While working at a company that makes an online real estate listing and search platform, I added a Simpsons easter egg. If you searched for 742 Evergreen Terrace in any town named Springfield, the app would load a Simpsons-esque webfont, all text would be rendered in it, and the color scheme would change to yellow, orangered, and blue.
Personally, I love the new game enhancements. The interface is better, the combat is more exciting and less stand-there-and-click-the-next-attack, and the first 30 levels are more intuitive. Plus, you have to look at it from SOE and Lucas Art's point-of-view. This is supposed to be a Star Wars MMO. MMO's are obviously popular (WoW) and there are millions upon millions of Star Wars fans. How many people played SWG before? Not enough, maybe a few hundred thousand, and of those, I'd say maybe 50 thousand actually active players. Out of millions, that's not much. How many copies of Nattlefront have sold? How many copies of KOTOR? A ton. people want to play MMOs, people want to play Star Wars games, but the old game simply was not drawing a large enough crowd. Hopefully the new one will.
The only effect SuprNova's shutdown had on me was to force redundancy on me- now, I get my files from a variety of sources. Sure, it's a little bit harder to browse what's new from 5 different pages, but it also keeps me focused on what I went looking for in the first place.
Subpoenas are flying in the high-profile lawsuit between The SCO Group and IBM, as both companies try to buttress their legal claims by turning to third parties for information.
SCO said Wednesday that it has filed subpoenas with the U.S. District Court in Utah, targeting six different individuals or organizations. Those include Novell; Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel; Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation; Stewart Cohen, chief executive of the Open Source Development Labs; and John Horsley, general counsel of Transmeta.
SCO spokesman Blake Stowell said he did not know what the subpoenas asked for, but "I know that some of them have been served."
IBM also has broadened its efforts to respond to the Linux-related lawsuit by asking a federal judge to order SCO to identify illegal source code and serving four other companies with subpoenas of its own.
SCO filed the suit in March, claiming that IBM "contaminated" Linux by illegally incorporating trade secrets inherited from Unix. So far, SCO has listed the names of 591 files in the Linux 2.4 and 2.5 kernels that allegedly contain illicit code but has not been more specific.
IBM's subpoenas were sent on Oct. 30 to BayStar Capital, Deutsche Bank, Renaissance Ventures and The Yankee Group, which have indicated they have reason to believe SCO's claims are legitimate. IBM has cited an Oct. 16 article in the Salt Lake Tribune that reported Deutsche Bank analyst Brian Skiba visited SCO's headquarters and saw a "near exact duplicate of source code between the Linux 2.4 kernel and (SCO's) Unix System V kernel." In October, BayStar Capital invested $50 million in SCO.
In a statement to CNET News.com on Wednesday, IBM said: "It is time for SCO to produce something meaningful. They have been dragging their feet, and it is not clear there is any incentive for SCO to try this in court." IBM filed motions on Nov. 3 and Nov. 6, asking the court to "issue an order compelling SCO to respond to IBM's interrogatories with specificity and in detail."
SCO's Stowell said his company provided about a million pages of documents in response to IBM's requests. "They are trying to coerce and intimidate," Stowell said, referring to Big Blue's subpoenas. "I think what they're trying to do is that if you're a potential investor in our company or an industry analyst that says anything even remotely favorable toward SCO, you're going to be subpoenaed by IBM."
The fundamental problem is that people who create things on the net as their full-time jobs need to somehow get paid for the effort.
The fundamental problem, actually, is that people want to create things on the net as their full-time job. There's no reason for this. It's not as if web pages are in such dire need of being created, or are that hard to maintain. It's things like Flash, Quicktime VR, streaming media, and other fancy but ultimately useless whiz-bobs that have made the net such a convoluted, advertising-filled medium.
Going from grassroots to commercial was the worst thing that happened to the net, but don't think that it was inevitable. It happened because people wanted to get paid for doing easy stuff.
If people found real jobs doing useful stuff, and updated their particular piece of the net as it was convenient, there would be no advertising and a much more personal feel to the web in general. There is nothing wrong with the web as a purely amature medium. Amature is where all the innovative stuff happens.
I recently read the article "Linux's Hit Men" by Daniel Lyons. I can only assume this article was meant to be labeled as an editorial because of the dominance of opinion over fact that this article presented. Further, I was appalled at the brazen links the writer drew between communism and the Open Source Movement, not to mention the assumption that communism is somehow "bad" or "wrong". The Chinese have a communist government, and yet they represent nearly a quarter of the world's population, are preparing a mission into space, and have vast manufacturing resources. These accomplishments are not trivial, nor should they be considered as exceptions to the rule of "Capitalism and democracy are the only viable social systems". Communism is just as valid a form of government as democracy, and should not be villainized because it is different. This is not the 1960's, there is no Cold War raging, and McCarthy has, thankfully, passed form the public eye. Join the rest of the world in the third millennium.
The Free Software Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the freedom of the individual. The GNU General Public License (GPL) is a way of working within existing US Copyright law to help achieve those aims. The GPL is different from most other click-thru licenses in that it is very readable, and explains not only the restrictions placed on the user, but also the reasons for those restrictions. The user need not even read the entire license to understand the gist of it- that is all laid out in the preamble. The rest of the GPL only confirms what is written in this section: software covered under the GPL can be distributed for a fee, the source code to any GPL software must be made available to those who request it (at the least), modifications of the code are both acceptable and encouraged, and works that are directly derived from free software must also be made free. These are the most important issues the GPL deals with, and they all support the aim of the Free Software Foundation: the power over software is given to the users of that software, as long as the creators publish under the GPL. This model is more appropriately compared to sharing a workload rather than communism. The creators of the software still own it; it is not public domain merely because its source is available for all to see. In fact, one of the aims of the GPL is to give users many of the benefits of public domain software without robbing the creators of credit or control.
The GPL makes as few restrictions as possible to preserve freedom. They limit the rights of the user from copying, in whole or in part, the GPL works into proprietary works- that is, works that are not GPL. This does not mean that distribution of GPL software implies that any other software distributed with it must be free, only that software based on/derived from GPL software must also be GPL. This prevents companies and individuals alike from benefiting wholesale from the works of others against their express wishes. Further, the GPL license must be distributed along with any GPL software/derivatives in order that those new users are aware of their rights. The GPL also limits its own use. I quote directly from the GPL, section 2 paragraph 2:
"These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If
identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program,
and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in
themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those
sections when you distribute them as separate works."
This paragraph states expressly that software that is not derivative of or modifications of GPL software can be distributed alongside GPL software under a different license. The only thing this restricts is the ability of a person or company from stealing the works of others and perpetrating those works as the company's (or person's) own. The software written by the company can be protected under its own license, and even closed
It doesn't matter what we think. In the end, it will come down to an old man in a black robe.
The law (both written and case) states quite clearly that SCO must take steps to end any alleged infringement. Any "man in a black robe" can't rule any other way.
This is the worst part about the American legal system, but was designed to be the best part- the judge can rule contrary to the letter of the law. This is what justice sometimes requires. It so gets my goat that the Judicial Branch operations in this country are more and more referred to as the legal system, rather than the justice system, because justice is the goal of the system. It would be unjust for the judge to rule that SGI owes SCO back-damages for code that is in the public domain, or released under the GPL legally even if the law states expressly that (s)he should. Unfortunately, often the only way a judge will do this is if (s)he rules that the law is in violation of the constitution (federal or state). This, of course, leads to Supreme Court cases, years of delay, and often ridiculously-high court fees by the time things are over. Oh, then there's the appeals process for the original ruling (not including the cases regarding the constitutionality of the law itself), and then, when it's all over, both participants have been dragged through so much mud that neither can quite retain their clean consumer-friendly image afterwards. Not to mention the fact that whatever code they were arguing about in the first place will be obsolete (and no doubt removed) by the time the case is over.
For a long time, the Large Magellanic Cloud, an irregular type satellite galaxy of our own, was held to be the closest galaxy to the Milky Way. It is 179,000 light-years away.
But in 1994 the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy was discovered at 80,000 light-years. It now holds the honor.
-Quote thanks to NASA
The closest galaxy is over25 times farther away than 3,000 light years.
I was doing an essay for a History class just last night. I had the textbook, multiple primary sources, and a sample essay out on my desk in treeware. Over the course of writing the essay, I turned less and less to the printed material and more often googled for information. I was too often frustrated at not being able to find a specific quote, or in which context a quote was made. Hundreds of non-text-searchable pages may have been sufficient if I had started a week earlier, but at T minus 4 hours and counting, I really didn't have the time to continuously flip through the treeware scanning for keywords. This is one reason I support textbooks that come with CD-ROMs of the entire text inside. I don't advocate getting rid of treeware completely, but more often than not it's becoming a last resource, not a first one.
It was done entirely on computers, no models. The DVD has a documentary on it: it was a landmark in that it only used CGI for the ships, spaceflight, etc. Also, the kid brother in that was in Invaders from Mrs- another 80's classic, even if it was a remake. IMDB Link[imdb.com].
We have seven computers in our house, a couple are Linux boxes, two are XP, and the others are 98/98SE. We all share a broadband connection via a LAN. What I'd like to do is set up a chat program that is only accessible from/to the other computers on the network. No one on the Internet should be able to IM in, and no one on the LAN should be able to IM out, but we should all be able to IM each other. We often work with sensitive data (credit-cards, SSN's, etc.) that I would prefer we not have to send outside the local network. Since numbers are far easier to share via text than over a phone/voice system, a secure IM system like this would be favourite. I am not against everyone using AIM, Yahoo, IRC etc. ont he side, but for sharing personal information, I need a more secure option than sending packets over the Internet. Encryption for just-in-case would also be a welcome addition. Any options, or am I pissing into the wind?
I agree with you 110%. There is far too much irrational "worrying about the children." In fact, "the children" have become nothing more than a a catch phrase to sway public opinion on a subject. Add into any argument that it's "for the children" and every "soccer Mom" left in the suburbs is on your side. The Nazi's used the "for the children" excuse when the were doing "racial cleansing." The Catholics use that excuse to defend their book-banning. It was used in the nonproliferation talks, to speed up the FDA's testing period for new drugs, and those damn-irritating child-safety windows that almost roll down halfway. All this, not to mention a host of laws about how parents should raise their own kids, child adoption laws (Rosie O'Donnell knows what I'm talking about here), restrictive, anti-constitutional gun laws, spyware on the Internet (so-called filtering software), and a plethora of other laws, programs, devices, and sundry. These serve to replace the parents in a family. I agree that a lot of people do a terrible job preparing their children for the future. But many, many more do just fine. My parents raised me without TV parental controls. My parents read books before I did, they knew what I was reading. They could recognize teenage-angst, and did not have to attribute it to: rock and roll, video games, TV violence, sexual abuse, drugs, hanging out with the "wrong crowd", or whatever else parents typically attribute their children's misbehavior to. My father recognized his fault when I did not open a door for a lady, or made derogatory remarks about their "station". My parents taught me the evil of racism, and the need to control my emotions, and channel them to positive uses. And yes, my parents screwed up, too. However, they did not blame it on TV, music, video games, the school system, or the kids down the street. Their rally cry was not "there should be a law against that"; rather, it was "we'll do better next time".
I go on this tirade to make a point. It seems the norm for parents today to be paranoid. If their child is late coming home from school, he's causing trouble. If he falls asleep in class, he's been out partying, and if he responds with an attitude, he's on drugs. They rely on others to do their parenting. Everything from preschool to car-trunks has to be "child safe". I am despondent when I read another "child protection act" has gone through Congress. I can no longer spank my child in public. Well, spanking worked on me, why wont it work on my children? It's a punishment; by definition, it must be cruel and unusual. I would not punish my child by sending him a dozen roses. Only something cruel (read: causing or conducive to injury, grief, or pain) and unusual (read: not in the ordinary daily routine) can get trough to the whole brain that something is bad. If they equate pain with what they did wrong, they will stop doing it. Pain is a built-in behavior control device. Parents should use it. And they should stop relying on other people to raise their kids for them. If a child locks himself in a trunk, he'll stop climbing in. If he runs away for a night, and is beaten by a bum for his milk-money, he'll stop running away. If he tries to commit suicide, locking him up in a small cell, taking away his shoelaces, and telling him what a screw-up he is, is not going to make him want to live. If you take something away from a child, they will find another way to get it, and this time you wont be there to curb the effect, or explain the language, or point out the morals. If we continue under the misconception that every child should grow up and have children of their own, we are leaving any kind of evolution behind. if the child is not smart enough to avoid climbing inside a hot oven, we should not ban ovens. If a parent does not have the skills necessary to raise children, we should enact laws and make all of society help them. That would keep these behavior patterns from being weeded-out, because their kids would probably grow up to use the same failed techniques. Rather, we should allow Nature to take it's course, intervening only when humanitarian concerns allow. Damn it, our kids are going to be too soft to handle the world when they come of age. They are all going to need psychiatrists to tell them they are screwups because of their parents, and when their boss rejects an idea, they don't have to jump out of an office window. I, for one, don't want to live with a bunch of sissy's who cant take criticism as just that instead of an attack on character, nor do I want my children to have those "the individual well being is most important, violence never solves anything, when you fail the world is here to say it's OK, don't do anything you are afraid to do, you're not the boss of me, there should be a law against that" attitudes.
This watch is just another way parents can pawn off their responsibilities. Watch your children, don't buy a watch to do that. One day, you wont be there for your kids. They need to know that, and learn how to act in just such a situation. You can't always be there, and this watch prevents them from learning that. Perhaps it will be too late when you finally free them from having to use it. Beware the temptation to overprotect your kids. It may keep them alive, but it'll really screw up their heads. Anyway, that's my two bits.
Winners may soar with the eagles, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Slashdot Mirror
While working at a company that makes an online real estate listing and search platform, I added a Simpsons easter egg. If you searched for 742 Evergreen Terrace in any town named Springfield, the app would load a Simpsons-esque webfont, all text would be rendered in it, and the color scheme would change to yellow, orangered, and blue.
That was easy.
Yeah, a little too easy.
It's quiet.
Yeah, a little too quiet.
Look, there's raph.
Yeah, a littletoo Raph.
I meant Battlefront. All spelling errors are my own, but feel free to take credit for them if you wish.
Personally, I love the new game enhancements. The interface is better, the combat is more exciting and less stand-there-and-click-the-next-attack, and the first 30 levels are more intuitive. Plus, you have to look at it from SOE and Lucas Art's point-of-view. This is supposed to be a Star Wars MMO. MMO's are obviously popular (WoW) and there are millions upon millions of Star Wars fans. How many people played SWG before? Not enough, maybe a few hundred thousand, and of those, I'd say maybe 50 thousand actually active players. Out of millions, that's not much. How many copies of Nattlefront have sold? How many copies of KOTOR? A ton. people want to play MMOs, people want to play Star Wars games, but the old game simply was not drawing a large enough crowd. Hopefully the new one will.
The only effect SuprNova's shutdown had on me was to force redundancy on me- now, I get my files from a variety of sources. Sure, it's a little bit harder to browse what's new from 5 different pages, but it also keeps me focused on what I went looking for in the first place.
Subpoenas are flying in the high-profile lawsuit between The SCO Group and IBM, as both companies try to buttress their legal claims by turning to third parties for information. SCO said Wednesday that it has filed subpoenas with the U.S. District Court in Utah, targeting six different individuals or organizations. Those include Novell; Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel; Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation; Stewart Cohen, chief executive of the Open Source Development Labs; and John Horsley, general counsel of Transmeta. SCO spokesman Blake Stowell said he did not know what the subpoenas asked for, but "I know that some of them have been served." IBM also has broadened its efforts to respond to the Linux-related lawsuit by asking a federal judge to order SCO to identify illegal source code and serving four other companies with subpoenas of its own. SCO filed the suit in March, claiming that IBM "contaminated" Linux by illegally incorporating trade secrets inherited from Unix. So far, SCO has listed the names of 591 files in the Linux 2.4 and 2.5 kernels that allegedly contain illicit code but has not been more specific. IBM's subpoenas were sent on Oct. 30 to BayStar Capital, Deutsche Bank, Renaissance Ventures and The Yankee Group, which have indicated they have reason to believe SCO's claims are legitimate. IBM has cited an Oct. 16 article in the Salt Lake Tribune that reported Deutsche Bank analyst Brian Skiba visited SCO's headquarters and saw a "near exact duplicate of source code between the Linux 2.4 kernel and (SCO's) Unix System V kernel." In October, BayStar Capital invested $50 million in SCO. In a statement to CNET News.com on Wednesday, IBM said: "It is time for SCO to produce something meaningful. They have been dragging their feet, and it is not clear there is any incentive for SCO to try this in court." IBM filed motions on Nov. 3 and Nov. 6, asking the court to "issue an order compelling SCO to respond to IBM's interrogatories with specificity and in detail." SCO's Stowell said his company provided about a million pages of documents in response to IBM's requests. "They are trying to coerce and intimidate," Stowell said, referring to Big Blue's subpoenas. "I think what they're trying to do is that if you're a potential investor in our company or an industry analyst that says anything even remotely favorable toward SCO, you're going to be subpoenaed by IBM."
The fundamental problem is that people who create things on the net as their full-time jobs need to somehow get paid for the effort.
The fundamental problem, actually, is that people want to create things on the net as their full-time job. There's no reason for this. It's not as if web pages are in such dire need of being created, or are that hard to maintain. It's things like Flash, Quicktime VR, streaming media, and other fancy but ultimately useless whiz-bobs that have made the net such a convoluted, advertising-filled medium.
Going from grassroots to commercial was the worst thing that happened to the net, but don't think that it was inevitable. It happened because people wanted to get paid for doing easy stuff.
If people found real jobs doing useful stuff, and updated their particular piece of the net as it was convenient, there would be no advertising and a much more personal feel to the web in general. There is nothing wrong with the web as a purely amature medium. Amature is where all the innovative stuff happens.
I recently read the article "Linux's Hit Men" by Daniel Lyons. I can only assume this article was meant to be labeled as an editorial because of the dominance of opinion over fact that this article presented. Further, I was appalled at the brazen links the writer drew between communism and the Open Source Movement, not to mention the assumption that communism is somehow "bad" or "wrong". The Chinese have a communist government, and yet they represent nearly a quarter of the world's population, are preparing a mission into space, and have vast manufacturing resources. These accomplishments are not trivial, nor should they be considered as exceptions to the rule of "Capitalism and democracy are the only viable social systems". Communism is just as valid a form of government as democracy, and should not be villainized because it is different. This is not the 1960's, there is no Cold War raging, and McCarthy has, thankfully, passed form the public eye. Join the rest of the world in the third millennium.
The Free Software Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the freedom of the individual. The GNU General Public License (GPL) is a way of working within existing US Copyright law to help achieve those aims. The GPL is different from most other click-thru licenses in that it is very readable, and explains not only the restrictions placed on the user, but also the reasons for those restrictions. The user need not even read the entire license to understand the gist of it- that is all laid out in the preamble. The rest of the GPL only confirms what is written in this section: software covered under the GPL can be distributed for a fee, the source code to any GPL software must be made available to those who request it (at the least), modifications of the code are both acceptable and encouraged, and works that are directly derived from free software must also be made free. These are the most important issues the GPL deals with, and they all support the aim of the Free Software Foundation: the power over software is given to the users of that software, as long as the creators publish under the GPL. This model is more appropriately compared to sharing a workload rather than communism. The creators of the software still own it; it is not public domain merely because its source is available for all to see. In fact, one of the aims of the GPL is to give users many of the benefits of public domain software without robbing the creators of credit or control.
The GPL makes as few restrictions as possible to preserve freedom. They limit the rights of the user from copying, in whole or in part, the GPL works into proprietary works- that is, works that are not GPL. This does not mean that distribution of GPL software implies that any other software distributed with it must be free, only that software based on/derived from GPL software must also be GPL. This prevents companies and individuals alike from benefiting wholesale from the works of others against their express wishes. Further, the GPL license must be distributed along with any GPL software/derivatives in order that those new users are aware of their rights.
The GPL also limits its own use. I quote directly from the GPL, section 2 paragraph 2:
"These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If
identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program,
and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in
themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those
sections when you distribute them as separate works."
This paragraph states expressly that software that is not derivative of or modifications of GPL software can be distributed alongside GPL software under a different license. The only thing this restricts is the ability of a person or company from stealing the works of others and perpetrating those works as the company's (or person's) own. The software written by the company can be protected under its own license, and even closed
This is the worst part about the American legal system, but was designed to be the best part- the judge can rule contrary to the letter of the law. This is what justice sometimes requires. It so gets my goat that the Judicial Branch operations in this country are more and more referred to as the legal system, rather than the justice system, because justice is the goal of the system. It would be unjust for the judge to rule that SGI owes SCO back-damages for code that is in the public domain, or released under the GPL legally even if the law states expressly that (s)he should. Unfortunately, often the only way a judge will do this is if (s)he rules that the law is in violation of the constitution (federal or state). This, of course, leads to Supreme Court cases, years of delay, and often ridiculously-high court fees by the time things are over. Oh, then there's the appeals process for the original ruling (not including the cases regarding the constitutionality of the law itself), and then, when it's all over, both participants have been dragged through so much mud that neither can quite retain their clean consumer-friendly image afterwards. Not to mention the fact that whatever code they were arguing about in the first place will be obsolete (and no doubt removed) by the time the case is over.
-Quote thanks to NASA
The closest galaxy is over25 times farther away than 3,000 light years.
I was doing an essay for a History class just last night. I had the textbook, multiple primary sources, and a sample essay out on my desk in treeware. Over the course of writing the essay, I turned less and less to the printed material and more often googled for information. I was too often frustrated at not being able to find a specific quote, or in which context a quote was made. Hundreds of non-text-searchable pages may have been sufficient if I had started a week earlier, but at T minus 4 hours and counting, I really didn't have the time to continuously flip through the treeware scanning for keywords. This is one reason I support textbooks that come with CD-ROMs of the entire text inside. I don't advocate getting rid of treeware completely, but more often than not it's becoming a last resource, not a first one.
It was done entirely on computers, no models. The DVD has a documentary on it: it was a landmark in that it only used CGI for the ships, spaceflight, etc. Also, the kid brother in that was in Invaders from Mrs- another 80's classic, even if it was a remake.
IMDB Link[imdb.com].
We have seven computers in our house, a couple are Linux boxes, two are XP, and the others are 98/98SE. We all share a broadband connection via a LAN. What I'd like to do is set up a chat program that is only accessible from/to the other computers on the network. No one on the Internet should be able to IM in, and no one on the LAN should be able to IM out, but we should all be able to IM each other. We often work with sensitive data (credit-cards, SSN's, etc.) that I would prefer we not have to send outside the local network. Since numbers are far easier to share via text than over a phone/voice system, a secure IM system like this would be favourite. I am not against everyone using AIM, Yahoo, IRC etc. ont he side, but for sharing personal information, I need a more secure option than sending packets over the Internet. Encryption for just-in-case would also be a welcome addition. Any options, or am I pissing into the wind?
I agree with you 110%. There is far too much irrational "worrying about the children." In fact, "the children" have become nothing more than a a catch phrase to sway public opinion on a subject. Add into any argument that it's "for the children" and every "soccer Mom" left in the suburbs is on your side. The Nazi's used the "for the children" excuse when the were doing "racial cleansing." The Catholics use that excuse to defend their book-banning. It was used in the nonproliferation talks, to speed up the FDA's testing period for new drugs, and those damn-irritating child-safety windows that almost roll down halfway. All this, not to mention a host of laws about how parents should raise their own kids, child adoption laws (Rosie O'Donnell knows what I'm talking about here), restrictive, anti-constitutional gun laws, spyware on the Internet (so-called filtering software), and a plethora of other laws, programs, devices, and sundry. These serve to replace the parents in a family. I agree that a lot of people do a terrible job preparing their children for the future. But many, many more do just fine. My parents raised me without TV parental controls. My parents read books before I did, they knew what I was reading. They could recognize teenage-angst, and did not have to attribute it to: rock and roll, video games, TV violence, sexual abuse, drugs, hanging out with the "wrong crowd", or whatever else parents typically attribute their children's misbehavior to. My father recognized his fault when I did not open a door for a lady, or made derogatory remarks about their "station". My parents taught me the evil of racism, and the need to control my emotions, and channel them to positive uses. And yes, my parents screwed up, too. However, they did not blame it on TV, music, video games, the school system, or the kids down the street. Their rally cry was not "there should be a law against that"; rather, it was "we'll do better next time". I go on this tirade to make a point. It seems the norm for parents today to be paranoid. If their child is late coming home from school, he's causing trouble. If he falls asleep in class, he's been out partying, and if he responds with an attitude, he's on drugs. They rely on others to do their parenting. Everything from preschool to car-trunks has to be "child safe". I am despondent when I read another "child protection act" has gone through Congress. I can no longer spank my child in public. Well, spanking worked on me, why wont it work on my children? It's a punishment; by definition, it must be cruel and unusual. I would not punish my child by sending him a dozen roses. Only something cruel (read: causing or conducive to injury, grief, or pain) and unusual (read: not in the ordinary daily routine) can get trough to the whole brain that something is bad. If they equate pain with what they did wrong, they will stop doing it. Pain is a built-in behavior control device. Parents should use it. And they should stop relying on other people to raise their kids for them. If a child locks himself in a trunk, he'll stop climbing in. If he runs away for a night, and is beaten by a bum for his milk-money, he'll stop running away. If he tries to commit suicide, locking him up in a small cell, taking away his shoelaces, and telling him what a screw-up he is, is not going to make him want to live. If you take something away from a child, they will find another way to get it, and this time you wont be there to curb the effect, or explain the language, or point out the morals. If we continue under the misconception that every child should grow up and have children of their own, we are leaving any kind of evolution behind. if the child is not smart enough to avoid climbing inside a hot oven, we should not ban ovens. If a parent does not have the skills necessary to raise children, we should enact laws and make all of society help them. That would keep these behavior patterns from being weeded-out, because their kids would probably grow up to use the same failed techniques. Rather, we should allow Nature to take it's course, intervening only when humanitarian concerns allow. Damn it, our kids are going to be too soft to handle the world when they come of age. They are all going to need psychiatrists to tell them they are screwups because of their parents, and when their boss rejects an idea, they don't have to jump out of an office window. I, for one, don't want to live with a bunch of sissy's who cant take criticism as just that instead of an attack on character, nor do I want my children to have those "the individual well being is most important, violence never solves anything, when you fail the world is here to say it's OK, don't do anything you are afraid to do, you're not the boss of me, there should be a law against that" attitudes. This watch is just another way parents can pawn off their responsibilities. Watch your children, don't buy a watch to do that. One day, you wont be there for your kids. They need to know that, and learn how to act in just such a situation. You can't always be there, and this watch prevents them from learning that. Perhaps it will be too late when you finally free them from having to use it. Beware the temptation to overprotect your kids. It may keep them alive, but it'll really screw up their heads. Anyway, that's my two bits. Winners may soar with the eagles, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.