Actual, total taxes paid for all levels of government combined is already very nearly flat, until you hit the top of the income bracket, at which point capital gains makes it very, very regressive.
If we all truly paid the same, the ultra-wealthy would be in for a huge tax hike, while the rest of us would see only a few small adjustments here and there.
The road use (that is, the damage they do to the roads) of semi trucks and other heavy vehicles is subsidized by fuel tax paid by others. Despite their high fuel consumption, heavy vehicles don't even come close to paying for the damage they do (practically all of it), while personal vehicles pay way more than it costs to keep up with the wear they cause (almost none, by comparison).
That makes you legal at the price of some money and a good deal of inconvenience, none of which helps the original creators or anyone making games now.
Unlike recent games, where the used market at least supports the higher new-game price, buying a cart of Super Mario Bros. and dumping it is just a silly ritual some people do to make their activities technically legal (the best kind of legal, I admit) and let them lord their imagined moral superiority over other people online.
The MAME folks seem to be especially bad about this. "I bought a broken, bare board for $5 on Ebay and dumped the ROM with uncommon, narrowly-purposed hardware, so now I can sneer at all those dirty pirates on Internet message boards while I play Dig-Dug in another window. Man, I'm so much better than those freeloading assholes!"
Just pirate the damn things. If you feel like someone deserves compensation for that, sending money to the individuals behind the games or buying newer products from the companies that published them would either one be more productive all-around, plus more morally praiseworthy, than buying 20-year-old carts and some obscure Chinese ROM-dumping hardware and pretending that does anything but make your activities more legal than regular-ol' pirates.
Note that I'm not saying pirating games that old is immoral, just that buying old-ass carts and dumping them isn't somehow significantly more moral than whatever moral weight one places on piracy.
Relatedly, any possession whatsoever imposes a cost on its owner, and that failing to recognize that fact and act appropriately can result in a kind of enslavement, too.
To paraphrase a bit in Thoreau's Walden, "I had a decorative rock on my desk; when I found that I had to dust it frequently to keep it looking good, I threw it out."
1) reference books, as you say 2) relatedly, anything with lots of diagrams, images, etc. (so, just about any decent non-fiction book) 3) anything with many footnotes (again, most non-fiction, plus loads of older fiction)
and I've discovered that
4) the benefits of an extensive library of free public-domain works is overrated when a huge percentage of them are far better with good, modern (so, still protected by copyright) meta-text like introductions, figures of various sorts, and footnotes, or are translations that are old enough that they'll likely turn off modern readers, with recent (still protected by copyright) translations being far more accessible and, often, simply better
IMO they're great for a small subset of public domain material, short non-fiction works, and recent popular fiction, and shit for just about everything else. Then there are the economic factors like not being able to re-sell your purchased ebooks despite their being nearly the same price as a physical copy and, on the flip side, not being able to pick up used books at 1/2 or (often far, far) less of the new price, which makes them a bit crappy for... well, just about anything.
The good bit is being able to carry a library with you everywhere--but that library may well be of significantly poorer quality and/or more expensive than a similar physical library.
We'll just have to memorize "4, 15, 25, and 28 are major versions with large differences, 12, 18, and 26 would have been major point releases and break or fix X, Y, and Z, respectively".
I'd say pick any two of the Three Ps of web programming (Perl, Python, and PHP) and you'd be OK. Don't start with PHP.
Perl and Python combined should give you enough job opportunities and make picking up PHP later a snap, while PHP plus either of the others should keep you from being a bad PHP coder.
As a third one to try to get experience in, Java or asp.net are good choices. Both are annoying in their own ways, but IMO Java's nicer to work in. Don't forget Javascript, too--it's very different from most other languages you're likely to work in, and none of those other languages will give you much of a boost on learning it, the way, say, Perl would for PHP; it draws heavily from non-C-pattern languages, unlike all the others I mentioned, all of which are similar enough that if you know two or three of them the others can be picked up in a couple days (though HR won't see it that way).
You'll be interfacing with databases constantly. Learn proper database design and the kinds of things SQL can do for you (more than you might think!) That's at least as important as any of the stuff above.
Once you know a couple languages, the hard part will be learning new libraries and frameworks, not new languages (within reason--I recently had to try to make sense of some Erlang, and holy fuck...)
If, after that stuff, you want more, try to get really good at configuring Apache and writing.htaccess files to accomplish various tasks. Maybe look at sort-of related tech you might have to work with, like the XML family (XSLT, Schema, etc.)
Prevents most SQL injection, improves performance, results in cleaner and more readable queries.
The widely-lauded readability of bound-variable SQL queries prompted me to write a Perl script that moves every other noun in my e-books to the footnotes. Much more readable now:)
Personally, I find KDE to be a much more polished, integrated, and comprehensive suite than GNOME.
I agree--and it's why every time I've tried KDE I've abandoned it and gone back to XFCE or Gnome after a few days.
"Ugh, kmail sucks, I'm gonna use Thunderbird... KOffice still blows, gotta set it to open files with (Open/Libre)Office instead. Konqueror? Fuck no, Firefox or Chromium or Opera, anything but that piece of crap. Amarok is so damn slow and bloated, need to find another player, not many QT options, guess I'll use a GTK solution..."
And so on, until I'm barely using any QT apps and almost no apps at all that integrate well with KDE, and all the while KDE seems to be mocking me for not using its integrated apps, most of which I hate.
If you like its default apps, fine. If not, all that work to make a tightly integrated DE and apps is just a bunch of useless bloat and features that only half-work if you don't do things exactly the way the devs want you to. I don't even like any of its competitors that much, and I really want to like KDE because it looks nice and has a few nice features that the others don't, but it's hard to justify using it if you don't run a single k* app.
I wish I'd understood, before going to university, that it is not immediately much (at all?) more difficult than high school. Hell, I'd say my senior year of high school with calculus, chem II, physics, plus the usual other classes like English and history, was significantly harder and required a much larger total time commitment than any of my years in college, even after the classes started to get more serious.
As it is, I only got over the shock of how easy it was after I'd completed a year of bullshit classes that didn't go beyond material covered by my sophomore year of high school (some, like psychology, spent significant portions of time covering things I'd learned in junior fucking high!)
In retrospect, I see that I could have easily tested out of a year's worth of classes using CLEP and asking the right people about non-CLEP testing to get credit for classes (taking the final and getting a B minimum, or something). Probably closer to two years.
If I had one piece of advice I could give to high school seniors regarding college, it would be: start taking tests to get out of classes as soon as you can. Summer before school, ideally. Remember that the final might be easier than the CLEP, so keep that in mind if you fail the CLEP and ask counselors or similar about other methods of avoiding classes. Consider knocking out in-major courses this way, too, especially if you have a lot of experience with them. Watch out for limits on how many credits earned this way the college will accept, and choose the courses you target for elimination accordingly
If you can test out odds are you weren't going to get much out of it, so it's not worth your time or money. If you feel cheated out of knowledge, spend an hour reading wikipedia pages on the subject--ta da, you just learned at least as much as you would have in the class.
Short answer? Because occasionally having to pay for something I don't like is better than the alternatives, and because it's not always possible to accomplish some things even if everyone wants them done without a sovereign power to force certain action (see: the Tragedy of the Commons, the Free Rider Problem, and Forster's Two Cheers for Democracy).
Subsidies spur production and research, as well as making a product more competitive internationally. They can keep a threatened industry that is desirable to keep around (say, one that is expected to be useful later but which might die in the meantime and be hard to start back up, or one that needs a push to get off the ground but will provide lots of jobs and tax money once it's going, or one critical to defense, even in an indirect sense) from being lost to foreign competition or simple changing demand. They can also be used to keep staples in the reach of the poor (though that happens more often in other countries, I think). Those are just the uses/justifications I can think of off the top of my head at 7:30 in the morning local time.
They're not as nonsensical as you imply, though I happen not to support this particular one myself.
Did poorly, too, from junior high through college. Usually knew the material as well as the top two or three in the class though, at all levels. For some reason I have a huge amount of trouble motivating myself to do school work. No problem with work ethic in any other area. Very strange.
My best guess is that I subconsciously categorize it as play, and since it's really boring and crappy play (not even any good for learning, as it's so slow), I don't want to do it. Can't figure out any other explanation. Easily learn new things and finish projects at work, easily dedicate hours to learning things I just want to know. Only formal education gives me that kind of trouble. I spent years fighting myself over it, and never did get much better.
So yeah, personally I kind of hate higher education. Couldn't pay me to go back. It's not you, though, higher ed.--it's me.
Sequels rarely do better than the original they continue. Claiming yourself a "genius" after the fact is ever so self serving.
I think Lucas is frequently full of shit, but his use of "genius" was actually humble. He's using it in the original sense of a personal minor deity (daemon in Greek, genius in Latin). He's basically saying he got lucky, as the sentence following that one makes clear.
DO use prepared statements with place holders e.g. "SELECT * FROM table WHERE id = ?"
Bingo. 90% of SQL injection prevented, right there.
DO NOT use user input as an identifier (column, table, or view name) E.G. "SELECT * FROM "+user_input+" WHERE 1=1";
If you really need to do this, create a white-listed array of tables it's OK to access in this manner and check the input against that before running the query. Also useful if you want user input to select a class/method to use/execute. That's basically what front controllers for many web frameworks do.
DO make users for your database that have the least amount of permissions required to run your app (Only UPDATE, INSERT, DELETE, SELECT)
EXEC's pretty handy. Damn near necessary, IMO. Pretty safe, too, as long as the rest of the permissions are locked down.
I am not a web developer, and this is the thing I have never understood. Why in the world do the web developers want a page to look consistent on all user agents? That's dumb. As a user, I just want your content: hypertext--text and hyperlinks. I don't care what color, width, or fonts you want stuff to be rendered in. That's my business.
As soon as you change human psychology so people don't stick around longer on and buy more widgets from pretty, precisely-designed pages with pervasive branding consistency right down to the font, maybe the marketing and graphic design folks will let us programmers write pages that all look the same.
Until then, you can just stick to reading RSS feeds.
AWESOME. Last time I played it it had to run in some kind of sandbox application or something, which IIRC had to itself be run in compatibility mode and with all kinds of very specific settings tweaked to get the cutscenes working, with the correct config being determined by so many factors that you really just had to trial-and-error until it worked.
With an open engine, that's at least one of the greats from that era that won't be lost.
We desperately need a virtual machine that actually provides full emulation of the hardware of a few older video cards (say, Nvidia2, Nvidia4, or un-numbered original ATI Radeon) so we can get Win95-98 games working again.
Hell, I've had a hard time getting Thief 3 to run past XP, and it's not even that old. SS2 is notoriously difficult to make work (including cutscenes), I've got a game called Civil War Generals 2 that I love but that won't run past XP, Mech Commander 1 is a pain, and I can't get Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries to work on anything I try. Grim Fandango is requires an increasingly awkward and fragile stack of life support to run, and that game's a fucking masterpiece.
That old pre-DX7 stuff is largely lost to us. It's a bizarre sort of black hole of games, with all the ones before being playable (DosBox) and most (but not all) of the ones after still working. We can emulate entire consoles from that time period--hell, even PS2 emulation is pretty decent these days, and the Wii emulator is coming along nicely--but the PC video cards of 95-2000 continue to be an obstacle.
I'd definitely pay a bit for a VM that would convince the OS it had a real video card from that time period installed, and with the code to back up its claim (lie) and output the video. Better, a modern hardware clone of a high-end Win98 machine in a little iPod sized box would be awesome, and totally worth a couple hundred bucks (which I'm sure is more than it would cost to produce, if the market were large enough to support mass production, which I suppose it's not)
Funny, I feel the opposite way: the one and only game on the 360 I can't play on my PS3 but wish I could is the port of Perfect Dark. If I had a 360, though, there'd be several games I like that I wouldn't be able to play (LBP series, Uncharted 2, and MGS4 come to mind immediately).
Playing BR is a nice bonus. It's also very good at playing video over a network--not sure how the 360 is at that, I got rid of mine before I tried it. I don't play online much so the free online play is much better for me than XBL; I'd never ever play online if I had to pay for it, since I wouldn't use it enough to make it worth the money. For those whose main use for their console is online multiplayer I can see how XBL would be worth it, though.
My wife teaches third grade. This year she's got a bunch of CoD:Modern Wafare players (yes, in 3rd grade--their parents must blow) and they all laughed at the sad parts of Where the Red Fern Grows and Island of the Blue Dolphin. Not some sort of laugh to cover sadness--they genuinely thought the dogs dying and the kid getting killed and all that were funny. Anything involving violence is hilarious to them.
She found that pretty damn disturbing, and thinks the fact that pretty much all they do at home (and all they talk about) is CoD might have something to do with it.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL
Actual, total taxes paid for all levels of government combined is already very nearly flat, until you hit the top of the income bracket, at which point capital gains makes it very, very regressive.
If we all truly paid the same, the ultra-wealthy would be in for a huge tax hike, while the rest of us would see only a few small adjustments here and there.
The road use (that is, the damage they do to the roads) of semi trucks and other heavy vehicles is subsidized by fuel tax paid by others. Despite their high fuel consumption, heavy vehicles don't even come close to paying for the damage they do (practically all of it), while personal vehicles pay way more than it costs to keep up with the wear they cause (almost none, by comparison).
Not complaining, just pointing it out.
No, silly. We have to give our corporate overlords more tax breaks if we want them to start hiring.
They really, really want to hire more of us, they just can't because of those damn taxes they pay on all the profits they're not hiring people with.
That makes you legal at the price of some money and a good deal of inconvenience, none of which helps the original creators or anyone making games now.
Unlike recent games, where the used market at least supports the higher new-game price, buying a cart of Super Mario Bros. and dumping it is just a silly ritual some people do to make their activities technically legal (the best kind of legal, I admit) and let them lord their imagined moral superiority over other people online.
The MAME folks seem to be especially bad about this. "I bought a broken, bare board for $5 on Ebay and dumped the ROM with uncommon, narrowly-purposed hardware, so now I can sneer at all those dirty pirates on Internet message boards while I play Dig-Dug in another window. Man, I'm so much better than those freeloading assholes!"
Just pirate the damn things. If you feel like someone deserves compensation for that, sending money to the individuals behind the games or buying newer products from the companies that published them would either one be more productive all-around, plus more morally praiseworthy, than buying 20-year-old carts and some obscure Chinese ROM-dumping hardware and pretending that does anything but make your activities more legal than regular-ol' pirates.
Note that I'm not saying pirating games that old is immoral, just that buying old-ass carts and dumping them isn't somehow significantly more moral than whatever moral weight one places on piracy.
Relatedly, any possession whatsoever imposes a cost on its owner, and that failing to recognize that fact and act appropriately can result in a kind of enslavement, too.
To paraphrase a bit in Thoreau's Walden, "I had a decorative rock on my desk; when I found that I had to dust it frequently to keep it looking good, I threw it out."
I've found that they're not much good for:
1) reference books, as you say
2) relatedly, anything with lots of diagrams, images, etc. (so, just about any decent non-fiction book)
3) anything with many footnotes (again, most non-fiction, plus loads of older fiction)
and I've discovered that
4) the benefits of an extensive library of free public-domain works is overrated when a huge percentage of them are far better with good, modern (so, still protected by copyright) meta-text like introductions, figures of various sorts, and footnotes, or are translations that are old enough that they'll likely turn off modern readers, with recent (still protected by copyright) translations being far more accessible and, often, simply better
IMO they're great for a small subset of public domain material, short non-fiction works, and recent popular fiction, and shit for just about everything else. Then there are the economic factors like not being able to re-sell your purchased ebooks despite their being nearly the same price as a physical copy and, on the flip side, not being able to pick up used books at 1/2 or (often far, far) less of the new price, which makes them a bit crappy for... well, just about anything.
The good bit is being able to carry a library with you everywhere--but that library may well be of significantly poorer quality and/or more expensive than a similar physical library.
Uh, I believe you have that reversed.
Because ECONOMICS.
We'll just have to memorize "4, 15, 25, and 28 are major versions with large differences, 12, 18, and 26 would have been major point releases and break or fix X, Y, and Z, respectively".
Fuck this new numbering scheme.
Why pay for something you have to pirate to use the way you want to?
I'd say pick any two of the Three Ps of web programming (Perl, Python, and PHP) and you'd be OK. Don't start with PHP.
Perl and Python combined should give you enough job opportunities and make picking up PHP later a snap, while PHP plus either of the others should keep you from being a bad PHP coder.
As a third one to try to get experience in, Java or asp.net are good choices. Both are annoying in their own ways, but IMO Java's nicer to work in. Don't forget Javascript, too--it's very different from most other languages you're likely to work in, and none of those other languages will give you much of a boost on learning it, the way, say, Perl would for PHP; it draws heavily from non-C-pattern languages, unlike all the others I mentioned, all of which are similar enough that if you know two or three of them the others can be picked up in a couple days (though HR won't see it that way).
You'll be interfacing with databases constantly. Learn proper database design and the kinds of things SQL can do for you (more than you might think!) That's at least as important as any of the stuff above.
Once you know a couple languages, the hard part will be learning new libraries and frameworks, not new languages (within reason--I recently had to try to make sense of some Erlang, and holy fuck...)
If, after that stuff, you want more, try to get really good at configuring Apache and writing .htaccess files to accomplish various tasks. Maybe look at sort-of related tech you might have to work with, like the XML family (XSLT, Schema, etc.)
The widely-lauded readability of bound-variable SQL queries prompted me to write a Perl script that moves every other noun in my e-books to the footnotes. Much more readable now :)
I agree--and it's why every time I've tried KDE I've abandoned it and gone back to XFCE or Gnome after a few days.
"Ugh, kmail sucks, I'm gonna use Thunderbird... KOffice still blows, gotta set it to open files with (Open/Libre)Office instead. Konqueror? Fuck no, Firefox or Chromium or Opera, anything but that piece of crap. Amarok is so damn slow and bloated, need to find another player, not many QT options, guess I'll use a GTK solution..."
And so on, until I'm barely using any QT apps and almost no apps at all that integrate well with KDE, and all the while KDE seems to be mocking me for not using its integrated apps, most of which I hate.
If you like its default apps, fine. If not, all that work to make a tightly integrated DE and apps is just a bunch of useless bloat and features that only half-work if you don't do things exactly the way the devs want you to. I don't even like any of its competitors that much, and I really want to like KDE because it looks nice and has a few nice features that the others don't, but it's hard to justify using it if you don't run a single k* app.
I wish I'd understood, before going to university, that it is not immediately much (at all?) more difficult than high school. Hell, I'd say my senior year of high school with calculus, chem II, physics, plus the usual other classes like English and history, was significantly harder and required a much larger total time commitment than any of my years in college, even after the classes started to get more serious.
As it is, I only got over the shock of how easy it was after I'd completed a year of bullshit classes that didn't go beyond material covered by my sophomore year of high school (some, like psychology, spent significant portions of time covering things I'd learned in junior fucking high!)
In retrospect, I see that I could have easily tested out of a year's worth of classes using CLEP and asking the right people about non-CLEP testing to get credit for classes (taking the final and getting a B minimum, or something). Probably closer to two years.
If I had one piece of advice I could give to high school seniors regarding college, it would be: start taking tests to get out of classes as soon as you can. Summer before school, ideally. Remember that the final might be easier than the CLEP, so keep that in mind if you fail the CLEP and ask counselors or similar about other methods of avoiding classes. Consider knocking out in-major courses this way, too, especially if you have a lot of experience with them. Watch out for limits on how many credits earned this way the college will accept, and choose the courses you target for elimination accordingly
If you can test out odds are you weren't going to get much out of it, so it's not worth your time or money. If you feel cheated out of knowledge, spend an hour reading wikipedia pages on the subject--ta da, you just learned at least as much as you would have in the class.
Short answer? Because occasionally having to pay for something I don't like is better than the alternatives, and because it's not always possible to accomplish some things even if everyone wants them done without a sovereign power to force certain action (see: the Tragedy of the Commons, the Free Rider Problem, and Forster's Two Cheers for Democracy).
Subsidies spur production and research, as well as making a product more competitive internationally. They can keep a threatened industry that is desirable to keep around (say, one that is expected to be useful later but which might die in the meantime and be hard to start back up, or one that needs a push to get off the ground but will provide lots of jobs and tax money once it's going, or one critical to defense, even in an indirect sense) from being lost to foreign competition or simple changing demand. They can also be used to keep staples in the reach of the poor (though that happens more often in other countries, I think). Those are just the uses/justifications I can think of off the top of my head at 7:30 in the morning local time.
They're not as nonsensical as you imply, though I happen not to support this particular one myself.
Did poorly, too, from junior high through college. Usually knew the material as well as the top two or three in the class though, at all levels. For some reason I have a huge amount of trouble motivating myself to do school work. No problem with work ethic in any other area. Very strange.
My best guess is that I subconsciously categorize it as play, and since it's really boring and crappy play (not even any good for learning, as it's so slow), I don't want to do it. Can't figure out any other explanation. Easily learn new things and finish projects at work, easily dedicate hours to learning things I just want to know. Only formal education gives me that kind of trouble. I spent years fighting myself over it, and never did get much better.
So yeah, personally I kind of hate higher education. Couldn't pay me to go back. It's not you, though, higher ed.--it's me.
I think Lucas is frequently full of shit, but his use of "genius" was actually humble. He's using it in the original sense of a personal minor deity (daemon in Greek, genius in Latin). He's basically saying he got lucky, as the sentence following that one makes clear.
Bingo. 90% of SQL injection prevented, right there.
If you really need to do this, create a white-listed array of tables it's OK to access in this manner and check the input against that before running the query. Also useful if you want user input to select a class/method to use/execute. That's basically what front controllers for many web frameworks do.
EXEC's pretty handy. Damn near necessary, IMO. Pretty safe, too, as long as the rest of the permissions are locked down.
As soon as you change human psychology so people don't stick around longer on and buy more widgets from pretty, precisely-designed pages with pervasive branding consistency right down to the font, maybe the marketing and graphic design folks will let us programmers write pages that all look the same.
Until then, you can just stick to reading RSS feeds.
AWESOME. Last time I played it it had to run in some kind of sandbox application or something, which IIRC had to itself be run in compatibility mode and with all kinds of very specific settings tweaked to get the cutscenes working, with the correct config being determined by so many factors that you really just had to trial-and-error until it worked.
With an open engine, that's at least one of the greats from that era that won't be lost.
We desperately need a virtual machine that actually provides full emulation of the hardware of a few older video cards (say, Nvidia2, Nvidia4, or un-numbered original ATI Radeon) so we can get Win95-98 games working again.
Hell, I've had a hard time getting Thief 3 to run past XP, and it's not even that old. SS2 is notoriously difficult to make work (including cutscenes), I've got a game called Civil War Generals 2 that I love but that won't run past XP, Mech Commander 1 is a pain, and I can't get Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries to work on anything I try. Grim Fandango is requires an increasingly awkward and fragile stack of life support to run, and that game's a fucking masterpiece.
That old pre-DX7 stuff is largely lost to us. It's a bizarre sort of black hole of games, with all the ones before being playable (DosBox) and most (but not all) of the ones after still working. We can emulate entire consoles from that time period--hell, even PS2 emulation is pretty decent these days, and the Wii emulator is coming along nicely--but the PC video cards of 95-2000 continue to be an obstacle.
I'd definitely pay a bit for a VM that would convince the OS it had a real video card from that time period installed, and with the code to back up its claim (lie) and output the video. Better, a modern hardware clone of a high-end Win98 machine in a little iPod sized box would be awesome, and totally worth a couple hundred bucks (which I'm sure is more than it would cost to produce, if the market were large enough to support mass production, which I suppose it's not)
Buy the PS3 version.
Put in Steam code.
Sell PS3 version at Vintage Stock (regional Gamestop-like shop) for store credit.
Buy a $20 PS3 game with store credit.
Any reason I can't do this? Is the PC version going to be $20 cheaper so it's not really worth it?
Huh? Mario Kart has always been multiplayer.
Double Dash is the best one, but my group of friends has abandoned the series for the very-similar Blur anyway.
Funny, I feel the opposite way: the one and only game on the 360 I can't play on my PS3 but wish I could is the port of Perfect Dark. If I had a 360, though, there'd be several games I like that I wouldn't be able to play (LBP series, Uncharted 2, and MGS4 come to mind immediately).
Playing BR is a nice bonus. It's also very good at playing video over a network--not sure how the 360 is at that, I got rid of mine before I tried it. I don't play online much so the free online play is much better for me than XBL; I'd never ever play online if I had to pay for it, since I wouldn't use it enough to make it worth the money. For those whose main use for their console is online multiplayer I can see how XBL would be worth it, though.
On the other hand: Sony. God they suck.
My wife teaches third grade. This year she's got a bunch of CoD:Modern Wafare players (yes, in 3rd grade--their parents must blow) and they all laughed at the sad parts of Where the Red Fern Grows and Island of the Blue Dolphin. Not some sort of laugh to cover sadness--they genuinely thought the dogs dying and the kid getting killed and all that were funny. Anything involving violence is hilarious to them.
She found that pretty damn disturbing, and thinks the fact that pretty much all they do at home (and all they talk about) is CoD might have something to do with it.