This is absolutely false. I came to this planet after hearing an invitation from your "Voyager II" spacecraft to come here. I have learned a great deal about your culture and laws by taking the form of a girl's dead husband and driving across the country with her. I watched her very carefully, and picked up what I needed to know to survive on this planet.
From these experiences, I can tell you that the rules of traffic lights are very simple:
Red light stop, green light go, yellow light go very fast.
I think it even goes beyond that though, because the elementary school kids of today have parents that grew up in the video game era. Many of these parents certainly grew up playing video games and should know that video games are not as harmful as their parents thought they were. Many of them probably remember playing games like Oregon Trail, so they would know that games can be at least somewhat educational.
However, I think especially when you're dealing with young parents, they tend to not really know how to react to these sorts of things, so they by default fall back on what their parents thought.
Growing up in the '80s, most parents of that time felt that video games had absolutely no value, and their use for any purpose was to be actively discouraged. While today's parents may not see games as pure evil, they are still harboring a lot of this latent fear of gaming that was hammered into them by their parents, even though they themselves played video games quite a lot and (probably) didn't end up as sociopaths.
I think people tend to be very over-conservative about these things when they are just starting out as parents, because they are terrified of doing anything that might "ruin" their kids. Sort of like how people keep the hand sanitizer around at all times with the first child, but by the time the third or fourth rolls around, they clean the pacifier by sticking it in their own mouths for half a second.
Sure, you spend the whole flight chatting up the "hot chick", and when the plane is getting ready to land, you tell her to meet you at the airport bar. You get there, and find the hairy 350 pound dude with sweat stains in the pits of his shirt that was giggling and shoving your seat forward the entire flight waiting there for you.
It could also be that the changes required to end up with an immune system like that are incredibly complex and may involve steps along the way that are not evolutionarily advantageous in most species, so the necessary sequence of evolutionary steps was not completed in most species. Or, it could just be that by random chance the mutations simply did not occur except in a few species, and did not stick for whatever reason in most cases where it did occur.
To say that there must be some tradeoff implies that evolution's purpose is to produce the most perfectly adapted organism possible, when in fact evolution has no purpose at all. It is a series of mutations that tend to produce organisms that are well adapted, but certainly not perfectly adapted in most cases, to the particular environment they find themselves in.
Or, it might turn out that the tradeoff is that you end up growing tough scaly skin that people like to make into boots and handbags, in which case I look forward to giving my wife a Gucci Human-skin bag in the near future.
What about the cost to build the electrical infrastructure to bring power to the ISP's servers? Or the taxpayer-subsidized telecom infrastructure that provides the bandwidth required to deliver the music to your PC?
Just like the government wouldn't give the telecoms billions of dollars in subsidies to upgrade their networks and then allow them to continue to raise rates and delay those same upgrades while spending the money on, apparently, hookers and blow? Congress works for the lobbyists (including telecom lobbyists), not for the people. Same with the FCC, which has spend the last several years either rolling back or just ignoring various regulations intended to keep these companies from having too much power.
Ah, but the point of any new technology product is to allow "experts" to publish books about it. Most people believe that the technical publishing industry was created in order to provide support for new technologies, but in fact new technology is created in order to provide more topics on which to write books.
It's a little-known fact that the earliest versions of Unix actually included an incredibly intuitive interface that actually made it possible for 90 year old grandmothers to go from novice to kernel hacker in less than 5 minutes. However, a (very) young Tim O'Reilly convinced Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie to re-develop it, scrapping the previous interface in favor of a command line that was so cryptic that he could actually make millions of dollars just by publishing books about how to use it.
The guy was a marketroid who got payed to blog about stuff. I'm guessing the motivation is that his new company offered him a basketload of money to blog about something else, and he took it.
Let me guess, you think the Internet is totally useless because all it's used for is porn? No, the Internet is THE GREATEST THING EVER because all it's used for is porn.
SCSI wasn't any fun anymore once they put in auto termination anyway. Long ago are the days when you couldn't get your SCSI disks to show up, no matter how you chained them or where you put the terminator. The only way to get it working was to cut yourself trying to connect the third drive for the 500th time and bleed all over the cables while swearing loudly. After that, everything would work just fine. You see, the dark lord will not allow SCSI to work without a blood sacrifice.
A broken space escalator would become a stairway to heaven, and if Led Zeppelin has taught us anything, it's that a Stairway to Heaven doesn't make any damn sense at all unless you're already so high you're practically in space already.
What's this article of which you speak? I was mostly just objecting to using the term "nanny state" when the stated intention is to present an objective opinion. Clearly, the term "nanny state" is too loaded to form the basis of a rational discussion.
A big part of parenting is teaching children how to function in society. The trick is to explain things to them at a time and in a way that they can understand given their emotional and mental development, and doing so in a way that resists transferring your own cynicism to them or that gives them more information than they're capable of processing at whatever age they are.
For example, telling children swear words are inappropriate because they are not polite and can offend people is okay, but telling them swear words are fine, but don't say them in front of stuffy old ladies because they might faint is probably not constructive. Likewise, trying to explain that swear words are okay in some situations but not others is going to be too difficult for a 5 year old to understand because they lack the fine tuned impulse control that (most) adults have, so a blanket ban on profanity is appropriate at that age.
Also, teaching 3 year olds the basics of why girls and boys have different parts is fine, but giving them an advanced anatomy course complete with graphic visual aids and a philosophical discussion regarding the different creation myths throughout history is probably not the best way to go about it.
It's easy to say "be brutally honest" before you have kids, but it gets a little more complicated once they're actually in front of you asking the questions. The last thing you want is for your kid's kindergarten teacher to call you in to ask you why little Johnny has been teaching advanced sex ed to his classmates (probably incorrectly, because he misinterpreted parts of your 3 hour anatomy course).
So yes, be as honest as possible with kids, but be prepared to make allowances for the underdeveloped state of their brains. Trying to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth will only cause mass confusion.
Starting off by calling it the "nanny state" is already trying to frame the debate in a way that reinforces particular biases.
No, we should not attempt to foam pad the entire world so the precious little ones don't get hurt, but that doesn't mean we should just toss them out in the woods and let them fend for themselves either. Certain safety regulations are required for the functioning of an advanced society, many of which are created at least in part to keep children safe (school zones, crosswalks, etc).
The debate should be about which regulations and safety precautions make sense, not about creating a false dichotomy by calling any regulation the imposition of a "nanny state".
I don't know of many places that you can't get at least 10 radio statios + internet. Clearly, you've never driven anywhere in the western United States, particularly the mountain west. I've taken many a road trip through west Texas or around the four corners area where I can go hours without a single radio station. Sometimes, I'll get one static-filled religious or country station, hit the seek button, and watch the dial go all the way around and end up right back at the same station.
Having said that, even though I make trips like this at least twice a year, I still don't have satellite radio, because I don't see the need. Even with my cheap factory installed car stereo with no auxiliary jacks, I can burn a few CDs from my MP3 collection to fill the hours when there are no decent radio stations. Maybe if I did that sort of traveling on a monthly basis or something. Regardless, I have a hard time seeing the appeal of paying a monthly fee for radio unless I'm a traveling salesman or something. Radio is not like TV, it's not something that people will generally listen to in their spare time. It's usually something people listen to when there are no other entertainment options, such as when they're driving.
Depends on what kind of engineering, I guess. A depressingly large number of my friends from electrical engineering ended up getting jobs that turned out to be more programming or IT work than actual engineering.
I remember during my very first paying job as a sysadmin (1997-ish), I was tasked to set up a new mail server. For some reason, I decided as part of my testing to send email to an "invalid" remote address that I came up with off the top of my head (bob@bob.com I think it was, or maybe foo@foo.com or something like that). So, I wrote a script that just sent thousands of emails out at once to this address. Within maybe 20 minutes, I get an angry phone call from the domain owner telling me to stop spamming him.
I learned my lesson, though. Now I never put my real phone number in the whois record for my domains.
I don't think that fits in this case. The smaller companies are more nimble and can adapt faster. So, they are the hare. The large companies are still slow to change and can't get anything done quickly, so they are the tortoise. The only difference now is, rather than winning because the hare is lazy and overconfident, the tortoise wins by using its vast resources to buy itself a race car and hiring goons (ie, the government) to break the hare's legs before the race starts.
I find it rather handy, actually. When someone says something is "unbreakable", I can be reasonably certain that it's going to break catastrophically at the earliest possible opportunity. It makes life just that much more predictable.
Slashdot Mirror
This is absolutely false. I came to this planet after hearing an invitation from your "Voyager II" spacecraft to come here. I have learned a great deal about your culture and laws by taking the form of a girl's dead husband and driving across the country with her. I watched her very carefully, and picked up what I needed to know to survive on this planet.
From these experiences, I can tell you that the rules of traffic lights are very simple:
Red light stop, green light go, yellow light go very fast.
I think it even goes beyond that though, because the elementary school kids of today have parents that grew up in the video game era. Many of these parents certainly grew up playing video games and should know that video games are not as harmful as their parents thought they were. Many of them probably remember playing games like Oregon Trail, so they would know that games can be at least somewhat educational.
However, I think especially when you're dealing with young parents, they tend to not really know how to react to these sorts of things, so they by default fall back on what their parents thought.
Growing up in the '80s, most parents of that time felt that video games had absolutely no value, and their use for any purpose was to be actively discouraged. While today's parents may not see games as pure evil, they are still harboring a lot of this latent fear of gaming that was hammered into them by their parents, even though they themselves played video games quite a lot and (probably) didn't end up as sociopaths.
I think people tend to be very over-conservative about these things when they are just starting out as parents, because they are terrified of doing anything that might "ruin" their kids. Sort of like how people keep the hand sanitizer around at all times with the first child, but by the time the third or fourth rolls around, they clean the pacifier by sticking it in their own mouths for half a second.
Sure, you spend the whole flight chatting up the "hot chick", and when the plane is getting ready to land, you tell her to meet you at the airport bar. You get there, and find the hairy 350 pound dude with sweat stains in the pits of his shirt that was giggling and shoving your seat forward the entire flight waiting there for you.
It could also be that the changes required to end up with an immune system like that are incredibly complex and may involve steps along the way that are not evolutionarily advantageous in most species, so the necessary sequence of evolutionary steps was not completed in most species. Or, it could just be that by random chance the mutations simply did not occur except in a few species, and did not stick for whatever reason in most cases where it did occur.
To say that there must be some tradeoff implies that evolution's purpose is to produce the most perfectly adapted organism possible, when in fact evolution has no purpose at all. It is a series of mutations that tend to produce organisms that are well adapted, but certainly not perfectly adapted in most cases, to the particular environment they find themselves in.
Or, it might turn out that the tradeoff is that you end up growing tough scaly skin that people like to make into boots and handbags, in which case I look forward to giving my wife a Gucci Human-skin bag in the near future.
What about the cost to build the electrical infrastructure to bring power to the ISP's servers? Or the taxpayer-subsidized telecom infrastructure that provides the bandwidth required to deliver the music to your PC?
Chuck Norris is SO 2007.
Just like the government wouldn't give the telecoms billions of dollars in subsidies to upgrade their networks and then allow them to continue to raise rates and delay those same upgrades while spending the money on, apparently, hookers and blow? Congress works for the lobbyists (including telecom lobbyists), not for the people. Same with the FCC, which has spend the last several years either rolling back or just ignoring various regulations intended to keep these companies from having too much power.
I bet if they just gave everyone $5 as an incentive to self report, you could get more accurate results at half the cost.
Ah, but the point of any new technology product is to allow "experts" to publish books about it. Most people believe that the technical publishing industry was created in order to provide support for new technologies, but in fact new technology is created in order to provide more topics on which to write books.
It's a little-known fact that the earliest versions of Unix actually included an incredibly intuitive interface that actually made it possible for 90 year old grandmothers to go from novice to kernel hacker in less than 5 minutes. However, a (very) young Tim O'Reilly convinced Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie to re-develop it, scrapping the previous interface in favor of a command line that was so cryptic that he could actually make millions of dollars just by publishing books about how to use it.
The guy was a marketroid who got payed to blog about stuff. I'm guessing the motivation is that his new company offered him a basketload of money to blog about something else, and he took it.
Man finds new job, quits old one. News at 11.
I thought Slashdot was pretty effective at stamping out good discussion for 8760+ hours per year.
One day without the usual "discussion" on Slashdot is not that big of a deal. You really should learn to relax and enjoy, or at least tolerate, it.
SCSI wasn't any fun anymore once they put in auto termination anyway. Long ago are the days when you couldn't get your SCSI disks to show up, no matter how you chained them or where you put the terminator. The only way to get it working was to cut yourself trying to connect the third drive for the 500th time and bleed all over the cables while swearing loudly. After that, everything would work just fine. You see, the dark lord will not allow SCSI to work without a blood sacrifice.
A broken space escalator would become a stairway to heaven, and if Led Zeppelin has taught us anything, it's that a Stairway to Heaven doesn't make any damn sense at all unless you're already so high you're practically in space already.
Wait a minute...objective opinion...that doesn't make any sense at all! I should lay off the cough syrup.
What's this article of which you speak? I was mostly just objecting to using the term "nanny state" when the stated intention is to present an objective opinion. Clearly, the term "nanny state" is too loaded to form the basis of a rational discussion.
A big part of parenting is teaching children how to function in society. The trick is to explain things to them at a time and in a way that they can understand given their emotional and mental development, and doing so in a way that resists transferring your own cynicism to them or that gives them more information than they're capable of processing at whatever age they are.
For example, telling children swear words are inappropriate because they are not polite and can offend people is okay, but telling them swear words are fine, but don't say them in front of stuffy old ladies because they might faint is probably not constructive. Likewise, trying to explain that swear words are okay in some situations but not others is going to be too difficult for a 5 year old to understand because they lack the fine tuned impulse control that (most) adults have, so a blanket ban on profanity is appropriate at that age.
Also, teaching 3 year olds the basics of why girls and boys have different parts is fine, but giving them an advanced anatomy course complete with graphic visual aids and a philosophical discussion regarding the different creation myths throughout history is probably not the best way to go about it.
It's easy to say "be brutally honest" before you have kids, but it gets a little more complicated once they're actually in front of you asking the questions. The last thing you want is for your kid's kindergarten teacher to call you in to ask you why little Johnny has been teaching advanced sex ed to his classmates (probably incorrectly, because he misinterpreted parts of your 3 hour anatomy course).
So yes, be as honest as possible with kids, but be prepared to make allowances for the underdeveloped state of their brains. Trying to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth will only cause mass confusion.
Starting off by calling it the "nanny state" is already trying to frame the debate in a way that reinforces particular biases.
No, we should not attempt to foam pad the entire world so the precious little ones don't get hurt, but that doesn't mean we should just toss them out in the woods and let them fend for themselves either. Certain safety regulations are required for the functioning of an advanced society, many of which are created at least in part to keep children safe (school zones, crosswalks, etc).
The debate should be about which regulations and safety precautions make sense, not about creating a false dichotomy by calling any regulation the imposition of a "nanny state".
He's not just sure, He's HIV positive.
Having said that, even though I make trips like this at least twice a year, I still don't have satellite radio, because I don't see the need. Even with my cheap factory installed car stereo with no auxiliary jacks, I can burn a few CDs from my MP3 collection to fill the hours when there are no decent radio stations. Maybe if I did that sort of traveling on a monthly basis or something. Regardless, I have a hard time seeing the appeal of paying a monthly fee for radio unless I'm a traveling salesman or something. Radio is not like TV, it's not something that people will generally listen to in their spare time. It's usually something people listen to when there are no other entertainment options, such as when they're driving.
Depends on what kind of engineering, I guess. A depressingly large number of my friends from electrical engineering ended up getting jobs that turned out to be more programming or IT work than actual engineering.
If you think being an engineering student sucks, wait until you graduate and have to actually get an engineering job!
I remember during my very first paying job as a sysadmin (1997-ish), I was tasked to set up a new mail server. For some reason, I decided as part of my testing to send email to an "invalid" remote address that I came up with off the top of my head (bob@bob.com I think it was, or maybe foo@foo.com or something like that). So, I wrote a script that just sent thousands of emails out at once to this address. Within maybe 20 minutes, I get an angry phone call from the domain owner telling me to stop spamming him.
I learned my lesson, though. Now I never put my real phone number in the whois record for my domains.
I don't think that fits in this case. The smaller companies are more nimble and can adapt faster. So, they are the hare. The large companies are still slow to change and can't get anything done quickly, so they are the tortoise. The only difference now is, rather than winning because the hare is lazy and overconfident, the tortoise wins by using its vast resources to buy itself a race car and hiring goons (ie, the government) to break the hare's legs before the race starts.
I find it rather handy, actually. When someone says something is "unbreakable", I can be reasonably certain that it's going to break catastrophically at the earliest possible opportunity. It makes life just that much more predictable.