Have you ever used GNOME or KDE? That's the whole point of a graphics toolkit and the architecture-- consistent application appearance and cross-functionality (i.e. cut & paste or drag and drop). If you stick with GNOME or KDE apps within that framework, the consistency is amazing. Certainly Windows does not guarantee any kind of consistency-- just try using emacs for Windows. Works nothing like Word. Nothing like it at all! I have other applications that I use everyday that don't even minimize correctly under Windows. Or here's another example: I want to change options in Netscape, that's Edit... Preferences. But for Outlook that's Tools... Options. That's not consistency. The same functionality is under different labels in completely different menus.
Re:Possibly for somethings, not all though.
on
Qt for Mac
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· Score: 2
No. The GPL expressly forbids building non-Free software using GPL libraries. This is exactly why the GNU C libraries are not GPL, but LGPL. You can read about it at the FSF page about LGPL. If the versions of QT are basically the same, except for licensing, then if you use QT Free you should be willing to grant the same freedom to your users that you yourself have gotten from Trolltech. If their paid licensing options are too expensive for proprietary developers, then the market should correct that-- they have the choice to change their price or lose customers and go out of business.
I will agree that some of their behavior is disconcerting (although perfectly understandable-- software as product rather than service has huge mental real estate in our culture, due in no small part to Mr. Gates of MS and his famous "stealing" letter). TT is making progress, and our only major concern is that Qt3 would not be GPL. But given the shared future Qt and KDE seem to have, I wouldn't worry about it too much.
I can't tell if you're joking or not. But if my kid were held back or told they had to do X, Y, or Z because they failed some standardized test like this, I'd want to see a copy of what the kid got wrong... but I bet it doesn't work like that.:)
Given that the implication is that we are born with the right to free speech, and that the Constitution simply makes it clear that the federal government cannot abridge that right, please explain what major oversight the ACLU is committing. The ACLU is constantly attempting to prevent government at all levels from overstepping its bounds. The link is great, but on the surface appears to provide no predictions for the future at all. Which base exactly were you worried we would get too far off from?
How young do you have to be to think this way? The only decent video game I've ever played with a mouse was Arkanoid-- and then only because a mouse is basically an inverted trackball. For anything else I'd rather have a regular old keyboard or a joystick (and in some cases two joysticks). Maybe a steering wheel for racing games, but those play fine with joysticks too.
It's not the children who need protection, it's the parents. They want to be protected from questions like, "Why are they doing that?" and "Doesn't that hurt?" and "I thought you said people who did that were supposed to be in love and married, but there are three people in this picture, what gives?"
As a parent, I think these rules are ridiculous. No, I don't give my kid smut. Nor do I take the kid to scary movies or rated R dramas. The kid is still a kid, and is going to be disproportionately scared by scary movies and won't follow most of the drama in an adult drama. I learned my lesson with the movie "The Man Who Knew Too Little" (with Bill Murray). The kid didn't get any of the jokes and grew so bored with the film that we had to leave in the middle of the movie.
So age-appropriate is a concern, but mostly because the child should have an interest or an educational need and shouldn't be left completely bewildered or confused.
S&D clearly describes some real world activity. In fact, my Russia counter-discussion clearly indicates that it seems to be working even when the cost is not monetary and you have a monopoly supplier. In fact, if we truly had a free market rather than the U.S. system, I might argue that it would be unethical NOT to maximize profits. But we don't have a free market, so I think it's appropriate to question whether gouging is ethical. The invisible hand in the U.S. belongs to Uncle Sam and he moves the market rather often (and sadly, this isn't some conspiracy theory, just that the government at all levels interferes regularly in the economy for the so-called good of the nation). One can only hear the exhausted "go move to Russia" cliche so many times before one cracks. Keep going, I may just break.:)
As a parent, I find these sorts of issues very relevant and often wonder if our "leaders" have even half a clue or any children of their own. But, like you, they don't appear to give kids much credit. Or perhaps they're all too aware that they're training the next generation to be a better brand of mindless employee/consumer.
I never suggested that the fundamentals of Econ 101 were suspect-- although I think for something commonly referred to as "Law of Supply and Demand" it is distinctly undertested by anything except the most rudimentary thought experiments-- certainly Adam Smith did not perform independent, controlled experiments in real economic groups to reach his conclusion. Certainly the whole "rational actor and full information" assumptions of econ theory should be examined given the role modern advertising plays in the U.S. economy.
If we are experiencing prosperity now it has little to do with the markets being free and everything to do with how much the government interferes with the markets-- sure you can describe how this works using the Law of Supply and Demand, but at the same time the tinkering undermines the most efficient working of same-- again, if you believe the fundamentals of Econ 101.
As to the Russia example: the government in Russia, where it was said we would have to wait 6 hours in line to get a cabbage, can tinker with supply and demand all it wants to, but if they have a very short supply of cabbages, it won't matter there will still be a shortage and rather than the economic price of cabbages going up, the cost increase is the amount of time you spend waiting in line for one (supply and demand where price is measured in time instead of dollars/yen/euros/seashells). If they had a decent supply of cabbages you would wait a lot less and no one would complain. The problem with their communist system appears to have been a scarcity of needed resources to produce sufficient goods and/or extremely poor management (or perhaps corrupt management) resulting in shortages-- the fact that they allowed for no redundancy or risk reduction by having only one producer, the state, is a major oversight.
Using "supply and demand" to justify corporate gouging is a bit like using Darwin's theory of evolution to justify killing short, skinny people for fun. It's not a club to bash over the heads of people who don't think your price is fair until they agree that your unfair price is fair. However, I have to agree that if you are in the middle of nowhere and your sole source of fluid replenishment is a can of soda, you deserve to pay $2.75. Next time bring some water with from home.
You seriously believe there is a big difference between Ford and GM? You're from Detroit, aren't you? This would have been a lot funnier if it pointed to Schwinn or Huffy imho.
What I'm waiting for next is for Ford and Chevy to come out with a "purchase agreement" contract that restricts your right to put those lame Calvin-pissing-on-the-other-logo stickers in the window of your truck. Talk about tarnishing a reputation!
While I agree "our" economy is capitalist in that it relies on capital and private ownership, I completely disagree that "supply and demand" are the basis for anything that has happened.
The money supply is tinkered with frequently-- in fact, just last week the Federal Reserve lowered a key interest rate. This has a direct effect on demand. Supply is frequently altered through subsidies and tax breaks-- especially in agriculture. Prices are often highly regulated for many of the most serious needs, telecom, energy utilities, etc. Finally, the government assists and prohibits businesses rather often. Think of zoning codes, antidrug laws, environmental laws, rent ceilings, and scads of other restrictions on supply and demand-- these restrictions prevent free market capitalism.
But by all means, please don't let reality get in the way of your ideology. You "love it or leave it" types make me sick. You don't care about freedom and you certainly don't care about the U.S. But I guess as long as the trains run on time, you don't care what government or big business do. Oh excuse me, not the trains-- I mean, as long as you can hop in your SUV and commute at speeds of 55mph or higher...:)
Personally I find the term "P2P filesharing" to be a bit of semantic nonsense. It is "filesharing"-- plain and simple. The only thing P2P implies is that the peers are roughly the same type of beast. But there is precious little that distinguishes peer-to-peer from client-server, except that the software in P2P tends to support both accepting and requesting connections-- that is, the client and server software are the same application.
BFD, I say. It's a small technical issue that has no legal bearing on the matter of "filesharing" itself. So unless you want to state that FTP, HTTP, DCC, and CD-ROM methods of filesharing show "precious little evidence... [of] being put to good use so far", then you really are allowing the debate to get steered off-track.
The $300 per seat savings will barely buy that employee a cup of Starbucks coffee every day they come to work. That's 15 cent per hour raise. All told it's $400k saved if every machine gets Linux. That's a one-time cost, not annual savings.
The point still stands that without the editing/rendering software AND incredibly cheap hardware, there will be NO competition from struggling artists.
All that aside, I am glad to see Free Software being used the way it was intended to be used. This supports the underlying assertion that Free Software is good for users-- even if those users are corporations. Maybe other big dollar companies will start paying more attention soon.
The OS may be free, but they have 1300 employees, who all have pretty nice sounding workstations and I'm sure there is other expensive hardware involved. I seriously doubt we'll be seeing RPMs of their animation software anytime soon. I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for the members of the MPAA to go out of business.
While it is formed from a verb stem, the present participle functions as both a verb and an adjective. If I had to choose I would call it an adjective, because if Bruce were the object of a transitive verb in that sentence you would write "Brucem parentem [video]" or something like that. ("I see Bruce passing away." -- after all "pereo" means "to perish", not "to travel".)
I am well aware of them both. However, Time-Warner-AOL does not produce any hardware to speak of (if any, I'm aware of none, vague recollections of some failed internet appliance). Sony does. TW/AOL has some other interesting complications going, what with their networks and cable and all that. But if we're comparing evils here, excluding Sony seems short-sighted. Or maybe we're just suppose to love them because they make our beloved Playstations?
I agree, but for several more reasons than the one you state. Workstation variation in the workplace is a recipe for distressed admins. The only way this is not going to be a headache for them is if they never have to get involved in building workstation hardware/software for employees and if employees are responsible for making sure they can connect with server software in a meaningful way-- which seems like an incredible waste of employee time when paying a single admin to do all this is probably more efficient.
Second, I can't imagine anyone outside of R/D at Microsoft or AOL wanting to plunk down hard-earned company profits to buy software from some other company. They get their own software at no charge. In the case of AOL mail, I'm surprised they don't let people use Netscape mail, but from what I understand AOL mail has a unique server component to it, whereas Netscape Mail relies on mailboxes. AOL probably already owns servers running AOL Mail, whereas they'd have to set up extra/different servers to allow some other mailboxing scheme. This is inefficient.
Finally, allowing employees to buy workstations and software with no central standard practically guarantees that a lot of hardware and software will be wasted if the employee leaves. I mean, what good is your G4 with Yellow Dog Linux, when I'd much rather have Windows 2000 on a Pentium machine? I guess we'll have to throw it away. How economical!
What, doesn't Sony get to be considered in the race for great evilness? Sony belongs to both the MPAA and the RIAA and unlike AOL-Time-Warner, they produce not only creative works which they try to keep from Fair Use, but they also manufacture the crippled hardware that actually does CSS and region coding in the first place.
Look, I've done your research for you and I don't think it bears out your assertion at all. While the National Institute of Mental Health (www.nimh.nih.gov) has some statistics available the adult numbers are annual and the adolescent numbers are semi-annual. A comparison indicates that there is no significant difference in the rate of depression for adults (9.5% of all adults have this in a given year) and the rate for adolescents (6% of all adolescents in a given 6-month time frame, also shown as 8.3% but without specifying a time frame). Certainly this completely blows the statement made that "most teenagers are depressed".
Also interesting to note is that while women, according to the NIMH, experience depression at twice the rate that men do, men are four times more likely to commit suicide (if you believe this).
By all means, don't let me interrupt as you red-bait your way through political discussions. Obviously, as you say, the problem is the citizens, nee voters. If only they hadn't let women and differently-skin-pigmented persons in those damn voting booths, none of this would have happened-- you didn't see this sort of societal decay when only landed white men could vote! Better yet, I'd seriously like to know which governments you think have died after about 200 years of "equality before the law". I mean, once we eliminate all the other potential break-down points like economics, war, disease, etc, I'm sure we'll find that was exactly the sole cause for their extinction.
Frankly, I don't buy this "it's getting worse every day" nonsense. It's not as though the U.S. was once some great bastion of freedom and equality and all that is suddenly eroding into a great police state. If anything, Americans are having an incredibly difficult time adjusting to how much freedom they do have. I mean, look at the way Britney is dressed and tell me things haven't improved!
I assumed nothing of the sort. I simply refuse to believe that teenagers are to be assumed depressed or at higher risk for suicide unless there are reasonably sufficient data to bear such statements out. In the case of suicide, teenagers are apparently less at risk than adults-- especially if they are as depressed as was purported.
I'll say it again, this kid was undergoing a serious event, the proper treatment for which was not for his father to leave him alone at home and go back to work (as if nothing had happened?). While I'm very sorry for this family's loss, I can't think of too many reactions that rank lower on my list of good ways to respond to major disciplinary incidents.
Please back up statements like "most teenagers are depressed" with some references to studies that bear this out. I don't think the rate of teenage depression is any different than the rate of adult depression-- and I certainly don't think this rate exceeds 50% at any given point in time (almost everyone is depressed at some point). According to the CDC, persons 19 and under commit suicide at a lower rate than adults in the U.S. I think we are being fed a lot of misinformation about self-esteem and the mental state of teenagers-- the time has come to be more skeptical of strong claims from the psychiatric field, especially as they gain more credibility and influence over policy-making.
As to the incident in the story, I don't think you leave your son at home alone after an incident like this. You sit with him, you find him a lawyer, you discuss it for a bit, you take away his computer, you yell at him, you get him to yell at you, you go out for ice cream and a walk around a lake or in a park, you go home and watch TV, have dinner, make sure that the boy can deal with 10 days of unsupervised life, or figure out what he's going to do when he's not in school and on his own, something, anything but go back to work. But that's easy for me to say, I wasn't there.
Isn't that the same argument Microsoft has been trying to use to discredit Linux and the FSF/GPL? And since when does income equate to benefit to society anyway? I always thought the things that benefitted society the most were those things that were the hardest to put a price tag on-- and often seemed to have been motivated by something greater than a few extra dollars in the pocket.
In fact, it is possible that having no guaranteed income is a bad thing for society because it means that taking risks is less easily afforded (except for extremely large corporations, who take risks all the time, but seem to end up with mass layoffs whenever their risks don't pan out--injuring not the bad leaders so much as the rank-and-file). People who can't afford to take risks are less likely to innovate, not the other way around. Just a thought.
The odds that your claim to a copyright on this information would hold up seem pretty slim to me. The track listing for a music CD would seem to me to belong to the producer of the CD, if anyone. The CDDB claim is not to the pieces of information individually, but to the database itself. Given that I've never dealt with CDDB, having only submitted track listings to freedb from Grip, I'm curious at what point freedb is safe from this sort of garbage, and how Gracenote can prove what information is CDDB-derived and what portion is not.
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Have you ever used GNOME or KDE? That's the whole point of a graphics toolkit and the architecture-- consistent application appearance and cross-functionality (i.e. cut & paste or drag and drop). If you stick with GNOME or KDE apps within that framework, the consistency is amazing. Certainly Windows does not guarantee any kind of consistency-- just try using emacs for Windows. Works nothing like Word. Nothing like it at all! I have other applications that I use everyday that don't even minimize correctly under Windows. Or here's another example: I want to change options in Netscape, that's Edit... Preferences. But for Outlook that's Tools... Options. That's not consistency. The same functionality is under different labels in completely different menus.
No. The GPL expressly forbids building non-Free software using GPL libraries. This is exactly why the GNU C libraries are not GPL, but LGPL. You can read about it at the FSF page about LGPL. If the versions of QT are basically the same, except for licensing, then if you use QT Free you should be willing to grant the same freedom to your users that you yourself have gotten from Trolltech. If their paid licensing options are too expensive for proprietary developers, then the market should correct that-- they have the choice to change their price or lose customers and go out of business.
I will agree that some of their behavior is disconcerting (although perfectly understandable-- software as product rather than service has huge mental real estate in our culture, due in no small part to Mr. Gates of MS and his famous "stealing" letter). TT is making progress, and our only major concern is that Qt3 would not be GPL. But given the shared future Qt and KDE seem to have, I wouldn't worry about it too much.
I can't tell if you're joking or not. But if my kid were held back or told they had to do X, Y, or Z because they failed some standardized test like this, I'd want to see a copy of what the kid got wrong... but I bet it doesn't work like that. :)
Given that the implication is that we are born with the right to free speech, and that the Constitution simply makes it clear that the federal government cannot abridge that right, please explain what major oversight the ACLU is committing. The ACLU is constantly attempting to prevent government at all levels from overstepping its bounds. The link is great, but on the surface appears to provide no predictions for the future at all. Which base exactly were you worried we would get too far off from?
How young do you have to be to think this way? The only decent video game I've ever played with a mouse was Arkanoid-- and then only because a mouse is basically an inverted trackball. For anything else I'd rather have a regular old keyboard or a joystick (and in some cases two joysticks). Maybe a steering wheel for racing games, but those play fine with joysticks too.
It's not the children who need protection, it's the parents. They want to be protected from questions like, "Why are they doing that?" and "Doesn't that hurt?" and "I thought you said people who did that were supposed to be in love and married, but there are three people in this picture, what gives?"
As a parent, I think these rules are ridiculous. No, I don't give my kid smut. Nor do I take the kid to scary movies or rated R dramas. The kid is still a kid, and is going to be disproportionately scared by scary movies and won't follow most of the drama in an adult drama. I learned my lesson with the movie "The Man Who Knew Too Little" (with Bill Murray). The kid didn't get any of the jokes and grew so bored with the film that we had to leave in the middle of the movie.
So age-appropriate is a concern, but mostly because the child should have an interest or an educational need and shouldn't be left completely bewildered or confused.
S&D clearly describes some real world activity. In fact, my Russia counter-discussion clearly indicates that it seems to be working even when the cost is not monetary and you have a monopoly supplier. In fact, if we truly had a free market rather than the U.S. system, I might argue that it would be unethical NOT to maximize profits. But we don't have a free market, so I think it's appropriate to question whether gouging is ethical. The invisible hand in the U.S. belongs to Uncle Sam and he moves the market rather often (and sadly, this isn't some conspiracy theory, just that the government at all levels interferes regularly in the economy for the so-called good of the nation). One can only hear the exhausted "go move to Russia" cliche so many times before one cracks. Keep going, I may just break. :)
So, how old are you, twerp? 20?
As a parent, I find these sorts of issues very relevant and often wonder if our "leaders" have even half a clue or any children of their own. But, like you, they don't appear to give kids much credit. Or perhaps they're all too aware that they're training the next generation to be a better brand of mindless employee/consumer.
I never suggested that the fundamentals of Econ 101 were suspect-- although I think for something commonly referred to as "Law of Supply and Demand" it is distinctly undertested by anything except the most rudimentary thought experiments-- certainly Adam Smith did not perform independent, controlled experiments in real economic groups to reach his conclusion. Certainly the whole "rational actor and full information" assumptions of econ theory should be examined given the role modern advertising plays in the U.S. economy.
If we are experiencing prosperity now it has little to do with the markets being free and everything to do with how much the government interferes with the markets-- sure you can describe how this works using the Law of Supply and Demand, but at the same time the tinkering undermines the most efficient working of same-- again, if you believe the fundamentals of Econ 101.
As to the Russia example: the government in Russia, where it was said we would have to wait 6 hours in line to get a cabbage, can tinker with supply and demand all it wants to, but if they have a very short supply of cabbages, it won't matter there will still be a shortage and rather than the economic price of cabbages going up, the cost increase is the amount of time you spend waiting in line for one (supply and demand where price is measured in time instead of dollars/yen/euros/seashells). If they had a decent supply of cabbages you would wait a lot less and no one would complain. The problem with their communist system appears to have been a scarcity of needed resources to produce sufficient goods and/or extremely poor management (or perhaps corrupt management) resulting in shortages-- the fact that they allowed for no redundancy or risk reduction by having only one producer, the state, is a major oversight.
Using "supply and demand" to justify corporate gouging is a bit like using Darwin's theory of evolution to justify killing short, skinny people for fun. It's not a club to bash over the heads of people who don't think your price is fair until they agree that your unfair price is fair. However, I have to agree that if you are in the middle of nowhere and your sole source of fluid replenishment is a can of soda, you deserve to pay $2.75. Next time bring some water with from home.
You seriously believe there is a big difference between Ford and GM? You're from Detroit, aren't you? This would have been a lot funnier if it pointed to Schwinn or Huffy imho.
What I'm waiting for next is for Ford and Chevy to come out with a "purchase agreement" contract that restricts your right to put those lame Calvin-pissing-on-the-other-logo stickers in the window of your truck. Talk about tarnishing a reputation!
While I agree "our" economy is capitalist in that it relies on capital and private ownership, I completely disagree that "supply and demand" are the basis for anything that has happened.
:)
The money supply is tinkered with frequently-- in fact, just last week the Federal Reserve lowered a key interest rate. This has a direct effect on demand. Supply is frequently altered through subsidies and tax breaks-- especially in agriculture. Prices are often highly regulated for many of the most serious needs, telecom, energy utilities, etc. Finally, the government assists and prohibits businesses rather often. Think of zoning codes, antidrug laws, environmental laws, rent ceilings, and scads of other restrictions on supply and demand-- these restrictions prevent free market capitalism.
But by all means, please don't let reality get in the way of your ideology. You "love it or leave it" types make me sick. You don't care about freedom and you certainly don't care about the U.S. But I guess as long as the trains run on time, you don't care what government or big business do. Oh excuse me, not the trains-- I mean, as long as you can hop in your SUV and commute at speeds of 55mph or higher...
Personally I find the term "P2P filesharing" to be a bit of semantic nonsense. It is "filesharing"-- plain and simple. The only thing P2P implies is that the peers are roughly the same type of beast. But there is precious little that distinguishes peer-to-peer from client-server, except that the software in P2P tends to support both accepting and requesting connections-- that is, the client and server software are the same application.
BFD, I say. It's a small technical issue that has no legal bearing on the matter of "filesharing" itself. So unless you want to state that FTP, HTTP, DCC, and CD-ROM methods of filesharing show "precious little evidence... [of] being put to good use so far", then you really are allowing the debate to get steered off-track.
The $300 per seat savings will barely buy that employee a cup of Starbucks coffee every day they come to work. That's 15 cent per hour raise. All told it's $400k saved if every machine gets Linux. That's a one-time cost, not annual savings.
The point still stands that without the editing/rendering software AND incredibly cheap hardware, there will be NO competition from struggling artists.
All that aside, I am glad to see Free Software being used the way it was intended to be used. This supports the underlying assertion that Free Software is good for users-- even if those users are corporations. Maybe other big dollar companies will start paying more attention soon.
The OS may be free, but they have 1300 employees, who all have pretty nice sounding workstations and I'm sure there is other expensive hardware involved. I seriously doubt we'll be seeing RPMs of their animation software anytime soon. I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for the members of the MPAA to go out of business.
While it is formed from a verb stem, the present participle functions as both a verb and an adjective. If I had to choose I would call it an adjective, because if Bruce were the object of a transitive verb in that sentence you would write "Brucem parentem [video]" or something like that. ("I see Bruce passing away." -- after all "pereo" means "to perish", not "to travel".)
I am well aware of them both. However, Time-Warner-AOL does not produce any hardware to speak of (if any, I'm aware of none, vague recollections of some failed internet appliance). Sony does. TW/AOL has some other interesting complications going, what with their networks and cable and all that. But if we're comparing evils here, excluding Sony seems short-sighted. Or maybe we're just suppose to love them because they make our beloved Playstations?
I agree, but for several more reasons than the one you state. Workstation variation in the workplace is a recipe for distressed admins. The only way this is not going to be a headache for them is if they never have to get involved in building workstation hardware/software for employees and if employees are responsible for making sure they can connect with server software in a meaningful way-- which seems like an incredible waste of employee time when paying a single admin to do all this is probably more efficient.
Second, I can't imagine anyone outside of R/D at Microsoft or AOL wanting to plunk down hard-earned company profits to buy software from some other company. They get their own software at no charge. In the case of AOL mail, I'm surprised they don't let people use Netscape mail, but from what I understand AOL mail has a unique server component to it, whereas Netscape Mail relies on mailboxes. AOL probably already owns servers running AOL Mail, whereas they'd have to set up extra/different servers to allow some other mailboxing scheme. This is inefficient.
Finally, allowing employees to buy workstations and software with no central standard practically guarantees that a lot of hardware and software will be wasted if the employee leaves. I mean, what good is your G4 with Yellow Dog Linux, when I'd much rather have Windows 2000 on a Pentium machine? I guess we'll have to throw it away. How economical!
What, doesn't Sony get to be considered in the race for great evilness? Sony belongs to both the MPAA and the RIAA and unlike AOL-Time-Warner, they produce not only creative works which they try to keep from Fair Use, but they also manufacture the crippled hardware that actually does CSS and region coding in the first place.
Look, I've done your research for you and I don't think it bears out your assertion at all. While the National Institute of Mental Health (www.nimh.nih.gov) has some statistics available the adult numbers are annual and the adolescent numbers are semi-annual. A comparison indicates that there is no significant difference in the rate of depression for adults (9.5% of all adults have this in a given year) and the rate for adolescents (6% of all adolescents in a given 6-month time frame, also shown as 8.3% but without specifying a time frame). Certainly this completely blows the statement made that "most teenagers are depressed".
Also interesting to note is that while women, according to the NIMH, experience depression at twice the rate that men do, men are four times more likely to commit suicide (if you believe this).
By all means, don't let me interrupt as you red-bait your way through political discussions. Obviously, as you say, the problem is the citizens, nee voters. If only they hadn't let women and differently-skin-pigmented persons in those damn voting booths, none of this would have happened-- you didn't see this sort of societal decay when only landed white men could vote! Better yet, I'd seriously like to know which governments you think have died after about 200 years of "equality before the law". I mean, once we eliminate all the other potential break-down points like economics, war, disease, etc, I'm sure we'll find that was exactly the sole cause for their extinction.
Frankly, I don't buy this "it's getting worse every day" nonsense. It's not as though the U.S. was once some great bastion of freedom and equality and all that is suddenly eroding into a great police state. If anything, Americans are having an incredibly difficult time adjusting to how much freedom they do have. I mean, look at the way Britney is dressed and tell me things haven't improved!
I assumed nothing of the sort. I simply refuse to believe that teenagers are to be assumed depressed or at higher risk for suicide unless there are reasonably sufficient data to bear such statements out. In the case of suicide, teenagers are apparently less at risk than adults-- especially if they are as depressed as was purported.
I'll say it again, this kid was undergoing a serious event, the proper treatment for which was not for his father to leave him alone at home and go back to work (as if nothing had happened?). While I'm very sorry for this family's loss, I can't think of too many reactions that rank lower on my list of good ways to respond to major disciplinary incidents.
specs for building roads in MN from MNDOT
Signs, Signals, and Pavement Markings from the Dept of Public Safety.
Please back up statements like "most teenagers are depressed" with some references to studies that bear this out. I don't think the rate of teenage depression is any different than the rate of adult depression-- and I certainly don't think this rate exceeds 50% at any given point in time (almost everyone is depressed at some point). According to the CDC, persons 19 and under commit suicide at a lower rate than adults in the U.S. I think we are being fed a lot of misinformation about self-esteem and the mental state of teenagers-- the time has come to be more skeptical of strong claims from the psychiatric field, especially as they gain more credibility and influence over policy-making.
As to the incident in the story, I don't think you leave your son at home alone after an incident like this. You sit with him, you find him a lawyer, you discuss it for a bit, you take away his computer, you yell at him, you get him to yell at you, you go out for ice cream and a walk around a lake or in a park, you go home and watch TV, have dinner, make sure that the boy can deal with 10 days of unsupervised life, or figure out what he's going to do when he's not in school and on his own, something, anything but go back to work. But that's easy for me to say, I wasn't there.
Isn't that the same argument Microsoft has been trying to use to discredit Linux and the FSF/GPL? And since when does income equate to benefit to society anyway? I always thought the things that benefitted society the most were those things that were the hardest to put a price tag on-- and often seemed to have been motivated by something greater than a few extra dollars in the pocket.
In fact, it is possible that having no guaranteed income is a bad thing for society because it means that taking risks is less easily afforded (except for extremely large corporations, who take risks all the time, but seem to end up with mass layoffs whenever their risks don't pan out--injuring not the bad leaders so much as the rank-and-file). People who can't afford to take risks are less likely to innovate, not the other way around. Just a thought.
The odds that your claim to a copyright on this information would hold up seem pretty slim to me. The track listing for a music CD would seem to me to belong to the producer of the CD, if anyone. The CDDB claim is not to the pieces of information individually, but to the database itself. Given that I've never dealt with CDDB, having only submitted track listings to freedb from Grip, I'm curious at what point freedb is safe from this sort of garbage, and how Gracenote can prove what information is CDDB-derived and what portion is not.