It's been a while since I was in school, but you'd be asked to put the device away if you were using it during class. Outside of class (e.g. during lunch time) would be fine though. Something like this could be seen as a distraction in the US schools if it is not specifically geared for educational use. So, if you brought in your PDA, most teachers would assume that you were playing games or goofing off in general and ask you to put it away. After repeat offenses, the teacher would probably confiscate the device and return it to you at the end of the day.
My two youngest brothers-in-law are 13 and 14, and a few years ago their private school mandated students to use the Palm V. Teachers would beam their homework assignments to them using the IR port so that parents could be aware of their child's assignments. Apparently, you could do anything this amazingy with paper and a pen. Eventually, the PDAs fell out of favor with the teachers (who had demanded them), probably because going around beaming an assignment to 20 or 30 Palms one at a time was tedious or they just couldn't find a legitimate use for them in the classroom. Today's PDAs, with 802.11 and BlueTooth, should be able to do things like this much more efficiently, but I think it'll be a long time before anything like this sees large scale deployment in the US. Mostly, I think the screen size of PDAs is too small for reading long bodies of text (my experience with my Axim X50).
Back on topic, yes you would get in trouble for using PDAs during class in the US school system. For some reason, we ban anything that isn't a pencil, paper, or textbook. Students aren't allowed to wear hats, have cell phones, chew gum, eat, or drink during class. Those are just the restrictions that I can remember off the top of my head. However, some teachers were much more lax and allowed students to get away with some of these things (my 12th grade English Lit teacher for example allowed us to make coffee, tea, or hot chocolate in her classroom before class started).
The first regular episode of the new series is titled '33'. Every time the fleet, lead by the Galactica, makes a faster than light jump to get away from the Cylons, the Cylons show up 33 minutes later forcing another FTL jump. The episode deals with the extreme stress that this puts the crew under.
Or you could buy the Keyspan Express Remote listed on the Mac Mini's accessories page. The BlueTooth keyboard and mouse should also work, but is a less elegant solution for the end user.
It still seems like the biggest problems to this theory are drive size/speed and audio output capabilities (or lack thereof) of the Mac Mini.
everything I wanted to get from the service was AAC encrypted and locked and couldn't be converted to MP3
Sorry, this is just wrong. You can either burn to a CD-RW and then re-rip anything that you bought through iTMS, or you can use one of the DRM-unlocking utilities that have popped up since iTMS launched.
Why can't we just have regular old MP3's?... they're the only universal standard out there!
No, MP3 is NOT the only universal standard out there. I suggest you take a look at all of the formats that your "MP3 players" (I hate that term) are actually capable of playing.
they sell the iPod at a loss in order to get more iTunes subscribers
Seeing as how easy it is to play non-iTMS acquired music on the iPod (iTunes even helps with this), I doubt that Apple would make this argument. If you can point me to somewhere that they have, I'd appreciate the link.
protect iTunes by keeping iPod owners from buying from other sources
The majority of the music on my iPod didn't come from iTMS and was all legally acquired. The iTunes application made it easy for me to move my entire collection over to my iPod. The truth is that iPod owners can play media from numerous sources, and iTMS users can play media on numerous players.
For anyone who bothered to READ the specs for the iPod and agreement with iTMS, there should be no surprises here. Of course, I guess that expecting consumers to be informed is just too much to ask these days...
I still have my TI-82 and my HP 48G, both of which I still use. I got the 48G because I fell in love with RPN. I'd loan them one of them, but with their mind sets towards computers and computer-like tools, they'd probably just destroy them within a couple of days. They both got Palm Vs about 2 years ago (required by their school), and by the end of the first semester, they'd fallen out of favor with the teachers who'd demanded them and they broke them within a week.
Actually, I was amazed by the typewriter. I can't remeber the model typewriter we had, but it was an old, heavy, metal thing and not one of those fancy "word processors" that all of the other kids had. I learned to type on that thing, and was amazed at how it showed my exactly what I typed. Learning how it worked is probably what got me interested the field in general, and I was always trying to push how fast I could type. When I took a typing class in 9th grade, I started out typing faster than the teacher. I really took the class just to be in the room with the computers, and since I could finish the assignments early, I got to play around on the computers and do whatever I wanted.
Good advice! My 14 year old brother-in-law had a game a few weeks ago that required that you type at least 30 wpm to get past one puzzle, and he couldn't do it. I sat down and hit about 55 wpm for him without really trying. I still can't convince him that being an fast and efficient typist is important, but I guess he'll figure that out on his own in college.
My 14 year old brother-in-law is taking the 8th grade "computer literacy" course at his school right now, and it sucks. One of his homework assignments was to modify an MS Word file to change some text to bold and italics. First, they assume that everyone has MS Word, and then this is the best assignment that they can give eigth graders? And he goes to what counts as a good school around here...
This is just too true. My wife's two youngest brothers are 13 and 14. They love there XBox (and Halo 2), and got incredibly upset when I told them that it wasn't really that revolutionary. They really believed that Halo was the first FPS with online game play, so I showed them some great FPSes on the PC (Doom 1&2, Quake 1-3, HL, and Unreal). They couldn't believe that people had been playing online for years. Then I showed them mods and how to download and choose your own model and skin. I swear, they almost lost it. They immediately wanted me to show them how to make models and skins, which I'm not talented at. I tried to explain 3D modeling to them, but it didn't go over very well.
In general, they just want their computers to boot up and let them download all of the free music that they can find. They're not interested in learning how to make the computer to do what they want, just how to make it get the songs that they want.
I wish kids were as amazed by computers as I was at that age. My first programming experience was on my TI-82 calculator, where I wrote a couple of games and other programs. I had a C64, but at the time didn't have enough exposure to the computing world to understand what it was capable of. I really wish that I still had that old thing, as it was awesome and would be great to show to my brothers-in-law.
This argument has been done to death. If you copy a piece of artwork with a pencil, you're most likely not creating an EXACT replica. With digital media, it's trivial to produce copies that are indistinguishable from the original. And as for singing along with a song, as long as you're not recording yourself and distributing copies then you're not playing the same game, much less in the same ballpark, as the pirates these types of measures are intended to compensate for.
I support our digital freedoms as much as the next slashdot user, but I don't support digital piracy in any form. The music on my iPod is all from CDs and songs that I've obtained legally. However, if a tax like this were passed in the US, I think the implication would be that the government has accepted that piracy cannot be stopped and no effort to do so should be made. Of course, I doubt that the German equivalent of the RIAA and MPAA will start turning a blind eye to piracy just because of this tax. If this happens in the US, I'm sure the MPAA and RIAA will want to have their cake and eat it too.
Several legitimate companies are giving away other gifts; some more and less expensive than the iPod.
I got a free iPod from J&TCooper's site, tech4free.com. I've got a page of pictures of my iPod and links to sites that are legitimate on my site. There are some very intersted items that you can get, including PC parts (also from J&TCooper), game consoles, a PC, and a lot more.
Knoppix is amazingly useful as a resuce resource. I can't always carry everything that I'd like with me when I might encounter a computer in need of repair. With a Knoppix CD on hand I have a great set of tools that can help to diagnose and repair many problems.
Too true. I provide support for my wife's computers at my house, and my in-laws' computers at thiers. When I first started doing this for them, I layed down a simple rule: if any one of them doesn't make any effort to keep their computer free of virus and malware, then I'm not going to make it a priority to fix their computer. I installed anti-virus software on each machine, and showed them how to run it. I scheduled it to run nightly, and told them all to let me know if anything is found. They're also required to update their virus defs at least weekly. Next, I installed Firefox. Some sites won't work with anything other than IE, and I understand that. I simply asked that they use Firefox whenever possible. Finally, I showed them how to run Windows update manually, and require them to do this at least weekly as well.
Whenever I'm asked to fix any problem on one of these computers, I first check that everything has been kept up to date. If anything hasn't been, I get back to that computer once it's been updated by its owner. My point is that we cannot force users to do what's best for them, but the Slashdot crowd can use its technical knowledge as a bargaining tool to encourage people to be responsible users. This kind of attitude would never fly in a corporate setting, but it works well when providing family tech support, which is something I assume many Slashdotters do.
The bugs he describes have already been fixed in Windows.
Tight coupling of the web browser with the OS has been fixed? I don't seem to have gotten that update on my machines.
Windows (and it is in not unique in this) suffers from design flaws that cannot be fixed with patches. One obvious solution for these flaws would be for Microsoft, and other OS developers, to make an effor to redesign parts of their system which haven repeatedly proven to be easily compromised. Instead, MS continues to release versions of Windows with default settings that are dangerous to the average user. Microsoft is certainly not the only OS vendor guilty of this, but they are the most high profile and with their controlling share of the desktop market, are easiest to blame for the problems that arise because of infected computers and users who are unaware of how to protect themselves.
Tycho's post on Wednesday implied that there would at least be a 3rd episode. Also, I wasn't really convinced that Gabe was dead in the 2nd part of that story, so there was definately more that could've been done there.
Slashdot could conceivably get into legal trouble by mirroring everything that they link to. If the editors had to take the time to contact content owners before linking, it could significantly slow down the flow of stories on Slashdot. I'm guessing that in this instance, the editors contacted Gabe and Tycho or vice versa and made an agreement to do this.
According to Tycho's post today, the series will run until Dec. 27. So, you should be able to expect the series to run like this: Page 1 - 12/17 (Fri) Page 2 - 12/20 (Mon) Page 3 - 12/22 (Wed) Page 4 - 12/24 (Fri) Page 5 - 12/27 (Mon) The sad part is that they appear to have abandoned the Sony Style storyline, of which episode 3 should've been up today.
Robert Zubrin's works on the subject, The Case for Mars and Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization are also excellent looks at the subject. Zubrin talks a lot about the levels of civilization, and the timespan and resources that we need to achieve each. The major problem with goals like this is that humans are not used to thinking 10 years in advance, much less 10,000 year.
Slashdot Mirror
Why couldn't it be Dippin' Dots, the Ice Cream of the Future?
Try their lemon custard. It's awesome, though the store near me often doesn't have it in.
It's been a while since I was in school, but you'd be asked to put the device away if you were using it during class. Outside of class (e.g. during lunch time) would be fine though. Something like this could be seen as a distraction in the US schools if it is not specifically geared for educational use. So, if you brought in your PDA, most teachers would assume that you were playing games or goofing off in general and ask you to put it away. After repeat offenses, the teacher would probably confiscate the device and return it to you at the end of the day.
My two youngest brothers-in-law are 13 and 14, and a few years ago their private school mandated students to use the Palm V. Teachers would beam their homework assignments to them using the IR port so that parents could be aware of their child's assignments. Apparently, you could do anything this amazingy with paper and a pen. Eventually, the PDAs fell out of favor with the teachers (who had demanded them), probably because going around beaming an assignment to 20 or 30 Palms one at a time was tedious or they just couldn't find a legitimate use for them in the classroom. Today's PDAs, with 802.11 and BlueTooth, should be able to do things like this much more efficiently, but I think it'll be a long time before anything like this sees large scale deployment in the US. Mostly, I think the screen size of PDAs is too small for reading long bodies of text (my experience with my Axim X50).
Back on topic, yes you would get in trouble for using PDAs during class in the US school system. For some reason, we ban anything that isn't a pencil, paper, or textbook. Students aren't allowed to wear hats, have cell phones, chew gum, eat, or drink during class. Those are just the restrictions that I can remember off the top of my head. However, some teachers were much more lax and allowed students to get away with some of these things (my 12th grade English Lit teacher for example allowed us to make coffee, tea, or hot chocolate in her classroom before class started).
The first regular episode of the new series is titled '33'. Every time the fleet, lead by the Galactica, makes a faster than light jump to get away from the Cylons, the Cylons show up 33 minutes later forcing another FTL jump. The episode deals with the extreme stress that this puts the crew under.
Or you could buy the Keyspan Express Remote listed on the Mac Mini's accessories page. The BlueTooth keyboard and mouse should also work, but is a less elegant solution for the end user.
It still seems like the biggest problems to this theory are drive size/speed and audio output capabilities (or lack thereof) of the Mac Mini.
everything I wanted to get from the service was AAC encrypted and locked and couldn't be converted to MP3
... they're the only universal standard out there!
Sorry, this is just wrong. You can either burn to a CD-RW and then re-rip anything that you bought through iTMS, or you can use one of the DRM-unlocking utilities that have popped up since iTMS launched.
Why can't we just have regular old MP3's?
No, MP3 is NOT the only universal standard out there. I suggest you take a look at all of the formats that your "MP3 players" (I hate that term) are actually capable of playing.
they sell the iPod at a loss in order to get more iTunes subscribers
Seeing as how easy it is to play non-iTMS acquired music on the iPod (iTunes even helps with this), I doubt that Apple would make this argument. If you can point me to somewhere that they have, I'd appreciate the link.
protect iTunes by keeping iPod owners from buying from other sources
The majority of the music on my iPod didn't come from iTMS and was all legally acquired. The iTunes application made it easy for me to move my entire collection over to my iPod. The truth is that iPod owners can play media from numerous sources, and iTMS users can play media on numerous players.
For anyone who bothered to READ the specs for the iPod and agreement with iTMS, there should be no surprises here. Of course, I guess that expecting consumers to be informed is just too much to ask these days...
I still have my TI-82 and my HP 48G, both of which I still use. I got the 48G because I fell in love with RPN. I'd loan them one of them, but with their mind sets towards computers and computer-like tools, they'd probably just destroy them within a couple of days. They both got Palm Vs about 2 years ago (required by their school), and by the end of the first semester, they'd fallen out of favor with the teachers who'd demanded them and they broke them within a week.
Depends on the system and the user. Lots of modern systems show you a pretty graphic instead of useful POST information these days.
Also, I doubt that most normal users have any clue what speed their CPU is, much less how to interpret the information provided in the BIOS.
Actually, I was amazed by the typewriter. I can't remeber the model typewriter we had, but it was an old, heavy, metal thing and not one of those fancy "word processors" that all of the other kids had. I learned to type on that thing, and was amazed at how it showed my exactly what I typed. Learning how it worked is probably what got me interested the field in general, and I was always trying to push how fast I could type. When I took a typing class in 9th grade, I started out typing faster than the teacher. I really took the class just to be in the room with the computers, and since I could finish the assignments early, I got to play around on the computers and do whatever I wanted.
Good advice! My 14 year old brother-in-law had a game a few weeks ago that required that you type at least 30 wpm to get past one puzzle, and he couldn't do it. I sat down and hit about 55 wpm for him without really trying. I still can't convince him that being an fast and efficient typist is important, but I guess he'll figure that out on his own in college.
My 14 year old brother-in-law is taking the 8th grade "computer literacy" course at his school right now, and it sucks. One of his homework assignments was to modify an MS Word file to change some text to bold and italics. First, they assume that everyone has MS Word, and then this is the best assignment that they can give eigth graders? And he goes to what counts as a good school around here...
This is just too true. My wife's two youngest brothers are 13 and 14. They love there XBox (and Halo 2), and got incredibly upset when I told them that it wasn't really that revolutionary. They really believed that Halo was the first FPS with online game play, so I showed them some great FPSes on the PC (Doom 1&2, Quake 1-3, HL, and Unreal). They couldn't believe that people had been playing online for years. Then I showed them mods and how to download and choose your own model and skin. I swear, they almost lost it. They immediately wanted me to show them how to make models and skins, which I'm not talented at. I tried to explain 3D modeling to them, but it didn't go over very well.
In general, they just want their computers to boot up and let them download all of the free music that they can find. They're not interested in learning how to make the computer to do what they want, just how to make it get the songs that they want.
I wish kids were as amazed by computers as I was at that age. My first programming experience was on my TI-82 calculator, where I wrote a couple of games and other programs. I had a C64, but at the time didn't have enough exposure to the computing world to understand what it was capable of. I really wish that I still had that old thing, as it was awesome and would be great to show to my brothers-in-law.
But you do say that an mp3 version of a song is the same, but there is loss in quality there also.
Just to nitpick, I never said anything about MP3s. The iPod supports several audio formats, including Apple Lossless.
This argument has been done to death. If you copy a piece of artwork with a pencil, you're most likely not creating an EXACT replica. With digital media, it's trivial to produce copies that are indistinguishable from the original. And as for singing along with a song, as long as you're not recording yourself and distributing copies then you're not playing the same game, much less in the same ballpark, as the pirates these types of measures are intended to compensate for.
I support our digital freedoms as much as the next slashdot user, but I don't support digital piracy in any form. The music on my iPod is all from CDs and songs that I've obtained legally. However, if a tax like this were passed in the US, I think the implication would be that the government has accepted that piracy cannot be stopped and no effort to do so should be made. Of course, I doubt that the German equivalent of the RIAA and MPAA will start turning a blind eye to piracy just because of this tax. If this happens in the US, I'm sure the MPAA and RIAA will want to have their cake and eat it too.
You can change your preferences to not display sigs in Slashdot comments right here.
Upfront: This post is to help me get free stuff.
Several legitimate companies are giving away other gifts; some more and less expensive than the iPod.
I got a free iPod from J&TCooper's site, tech4free.com. I've got a page of pictures of my iPod and links to sites that are legitimate on my site. There are some very intersted items that you can get, including PC parts (also from J&TCooper), game consoles, a PC, and a lot more.
Knoppix is amazingly useful as a resuce resource. I can't always carry everything that I'd like with me when I might encounter a computer in need of repair. With a Knoppix CD on hand I have a great set of tools that can help to diagnose and repair many problems.
Too true. I provide support for my wife's computers at my house, and my in-laws' computers at thiers. When I first started doing this for them, I layed down a simple rule: if any one of them doesn't make any effort to keep their computer free of virus and malware, then I'm not going to make it a priority to fix their computer. I installed anti-virus software on each machine, and showed them how to run it. I scheduled it to run nightly, and told them all to let me know if anything is found. They're also required to update their virus defs at least weekly. Next, I installed Firefox. Some sites won't work with anything other than IE, and I understand that. I simply asked that they use Firefox whenever possible. Finally, I showed them how to run Windows update manually, and require them to do this at least weekly as well.
Whenever I'm asked to fix any problem on one of these computers, I first check that everything has been kept up to date. If anything hasn't been, I get back to that computer once it's been updated by its owner. My point is that we cannot force users to do what's best for them, but the Slashdot crowd can use its technical knowledge as a bargaining tool to encourage people to be responsible users. This kind of attitude would never fly in a corporate setting, but it works well when providing family tech support, which is something I assume many Slashdotters do.
The bugs he describes have already been fixed in Windows.
Tight coupling of the web browser with the OS has been fixed? I don't seem to have gotten that update on my machines.
Windows (and it is in not unique in this) suffers from design flaws that cannot be fixed with patches. One obvious solution for these flaws would be for Microsoft, and other OS developers, to make an effor to redesign parts of their system which haven repeatedly proven to be easily compromised. Instead, MS continues to release versions of Windows with default settings that are dangerous to the average user. Microsoft is certainly not the only OS vendor guilty of this, but they are the most high profile and with their controlling share of the desktop market, are easiest to blame for the problems that arise because of infected computers and users who are unaware of how to protect themselves.
Tycho's post on Wednesday implied that there would at least be a 3rd episode. Also, I wasn't really convinced that Gabe was dead in the 2nd part of that story, so there was definately more that could've been done there.
In Soviet Russia, Slashdot slashdots Slashdot!
Slashdot could conceivably get into legal trouble by mirroring everything that they link to. If the editors had to take the time to contact content owners before linking, it could significantly slow down the flow of stories on Slashdot. I'm guessing that in this instance, the editors contacted Gabe and Tycho or vice versa and made an agreement to do this.
According to Tycho's post today, the series will run until Dec. 27. So, you should be able to expect the series to run like this:
Page 1 - 12/17 (Fri)
Page 2 - 12/20 (Mon)
Page 3 - 12/22 (Wed)
Page 4 - 12/24 (Fri)
Page 5 - 12/27 (Mon)
The sad part is that they appear to have abandoned the Sony Style storyline, of which episode 3 should've been up today.
Robert Zubrin's works on the subject, The Case for Mars and Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization are also excellent looks at the subject. Zubrin talks a lot about the levels of civilization, and the timespan and resources that we need to achieve each. The major problem with goals like this is that humans are not used to thinking 10 years in advance, much less 10,000 year.