There are three levels of ignorance. The shallowest, most easily corrected, is "adult" ignorance, or simple lack of knowledge. One displaying adult ignorance can be easily corrected by a simple statement of the facts. The adult is invited to examine reality, which is done with a gracious thank you, and life moves on.
The intermediate level of ignorance is the "adolescent." Here we have lack of knowledge compounded by lack of motivation to learn. The adolescent does not know the truth of facts, and lacks the fundamental motivation to discover them. They can be placed in front of him and he will grudgingly accept their existence, but otherwise he forges onward in his ignorance, somewhat blissful and innocent. The adolescent can fall either forward into adult ignorance, or backward into the deep stage, the fatal stage of ignorance.
This is "infantile" ignorance. The ignorant infant is unaware of reality, and flat-out refuses to accept evidence of his error or lack of knowledge. In a five-year-old child, infantile ignorance is "cute." The child refuses to believe that the world more complex than his on-the-spot interpretation, and objects outside of his perspective are not real, and therefore need not be considered. It is innocence and this is endearing, for it reminds us of when the world was simple and cast in shades black and white.
An adult who displays infantile ignorance is disgusting in the same way as an adult who has shit his pants. Bigotry and prejudice are two examples of infantile ignorance; the unrepentant refusal to be shown the truth or reality of facts regarding one's world. In an adult there is no innocent excuse for it; it's wilful and deliberate behavior. There's nothing to be done about the adult who displays infantile ignorance except to send them back to the "kid's table" to eat their meal, play with their feces, and drool on themselves. You cannot engage in adult conversation about important matters with the wilfully ignorant. There's a reason the term "like arguing with a four-year-old" was invented, and a reason it is a metaphor for futility.
Why didn't Courtney Love start by distributing her music for love instead of signing with a label?
Like every other artist, Courtney Love had to jump up and down to get people to listen to her for free, before they decided they would pay her for the privledge. And when she started, back in the late 1980's, there was no such thing as Mp3 or Napster. Even as late as six years ago, a PC with a sound card and CD in it was referred to as a "multimedia" PC as if it were special. Not only that, but recording a CD still cost thousands of dollars.
It's a development you may not be aware of: Ten years ago, a 16-track recording console (the absolute minimum you'd want to produce a CD-quality recording on) still cost thousands to tens of thousands of dollars. A digital recording console was completely out of reach. It was anywhere from thirty to three hundred dollars an hour in a studio to use these things and the services of an engineer to run them.
Today, a 16-track digital mixer can be had for a thousand dollars. A computer with a CD burner for another thousand. This has all happened in the last two to three years that prices have fallen this low on high-quality recording equipment. Artists are now appearing who can make a CD, literally, in their basement, on a reasonable home-recording budget, and the recordings if done right can approach the quality of what you might have heard on the radio twenty years ago. I think it is this phenomenon which has frightened the RIAA more than anything else. That's why (I believe) they're trying to close the distribution channels. In the next five to ten years, the rules will change drastically. They aren't ready for it. They are using a business model which is incredibly unfair, and artists are approaching a day when they can cast that encumberance off for an extremely minor investment. It just hasn't occurred to a lot of them yet.
I predict people will end up using BBS software over ssh and downloading using zmodem. (as some ppl are doing already)
AND
The sooner these goons realise that they cannot stop whats happening the better for them and for everyone else
What the RIAA is refusing to realize is this was happening for decades before napster came along. Any early Metallica fans out there can confirm for me that their first recording was a bootleg tape the trading of which they openly encouraged. The delicious hypocrisy of them suing Napster two decades down the road cannot be emphasized enough.
There was a lot more bootlegging going on than that, Ms. Rosen! During the 1980's I amassed a collection of casette tapes that numbered in the dozens. I also amassed a collection of records I bought, based on what I liked from tapes I traded that numbered in the hundreds. The record industry did not die of casette tape trading. They are in no danger of dying of p2p trading either, if they will get their heads out of their asses and realize that p2p is the online manifestation of a phenomenon that has existed since the first record album was copied to the first casette tape! Artists are not starving in the streets! Record companies are not hemorraging money!
A simpler method may be simply to install nose radar in *all* sizable airplanes, and automatically engage the autopilot when flying within 1000m of an object (building, mountain, etc.) to avoid it.
How would a plane equipped suchly ever land?
More to the point, no pilot would ever take the controls of a plane that had no override for such a system. How would that keep a terrorist from just kicking the override in and going at it?
Some prick went through this entire discussion and modded down any POV which did not agree with his. He did it to me too. I'm telling you, dude, whoever you are, metamod exists. I used to let "offtopic" slip by in metamod. However, I'm now following the entire thread back, and I'm metamodding every day too. It goes both ways.
Unfortunately the majority of the people on welfare (from my personal experiences, I could be wrong)
Evidently your education didn't include any critical thinking, or you'd know better than to make generalizations such as this. It's impossible for you to know the relevant circumstances of the majority of people on welfare. If you had any sense you'd have avoided that premise in your argument, and stuck to the "think of what this could enable" premise.
The parent of this thread is a pin-brained troll, and the reason he's wrong has nothing to do with whether or not poor people choose to be poor. It has to do with a flawed perception that dedicating resources to one or another science project "takes away" from money that could be going to the poor. If we wanted to eliminate poverty we could easily grit our teeth, and establish a minimum level of subsistence in this country. Anyone could be guaranteed that minimum level and no more, and the carrot-and-stick model to get people inspired to work would be to require useful employment to get anything above a hovel in a giant apartment building.
I don't think our civilization is advanced or our culture mature enough to play with this kind of concept, but there's no doubt we have an excess of resources available to implement it. Done correctly it could eliminate a lot of our social problems. Done wrong it could cause more than it solves.
But there's one thing for certain: generalizing about "lazy poor people" like you do isn't helping anyone think about it clearly. Tell me truthfully when the last time was you had to worry about where your next meal was coming from. If you don't remember, you don't have anything to say about this subject. Period.
How could the parent post be offtopic? It's about fusion and it's direct impact on our society. What the bloody hell is wrong with you people? I can't wait to smack your little hands in metamod.
The economy (and civilization) will collapse when we run out of oil, and those people won't be in charge of jack shit anymore. If they're lucky they'll just get their heads put on a pike. If they're not they and their descendants will spend hundreds of years hiding out in an underground bunker waiting for people to forget about them. The economy that arises from that will be fusion based and people who want to acquire exclusive rights to mine anything will have to sign over their reproductive organs to the public to ensure they don't get out of control.
Therefore, folks like your sister and the rest of the world don't know what their being sold.
Ah, but they will. They will know the minute it doesn't work in their computer's CD player.
The music industry is going to have to face the fact that a lot of people use their computers for music. Why not? it was sold as the multipurpose multimedia plaything, and now everyone has one. I have gone so far as to remove my $49 subwoofer speakers, plug the output into a decent 100-watt reciever, and get out my good old Bose speakers to use as the PC sound system.
They are also going to have to accustom themselves to the reality that they sell more products with an open format and less with a proprietary format. Divx failed because it was irritating and a ripoff. These new copy-protected CD's will too. A small vocal minority can (and will) alert the CD-buying majority to what's going on, and in no time at all artists will be fleeing the copy-protected CD racket like it's on fire.
Explain to them that they'll have to buy all new equipment just to listen to the stuff. It won't take long at all. This is going to go over just like DIVX. In fact, it's the industry's attempt to implement a legally mandated divx-like scheme, where they lock themselves in to a new standard and lock everyone else out. It will fail, and spectacularly, if the public is motivated not to buy. The DIVX backlash was tremendous. If the DIVX cartel hadn't caved in, many of their members would likely be out of business right now.
Just give your friends and relatives the bottom line: this means you will have to spend a shitload of money to keep watching TV, or listening to music. This is the same thing that's going to leave HDTV stillborn. Large numbers of consumers are going to opt out of that mandatory conversion.
I have to confess to borrowing that meme from them. I believe in all honesty it would have occurred to me eventually. I was once a starving artist, but I was starving because no one knew who I was, and I was smart enough to get a job in a non-starving occupation before it became fatal. If I had made a break selling millions of records, I would have had the sense to realize how lucky I was to have as a job something most people do for fun (and in fact because my real job is programming computers I still do have that sense). Understand, I know it's hard work. I know it takes talent. It's just that the concept of a musician "working" for a living is a little hilarious to me.
Speaking rhetorically to Mr. Big Ticket Musician: If you're not popular, your material likely won't show up on Napster. If you are popular, you can command thirty to sixty to three hundred dollars a ticket for people to see you play. And if you can't manage to do the work required for that, and make money at it, I have no idea what you're doing wrong, but it's something serious. At some point, you have to play if you want to get paid. I think record companies and their manufactured "artists" have completely lost touch of that concept. They want to stand at the banks of their "revenue stream" with a sifter and just collect cash.
Never release the CD to the public. Period. That ensures that no one will copy it, and that no one will listen to it without paying rights or royalties.
Of course, the whole point of copyright is to encourage releasing to the public domain. It's just that that public domain is a bit more expansive than these imbeciles have realized.
Let's assume (in some mythical different dimension) that illegally-distributed music isn't a problem for the industry.
Why don't we take that as a point in fact? The deluge of digital music available on the internet has not been followed by the collapse of the record industry. We do not see top 40 artists hanging out on the street pushing shopping carts full of pop cans. What we're seeing is a previously invisible economy of traded and shared music. Fifteen years ago, I did this with cassette tapes. Now it's done with mp3's. But the phenomenon remains the same. "Hey, check this tape out." If I like the tape, I go and make a conscious decision to buy into what the artist is selling. If not, I don't.
Now that the economy of music-sharing is no longer invisible, record companies want a cut of the game. They don't yet understand that without the game of music sharing, there is likely no game of music buying. I get introduced to most of my music, most of my die-hard, must-buy-all-imports-and-special-prints artists because someone gave me a tape or (these days) an Mp3 of the music. I would not have even known most of these artists existed, or were worth checking out, if I hadn't had the "pirated" copy of their one of their seminal recordings given to me.
They can't cut open the goose that lays the golden eggs without killing her. Culture exists as a free exchange of ideas. Putting gates at every point of exchange with the idea of collecting tolls is simply a guarantee that people will find other roads to travel. I don't understand why a multibillion dollar industry can't get enough, but I don't have any sympathy for them. They will soon find out how lucky they are to get any. I will not buy copy-protected CD's. I will take them back to the store and I will take my money elsewhere.
What I heard was not a theramin. It was a human voice. A theramin reaches well above the human vocal range. I've played with one (I can't say I played it because all I did was make awful squelching noises). But on Star Trek's original run, it's pretty clearly a soprano voice, no words. A theramin's sound is much more like a pure sine wave, with little or no overtones to color its timbre. Considering when it was devised, that's probably all it is.
I watched the first TNG episode from my college dorm. It remains one of the most stilted, lifeless pieces of television production I've ever witnessed. Even the TOS's third-season Roddenberry-written pieces of tripe were more lively than the near-interminable scenes of Deanna Troi moaning on and on about "loneliness" and "despair."
Having said that, Roddenberry knew in spite of his awful writing skills, how to create a dynamic series. Starting around the middle of the first season I saw a definite improvement. By the time it all came to an end I was wishing it wouldn't. I couldn't say the same for the series' that have been launched without Roddenberry around. I can't quantify what it was he did, but he clearly wasn't there to do it for DS9 or Voyager. We shall see.
I have seen claims that even performing the songs without paying the license is illegal. Of course these claims were by lawyers. Most composers, without whom the lawyers would not exist, are thrilled to have their songs performed by someone else. It increases its presence in the public's mind, therefore making it a more desirable song.
Lawyers and shareholders and their absurd expectations are destroying the culture of our age. I have this fantasy where I'm put in cryo suspension near the end of my life and wake up in a thousand years, just so I can prove if only to myself that most of the cultural output of the 20th century will vanish into a legalistic black hole.
How would you feel if you produced a hit one day, it's played everywhere, but instead of a lot of money, you only receive a few pats on the back?
That happens to a lot of artists. It's called a recording contract. Nonetheless, we don't see Top 40 pop stars begging for handouts in the streets. The issue is not that they are lacking compensation. It's that they've discovered a new "economy" in their works and feel they are entitled to a piece of that pie as well. However, they are startled to find that the casual undeground economy they've discovered is not regulated by law, and no one really knows what goes on in it. There is exceedingly scant evidence regarding buying habits of people who indulge in digital music. You certainly aren't sharing any.
Radio stations have to pay to be able to air music. So do supermarkets, discotheques, or anyone that plays copyrighted music for large audiences. So, why should websites all of a sudden form an exception?
Good point. More interestingly, why does a large record company think they can do what a small startup cannot?
This "music should be for free" attitude has to change.
I don't know a lot of people who think it should be free. As a musician myself I certainly don't believe that. But it makes very little sense to erode the public's fair-use rights in order to prop up a shitty business model. There's the difference between the reasonable expectation that you get compensated, and the unreasonable expectation that you get compensated every time your product changes hands. There is a right of first sale, and that's about all that was guaranteed until recently.
Your simplistic reduction of this issue doesn't help discussion. I detest it when people attempt to reduce this to a) all digital copying is piracy b) piracy is bad c) therefore all digital copying is bad. It's sloppy thinking.
Use those DDoS attacks on the Taliban and the terrorists. Block out their news, their proproganda.
Sorry, this is the same government that recently moved to ban floppy disks, in addition to the internet. Not a lot of propaganda flowing through the digital world in Afghanistan, chum.
Let the adults paying to surf in your class surf. Or crack down on doodling in notebooks as well.
I can't believe this got modded insightful. If your doodle pad made beeping, clicking noises I would argue that yes it should be prohibited from a class where other people are trying to pay attention.
Slashdot Mirror
The intermediate level of ignorance is the "adolescent." Here we have lack of knowledge compounded by lack of motivation to learn. The adolescent does not know the truth of facts, and lacks the fundamental motivation to discover them. They can be placed in front of him and he will grudgingly accept their existence, but otherwise he forges onward in his ignorance, somewhat blissful and innocent. The adolescent can fall either forward into adult ignorance, or backward into the deep stage, the fatal stage of ignorance.
This is "infantile" ignorance. The ignorant infant is unaware of reality, and flat-out refuses to accept evidence of his error or lack of knowledge. In a five-year-old child, infantile ignorance is "cute." The child refuses to believe that the world more complex than his on-the-spot interpretation, and objects outside of his perspective are not real, and therefore need not be considered. It is innocence and this is endearing, for it reminds us of when the world was simple and cast in shades black and white.
An adult who displays infantile ignorance is disgusting in the same way as an adult who has shit his pants. Bigotry and prejudice are two examples of infantile ignorance; the unrepentant refusal to be shown the truth or reality of facts regarding one's world. In an adult there is no innocent excuse for it; it's wilful and deliberate behavior. There's nothing to be done about the adult who displays infantile ignorance except to send them back to the "kid's table" to eat their meal, play with their feces, and drool on themselves. You cannot engage in adult conversation about important matters with the wilfully ignorant. There's a reason the term "like arguing with a four-year-old" was invented, and a reason it is a metaphor for futility.
None of us are out of range anymore. I get to feel brave just getting in the elevator. How about you?
No more, I'm sure, than your broad, sweeping generalization based on a fictional, melodramatic morality play pisses me off.
Like every other artist, Courtney Love had to jump up and down to get people to listen to her for free, before they decided they would pay her for the privledge. And when she started, back in the late 1980's, there was no such thing as Mp3 or Napster. Even as late as six years ago, a PC with a sound card and CD in it was referred to as a "multimedia" PC as if it were special. Not only that, but recording a CD still cost thousands of dollars. It's a development you may not be aware of: Ten years ago, a 16-track recording console (the absolute minimum you'd want to produce a CD-quality recording on) still cost thousands to tens of thousands of dollars. A digital recording console was completely out of reach. It was anywhere from thirty to three hundred dollars an hour in a studio to use these things and the services of an engineer to run them.
Today, a 16-track digital mixer can be had for a thousand dollars. A computer with a CD burner for another thousand. This has all happened in the last two to three years that prices have fallen this low on high-quality recording equipment. Artists are now appearing who can make a CD, literally, in their basement, on a reasonable home-recording budget, and the recordings if done right can approach the quality of what you might have heard on the radio twenty years ago. I think it is this phenomenon which has frightened the RIAA more than anything else. That's why (I believe) they're trying to close the distribution channels. In the next five to ten years, the rules will change drastically. They aren't ready for it. They are using a business model which is incredibly unfair, and artists are approaching a day when they can cast that encumberance off for an extremely minor investment. It just hasn't occurred to a lot of them yet.
AND
The sooner these goons realise that they cannot stop whats happening the better for them and for everyone else
What the RIAA is refusing to realize is this was happening for decades before napster came along. Any early Metallica fans out there can confirm for me that their first recording was a bootleg tape the trading of which they openly encouraged. The delicious hypocrisy of them suing Napster two decades down the road cannot be emphasized enough.
There was a lot more bootlegging going on than that, Ms. Rosen! During the 1980's I amassed a collection of casette tapes that numbered in the dozens. I also amassed a collection of records I bought, based on what I liked from tapes I traded that numbered in the hundreds. The record industry did not die of casette tape trading. They are in no danger of dying of p2p trading either, if they will get their heads out of their asses and realize that p2p is the online manifestation of a phenomenon that has existed since the first record album was copied to the first casette tape! Artists are not starving in the streets! Record companies are not hemorraging money!
How would a plane equipped suchly ever land?
More to the point, no pilot would ever take the controls of a plane that had no override for such a system. How would that keep a terrorist from just kicking the override in and going at it?
Some prick went through this entire discussion and modded down any POV which did not agree with his. He did it to me too. I'm telling you, dude, whoever you are, metamod exists. I used to let "offtopic" slip by in metamod. However, I'm now following the entire thread back, and I'm metamodding every day too. It goes both ways.
They didn't even have to do that right, with this device at their disposal.
Evidently your education didn't include any critical thinking, or you'd know better than to make generalizations such as this. It's impossible for you to know the relevant circumstances of the majority of people on welfare. If you had any sense you'd have avoided that premise in your argument, and stuck to the "think of what this could enable" premise.
The parent of this thread is a pin-brained troll, and the reason he's wrong has nothing to do with whether or not poor people choose to be poor. It has to do with a flawed perception that dedicating resources to one or another science project "takes away" from money that could be going to the poor. If we wanted to eliminate poverty we could easily grit our teeth, and establish a minimum level of subsistence in this country. Anyone could be guaranteed that minimum level and no more, and the carrot-and-stick model to get people inspired to work would be to require useful employment to get anything above a hovel in a giant apartment building.
I don't think our civilization is advanced or our culture mature enough to play with this kind of concept, but there's no doubt we have an excess of resources available to implement it. Done correctly it could eliminate a lot of our social problems. Done wrong it could cause more than it solves.
But there's one thing for certain: generalizing about "lazy poor people" like you do isn't helping anyone think about it clearly. Tell me truthfully when the last time was you had to worry about where your next meal was coming from. If you don't remember, you don't have anything to say about this subject. Period.
How could the parent post be offtopic? It's about fusion and it's direct impact on our society. What the bloody hell is wrong with you people? I can't wait to smack your little hands in metamod.
The economy (and civilization) will collapse when we run out of oil, and those people won't be in charge of jack shit anymore. If they're lucky they'll just get their heads put on a pike. If they're not they and their descendants will spend hundreds of years hiding out in an underground bunker waiting for people to forget about them. The economy that arises from that will be fusion based and people who want to acquire exclusive rights to mine anything will have to sign over their reproductive organs to the public to ensure they don't get out of control.
Did you read more than the subject line, pray tell?
Ah, but they will. They will know the minute it doesn't work in their computer's CD player.
The music industry is going to have to face the fact that a lot of people use their computers for music. Why not? it was sold as the multipurpose multimedia plaything, and now everyone has one. I have gone so far as to remove my $49 subwoofer speakers, plug the output into a decent 100-watt reciever, and get out my good old Bose speakers to use as the PC sound system.
They are also going to have to accustom themselves to the reality that they sell more products with an open format and less with a proprietary format. Divx failed because it was irritating and a ripoff. These new copy-protected CD's will too. A small vocal minority can (and will) alert the CD-buying majority to what's going on, and in no time at all artists will be fleeing the copy-protected CD racket like it's on fire.
Just give your friends and relatives the bottom line: this means you will have to spend a shitload of money to keep watching TV, or listening to music. This is the same thing that's going to leave HDTV stillborn. Large numbers of consumers are going to opt out of that mandatory conversion.
Speaking rhetorically to Mr. Big Ticket Musician: If you're not popular, your material likely won't show up on Napster. If you are popular, you can command thirty to sixty to three hundred dollars a ticket for people to see you play. And if you can't manage to do the work required for that, and make money at it, I have no idea what you're doing wrong, but it's something serious. At some point, you have to play if you want to get paid. I think record companies and their manufactured "artists" have completely lost touch of that concept. They want to stand at the banks of their "revenue stream" with a sifter and just collect cash.
Of course, the whole point of copyright is to encourage releasing to the public domain. It's just that that public domain is a bit more expansive than these imbeciles have realized.
Why don't we take that as a point in fact? The deluge of digital music available on the internet has not been followed by the collapse of the record industry. We do not see top 40 artists hanging out on the street pushing shopping carts full of pop cans. What we're seeing is a previously invisible economy of traded and shared music. Fifteen years ago, I did this with cassette tapes. Now it's done with mp3's. But the phenomenon remains the same. "Hey, check this tape out." If I like the tape, I go and make a conscious decision to buy into what the artist is selling. If not, I don't.
Now that the economy of music-sharing is no longer invisible, record companies want a cut of the game. They don't yet understand that without the game of music sharing, there is likely no game of music buying. I get introduced to most of my music, most of my die-hard, must-buy-all-imports-and-special-prints artists because someone gave me a tape or (these days) an Mp3 of the music. I would not have even known most of these artists existed, or were worth checking out, if I hadn't had the "pirated" copy of their one of their seminal recordings given to me.
They can't cut open the goose that lays the golden eggs without killing her. Culture exists as a free exchange of ideas. Putting gates at every point of exchange with the idea of collecting tolls is simply a guarantee that people will find other roads to travel. I don't understand why a multibillion dollar industry can't get enough, but I don't have any sympathy for them. They will soon find out how lucky they are to get any. I will not buy copy-protected CD's. I will take them back to the store and I will take my money elsewhere.
What I heard was not a theramin. It was a human voice. A theramin reaches well above the human vocal range. I've played with one (I can't say I played it because all I did was make awful squelching noises). But on Star Trek's original run, it's pretty clearly a soprano voice, no words. A theramin's sound is much more like a pure sine wave, with little or no overtones to color its timbre. Considering when it was devised, that's probably all it is.
Having said that, Roddenberry knew in spite of his awful writing skills, how to create a dynamic series. Starting around the middle of the first season I saw a definite improvement. By the time it all came to an end I was wishing it wouldn't. I couldn't say the same for the series' that have been launched without Roddenberry around. I can't quantify what it was he did, but he clearly wasn't there to do it for DS9 or Voyager. We shall see.
Lawyers and shareholders and their absurd expectations are destroying the culture of our age. I have this fantasy where I'm put in cryo suspension near the end of my life and wake up in a thousand years, just so I can prove if only to myself that most of the cultural output of the 20th century will vanish into a legalistic black hole.
Does it occur to you that more than two people might exist on Slashdot? And that their opinions may differ?
That happens to a lot of artists. It's called a recording contract. Nonetheless, we don't see Top 40 pop stars begging for handouts in the streets. The issue is not that they are lacking compensation. It's that they've discovered a new "economy" in their works and feel they are entitled to a piece of that pie as well. However, they are startled to find that the casual undeground economy they've discovered is not regulated by law, and no one really knows what goes on in it. There is exceedingly scant evidence regarding buying habits of people who indulge in digital music. You certainly aren't sharing any.
Radio stations have to pay to be able to air music. So do supermarkets, discotheques, or anyone that plays copyrighted music for large audiences. So, why should websites all of a sudden form an exception?
Good point. More interestingly, why does a large record company think they can do what a small startup cannot?
This "music should be for free" attitude has to change.
I don't know a lot of people who think it should be free. As a musician myself I certainly don't believe that. But it makes very little sense to erode the public's fair-use rights in order to prop up a shitty business model. There's the difference between the reasonable expectation that you get compensated, and the unreasonable expectation that you get compensated every time your product changes hands. There is a right of first sale, and that's about all that was guaranteed until recently.
Your simplistic reduction of this issue doesn't help discussion. I detest it when people attempt to reduce this to a) all digital copying is piracy b) piracy is bad c) therefore all digital copying is bad. It's sloppy thinking.
Sorry, this is the same government that recently moved to ban floppy disks, in addition to the internet. Not a lot of propaganda flowing through the digital world in Afghanistan, chum.
I can't believe this got modded insightful. If your doodle pad made beeping, clicking noises I would argue that yes it should be prohibited from a class where other people are trying to pay attention.
Oh yeah, what other people?
What I should have said is, do you have an argument, or are you just releasing hot air between your lips?