I think one could make a connection in a sense. How many people do you know who are simultaneously piano, cello, and trumpet virtuosos? None?
Learning anything requires time. Geeks are notorious for spending their time doing "geeky" things which are also notable because they generally fail to cultivate social skills (but do cultivate a different skillset, just like the music analogy).
While I don't necessarily disagree (there are activities which seem to do nothing (mindlessly playing solitaire for hours on end) as well as activities that can cultivate both facilties), I think you're being overly simplistic.
But lastly, I disagree with your cynical note at the end. All industry devotes much of its energy to profit for the same reason we devote much of our existance to eating and drinking. Children who have music lessons, for example, are shown to do better on standardized tests. Just because the music teachers may want to make a profit so they can maybe own a house or something silly, doesn't mean their efforts are insincere or useless.
The current generation of gamers views Final Fantasy the way many geeks view star wars. They played them when they were little and view with nostalgia everything about the past games giving the series no room to evolve.
Personally, I liked a lot of the games in different ways. I loved the skill system and difficulty of FF5. The freedom to choose characters in FF1 added diversity and replayability. FF6's system allowed both customizability and uniqueness to each character. FF8 had the worst ability system of almost any game I've played which is entirely what made it a bad game (the plot actually wasn't too bad).
Plot-wise, I thought FF4 fell flat on its face in many respects. The entire storyline was based on "We must find the last crystal" and then later finding out it wasn't really the last crystal after all through a contrived plot "twist". The plot of FFX (gather all the summons) was very similar in many respects (and I thought it too sucked).
Plot-wise FF7 or FF Tactics anyday. I want a good plotline with twists that can be a little confusing at times but provides the player with a clear direction as where to go next from a gameplay standpoint.
What would I like to see is a new Square RPG with an original ability system, an original plot, and original characters. I don't want them to become the Disney of RPGs and continue to make FFX-2 just like the Lion King 1 1/2 or Alladin 2. I want them to innovate. If they make another god-awful ability system like FF8, I'd actually rather have that than the recycled/very limiting (FF9).
I'm quite disturbed at the number of moronic bills that have been passed just this session.
First, they banned same sex couples from adopting children -- most sinister is allowing the state to monitor the activities of foster parents to make sure they're straight.
Second, they've banned "sexy cheerleading". Yes, that right. They took time out of their legislative session to vote on a bill banning public high schools from cheers and outfits people might consider appropriate.
You can learn a lot about your own state sometime just by watching the Daily Show.
Google says light travels: 299 792 458 m/s == 299 792 km/s The earth's circumference is 40 076 km (we're not stringing fiber through the center of the earth so diameter would be incorrect). If I remember correctly, current networking hardware can do maybe.7 the speed of light.
So let's do some math. 40k km / (300k km *.7) ==.190 seconds.
So a ping of 190 before we even get started on network protocols if you live across the world. Even at the speed of light, we're still going over 100 milliseconds.
I know this is a publicity stunt, but can't we at least acknowledge the role of physics in making a game playable? (For a FPS competition, even a ping of 100 milliseconds would be unacceptable).
Apple already uses x86 chips. If one looks inside their airport, it's powered by an AMD 486. As AMD moves toward a higher end market, I think it'd make sense for Apple to use low-end Intel chips for some of their products.
...was not that Leia knew about her mother in Episode 6. If one actually reads the dialogue, he says the following: LUKE: Leia... do you remember your mother? Your real mother? LEIA: Just a little bit. She died when I was very young. LUKE: What do you remember? LEIA: Just...images, really. Feelings. LUKE: Tell me. LEIA: She was very beautiful. Kind, but...sad.
So, let's see. Very young. Check. Can't remember words or anything specific. Check. However Obi-wan's dialogue is a bit more problematic: OBI-WAN: When your father left, he didn't know your mother was pregnant. Your mother and I knew he would find out eventually, but we wanted to keep you both as safe as possible, for as long as possible. So I took you to live with my brother Owen on Tatooine... and your mother took Leia to live as the daughter of Senator Organa, on Alderaan.
Where to begin? How about Anakin knowing very early on and oh how about that bit about Leia taking Leia to Alderaan. Now THAT's a problem.
However, to look at this and see that as the overriding point of the trilogy is to miss the point: the one critical mistake that could've averted Anakin's fall and the empire's rise. He didn't use a condom. If Padme/Anakin had used proper birth control, Luke/Leia wouldn't have been born but more importantly Anakin would have lost his biggest motivation to go to the dark side.
So remember kids, for the sake of the galaxy, use proper contraception.
I happen to believe that morality means nothing when not imposed from within.
OK. Agreed.
Why not be able to have both unfettered school prayer AND legal drug use by adults?
We have legal school prayer. The only issue is whether an authority acting in government capacity can lead it or not. But of course, that's not "morality being imposed". That's only the government telling you how to pray. Completely different.
Isn't society better off when the individual is free and the government has a few defined tasks that it specializes on rather than becoming some monstrosity that has 50 bazillion departments that regulate everything from littering to education to the hair cut a toy poodle can have on sunday?
Where's the poodle part? Not aware of that. The government has evolved to be big. How would you know how large it should be? Oh that's right, you're making practical decisions based on idealogical principles! How silly of me! We don't need any evidence that it could work in a modern society! Count me in!
It was the will of most whites for much of our history to keep blacks down.
For the first ones, it really depends on how you define "most". In 1861 (over 100 years ago, thus further than over half our history ago), a man was elected president from a new party founded on the basis of abolishing slavery. He recieved most of the popular vote. Most of the founding fathers were against slavery in principle, but saw no way out of it (many freed their slaves after their death).
It was the will of most Germans to elect Hitler.
Hitler never got the majority of the popular vote so I fail to see how that's most. His high was somewhere around 1/3. In fact, if the laws written in the Weimar constitution were actually followed, Hitler would've never had vast sweeping powers. But Hitler decided he didn't need a big government making laws and abolished the government by fiat He could do it himself! I guess you and he do have something in common!
(As a caveat, disolving the representitive body in England caused a civil war a few hundred years ago. The Germans had no such response in the 1930's, so maybe I'll give you popular acquiescence, but no doubt caused by popular fear).
Seriously, I enjoy your principles, but where you go with it and how you derive it are simply ranting. If I want sensationalism, I'll watch Jerry Springer.
Hiring "unattractive" women doesn't necessarily mean anything. I mean, come on. Here's an idea. Hire actual geeks. Both men and women. A woman who can talk to me about the evolution of role-playing games is ten times more attractive to me than some test tube blonde with implants whose gaming knowledge extends to Ms. Pacman. Hell, she might even make me buy want to buy their game. Having a passionate developer manning (personing?) the booth would be even better.
Instead of beign an "anti" movement, they ought to be "for" something that is lacked by placing an emphasis on appearance. Otherwise, it's just a publicity stunt...like booth babes.
So I'm a programmer on PC. As such, I don't like changing dozens of lines of code before testing.
So my here's my silly/ignorant question: how do traditional console programmers test/debug code? Did the SMB3 crew do it the same way it's done today, and if not, how did they do it differently?
I see lots of pens and paper and a couple computers in the photos and a bit about how the graphics are explained but a lot of "how it's done" isn't really explained.
The current definition does not allow Genesis to be considered since it states only "natural" explainations can be used (no positing a super-natural creator).
I concur that the defense case sounds like a crock via the article, but that could just be the article. It's hard for me to believe that the entire jury could be that dumb.
The charge should be based on the fact that he decided to pilot the vehical whilst intoxicated and in so doing so caused the death.
I disagree with your first argument. Unlike most cases involving drunk driving where the victim had no choice in the matter, the victim willingly chose to ride with his obviously drunk friend. I think he knew the risks (and if he didn't because he was too drunk, what forbids the driver from using the same logic in his defense?)
Two guys are driving in a car. The passenger thinks it'd be cool to pull the parking brake and push down and the driver's foot (emulating the quick turn in GTA). This causes the car to skid out of control and crash into a tree, killing the passenger.
At least, that's the defense's story.
This has nothing to do with GTA. It's about two drunk guys doing stupid things while drunk and one getting killed.
According to various sources (like this one), Windows x64 is supposed to be free as in beer if you have 32 bit license. Wish I could find the link on the MS website.
If anyone wants further news about this, I found this to be interesting.
Basically, during the fall of one of the latter Chinese dynasties, protests against Japan were encouraged as the people had less faith in Confucianism and thus the emperor thought their anger against the Japanese could be used to rally national unity. In the same way, perhaps the current government's ideological grip is being lost as a communist economy is giving way to a much more open-market one and thus China again looks for a way to rally national unity.
Some could even argue that allowing for free forms of expression against the Japanese government could lessen desire for other, less desirable, open demonstrations (ala Tienaman Square).
Basically, his point is that users care about their data and running as root vs not offers no such protection. Michael's solution is to throw up his hands and give up such security completely. Why not, instead, embrace the root model to protect user data just as your system critical libraries are protected?
The ability to do so is already in the system: just create a different user. But I don't want to run Openoffice, etc al, as a different user.
In large coding projects, CVS/SVN/etc are used to maintain version integrity. Here's a thought: integrate svn or cvs into the GUI. When a user is asked to save a file, it prompts them for a password, they enter and voila (modify the APIs for Xwindows et al so that individual apps don't even need to know). Security. Additionally, since you're using version management, it's now possible to revert to previous version of documents -- hard drive space is so cheap nowadays compared ot file sizes (50KB for a spreadsheet) why not combine both technologies? The key is merely integrating the technologies into the GUI. Not that this is easy, but I see no reason why it's not useful (I have dozens of different versions of most everything lying around, just in case).
Essentially the entire comment thread has been Robertson bashing which is good -- since his conclusion is ultimately wrong -- but no one seems to want to offer up a solution to the one good point he makes.
Both XGI and VIA do budget GFX cards with subpar performance for anything 3D. They're doing this as a marketing ploy.
Numerous posters have noted "why doesn't nVidia/ATI do this since we have to buy the HW anyway?"
Since the drivers communicate with the low-level hardware, they reveal partially the design of the hardware and I would assume there's some clever optimizations as well. They're not worried about Joe Sixpack having the source. They're worried about another card company looking at the code and thus making drivers/cards with better performance.
While open source is great for many things, I'm perfectly comfortable with not editing my video driver source code. Why do we really need it? It's not like this is a webserver, a browser, or anything I'd want to try to improve.
I'd much rather have these companies keep their drivers closed-sourced and use some of their profits to fund OSDN or the EFF.
I'm using the current release of Redhat enterprise. I've managed to find dependency hell using every "modern distibution" from Mandrake and Redhat (Fedora and Enterprise) to Gentoo and Debian. While some installs work just fine, the nasty ones are nearly impossible to fix.
The windows installers by far and large "just work". It's not to say that I haven't ever had any problems, it's merely that the problems never result in program A requiring library Z version 1.1 and program B requiring library Z version 1.0. The problems are also generally solvable in less time and occur less frequently.
For the record, I spend about the same ammount of time in both OSes.
You're totally addressing the wrong part of the problem.
The guy's going to give the machines to the kids preconfigured. It doesn't matter how easy it is to install. What matters, is ease to maintain. I don't know what kind of 98 box you're using, but my old 98 boxes still work fine on the 'net and aren't owned.
Many people still pay professionals to install MS Office on their machines. I can't wait for someone to explain rpm -Uvh to them.
Man, I'm glad you told me that. I spent the better part of yesterday trying to figure out why a library required on GTK+ wouldn't compile on my redhat box. I now know I was dreaming!
Seriously though, I'll wade through that shit. You think an 8 year old would? Or even know where to look?
Computer's aren't monoliths; people want to install things and want them to work. They don't want something to not work after compiling from source (good luck on getting them to do that) and then doing research to discover the library they're missing, only to figure out it requires a newer version of another library, and then discover that the installer bombs while trying to rename a file (permission denied) despite running as root.
I work at a place where people develop on Unix. Not exactly n00bs. Yet, we almost all use either OSX or Windows at home. Why? While Linux is better at some things (like being a server), trying to install desktop software only to go through dependency and obscure problem hell is something we don't like to spend our free time doing. Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and Unix. It's just not designed as a desktop OS, even redhat admits as much.
If the kid gets a computer with Linux, he'll prolly get someone to put Windows on it (which Daddy/Mommy knows how to use) or just buy another computer. It's much better for Free Software and for kids to put polished OSS on a Windows box (like Open Office, Firefox, and Gimp).
I really hope Linux will get there someday. It's just that today isn't that day, and by pushing a unready product to an audience, you give it a bad reputation.
I say just increase the gas tax for non-trucks or delivery vehicles. Having more innefficient vehicles pay more is fairly natural since they tend to be heavier -> cause more road wear.
"With great power, comes great responsibility" -- Stan Lee
Power is always going to be proportional to risk. Users are fine with being able to send messages to people all over the world, make their own CDs, and read news/events from anyway in the world on their PC. It's a pretty damn powerful device.
The telephone gave people one of those abilities, and most people know how to deal with telemarketers. There's little difference between the worst telemarketers and phishing.
Most people know if their car is broken, to take it to a mechanic, but there's also just certain things they just shouldn't do. Like drive with the parking break on. Or drive on the left side of the road except in England/Japan/Australia/etc. Maybe, oh I dont' know, not opening e-mail attachments could be an analogue. Is taking your car to get a tune-up every once in a while really that much different than running Windows Update (or your OS's equivalent)?
The computer simply allows people to do more things more quickly than any other invention has in the 20th century (except possibly the car). With all this power, users must take responsibility for their actions, or at least know who to take stuff to when it goes wrong. A user with a trojan is like a person driving a car with bad brakes -- a danger to themselves and everyone around them.
As the technology becomes older, I think knowing these terms will become as common-place as their older equipmnt, but I think that'll take at least one generation for society to work out -- just as it did in the previous cases.
Slashdot Mirror
I think one could make a connection in a sense. How many people do you know who are simultaneously piano, cello, and trumpet virtuosos? None?
Learning anything requires time. Geeks are notorious for spending their time doing "geeky" things which are also notable because they generally fail to cultivate social skills (but do cultivate a different skillset, just like the music analogy).
While I don't necessarily disagree (there are activities which seem to do nothing (mindlessly playing solitaire for hours on end) as well as activities that can cultivate both facilties), I think you're being overly simplistic.
But lastly, I disagree with your cynical note at the end. All industry devotes much of its energy to profit for the same reason we devote much of our existance to eating and drinking. Children who have music lessons, for example, are shown to do better on standardized tests. Just because the music teachers may want to make a profit so they can maybe own a house or something silly, doesn't mean their efforts are insincere or useless.
I feel this horrible pain down all the diodes down my left side.
Brain the size of a planet....
The current generation of gamers views Final Fantasy the way many geeks view star wars. They played them when they were little and view with nostalgia everything about the past games giving the series no room to evolve.
Personally, I liked a lot of the games in different ways. I loved the skill system and difficulty of FF5. The freedom to choose characters in FF1 added diversity and replayability. FF6's system allowed both customizability and uniqueness to each character. FF8 had the worst ability system of almost any game I've played which is entirely what made it a bad game (the plot actually wasn't too bad).
Plot-wise, I thought FF4 fell flat on its face in many respects. The entire storyline was based on "We must find the last crystal" and then later finding out it wasn't really the last crystal after all through a contrived plot "twist". The plot of FFX (gather all the summons) was very similar in many respects (and I thought it too sucked).
Plot-wise FF7 or FF Tactics anyday. I want a good plotline with twists that can be a little confusing at times but provides the player with a clear direction as where to go next from a gameplay standpoint.
What would I like to see is a new Square RPG with an original ability system, an original plot, and original characters. I don't want them to become the Disney of RPGs and continue to make FFX-2 just like the Lion King 1 1/2 or Alladin 2. I want them to innovate. If they make another god-awful ability system like FF8, I'd actually rather have that than the recycled/very limiting (FF9).
Yeah, apparently I missed the part where it passed one house and died in the other.
I'm new to Texas so thanks for letting me in on the joke.
I'm quite disturbed at the number of moronic bills that have been passed just this session.
First, they banned same sex couples from adopting children -- most sinister is allowing the state to monitor the activities of foster parents to make sure they're straight.
Second, they've banned "sexy cheerleading". Yes, that right. They took time out of their legislative session to vote on a bill banning public high schools from cheers and outfits people might consider appropriate.
You can learn a lot about your own state sometime just by watching the Daily Show.
I know light travels very fast.
/s == 299 792 km /s .7 the speed of light.
.190 seconds.
Google says light travels:
299 792 458 m
The earth's circumference is 40 076 km (we're not stringing fiber through the center of the earth so diameter would be incorrect).
If I remember correctly, current networking hardware can do maybe
So let's do some math. 40k km / (300k km *.7) ==
So a ping of 190 before we even get started on network protocols if you live across the world. Even at the speed of light, we're still going over 100 milliseconds.
I know this is a publicity stunt, but can't we at least acknowledge the role of physics in making a game playable? (For a FPS competition, even a ping of 100 milliseconds would be unacceptable).
Apple already uses x86 chips. If one looks inside their airport, it's powered by an AMD 486. As AMD moves toward a higher end market, I think it'd make sense for Apple to use low-end Intel chips for some of their products.
...was not that Leia knew about her mother in Episode 6. If one actually reads the dialogue, he says the following:
LUKE: Leia... do you remember your mother? Your real mother?
LEIA: Just a little bit. She died when I was very young.
LUKE: What do you remember?
LEIA: Just...images, really. Feelings.
LUKE: Tell me.
LEIA: She was very beautiful. Kind, but...sad.
So, let's see. Very young. Check. Can't remember words or anything specific. Check. However Obi-wan's dialogue is a bit more problematic:
OBI-WAN: When your father left, he didn't know your mother was pregnant. Your mother and I knew he would find out eventually, but we wanted to keep you both as safe as possible, for as long as possible. So I took you to live with my brother Owen on Tatooine... and your mother took Leia to live as the daughter of Senator Organa, on Alderaan.
Where to begin? How about Anakin knowing very early on and oh how about that bit about Leia taking Leia to Alderaan. Now THAT's a problem.
However, to look at this and see that as the overriding point of the trilogy is to miss the point: the one critical mistake that could've averted Anakin's fall and the empire's rise. He didn't use a condom. If Padme/Anakin had used proper birth control, Luke/Leia wouldn't have been born but more importantly Anakin would have lost his biggest motivation to go to the dark side.
So remember kids, for the sake of the galaxy, use proper contraception.
I happen to believe that morality means nothing when not imposed from within.
OK. Agreed.
Why not be able to have both unfettered school prayer AND legal drug use by adults?
We have legal school prayer. The only issue is whether an authority acting in government capacity can lead it or not. But of course, that's not "morality being imposed". That's only the government telling you how to pray. Completely different.
Isn't society better off when the individual is free and the government has a few defined tasks that it specializes on rather than becoming some monstrosity that has 50 bazillion departments that regulate everything from littering to education to the hair cut a toy poodle can have on sunday?
Where's the poodle part? Not aware of that. The government has evolved to be big. How would you know how large it should be? Oh that's right, you're making practical decisions based on idealogical principles! How silly of me! We don't need any evidence that it could work in a modern society! Count me in!
It was the will of most whites for much of our history to keep blacks down.
For the first ones, it really depends on how you define "most". In 1861 (over 100 years ago, thus further than over half our history ago), a man was elected president from a new party founded on the basis of abolishing slavery. He recieved most of the popular vote. Most of the founding fathers were against slavery in principle, but saw no way out of it (many freed their slaves after their death).
It was the will of most Germans to elect Hitler.
Hitler never got the majority of the popular vote so I fail to see how that's most. His high was somewhere around 1/3. In fact, if the laws written in the Weimar constitution were actually followed, Hitler would've never had vast sweeping powers. But Hitler decided he didn't need a big government making laws and abolished the government by fiat He could do it himself! I guess you and he do have something in common!
(As a caveat, disolving the representitive body in England caused a civil war a few hundred years ago. The Germans had no such response in the 1930's, so maybe I'll give you popular acquiescence, but no doubt caused by popular fear).
Seriously, I enjoy your principles, but where you go with it and how you derive it are simply ranting. If I want sensationalism, I'll watch Jerry Springer.
Hiring "unattractive" women doesn't necessarily mean anything. I mean, come on. Here's an idea. Hire actual geeks. Both men and women. A woman who can talk to me about the evolution of role-playing games is ten times more attractive to me than some test tube blonde with implants whose gaming knowledge extends to Ms. Pacman. Hell, she might even make me buy want to buy their game. Having a passionate developer manning (personing?) the booth would be even better.
Instead of beign an "anti" movement, they ought to be "for" something that is lacked by placing an emphasis on appearance. Otherwise, it's just a publicity stunt...like booth babes.
So I'm a programmer on PC. As such, I don't like changing dozens of lines of code before testing.
So my here's my silly/ignorant question: how do traditional console programmers test/debug code? Did the SMB3 crew do it the same way it's done today, and if not, how did they do it differently?
I see lots of pens and paper and a couple computers in the photos and a bit about how the graphics are explained but a lot of "how it's done" isn't really explained.
The current definition does not allow Genesis to be considered since it states only "natural" explainations can be used (no positing a super-natural creator).
I concur that the defense case sounds like a crock via the article, but that could just be the article. It's hard for me to believe that the entire jury could be that dumb.
The charge should be based on the fact that he decided to pilot the vehical whilst intoxicated and in so doing so caused the death.
I disagree with your first argument. Unlike most cases involving drunk driving where the victim had no choice in the matter, the victim willingly chose to ride with his obviously drunk friend. I think he knew the risks (and if he didn't because he was too drunk, what forbids the driver from using the same logic in his defense?)
Two guys are driving in a car. The passenger thinks it'd be cool to pull the parking brake and push down and the driver's foot (emulating the quick turn in GTA). This causes the car to skid out of control and crash into a tree, killing the passenger.
At least, that's the defense's story.
This has nothing to do with GTA. It's about two drunk guys doing stupid things while drunk and one getting killed.
According to various sources (like this one), Windows x64 is supposed to be free as in beer if you have 32 bit license. Wish I could find the link on the MS website.
If anyone wants further news about this, I found this to be interesting.
Basically, during the fall of one of the latter Chinese dynasties, protests against Japan were encouraged as the people had less faith in Confucianism and thus the emperor thought their anger against the Japanese could be used to rally national unity. In the same way, perhaps the current government's ideological grip is being lost as a communist economy is giving way to a much more open-market one and thus China again looks for a way to rally national unity.
Some could even argue that allowing for free forms of expression against the Japanese government could lessen desire for other, less desirable, open demonstrations (ala Tienaman Square).
Basically, his point is that users care about their data and running as root vs not offers no such protection. Michael's solution is to throw up his hands and give up such security completely. Why not, instead, embrace the root model to protect user data just as your system critical libraries are protected?
The ability to do so is already in the system: just create a different user. But I don't want to run Openoffice, etc al, as a different user.
In large coding projects, CVS/SVN/etc are used to maintain version integrity. Here's a thought: integrate svn or cvs into the GUI. When a user is asked to save a file, it prompts them for a password, they enter and voila (modify the APIs for Xwindows et al so that individual apps don't even need to know). Security. Additionally, since you're using version management, it's now possible to revert to previous version of documents -- hard drive space is so cheap nowadays compared ot file sizes (50KB for a spreadsheet) why not combine both technologies? The key is merely integrating the technologies into the GUI. Not that this is easy, but I see no reason why it's not useful (I have dozens of different versions of most everything lying around, just in case).
Essentially the entire comment thread has been Robertson bashing which is good -- since his conclusion is ultimately wrong -- but no one seems to want to offer up a solution to the one good point he makes.
All this time I thought Buddweiser only sold water!
Both XGI and VIA do budget GFX cards with subpar performance for anything 3D. They're doing this as a marketing ploy.
Numerous posters have noted "why doesn't nVidia/ATI do this since we have to buy the HW anyway?"
Since the drivers communicate with the low-level hardware, they reveal partially the design of the hardware and I would assume there's some clever optimizations as well. They're not worried about Joe Sixpack having the source. They're worried about another card company looking at the code and thus making drivers/cards with better performance.
While open source is great for many things, I'm perfectly comfortable with not editing my video driver source code. Why do we really need it? It's not like this is a webserver, a browser, or anything I'd want to try to improve.
I'd much rather have these companies keep their drivers closed-sourced and use some of their profits to fund OSDN or the EFF.
I'm using the current release of Redhat enterprise. I've managed to find dependency hell using every "modern distibution" from Mandrake and Redhat (Fedora and Enterprise) to Gentoo and Debian. While some installs work just fine, the nasty ones are nearly impossible to fix.
The windows installers by far and large "just work". It's not to say that I haven't ever had any problems, it's merely that the problems never result in program A requiring library Z version 1.1 and program B requiring library Z version 1.0. The problems are also generally solvable in less time and occur less frequently.
For the record, I spend about the same ammount of time in both OSes.
You're totally addressing the wrong part of the problem.
The guy's going to give the machines to the kids preconfigured. It doesn't matter how easy it is to install. What matters, is ease to maintain. I don't know what kind of 98 box you're using, but my old 98 boxes still work fine on the 'net and aren't owned.
Many people still pay professionals to install MS Office on their machines. I can't wait for someone to explain rpm -Uvh to them.
Man, I'm glad you told me that. I spent the better part of yesterday trying to figure out why a library required on GTK+ wouldn't compile on my redhat box. I now know I was dreaming!
Seriously though, I'll wade through that shit. You think an 8 year old would? Or even know where to look?
Computer's aren't monoliths; people want to install things and want them to work. They don't want something to not work after compiling from source (good luck on getting them to do that) and then doing research to discover the library they're missing, only to figure out it requires a newer version of another library, and then discover that the installer bombs while trying to rename a file (permission denied) despite running as root.
I work at a place where people develop on Unix. Not exactly n00bs. Yet, we almost all use either OSX or Windows at home. Why? While Linux is better at some things (like being a server), trying to install desktop software only to go through dependency and obscure problem hell is something we don't like to spend our free time doing. Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and Unix. It's just not designed as a desktop OS, even redhat admits as much.
If the kid gets a computer with Linux, he'll prolly get someone to put Windows on it (which Daddy/Mommy knows how to use) or just buy another computer. It's much better for Free Software and for kids to put polished OSS on a Windows box (like Open Office, Firefox, and Gimp).
I really hope Linux will get there someday. It's just that today isn't that day, and by pushing a unready product to an audience, you give it a bad reputation.
I say just increase the gas tax for non-trucks or delivery vehicles. Having more innefficient vehicles pay more is fairly natural since they tend to be heavier -> cause more road wear.
"With great power, comes great responsibility" -- Stan Lee
Power is always going to be proportional to risk. Users are fine with being able to send messages to people all over the world, make their own CDs, and read news/events from anyway in the world on their PC. It's a pretty damn powerful device.
The telephone gave people one of those abilities, and most people know how to deal with telemarketers. There's little difference between the worst telemarketers and phishing.
Most people know if their car is broken, to take it to a mechanic, but there's also just certain things they just shouldn't do. Like drive with the parking break on. Or drive on the left side of the road except in England/Japan/Australia/etc. Maybe, oh I dont' know, not opening e-mail attachments could be an analogue. Is taking your car to get a tune-up every once in a while really that much different than running Windows Update (or your OS's equivalent)?
The computer simply allows people to do more things more quickly than any other invention has in the 20th century (except possibly the car). With all this power, users must take responsibility for their actions, or at least know who to take stuff to when it goes wrong. A user with a trojan is like a person driving a car with bad brakes -- a danger to themselves and everyone around them.
As the technology becomes older, I think knowing these terms will become as common-place as their older equipmnt, but I think that'll take at least one generation for society to work out -- just as it did in the previous cases.