Actually, I believe you are allowed to rip it. (Distributing the rip is what tends to get people in trouble.) However, making a ripping program available can get you in trouble. In short, the action is legal but the tools to let you perform the action are not.
The reasoning here is that studios know they'd never be able to stop people from ripping their own DVDs. They wouldn't even be able to detect this - unless the person shared it online, of course. But a DVD ripping program being offered online is something they can find and stop. Without those, there is no DVD ripping (at least for most people).
I have a "Kindle with ads." In theory, the only ads I see are when the Kindle is off (in which case, it is in a protective cover so I don't see it) or when I'm browsing my list of books (in which case, the ad is tucked away at the bottom of the screen and easily ignored). In practice, something has gone wrong with my Kindle and it isn't loading up new ads to show me. Not that I'm complaining at all. (It still syncs up books.)
That's my impression of the voice control in those Kindle TV ads with "Find Gary Busey." If we had that in my house, I know just what would happen. My kids would get into a shouting match:
Kid 1: "Play Show A" Kid 2: "No, Play Show B!" Kid 1: "Play Show A!!!" Kid 2: "PLAY SHOW B!!!" Me: "TV, TURN OFF!!!"
Then again, perhaps that last voice control part could be useful. (Recognize the parents' voice and then ignore the kids.) Still, I think we'll stick with plain, old remote controls.
Sadly, our society sees women as "natural parents" and men as "idiots who would feed the baby pizza and beer if given the chance." While out their kids, some dads are told how nice it is that they are "babysitting" them. It amazes some people that men can actually be good dads and are capable of actually helping in the house. (For example, I'm the chef of our family. I cook all of the dinners.) Part of the blame for this are the endless TV shows portraying the idiot bumbling dad who would go to ruin if it weren't for his loving, extremely-patient wife. (Have a TV show with an idiot bumbling wife and a patient dad and watch the complaints fly.)
Even worse is the view that all men are psycho kid-stalkers out to do harm to any child they can. If my wife and I saw a child crying on the sidewalk by himself or herself, I wouldn't walk up to them. I'd want to. I'd want to help, but I'd know better. I'd be seen as "creepy man preying on an innocent kid." My wife, on the other hand, would be able to do that because she's a woman. She'd be seen as "loving woman who wants to help a child."
I've called Google more than once due to errors with listed phone numbers. (The phone number listed when you searched for one of my company's departments was a different department. You can imagine how annoying the flood of wrong "I looked it up online" numbers was.) The people I spoke with were very helpful and knowledgeable. I'll admit that finding a support number for Google isn't easy, but it can be done.
I'm sorry, but Facebook just reorganized how they display postings and the Fatwa didn't appear. Maybe they would like to advertise with Facebook to ensure that their Fatwa status updates appear at the top of everyone's feeds?
Zuckerberg wouldn't even need to say anything. He'd be jailed as an evil Zionist spy or some other nonsense the moment he tried to leave the country. I wouldn't fare any better with the last name Levine. You couldn't pay me enough money to travel to Iran.
Not just social isolation, but falling in with the wrong crowd socially. Had he had friends who educated him about his misogyny (and had he listened), he might have turned his dating life around. However, from the reports I've heard, he fell into a crowd who - like him - saw women as objects who should bend to men's sexual demands and who got upset when women insisted on being treated like actual people. This added to his mental instability instead of helping him.
Probably the kind of dating approach where he viewed women as objects whose sole purpose in this world was to bend to his sexual desires instead of viewing them as actual people. That would more than cancel out any much more superficial things he had going for him (looks, money, etc).
One of them (Adam Lanza) I remember only because the media started going crazy with "He had Asperger's which made him shoot everyone up." As someone with Asperger's Syndrome and as the father of a boy with Asperger's this struck a nerve. People with Asperger's aren't more likely to commit violent acts than neurotypical (non-Autistic) people. In fact, they are more likely to be the recipients of violence. If they do become violent, they are more likely to hurt themselves than others and even if they hurt others it will be in an unplanned out lashing out (e.g. swinging arms because they are upset and happening to hit someone), not a carefully planned out event like these mass killings were. But, unfortunately, the media loves a simple "reason" and seized on Asperger's as "the cause." The whole affair burned Lanza's name into my memory. So it wasn't his actions that cause me to remember him but the media missteps in reporting his actions.
Like pretty much any invention mankind has ever come up with, the Internet can help or hurt. If someone is feeling upset over something, they can turn to friends online for help and can get assistance, support, and guidance through their troubled times. Or, if they aren't as lucky or don't look in the right places, they can find abuse hurled at them, idiots saying "Why don't you just kill yourself" and the like, or an echo chamber where particular prejudices are amplified and focused against Group X being the cause of all of the person's problems.
This isn't really that different from a distraught person seeking help from others via face-to-face social interaction except that the "kill yourself" jerks are probably somewhat less likely to say that to a person's face. Then again, some people I've met in person don't seem to care at all if what they say/do hurts another person. In fact, they consider hurting another person as "harmless fun." These people would be jerks even if the Internet had never existed.
Sadly, the teaching profession, as it stands now, is hard on good teachers. Good teachers put in a lot of effort and pour their hearts and souls into the profession. In return, they need to deal with bad parents, bad kids, administrators who won't back them up, politicians who think they know how to teach better than teachers, funding cuts so severs that they [the teachers] need to pay for supplies with their own money, low salaries, etc. Many good teachers burn out early and leave the profession.
Meanwhile, the bad teachers deal with all of that by simply not caring and doing the bare minimum to pass their students off to the next teacher. These teachers endure for years, teaching tons of students but not inspiring learning.
I don't know how you can identify good teachers and prevent them from burning out/leaving, but doing this would really help the school system.
I agree with all of this. We do punish our autistic child, but are careful about what we do and how we phrase it. We're also fine with him losing privileges in school if he doesn't behave. Of course, this isn't framed as "being punished" but it's in his behavior plan as him being in control of whether he gets rewards. He likes this control and has improved many behaviors.
Before we had the autism diagnosis, though, the principal at the time convinced us that our kid was just a defiant troublemaker and needed to be punished severely at school which didn't work at all. Then again, post-diagnosis, this principal tried blocking us from getting services for our kid - even going so far as "calling us into his office" to yell at us for daring to go to the superintendent's office when he was dragging his feet. Let's just say that we weren't sad at all when he was later removed rapidly over a series of sexual harassment claims. (In hindsight, a lot of the 504 plans he was tasked with administering were found to be in shambles and we believe he was angry with us for going above his head because he didn't want district scrutiny in his school lest it reveal his failings.) We could use less administrators/teachers like him and more like the substitute teacher who "got" my son and was able to shorten his previously 30 minute meltdowns to 3 minute cool-down sessions.
My son has autism (high functioning/Asperger's Syndrome) and I agree with this. I'd only add that the person teaching a kid with autism needs to remember three things:
1) Every kid with autism is different. The common phrase is "If you've met one kid with Autism, you've met one kid with Autism." Don't tell me that you know how to handle kids with autism because you dealt with one a few years back. (I actually had a teacher tell me this as she was ready to kick my son out of her class because he wasn't dealing with her bordering-on-abusive teaching style.)
2) They might be a certain age and they might even be intellectually older than their peers, but socially/emotionally they are younger. My 10 year old Aspie is about 12 intellectually. However, he's about 6 socially/emotionally. This leads to problems when he does things that a six year old would do that aren't socially appropriate for a 10 year old to do.
3) They can get overwhelmed by certain sensations and need time to unwind/decompress. When my son needs to decompress, he starts getting very agitated and often can't tell us what he needs. He'll shout "No!", run around the room, laugh, etc. To the untrained eye, he seems defiant and in need of punishment. Punishment just makes the problem worse, though, not better. He needs to be taken out of the situation so he can calm down and decompress.
Sadly, too many teachers just see my son as intellectually advanced and thus assume he should be able to handle everything they throw at him. When a teacher "gets" my son, he excels. When they don't, school is a nightmare.
My wife is a teacher (well, was before our second son was born and she stayed home because daycare for our son would have cost more than her salary). She refers to this lack of bathroom breaks as "teacher bladder." Among other "fun" things that teachers need to deal with are after-hours work (grading papers after the kids go home, prepping the classroom before the kids arrive) and even working during vacation time (summer vacation = time spent prepping for next year's class). People have this misconception that teachers have an "easy" job, get summers off, etc. They don't. Some might phone it in, but that's pretty much true of any profession. The good teachers out there work their rears off for very little pay, very little gratitude, and lots of stress. All in an effort to spark a love of learning in their students. If the world was a fair place salary-wise, sports stars would work for $20,000 a year and teachers would get multi-million dollar contracts.
And people once imagined that nuclear power would power homes, batteries, cars, etc. As we learn more about a given item, viewpoints change. So when the threat seemed to be "chopping down tons of trees to make paper bags", plastic seemed the better option. Now, though, we see that plastic bags are an even bigger threat to the environment so that's changed. Reusable canvas bags are now considered the best option.
The point is that poverty is the main issue facing education today, not creating more tests and forcing teachers to use a one-size-fits-all curriculum developed by bureaucrats and corporations.
This isn't a matter of Facebook posts. The second example I give is one my own son encountered. I've dealt with this all year with both of my boys - one in 1st grade and one in 5th grade. I often understand just what the point of the exercise is, but the way they are phrased and the methods they require the students to use lead to confusion and frustration.
I love math. I'm the math geek who, in school, would make up and do math problems just for fun. What's 2 to the 100th power? I'd sit down and multiply it out by hand to find out and would think of it as fun.
Yet, I look at the math my kids are doing (1st grade and 5th grade) and if I was in their place I'd hate math too. It's sad. My oldest has gone from being a math geek who would sneak math into art projects (seriously, he'd have a drawing with 1 + 1 = 2 in there for no apparent reason) to hating doing math. At least, until I show him the "old school" way of doing it at which point he loves it again.
I wish we could walk away. I have two kids in elementary school and the math they're learning sickens me. They don't actually work with numbers, but need to draw "word sentences" to graphically represent problems. If you have 8 + 3, you don't just add the numbers, you draw 8 boxes and then you draw 3 boxes and then you count all of the boxes to get your answer. If this was just the introduction to the concept of addition, it might be fine, but this is how they expect kids to add (and multiply and divide!) even after they've been doing it for awhile.
I posted this above but I'll post it again: http://www.ijreview.com/2014/05/137962-common-core-approach-solving-basic-math-problem-doesnt-confuse-congrats/
Then there's the Common Core math problem my son had: 1.62 / 0.27
He wasn't told to actually divide numbers. Instead, he had to draw 162 "tenths segments" and then redraw them in groups of 27. The number of groups he got was the answer. I want to see them try to scale this method up to dividing 237.235. The kids will be drawing "tenths segments" for hours, if not days.
Exactly. A ton of effort is being made to change the educational system so "no child is left behind" or so we can "race to the top." However, all of the educational gaps go away when you account for poverty. A poor kid who is worried if he'll get to eat dinner tonight and breakfast tomorrow, who is worried that his dad has been out of work for months and they might lose their apartment, who is worried that his older brother had to drop out of school to get a minimum wage job to help support his family... that kid is not going to be very focused on learning. Take away his worries about money/food/etc and he'll do just as well as any other kid who doesn't need to worry about those things.
But it's easier for the politicians to just blame teachers for not teaching hard enough and then order more high stakes tests to "hold the teachers' feet to the fire" or threaten to shut down public schools because poor kids can go to those expensive private schools instead, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I believe you are allowed to rip it. (Distributing the rip is what tends to get people in trouble.) However, making a ripping program available can get you in trouble. In short, the action is legal but the tools to let you perform the action are not.
The reasoning here is that studios know they'd never be able to stop people from ripping their own DVDs. They wouldn't even be able to detect this - unless the person shared it online, of course. But a DVD ripping program being offered online is something they can find and stop. Without those, there is no DVD ripping (at least for most people).
I have a "Kindle with ads." In theory, the only ads I see are when the Kindle is off (in which case, it is in a protective cover so I don't see it) or when I'm browsing my list of books (in which case, the ad is tucked away at the bottom of the screen and easily ignored). In practice, something has gone wrong with my Kindle and it isn't loading up new ads to show me. Not that I'm complaining at all. (It still syncs up books.)
That's my impression of the voice control in those Kindle TV ads with "Find Gary Busey." If we had that in my house, I know just what would happen. My kids would get into a shouting match:
Kid 1: "Play Show A"
Kid 2: "No, Play Show B!"
Kid 1: "Play Show A!!!"
Kid 2: "PLAY SHOW B!!!"
Me: "TV, TURN OFF!!!"
Then again, perhaps that last voice control part could be useful. (Recognize the parents' voice and then ignore the kids.) Still, I think we'll stick with plain, old remote controls.
Actually, Google does have an eBookstore: Google Play Books. They also sell Movies, TV shows, and music on their Google Play store.
Sadly, our society sees women as "natural parents" and men as "idiots who would feed the baby pizza and beer if given the chance." While out their kids, some dads are told how nice it is that they are "babysitting" them. It amazes some people that men can actually be good dads and are capable of actually helping in the house. (For example, I'm the chef of our family. I cook all of the dinners.) Part of the blame for this are the endless TV shows portraying the idiot bumbling dad who would go to ruin if it weren't for his loving, extremely-patient wife. (Have a TV show with an idiot bumbling wife and a patient dad and watch the complaints fly.)
Even worse is the view that all men are psycho kid-stalkers out to do harm to any child they can. If my wife and I saw a child crying on the sidewalk by himself or herself, I wouldn't walk up to them. I'd want to. I'd want to help, but I'd know better. I'd be seen as "creepy man preying on an innocent kid." My wife, on the other hand, would be able to do that because she's a woman. She'd be seen as "loving woman who wants to help a child."
I've called Google more than once due to errors with listed phone numbers. (The phone number listed when you searched for one of my company's departments was a different department. You can imagine how annoying the flood of wrong "I looked it up online" numbers was.) The people I spoke with were very helpful and knowledgeable. I'll admit that finding a support number for Google isn't easy, but it can be done.
I'm sorry, but Facebook just reorganized how they display postings and the Fatwa didn't appear. Maybe they would like to advertise with Facebook to ensure that their Fatwa status updates appear at the top of everyone's feeds?
Zuckerberg wouldn't even need to say anything. He'd be jailed as an evil Zionist spy or some other nonsense the moment he tried to leave the country. I wouldn't fare any better with the last name Levine. You couldn't pay me enough money to travel to Iran.
Not just social isolation, but falling in with the wrong crowd socially. Had he had friends who educated him about his misogyny (and had he listened), he might have turned his dating life around. However, from the reports I've heard, he fell into a crowd who - like him - saw women as objects who should bend to men's sexual demands and who got upset when women insisted on being treated like actual people. This added to his mental instability instead of helping him.
Probably the kind of dating approach where he viewed women as objects whose sole purpose in this world was to bend to his sexual desires instead of viewing them as actual people. That would more than cancel out any much more superficial things he had going for him (looks, money, etc).
Unless you happen to be dating someone who works for the NSA, then they might be watching you.
Or if you are a friend of someone who works for the NSA.
Or if you just got someone in the NSA upset for some reason. Like that article you published lambasting the NSA.
One of them (Adam Lanza) I remember only because the media started going crazy with "He had Asperger's which made him shoot everyone up." As someone with Asperger's Syndrome and as the father of a boy with Asperger's this struck a nerve. People with Asperger's aren't more likely to commit violent acts than neurotypical (non-Autistic) people. In fact, they are more likely to be the recipients of violence. If they do become violent, they are more likely to hurt themselves than others and even if they hurt others it will be in an unplanned out lashing out (e.g. swinging arms because they are upset and happening to hit someone), not a carefully planned out event like these mass killings were. But, unfortunately, the media loves a simple "reason" and seized on Asperger's as "the cause." The whole affair burned Lanza's name into my memory. So it wasn't his actions that cause me to remember him but the media missteps in reporting his actions.
Like pretty much any invention mankind has ever come up with, the Internet can help or hurt. If someone is feeling upset over something, they can turn to friends online for help and can get assistance, support, and guidance through their troubled times. Or, if they aren't as lucky or don't look in the right places, they can find abuse hurled at them, idiots saying "Why don't you just kill yourself" and the like, or an echo chamber where particular prejudices are amplified and focused against Group X being the cause of all of the person's problems.
This isn't really that different from a distraught person seeking help from others via face-to-face social interaction except that the "kill yourself" jerks are probably somewhat less likely to say that to a person's face. Then again, some people I've met in person don't seem to care at all if what they say/do hurts another person. In fact, they consider hurting another person as "harmless fun." These people would be jerks even if the Internet had never existed.
Sadly, the teaching profession, as it stands now, is hard on good teachers. Good teachers put in a lot of effort and pour their hearts and souls into the profession. In return, they need to deal with bad parents, bad kids, administrators who won't back them up, politicians who think they know how to teach better than teachers, funding cuts so severs that they [the teachers] need to pay for supplies with their own money, low salaries, etc. Many good teachers burn out early and leave the profession.
Meanwhile, the bad teachers deal with all of that by simply not caring and doing the bare minimum to pass their students off to the next teacher. These teachers endure for years, teaching tons of students but not inspiring learning.
I don't know how you can identify good teachers and prevent them from burning out/leaving, but doing this would really help the school system.
I agree with all of this. We do punish our autistic child, but are careful about what we do and how we phrase it. We're also fine with him losing privileges in school if he doesn't behave. Of course, this isn't framed as "being punished" but it's in his behavior plan as him being in control of whether he gets rewards. He likes this control and has improved many behaviors.
Before we had the autism diagnosis, though, the principal at the time convinced us that our kid was just a defiant troublemaker and needed to be punished severely at school which didn't work at all. Then again, post-diagnosis, this principal tried blocking us from getting services for our kid - even going so far as "calling us into his office" to yell at us for daring to go to the superintendent's office when he was dragging his feet. Let's just say that we weren't sad at all when he was later removed rapidly over a series of sexual harassment claims. (In hindsight, a lot of the 504 plans he was tasked with administering were found to be in shambles and we believe he was angry with us for going above his head because he didn't want district scrutiny in his school lest it reveal his failings.) We could use less administrators/teachers like him and more like the substitute teacher who "got" my son and was able to shorten his previously 30 minute meltdowns to 3 minute cool-down sessions.
My son has autism (high functioning/Asperger's Syndrome) and I agree with this. I'd only add that the person teaching a kid with autism needs to remember three things:
1) Every kid with autism is different. The common phrase is "If you've met one kid with Autism, you've met one kid with Autism." Don't tell me that you know how to handle kids with autism because you dealt with one a few years back. (I actually had a teacher tell me this as she was ready to kick my son out of her class because he wasn't dealing with her bordering-on-abusive teaching style.)
2) They might be a certain age and they might even be intellectually older than their peers, but socially/emotionally they are younger. My 10 year old Aspie is about 12 intellectually. However, he's about 6 socially/emotionally. This leads to problems when he does things that a six year old would do that aren't socially appropriate for a 10 year old to do.
3) They can get overwhelmed by certain sensations and need time to unwind/decompress. When my son needs to decompress, he starts getting very agitated and often can't tell us what he needs. He'll shout "No!", run around the room, laugh, etc. To the untrained eye, he seems defiant and in need of punishment. Punishment just makes the problem worse, though, not better. He needs to be taken out of the situation so he can calm down and decompress.
Sadly, too many teachers just see my son as intellectually advanced and thus assume he should be able to handle everything they throw at him. When a teacher "gets" my son, he excels. When they don't, school is a nightmare.
My wife is a teacher (well, was before our second son was born and she stayed home because daycare for our son would have cost more than her salary). She refers to this lack of bathroom breaks as "teacher bladder." Among other "fun" things that teachers need to deal with are after-hours work (grading papers after the kids go home, prepping the classroom before the kids arrive) and even working during vacation time (summer vacation = time spent prepping for next year's class). People have this misconception that teachers have an "easy" job, get summers off, etc. They don't. Some might phone it in, but that's pretty much true of any profession. The good teachers out there work their rears off for very little pay, very little gratitude, and lots of stress. All in an effort to spark a love of learning in their students. If the world was a fair place salary-wise, sports stars would work for $20,000 a year and teachers would get multi-million dollar contracts.
And people once imagined that nuclear power would power homes, batteries, cars, etc. As we learn more about a given item, viewpoints change. So when the threat seemed to be "chopping down tons of trees to make paper bags", plastic seemed the better option. Now, though, we see that plastic bags are an even bigger threat to the environment so that's changed. Reusable canvas bags are now considered the best option.
The point is that poverty is the main issue facing education today, not creating more tests and forcing teachers to use a one-size-fits-all curriculum developed by bureaucrats and corporations.
This isn't a matter of Facebook posts. The second example I give is one my own son encountered. I've dealt with this all year with both of my boys - one in 1st grade and one in 5th grade. I often understand just what the point of the exercise is, but the way they are phrased and the methods they require the students to use lead to confusion and frustration.
I love math. I'm the math geek who, in school, would make up and do math problems just for fun. What's 2 to the 100th power? I'd sit down and multiply it out by hand to find out and would think of it as fun.
Yet, I look at the math my kids are doing (1st grade and 5th grade) and if I was in their place I'd hate math too. It's sad. My oldest has gone from being a math geek who would sneak math into art projects (seriously, he'd have a drawing with 1 + 1 = 2 in there for no apparent reason) to hating doing math. At least, until I show him the "old school" way of doing it at which point he loves it again.
Common Core can't die soon enough!
I wish we could walk away. I have two kids in elementary school and the math they're learning sickens me. They don't actually work with numbers, but need to draw "word sentences" to graphically represent problems. If you have 8 + 3, you don't just add the numbers, you draw 8 boxes and then you draw 3 boxes and then you count all of the boxes to get your answer. If this was just the introduction to the concept of addition, it might be fine, but this is how they expect kids to add (and multiply and divide!) even after they've been doing it for awhile.
I posted this above but I'll post it again: http://www.ijreview.com/2014/05/137962-common-core-approach-solving-basic-math-problem-doesnt-confuse-congrats/
To solve 32 - 12 = ? you do the following:
12 + 3 = 15
15 + 5 = 20
20 + 10 = 30
30 + 2 = 32
Then 3 + 5 = 8, 8 + 10 = 18, 18 + 2 = 20. Therefore 32 - 12 = 20.
Then there's the Common Core math problem my son had: 1.62 / 0.27
He wasn't told to actually divide numbers. Instead, he had to draw 162 "tenths segments" and then redraw them in groups of 27. The number of groups he got was the answer. I want to see them try to scale this method up to dividing 237.235. The kids will be drawing "tenths segments" for hours, if not days.
Sadly, we've replaced fuzzy math with Common Core math which is so horrible it makes one long for the days of fuzzy math.
Exactly. A ton of effort is being made to change the educational system so "no child is left behind" or so we can "race to the top." However, all of the educational gaps go away when you account for poverty. A poor kid who is worried if he'll get to eat dinner tonight and breakfast tomorrow, who is worried that his dad has been out of work for months and they might lose their apartment, who is worried that his older brother had to drop out of school to get a minimum wage job to help support his family... that kid is not going to be very focused on learning. Take away his worries about money/food/etc and he'll do just as well as any other kid who doesn't need to worry about those things.
But it's easier for the politicians to just blame teachers for not teaching hard enough and then order more high stakes tests to "hold the teachers' feet to the fire" or threaten to shut down public schools because poor kids can go to those expensive private schools instead, right?