"Kids are too small and immature to understand what's best for them."
Sometimes. Not always.
Yes, they will make mistakes -- that's why the presence of understanding adult mentors is so important. However, assuming that you know more about what's best for a person (even a child) than that person does is at least 90% of the time an act of insufferable arrogance.
Too many parents want their kids to be something they are not. I have had fewer problems with my parents in this regard than most people, but I've still had problems. Kids need at least some freedom to make their own decisions, their own (dare I say it?) mistakes.
As for me, the biggest mistake and the most wasted time of my life was TRYING to fit in with my so-called peer group as a young teenager.
Now there's a thought, get him interested in something artistic and apprentice him to some nice Laurel...:)
OK, I'm being silly.
On a more serious note: I have never much cared for the notion that the "peer group" is or should be decided on the basis of chronological age. Yes, it's probably a good thing if he has a few friends reasonably close in age -- he needs time to be a kid too. But being able to socialize with adults, or with older and younger kids, is a more valuable skill once you get out into the workforce and not everyone is the same age as you.:P
Let him form friendships based on his own interests and hobbies. Make sure he finds some other than one narrow field of academics, yes, but don't tell him that he MUST socialize exclusively with people he has very little in common with, except when he's busy being a child prodigy. That's not fair to him.
My point is this: being in a healthy environment where you can express yourself and not dumb yourself down is wonderful, and being arrogant will always make people dislike you. But being surrounded by morons who are themselves arrogant and obnoxious and project their frustration and anger onto you is a hostile environment which fosters the kind of arrogance you refer to (it's hard when your self-esteem is constantly shot down not to hold on to the one thing you KNOW you have over everybody around you).
This is very important. Sometimes (and I work with people much like this) people actually become arrogant about their own lack of intelligence. It becomes something of a point of honor for them. I find this frightening.:)
And yes, being in that environment is incredibly frustrating. In general, being surrounded by people who don't share your own values is stressful, and tends to create one of two reactions: either an attempt to reject your own values for the sake of fitting in, or holding on to those values more strongly than ever, usually in an obnoxious way that makes everyone else dislike you. Or both reactions at once, and a nervous breakdown.
The best solution does seem to be to get out and find people who share your values, but that can be taken too far, and make you become narrow-minded. So there's no perfect answer. But at least there seem to be better ones than deliberately playing dumb!:)
You said that most, but not all, of what smart kids go through, they bring on themselves. That their problem is that they are arrogant and condescending and act like they are better than everyone else. That other people don't want to be around them because they are no fun.
You're working with a stereotype here more than the reality. I have a problem with this. When I was in school, there was a long period of time that I specifically went out of my way not to contribute to class discussions etc. because I didn't want to be seen as the stereotyped obnoxious brain. And it didn't help worth a damn. I had skipped a grade, so I was the youngest one in my class, and people knew how old I was. The kids I had trouble with were STILL only friendly when they wanted to copy my homework, and nasty to me when they figured out I wasn't going to let them.
I had, and have, friends. Real friends. They don't treat me this way, and they don't consider me an obnoxious overbearing bitch.:)
I overstated my case, yes, but your advice is dangerously close to "pretend you don't have a brain and everything will be fine." And there is FAR too much of that going on as it is, especially for girls. And yes, it did hit a nerve, and I should have tried to be a bit more objective. But I still consider it irresponsible to tell a smart kid who's having trouble dealing with the cruelty that s/he's surrounded by "it's all your fault! Hide your intelligence! Pretend you are exactly like everyone else! It's more important to be liked than to be right!"
Hell, I still deal with that at work. I went to my boss about a mathematical error that the person who was training me was telling me to make, after first pointing it out to the person who was training me and getting screamed at for my trouble. Once my boss understood what I was talking about, she said "well, this won't be a popular decision..." WHO CARES if it's "popular" or not? We get audited, we have to follow basic mathematical and accounting principles, they were not being followed in this case, and the manager is reluctant to fix a major mathematical error because it's UNPOPULAR to do things correctly?!
I think this is absurd. If that makes me arrogant, so be it. And yes, I've strayed off topic a bit, but the point is that I don't think it does any good to tell bright kids that they need to play dumb to fit in, because all it does is reinforce the stereotype that "smart = social outcast," and makes kids and adults ashamed of their own intelligence.
I was homeschooled for four years, and many of the local homeschoolers where what my mother and I nicknamed the "homeschooling anarchists." They were so very big on this "don't push the kid!" stuff that they just assumed my mother had pushed me to learn to read when I was two years old.
She didn't push. She got out of my way, mostly.
There were moments I wished to be a "normal" kid, but most of the time I realized that I was actually having more fun and enjoying life more than most of my so-called peer group, and I was learning a more important socialization skill -- to get along with people in other than my immediate age bracket.
Let the kid follow his own interests, whatever they may happen to be, as long as they don't involve something that is likely to do him physical harm or get him (or you) locked up with the key thrown away for the rest of his life. For that matter, we should be doing that with even non-"prodigy" children.:P
It's "usually" the smart kid's fault when he (or she) gets picked on? It was my fault that my high school French teacher couldn't control the class well enough to keep people from blatantly copying my tests, and the kids gave me trouble because I told them not to? It's my FAULT that I think academic dishonesty is inappropriate?! I think this is a good thing.
It's not a question of being a "ball hog" or having all the right answers. If someone asks me how I did on a test, am I supposed to lie for the sake of other people's self-esteem? Is that truly the message you want to be sending here?
Girls, in particular, have enough problems with being conditioned into believing that being intelligent is a negative thing. Bullshit comments like "smart kids who get picked on have only themselves to blame" make it worse.
Shall we then say that students of a different race deserve to be made fun of, that women who dare to walk alone at night or wear something more revealing than a nun's habit deserve to be treated as sex objects if not acutally threatened with rape, or that someone who has a physical or mental disability deserves to be harassed for it? And that objecting to this is "spoiling someone's fun"? Is this REALLY the message you want to send?
It's even worse here in Rochester. A certain major company HQed here that shall remain nameless has been known to lay off its workers and THEN hire them back as temps.
I'm currently working in a department that has two full-time and one part-time permanent staff members -- and ELEVEN temps, at least one of whom has been there for two years. At that point, the company needs to suck it up and admit that it needs to hire more staff.:P
I'm still here, still living in Rochester, and that time thing is kind of a pain in the neck. It'd be interesting to get an occasional gathering of the western NY slashdotters though.
SUNY Geneseo had a netnic or two, since so many of us were on The Far Side and ISCA BBS. But netnics just don't seem to be as big a deal anymore. I guess that's what happens when people get out of school and have to get a life.
That's exactly the sort of situation I worry about. I was homeschooled before it became a more visible option, and my family used to worry that someone was going to call social services, even though everything we were doing was legit and above-board.
My grandfather attended a Catholic school, and the nuns beat him for being left-handed. When he got married, he made my grandmother promise to send their kids to public school. At CCD class, Mom was told her parents didn't love her because they sent her to public school.
They also told her that the Devil dances on the altar at Protestant churches. My grandfather took Mom to a Protestant service to prove them wrong. *grin*
Heh. I was the dorky kid who got elected as (probably) a joke to the freshman class homecoming court representative. Then again, maybe people actually did like me. I could never be sure. The handful of loudmouthed assholes sort of outweighed the rest.
What precisely is the reason that her alleged casting of a hex resulted in suspension?
If she "cursed" the teacher, then any punishment she received should be in line with the sort of punishment a student would receive for swearing at a teacher in a more typical fashion.
If she threatened the teacher with physical harm in any normally understandable mundane sense, that should be dealt with appropriately. (Note, I don't say in a normal fashion... schools tend to overreact in some instances to "threats" that are meaningless.)
If she threatened the teacher with metaphysical harm and she received the sort of punishment usually associated with threats of physical harm, then whoever decided her punishment is (it could be logically concluded) expressing belief that she can DO whatever it is she said she could do.
If she was suspended for insulting the teacher and being Wiccan (or looking like she might be), that's REALLY lame.
It's just a pity he can't find anything better to do than pick over the bones of the victims of Columbine, at the same time branding any Slashdot reader as a "geek"... again, and again, and again, and again...
Yes, it's just a pity....
It's also just a pity that educational administrators, teachers of various levels, law enforcement officials, mental health "professionals" (and I use the term VERY loosely in this case), and of course the general public at large are perpetuating this horseshit. Again, and again, and again, and again.
It's just a pity that, even before Columbine brought everything to a head, the rules changed for the worse (IMHO), encroaching on what should have been a place where bright and offbeat kids could get AWAY from that garbage. And the rules keep getting stricter, and stricter, and stricter....
It's just a pity that those same bright and offbeat kids are deciding against becoming teachers now, so that they will never have to face an administration that forces them to turn on their own kind. It's a pity that even on Slashdot itself, the Hellmouth threads face so many flames. Anywhere less sympathetic, and we have to scream, and scream, and scream, and scream to be heard.
And of course this doesn't apply to every reader of Slashdot. I don't think there are very many stories that the entire readership think belong here.
*shrug*
If you don't want to see it, don't read it.
The head-blind are surrounding us everywhere else, so I'm not surprised to see it here.
Damn, I wish I had some moderator points right now.:)
Society's approach to chemicals is insane to say the least. The variant at my college was the counseling center throwing Zoloft at anyone who asked for drugs subsequent to a classmate of mine committing suicide by ODing on Zoloft. Irresponsible much?
My particular circle of friends at college ranged from those who never did any drugs whatsoever (including alcohol and tobacco, possibly including caffeine) for religious/moral or medical reasons, all the way to the guy who decided one day to take the shrooms he somehow forgot he had stashed in his desk. The users didn't do anything beyond politely asking if someone wished to partake with them, the non-users didn't preach about the evils of drugs, keys were taken away as appropriate, people followed the rules of whatever house they were in at the time, and it all worked just fine.
Legal adults ought to have the opportunity to make up their own damn minds about what they choose to ingest. They should also deal with the consequences should they harm someone else while under the influence. I'd also rather see impairment testing for drivers etc. than straight BAC and such -- I don't care if a driver is imparied from alcohol, illegal drugs, legal medication or lack of sleep. If said driver is impaired, said driver has no business behind a wheel.
1. Distance from concentrations of foreign language speakers. Since I live in New York, it would be fairly easy for me to drive to Quebec, but that's about it in terms of going someplace where the signs are all in another language (not counting the local alphabet-soup neighborhood). Contrast this with the much shorter distances between European countries.
2. Americans are damned arrogant and think the world should learn English to accommodate us, but we shouldn't need to do likewise. This is nothing new -- my mother was an exchange student in Belgium about 30 years ago when some of the other American students she traveled with walked into a post office and started loudly berating the man behind the counter because nobody there spoke English. Never mind that English isn't one of the two official languages of the country.
Rude. Very rude and arrogant. And the Internet seems to be making it worse, unfortunately.
Sure, plenty of less-developed countries have English as one of, if not the only, "official" language.
Does that mean that all or even a majority of the native population speaks it at all, let alone as a first language? Absolutely not!
(I wish I could find my sociolinguistics class notes *sigh*)
I do remember that in at least one case, English was designated the "official" language to keep a war from breaking out between speakers of the two main languages actually in use in the country in question.
The official language of Haiti is French. Do most Haitians speak standard French? No. Most Haitians speak a local creole that speakers of standard French would find difficult to comprehend.
Of course, given that these people don't generally have Internet access, they may not be seen as relevant to the discussion. I'm just pointing out that they exist in large numbers.
Of course, in the overall political scheme of things, if you look at what he was advocating at the time, Richard Nixon would be too far left to be electable in the current political climate.
If Al Gore was recognizably the same Al Gore who WROTE Earth in the Balance, then I would have to agree. I'd barely recognize him, myself -- he's been pandering to the center and center-right for the past eight years, and I for one am getting very nervous about continuing to support an increasingly non-progressive Democratic party just because they are marginally saner than the Republicans on social and environmental issues.
I am not terribly fond of the idea of 4 years of Shrub in office, but I'm beginning to wonder if there is any other way to get this message across.
It's a lose/lose proposition. I'm voting for Nader precisely because I don't like either one of the major party candidates.
One of the places I temped at let me go completely out of the blue (long story, not really relevant). I don't know if they bothered to tell the security guard I was gone or not.
If the thief is a former employee, a friendly security guard who knows the person might not have really thought about the person waltzing in.
This depends, of course, on how tight security was to begin with. When I worked in the vault of a bank, that certainly wouldn't have been an option -- the pass I used there had three levels of security coded into it to actually get me to my desk.
There is of course also the possibility that the thief is a current employee -- possibly even one of the security guards. Especially given how precisely targeted the whole things was.
The ethical problem here, as I see it, is the difference between choosing not to spend limited resources on obtaining something... and choosing to spend limited resources on deliberately blocking access to something.
Big difference, when acting as disseminators of information. NO library in existence currently could possibly hold every last bit of information out there. Some libraries specialize in certain sorts of collections, and many libraries spend a considerable amount of resources referring patrons to places that have what they don't.
Installing blocking software would be more like throwing out books that someone donated.
It's ILLEGAL. We can argue till the cows come home about whether it should be, but if kids are breaking the law in plain view on (and with!)library property, the library staff can get in trouble for contributing to delinquency.
There will doubtless be an outcry at that point for censorware, if not for outright removal of internet access from libraries, once the situation is made public. And that screws everyone.
Sort of like how, even if you think drugs should be legalized, standing outside the library where the legal smokers go, smoking a joint, is probably not the wisest move...
However, you certainly have raised a good point here. When there's potentially a situation that could result in someone getting information they shouldn't have or being able to pull a nasty "prank book order" or worse, then I think the company should take steps to minimize that possibility.
And it's a good idea to make sure whatever privacy buttons you want clicked GET clicked! Look for them first in the future.
First, there's the one that happened to me. For various reasons, my car is currently registered in my dad's name. I live in Rochester, NY; he lives in Rome (about a 2.5-hour drive away). One of my plates fell off of my car. I went to the DMV to turn in my other plate, and was told that I couldn't get new ones because the car was in his name. This, in a city heavily populated by college students who frequently have such arrangements with their parents. *grr* I have the same last name, I live here, and apparently even CALLING my dad for permission was not an acceptable option.
The one that my friend's going through is a bit more complex. He bought a used Firebird, got in an accident with it (not his fault), and bought a used van. He switched the car registration from the Firebird to the van, and eventually ended up selling the van and switching the registration back again. Apparently, his insurance company had no record of this, insured BOTH the Firebird and the van, and then cancelled his account for non-payment. Of course, since he was getting his mail at a PO box and had during this time cancelled it and filed a change-of-address (which the insurance co. claims they never received), he never got the bills -- even though all the REST of his mail is being forwarded just fine.
The insurance company won't reinstate him now, either. (Idiots.) He had no clue about any of this until he got a nasty notice from the DMV saying "You're driving without insurance -- either provide proof of insurance or turn your plates in within 10 days, or we're suspending your license."
Then, there's my little fight with the electric company. I came home a few weeks ago to a nasty notice on bright yellow paper taped to my door saying that my electric service was going to be turned off for nonpayment of about $850. I called and all I could get was "There must be some mistake, miss; our accounts show that you are paid in full." I called the public service commission (so-called) to complain, was told "this is the emergency number, you need to call complaints," and spent three days trying to call from work (where I share a phone with five other people) and getting stuck on hold for 10 minutes at a time and/or busy signals. All THEY could tell me when I finally got a human is "there must be some mistake." Yeah, and I want that in WRITING. *grrrr*
... pity the poor folks who have to deal with the information.:P
I'm currently working data-entry for a large health insurance program. One of my pet peeves is fast becoming parents who give their twin children cutesy near-identical names. One slip of the finger and....
And of course, it's all too easy to get into the flip side of the problem. I've lost count of how many times I've been denied credit cards because the credit bureaus evidently think I don't exist. I finally managed to get a $200 card with a $49 security deposit. *grrrr*
Slashdot Mirror
"Kids are too small and immature to understand what's best for them."
Sometimes. Not always.
Yes, they will make mistakes -- that's why the presence of understanding adult mentors is so important. However, assuming that you know more about what's best for a person (even a child) than that person does is at least 90% of the time an act of insufferable arrogance.
Too many parents want their kids to be something they are not. I have had fewer problems with my parents in this regard than most people, but I've still had problems. Kids need at least some freedom to make their own decisions, their own (dare I say it?) mistakes.
As for me, the biggest mistake and the most wasted time of my life was TRYING to fit in with my so-called peer group as a young teenager.
Now there's a thought, get him interested in something artistic and apprentice him to some nice Laurel...:)
OK, I'm being silly.
On a more serious note: I have never much cared for the notion that the "peer group" is or should be decided on the basis of chronological age. Yes, it's probably a good thing if he has a few friends reasonably close in age -- he needs time to be a kid too. But being able to socialize with adults, or with older and younger kids, is a more valuable skill once you get out into the workforce and not everyone is the same age as you.
Let him form friendships based on his own interests and hobbies. Make sure he finds some other than one narrow field of academics, yes, but don't tell him that he MUST socialize exclusively with people he has very little in common with, except when he's busy being a child prodigy. That's not fair to him.
This is very important. Sometimes (and I work with people much like this) people actually become arrogant about their own lack of intelligence. It becomes something of a point of honor for them. I find this frightening.
And yes, being in that environment is incredibly frustrating. In general, being surrounded by people who don't share your own values is stressful, and tends to create one of two reactions: either an attempt to reject your own values for the sake of fitting in, or holding on to those values more strongly than ever, usually in an obnoxious way that makes everyone else dislike you. Or both reactions at once, and a nervous breakdown.
The best solution does seem to be to get out and find people who share your values, but that can be taken too far, and make you become narrow-minded. So there's no perfect answer. But at least there seem to be better ones than deliberately playing dumb!
You said that most, but not all, of what smart kids go through, they bring on themselves. That their problem is that they are arrogant and condescending and act like they are better than everyone else. That other people don't want to be around them because they are no fun.
You're working with a stereotype here more than the reality. I have a problem with this. When I was in school, there was a long period of time that I specifically went out of my way not to contribute to class discussions etc. because I didn't want to be seen as the stereotyped obnoxious brain. And it didn't help worth a damn. I had skipped a grade, so I was the youngest one in my class, and people knew how old I was. The kids I had trouble with were STILL only friendly when they wanted to copy my homework, and nasty to me when they figured out I wasn't going to let them.
I had, and have, friends. Real friends. They don't treat me this way, and they don't consider me an obnoxious overbearing bitch.
I overstated my case, yes, but your advice is dangerously close to "pretend you don't have a brain and everything will be fine." And there is FAR too much of that going on as it is, especially for girls. And yes, it did hit a nerve, and I should have tried to be a bit more objective. But I still consider it irresponsible to tell a smart kid who's having trouble dealing with the cruelty that s/he's surrounded by "it's all your fault! Hide your intelligence! Pretend you are exactly like everyone else! It's more important to be liked than to be right!"
Hell, I still deal with that at work. I went to my boss about a mathematical error that the person who was training me was telling me to make, after first pointing it out to the person who was training me and getting screamed at for my trouble. Once my boss understood what I was talking about, she said "well, this won't be a popular decision..." WHO CARES if it's "popular" or not? We get audited, we have to follow basic mathematical and accounting principles, they were not being followed in this case, and the manager is reluctant to fix a major mathematical error because it's UNPOPULAR to do things correctly?!
I think this is absurd. If that makes me arrogant, so be it. And yes, I've strayed off topic a bit, but the point is that I don't think it does any good to tell bright kids that they need to play dumb to fit in, because all it does is reinforce the stereotype that "smart = social outcast," and makes kids and adults ashamed of their own intelligence.
I was homeschooled for four years, and many of the local homeschoolers where what my mother and I nicknamed the "homeschooling anarchists." They were so very big on this "don't push the kid!" stuff that they just assumed my mother had pushed me to learn to read when I was two years old.
She didn't push. She got out of my way, mostly.
There were moments I wished to be a "normal" kid, but most of the time I realized that I was actually having more fun and enjoying life more than most of my so-called peer group, and I was learning a more important socialization skill -- to get along with people in other than my immediate age bracket.
Let the kid follow his own interests, whatever they may happen to be, as long as they don't involve something that is likely to do him physical harm or get him (or you) locked up with the key thrown away for the rest of his life. For that matter, we should be doing that with even non-"prodigy" children.
Sorry, but I can't let this one slide.
It's "usually" the smart kid's fault when he (or she) gets picked on? It was my fault that my high school French teacher couldn't control the class well enough to keep people from blatantly copying my tests, and the kids gave me trouble because I told them not to? It's my FAULT that I think academic dishonesty is inappropriate?! I think this is a good thing.
It's not a question of being a "ball hog" or having all the right answers. If someone asks me how I did on a test, am I supposed to lie for the sake of other people's self-esteem? Is that truly the message you want to be sending here?
Girls, in particular, have enough problems with being conditioned into believing that being intelligent is a negative thing. Bullshit comments like "smart kids who get picked on have only themselves to blame" make it worse.
Shall we then say that students of a different race deserve to be made fun of, that women who dare to walk alone at night or wear something more revealing than a nun's habit deserve to be treated as sex objects if not acutally threatened with rape, or that someone who has a physical or mental disability deserves to be harassed for it? And that objecting to this is "spoiling someone's fun"? Is this REALLY the message you want to send?
Think about it.
It's even worse here in Rochester. A certain major company HQed here that shall remain nameless has been known to lay off its workers and THEN hire them back as temps.
:P
I'm currently working in a department that has two full-time and one part-time permanent staff members -- and ELEVEN temps, at least one of whom has been there for two years. At that point, the company needs to suck it up and admit that it needs to hire more staff.
I'm still here, still living in Rochester, and that time thing is kind of a pain in the neck. It'd be interesting to get an occasional gathering of the western NY slashdotters though.
SUNY Geneseo had a netnic or two, since so many of us were on The Far Side and ISCA BBS. But netnics just don't seem to be as big a deal anymore. I guess that's what happens when people get out of school and have to get a life.
:P
That's exactly the sort of situation I worry about. I was homeschooled before it became a more visible option, and my family used to worry that someone was going to call social services, even though everything we were doing was legit and above-board.
My grandfather attended a Catholic school, and the nuns beat him for being left-handed. When he got married, he made my grandmother promise to send their kids to public school. At CCD class, Mom was told her parents didn't love her because they sent her to public school.
They also told her that the Devil dances on the altar at Protestant churches. My grandfather took Mom to a Protestant service to prove them wrong. *grin*
Heh. I was the dorky kid who got elected as (probably) a joke to the freshman class homecoming court representative. Then again, maybe people actually did like me. I could never be sure. The handful of loudmouthed assholes sort of outweighed the rest.
:P
What precisely is the reason that her alleged casting of a hex resulted in suspension?
If she "cursed" the teacher, then any punishment she received should be in line with the sort of punishment a student would receive for swearing at a teacher in a more typical fashion.
If she threatened the teacher with physical harm in any normally understandable mundane sense, that should be dealt with appropriately. (Note, I don't say in a normal fashion
If she threatened the teacher with metaphysical harm and she received the sort of punishment usually associated with threats of physical harm, then whoever decided her punishment is (it could be logically concluded) expressing belief that she can DO whatever it is she said she could do.
If she was suspended for insulting the teacher and being Wiccan (or looking like she might be), that's REALLY lame.
I'd like to know exactly what went on there.
Yes, it's just a pity....
It's also just a pity that educational administrators, teachers of various levels, law enforcement officials, mental health "professionals" (and I use the term VERY loosely in this case), and of course the general public at large are perpetuating this horseshit. Again, and again, and again, and again.
It's just a pity that, even before Columbine brought everything to a head, the rules changed for the worse (IMHO), encroaching on what should have been a place where bright and offbeat kids could get AWAY from that garbage. And the rules keep getting stricter, and stricter, and stricter....
It's just a pity that those same bright and offbeat kids are deciding against becoming teachers now, so that they will never have to face an administration that forces them to turn on their own kind. It's a pity that even on Slashdot itself, the Hellmouth threads face so many flames. Anywhere less sympathetic, and we have to scream, and scream, and scream, and scream to be heard.
And of course this doesn't apply to every reader of Slashdot. I don't think there are very many stories that the entire readership think belong here.
*shrug*
If you don't want to see it, don't read it.
The head-blind are surrounding us everywhere else, so I'm not surprised to see it here.
...we're talking in THIS instance about a kid being suspended from school for something that doesn't strike me as a suspend-able offense.
Were I in that situation, I'd demand to see exactly WHAT rule it was I supposedly broke.
Damn, I wish I had some moderator points right now.
Society's approach to chemicals is insane to say the least. The variant at my college was the counseling center throwing Zoloft at anyone who asked for drugs subsequent to a classmate of mine committing suicide by ODing on Zoloft. Irresponsible much?
My particular circle of friends at college ranged from those who never did any drugs whatsoever (including alcohol and tobacco, possibly including caffeine) for religious/moral or medical reasons, all the way to the guy who decided one day to take the shrooms he somehow forgot he had stashed in his desk. The users didn't do anything beyond politely asking if someone wished to partake with them, the non-users didn't preach about the evils of drugs, keys were taken away as appropriate, people followed the rules of whatever house they were in at the time, and it all worked just fine.
Legal adults ought to have the opportunity to make up their own damn minds about what they choose to ingest. They should also deal with the consequences should they harm someone else while under the influence. I'd also rather see impairment testing for drivers etc. than straight BAC and such -- I don't care if a driver is imparied from alcohol, illegal drugs, legal medication or lack of sleep. If said driver is impaired, said driver has no business behind a wheel.
Why are these things so difficult to comprehend?
Two major reasons:
1. Distance from concentrations of foreign language speakers. Since I live in New York, it would be fairly easy for me to drive to Quebec, but that's about it in terms of going someplace where the signs are all in another language (not counting the local alphabet-soup neighborhood). Contrast this with the much shorter distances between European countries.
2. Americans are damned arrogant and think the world should learn English to accommodate us, but we shouldn't need to do likewise. This is nothing new -- my mother was an exchange student in Belgium about 30 years ago when some of the other American students she traveled with walked into a post office and started loudly berating the man behind the counter because nobody there spoke English. Never mind that English isn't one of the two official languages of the country.
Rude. Very rude and arrogant. And the Internet seems to be making it worse, unfortunately.
Sure, plenty of less-developed countries have English as one of, if not the only, "official" language.
Does that mean that all or even a majority of the native population speaks it at all, let alone as a first language? Absolutely not!
(I wish I could find my sociolinguistics class notes *sigh*)
I do remember that in at least one case, English was designated the "official" language to keep a war from breaking out between speakers of the two main languages actually in use in the country in question.
The official language of Haiti is French. Do most Haitians speak standard French? No. Most Haitians speak a local creole that speakers of standard French would find difficult to comprehend.
Of course, given that these people don't generally have Internet access, they may not be seen as relevant to the discussion. I'm just pointing out that they exist in large numbers.
:)
That's pretty funny.
Of course, in the overall political scheme of things, if you look at what he was advocating at the time, Richard Nixon would be too far left to be electable in the current political climate.
This depresses me greatly.
If Al Gore was recognizably the same Al Gore who WROTE Earth in the Balance, then I would have to agree. I'd barely recognize him, myself -- he's been pandering to the center and center-right for the past eight years, and I for one am getting very nervous about continuing to support an increasingly non-progressive Democratic party just because they are marginally saner than the Republicans on social and environmental issues.
I am not terribly fond of the idea of 4 years of Shrub in office, but I'm beginning to wonder if there is any other way to get this message across.
It's a lose/lose proposition. I'm voting for Nader precisely because I don't like either one of the major party candidates.
Here's something else to consider:
One of the places I temped at let me go completely out of the blue (long story, not really relevant). I don't know if they bothered to tell the security guard I was gone or not.
If the thief is a former employee, a friendly security guard who knows the person might not have really thought about the person waltzing in.
This depends, of course, on how tight security was to begin with. When I worked in the vault of a bank, that certainly wouldn't have been an option -- the pass I used there had three levels of security coded into it to actually get me to my desk.
There is of course also the possibility that the thief is a current employee -- possibly even one of the security guards. Especially given how precisely targeted the whole things was.
The ethical problem here, as I see it, is the difference between choosing not to spend limited resources on obtaining something ... and choosing to spend limited resources on deliberately blocking access to something.
Big difference, when acting as disseminators of information. NO library in existence currently could possibly hold every last bit of information out there. Some libraries specialize in certain sorts of collections, and many libraries spend a considerable amount of resources referring patrons to places that have what they don't.
Installing blocking software would be more like throwing out books that someone donated.
IMHO at least.
It's ILLEGAL. We can argue till the cows come home about whether it should be, but if kids are breaking the law in plain view on (and with!)library property, the library staff can get in trouble for contributing to delinquency.
There will doubtless be an outcry at that point for censorware, if not for outright removal of internet access from libraries, once the situation is made public. And that screws everyone.
Sort of like how, even if you think drugs should be legalized, standing outside the library where the legal smokers go, smoking a joint, is probably not the wisest move...
Especially in a library, of all places?
There's plenty of objectionable content among the books. And it's much harder to filter books than it is to filter net-sites.
OTOH, maybe the censorware is a good thing... make the kids look for their porn and bomb-making materials the old-fashioned way.
[Note to the sarcasm-impaired: the preceding paragraph was not meant to be taken seriously!]
However, you certainly have raised a good point here. When there's potentially a situation that could result in someone getting information they shouldn't have or being able to pull a nasty "prank book order" or worse, then I think the company should take steps to minimize that possibility.
And it's a good idea to make sure whatever privacy buttons you want clicked GET clicked! Look for them first in the future.
First, there's the one that happened to me. For various reasons, my car is currently registered in my dad's name. I live in Rochester, NY; he lives in Rome (about a 2.5-hour drive away). One of my plates fell off of my car. I went to the DMV to turn in my other plate, and was told that I couldn't get new ones because the car was in his name. This, in a city heavily populated by college students who frequently have such arrangements with their parents. *grr* I have the same last name, I live here, and apparently even CALLING my dad for permission was not an acceptable option.
The one that my friend's going through is a bit more complex. He bought a used Firebird, got in an accident with it (not his fault), and bought a used van. He switched the car registration from the Firebird to the van, and eventually ended up selling the van and switching the registration back again. Apparently, his insurance company had no record of this, insured BOTH the Firebird and the van, and then cancelled his account for non-payment. Of course, since he was getting his mail at a PO box and had during this time cancelled it and filed a change-of-address (which the insurance co. claims they never received), he never got the bills -- even though all the REST of his mail is being forwarded just fine.
The insurance company won't reinstate him now, either. (Idiots.) He had no clue about any of this until he got a nasty notice from the DMV saying "You're driving without insurance -- either provide proof of insurance or turn your plates in within 10 days, or we're suspending your license."
Then, there's my little fight with the electric company. I came home a few weeks ago to a nasty notice on bright yellow paper taped to my door saying that my electric service was going to be turned off for nonpayment of about $850. I called and all I could get was "There must be some mistake, miss; our accounts show that you are paid in full." I called the public service commission (so-called) to complain, was told "this is the emergency number, you need to call complaints," and spent three days trying to call from work (where I share a phone with five other people) and getting stuck on hold for 10 minutes at a time and/or busy signals. All THEY could tell me when I finally got a human is "there must be some mistake." Yeah, and I want that in WRITING. *grrrr*
... pity the poor folks who have to deal with the information.
I'm currently working data-entry for a large health insurance program. One of my pet peeves is fast becoming parents who give their twin children cutesy near-identical names. One slip of the finger and
And of course, it's all too easy to get into the flip side of the problem. I've lost count of how many times I've been denied credit cards because the credit bureaus evidently think I don't exist. I finally managed to get a $200 card with a $49 security deposit. *grrrr*