I think *assuming* this will be true is indeed taking it too far, thanks to the factors you cite. But one can *encourage* it to be true, by molding kids' tastes -- AND *more importantly* their sense of being responsible for their own decisions, thus not as ready to bow to peer pressure (ie. letting the group make your decisions for you).
I think the original point was that since people Way Back When had no choice but to "grow up fast", they did so, and that included taking on what seem to us moderns to be the responsibilities of someone in their middle years.
In our Modern Times, there's no particular need for kids to "grow up fast" -- so (exacerbated by increasingly insular nannying) they don't.
Despite being tied to increased longevity, I'm not sure this is such a good thing, as the longer kids don't HAVE to take responsibility for their own lives, the more they get in the habit of being nannied, and that may in itself be a major contributor to the current political climate.
BTW, me and my Norse ancestors love your tagline:D
The parent poster's point was that kids (especially pre-teens) tend to eat what they're in the habit of eating, and will continue that even when away from home, because it tastes familiar and therefore good.
So... make your home eating habits good, and make those habits EASY for the kid to keep... and they're more likely to maintain a taste for healthier foods when away from home.
And their healthy-tastes are just as likely to be the peer pressure which the non-healthy-eating kids bow to, as the reverse.
The reason for that is obvious: the age of obesity (the principle cause of type-2 diabetes) has been creeping downward, until now it's rare to see a child in NORMAL weight.
When I was a kid (1960s), there was never more than one obese child in any school. In the 1980s, we started seeing a large proportion of late-teens who where chubby. By around 2000, most early-teens were chubby. Now, many grade-schoolers are morbidly obese (over 50% of their body mass is fat) -- and they're the norm, not the exception.
With even the most cursory observation of what's become the typical-weight child and teenager, that type-2 diabetes is appearing at earlier and earlier ages should come as no surprise. Remember that it's also called "obesity-related diabetes".
Upon RTFA'ing, I also had some doubts. They seem to be specifically studying extra-stressed populations (war and famine babies) rather than the average for a given era. Conclusion: starvation and disease in childhood increases the chance that you'll be unhealthy as an adult. Well, d'oh!
I also wondered about data like "in 18nn, NN percent of the population had heart disease". In that era, diagnoses were fairly crude, and often at best wild guesses. What would those people be diagnosed with (if anything) in the present, using modern techniques??
My ancestors and relatives that I know about from that era mostly lived into their 80s and 90s, in robust health. Hmm..... Maybe we're from another planet.:)
I'm wondering if that might be better countered by allowing each public session to use NN-many megs, and if the user wants to waste their quota on MySpace, that's their problem.
In California, that sort of tactic is routine, and the usual end result is that the worst slime gets elected, while the honest candidates have no way to counter such statements without coming off like they're endorsing the very evildoing they're being accused of supporting.
I've seen these tactics derail the best candidates over and over. It's so consistent here that as soon as I see such an ad, I start wondering which slimey opponent ran it. But most people just blindly latch onto 'em as "truth", because the tone is so "convincing" and most people don't really look beyond that.
In the mob mentality, "tabloid truth" trumps facts every time.
But for every point that could be made toward "Slashdot is educational!" a counterpoint exists in the form of a troll, and I think it's a fair bet that in the mindset of this law, the prevalence of trolls may well trump "educational".
I'm sure there must be some educational pages on MySpace too, just as there are on LiveJournal, DeviantArt, etc. -- but that's not the public *perception*. Nor would it be of Slashdot if they read it unfiltered, as a spotcheck for "quality" is liable to do.
In short, one of the ways this law and others like it go wrong, is that it assumes guilt and forces the site to prove its innocence. Which can be difficult if there exists even a hint of "wrongdoing".
In slashdotspeak, it's as if all such websites start with a score of -1, yet the public threshold is +3, so some kindly moderator has to mod them up out of the muck before most people will see them at all.
What most people don't realise is that Dolly Parton made most of her money as a *songwriter*, not as a singer. Sure, she was top of the C&W charts, and everyone knew her name -- but that's not where the money is; we all know how the RIAA cartel fleeces the artists! But if you own the song, whenever someone else uses it you get paid a fixed royalty no matter what, even before the RIAA takes their cut.
In simple terms, addiction isn't the *need* for something. It's the *inability to function without it*.
Which is why people can't just apply willpower.
And very often the addiction isn't really cured, but rather is replaced with another less-destructive addiction, such as the common scenario of the alcoholic who substitutes bible-thumping for booze.
Actually, many dogs do have some colour vision. The ability to see red, orange, and yellow is fairly common (anyone who trains retrievers for field trials soon discovers this). Less commonly, some dogs see green. I've encountered one dog that can see blue.
What you're talking about is the training of and *selection toward* people who CAN be trained to see and *identify* a threat at a distance. Some people can do it; others can't. Not everyone can become a fighter pilot!
I've noticed that the more prey-like a person's instincts are, the LESS likely they are to see, or even be capable of LEARNING to see, such stuff at a distance. It's like they only see what's right in front of them, and have a lot of trouble seeing beyond the first object their vision comes to.
Frex, watch how different personality types drive a car. The predators (the same people who make good fighter pilots) are always watching not only near but far objects, and will see a "threat" (problem on the road, change of traffic pattern, etc.) a LONG way off, often at the limit of the horizon. Conversely the prey types don't look further than one or two cars ahead, and everything beyond that comes as a surprise to them. And I've found they can't be taught to look further out, either.
See my other posts where I talk about predator vs prey reactions to threats like snakes.
As to eyesight being only for tools, as a professional dog trainer I can assure you that normal-sighted dogs have much better distance *and* detail vision than do normal-sighted humans. The notion that dogs are myopic predates the realisation that there is inherited blindness in dogs.
I think it's more a matter of whether you happened to inherit certain primitive genes or not.
My mom has always freaked at the sight of a snake -- jumps onto a chair and screams, exactly like some footage I once saw of an orangutan that saw a snake. Even details like the tone of voice and arm-pointing mannerism were identical.
I'm the opposite, I want to catch and mess with it. But I'm a predator/hunter by nature, and have no prey-like reactions at all. (Just like my dad.)
I have no fear of snakes. My instinct toward them is predatory; I naturally want to catch them. I've always had that reaction.
My mom reacts to the sight of a snake by leaping onto the nearest raised object and screaming at the top of her lungs. She's always had that reaction, from the first time she ever saw a snake.
I've seen film of an orangutan reacting to a snake that was so much like my mom it might as well have been her:)
That's the one time CSS does well for we users of dinosaur-browser -- if implemented *properly*, the page degrades to essentially plaintext, often much more what I had in mind for reading than the CSS'd view (frex, as Cringely's pages do). The one drawback being that all the navigation and images will be in one long stack, typically at the top of the page, with all the content at the bottom. But that is still easy enough to cope with as all the content is still there, and other than misplaced images, everything is generally in catalog order. Scrolling down a few screens won't kill me.:)
But bad CSS implementation, when "absent by browser", leaves the content variously mangled or not visible. In my observation the absolute worst thing you can do is *mix* tables and CSS to set layout positions. I see that done occasionally with pedigree charts -- which play nice as tables (and will generally degrade to text in decipherable stacks of data), but degrade to incomprehensible mush when CSS'd (or mixed format).
In my everyday browser, I disable both javascript and images, and it doesn't do flash either. Originally this was because I've always been stuck on such a slow connection (broadband is not available here) but I've come to prefer it that way.
I'm not alone -- I know people on broadband who also disable js and images, because they prefer to see the web as nearly plaintext as can be managed.
I think the common factor here is that we use the web for content, not for appearance. We don't care what it looks like so long as it's legible. Anything else is just a distraction, annoyance, or impediment.
Now, if your site is all about photography, naturally there'll be images that need loading. But when I have to wait for/fight with some slideshow app to see your work -- well, chances are I won't be back.
And in a slightly newer build of IE5, the bug was still there but affected different examples.
Aside from scratching my head over how such a bug got into the rendering engine in the first place, how the hell do you test for *content* affecting *tag behaviour*?? The possible interactions are infinite!!
Exactly so. If the site is intended for the USER to get some job done, don't inundate me with a bunch of pretty but useless crap. And DON'T assume I'm on broadband and "won't mind" being sent several megs worth of stock images (and worse, rigged so the browser won't cache anything -- I'm seeing that more and more often).
Now, if the site's only function is to flaunt your 1337 design sk1lz, hey, go for it. Just don't expect me to waste my time admiring it when all I want is to get some specific job done and get out of there.
One problem I often see is that when CSS is used to substitute for tables that used colspan and rowspan, when you view the page without the stylesheet (as is likely if you save it locally) the CSS'd version falls apart much more illegibly than does a tables-to-text conversion.
The "answer" is to "reinstall Windows"... often leading to forced reinstalls of everything else, sometimes data loss, and always a higher bill for fixing the system than would have been the case if you could just download the required Patch A or Utility X, using any working system you have available.
This nonsense is NOT the road to happy customers.
As you say, one does not always have the luxury of a *working* WGA-compliant OS and browser, particularly when dealing with random client setups.
Slashdot Mirror
I think *assuming* this will be true is indeed taking it too far, thanks to the factors you cite. But one can *encourage* it to be true, by molding kids' tastes -- AND *more importantly* their sense of being responsible for their own decisions, thus not as ready to bow to peer pressure (ie. letting the group make your decisions for you).
I think the original point was that since people Way Back When had no choice but to "grow up fast", they did so, and that included taking on what seem to us moderns to be the responsibilities of someone in their middle years.
:D
In our Modern Times, there's no particular need for kids to "grow up fast" -- so (exacerbated by increasingly insular nannying) they don't.
Despite being tied to increased longevity, I'm not sure this is such a good thing, as the longer kids don't HAVE to take responsibility for their own lives, the more they get in the habit of being nannied, and that may in itself be a major contributor to the current political climate.
BTW, me and my Norse ancestors love your tagline
The parent poster's point was that kids (especially pre-teens) tend to eat what they're in the habit of eating, and will continue that even when away from home, because it tastes familiar and therefore good.
... and they're more likely to maintain a taste for healthier foods when away from home.
So... make your home eating habits good, and make those habits EASY for the kid to keep
And their healthy-tastes are just as likely to be the peer pressure which the non-healthy-eating kids bow to, as the reverse.
The reason for that is obvious: the age of obesity (the principle cause of type-2 diabetes) has been creeping downward, until now it's rare to see a child in NORMAL weight.
When I was a kid (1960s), there was never more than one obese child in any school. In the 1980s, we started seeing a large proportion of late-teens who where chubby. By around 2000, most early-teens were chubby. Now, many grade-schoolers are morbidly obese (over 50% of their body mass is fat) -- and they're the norm, not the exception.
With even the most cursory observation of what's become the typical-weight child and teenager, that type-2 diabetes is appearing at earlier and earlier ages should come as no surprise. Remember that it's also called "obesity-related diabetes".
Upon RTFA'ing, I also had some doubts. They seem to be specifically studying extra-stressed populations (war and famine babies) rather than the average for a given era. Conclusion: starvation and disease in childhood increases the chance that you'll be unhealthy as an adult. Well, d'oh!
:)
I also wondered about data like "in 18nn, NN percent of the population had heart disease". In that era, diagnoses were fairly crude, and often at best wild guesses. What would those people be diagnosed with (if anything) in the present, using modern techniques??
My ancestors and relatives that I know about from that era mostly lived into their 80s and 90s, in robust health. Hmm..... Maybe we're from another planet.
Now that you mention it, I believe you're correct!!
I dunno... I mean, gods know what the internet has been eating. Do you really WANT to see what would come out at the colonics clinic??
And I also note how your sig seems eerily appropriate...
I'm wondering if that might be better countered by allowing each public session to use NN-many megs, and if the user wants to waste their quota on MySpace, that's their problem.
In California, that sort of tactic is routine, and the usual end result is that the worst slime gets elected, while the honest candidates have no way to counter such statements without coming off like they're endorsing the very evildoing they're being accused of supporting.
I've seen these tactics derail the best candidates over and over. It's so consistent here that as soon as I see such an ad, I start wondering which slimey opponent ran it. But most people just blindly latch onto 'em as "truth", because the tone is so "convincing" and most people don't really look beyond that.
In the mob mentality, "tabloid truth" trumps facts every time.
But for every point that could be made toward "Slashdot is educational!" a counterpoint exists in the form of a troll, and I think it's a fair bet that in the mindset of this law, the prevalence of trolls may well trump "educational".
I'm sure there must be some educational pages on MySpace too, just as there are on LiveJournal, DeviantArt, etc. -- but that's not the public *perception*. Nor would it be of Slashdot if they read it unfiltered, as a spotcheck for "quality" is liable to do.
In short, one of the ways this law and others like it go wrong, is that it assumes guilt and forces the site to prove its innocence. Which can be difficult if there exists even a hint of "wrongdoing".
In slashdotspeak, it's as if all such websites start with a score of -1, yet the public threshold is +3, so some kindly moderator has to mod them up out of the muck before most people will see them at all.
Oh, I see. They're going to give the internet a tubal ligation!!
I had the same thought. But my next thought was that it'll probably go like this:
Kazaa pays a token part of the settlement up front, keeps operating as usual, and goes gung-ho for anything that can make a buck.
The RIAA takes the lion's share of those future bucks.
What most people don't realise is that Dolly Parton made most of her money as a *songwriter*, not as a singer. Sure, she was top of the C&W charts, and everyone knew her name -- but that's not where the money is; we all know how the RIAA cartel fleeces the artists! But if you own the song, whenever someone else uses it you get paid a fixed royalty no matter what, even before the RIAA takes their cut.
In simple terms, addiction isn't the *need* for something. It's the *inability to function without it*.
Which is why people can't just apply willpower.
And very often the addiction isn't really cured, but rather is replaced with another less-destructive addiction, such as the common scenario of the alcoholic who substitutes bible-thumping for booze.
[puts on professional dog trainer hat]
Actually, many dogs do have some colour vision. The ability to see red, orange, and yellow is fairly common (anyone who trains retrievers for field trials soon discovers this). Less commonly, some dogs see green. I've encountered one dog that can see blue.
What you're talking about is the training of and *selection toward* people who CAN be trained to see and *identify* a threat at a distance. Some people can do it; others can't. Not everyone can become a fighter pilot!
I've noticed that the more prey-like a person's instincts are, the LESS likely they are to see, or even be capable of LEARNING to see, such stuff at a distance. It's like they only see what's right in front of them, and have a lot of trouble seeing beyond the first object their vision comes to.
Frex, watch how different personality types drive a car. The predators (the same people who make good fighter pilots) are always watching not only near but far objects, and will see a "threat" (problem on the road, change of traffic pattern, etc.) a LONG way off, often at the limit of the horizon. Conversely the prey types don't look further than one or two cars ahead, and everything beyond that comes as a surprise to them. And I've found they can't be taught to look further out, either.
See my other posts where I talk about predator vs prey reactions to threats like snakes.
As to eyesight being only for tools, as a professional dog trainer I can assure you that normal-sighted dogs have much better distance *and* detail vision than do normal-sighted humans. The notion that dogs are myopic predates the realisation that there is inherited blindness in dogs.
I think it's more a matter of whether you happened to inherit certain primitive genes or not.
My mom has always freaked at the sight of a snake -- jumps onto a chair and screams, exactly like some footage I once saw of an orangutan that saw a snake. Even details like the tone of voice and arm-pointing mannerism were identical.
I'm the opposite, I want to catch and mess with it. But I'm a predator/hunter by nature, and have no prey-like reactions at all. (Just like my dad.)
A study in contrasts:
:)
I have no fear of snakes. My instinct toward them is predatory; I naturally want to catch them. I've always had that reaction.
My mom reacts to the sight of a snake by leaping onto the nearest raised object and screaming at the top of her lungs. She's always had that reaction, from the first time she ever saw a snake.
I've seen film of an orangutan reacting to a snake that was so much like my mom it might as well have been her
That's the one time CSS does well for we users of dinosaur-browser -- if implemented *properly*, the page degrades to essentially plaintext, often much more what I had in mind for reading than the CSS'd view (frex, as Cringely's pages do). The one drawback being that all the navigation and images will be in one long stack, typically at the top of the page, with all the content at the bottom. But that is still easy enough to cope with as all the content is still there, and other than misplaced images, everything is generally in catalog order. Scrolling down a few screens won't kill me. :)
But bad CSS implementation, when "absent by browser", leaves the content variously mangled or not visible. In my observation the absolute worst thing you can do is *mix* tables and CSS to set layout positions. I see that done occasionally with pedigree charts -- which play nice as tables (and will generally degrade to text in decipherable stacks of data), but degrade to incomprehensible mush when CSS'd (or mixed format).
In my everyday browser, I disable both javascript and images, and it doesn't do flash either. Originally this was because I've always been stuck on such a slow connection (broadband is not available here) but I've come to prefer it that way.
I'm not alone -- I know people on broadband who also disable js and images, because they prefer to see the web as nearly plaintext as can be managed.
I think the common factor here is that we use the web for content, not for appearance. We don't care what it looks like so long as it's legible. Anything else is just a distraction, annoyance, or impediment.
Now, if your site is all about photography, naturally there'll be images that need loading. But when I have to wait for/fight with some slideshow app to see your work -- well, chances are I won't be back.
An example of a browser quirk that apparently depends on the CONTENT inside the tags, not the tags themselves:
l ebug/ie5_tableborder_bug.htm
l ebug/ammo_02_tablebug_comp2.gif
Description:
http://home.earthlink.net/~rividh/kennel/news/tab
Screenshot of the original issue: http://home.earthlink.net/~rividh/kennel/news/tab
And in a slightly newer build of IE5, the bug was still there but affected different examples.
Aside from scratching my head over how such a bug got into the rendering engine in the first place, how the hell do you test for *content* affecting *tag behaviour*?? The possible interactions are infinite!!
Exactly so. If the site is intended for the USER to get some job done, don't inundate me with a bunch of pretty but useless crap. And DON'T assume I'm on broadband and "won't mind" being sent several megs worth of stock images (and worse, rigged so the browser won't cache anything -- I'm seeing that more and more often).
Now, if the site's only function is to flaunt your 1337 design sk1lz, hey, go for it. Just don't expect me to waste my time admiring it when all I want is to get some specific job done and get out of there.
One problem I often see is that when CSS is used to substitute for tables that used colspan and rowspan, when you view the page without the stylesheet (as is likely if you save it locally) the CSS'd version falls apart much more illegibly than does a tables-to-text conversion.
The "answer" is to "reinstall Windows"... often leading to forced reinstalls of everything else, sometimes data loss, and always a higher bill for fixing the system than would have been the case if you could just download the required Patch A or Utility X, using any working system you have available.
This nonsense is NOT the road to happy customers.
As you say, one does not always have the luxury of a *working* WGA-compliant OS and browser, particularly when dealing with random client setups.