "people who love control over their hardware but trust Google." ;)
Yes, this isn't really an antitrust issue. The iPhone/iPod/iPad do not have an exclusive in any market area, and it's really easy to find alternatives if you don't like what Apple is doing with their lock-in.
The Nokia 5800, for example, is nearly as good as the iPhone in many ways, and is better in others. Around $250 can get you an unlocked phone (no contract required) with WiFi (so you could skip the data plan if you wanted to) and qualifies you for the AT&T $15 data plan instead of the $30 one the iPhone requires if you decide you want data on the go. Plus it's got a 3 megapixel camera, a second camera on the front for video conferencing, and the usual things you expect in a phone like a replaceable battery, mass-storage support, upgradeable memory, etc.
The point is not to directly compare the two handsets as much as to demonstrate a specific example of why Apple does not have an exclusive lock-in on the touchscreen smartphone market. Blackberry and many other companies have their own entries in the ring, many of them are very capable units, and all of them except Apple currently allow pretty open development policies. So if openness is a criteria for you, Apple isn't the right answer for you. If you like the way Apple is doing things, then there's an Apple for that. You have a choice, therefore antitrust law should not apply.
If and when Apple exceeds 80% smartphone market share, is required in order to perform some function that no other device can replace, and/or starts telling developers that they cannot port the same product they submit to Apple to any other platform, then we'll talk about "Antitrust". But I don't see any of that happening any time soon.
As it stands, from what I can see, Apple is just nannying their users and annoying their developers, which (IMHO) is bad for their product and bad for their brand, but is their decision to make since there are plenty of other (arguably better, though that depends on your priorities and personal preferences) smartphones on the market.
Before the 1970's mandatory reporting laws did not exist. That doesn't mean that molestation did not exist, or that it went unreported all the time.
The bigger problem back then was probably many parents failed to report family or unrelated cases of child sexual assault out of fear it would hurt their kid more to have it publicized, or hurt the family in general.
Exactly. This is precisely what the mandatory reporting laws that GP referred to were meant to counteract. Before the 1970s, many parents, teachers, etc might have bee reluctant to get involved. After the 1970's, the risk of not getting involved (and therefore being charged with a crime in not reporting the abuse) started to outweigh the risk of getting involved.
Society has become more aware of the problems, because more people are reporting them, because mandatory reporting laws exist. That doesn't mean there is more molestation, only that you see more of it in the news because covering it up is not only harder, it's now a crime.
No, that would give the robots first claim at having settled all the good parts when they reach sentience.
So, waa-a-a-ait, you're saying four legs good, two legs baa-aa-aad?
No, it'll just have to run through a 3270 or 5250 screen, and you can use Shift-F1. Problem solved all the way up to F24!
That was it, the couple must have escaped from The Village.
You're right, for some families it's going to be very hard, maybe even impossible.
I know of a number of people who are on the treadmill, though, and still have $150 a month cable TV bills, iPhones with data plans for every member of the household over 12, day care costs, and a car for every driver in the household.
Lose a car or two, lose all the cell phones, lose the cable bill, and lose the child care costs, and in a lot of families you have exceeded what the second breadwinner makes in savings.
Thinking about things in those terms is hard, because we all like our own car, and instant communications, and TV. All of those things pale in comparison to the quality of time spent with the kids, allowing children to be children, good food on the table for their growing bodies, and imaginative play for their growing minds.
Getting off the treadmill requires making compromises that a lot of families don't want to make. Dropping cable, losing the cell phones for the kids, stripping the family cell phone of its data plan, possibly reducing the number of cars, running a budget, focusing on buying the kids fewer things that are better-made (durable over stylish or disposable), and taking up frugal shopping as a near-profession.
Finding a nice shirt at a thrift store or getting a bag of clothes off Freecycle is a triumph, not a cause for shame.
We've come to equate having nice, shiny, new things with being successful. The compromises involved in getting those nice things are starting to impact our lifespans and the health of ourselves and our children.
We, as individuals in our society, would be well-served by reevaluating our priorities on an ongoing basis and see if what we are doing is what we feel is honestly best for ourselves and our kids, or just what is easiest or makes us look successful to those around us.
I don't want the government to make these decisions for us. It's not their place. But if we want the freedom to make decisions, we're well-served by thinking about those decisions and making thoughtful choices. Freedom to choose means that not all parents will want to do this, but those that do will be more committed to it.
I love potatoes, but the real nutrition is found in the skin, and is only really all that nutritious if served lightly cooked.
Cutting the skin off, slicing it, and frying it in cheap oil to make sure any remaining nutrition is killed turns the nutritious potato into pretty much a complete disaster.
But, yeah, potatoes are great. As potatoes. Not as chips or fries.
Don't get me wrong, I adore fries and chips. Love 'em love 'em love 'em. What's not to love? I could easily scarf down truckloads of both (nom-nom-nom!!). I eat them occasionally, and it's really hard to keep my portions down when I do, so I treat them as the "special treat" they are. I don't hold any illusion they are vegetables in the nutritional sense of the word.
Every Friday after work, I go to my local brewpub and order myself a couple of large tankards of fine brew, a freshly-made hamburger loaded with Stilton cheese, and a big pile of french fries. That is the one meal a week I allow myself fries and skipping the veggies.
You gotta eat right, but you gotta live, too. It's just terribly unwise to make them a daily staple of your diet.
Yeah, I'm shocked that anyone could be shocked.
P2P means "Peer to Peer". That means your computer makes a direct connection to other users who seed or leech you. In order to do that, you need to give your IP address so they know who to talk back to. IP addresses resolve to a host, which can always identify your ISP and in rarer cases can identify your username on the ISP (this is thankfully very rare any more).
I wonder how shocked the poster of this article would be if he realized that every web page he visits gets the same exact information?
I'm with you on that, most of our meals are prepared at home from fresh ingredients.
But there is also the "rat race treadmill" to contend with.
When I was a kid, it was the norm for one parent to work. They bought the kids a few toys, and by and large they chose those toys carefully because there wasn't a lot of money for those toys to be replaced often. So they chose durable, and they chose generic (a toy that can be used to play more than one thing, so it's not obsolete when the next movie comes out, except we didn't have movies to tell us when our toys were obsolete).
With less money coming in, but a parent free to do things at home, you focused on buying food and preparing it because (to your point) it is cheaper.
Now, both parents work in a lot of homes. There simply isn't time to prepare quality meals day-in-and-day-out, so they do what they need to do, and that means frequent eating out. And Mickey D's is a lot cheaper and more convenient than a restaurant that serves decent food. Plus, it's full of sugar and stuff your kids want to eat, so once they set foot in there once they'll want to go again and again.
They have less free time, so they use TV and movies to fill their kids' time so they can get stuff done. They also buy their kids more toys (partly because the kids are told they "need" it by the movies, partly because it's a form of attention and they know they lack the time to give their kids the attention they really deserve).
So what the hell, it takes 5 minutes to get a meal at Mickey D's, and you're busy, and the local restaurant takes forever and would cost $10/person more, and it's what the kids are wanting and you don't want to spend that precious time with them arguing over food... I think you see where this is going.
It starts a treadmill cycle because the extra expense means they "need" the extra income.
Drop one job, learn to budget with the remaining income (which probably means dropping Cable and not buying some gadgets, and certainly means buying fresh food and reserving eating out to a rare occasion). Spend the time you save with your kids.
I'm not saying it would work for everyone. But it would work for a surprising number of people who think it wouldn't.
mandating no TV broadcasts on thursdays!
Change that to "any day ending in 'y'" and it's a good start. :)
Seriously, I'd be totally on board with a total ban on children's television, except for a few teensy pesky facts:
1. Businesses are, in general, smarter than the government. If such a ban were to be passed, it would be a waste of effort.
2. Not everyone is on board with the whole "television bad for young brains" thing. So this would be a government mandate that parents would simply find a way around, and the result would be probably even more harmful.
Banning plastic toys is going to have a simple workaround for parents who want their kids to eat fast food unhealthy crap but whose kids also want the plastic crappy toys based on the repetitive imagination-destroying movie they just watched.
The parents will take the kids to the restaurant, feed them the crap, then go to the dollar store and buy them the toy.
If you think the food is bad, ban the food. Better yet, educate the parents on why the food is bad.
Kill your television. That's probably good for $100 a month. Take half that money and spend it on quality toys, and the other half and buy the ingredients for a really good meal once or twice a week. Take some of the TV time you've saved, get your kids in the kitchen, and make a mess making a great meal together out of fresh, tasty ingredients.
Don't ask the government to do anything. They aren't good at stuff like this. They are good at defending you from threats. They are good at ensuring your food and water supplies are safe. They are good at maintaining the roads, the sewage system, the communication system, and other important infrastructure. They are good at keeping people handy in case you have a fire or someone is breaking in to your house. They are usually pretty OK at providing a decent education to your kids. Recent events aside, they are even usually somewhat adequate at protecting you from being cheated by your bank or businesses.
They suck at parenting. It's far too personal and complex for a blanket law to even start to help.
The problem with that is portion control. We give my daughter a small portion of meat and the main meal, and the portion of fresh vegetables she needs to eat for the meal. When she's done eating everything she's given in the first round, we know she's eaten a healthy meal and she can have seconds of whatever she likes. If she's not hungry enough to finish the meal, she's at least had a decent amount of vegetables.
As often as not, she wants more vegetables, or a portion of everything. But if she wants more meat or bread, we at least know she's had a healthy portion of the stuff she needs to be eating.
We eat the same way ourselves. Vegetables first, maybe with a small portion of whatever the main meal is, then we can have seconds of whatever we want.
But it's tough for some parents to understand that kids have smaller stomachs and burn off lots of calories, so they won't eat a lot at mealtime but they NEED to snack a lot. Healthy snacks are incredibly important.
As the parent of a seven-year-old child, I've also found that Disney/Dreamworks/Movies/TV in general is as bad for her developing mind and attention span as McDonalds/Burger King/Wendys is for her developing body, so we moved out television into the basement a couple of years ago, canceled our cable subscription, and spend the savings on good-quality solidly-built toys and dolls for her to play with, and healthy food for her to eat.
In the time not spent watching television, I've taken up woodworking and carving and many of her toys were things I made for her, or we made together down in my workshop. She has a small set of woodworking tools herself, and makes her own things as long as I'm there with her. I don't know what they are supposed to be, and I don't ask, because she turns them into what she needs them to be while playing with them. That's what a child's imagination should be.
I can not expect the Government to regulate any of this for me in any meaningful way. I'd love if everyone raised their kids the way I want to raise mine. I'd love to ban the disposable plastic toys that destroy any sense of gratitude and appreciation for what you have by ensuring that everything you own breaks in a month and needs to be replaced, and destroy any sense of imagination by being specific to a movie that you "have" to play with "like the movie intended". I'd love to ban the movies and TV that destroy the attention span and squashes creative imagination and replaces it with regurgitation of repetitive images that have been passively delivered. I'd love to replace processed sugary empty bad-fat-laden fast food with healthy prepared meals. But would you appreciate it if I banned your Disney movies because science has shown them to be unhealthy for your child? Probably not so much.
My Government is not going to be able to do this for me. I honestly wish they could, but they won't be able to. These are all decisions I need to make, or they are a government mandate that gives me no respect for the information behind them. It'll just be the government telling me what to do, not informing me so I understand the reasoning behind decisions I need to make for my child.
If they try to regulate things the way I want, it won't be the way you want them, and, the law of unintended consequences will ensure that some aspect of the way I want to raise my child will be interfered with, and the law of businesses having more influence in government than I do will ensure that the businesses will get enough exceptions to make the law useless for its intended purpose anyway.
I love that you want to feed your child healthy food, and that you recognize that the plastic stuff is making them eat unhealthy. Why are you thinking about banning the plastic stuff? Kill your television so your daughter becomes unaware the plastic stuff exists, and choose healthier restaurants. You're doing what's best for her body and her mind that way, and the crap food industry will have to change if enough people just do it.
The fact that you care enough about your daughter's developing body to want to feed her well makes me want to find you and give you a big hug. But I don't think the government can force this on everyone, and if they try it'll just mess things up further.
...they ban the toys, but keep the crap food?
Note to anyone with mod points. This doesn't deserve "funny", it deserves "insightful". LOTS AND LOTS of "insightful".
First, let me say this. I'm totally on board with Jamie Oliver, love what the guy is trying to do, etc etc. I think his "revolution" show is only vaguely based on the reality of the people he's covering, but he's gotta sell ads for his network so he can keep buying food for his family, and it doesn't detract from the good that such a revolution could do.
Having said all that... Here's a tip: If the kid never learns that McDonald's meals come with toys, the toys cannot be used to sell the food.
But the shitty plastic toys are as bad for brain development as the shitty fatty food is for body development. And the shitty mind pablum TV that the shitty food and the shitty toys are advertised on is even worse.
Stay away from the King, the Clown, and the young girl with the red pigtails. There is absolutely nothing inside those four walls that your kid needs, or that is in any way good for your kid.
We don't need laws against using plastic crap to sell crap food. We need to make good healthy food as affordable as crap food, and show people how easy it is to feed it to their kids. We need to get rid of the plastic crap and go back to durable toys that last and foster imagination and free play. We don't need our congresscritters to pass "Save the Children" laws to do this for us, because those almost always backfire.
(Example from the show: like making Jamie take his pasta-and-vegetables off the food line because it didn't have enough vegetables, then stating that french fries DO count as a full vegetable when it was replaced with prepared crap).