School isn't about "working", or at least it shouldn't be. School is supposed to be about LEARNING.
I'm afraid you've misunderstood my point (I was in a rush at the time as a client was walking in the door so I may not have made myself completely clear).
I wasn't directly comparing school to the workforce, my point was simply that school prepares you for the real world. I've noticed a trend lately where Slashdotters feel that having a set time to show up for work every day is abhorrent. My point all along has simply been that most employers expect their employees to show up at a certain time, which can often be flexible, and work for a prescribed number of hours in a day.
High School especially needs to be regimented. How many 14-18 year olds, on average, would you consider to be disciplined enough to show up on their own every day and complete all their daily tasks?
And if your employer gave you 8 hours of only utterly mindless tasks (on top of similar work you're expected to do at home), in an extremely restrictive (in every sense) environment, did not allow you a lunch break, etc.,
LOL! What school did you go to? No lunch break? Wow! I not only had a 1 hour lunch break, I also had spare periods during my last 2 years (which were either before or after lunch which actually gave me a 2.5 hour break in the middle of the day).
Mindless tasks? What, like learning one's native language, learning how to manipulate numbers, learning automotive repair, learning the history of one's own country and culture,... ?
Did you go to "High School" or "Boarding School"?!?
As an adult, I get to negotiate where I work, when I work, how much I get paid, and many other aspects of my job. Plus, I typically work on things that actually matter and work on them until they are completed. These things mostly use skills I already have and are in my chosen area of interest.
How many 14-16 year old children know what their chosen areas of interest/expertise are? Hint: At that age; they don't generally have one. How many are responsible enough to elect to attend the courses that will give them a well balanced knowledge of language, numbers, etc.? If given the options, how many students would attend the likes of English, French/Spanish, Math(s), History, Geography versus the attendance of Gym, Shop, Home Ec....?
As for the skills you already have; most people need time to develop those skills while acquiring other skills such as reading, writing and arithmetic.
Moreover; what sort of employer will hire you if you tell them you have a grade 8 education and years of "life experience" as a teenager?
As a child, you get to do none of this.
Many parents work with (or for) their children to select a school that's most suitable to their wants and needs. Vocational/trade, academic, religious, private, etc.
You don't get paid,
You get paid with an education people in some countries would kill for.
you get basically no respect from teachers and other adults.
Respect is earned.
You're generalizing all teachers and adults (do you disrespect children?).
Once you learn to be a productive member of society, you'll find respect tends to come naturally.
Often children are treated very bad by other children. If this kind of thing happened to me at work, there would be a lawsuit.
Are you telling me that as an adult you've never been "treated badly" by another adult? Has everyone been nice, kind and polite to you, or do you regularly experience a variety of people with a variety of temperaments and use the interpersonal skills you developed as a child in school to handle the situation?
(BTW - do you seriously sue people who are mean to you?)
* forced attendance -- by forcing people to attend, there is no motivation to make the most out of it. There is no real opportunity cost to being in the classroom, making a high percentage of people there unmotivated to learn.
What is this recent trend I'm seeing here about how horrible it is to have to show up somewhere every day? It's called WORKING, people! Out here in the real world most employers require their employees to show up at a prescribed time every day. It's called working for a living.
What if I don't want to go jump through hoops, or pay double for the privelege?
By that what you mean, of course, is that you don't want to pay fair market value for a commercial broadband account.
If you want to continue to receive drastically discounted, multi-megabit residential broadband service, you'll deal with the limitations or you'll step up and buy yourself a static and run whatever you want.
What if I want to acess my work mail server from home? Or a clients? Or I just want to access the email that I've been using for years via pop/smtp?
Nobody said anything about blocking POP or IMAP, we're talking about SMTP. Remember that the Internet (and e-mail in general) is a steaming pile of feces right now precisely because every Tom, Dick, and Harry out there thinks they can run a mail or web server and barely any ISPs force outbound SMTP through their own servers.
This was on a laptop. Who says that the pr0n was being viewed during working hours or even in the office? The laptop should be re-imaged before being given to another employee anyway.
It doesn't matter when, where, how, or why the employee used it or on what type of equipment. It is company equipment. Period. The use of company equipment for anything but company business is forbidden. Period. If the employee wanted porn, he could have just as easily downloaded it on his home computer or his personal laptop or rented it from his local video store.
This notion that employees should be protected after various wrongdoings is ridiculous. Viewing of pornographic material whenever and wherever you choose is not by any means a protected right.
The kind of employer from whom all those nice aeron chairs were available for cut-rate prices on ebay.
I find it hard to believe the nonchalant attitude I'm seeing up there. Seriously; somebody says employers who request punctionality are dispassionate and gets modded Insightful for it?
Flex time is one thing, but "come whenever you feel like it"?!? Come on! Here in the real world...
Then again, if you have the kind of employer who you feel you have to lie to when you want to sleep in once in a while, then maybe you should be looking for a new employer.
What kind of employer is ok with their employees choosing to sleep in once in a while?
If I did that to my boss, my next exmployer would be the lady at the Unemployment Office.
I bet Canada would be a great place for datacenters, if you had the backbone capacity and redundancy.
Firstly, we most certainly have the "backbone capacity" here in Canada. Secondly, it frequently hits 110-120 degrees Fahrenheit (surprise! We get "summer" too!)
a)charge me bit-for-bit and quit throttling
b) up everyone's price until you're not overselling any more because of lower demand
c) offer tiered pricing for higher bandwidth users. That's great for me; I don't mind slower speeds, so I can save me some dough.
Oh no no no! ISPs tried that. The people got up in arms because they're paying a premium rate (ha!) for their "broadband" connection, then when they find out they have to pay when they monopolize the service (3% of users using 80% of the bandwidth, for example) they cried about how unfair it was!
Broadband Internet access made surfing the web and streaming music and medium-quality video easier because you didn't have to wait forever for things to queue. It was offered initially as a burstable service, much like dial-up was (eg. 100 28.8k modems sharing a single 1.5MBit T1), however with today's modern multiple-GB downloads (mostly pirate software, movies and porn I'd wager), high quality streaming full-screen video, VOIP services, etc. it's a lot more noticeable.
How would consumers react if they were charged market-value (even wholesale) for the bandwidth they consumed?
Cut the ISPs some slack here. They entered into a free-market, improved their services, then the free market changed so drastically they couldn't adapt without serious backlash.
If you use your 3.0MBit connection at 90% capacity for 100% of the month, you should expect to have to pay more than the casual websurfer, or you should lease a line from your telco and see how THAT bill feels.
Instructing someone to deliberately lie? Great plan.
In a day in age where court systems reward theives and other criminals with massive liability settlements against those they mercilessly victimize, what's the bigger problem here?
I've heard some stories at work of people having their lunches/food taken from the communal fridges. Personally, I find it very bizarre.
It happened to me once. I'm in sales, so I can't always sit for 30 minutes when my lunch arrives. This time I had Jerk chicken and rice waiting for me while I finished with a client. When I returned to the lunch room it was gone.
I was furious! I mean, it's not about the $6.00 lunch so much as now I have to try to make another hole in my schedule to go get more for myself but also to find time to eat it.
If the person had come to me and said they were broke and needed food I'd have given them the six bucks.
they could adopt if they can find an agency that doesn't think gays are perverts that will molest the child or force their lifestyle on them...
You also have to convince people that there's nothing inherrently wrong with "the gay lifestyle".
This may come as a surprise to many, but most homosexuals have jobs, responsibilities, bills, rent/mortgage payments, stresses of the daily grind, friends, family, aquaintances, enemies, problems, hobbies, vices,...
Wow! Sounds an awful lot like straight people to me!
The differences come in the fact that they prefer to bed with members of their own sex. They also tend to share more characteristics with the opposite sex. Which is not to say that all gay men are 'sissies' and all gay women are 'butches', of course. It's entirely probable, in fact, that everybody reading this post either knows or is related to atleast one gay person. Perhaps you know it, perhaps you don't, perhaps they haven't even acknowledged it due to the stigma.
I know, though, that when people think "gay couple" they think of Robin Williams and Nathan Lane in The Birdcage. Many people would be surprised to learn that Will from Will & Grace is a more accurate depiction.
My argument about gay adoption, though, is that there are countless straight couples out there who abuse or neglect their children, entertain questionable sexual practises, abuse drugs/alcohol, or generally create a horrible environment for a child's upbringing but people don't object to those kooks procreating, so why object to the adoption by people who want someone to love and cherish?
So instead of actually working toward that goal and getting as close as possible, you would rather that everyone just gave up and just keep things as screwed up as they are now?
So let's see if I understand; you didn't understand anything I said in my initial response, and you're still arguing that the solution to all of our computer related problems is technical (and Microsoft seems to be at the forefront from what I gather of your arguments), yet you continue to argue the same point over and over.
If you're not going to address my initial points save yourself some time by not responding.
I think you've missed the point. Any 'foolproof design' has been a pipe-dream since humans have been creating... anything. An OS wth a foolproof design has been a pipe dream since computers were invented.
But hey, if Microsoft can finally accomplish this, hey, all the power to them. Excuse me while I split my sides now.
On a more serious note -- yes, there are real patches for user stupidity. They are called "foolproof design" and "solid usability".
Yeah, right. There's a reason there's a cliche about "... along will come a better fool" - because it's true.
We have so many warnings and safety bubbles around us nowadays we're losing the ability to protect ourselves from our surroundings. We're creating a society of clueless, helpless retards.
We start our computers and watch as fifteen protection mechanisms automatically fire up and scan for anything malicious. Our ISPs filter our traffic to protect us from that which we cannot protect ourselves; heaven forbid a message should get through with an attachment and some retard on the other end of the ethernet clicks on the damned thing.
You can see paralells in other areas of life. Cars, for example, have so much safety built into them it's probably doubling the production cost of your average sedan. Yet morons still find ways to kill themselves. Hell, people feel so artificially safe in their cars they're driving faster, more carelessly and more drunk because, hey, it's not like I can be HURT or anything! I've got ABS; it's impossible for me to hit somebody! {SIGH!}
It's getting so bad we have physicians in the UK wanting to ban the most important knife in the kitchen - the chef's knife - because a) they know nothing about cooking, and b) people are damned stupid and hostile enough to keep stabbing each other with them! See what happens when you outlaw guns? People stab each-other! If you ban knifes, they'll bludgeon each other to death!
The long and short of it is this; there is no cure for human stupidity. Darwinism is a pipe-dream, but it's a good one.
I saw a documentary (probably on BBC2) a few years ago, where people were shown (faked) old photographs of them in a hot air balloon. Most of the subjects said that they couldn't remember the occasion.
However, seven days later, when the same subjects were shown the photographs again, almost every one of them said that they could remember it a bit better. They could even say who was with them on the day, and so on.
I saw a similar memory-testing documentary, I believe it was also a BBC production.
The purpose was to test the memories of the Roswell incident. The testers got about a dozen subjects together and strapped cameras to their heads to take them on a "nature walk" to study what people see and interperet in nature. Along the way they came across a small clearing, taped off with yellow caution tape, with a soldier, a scientist, and a suit inside investigating the landing/crash site of a weather baloon.
Later recollections by the volunteers included accounts of 2-3 soldiers "rushing" towards them with guns drawn and shouting orders to "Clear the area!", another report included a detailed account of several investigators and soldiers even though the eyeball-level video footage shows her being rushed away from the area by her companion and not actually seeing much of anything except her companion's back and the ground around the site.
The stories became more elaborate as the weeks and months went by to the point where these people practically witnessed the next Roswell crash in their minds.
The school should be grateful for the opportunity to learn just how lame their infrastructure is.
As someone who administered a high school network, sorry my friend, but this just isn't in their mindset. Anytime somebody finds a limitation with school technologies it's immediately their fault for mis-using school resources. When my school of some 400 workstations, all connected to the Internet via 10BaseTX, outstripped our 128Kb/s ISDN link it was decided that we should put tighter restrictions on the proxy because students were abusing the connection.
When I implemented a local cacheing DNS server, I required a reverse PTR in the district's authoritative servers. I was given a 45 minute lecture over the phone as to why I couldn't use his private T1 for the school's routed traffic. It took an additional 45 minutes to explain that this would only be for school-board domain queries and that all other DNS queries would traverse the regular link and that all other routed traffic would, in fact, traverse our local ISDN link (duh) I then got the pleasure of a 30 minute discussion on how to implement the PTR.
See, in a school board you have two primary motivating factors; unions and politics. These factors lend to ignorance and bliss. People with seniority get the cushy jobs because they want them. Qualifications be damned. There are countless schools that have business teachers administrating their school network. Keep in mind that these are people who teach Microsoft Office and Mavis Beacon Touch Typing programs - they couldn't tell you what TCP/IP stood for in a million years! They are, however, either the most qualified or the most vocal so they get the job.
Now, get into their mindset; there's not enough [x]** to go around. Somebody took more than their fair share. That somebody must be punished. The concept of bandwidth being fluid, websites and other Internet resources requiring more bandwidth every year does not register with these people. In their mind, smarter people made the decision that for x number of students we require y amount of bandwidth. Any more than that is a deliberate misuse and should be punished.
Thankfully I was merely a contractor, and thankfully my term ended and was not renewed.
** Where [x] is scissors, glue, paper, chalk, bandwidth, floppy discs, spekaers, etc.
Whelp, laid down on my couch at approx. 6:30PM the night before a big exam at 8:30 the next morning. Woke up at 8:15, panicked, threw my clothes on and rushed out the door, flew across the highway at breakneck speed, arrived to find an empty campus.
If he had no evidence, I would. If he had evidence, then I would believe him. As a writer working for CNN I'd be more inclined to believe him, but without evidence he'd still just be a liar.
I, I, I... It's great that you believe yourself to be so open-minded. What about his sister, girlfriend/wife, employer, friends and family?
Think long and hard - soul search, as it were. Imagine if the caretaker for your children were accused of being a pedophile or child pornographer or any number of other hideous things. Would you leave your children in their care while you waited for proof? What about one of your friends or family members? Your significant other, your child's teacher? Priest?
How do you think those around you would act towards you if you were accused of something like this? I can tell you it's not as easy as it sounds. Two of my friends have been on the receiving end of these accusations and their lives were forever changed. One went to court and was not charged in the end. Truth be told, nobody but him and his two young children know the truth to this day. The other turned out to be a misunderstanding. His daughter told his ex-wife where daddy touched her, it turned out he was towelling her off after her nightly bath. He lost custody for several weeks and almost went to trial over it.
These accusations are VERY serious, life-altering things; I can't stress that enough. Poeple have lost their jobs, marriages, close friendships, become alienated from their families or even lost their lives over them.
If you ever find yourself in such a situation, and I hope it never comes to pass, but consider then how valuable repercussion-free speech is when you've lost everything and are being brutally beaten with no sympathy from anybody you thought loved you.
It's one thing to have the freedom to be able to disagree with your elected officials or to express an opinion or negative experience you've had with a company, product, or service, but it's another entirely to be able to literally say whatever you want without penalty. That's why slander and libel laws exist - to protect people's reputations from being unduly tarnished by anyone with a vendetta.
That being said, this case appears to have some merit. Accusations of bribery, fraud, and miscarriage of justice on a notorious message board could have serious repercussions for the company. It should be noted, too, that freedom of speech, the 1st amendment, the CCRF et al. do not protect against civil litigation due to speech; they merely prevent the government from creating laws that inhibit free speech or using the criminal justice system to penalize speakers.
Maybe something that mis-spells words in the first place might work. Say, provide the wrong letters:
Challenge: "Oniad Ptateg" (hint: America )
Response: "NTSS"
Since I'm still trying to figure out what you mean (even with the spelling correction), that wouldn't make a good test. You'd eliminate those who can't make an immediate distinction. The idea behind such tests is to show a human something that they can immediately associate and give the correct answer. Giving out word problems and puzzles will only aleienate 75% of your sight/hearing abled client base and probably the same portion of the deaf-blind you were trying to assist in the first place.
I'm still not getting it. As you're obviously so much smarter than I am, explain why being in physical proximity to her means he's forced to watch it, rather than doing the things I suggested.
Don't worry, if there comes a day when you live with a woman you'll understand.
Why do you ass-u-me that expensive facilities are required for quality programming? I'm not a fanboy of American Idol and its offspring. Are you really trying to justify television advertising as a requirement for cable to exist?
Actually, I was talking about the monthly cable subscription charge for cable television.
Why do you 1) assume that I'm in a country that has thousands of shows broadcast into my home 24/7? 2) assume that I think thousands of television shows that are broadcast into my home are anything more then a waste of resources.
Because you said you had cable television. How many shows were broadcast to your cable installation? 12?
Ad-free, subscription based television does not exist yet, in my country. Why do you ass-u-me I'm American? You've made countless assumptions in your reply, and you know what that makes you.
Not being American myself, I'm not sure where you got the assumption I was inferring so for yourself. Care to point that out in my reply?
BTW - if you'd point out what "your country" is, perhaps it would be easier to discuss the situation in your particular part of the planet rather than griping about assumptions.
Can't you be with her but do something else? Playing a game, reading, posting utter shite on teh intarwebs are just three things that spring to mind. I know for a fact you're capable of at least one of them.
It sounds to me as if he wishes to be with her while she watches television, not as if it's the only time he's able to be with her.
Besides that; do you really think that because he doesn't like TV but she does is going to cause the outright cancellation of the service? It's a marriage; there's some level of compromise involved. I'm sure he has hobbies and interests that she doesn't share, but she doesn't forbid them because they make him happy.
(Insert cliche about Slashdot and marriage/women here)
P.S. w/?
Common short-form for "with". Obviously you figured it out, else you wouldn't have been able to respond.
If I'm paying for a service (cable/satellite), I expect that advertisements will be removed.
I cancelled my cable service with the reason I refuse to pay for commercial advertising.
Do you think the cable grows in the ground like so many tree roots? Do you think the programs just appear on that cable without the benefeits of expensive facilities, equipment and trained staff?
Moreover, do you really think your $25/month pays for the production of the thousands of shows that are broadcast to your home 24/7?
If you want ad-free, subscription based television it already exists in the form of HBO et al. You're more than welcome to sign up and step off your soapbox at any time.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm afraid you've misunderstood my point (I was in a rush at the time as a client was walking in the door so I may not have made myself completely clear).
I wasn't directly comparing school to the workforce, my point was simply that school prepares you for the real world. I've noticed a trend lately where Slashdotters feel that having a set time to show up for work every day is abhorrent. My point all along has simply been that most employers expect their employees to show up at a certain time, which can often be flexible, and work for a prescribed number of hours in a day.
High School especially needs to be regimented. How many 14-18 year olds, on average, would you consider to be disciplined enough to show up on their own every day and complete all their daily tasks?
LOL! What school did you go to? No lunch break? Wow! I not only had a 1 hour lunch break, I also had spare periods during my last 2 years (which were either before or after lunch which actually gave me a 2.5 hour break in the middle of the day).
Mindless tasks? What, like learning one's native language, learning how to manipulate numbers, learning automotive repair, learning the history of one's own country and culture, ... ?
Did you go to "High School" or "Boarding School"?!?
How many 14-16 year old children know what their chosen areas of interest/expertise are? Hint: At that age; they don't generally have one. How many are responsible enough to elect to attend the courses that will give them a well balanced knowledge of language, numbers, etc.? If given the options, how many students would attend the likes of English, French/Spanish, Math(s), History, Geography versus the attendance of Gym, Shop, Home Ec. ...?
As for the skills you already have; most people need time to develop those skills while acquiring other skills such as reading, writing and arithmetic.
Moreover; what sort of employer will hire you if you tell them you have a grade 8 education and years of "life experience" as a teenager?
Many parents work with (or for) their children to select a school that's most suitable to their wants and needs. Vocational/trade, academic, religious, private, etc.
You get paid with an education people in some countries would kill for.
Are you telling me that as an adult you've never been "treated badly" by another adult? Has everyone been nice, kind and polite to you, or do you regularly experience a variety of people with a variety of temperaments and use the interpersonal skills you developed as a child in school to handle the situation?
(BTW - do you seriously sue people who are mean to you?)
What is this recent trend I'm seeing here about how horrible it is to have to show up somewhere every day? It's called WORKING, people! Out here in the real world most employers require their employees to show up at a prescribed time every day. It's called working for a living.
By that what you mean, of course, is that you don't want to pay fair market value for a commercial broadband account.
If you want to continue to receive drastically discounted, multi-megabit residential broadband service, you'll deal with the limitations or you'll step up and buy yourself a static and run whatever you want.
Nobody said anything about blocking POP or IMAP, we're talking about SMTP. Remember that the Internet (and e-mail in general) is a steaming pile of feces right now precisely because every Tom, Dick, and Harry out there thinks they can run a mail or web server and barely any ISPs force outbound SMTP through their own servers.
It doesn't matter when, where, how, or why the employee used it or on what type of equipment. It is company equipment. Period. The use of company equipment for anything but company business is forbidden. Period. If the employee wanted porn, he could have just as easily downloaded it on his home computer or his personal laptop or rented it from his local video store.
This notion that employees should be protected after various wrongdoings is ridiculous. Viewing of pornographic material whenever and wherever you choose is not by any means a protected right.
I find it hard to believe the nonchalant attitude I'm seeing up there. Seriously; somebody says employers who request punctionality are dispassionate and gets modded Insightful for it?
Flex time is one thing, but "come whenever you feel like it"?!? Come on! Here in the real world ...
What kind of employer is ok with their employees choosing to sleep in once in a while?
If I did that to my boss, my next exmployer would be the lady at the Unemployment Office.
Firstly, we most certainly have the "backbone capacity" here in Canada. Secondly, it frequently hits 110-120 degrees Fahrenheit (surprise! We get "summer" too!)
Oh no no no! ISPs tried that. The people got up in arms because they're paying a premium rate (ha!) for their "broadband" connection, then when they find out they have to pay when they monopolize the service (3% of users using 80% of the bandwidth, for example) they cried about how unfair it was!
Broadband Internet access made surfing the web and streaming music and medium-quality video easier because you didn't have to wait forever for things to queue. It was offered initially as a burstable service, much like dial-up was (eg. 100 28.8k modems sharing a single 1.5MBit T1), however with today's modern multiple-GB downloads (mostly pirate software, movies and porn I'd wager), high quality streaming full-screen video, VOIP services, etc. it's a lot more noticeable.
How would consumers react if they were charged market-value (even wholesale) for the bandwidth they consumed?
Cut the ISPs some slack here. They entered into a free-market, improved their services, then the free market changed so drastically they couldn't adapt without serious backlash.
If you use your 3.0MBit connection at 90% capacity for 100% of the month, you should expect to have to pay more than the casual websurfer, or you should lease a line from your telco and see how THAT bill feels.
In a day in age where court systems reward theives and other criminals with massive liability settlements against those they mercilessly victimize, what's the bigger problem here?
It happened to me once. I'm in sales, so I can't always sit for 30 minutes when my lunch arrives. This time I had Jerk chicken and rice waiting for me while I finished with a client. When I returned to the lunch room it was gone.
I was furious! I mean, it's not about the $6.00 lunch so much as now I have to try to make another hole in my schedule to go get more for myself but also to find time to eat it.
If the person had come to me and said they were broke and needed food I'd have given them the six bucks.
You also have to convince people that there's nothing inherrently wrong with "the gay lifestyle".
This may come as a surprise to many, but most homosexuals have jobs, responsibilities, bills, rent/mortgage payments, stresses of the daily grind, friends, family, aquaintances, enemies, problems, hobbies, vices, ...
Wow! Sounds an awful lot like straight people to me!
The differences come in the fact that they prefer to bed with members of their own sex. They also tend to share more characteristics with the opposite sex. Which is not to say that all gay men are 'sissies' and all gay women are 'butches', of course. It's entirely probable, in fact, that everybody reading this post either knows or is related to atleast one gay person. Perhaps you know it, perhaps you don't, perhaps they haven't even acknowledged it due to the stigma.
I know, though, that when people think "gay couple" they think of Robin Williams and Nathan Lane in The Birdcage. Many people would be surprised to learn that Will from Will & Grace is a more accurate depiction.
My argument about gay adoption, though, is that there are countless straight couples out there who abuse or neglect their children, entertain questionable sexual practises, abuse drugs/alcohol, or generally create a horrible environment for a child's upbringing but people don't object to those kooks procreating, so why object to the adoption by people who want someone to love and cherish?
So let's see if I understand; you didn't understand anything I said in my initial response, and you're still arguing that the solution to all of our computer related problems is technical (and Microsoft seems to be at the forefront from what I gather of your arguments), yet you continue to argue the same point over and over.
If you're not going to address my initial points save yourself some time by not responding.
I think you've missed the point. Any 'foolproof design' has been a pipe-dream since humans have been creating ... anything. An OS wth a foolproof design has been a pipe dream since computers were invented.
But hey, if Microsoft can finally accomplish this, hey, all the power to them. Excuse me while I split my sides now.
Yeah, right. There's a reason there's a cliche about "... along will come a better fool" - because it's true.
We have so many warnings and safety bubbles around us nowadays we're losing the ability to protect ourselves from our surroundings. We're creating a society of clueless, helpless retards.
We start our computers and watch as fifteen protection mechanisms automatically fire up and scan for anything malicious. Our ISPs filter our traffic to protect us from that which we cannot protect ourselves; heaven forbid a message should get through with an attachment and some retard on the other end of the ethernet clicks on the damned thing.
You can see paralells in other areas of life. Cars, for example, have so much safety built into them it's probably doubling the production cost of your average sedan. Yet morons still find ways to kill themselves. Hell, people feel so artificially safe in their cars they're driving faster, more carelessly and more drunk because, hey, it's not like I can be HURT or anything! I've got ABS; it's impossible for me to hit somebody! {SIGH!}
It's getting so bad we have physicians in the UK wanting to ban the most important knife in the kitchen - the chef's knife - because a) they know nothing about cooking, and b) people are damned stupid and hostile enough to keep stabbing each other with them! See what happens when you outlaw guns? People stab each-other! If you ban knifes, they'll bludgeon each other to death!
The long and short of it is this; there is no cure for human stupidity. Darwinism is a pipe-dream, but it's a good one.
I saw a similar memory-testing documentary, I believe it was also a BBC production.
The purpose was to test the memories of the Roswell incident. The testers got about a dozen subjects together and strapped cameras to their heads to take them on a "nature walk" to study what people see and interperet in nature. Along the way they came across a small clearing, taped off with yellow caution tape, with a soldier, a scientist, and a suit inside investigating the landing/crash site of a weather baloon.
Later recollections by the volunteers included accounts of 2-3 soldiers "rushing" towards them with guns drawn and shouting orders to "Clear the area!", another report included a detailed account of several investigators and soldiers even though the eyeball-level video footage shows her being rushed away from the area by her companion and not actually seeing much of anything except her companion's back and the ground around the site.
The stories became more elaborate as the weeks and months went by to the point where these people practically witnessed the next Roswell crash in their minds.
As someone who administered a high school network, sorry my friend, but this just isn't in their mindset. Anytime somebody finds a limitation with school technologies it's immediately their fault for mis-using school resources. When my school of some 400 workstations, all connected to the Internet via 10BaseTX, outstripped our 128Kb/s ISDN link it was decided that we should put tighter restrictions on the proxy because students were abusing the connection.
When I implemented a local cacheing DNS server, I required a reverse PTR in the district's authoritative servers. I was given a 45 minute lecture over the phone as to why I couldn't use his private T1 for the school's routed traffic. It took an additional 45 minutes to explain that this would only be for school-board domain queries and that all other DNS queries would traverse the regular link and that all other routed traffic would, in fact, traverse our local ISDN link (duh) I then got the pleasure of a 30 minute discussion on how to implement the PTR.
See, in a school board you have two primary motivating factors; unions and politics. These factors lend to ignorance and bliss. People with seniority get the cushy jobs because they want them. Qualifications be damned. There are countless schools that have business teachers administrating their school network. Keep in mind that these are people who teach Microsoft Office and Mavis Beacon Touch Typing programs - they couldn't tell you what TCP/IP stood for in a million years! They are, however, either the most qualified or the most vocal so they get the job.
Now, get into their mindset; there's not enough [x]** to go around. Somebody took more than their fair share. That somebody must be punished. The concept of bandwidth being fluid, websites and other Internet resources requiring more bandwidth every year does not register with these people. In their mind, smarter people made the decision that for x number of students we require y amount of bandwidth. Any more than that is a deliberate misuse and should be punished .
Thankfully I was merely a contractor, and thankfully my term ended and was not renewed.
** Where [x] is scissors, glue, paper, chalk, bandwidth, floppy discs, spekaers, etc.
Yep. It was 8:15PM.
I, I, I ... It's great that you believe yourself to be so open-minded. What about his sister, girlfriend/wife, employer, friends and family?
Think long and hard - soul search, as it were. Imagine if the caretaker for your children were accused of being a pedophile or child pornographer or any number of other hideous things. Would you leave your children in their care while you waited for proof? What about one of your friends or family members? Your significant other, your child's teacher? Priest?
How do you think those around you would act towards you if you were accused of something like this? I can tell you it's not as easy as it sounds. Two of my friends have been on the receiving end of these accusations and their lives were forever changed. One went to court and was not charged in the end. Truth be told, nobody but him and his two young children know the truth to this day. The other turned out to be a misunderstanding. His daughter told his ex-wife where daddy touched her, it turned out he was towelling her off after her nightly bath. He lost custody for several weeks and almost went to trial over it.
These accusations are VERY serious, life-altering things; I can't stress that enough. Poeple have lost their jobs, marriages, close friendships, become alienated from their families or even lost their lives over them.
If you ever find yourself in such a situation, and I hope it never comes to pass, but consider then how valuable repercussion-free speech is when you've lost everything and are being brutally beaten with no sympathy from anybody you thought loved you.
It's one thing to have the freedom to be able to disagree with your elected officials or to express an opinion or negative experience you've had with a company, product, or service, but it's another entirely to be able to literally say whatever you want without penalty. That's why slander and libel laws exist - to protect people's reputations from being unduly tarnished by anyone with a vendetta.
That being said, this case appears to have some merit. Accusations of bribery, fraud, and miscarriage of justice on a notorious message board could have serious repercussions for the company. It should be noted, too, that freedom of speech, the 1st amendment, the CCRF et al. do not protect against civil litigation due to speech; they merely prevent the government from creating laws that inhibit free speech or using the criminal justice system to penalize speakers.
Since I'm still trying to figure out what you mean (even with the spelling correction), that wouldn't make a good test. You'd eliminate those who can't make an immediate distinction. The idea behind such tests is to show a human something that they can immediately associate and give the correct answer. Giving out word problems and puzzles will only aleienate 75% of your sight/hearing abled client base and probably the same portion of the deaf-blind you were trying to assist in the first place.
Don't worry, if there comes a day when you live with a woman you'll understand.
Actually, I was talking about the monthly cable subscription charge for cable television.
Because you said you had cable television. How many shows were broadcast to your cable installation? 12?
Not being American myself, I'm not sure where you got the assumption I was inferring so for yourself. Care to point that out in my reply?
BTW - if you'd point out what "your country" is, perhaps it would be easier to discuss the situation in your particular part of the planet rather than griping about assumptions.
It sounds to me as if he wishes to be with her while she watches television, not as if it's the only time he's able to be with her.
Besides that; do you really think that because he doesn't like TV but she does is going to cause the outright cancellation of the service? It's a marriage; there's some level of compromise involved. I'm sure he has hobbies and interests that she doesn't share, but she doesn't forbid them because they make him happy.
(Insert cliche about Slashdot and marriage/women here)
Common short-form for "with". Obviously you figured it out, else you wouldn't have been able to respond.
Do you think the cable grows in the ground like so many tree roots? Do you think the programs just appear on that cable without the benefeits of expensive facilities, equipment and trained staff?
Moreover, do you really think your $25/month pays for the production of the thousands of shows that are broadcast to your home 24/7?
If you want ad-free, subscription based television it already exists in the form of HBO et al. You're more than welcome to sign up and step off your soapbox at any time.