Thanks for that - I entirely agree. It's sad that instead they're going in the other direction - the wide availability of free images is being cited as a reason for yet more laws.
We also have lobbyists who claim that the reason for child porn laws wasn't as you point out, but was because looking at images turned people into pedophiles. Thus, it's used as the predecent for everything from fictional and cartoon "child porn" images, to images of consenting adults that appear "extreme" or "violent".
I think it's also interesting how, when child porn was made illegal, despite the strong case there were people who spoke out against it out of fear of freedom of expression issues. Now 30 years later, no one dares oppose laws such as those criminalising cartoons, out of fear of being labelled a supporter of child porn.
In the UK, ISTR that originally it was only punishable with a fine, and only illegal if you intended to distrubute the material. Now 30 years on, laws against cartoons and consensual adult pornography are being brought in straight off for simple possession, and punishable with three years in prison.
The technology didn't exist, but that's a completely separate issue - you might as well claim that couples having sex with contraception isn't natural. But the idea of wanting to show someone you love your body, through whatever means are available, does not seem unreasonable or unnatural to me.
With the availability of digital cameras and mobile phones, people taking sexual pictures of themselves is going to vastly increase - with the various batshit laws on pornography (in some countries, including consenting adults), there's a lot of potential criminals being made. The older (voting) generation don't care, because having grown up in an age when video cameras were expensive or unavailable, and any film had to be processed by Boots, they just think "Why on earth would someone want to take a photo of them?" The Governments and police love it, because it means a quick search of someone's computer will be increasingly likely to show up illegal images, which is sufficient to put them away no matter what they were originally suspected of.
What are the potential consequences OOI - which of them are worse than the teen being criminalised, and which of them are solved by criminalising the teen?
Even if we say they can't consent (which is fine with me), it doesn't then make sense to prosecute them for that. I mean, if we say they can't comprehend the consequences of having sex (or taking photos), why do we then say they can comprehend it when it comes to criminalising them?
The argument for saying they can't consent is that they don't have the mental capacity to do so, but this also means they ought not be held criminally liable for it.
So that's one way to handle it - below a certain age, they can't consent to sex with all (even with someone of the same age), but they also aren't liable for their actions.
I find it interesting that you think you can telepathically determine whether I read it or not.
If you did read it, then why did you criticise it for something it doesn't say?
"Sometimes considered" is meaningless fluff. You're sometimes considered a stupid, pedantic fuckwit.
It's not ideal, but far more intelligent than the writing ability of someone who resorts to ad-hominems, and thinks names like "wankipedia" are funny. Seriously, are you 12? Or some chav that got let loose here?
The claim in Wikipedia is cited to a source. But I'm sure that won't affect your straw man argument, as you're more interested in insulting anyone who dares to disagree with you.
Your claim however is not cited to a source - it's your own opinion, but you attempt to hide it because you're not only a troll, but you're not man enough to say it directly.
A more complex OS has more avenues for failure, and indeed for glitch free media playback Windows will never be a perfect choice [technet.com]. That does not mean I think Windows - any version - is less stable than Amiga OS, because I don't.
You are basing your argument solely as "AmigaOS must be more unstable than TOS, because it multitasks and is more complex", in the complete absence of any evidence, or even experience of having used TOS. By this reasoning, Windows today must be at least as unstable as AmigaOS, and more unstable than TOS. Same for OS X and Linux.
Amiga OS was not created in a day. Along the way developers fixed bugs and improved stability, however Amiga OS was from the get go a more ambitious project than TOS. Historically more complex projects tend to have more issues that need to be resolved. Amiga OS 1.0 came out in 1985, 1.3.2 in 1989 (according to here). In contrast, TOS went from 1.0 to 1.04 in the same period - which was the last ST release.
Yes, AmigaOS received lots more development, that's why I preferred it. So it had more issues to be resolved? If they were resolved, who cares. Modern OSs have vastly more issues that need resolving.
That does not automatically mean TOS is more stable, but it is a complexity developers did not have to deal with.
Right. The TOS developers didn't have to deal with complexity, and this has nothing to do with the claim that one is more stable than the other. I'm glad we agree. I don't know why you didn't just say TOS was a more primitive OS, rather than making claims of it being more stable, if you didn't actually mean that.
In the Wiki article, this is quoted, and given a reference (Royle). It also clearly states "sometimes considered", not that it was. If fail to see what it's doing wrong?
But that's wikipedia for you.
No, that's misquoting people on Slashdot for you. I find it interesting that you distrust Wikipedia without even reading it, but you trust a random person's summary of it.
I do not know how stable TOS is, as I've never used it, but I do know that it is a simpler OS than the Amiga's OS.
So since Windows XP and OS X are more complex than AmigaOS, TOS and DOS were, they're more unstable? I don't think so.
Sorry, your argument is laughable. You're trying to have a 20 year old ST vs Amiga debate when you haven't even used an ST, based on some claim that multitasking makes computers more unstable. Well I guess we should throw out all our modern OSs today and go back to the robust TOS!
If supporting multitasking inherently makes an OS less stable - even when an OS is only running one application - let's see your evidence for that?
no co processors
So the ST is not only more stable because of it's simpler OS, but also due to it's simpler hardware. Brilliant! Being crap is now touted as an advantage! I guess today's complex hardware must have no hope of staying up.
One way to teach bad writing is to show examples of it.
(I never understood why writing a lot reduces someone's writing skills anyway - I'd say the opposite, it's far more likely if you never have to write.)
Add to that the differences between US and UK English
I think you'll be fighting a losing battle here - children, and not to mention adults, are going to pick up US English anyway, whether it's taught or not in schools. Indeed, if you're worried about that, then that's all the more reason to teach it - to point out how even "English" has different dialects.
The English language is not defined by authority, it evolves, and at some point we're going to have to give up the practice of marking students wrong when they practise a particular spelling that's acceptable in US English, but not traditionally in UK English.
Your argument is correct, but that doesn't change the fact that Wikipedia is indeed unreliable.
Well, all sources are "unreliable" in just the same sense. Some sources are more reliable than others - and IIRC studies have shown that Wikipedia does pretty good here. I don't know why Wikipedia gets all the criticism for unreliability, when there are far more unreliable sources (e.g., the media) that get swallowed as fact.
Students who use any encyclopedia for academic papers need to follow the citations and use those, not the article itself.
Fixed that for you.
And any source that doesn't have citations - unless you're referencing it as a primary or secondary source - shouldn't be used at all (this would cut out most the media, who for some reason never give their sources).
This is a common criticism, and it makes no sense - Wikipedia is unreliable, because your edits got reverted? If Britannica don't publish my contribution, are they unreliable too?
The joke is that on the one hand, people criticise Wikipedia because anyone could make a poor edit, but then other people criticise it because edits can get reverted. Which is it?
Let's have a link to what your edits were, please. Of course, I'm sure you thought your edit was making great improvements, but everyone would think that, including those making bad edits. And yes, I'll concede it's possible that sometimes a useful contribution is reverted, but that isn't an argument for saying that Wikipedia is unreliable - it just means that it misses out on a random piece of extra information.
I can't think of anything worse to teach children than to use Wikipedia as a primary source of research and to use Twitter as a primary means of communication.
I don't really care about the proposal, but I wondered how long it would be before anti-Wikipedia rants came. First post, it seems.
Where in TFA does it claim teaching Wikipedia as a primary source? It's not a primary source, so that would be flat out wrong - it's a tertiary source, just like any other encyclopedia. And if you're worried about people misusing Wikipedia, surely that's all the more reason to teach people how to assess sources properly?
As for twitter, where in TFA does it say using it as the primary means of communication?
This is an article about primary schools - perhaps this confused you?
Far more would be gained by teaching kids how to use and administer computers than simply jumping on whatever the current internet bandwagon is and letting kids arse around with it.
Why would letting kids "arse around with computers" as you suggest, be any better? See, it's easy to criticise a policy if you sum it up as "arse around", without reading anything about it.
Modern personal computing was really built on what Windows 95 brought to the public.
I take your point about how computing was fun back then, but I don't see how this was brought because of Windows 95 (Windows 95 might have been what most people used, due to the dominance of Microsoft, but that's a different issue).
And now computing isn't fun anymore, anymore than, say, using a telephone is.
As I said in another post, I think computing sucked in the 90s, but is fun again now. We have Internet access all the time, and don't have to fight with a phone line or worry about the bills. Computers are cheap again in the sense that there's plenty of decent products in the low end market (like there were in the 80s and early 90s, as opposed to having to spend over £1,000 on a PC). Computers are small again (they don't need to be massive great big huge towers - remember that word, when we actually had a word for "big huge computer", instead of it being the default? At some point, "desktops" disappeared, and "towers" became "desktops"). You can get computers with everything integrated instead faffing around with 5 cards. Basically, all the annoyances I associated with PCs and DOS/Windows finally appear to have disappeared.
I think programming is more fun too, especially for graphics/games - we have better libraries to cope with the range of hardware, and GPUs are fully programmable.
The web has finally got over its "best viewed in IE" stage. There are lots of addictive games to eat up my life - including plenty of ones a few years old, which are cheap to obtain, and don't require expensive hardware.
Who back then didn't spend many weekends staying up all night, to the breaking sun of dawn, playing games, "surfing the web", and chatting, in AOL rooms or IRC, with people far across the globe in real time?
MacOS, on the other hand, never had preemptive multitasking. Later versions had cooperative multitasking which relied on programs being specially written to support it. However, just one app running without that support was all it took to bring your Mac to a screeching halt. The late 90's were a horrible time to be a Mac user, and Apple's market share declined sharply during this period because of how primitive the last versions of MacOS were compared to everything else on the market. After the return of Jobs in the late 90's, Apple started to turn around by making flashy hardware, colored iMac's, those god-awful puck-mice, etc.. It wasn't until OSX came along that Apple was able to attract (at least some) users more interested in working on their macs than in how they looked.
I entirely agree. The sad thing is that Mac users often looked down upon Amiga users as using a "toy", and now think of the (relative) success of OS X as proving right, but it's a completely different platform; it was only by ditching the OS (and later replacing the hardware - same broom with different brush and different handle, right?) that Apple managed to attract more users, which kind of proves our point about the state of classic MacOS at the time.
I'd also say that computing in general sucked in the late 90s. The Windows NT line still wasn't good for consumer use (and wouldn't be until 2000), whilst Windows 9x was rather abysmal, and for both, the amount of memory needed to run them at a decent speed was still very expensive. I still loved AmigaOS, but the PC companies that had bought it from Commodore were just squeezing the existing technology for money and not doing any innovation for it, hardware for it was getting old and expensive, companies were leaving for other platforms and those that remained often preferred to squeeze users for as much money as possible. It wasn't until years later that I started to enjoy computing again.
He didn't say it didn't get cooperative multitasking until the late 90s, he said that Macs sucked by the late 90s, compared to what other platforms had achieved.
And I think System 7 reasonably counts as a later version of classic MacOS, having been released 7 years after the first version.
True, but it took some time to convert Nextstep into OS X and release it as a product to run on the Mac hardware, so I don't think that the OP was wrong with his timescales. A quick Google suggests Jobs returned in 1996, but OS X wasn't released until 1999 (and not on desktops until 2001).
Re:The 10 OSes I have gladly left behind...
on
10 OSes We Left Behind
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I presume you're being funny, but why was 2000 bad, and XP good? XP is mostly 2000 with extra fluff I usually turn off, and newer drivers/updates installed as standard (which is handy to save downloading, but this didn't apply when 2000 was a recent OS). And XP was hated on places like Slashdot when it first came out - everyone preferred 2000...
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for that - I entirely agree. It's sad that instead they're going in the other direction - the wide availability of free images is being cited as a reason for yet more laws.
We also have lobbyists who claim that the reason for child porn laws wasn't as you point out, but was because looking at images turned people into pedophiles. Thus, it's used as the predecent for everything from fictional and cartoon "child porn" images, to images of consenting adults that appear "extreme" or "violent".
I think it's also interesting how, when child porn was made illegal, despite the strong case there were people who spoke out against it out of fear of freedom of expression issues. Now 30 years later, no one dares oppose laws such as those criminalising cartoons, out of fear of being labelled a supporter of child porn.
In the UK, ISTR that originally it was only punishable with a fine, and only illegal if you intended to distrubute the material. Now 30 years on, laws against cartoons and consensual adult pornography are being brought in straight off for simple possession, and punishable with three years in prison.
Same in the UK too - the law was even specifically changed to raise it to 18 in 2003.
And a law currently going through Parliament will criminalise all sexual images (including drawings, cartoons) that appear to depict someone under 18 (or even an adult with the "predominant" impression of someone under 18): http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/graphic-artists-condemn-plans-to-ban-erotic-comics-1652270.html
Soon privately doodling a sketch of yourself at 17 (or perhaps older, if the jury think you look young enough in the drawing) will be illegal.
It's okay for gay teens to have sex then :)
The technology didn't exist, but that's a completely separate issue - you might as well claim that couples having sex with contraception isn't natural. But the idea of wanting to show someone you love your body, through whatever means are available, does not seem unreasonable or unnatural to me.
With the availability of digital cameras and mobile phones, people taking sexual pictures of themselves is going to vastly increase - with the various batshit laws on pornography (in some countries, including consenting adults), there's a lot of potential criminals being made. The older (voting) generation don't care, because having grown up in an age when video cameras were expensive or unavailable, and any film had to be processed by Boots, they just think "Why on earth would someone want to take a photo of them?" The Governments and police love it, because it means a quick search of someone's computer will be increasingly likely to show up illegal images, which is sufficient to put them away no matter what they were originally suspected of.
What are the potential consequences OOI - which of them are worse than the teen being criminalised, and which of them are solved by criminalising the teen?
Even if we say they can't consent (which is fine with me), it doesn't then make sense to prosecute them for that. I mean, if we say they can't comprehend the consequences of having sex (or taking photos), why do we then say they can comprehend it when it comes to criminalising them?
The argument for saying they can't consent is that they don't have the mental capacity to do so, but this also means they ought not be held criminally liable for it.
So that's one way to handle it - below a certain age, they can't consent to sex with all (even with someone of the same age), but they also aren't liable for their actions.
I find it interesting that you think you can telepathically determine whether I read it or not.
If you did read it, then why did you criticise it for something it doesn't say?
"Sometimes considered" is meaningless fluff. You're sometimes considered a stupid, pedantic fuckwit.
It's not ideal, but far more intelligent than the writing ability of someone who resorts to ad-hominems, and thinks names like "wankipedia" are funny. Seriously, are you 12? Or some chav that got let loose here?
The claim in Wikipedia is cited to a source. But I'm sure that won't affect your straw man argument, as you're more interested in insulting anyone who dares to disagree with you.
Your claim however is not cited to a source - it's your own opinion, but you attempt to hide it because you're not only a troll, but you're not man enough to say it directly.
A more complex OS has more avenues for failure, and indeed for glitch free media playback Windows will never be a perfect choice [technet.com]. That does not mean I think Windows - any version - is less stable than Amiga OS, because I don't.
You are basing your argument solely as "AmigaOS must be more unstable than TOS, because it multitasks and is more complex", in the complete absence of any evidence, or even experience of having used TOS. By this reasoning, Windows today must be at least as unstable as AmigaOS, and more unstable than TOS. Same for OS X and Linux.
Amiga OS was not created in a day. Along the way developers fixed bugs and improved stability, however Amiga OS was from the get go a more ambitious project than TOS. Historically more complex projects tend to have more issues that need to be resolved. Amiga OS 1.0 came out in 1985, 1.3.2 in 1989 (according to here). In contrast, TOS went from 1.0 to 1.04 in the same period - which was the last ST release.
Yes, AmigaOS received lots more development, that's why I preferred it. So it had more issues to be resolved? If they were resolved, who cares. Modern OSs have vastly more issues that need resolving.
That does not automatically mean TOS is more stable, but it is a complexity developers did not have to deal with.
Right. The TOS developers didn't have to deal with complexity, and this has nothing to do with the claim that one is more stable than the other. I'm glad we agree. I don't know why you didn't just say TOS was a more primitive OS, rather than making claims of it being more stable, if you didn't actually mean that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whoosh
It seems to vary - at my UK primary school, we did WW2 (more than just pictures), and then WW1 in secondary school.
Running and screaming lessons? Dipping a ball in dogshit and throwing to someone lessons?
Well they were compulsory at my school, we called them PE and Games...
In the Wiki article, this is quoted, and given a reference (Royle). It also clearly states "sometimes considered", not that it was. If fail to see what it's doing wrong?
But that's wikipedia for you.
No, that's misquoting people on Slashdot for you. I find it interesting that you distrust Wikipedia without even reading it, but you trust a random person's summary of it.
Good applications can also bring down the OS.
Fine, "good" applications too - whichever.
I do not know how stable TOS is, as I've never used it, but I do know that it is a simpler OS than the Amiga's OS.
So since Windows XP and OS X are more complex than AmigaOS, TOS and DOS were, they're more unstable? I don't think so.
Sorry, your argument is laughable. You're trying to have a 20 year old ST vs Amiga debate when you haven't even used an ST, based on some claim that multitasking makes computers more unstable. Well I guess we should throw out all our modern OSs today and go back to the robust TOS!
If supporting multitasking inherently makes an OS less stable - even when an OS is only running one application - let's see your evidence for that?
no co processors
So the ST is not only more stable because of it's simpler OS, but also due to it's simpler hardware. Brilliant! Being crap is now touted as an advantage! I guess today's complex hardware must have no hope of staying up.
I'm confused - if you only wrote offline, or if you didn't write much at all, no one would be putting red rings around your mistakes, surely?
I often don't bother to expand my vocabulary. If I come across a word whose meaning I'm unsure of, I ignore it.
It's the opposite for me - if there's a word I don't understand, I can look it up immediately, instead of trying to guess.
One way to teach bad writing is to show examples of it.
(I never understood why writing a lot reduces someone's writing skills anyway - I'd say the opposite, it's far more likely if you never have to write.)
Add to that the differences between US and UK English
I think you'll be fighting a losing battle here - children, and not to mention adults, are going to pick up US English anyway, whether it's taught or not in schools. Indeed, if you're worried about that, then that's all the more reason to teach it - to point out how even "English" has different dialects.
The English language is not defined by authority, it evolves, and at some point we're going to have to give up the practice of marking students wrong when they practise a particular spelling that's acceptable in US English, but not traditionally in UK English.
Thanks, I'll take a look.
Your argument is correct, but that doesn't change the fact that Wikipedia is indeed unreliable.
Well, all sources are "unreliable" in just the same sense. Some sources are more reliable than others - and IIRC studies have shown that Wikipedia does pretty good here. I don't know why Wikipedia gets all the criticism for unreliability, when there are far more unreliable sources (e.g., the media) that get swallowed as fact.
Students who use any encyclopedia for academic papers need to follow the citations and use those, not the article itself.
Fixed that for you.
And any source that doesn't have citations - unless you're referencing it as a primary or secondary source - shouldn't be used at all (this would cut out most the media, who for some reason never give their sources).
How can you trust that link, it's from Wikipedia!!!
This is a common criticism, and it makes no sense - Wikipedia is unreliable, because your edits got reverted? If Britannica don't publish my contribution, are they unreliable too?
The joke is that on the one hand, people criticise Wikipedia because anyone could make a poor edit, but then other people criticise it because edits can get reverted. Which is it?
Let's have a link to what your edits were, please. Of course, I'm sure you thought your edit was making great improvements, but everyone would think that, including those making bad edits. And yes, I'll concede it's possible that sometimes a useful contribution is reverted, but that isn't an argument for saying that Wikipedia is unreliable - it just means that it misses out on a random piece of extra information.
I can't think of anything worse to teach children than to use Wikipedia as a primary source of research and to use Twitter as a primary means of communication.
I don't really care about the proposal, but I wondered how long it would be before anti-Wikipedia rants came. First post, it seems.
Where in TFA does it claim teaching Wikipedia as a primary source? It's not a primary source, so that would be flat out wrong - it's a tertiary source, just like any other encyclopedia. And if you're worried about people misusing Wikipedia, surely that's all the more reason to teach people how to assess sources properly?
As for twitter, where in TFA does it say using it as the primary means of communication?
This is an article about primary schools - perhaps this confused you?
Far more would be gained by teaching kids how to use and administer computers than simply jumping on whatever the current internet bandwagon is and letting kids arse around with it.
Why would letting kids "arse around with computers" as you suggest, be any better? See, it's easy to criticise a policy if you sum it up as "arse around", without reading anything about it.
Nice straw man.
Modern personal computing was really built on what Windows 95 brought to the public.
I take your point about how computing was fun back then, but I don't see how this was brought because of Windows 95 (Windows 95 might have been what most people used, due to the dominance of Microsoft, but that's a different issue).
And now computing isn't fun anymore, anymore than, say, using a telephone is.
As I said in another post, I think computing sucked in the 90s, but is fun again now. We have Internet access all the time, and don't have to fight with a phone line or worry about the bills. Computers are cheap again in the sense that there's plenty of decent products in the low end market (like there were in the 80s and early 90s, as opposed to having to spend over £1,000 on a PC). Computers are small again (they don't need to be massive great big huge towers - remember that word, when we actually had a word for "big huge computer", instead of it being the default? At some point, "desktops" disappeared, and "towers" became "desktops"). You can get computers with everything integrated instead faffing around with 5 cards. Basically, all the annoyances I associated with PCs and DOS/Windows finally appear to have disappeared.
I think programming is more fun too, especially for graphics/games - we have better libraries to cope with the range of hardware, and GPUs are fully programmable.
The web has finally got over its "best viewed in IE" stage. There are lots of addictive games to eat up my life - including plenty of ones a few years old, which are cheap to obtain, and don't require expensive hardware.
Who back then didn't spend many weekends staying up all night, to the breaking sun of dawn, playing games, "surfing the web", and chatting, in AOL rooms or IRC, with people far across the globe in real time?
Who doesn't do that now? :)
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS_versions for screenshots of every major version.
MacOS, on the other hand, never had preemptive multitasking. Later versions had cooperative multitasking which relied on programs being specially written to support it. However, just one app running without that support was all it took to bring your Mac to a screeching halt. The late 90's were a horrible time to be a Mac user, and Apple's market share declined sharply during this period because of how primitive the last versions of MacOS were compared to everything else on the market. After the return of Jobs in the late 90's, Apple started to turn around by making flashy hardware, colored iMac's, those god-awful puck-mice, etc.. It wasn't until OSX came along that Apple was able to attract (at least some) users more interested in working on their macs than in how they looked.
I entirely agree. The sad thing is that Mac users often looked down upon Amiga users as using a "toy", and now think of the (relative) success of OS X as proving right, but it's a completely different platform; it was only by ditching the OS (and later replacing the hardware - same broom with different brush and different handle, right?) that Apple managed to attract more users, which kind of proves our point about the state of classic MacOS at the time.
I'd also say that computing in general sucked in the late 90s. The Windows NT line still wasn't good for consumer use (and wouldn't be until 2000), whilst Windows 9x was rather abysmal, and for both, the amount of memory needed to run them at a decent speed was still very expensive. I still loved AmigaOS, but the PC companies that had bought it from Commodore were just squeezing the existing technology for money and not doing any innovation for it, hardware for it was getting old and expensive, companies were leaving for other platforms and those that remained often preferred to squeeze users for as much money as possible. It wasn't until years later that I started to enjoy computing again.
He didn't say it didn't get cooperative multitasking until the late 90s, he said that Macs sucked by the late 90s, compared to what other platforms had achieved.
And I think System 7 reasonably counts as a later version of classic MacOS, having been released 7 years after the first version.
True, but it took some time to convert Nextstep into OS X and release it as a product to run on the Mac hardware, so I don't think that the OP was wrong with his timescales. A quick Google suggests Jobs returned in 1996, but OS X wasn't released until 1999 (and not on desktops until 2001).
I presume you're being funny, but why was 2000 bad, and XP good? XP is mostly 2000 with extra fluff I usually turn off, and newer drivers/updates installed as standard (which is handy to save downloading, but this didn't apply when 2000 was a recent OS). And XP was hated on places like Slashdot when it first came out - everyone preferred 2000...