"Is there any way to drive the culture out of the kids who are in school today?"
Perhaps one way to start attempting to address this would be to train teachers on how to recognize bullying, and to punish this type of behaviour heavily (suspensions etc.) (In no other section of society is physical and/or verbal abuse tolerated as much as it is in schools - this double-standard should be addressed.)
In my school kids would beat up defenseless kids literally right under the noses of teachers. It used to absolutely astound me how a teacher could stare right at stuff like this going on, and then stare right past it. Not once in all my years at school - despite kids with broken bones and stab wounds - did I ever see a single instance of this type of criminally violent behaviour going punished at all.
As far as I'm concerned, if you condone this type of criminally violent behaviour when it is the "jocks" victimizing the "nerds", then you can't at the same time condemn criminally violent behaviour like what these gunners carried out.
What people say isn't much of a problem. Heck, school would not have been nearly so bad if it was just verbal assault.
The real problem here is the day-in day-out physical assault that kids endure for years on end, that EVERYBODY in the system turns a blind eye to. Kids don't just tease each other relentlessly, as seems to be a common misconception - bullies/jocks/etc are literally beating up other kids - daily - and literally right underneath the noses of teachers etc. I remember a guy at our school whose hand was broken by being kicked, and another time when someone was stabbed with a knife. This was in an upper/middle class decent school in a decent area. Calling this SELF alienation is failing miserably to see what is happening here, and who are the real victims here.
"it has happened to everyone"
This is completely false, at least where I went to school - only a small minority of the students, maybe 2 or 3 percent, were beaten up, ridiculed, taunted, rejected etc day-in day-out for years. Such a tiny percentage is certainly not "everyone".
This whole thing reminded me of John Lennon's "Working Class Hero"..
As soon as you're born they make you feel small By giving you no time instead of it all Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all A working class hero is something to be
They hurt you at home and they hit you at school They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool Till you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules A working class hero is something to be
When they've tortured and scared you for 20 odd years Then they expect you to pick a career When you can't really function you're so full of fear A working class hero is something to be Keep you doped wit religion and sex and TV And you think you're so clever and classless and free But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see A working class hero is something to be
There's room at the top they are telling you still But first you must learn how to smile as you kill If you want to be like the folks on the hill
A working class hero is something to be If you want to be a hero just follow me If you want to be a hero well just follow me
What millions of adults just do not seem to get, is that for the kids attending high school, HIGH SCHOOL *IS* THE REAL WORLD. And just because it seems less serious in retrospect once you've been out of the hellhole for a few years, does NOT MAKE IT OK to dismiss the relentless torture as "kids stuff". That attitude can only make things worse - it's like saying to kids "hey your little problems at school are unimportant and meaningless, and you'll agree once you get into the real world".
How is a kid supposed to feel when you tell him his ENTIRE WORLD is some little meaningless thing that he will forget about? Is he supposed to feel better that every day of his life for the next five or ten years is going to a fiendish hell filled with torture, physical assault, anguish and hatred?
... or at least "university" as we call it, didn't teach me anything about free speech either. It did teach me quite a bit about Computer Science... and some physics... and some math... but free speech just wasn't in the syllabus.
"let us take steps to protect the freedom that we have been given"
I would make that, "let us take steps to protect the freedom that millions of people have laid down their lives over the course of history to give us"
And, of course, the usual reminder that there is NO evidence at all to suggest that the viewing of porn by minors is harmful. Perhaps people should reconsider why they think nudity is evil filthy offensive and shameful.
The main reason I don't like intel is that their chips are waaaay overpriced. Mainly because they have no competition.
The "buy AMD argument" doesn't really count - AMD provides competition in the low-end CPU market. Intel has NO competition in the high-end CPU market. (When I recently upgraded my computer I unfortunately needed a high-end CPU in the x86 market, so AMD was NOT an option.) Remember, these are fundamentally two different markets. People who need big-n-fast buy big-n-fast. People who don't, dont.
Look at intels pricing: Low-end cpu market, low prices, competition. High-end cpu market, very high prices, no competition. Coincidence? Hardly.
The price/performance ratio is MUCH lower in the low-end CPU's. But when you need fast, you gotta have your wallet sucked dry, so that Andy Grove and his executive chums can each get their 2 million $ bonuses this year, on top of their $400K salaries. (Sure, they deserve it, they're the successful ones, but that doesn't change the fact that they're overpriced.) $7 billion in the bank doesn't hurt either.
Trenchcoats and Parenting
on
Why Kids Kill
·
· Score: 1
"there weren't any obvious reasons in the family life why this would happen"
Thats the whole thing about this; the reasons aren't normally "obvious" in any sense.
Everyone thinks things like alcoholism, abuse etc, when they try think of "obvious" things that are wrong. But some problems are far more insiduous.
I grew up in a family with no "obvious" problems. From the outside, everything looks great - upper/middle class, happily married parents, relatively wealthy, intelligent family (everyone has degrees or post-grad degrees), all achievers etc. But I know the absolute hell of growing up with no support structure whatsoever and a horrible school life - despite the fact that there is nothing obviously wrong with my family. Some problems don't show on the surface. These kids probably just had no support structure, nobody they could talk to (that was actually approachable) that would understand their problems, and nobody that seemed to care. (As another example, Sylvia Plath also seemed to have a "perfect" life on the outside.)
Millions of kids are going through the same hell each day, and nobody seems to care.. "ah, kids problems, how cute, remember when we were kids, ha ha, we didn't know what real problems were yet". It is no surprise that some kids crack. Our society is failing miserably at raising kids.
Enlightenment->SoundBug?
on
Red Hat 6.0
·
· Score: 1
Sounds a little bit like MS DirectSound, kind of.
But why not just make it only hold the sound device when there are applications that actually want to use it? I.e. something like a reference count, which when it reaches 0, E releases the sound device. This way apps can still be written the "legacy" way.
I presume that since E plays sounds so often with its themes n stuff that the overhead of doing this would introduce too much latency on the sound playing... or would it?
Although this feature of E is nice, it bothers me that it somehow introduces a kind of "lock-in".. apps start getting written *for* it, and eventually I will need to install E to use those apps. Am I overly paranoid? Will apps (even binaries) *always* still support sound on a system without GNOME at all?
Enlightenment->SoundBug?
on
Red Hat 6.0
·
· Score: 1
Does E still have that bug where it seems to grab the sound device and nothing else can play sound? (It's been a long time since I looked at E, something like v 0.13, so excuse me if thats a dumb question.)
Ah well. Either way, doesn't really bother me. I'll play around a bit with the new stuff, then go back to icewm --- I "only" have 64MB RAM on my Linux box.
I must have given them my email address.. I don't remember doing it, I must have been smoking something bizarre when I did it.. but I entered my email address into some or other form on their website (I do NOT remember doing this, but I must have, because it was one of my email aliases I don't normally use.)
Anyway, I recently start getting these stupid emails about services that aren't even available where I live (Duh, Microsoft, can't you check the TLD?), like that Sidewalk stuff.
To be fair it gave me two ways to unsubscribe, and I sorta believed MS would really remove me from their lists (not their databases, but their lists).. so I tried going to their website to unregister. Only problem is, of all websites I've ever visited, microsoft.com is the only one that ALWAYS constantly gives me errors connecting. Not only that, it's damn slow... in the end I gave up trying to do that, I was getting nowhere.
So I did the "reply and put unsubscribe in the body of the email" thing. A week later I get another spam from them. So once again, I put 'unsubscribe' in the body of the email and replied again. So far I haven't gotten any new spam from them.
With the high costs of telecommunications down here in South Africa (partly because its 3rd world country and partly because telecomms is regulated/monopolised by the government) few schools can afford to be online at this stage. Most school websites here are hosted on other commercial/sponsored servers.
In fact, from what I can tell, only a relatively small percentage of schools here even have computers (maybe the top 5 to 15% ?), so I'm not entirely sure what they're going to install this stuff on, but it would definitely be a good idea if the government were to standardize on something right now. And since this country is so poor, it *shouldn't* be a Microsoft solution - we can't afford to get stuck in a massive upgrade cycle, constantly forking over more and more US$ to get "upgrades".
Lack of skills would also be a problem, although I'd be willing to do a bit of volunteer work myself. Nonetheless, kids are very fast learners. Teachers, on the other hand...
I'm sure this is a publicity stunt, but it doesn't seem like such a bad idea either. It does need *someone* to fund training/installation, and it only seems right that Mr Cowpland considers this.
BTW.. Linux/Corel may already by freely available here, but it isn't so easy to get hold of. Very few people have the bandwidth required to download Linux and WP. Not that many people have CD writers either. Don't count on stores to provide this stuff either - the local computer store here USED TO sell Linux, but about a year ago Microsoft "bought" ALL their shelf space somehow, so now Linux is nowhere to be seen there. All that remains is academia, and even they've gotten very stingy lately with bandwidth and so on.
It saddens me that there are so many people who are so ultra-sensitive and out of touch with reality that the mere sight of a word like "shit" or "damn" is enough to send them into a dizzying tizz, running off and crying on their pillow, running to the Supreme Court crying "make them stop please!".
It saddens me that there are people who believe that the human body, in its nude state, is something offensive. There are people who think genitals are offensive things that should be shamefully hidden away. There are people who think little girls should not be allowed to view the statue of David, presumably because they must not be allowed to know that men have penises.
Its sad that there are so many people who need to be protected from themselves. How do these people survive?
The government isn't saying "all drugs are bad".. they're saying "all drugs except the ones that heavily feed our economy such as nicotine and alcohol are bad".
The government isn't saying "all drugs are bad".. they're saying "all drugs except the ones that heavily feed our economy such as nicotine and alcohol are bad".
.. it is discovered that the majority of people DO in fact watch "friends", and most of the other tripe they push at us?
Do you really want TV schedules calculated by algorithms that analyze the viewing habits of the *general public*? Remember, we're talking about mostly people without University educations, and we're talking about millions of housewives who tune in to their favorite soapies every day. The networks will quickly discover (as if they haven't already) that serving anything vaguely intellectual is a waste of money, since it only covers a small percentage of the potential market.
As for this being used only for good, really, what's the chance? Can you name a single huge corporation that *wouldn't* jump at a chance like this to abuse this? I for one can't.
The article makes a glaring mistake. They make note of the statistical correlation between drug use - and then they incorrectly state that the drugs must have caused the depression.
This is a bogus inference, unfortunately the majority of the public is not well educated enough to spot it.
There IS a well-known, well-documented link between depression and drug abuse - but it's a classic "chicken and egg" situation - one can just as easily say that people who are already depressed are more likely to go out and take drugs, to feel better. No self-respecting scientist would claim that either case is true - nobody really knows. Man's knowledge of clinical depression, the most common mental illness (which affects up to 20% of people), is still horribly inadequate.
Anyone out there who may be interested in finding out a bit more about clinical depression may want to check out my homepage. (I'm a depressive myself, but I don't do drugs.)
It's not just that content providers choose codec's because corporations tend to trust other corporations - its worse - content providers often "choose" codec's because the corporation pushing a certain format PAYS them to (Microsoft, for example, setting up deals with major content providers to use their format).
Gosh.. it seems no matter *what* Rob posts on/., *someone* will come along and write "hey this is old news, I saw this down on --- ten years ago when I was a kid".
Some responses are getting predictable. I think Rob should write a Perl script that auto-responds to any new article that is posted, just to get some of the predictable responses over with.
He could have an "Old news..." script for articles. For polls, he could have a "There should be checkboxes" auto-message-writing script. In the pre-heavy-moderation days this could have solved several other problems, like "first post" and "meept".
Any other ideas for auto-responses?
PS I'm not lashing at out at this particular post about QuickTime, just making a general comment.. maybe it is old news (I don't think so though.. I remember there was a rumor a while back that Apple would do this, round about the time they released the new iMacs, or was it when they APSL'ed MacOS X, I can't remember.. but there wasn't any solid news about it.)
Everyone bitches and moans about proprietary codecs (including me).. but the people who put the work into writing those codecs have to eat too, and it seems they feel they have a right to make money from their efforts.
What I'm wondering is, since so many people are bitching about closed codecs, why don't we see any really good OPEN codecs? Surely one or two *decent* open codecs would be enough to put a slight dent in the closed-codec world? Where are the open codecs?
Until the opensource world produces some good alternatives, they shouldn't be complaining about the proprietary stuff.
I remember getting pissed off a few months ago because someone was passing around a petition at my university hostel to get some or other movie banned (because it portrayed Christ as gay or something like that.) I was horrified that "in this day and age" people still thought it was okay for one group of people to control what everyone may or may not look at.
I asked one of the guys who signed the petition, "do you believe in free speech", and he immediately answered "yes".. he did not even realise the inconsistency between his answer and his actions. That is disturbing.
I sometimes wonder how I would feel about it if someone put up a "linuxsux.com" website or something like that. (How would the slashdot people feel about such a site being closed down?) The fact is, other people have the right to say that Linux sucks, even if I don't like it. (It's probably only a matter of time before someone does put up such a site:)
Exchange rates taken into account, $10 is about the same as you'll pay for an average CD here.
Basically the cost of production/distribution is shrinking, in fact reaching an all-time low - yet the end-user cost remains the same, or goes up? Someone is making big bucks here.
Oh well.. consumers get ripped off because they WANT to get ripped off. If that wasn't the case, people would simply refuse to pay these bloated prices.. and yet people DO pay. As they say, 'its morally wrong for a sucker to keep his money'.
Same reason spam is on the rise, and not getting less.. because it WORKS.
It doesn't matter if you thought it was funny or not (I for one didn't think it was funny either). The fact is that other people did.
Whether or not *you* or *I* think something is funny or not, is NOT relevant when determining whether something should be censored or not. Is it "right" to censor things that *you* don't like but "wrong" to censor things that you approve of? Sorry, but that isn't free speech at all.
Slashdot Mirror
"Is there any way to drive the culture out of the kids who are in school today?"
Perhaps one way to start attempting to address this would be to train teachers on how to recognize bullying, and to punish this type of behaviour heavily (suspensions etc.) (In no other section of society is physical and/or verbal abuse tolerated as much as it is in schools - this double-standard should be addressed.)
In my school kids would beat up defenseless kids literally right under the noses of teachers. It used to absolutely astound me how a teacher could stare right at stuff like this going on, and then stare right past it. Not once in all my years at school - despite kids with broken bones and stab wounds - did I ever see a single instance of this type of criminally violent behaviour going punished at all.
As far as I'm concerned, if you condone this type of criminally violent behaviour when it is the "jocks" victimizing the "nerds", then you can't at the same time condemn criminally violent behaviour like what these gunners carried out.
"... don't worry about what people say"
What people say isn't much of a problem. Heck, school would not have been nearly so bad if it was just verbal assault.
The real problem here is the day-in day-out physical assault that kids endure for years on end, that EVERYBODY in the system turns a blind eye to. Kids don't just tease each other relentlessly, as seems to be a common misconception - bullies/jocks/etc are literally beating up other kids - daily - and literally right underneath the noses of teachers etc. I remember a guy at our school whose hand was broken by being kicked, and another time when someone was stabbed with a knife. This was in an upper/middle class decent school in a decent area. Calling this SELF alienation is failing miserably to see what is happening here, and who are the real victims here.
"it has happened to everyone"
This is completely false, at least where I went to school - only a small minority of the students, maybe 2 or 3 percent, were beaten up, ridiculed, taunted, rejected etc day-in day-out for years. Such a tiny percentage is certainly not "everyone".
This whole thing reminded me of John Lennon's "Working Class Hero" ..
As soon as you're born they make you feel small
By giving you no time instead of it all
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all
A working class hero is something to be
They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool
Till you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules
A working class hero is something to be
When they've tortured and scared you for 20 odd years
Then they expect you to pick a career
When you can't really function you're so full of fear
A working class hero is something to be
Keep you doped wit religion and sex and TV
And you think you're so clever and classless and free
But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see
A working class hero is something to be
There's room at the top they are telling you still
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill
If you want to be like the folks on the hill
A working class hero is something to be
If you want to be a hero just follow me
If you want to be a hero well just follow me
What millions of adults just do not seem to get, is that for the kids attending high school, HIGH SCHOOL *IS* THE REAL WORLD. And just because it seems less serious in retrospect once you've been out of the hellhole for a few years, does NOT MAKE IT OK to dismiss the relentless torture as "kids stuff". That attitude can only make things worse - it's like saying to kids "hey your little problems at school are unimportant and meaningless, and you'll agree once you get into the real world".
How is a kid supposed to feel when you tell him his ENTIRE WORLD is some little meaningless thing that he will forget about? Is he supposed to feel better that every day of his life for the next five or ten years is going to a fiendish hell filled with torture, physical assault, anguish and hatred?
... or at least "university" as we call it, didn't teach me anything about free speech either. It did teach me quite a bit about Computer Science ... and some physics ... and some math ... but free speech just wasn't in the syllabus.
"let us take steps to protect the freedom that we have been given"
I would make that, "let us take steps to protect the freedom that millions of people have laid down their lives over the course of history to give us"
And, of course, the usual reminder that there is NO evidence at all to suggest that the viewing of porn by minors is harmful. Perhaps people should reconsider why they think nudity is evil filthy offensive and shameful.
The main reason I don't like intel is that their chips are waaaay overpriced. Mainly because they have no competition.
The "buy AMD argument" doesn't really count - AMD provides competition in the low-end CPU market. Intel has NO competition in the high-end CPU market. (When I recently upgraded my computer I unfortunately needed a high-end CPU in the x86 market, so AMD was NOT an option.) Remember, these are fundamentally two different markets. People who need big-n-fast buy big-n-fast. People who don't, dont.
Look at intels pricing: Low-end cpu market, low prices, competition. High-end cpu market, very high prices, no competition. Coincidence? Hardly.
The price/performance ratio is MUCH lower in the low-end CPU's. But when you need fast, you gotta have your wallet sucked dry, so that Andy Grove and his executive chums can each get their 2 million $ bonuses this year, on top of their $400K salaries. (Sure, they deserve it, they're the successful ones, but that doesn't change the fact that they're overpriced.) $7 billion in the bank doesn't hurt either.
"there weren't any obvious reasons in the family life why this would happen"
Thats the whole thing about this; the reasons aren't normally "obvious" in any sense.
Everyone thinks things like alcoholism, abuse etc, when they try think of "obvious" things that are wrong. But some problems are far more insiduous.
I grew up in a family with no "obvious" problems. From the outside, everything looks great - upper/middle class, happily married parents, relatively wealthy, intelligent family (everyone has degrees or post-grad degrees), all achievers etc. But I know the absolute hell of growing up with no support structure whatsoever and a horrible school life - despite the fact that there is nothing obviously wrong with my family. Some problems don't show on the surface. These kids probably just had no support structure, nobody they could talk to (that was actually approachable) that would understand their problems, and nobody that seemed to care. (As another example, Sylvia Plath also seemed to have a "perfect" life on the outside.)
Millions of kids are going through the same hell each day, and nobody seems to care .. "ah, kids problems, how cute, remember when we were kids, ha ha, we didn't know what real problems were yet". It is no surprise that some kids crack. Our society is failing miserably at raising kids.
Sounds a little bit like MS DirectSound, kind of.
... or would it?
.. apps start getting written *for* it, and eventually I will need to install E to use those apps. Am I overly paranoid? Will apps (even binaries) *always* still support sound on a system without GNOME at all?
But why not just make it only hold the sound device when there are applications that actually want to use it? I.e. something like a reference count, which when it reaches 0, E releases the sound device. This way apps can still be written the "legacy" way.
I presume that since E plays sounds so often with its themes n stuff that the overhead of doing this would introduce too much latency on the sound playing
Although this feature of E is nice, it bothers me that it somehow introduces a kind of "lock-in"
Does E still have that bug where it seems to grab the sound device and nothing else can play sound? (It's been a long time since I looked at E, something like v 0.13, so excuse me if thats a dumb question.)
Ah well. Either way, doesn't really bother me. I'll play around a bit with the new stuff, then go back to icewm --- I "only" have 64MB RAM on my Linux box.
I really have received spam from Microsoft.
.. I don't remember doing it, I must have been smoking something bizarre when I did it .. but I entered my email address into some or other form on their website (I do NOT remember doing this, but I must have, because it was one of my email aliases I don't normally use.)
.. so I tried going to their website to unregister. Only problem is, of all websites I've ever visited, microsoft.com is the only one that ALWAYS constantly gives me errors connecting. Not only that, it's damn slow ... in the end I gave up trying to do that, I was getting nowhere.
I must have given them my email address
Anyway, I recently start getting these stupid emails about services that aren't even available where I live (Duh, Microsoft, can't you check the TLD?), like that Sidewalk stuff.
To be fair it gave me two ways to unsubscribe, and I sorta believed MS would really remove me from their lists (not their databases, but their lists)
So I did the "reply and put unsubscribe in the body of the email" thing. A week later I get another spam from them. So once again, I put 'unsubscribe' in the body of the email and replied again. So far I haven't gotten any new spam from them.
With the high costs of telecommunications down here in South Africa (partly because its 3rd world country and partly because telecomms is regulated/monopolised by the government) few schools can afford to be online at this stage. Most school websites here are hosted on other commercial/sponsored servers.
...
.. Linux/Corel may already by freely available here, but it isn't so easy to get hold of. Very few people have the bandwidth required to download Linux and WP. Not that many people have CD writers either. Don't count on stores to provide this stuff either - the local computer store here USED TO sell Linux, but about a year ago Microsoft "bought" ALL their shelf space somehow, so now Linux is nowhere to be seen there. All that remains is academia, and even they've gotten very stingy lately with bandwidth and so on.
In fact, from what I can tell, only a relatively small percentage of schools here even have computers (maybe the top 5 to 15% ?), so I'm not entirely sure what they're going to install this stuff on, but it would definitely be a good idea if the government were to standardize on something right now. And since this country is so poor, it *shouldn't* be a Microsoft solution - we can't afford to get stuck in a massive upgrade cycle, constantly forking over more and more US$ to get "upgrades".
Lack of skills would also be a problem, although I'd be willing to do a bit of volunteer work myself. Nonetheless, kids are very fast learners. Teachers, on the other hand
I'm sure this is a publicity stunt, but it doesn't seem like such a bad idea either. It does need *someone* to fund training/installation, and it only seems right that Mr Cowpland considers this.
BTW
It saddens me that there are so many people who are so ultra-sensitive and out of touch with reality that the mere sight of a word like "shit" or "damn" is enough to send them into a dizzying tizz, running off and crying on their pillow, running to the Supreme Court crying "make them stop please!".
It saddens me that there are people who believe that the human body, in its nude state, is something offensive. There are people who think genitals are offensive things that should be shamefully hidden away. There are people who think little girls should not be allowed to view the statue of David, presumably because they must not be allowed to know that men have penises.
Its sad that there are so many people who need to be protected from themselves. How do these people survive?
The government isn't saying "all drugs are bad" .. they're saying "all drugs except the ones that heavily feed our economy such as nicotine and alcohol are bad".
Funny cartoon related to this at http://www.perkel.com/politics/issu es/smoke.htm. BTW, anyone here thinking of starting smoking, go read that page first. Some useful info there.
The government isn't saying "all drugs are bad" .. they're saying "all drugs except the ones that heavily feed our economy such as nicotine and alcohol are bad".
Funny cartoon related to this at http://www.perkel.com/politics/issu es/smoke.htm. BTW, anyone here thinking of starting smoking, go read that page first. Some useful info there.
Windows help attempts this, but it's basically useless.
Here is a sample of the general idea of Microsoft's implementation of this: (I made this one up, but its pretty close to the real ones)
MsgBox: There was an error printing to the printer
User clicks "help". A help box pops up.
HelpBox: Is the printer turned on? [yes/no]
User clicks "yes"
HelpBox: Is there paper in the printer? [yes/no]
User clicks "yes"
HelpBox: Oh, then I'm afraid I don't know what is wrong. Call a technician/microsoft-support/whatever.
User: AAAARGH!!!
.. it is discovered that the majority of people DO in fact watch "friends", and most of the other tripe they push at us?
Do you really want TV schedules calculated by algorithms that analyze the viewing habits of the *general public*? Remember, we're talking about mostly people without University educations, and we're talking about millions of housewives who tune in to their favorite soapies every day. The networks will quickly discover (as if they haven't already) that serving anything vaguely intellectual is a waste of money, since it only covers a small percentage of the potential market.
As for this being used only for good, really, what's the chance? Can you name a single huge corporation that *wouldn't* jump at a chance like this to abuse this? I for one can't.
The article makes a glaring mistake. They make note of the statistical correlation between drug use - and then they incorrectly state that the drugs must have caused the depression.
This is a bogus inference, unfortunately the majority of the public is not well educated enough to spot it.
There IS a well-known, well-documented link between depression and drug abuse - but it's a classic "chicken and egg" situation - one can just as easily say that people who are already depressed are more likely to go out and take drugs, to feel better. No self-respecting scientist would claim that either case is true - nobody really knows. Man's knowledge of clinical depression, the most common mental illness (which affects up to 20% of people), is still horribly inadequate.
Anyone out there who may be interested in finding out a bit more about clinical depression may want to check out my homepage. (I'm a depressive myself, but I don't do drugs.)
Sounds like the promised land to me! :)
.. wouldn't be too surprised if this gets moderated down ...
hehe
It's not just that content providers choose codec's because corporations tend to trust other corporations - its worse - content providers often "choose" codec's because the corporation pushing a certain format PAYS them to (Microsoft, for example, setting up deals with major content providers to use their format).
Gosh .. it seems no matter *what* Rob posts on /., *someone* will come along and write "hey this is old news, I saw this down on --- ten years ago when I was a kid".
..." script for articles. For polls, he could have a "There should be checkboxes" auto-message-writing script. In the pre-heavy-moderation days this could have solved several other problems, like "first post" and "meept".
.. maybe it is old news (I don't think so though .. I remember there was a rumor a while back that Apple would do this, round about the time they released the new iMacs, or was it when they APSL'ed MacOS X, I can't remember .. but there wasn't any solid news about it.)
Some responses are getting predictable. I think Rob should write a Perl script that auto-responds to any new article that is posted, just to get some of the predictable responses over with.
He could have an "Old news
Any other ideas for auto-responses?
PS I'm not lashing at out at this particular post about QuickTime, just making a general comment
Everyone bitches and moans about proprietary codecs (including me) .. but the people who put the work into writing those codecs have to eat too, and it seems they feel they have a right to make money from their efforts.
What I'm wondering is, since so many people are bitching about closed codecs, why don't we see any really good OPEN codecs? Surely one or two *decent* open codecs would be enough to put a slight dent in the closed-codec world? Where are the open codecs?
Until the opensource world produces some good alternatives, they shouldn't be complaining about the proprietary stuff.
I remember getting pissed off a few months ago because someone was passing around a petition at my university hostel to get some or other movie banned (because it portrayed Christ as gay or something like that.) I was horrified that "in this day and age" people still thought it was okay for one group of people to control what everyone may or may not look at.
.. he did not even realise the inconsistency between his answer and his actions. That is disturbing.
:)
I asked one of the guys who signed the petition, "do you believe in free speech", and he immediately answered "yes"
I sometimes wonder how I would feel about it if someone put up a "linuxsux.com" website or something like that. (How would the slashdot people feel about such a site being closed down?) The fact is, other people have the right to say that Linux sucks, even if I don't like it. (It's probably only a matter of time before someone does put up such a site
Exchange rates taken into account, $10 is about the same as you'll pay for an average CD here.
Basically the cost of production/distribution is shrinking, in fact reaching an all-time low - yet the end-user cost remains the same, or goes up? Someone is making big bucks here.
Oh well
Same reason spam is on the rise, and not getting less
It doesn't matter if you thought it was funny or not (I for one didn't think it was funny either). The fact is that other people did.
Whether or not *you* or *I* think something is funny or not, is NOT relevant when determining whether something should be censored or not. Is it "right" to censor things that *you* don't like but "wrong" to censor things that you approve of? Sorry, but that isn't free speech at all.