But in the end, you honestly can't make them think. A lot of these managers don't want things to be done right, which honestly a process. Security is an area where most people think about in terms of like putting a padlock on the toolshed door--it looks nice and shiny, even if the wood is rotted out underneath. Probably one of the biggest challenges in IT is overcoming the quick-fix, instant gratification mindset of the managerial class.
Remember that most of these people honestly believe that a problem can be fixed if you throw enough money and/or lawyers at it. Sad as it is to say it, you can certainly -try- to make them aware of the problems, but most of the time, that flashy, slick, Microsoft promise of security is all they need. As said before, they still live in a world where they think you buy one thing and it fixes the problem. You can take them through a step by step process and show them the flaws in their purchase, and maybe prevail to become the supplier, but in the end, they may well have to have a breach and a few lawsuits to get the clue. Even then, to cover their asses as fast as possible, they may still choose to go for another quick fix and put a bigger padlock on the rotten shed door.
In any case, if a kid is playing Quake for hours a day and parents don't know, then it's probably their fault. All they need to do is knock on the kid's bedroom door and see what's up.
Given the results of the study on child care that were released this last week--the ones that say that leaving your kids with the sitter is bad, but you're depriving them of education if you don't--and given the fact that far too many parents buy the psychological BS about hos teenagers have a right to privacy in their rooms that adults don't enjoy, you're going to have to do some pretty loud cheerleading to convince this generation of parents that they should be invading the castle. Know what I mean?
Might help if society weren't tossing around so many mixed messages. You're supposed to send them to school, give them everything that they 'need'(didn't know having a computer was required to learn your ABCs), and look the other way when they get taught how to use drugs, catch STDs, and how to demand more expensive toys. Then you get blamed for every little infraction they make because, even though they are supposed to be away from you 8 hours a day, and spend 3-5 doing homework, you're supposed to manage to 'control' them. Sounds kinda 'lose-lose' to me.
Either way, suing the gaming companies is ridiculous.
Re:Information wants to be free - for the children
on
The Value Of Privacy
·
· Score: 1
I am wondering when people are finally going to catch on to the practise of forcing your product on to people by forcing it at kids through TV and/or schools. In our house, the presence of children tangentially affects certain purchases, but widely we avoid a lot of it by not having TV and sticking to either educational materials, music, or -reading- to them.
It's amazing how much more civilized and human my children became when we got rid of broddcast TV and cable. I recommend the practise to anyone, since there is virtually nothing on TV worth watching anyway.
Similar for pressing assault charges, without evidence or credible (adult) witnesses, it will never fly.
Granted that the question is rhetorical, but at the same time, they are already perfectly willing to effectively expel a student without credible (adult) witnesses.
So basically, until there is a HUGE uproar, the system will be allowed to continue as it is. Glad my kids are never going to public school to learn such a harsh and pointless lesson.
For more than a week now, two of the world's superpowers have been nose-to-nose, endangering not only global security but their own valuable and increasingly important economic relationship, because one culture can't apologize for an obvious accident and the other culture insists that only an apology can end the crisis.
I don't know what planet anyone else lives on, but 'global security' is an illusion. We may clothe it all in wonderous diplomatic and civilized language, but the world is not, nor ever has been a safe place. It wold be wonderful to see a planet where we didn't need to threaten people with nuclear annihalation, but that hope got flushed down the drain when The USSR and the US started seeing who could build the biggest bombs.
I also think that the economic relationship between the US and China is severely flawed and motivated more by the desires of guys like Bill Gates, than by core American values of Liberty and economic freedom. Party bosses get rich over there, not common people. They execute people for being different. Tianamen Square.
If anyone thinks that a simple apology will fix what happened over international waters with a state who has a history of aggressive and unsafe air engagements, I have some great seaside property and a bridge for sale...on the moon. We have a while generation that has been raised to believe that you 'give peace a chance' . We did and it looks very much like China broke it.:-(
Let's get this straight: US China policy needs to be based on more than who is going to make a ton of money in the deal.
This is exactly why Microsoft has "Critical Update Notification" for Win98, ME, 2k. Everytime a security update comes out you are notified, and asked if you want to install it.
Dunno about anyone else, but the single fastest way to have a functional machine go belly up, regardless of OS, is to change something willy-nilly, without knowing what it does. Allowing the vendor to have control over what gets patched and when is suicidal and not in thebest interest of users. Placing blind faith that M$ has your best interests at heart and that their patches even work right, is a disaster waiting to happen. M$ thinks their customers are stupid, worthless sources of revenue--they don't give a crap about anyone but their shareholders.
But even more important, in an age where we need people to RTFM, autoinstalling anything, without reading the release notes and taking the time to figure out if you really need the changes, is totally begging for problems. Users like my mom don't stand a chance--the smart ones call tech support, or their geeky kids before they make changes.
Katz, you apparently don't read the news before you make these accusations. John Ashcroft, in fact, DID speak out about the culture of bullying and spoke derisively of it in stories connected to the Santee High School shootings. Santee High School was recieving federal money to 'study' bullying at the school(which translates into guaranteeing the job of some adminstrator for the length of the grant). Ashcroft spoke quite forcefully.
Bullying continues, not because of Shrub and his AG, but because parents don't sue the pants off administrators for ignoring complaints and suspending kids who try to defend themselves. Maybe, if one or two of the people who were -known- problems found themselves in deep hot water for it, starting in elementary school, they wouldn't think it was permissible in high school.
The Educational-Industrial complex doesn't want anyone to know about these clearly dangerous notions from Mr. Franklin. They represent a danger to the status quo, bottom line, and, worse, might give people the idea that it isn't all about making them money.
All we're seeing here is a brazen attempt to deny higher education to to anyone who doesn't attend a school acceptable to the teachers' unions in California. It's quite about protecting the status quo if a broken system--probably time for people in CA to say 'um, no'. If not, maybe the best and the brightest will simply go elsewhere and deny CA the privilege of taxing the hell out of them.:)
I'm not about to make the public schools worse by drainging away a large percentage of their funds and turn them into non-functional holding cells for stupid kids.
Wow! I hope you never have to endure your child coming home from school in tears because his -teacher- called him stupid in front of the class. They focus their anger on themselves, because adults are often much bigger than life to them--and can't be wrong. Can they?
Let me clue you in.... Those words hurt for decades afterward and shape their lives to come.
So the next time that you want to sling the 'stupid kids' label at the children of people who would love to, but don't know how to escape the pit of public education, think about that.
The difficulty of the current situation is that there are appropriate times to inform, which are blurred, and there are certain levels of responsibilty missing in our system.
The real difficulty is that we've had 40+ years to breed a pathetic excuse for a public education system that actually just exists to enforce the classist aspirations of the elite. Crabs in a bucket will climb over each other in an attempt to escape, but simply pull each other down. Administrators are paid to enforce this model and tell school boards that they have to accept it.
Schools are steadily growing worse at over reacting to everything, from aspirin to normal adolescent boundary testing that is essential to our growth as independent adults. Students, in many schools, are viewed more as enemies than pupils, and certainly not partners in their own education experience. How anyone learns in these schools is a mystery to me.
John Taylor Gatto has a lot to say on this subject. I heartily recommend "Dumbing Us Down", for anyone who wants the perspective of someone on the inside. I also recommend "The Underground History of American Education", which is his own essay about what he sees as the factors that have led to this mess.
And why is it the students job to snich?
Ask the Nazis in the 30's. But it comes down to finding all the people who are different and don't fit in the model. Some of them are free thinkers and many of them are dark skinned. I'm white and I know how racist the system was -designed- to be.
Parents should, but don't far too often, take active roles in their children's lives. Teachers are so overburdened in most districts and so underpaid, that they are incapable of knowing their students well enough to understand them. Policies in many places create artificial divisions between teacher and student a between the students themselves.
Again, this is how the system is designed. Isolated kids from families. Isolate teachers through burdensome regulations. Keep everybody apart, lie to them when you gather them together, and demonize the opposition. Kinda like Al Gore and the Democrats do.
High school is a destructive enough time in many peoples lives already. TO further alienate those already on the fringe by these over-reactionary policies is just inviting more Columbines....
There are no mysteries here, people. Knee jerk defense of the system and more money isn't going to fix this mess. Kids are suffering. Education reform, NOW.
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
We successfully outlawed the ownership of other human beings in 1868. Mind you, if the corporations decide they want to reverse this, they can probably throw a few billion around to get it. However, I suspect that the people are probably going to make things pretty ugly for them in the meantime.
I remember watching the first liftoff of the shuttle in high school. I shamelessly cut English and was quite brazen about it. History, or comma splices--let just say the choice was simple enough. It was a miracle and I knew it.
I was in the shower when the Challenger blew. It was the year I got married. I stepped out to the sound of Tom Brokaw bemoaning the tragedy and speculating about what happened. I sat down on the couch and cried. I think a lot of us who really understood the miracle did.
Then we got into that whole O ring thing and the press acted like it was all their idea. Of course, the press also were the first to act like the shuttle program was routine and glossed over the hard reality that the Space Shuttle is essentially a flying bomb. People who understood, knew about the miracle involved were pretty offended.
So then the media crucified NASA; when days before the accident they were asking what was wrong with the Shuttle Program and why NASA couldn't get the thing off the ground. They had made it commonplace, no big deal, and made the masses think that it wasn't a big deal.
Of course, that didn't stop it all from being a miracle. It still is a miracle, when you consider Hubble, the Space Station, and the fact that we walked on the moon. When Apollo orbitted the moon and the crew read from Genesis, it made men stop and stare in awe. The astronauts won an Emmy for their oration. But because of the media, cheapening the experience, by the time of the Apollo 13, people were numbed to the miracle--when Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon the year before.
It wasn't just another moon shot. It wasn't just another shuttle launch. It wasn't just another space station. All of them were miracles, in just that the vehicles ever got off the ground in the first place.
The evil of the media is that it delights in robbing us of our heros and taking away our miracles. And I really wish we could make everyone understand that.
MUDs, especially the small, more intimate games, are great places to foster limited and more intimate community than could -ever- be found in the behemoth that is IRC. For the most part, there isn't the rash of script kiddies and 3l3t3 hacx0rz, no one doing warez, and lots of opportunities for doing artful RP. I ran my vampire game in the IRC for 18 months and the moment we moved to MUSH, everything improved. For what it is and what it does, it is a fine medium.
There are also lots of improvements happening in the realm of the servers themselves, too. There is one group actively working to clear up some of the more ancient and venerable bugs. Some few of them, especially MUX have seen such profound changes in their performance and application(ie, used as intranet chat servers), that it's quite gratifying. The world turns anew for a lot of things and even if MUDs in general remain small communities, just about any community can be a good thing for the people in it.
I have legally purchased copies of Terminator and Terminator 2. I copy these movies, so that my kids can play them and not destroy the original copy, which is being carefully stored somewhere out of reach. While I am making the copies, I choose to remove the one gratuitous sex scene, on the grounds that it is far too graphic for my kids to watch, even with parental guidance. I also remove the ads from this copy, so that the film takes up less space, and we are not inundated with rampant that commercialism we had no desire to see.
I do this with a VHS machine fairly easily and accomplish not only the copies, but get them onto one tape, which saves a ton of clutter when the tape winds up on the floor.
I cannot do this with DVD, since I would need DeCSS to access the data on the medium. DMCA makes this act alone illegal, since possession of DeCSS violates the anti-circumvention clause. I therefore cannot take subsequent steps to make a single edited copy that I consider acceptable for viewing by my children.
I note that this step goes even further than the 1st Amendment and touches on the rights and responsibilities of parents affirmed by the Supreme Court regarding the rearing of their kids. DMCA effectively renders my ability to regulate viewing content and provide appropriate parental guidance to my kids, both in the movie content and in removing the ads that we don't want them to see.
Remember, people do leave. There's nothing you can do about it, once someone has made up her mind. That's what exit interviews are for. If somebody leaves and tells you on the way out "Damnit I've been asking you for 9 months for a refrigerator for the developers", then you get an idea of how important those perks are.
Everywhere that I have ever worked, the exit interview's sole purpose was to reinforce the climate of denial that the organization was wallowing in. Frankly, all they do is hold your last paycheck hostage so they can basically let some HR flunky waste your time and make a lot of veiled accusations of not being a 'team player'.
Of course, Human Resources departments are probably the biggest single factor in the decline of employee/employer relations.
The baby needs those stem cells as much as the people getting them from the bank. The transistion from womb to breathing is tied to the umbilical cord and whether that cord is allowed to cease pulsing on its own. Hospitals are so busy trying to turn a fast buck on the stem cells in that cord that they cut it too soon and force the transition to quickly. It's unethical as all hell, but anything in the name of 'saving lives' or, in the old form 'a buck'.
With a 25-30% C-section rate in this country, most all of them done for convenience of doctors and the money you can reap from insurance, don't even talk about health benefits. When mankind finally learns to keep his hands out of things he has no business messing with, our world is going to get a whole lot better. Until then, little boys like Adam are going to be manufactured by dimwitted parents for all the wrong reasons.
I may be a geek, but I don't look at people like I look at peripherals.
Is it just me or does Hillary Rosen look like one of those women on the cover of The Wall album? From her comments, I still don't think that she or the RIAA get it. Pissing off consumers like me is bad. Their tactics in the net are doing just that. It only takes a bit of passive boycotting to make a PR dent in the media machine.... And I note that the PR of a boycott is worse than the lost revenues.
I think content providers better wake up, because Orrin Hatch is FAR more in tune with consumers than they ever have been. Pissing off Orrin Hatch is -worse-, even if Ms. Rosen asserts that he doesn't understand what they do. I am sure, either way, that the industry doesn't understand what it is doing. Certainly, Hatch and Leahy will have no trouble codifying fair use and modifying copyright from under them, if they aren't -very- careful.
The net is making people more savvy. LOTS more savvy. They hear things, meet up with folks who can explain and set them straight, and then you have people who are doing more for themselves than ever before. I've watched my parents go from clueless to realistic and striving to understand the medium. No, they don't have many clues, but the clue they do have are increasingly the important ones. The net is empowering people, slowly but surely, and this terrifies the people who benefit from maintenance of the status quo.
Well, along with all the other matters to send off to my Rep and Senators, we can now add the 'independent' review of Carnivore. Anyone who isn't totally disturbed by Freeh and his department's lack of respect for the court order should make it plain and apparent to their congress grunts, as well as the key folks on the Senate and House Judiciary committees that the continued recalcitrance is injustifiable.
I figure about the time that business is done with this self-mutilation that economy will slide right into the hole. If the trends of the turn of the 20th Century are anything to go on, we're seeing it all over again--patents of all sorts will fall out of favor. Methinks that those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.
What'd happen? It'd be like AT & T back in the 70s. You didn't buy your phone, you rented it from Ma Bell. In fact if memory serves correctly, it was actually illegal to hook a non-AT & T device to the line or service an AT & T phone. By "service" that included opening up the phone.
Let me note that you signed a rental agreement and also paid rental fees for phones in those days. It was an upfront deal and AT&T had the right to tell you to leave their equipment alone. The vertical integration of services and equipment was part of the deal that got them broken up.
However.... The Cue:Cat simply is not the same thing at all. They were handed out for free and sent through the mail, THEN D:C decided to change the game. They haven't been honest or forthright and may well have broken the law in the process. We should not feel any more sorry for them that we did when AT&T got nailed--especially since D:C is so clearly the ametuer hour when it comes to this scheme.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember that most of these people honestly believe that a problem can be fixed if you throw enough money and/or lawyers at it. Sad as it is to say it, you can certainly -try- to make them aware of the problems, but most of the time, that flashy, slick, Microsoft promise of security is all they need. As said before, they still live in a world where they think you buy one thing and it fixes the problem. You can take them through a step by step process and show them the flaws in their purchase, and maybe prevail to become the supplier, but in the end, they may well have to have a breach and a few lawsuits to get the clue. Even then, to cover their asses as fast as possible, they may still choose to go for another quick fix and put a bigger padlock on the rotten shed door.
Given the results of the study on child care that were released this last week--the ones that say that leaving your kids with the sitter is bad, but you're depriving them of education if you don't--and given the fact that far too many parents buy the psychological BS about hos teenagers have a right to privacy in their rooms that adults don't enjoy, you're going to have to do some pretty loud cheerleading to convince this generation of parents that they should be invading the castle. Know what I mean?
Might help if society weren't tossing around so many mixed messages. You're supposed to send them to school, give them everything that they 'need'(didn't know having a computer was required to learn your ABCs), and look the other way when they get taught how to use drugs, catch STDs, and how to demand more expensive toys. Then you get blamed for every little infraction they make because, even though they are supposed to be away from you 8 hours a day, and spend 3-5 doing homework, you're supposed to manage to 'control' them. Sounds kinda 'lose-lose' to me.
Either way, suing the gaming companies is ridiculous.
I am wondering when people are finally going to catch on to the practise of forcing your product on to people by forcing it at kids through TV and/or schools. In our house, the presence of children tangentially affects certain purchases, but widely we avoid a lot of it by not having TV and sticking to either educational materials, music, or -reading- to them.
It's amazing how much more civilized and human my children became when we got rid of broddcast TV and cable. I recommend the practise to anyone, since there is virtually nothing on TV worth watching anyway.
Don't miss TV. Nope Nope.
Granted that the question is rhetorical, but at the same time, they are already perfectly willing to effectively expel a student without credible (adult) witnesses.
So basically, until there is a HUGE uproar, the system will be allowed to continue as it is. Glad my kids are never going to public school to learn such a harsh and pointless lesson.
Anyone know what happened to the Monolith in Seattle?
I don't know what planet anyone else lives on, but 'global security' is an illusion. We may clothe it all in wonderous diplomatic and civilized language, but the world is not, nor ever has been a safe place. It wold be wonderful to see a planet where we didn't need to threaten people with nuclear annihalation, but that hope got flushed down the drain when The USSR and the US started seeing who could build the biggest bombs.
I also think that the economic relationship between the US and China is severely flawed and motivated more by the desires of guys like Bill Gates, than by core American values of Liberty and economic freedom. Party bosses get rich over there, not common people. They execute people for being different. Tianamen Square.
If anyone thinks that a simple apology will fix what happened over international waters with a state who has a history of aggressive and unsafe air engagements, I have some great seaside property and a bridge for sale...on the moon. We have a while generation that has been raised to believe that you 'give peace a chance' . We did and it looks very much like China broke it. :-(
Let's get this straight: US China policy needs to be based on more than who is going to make a ton of money in the deal.
Dunno about anyone else, but the single fastest way to have a functional machine go belly up, regardless of OS, is to change something willy-nilly, without knowing what it does. Allowing the vendor to have control over what gets patched and when is suicidal and not in thebest interest of users. Placing blind faith that M$ has your best interests at heart and that their patches even work right, is a disaster waiting to happen. M$ thinks their customers are stupid, worthless sources of revenue--they don't give a crap about anyone but their shareholders.
But even more important, in an age where we need people to RTFM, autoinstalling anything, without reading the release notes and taking the time to figure out if you really need the changes, is totally begging for problems. Users like my mom don't stand a chance--the smart ones call tech support, or their geeky kids before they make changes.
Bullying continues, not because of Shrub and his AG, but because parents don't sue the pants off administrators for ignoring complaints and suspending kids who try to defend themselves. Maybe, if one or two of the people who were -known- problems found themselves in deep hot water for it, starting in elementary school, they wouldn't think it was permissible in high school.
Talk like this could start a Revolution. :)
All we're seeing here is a brazen attempt to deny higher education to to anyone who doesn't attend a school acceptable to the teachers' unions in California. It's quite about protecting the status quo if a broken system--probably time for people in CA to say 'um, no'. If not, maybe the best and the brightest will simply go elsewhere and deny CA the privilege of taxing the hell out of them. :)
Wow! I hope you never have to endure your child coming home from school in tears because his -teacher- called him stupid in front of the class. They focus their anger on themselves, because adults are often much bigger than life to them--and can't be wrong. Can they?
Let me clue you in.... Those words hurt for decades afterward and shape their lives to come.
So the next time that you want to sling the 'stupid kids' label at the children of people who would love to, but don't know how to escape the pit of public education, think about that.
The real difficulty is that we've had 40+ years to breed a pathetic excuse for a public education system that actually just exists to enforce the classist aspirations of the elite. Crabs in a bucket will climb over each other in an attempt to escape, but simply pull each other down. Administrators are paid to enforce this model and tell school boards that they have to accept it.
Schools are steadily growing worse at over reacting to everything, from aspirin to normal adolescent boundary testing that is essential to our growth as independent adults. Students, in many schools, are viewed more as enemies than pupils, and certainly not partners in their own education experience. How anyone learns in these schools is a mystery to me.
John Taylor Gatto has a lot to say on this subject. I heartily recommend "Dumbing Us Down", for anyone who wants the perspective of someone on the inside. I also recommend "The Underground History of American Education", which is his own essay about what he sees as the factors that have led to this mess.
And why is it the students job to snich?
Ask the Nazis in the 30's. But it comes down to finding all the people who are different and don't fit in the model. Some of them are free thinkers and many of them are dark skinned. I'm white and I know how racist the system was -designed- to be.
Parents should, but don't far too often, take active roles in their children's lives. Teachers are so overburdened in most districts and so underpaid, that they are incapable of knowing their students well enough to understand them. Policies in many places create artificial divisions between teacher and student a between the students themselves.
Again, this is how the system is designed. Isolated kids from families. Isolate teachers through burdensome regulations. Keep everybody apart, lie to them when you gather them together, and demonize the opposition. Kinda like Al Gore and the Democrats do.
High school is a destructive enough time in many peoples lives already. TO further alienate those already on the fringe by these over-reactionary policies is just inviting more Columbines....
There are no mysteries here, people. Knee jerk defense of the system and more money isn't going to fix this mess. Kids are suffering. Education reform, NOW.
Amendment XIV-US Constitution (laws vary elsewhere)
(1868)
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
We successfully outlawed the ownership of other human beings in 1868. Mind you, if the corporations decide they want to reverse this, they can probably throw a few billion around to get it. However, I suspect that the people are probably going to make things pretty ugly for them in the meantime.
I was in the shower when the Challenger blew. It was the year I got married. I stepped out to the sound of Tom Brokaw bemoaning the tragedy and speculating about what happened. I sat down on the couch and cried. I think a lot of us who really understood the miracle did.
Then we got into that whole O ring thing and the press acted like it was all their idea. Of course, the press also were the first to act like the shuttle program was routine and glossed over the hard reality that the Space Shuttle is essentially a flying bomb. People who understood, knew about the miracle involved were pretty offended.
So then the media crucified NASA; when days before the accident they were asking what was wrong with the Shuttle Program and why NASA couldn't get the thing off the ground. They had made it commonplace, no big deal, and made the masses think that it wasn't a big deal.
Of course, that didn't stop it all from being a miracle. It still is a miracle, when you consider Hubble, the Space Station, and the fact that we walked on the moon. When Apollo orbitted the moon and the crew read from Genesis, it made men stop and stare in awe. The astronauts won an Emmy for their oration. But because of the media, cheapening the experience, by the time of the Apollo 13, people were numbed to the miracle--when Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon the year before.
It wasn't just another moon shot. It wasn't just another shuttle launch. It wasn't just another space station. All of them were miracles, in just that the vehicles ever got off the ground in the first place.
The evil of the media is that it delights in robbing us of our heros and taking away our miracles. And I really wish we could make everyone understand that.
MUDs, especially the small, more intimate games, are great places to foster limited and more intimate community than could -ever- be found in the behemoth that is IRC. For the most part, there isn't the rash of script kiddies and 3l3t3 hacx0rz, no one doing warez, and lots of opportunities for doing artful RP. I ran my vampire game in the IRC for 18 months and the moment we moved to MUSH, everything improved. For what it is and what it does, it is a fine medium.
There are also lots of improvements happening in the realm of the servers themselves, too. There is one group actively working to clear up some of the more ancient and venerable bugs. Some few of them, especially MUX have seen such profound changes in their performance and application(ie, used as intranet chat servers), that it's quite gratifying. The world turns anew for a lot of things and even if MUDs in general remain small communities, just about any community can be a good thing for the people in it.
I have legally purchased copies of Terminator and Terminator 2. I copy these movies, so that my kids can play them and not destroy the original copy, which is being carefully stored somewhere out of reach. While I am making the copies, I choose to remove the one gratuitous sex scene, on the grounds that it is far too graphic for my kids to watch, even with parental guidance. I also remove the ads from this copy, so that the film takes up less space, and we are not inundated with rampant that commercialism we had no desire to see.
I do this with a VHS machine fairly easily and accomplish not only the copies, but get them onto one tape, which saves a ton of clutter when the tape winds up on the floor.
I cannot do this with DVD, since I would need DeCSS to access the data on the medium. DMCA makes this act alone illegal, since possession of DeCSS violates the anti-circumvention clause. I therefore cannot take subsequent steps to make a single edited copy that I consider acceptable for viewing by my children.
I note that this step goes even further than the 1st Amendment and touches on the rights and responsibilities of parents affirmed by the Supreme Court regarding the rearing of their kids. DMCA effectively renders my ability to regulate viewing content and provide appropriate parental guidance to my kids, both in the movie content and in removing the ads that we don't want them to see.
Everywhere that I have ever worked, the exit interview's sole purpose was to reinforce the climate of denial that the organization was wallowing in. Frankly, all they do is hold your last paycheck hostage so they can basically let some HR flunky waste your time and make a lot of veiled accusations of not being a 'team player'.
Of course, Human Resources departments are probably the biggest single factor in the decline of employee/employer relations.
With a 25-30% C-section rate in this country, most all of them done for convenience of doctors and the money you can reap from insurance, don't even talk about health benefits. When mankind finally learns to keep his hands out of things he has no business messing with, our world is going to get a whole lot better. Until then, little boys like Adam are going to be manufactured by dimwitted parents for all the wrong reasons.
I may be a geek, but I don't look at people like I look at peripherals.
Is it just me or does Hillary Rosen look like one of those women on the cover of The Wall album? From her comments, I still don't think that she or the RIAA get it. Pissing off consumers like me is bad. Their tactics in the net are doing just that. It only takes a bit of passive boycotting to make a PR dent in the media machine.... And I note that the PR of a boycott is worse than the lost revenues.
I think content providers better wake up, because Orrin Hatch is FAR more in tune with consumers than they ever have been. Pissing off Orrin Hatch is -worse-, even if Ms. Rosen asserts that he doesn't understand what they do. I am sure, either way, that the industry doesn't understand what it is doing. Certainly, Hatch and Leahy will have no trouble codifying fair use and modifying copyright from under them, if they aren't -very- careful.
The net is making people more savvy. LOTS more savvy. They hear things, meet up with folks who can explain and set them straight, and then you have people who are doing more for themselves than ever before. I've watched my parents go from clueless to realistic and striving to understand the medium. No, they don't have many clues, but the clue they do have are increasingly the important ones. The net is empowering people, slowly but surely, and this terrifies the people who benefit from maintenance of the status quo.
Well, along with all the other matters to send off to my Rep and Senators, we can now add the 'independent' review of Carnivore. Anyone who isn't totally disturbed by Freeh and his department's lack of respect for the court order should make it plain and apparent to their congress grunts, as well as the key folks on the Senate and House Judiciary committees that the continued recalcitrance is injustifiable.
You basically need to fight with letters.
I figure about the time that business is done with this self-mutilation that economy will slide right into the hole. If the trends of the turn of the 20th Century are anything to go on, we're seeing it all over again--patents of all sorts will fall out of favor. Methinks that those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.
Let me note that you signed a rental agreement and also paid rental fees for phones in those days. It was an upfront deal and AT&T had the right to tell you to leave their equipment alone. The vertical integration of services and equipment was part of the deal that got them broken up.
However.... The Cue:Cat simply is not the same thing at all. They were handed out for free and sent through the mail, THEN D:C decided to change the game. They haven't been honest or forthright and may well have broken the law in the process. We should not feel any more sorry for them that we did when AT&T got nailed--especially since D:C is so clearly the ametuer hour when it comes to this scheme.
It's easy to see the problem. Like Gore's reinvented himself so many times that he's not even the real Al Gore. ;-)