Of course, the real kicker will be in the fine print when Telecom lobbyists convince their representatives to include examptions for any company with greater than X employees, or Y income, or located in State Z.
That is of course assuming this bill ever makes it to a vote.
These dangers include the fact that you can easily find out alot of personal information about someone. And, that information is readily available to millions of people on the web.
Yes, and it's only the information you choose to share about yourself unless you're aware of something I'm not.
But, parents should consider doing their job. Note: IMHO, that job should include removing computers from their children's bedroom.
You know, the "parents should consider doing their job" line gets really tiresome. That slogan isn't a magic wand that will suddenly make all the kids do their homework, clean behind their ears, and otherwise act to someone's idea of perfection.
The kid should be using a laptop in the kitchen. It won't cure the problem, but it will involve the parents in what their kids are doing on line.
This is based on your extensive experiences as a parent? Methinks not. Go ahead, stick a laptop and its extended power cord on the kitchen table, assuming you have a kitchen with space for that. I'll give it 6 months - tops - before it's whiplashed off the table and destroyed.
I think you need to realize that Oprah, while being very influential, very powerful, and very rich - is still human and makes mistakes. And guess what - this isn't the last professional mistake she's going to make, I guarantee it.
From now on, her reccomendation of a book or cause not only won't make me buy or support it, it will make me suspicious of it.
Follow anyone long enough, and you'll develop that attitude towards them as well. Professionals aren't perfect at what they do, and expecting them to be is nothing more than creating your own guaranteed, self-fulfilling prophecy.
If these are traditional medicine, nobody can patent it because of prior art, and whoever claims it will not stand long in the court.
You'd think so, wouldn't you?
Now that they put everything online, accessible by anyone anywhere, wouldn't that make piracy easier?
No, because making something easily available and free to use can't be pirated.
Imagine a japanese doctor takes a recipe there, adds a bit of japanese herbs and claims it her own? She still won't stand long in the court, but now the enforceability is further weakened because they are so far away and have a different jurisdiction.
Um, the japanese doctor can already do this. By making their knowledge publicly available, the Indian government is helping to make it less likely that someone else can abuse their particular knowledge base by patenting it.
I'm not saying that people in/outside India cannot do that now, but imagine the ease of pirating a music CD compared to music cassette.
That is a complete non-sequitir and a terrible, invalid analogy.
I hope they're not making the piracy too easy even for the most casual pirates.
There's more to life than pirates, such as the 6+ billion people in the world who are *not* pirates. I believe making this knowledge widely available will help a great deal more than it might hypothetically hurt.
I realize you were referring to your parent post, not mine, but thank you for your sentiment. As an adult, critically-thinking Christian, I get as fed up with the Holy Rollers as you do (if your sig is any indication). Like Muslims, I'm sure I'm not the only religious person who gets tired of World Class Jerks who wrap themselves in my religion's God to justify immature, shortsighted actions that encourage others to think I must be like those asshats too.
There are, but most of us are adults with kids to raise, jobs to do, and (hopefully) fun lives to lead, just like anyone else. That means we generally don't have the time, energy, or commitment to raise a high, holy stink every time the world acts upon its free will, so we don't get a whole lot of media attention.
As a Christian, there are more opportunities to make positive, constructive differences in my life and the lives of my friends, family, and local community than I have time to do them in. I sure as heck do not have time to be some 19th century knuckle-dragging Creationist, or whatever else the Religious Mediahounds are carrying on about. As Austin said, "Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are."
Social skills? Seriously, man. We obviously aren't playing with the same broad swaths of humanity if you think DnD teaches social skills!
Hahahha. Pardon me if I politely disagree. My level 14 Pacifist Healer with a base CHA of 29, modifier of +9, and CHA-check modifiers of +7 (for a total of 45) might have something to say about using Diplomacy when your party of 6 is surrounded by a horde of high-level, evil, intelligent NPCs. You'd be amazed how much you can learn from being required to say the right things by your DM or being attacked.:-)
Re:Video games, MMO's and RPG's supplanting table
on
Dungeons and Shadows
·
· Score: 1
I know the feeling. I'm lucky in that I have 5-6 friends who also have jobs, family, etc., but who genuinely enjoy D&D. We live near the same city (Cincinnati), so our host puts out a schedule of 4-5 dates when he and his wife can host the game over the next 2 months, and then we all reply to say which dates work for us and which don't. By process of elimination, we usually end up with 1 date where we can all make it, and we agree to get together then ("then" always being 2-6 weeks in advance). It takes a little work, but we all get together about once every 6-7 weeks while working our way through the campaign.
FWIW, we've already worked through several chapters of a big campaign over the last 14 months now, and my PC has grown from level 5 to level 14. Since it's all for fun (and we're all in our 30s or late 30s), we really look forward to that 6-8 hour night of gaming to eat, bullshit, blow off steam, and disconnect from the real world for a little bit with our friends.
No. He is a self-employed consultant, not an employee.
So is every music act that tours.
If he is operating as a business (not an employee, there is a huge distinction in tax law) then he should pay individual income tax in the state that his employer (his business) pays him.
So when Aerosmith go on tour, they should pay 10-20% state income tax on their total net income in every one of the 20-40 states they tour in? They'd end up owing 200-400% of their total pre-tax income.
Second, that job that he telecommutes to wouldn't exist without the services that NYS provides to his company.
So if he's a consultant who occasionally travels to 3-6 states where his client base exists while living elsewhere, he should pay the full tax rate for each state based on your logic? That's ridiculous, regardless of how many services a state is providing to his clients.
I may have missed something, but wasn't RIM's Blackberry software found to infringe on a software patent held by someone else, and they were ordered to shut down their wireless e-mail service in the United States? I'm wondering if they will be developing software based on the patented tech that RIM was already slapped down for.
"I'm sure I'm not the only one who felt that way."
Oh, you weren't. After watching the Cups of Suck that were Episodes I and II, my enthusiasm for seeing III was matched only by the desire to vigorously wipe my ass with steel wool.
Is the solution a master password, with all of the potential problems that represents, or biometrics, or are we stuck with post-it notes and a call to the help desk?
I just use the rotating password of IAmGodsGiftToWomen01, 02, 03... No geek will ever come up with that one!
There are tons of Christians like him, me being one of them. As I saw in a recent article, "Intelligent Design" has as much to do with science as Barney the Purple Dinosaur, is not science in any way shape or form according to the basic Scientific Method, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method), and is nothing more than "Creationism in a cheap tuxedo."
The fact that Christian zealots insist on including this in a science class speaks more to their idiocy than anything else.
Just curious, when was the last time you actually saw a BSOD? I've been using Windows since 1995 and haven't seen one since I got Windows 2000 in 2001. Is there some secret Blue Screen of Death Club that's meeting that we haven't heard about?
"If I find your post sufficiently objectionable, should I be permitted to kill you too?"
Hmmm, a single post to Slashdot being compared to some professional asshat who spammed millions of people and mail servers around the world. Now THAT'S Slashdot for you.
As for the spammer, I gave you this abridged Clerks retort: Blue-Collar Man: Excuse me. I don't mean to interrupt, but what were you talking about? Randal: The ending of Return of the Jedi. Dante: My friend is trying to convince me that any contractors working on the uncompleted Death Star were innocent victims when the space station was destroyed by the rebels. Blue-Collar Man: Well, I'm a contractor myself. I'm a roofer... (digs into pocket and produces business card) Dunn and Reddy Home Improvements. And speaking as a roofer, I can say that a roofer's personal politics come heavily into play when choosing jobs. Randal: Like when? Blue-Collar Man: Three months ago I was offered a job up in the hills. A beautiful house with tons of property. It was a simple reshingling job, but I was told that if it was finished within a day, my price would be doubled. Then I realized whose house it was. Dante: Whose house was it? Blue-Collar Man: Dominick Bambino's. Randal: "Babyface" Bambino? The gangster? Blue-Collar Man: The same. The money was right, but the risk was too big. I knew who he was, and based on that, I passed the job on to a friend of mine. Dante: Based on personal politics. Blue-Collar Man: Right. And that week, the Foresci family put a hit on Babyface's house. My friend was shot and killed. He wasn't even finished shingling. Randal: No way! Blue-Collar Man: (paying for coffee) I'm alive because I knew there were risks involved taking on that particular client. My friend wasn't so lucky. (pauses to reflect) You know, any contractor willing to work on that Death Star knew the risks. If they were killed, it was their own fault. A roofer listens to this... (taps his heart) not his wallet.
"I attended catholic school, and in 8th grade (circa 1992), we were diagramming sentences. I haven't met a single other person under 50 that has even heard of such a thing."
I'm 39 and was doing it in the 70's, so maybe you should increase your sample size?
"The point is that most people have very poor grammar, even if they think they're just fine."
I have excellent grammar practices that I continually work to improve, and it sure as shit isn't because I experienced boring-as-crap, brain-dead, sentence structure exercises as a pre-teen. The sooner in-class sentence structure diagramming is killed off, the better.
"I have no experience of education outside the US, but I can say confidently that public education in my country sucks. And it may always suck. However, what can we do to make it suck less?"
Put Microsoft in charge of it. Then it would blow.;-)
*******
Seriously, I don't know how much can be done about it given the following laws:
1. All students learn in different ways. Some kids are really good at learning through books, while others don't really learn until they can experiment, make mistakes, and do it in a hands-on environment. As for now, there's usually a token hands-on moment buried within hours of by-the-book learning, so changing this would make it suck less.
2. Motivation and curiosity. I didn't care about biology or any of the hard sciences in K-12 because the classes were quite boring, and the teachers did nothing to make them anything less than boring. Since I couldn't go my own way in class, and didn't have the money to do cool stuff on my own time because of my own curiosity (I grew up poor), the sciences sucked in K-12. Make student curiosity, even for normally taboo topics like drugs or explosives, the primary driver for education and the classes will suck less. Of course, that will never happen since the general public is so fucking retarded, and the media reinforces it.
There's more besides those two, but they cover most of why K-12 sucks. If my chemistry/organic chemistry teacher in grades 11 and 12 had made classes that sucked in at least a little of my curiosity, and then taught why the periodic table of elements and their values were important after I'd been interested, I might have done better. Instead, we did very boring, by-the-book lab experiments and were graded on how well we memorized the PT element values.
I wish there were more Bill Nye the Science Guy teachers, and fewer like the ones I had.
"It really is too bad Opera is choosing to charge for it's browser or force people to look at ads, or I'd look into downloading it. It's shaping up pretty good, but I've tweaked FireFox to block all ads... not just popups, all ads, so it would be shitty to have them back and built into the browser. Any extensions for FireFox that connect to a BitTorrent client?"
Or, in my own words:
"It really is too bad ZakuSage is choosing to charge for his work and creativity, or force people to look at his ads, or I'd look into using him. It's shaping up pretty good, but I've tweaked FireFox to block all ads... not just popups, all ads, so it would be shitty to have them back and built into the browser since I'm too cheap to actually pay for a browser I really like."
"Then if they want to be seen as adults and not complete idiots, they had better re-think cases like the New London, CT property rubbish they just ruled on. That and direct contradictions of rulings that they just made. It's looking more and more like they're being paid off by someone to rule a certain way and frankly i'm not sure i'd be surprised..."
While I agree the New London decision is pretty bad, there have been much worse if you check the S.C. case history. As for this Grokster decision, it was dead on correct. When the main point of advertising your technology is as a sure-fire, easy way to break the law, you're going to get slapped down.
As for being paid off, sure. Of course, you have the right as a Citizen to get involved in counteracting their decisions through your legislatures, but methinks the only thing you'll *actually* do is post to an online community.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, the real kicker will be in the fine print when Telecom lobbyists convince their representatives to include examptions for any company with greater than X employees, or Y income, or located in State Z.
That is of course assuming this bill ever makes it to a vote.
These dangers include the fact that you can easily find out alot of personal information about someone. And, that information is readily available to millions of people on the web.
Yes, and it's only the information you choose to share about yourself unless you're aware of something I'm not.
But, parents should consider doing their job. Note: IMHO, that job should include removing computers from their children's bedroom.
You know, the "parents should consider doing their job" line gets really tiresome. That slogan isn't a magic wand that will suddenly make all the kids do their homework, clean behind their ears, and otherwise act to someone's idea of perfection.
The kid should be using a laptop in the kitchen. It won't cure the problem, but it will involve the parents in what their kids are doing on line.
This is based on your extensive experiences as a parent? Methinks not. Go ahead, stick a laptop and its extended power cord on the kitchen table, assuming you have a kitchen with space for that. I'll give it 6 months - tops - before it's whiplashed off the table and destroyed.
Chuck
I think you need to realize that Oprah, while being very influential, very powerful, and very rich - is still human and makes mistakes. And guess what - this isn't the last professional mistake she's going to make, I guarantee it.
From now on, her reccomendation of a book or cause not only won't make me buy or support it, it will make me suspicious of it.
Follow anyone long enough, and you'll develop that attitude towards them as well. Professionals aren't perfect at what they do, and expecting them to be is nothing more than creating your own guaranteed, self-fulfilling prophecy.
Regardless of law, is it perfectly OK to buy a CD then proceed to redistribute it ad infinitum?
;-)
Yes.
If these are traditional medicine, nobody can patent it because of prior art, and whoever claims it will not stand long in the court.
You'd think so, wouldn't you?
Now that they put everything online, accessible by anyone anywhere, wouldn't that make piracy easier?
No, because making something easily available and free to use can't be pirated.
Imagine a japanese doctor takes a recipe there, adds a bit of japanese herbs and claims it her own? She still won't stand long in the court, but now the enforceability is further weakened because they are so far away and have a different jurisdiction.
Um, the japanese doctor can already do this. By making their knowledge publicly available, the Indian government is helping to make it less likely that someone else can abuse their particular knowledge base by patenting it.
I'm not saying that people in/outside India cannot do that now, but imagine the ease of pirating a music CD compared to music cassette.
That is a complete non-sequitir and a terrible, invalid analogy.
I hope they're not making the piracy too easy even for the most casual pirates.
There's more to life than pirates, such as the 6+ billion people in the world who are *not* pirates. I believe making this knowledge widely available will help a great deal more than it might hypothetically hurt.
Chuck
I realize you were referring to your parent post, not mine, but thank you for your sentiment. As an adult, critically-thinking Christian, I get as fed up with the Holy Rollers as you do (if your sig is any indication). Like Muslims, I'm sure I'm not the only religious person who gets tired of World Class Jerks who wrap themselves in my religion's God to justify immature, shortsighted actions that encourage others to think I must be like those asshats too.
Why can't there be more Christians like you?
There are, but most of us are adults with kids to raise, jobs to do, and (hopefully) fun lives to lead, just like anyone else. That means we generally don't have the time, energy, or commitment to raise a high, holy stink every time the world acts upon its free will, so we don't get a whole lot of media attention.
As a Christian, there are more opportunities to make positive, constructive differences in my life and the lives of my friends, family, and local community than I have time to do them in. I sure as heck do not have time to be some 19th century knuckle-dragging Creationist, or whatever else the Religious Mediahounds are carrying on about. As Austin said, "Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are."
Peace.
Social skills? Seriously, man. We obviously aren't playing with the same broad swaths of humanity if you think DnD teaches social skills!
:-)
Hahahha. Pardon me if I politely disagree. My level 14 Pacifist Healer with a base CHA of 29, modifier of +9, and CHA-check modifiers of +7 (for a total of 45) might have something to say about using Diplomacy when your party of 6 is surrounded by a horde of high-level, evil, intelligent NPCs. You'd be amazed how much you can learn from being required to say the right things by your DM or being attacked.
I know the feeling. I'm lucky in that I have 5-6 friends who also have jobs, family, etc., but who genuinely enjoy D&D. We live near the same city (Cincinnati), so our host puts out a schedule of 4-5 dates when he and his wife can host the game over the next 2 months, and then we all reply to say which dates work for us and which don't. By process of elimination, we usually end up with 1 date where we can all make it, and we agree to get together then ("then" always being 2-6 weeks in advance). It takes a little work, but we all get together about once every 6-7 weeks while working our way through the campaign.
FWIW, we've already worked through several chapters of a big campaign over the last 14 months now, and my PC has grown from level 5 to level 14. Since it's all for fun (and we're all in our 30s or late 30s), we really look forward to that 6-8 hour night of gaming to eat, bullshit, blow off steam, and disconnect from the real world for a little bit with our friends.
Peace,
Chuck
No. He is a self-employed consultant, not an employee.
So is every music act that tours.
If he is operating as a business (not an employee, there is a huge distinction in tax law) then he should pay individual income tax in the state that his employer (his business) pays him.
So when Aerosmith go on tour, they should pay 10-20% state income tax on their total net income in every one of the 20-40 states they tour in? They'd end up owing 200-400% of their total pre-tax income.
Second, that job that he telecommutes to wouldn't exist without the services that NYS provides to his company.
So if he's a consultant who occasionally travels to 3-6 states where his client base exists while living elsewhere, he should pay the full tax rate for each state based on your logic? That's ridiculous, regardless of how many services a state is providing to his clients.
I may have missed something, but wasn't RIM's Blackberry software found to infringe on a software patent held by someone else, and they were ordered to shut down their wireless e-mail service in the United States? I'm wondering if they will be developing software based on the patented tech that RIM was already slapped down for.
It is amazing how people who don't know him call him names and mock/criticize those who show interest in his past.
Davon,
You misspelled 'Slashdot.'
Chuck
You misspelled 'years.' ;-)
"I'm sure I'm not the only one who felt that way."
Oh, you weren't. After watching the Cups of Suck that were Episodes I and II, my enthusiasm for seeing III was matched only by the desire to vigorously wipe my ass with steel wool.
Is the solution a master password, with all of the potential problems that represents, or biometrics, or are we stuck with post-it notes and a call to the help desk?
I just use the rotating password of IAmGodsGiftToWomen01, 02, 03... No geek will ever come up with that one!
"Just FYI, it also works in Safari"
I take it you're one of the 10 people to own a Mac?
>;-)
There are tons of Christians like him, me being one of them. As I saw in a recent article, "Intelligent Design" has as much to do with science as Barney the Purple Dinosaur, is not science in any way shape or form according to the basic Scientific Method, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method), and is nothing more than "Creationism in a cheap tuxedo."
The fact that Christian zealots insist on including this in a science class speaks more to their idiocy than anything else.
Chuck
Just curious, when was the last time you actually saw a BSOD? I've been using Windows since 1995 and haven't seen one since I got Windows 2000 in 2001. Is there some secret Blue Screen of Death Club that's meeting that we haven't heard about?
Chuck
"If I find your post sufficiently objectionable, should I be permitted to kill you too?"
Hmmm, a single post to Slashdot being compared to some professional asshat who spammed millions of people and mail servers around the world. Now THAT'S Slashdot for you.
As for the spammer, I gave you this abridged Clerks retort:
Blue-Collar Man: Excuse me. I don't mean to interrupt, but what were you talking about?
Randal: The ending of Return of the Jedi.
Dante: My friend is trying to convince me that any contractors working on the uncompleted Death Star were innocent victims when the space station was destroyed by the rebels.
Blue-Collar Man: Well, I'm a contractor myself. I'm a roofer... (digs into pocket and produces business card) Dunn and Reddy Home Improvements. And speaking as a roofer, I can say that a roofer's personal politics come heavily into play when choosing jobs.
Randal: Like when?
Blue-Collar Man: Three months ago I was offered a job up in the hills. A beautiful house with tons of property. It was a simple reshingling job, but I was told that if it was finished within a day, my price would be doubled. Then I realized whose house it was.
Dante: Whose house was it?
Blue-Collar Man: Dominick Bambino's.
Randal: "Babyface" Bambino? The gangster?
Blue-Collar Man: The same. The money was right, but the risk was too big. I knew who he was, and based on that, I passed the job on to a friend of mine.
Dante: Based on personal politics.
Blue-Collar Man: Right. And that week, the Foresci family put a hit on Babyface's house. My friend was shot and killed. He wasn't even finished shingling.
Randal: No way!
Blue-Collar Man: (paying for coffee) I'm alive because I knew there were risks involved taking on that particular client. My friend wasn't so lucky. (pauses to reflect) You know, any contractor willing to work on that Death Star knew the risks. If they were killed, it was their own fault. A roofer listens to this... (taps his heart) not his wallet.
The spammer should have listened to the roofer.
"I attended catholic school, and in 8th grade (circa 1992), we were diagramming sentences. I haven't met a single other person under 50 that has even heard of such a thing."
I'm 39 and was doing it in the 70's, so maybe you should increase your sample size?
"The point is that most people have very poor grammar, even if they think they're just fine."
I have excellent grammar practices that I continually work to improve, and it sure as shit isn't because I experienced boring-as-crap, brain-dead, sentence structure exercises as a pre-teen. The sooner in-class sentence structure diagramming is killed off, the better.
Please pardon my passion on that topic.
"I have no experience of education outside the US, but I can say confidently that public education in my country sucks. And it may always suck. However, what can we do to make it suck less?"
;-)
Put Microsoft in charge of it. Then it would blow.
*******
Seriously, I don't know how much can be done about it given the following laws:
1. All students learn in different ways. Some kids are really good at learning through books, while others don't really learn until they can experiment, make mistakes, and do it in a hands-on environment. As for now, there's usually a token hands-on moment buried within hours of by-the-book learning, so changing this would make it suck less.
2. Motivation and curiosity. I didn't care about biology or any of the hard sciences in K-12 because the classes were quite boring, and the teachers did nothing to make them anything less than boring. Since I couldn't go my own way in class, and didn't have the money to do cool stuff on my own time because of my own curiosity (I grew up poor), the sciences sucked in K-12. Make student curiosity, even for normally taboo topics like drugs or explosives, the primary driver for education and the classes will suck less. Of course, that will never happen since the general public is so fucking retarded, and the media reinforces it.
There's more besides those two, but they cover most of why K-12 sucks. If my chemistry/organic chemistry teacher in grades 11 and 12 had made classes that sucked in at least a little of my curiosity, and then taught why the periodic table of elements and their values were important after I'd been interested, I might have done better. Instead, we did very boring, by-the-book lab experiments and were graded on how well we memorized the PT element values.
I wish there were more Bill Nye the Science Guy teachers, and fewer like the ones I had.
"It really is too bad Opera is choosing to charge for it's browser or force people to look at ads, or I'd look into downloading it. It's shaping up pretty good, but I've tweaked FireFox to block all ads... not just popups, all ads, so it would be shitty to have them back and built into the browser.
:-)
Any extensions for FireFox that connect to a BitTorrent client?"
Or, in my own words:
"It really is too bad ZakuSage is choosing to charge for his work and creativity, or force people to look at his ads, or I'd look into using him. It's shaping up pretty good, but I've tweaked FireFox to block all ads... not just popups, all ads, so it would be shitty to have them back and built into the browser since I'm too cheap to actually pay for a browser I really like."
Of course, YMMV.
Ya know, when I see incredibly dumb Apple topics like this one, this article immediately springs to mind:
iProduct.
"Then if they want to be seen as adults and not complete idiots, they had better re-think cases like the New London, CT property rubbish they just ruled on. That and direct contradictions of rulings that they just made. It's looking more and more like they're being paid off by someone to rule a certain way and frankly i'm not sure i'd be surprised..."
While I agree the New London decision is pretty bad, there have been much worse if you check the S.C. case history. As for this Grokster decision, it was dead on correct. When the main point of advertising your technology is as a sure-fire, easy way to break the law, you're going to get slapped down.
As for being paid off, sure. Of course, you have the right as a Citizen to get involved in counteracting their decisions through your legislatures, but methinks the only thing you'll *actually* do is post to an online community.