Top execs will already pay the price when they get the boot from their cushy jobs for the poor oversight they have exercised.
I agree with some of what you said, but this one made me stop in my tracks.
You seem to be under the impression that getting fired has the same negative effects on executives of some of the biggest companies in the world that they do on the average working joe. It simply isn't the case.
Yes, some top executives will likely be fired -- and they'll be sent on their way with huge severance packages to ultimately join the board of some other massive corporations. After all, "CEO of BP" is an impressive resume bullet and he can quite easily make a strong case that it wasn't really his fault.
I also strongly disagree with your premise that BP has already been punished. Of course they lost market cap; this is a horrendous PR disaster in addition to the environmental disaster, and share prices are going to reflect that.
However, that does not mean that the market cap will not bounce back some time after they get this thing fixed and the PR disaster part starts to abate. It also doesn't mean that people thinking your company is worse now than they did yesterday is a suitable punishment even if the loss stuck. The only REAL loss I've seen so far is the actual oil. It's unfortunate for them, and it is a real loss -- but it is not a punishment. Reports I've seen leaking out that they may have know there were problems weeks before the accident and chose to ignore them--now to the tune of billions of dollars of various types of damage due to their negligence--makes me believe that they do need to be punished. I don't always possess that attitude toward accidents, but in this case it seems appropriate.
And ultimately, why should anybody other than BP pay for the damages they've caused and the money they've cost other people from their mistakes?
Fine. Observing passengers for potential cues is security theater.
I have no particular problem with the idea of observing passengers for suspicious behavior. It's security theater because it doesn't work.
Read the Nature article that was linked, and you'll see the following statistic: From January 2006 to November 2009, these SPOT officers singled out over 232,000 people for further inspection. Of these, 1,710 were arrested. Of THOSE, zero were terrorists.
Let's set aside the fact that these programs are ostensibly about stopping terrorism and instead consider it a victory if anybody was arrested for anything at all--a metric which makes it look much better. 1710/232000 is 0.74%. They have a success rate equal to grabbing one out of every 134 people who pass through the security checkpoints randomly.
Now I'm not sure what a philosophical debate on what a successful program is would turn up, but surely we can agree that 1% success rate is a failure? And this aspires to that level of failure. If these 3,000 officers make $50,000 a year each, we paid $575,000,000 in that approximately 46 month time period to catch 1,710 people of various, non-terrorism-related crimes. Or about $336,257 per arrest. Roughly two officers employed in the program per arrest made.
Now fast forward back to reality where the purpose of these programs is to make airports and air travel more safe and realize its complete and utter lack of success. Go further in understanding that while these numbers are helpful in making an evaluation, these numbers are PEOPLE who are questioned, searched, potentially delayed and detained to arrest a criminal less than one percent of the time. Take another step and consider the philosophical implications of detaining people because they look wrong to you, and the horrendous abuses--conscious or unconscious--that this permits.
Hoo boy. That's why this is ridiculous security theater, and why it needs to be stopped.
What's the solution, you ask? Honestly, I agree with another reply to you: The solution is to accept that there is a risk in flying and move on. The reality is that there is more risk of you dying in a plane crash than a terrorist activity aboard your plane, and obviously far less risk of dying related to air travel than there is simply driving to work in the mornings. And really, the best this airport security can ever hope to accomplish is to force a terrorist to detonate their bombs in crowded security lines instead of crowded airplanes.
Why we've spent hundreds of millions on this program and billions overall on the charade... well it isn't beyond me, it's politics. It's not about safety. It's about an illusion of safety. There's some value to that, but not so much as we spend.
They should sue the casino and, frankly, should win. That's who their beef is with; they supposedly won $X but weren't given it because they casino--in sole possession of the machines at all times, including before inspection by the way--deemed it faulty. And hell, maybe it was. Why is that the player's problem?
If there is a legitimate malfunction, it should then be up to the casino to sue the manufacturers or maintainers of the devices, or the people who certified them as properly functioning, and prove their case. That's who THEIR beef is with. Somewhere in this chain is a responsible party, and it is not the player.
Things are already SEVERELY skewed in the direction of the casinos (and that's fine). They shouldn't be able to evade responsibility for a jackpot by simply going "oh, no, see, I'm pretty sure this malfunctioned. Let me take this machine into a back room where we can hold it until it's evaluated. Hmm? No, you definitely don't need to be allowed access to our super secret casino holding chambers to ensure it isn't tampered with!" (If you don't think that's how it's happening, just make a quick Google search for payouts that weren't paid because of malfunctions.) As others have pointed out, you'd be laughed out of the joint if you claimed you need the machine inspected because you lost.
You and I are responsible for maintaining our vehicles, our property, our equipment, things we produce; why am I responsible for a malfunctioning machine in their favor but nobody is responsible for a malfunctioning machine in my favor? I'm not looking to zing anybody, I'm not looking to help the "little guy" get rich -- I just want fairness and responsibility. Sometimes that means walloping somebody so hard that they make sure the problem never happens again.
Hey, cool, no problem. In order to appease Slashdotters, I think both principals should expunge the suspensions from the students' records and apologize for grossly overstepping their bounds. Then, they should walk next door to the next court and bankrupt the students' parents, forcing them to pursue a defense against a libel case they would almost certainly lose.
Of course that would have Slashdotters raging mad too, so apparently if you're a public school principal you simply have no recourse whatsoever when you're libeled and called a pedophile -- in a job in which you work directly with children every day.
It's a ten day suspension, and frankly both students deserved it. Get the hell over it. If they wanted to powertrip over the kids, they could literally ruin their parents' lives. And they would be legally in the right to do it. Is that really what people want? It's good for all parties involved, including the students themselves, who learn that there are consequences to being an idiot. Done in a manner that teaches a lesson but doesn't ruin somebody's life like that EXACT behavior could do in the future.
She is just fishing for a settlement, like most lawsuits are. If it went to court I would expect it to be a joint liability between the driver and her. Without knowing the specifics of how she got hit I couldn't guess as to how the blame will be apportioned.
and no, "someone else could have being using their personal IP or broke into their house and used their computer" is a flimsy argument at best.
I disagree.
Imagine for a moment that we live in a world where the RIAA et al's schemes are 100% accurate. They never accuse somebody falsely, their automated programs never claim copyright over something that isn't theirs, nothing they flag is ever a case of fair use, etc. In other words, let's given them the complete benefit of the doubt, even though we know from past history that all of these assumptions are wrong.
This best-case scenario leads to the following conclusion: A certain IP address downloaded the files. With some fishing around in the ISP logs, you can narrow that down further to "a certain household downloaded the files."
There is no way to determine, beyond that, who actually did the infringement. Why should I be forced to pay for my brother's infringement? Or my roommate's? Or my (hypothetical) adult children? Punishing people who are actually responsible for the crime or tort is fundamental to any justice system, and I fail to see why it should be abandoned just because it's too hard. Our entire justice system is based around the idea that it's better for guilty men to go free than innocent men to go to prison; why should the civil justice system be any different? Especially when the damages can be so horrendously out of whack that it has every possibility to ruin a person's life as effectively as jail time?
I realize that puts labels and studios in a sticky spot in terms of trying to stop infringement, and I honestly can't proffer any solution to it. I also don't particularly care. It's far less important than the concept of punishing the guilty and leaving the rest of us the hell alone. Better to let a thousand guilty men go free and all that.
All of this ignores, of course, the outrageous and wholly disproportional nature of the damage awards, the damn near extortionary tactics based on the premise that even litigating a winning defense can be crippling, the dubious and possibly even illegal tactics the RIAA and their ilk use (such as bundling unrelated lawsuits, dropping lawsuits if it looks like they might lose, etc), the fact that our assumptions are knowingly false, and any number of other potential issues.
At the very least, I hope we can agree that it's not as simple as you paint it to be. Punishing guilty people is good, but so is the integrity of the entire system and its proceedings, the belief that those punished actually are guilty, and that at the end of the day, justice was served -- whoever won. Maybe there's a good solution for both, but if I have to choose I'm damn well giving up on the punishment. Especially in this context.
Maybe I'm reading too much into but I'm somewhat bothered by the wording that you're trying to get him into coding, as if you have some personal interest in it happening. If that's the case, perhaps the first step would be to examine your own motives and ensure that whatever you do about it from that point onward is in his best interests and not pushing him excessively toward somewhere he does not want to be.
Once you do that I think it becomes really simple: Just have somebody sit down and talk to him about it. "Hey junior, have you ever considered giving programming a try? Maybe one day you can code your own video game." He'll either say yes in which case you have your easy in, no he's never considered it in which case just talk to him about the possibilities and see where it leads, or that he's considered it but for whatever reason decided against it and you should probably let the matter drop (unless it's something self-defeating like "I'm not smart enough;" it may even ultimately be true but it's probably a really bad reason to let a fourteen year old avoid trying something).
If somebody is a decent programmer themselves (you, his parents, etc) it would be a helpful tool to have somebody who could show him the ropes and who he could turn to for answers when he inevitably gets stuck. Show him some things you created, especially some of your older stuff. Assuming he accepts the premise some others have given decent choices for where to start: Game modding/scripting, frameworks, etc. Just help him temper his expectations so he understands that if he's not coding Quake his second week that it isn't a failure or a waste of time. I think it takes time to even realize how little computers actually know how to do before you understand the complexity of giving it the necessary instructions.
This is one of the biggest problem with the DMCA. You have given all the power to the big conglomerates without making them risk anything in return. They just indiscriminately fire C&D letters like shotgun blasts and use them to anti-competitive effect.
Because they didn't do that with cease and desist letters before the DMCA existed? The threat of legal action on frivolous claims has always been a severe deterrent, even when the receiving party knows they have no merit. The reality is that the little guy can seldom even afford to win a lawsuit, much less lose it.
That said, I like the DMCA, at least as far as the takedown process is concerned. The problem is you have to understand it has little to do with the copyright holder and the person the notice is sent against. They file a takedown notice so you file a notice of "we coo', we coo'." The host (Google in this case) has immunity from whatever happens between you two, and it proceeds from there exactly as if the DMCA didn't exist; ie, they can choose to file a lawsuit against you or not. It's pretty fair process to me, and one which provides an important ability for places like Google to offer to host anything of yours at all.
I'd be less critical of the DMCA if they had a penalty, $10,000 plus costs, for reckless or malicious take-down notices
It does. For starters, the takedown notice is made under penalty of perjury. You're also allowed to file a lawsuit for damages against the party filing a false takedown notice, without needing to prove actual damages. A group called "Online Policy Group" won $125,000 from Diebold in 2004 for false notices.
That said, the penalties are probably not high enough and the burden to acquire them too high. That should be addressed.
Moreover, they generally accept cases that either have a serious constitutional issue to address or issues which lower courts have reached wildly inconsistent decisions on. Being as innocent infringement would be a construct of Congress I see no constitutional issue on that point. I don't know if lower courts are being inconsistent on the issue, but this is the first case I know about that's addressing it -- a bad sign for whether or not the court will grant certiorari.
I don't see it happening. There are simply too much more important cases for them to accept.
I don't want him hearing things while we're walking around in public that we find offensive.
Well, too bad. It's going to happen in public and there's simply nothing you can do about it.
For what it's worth, you're doing the right thing. The proper approach isn't to shield him from the language itself, but rather to help him understand what he should and shouldn't say in certain situations. Just as there are rules of grammar for when to use certain words, so too are there rules of etiquette. To some degree those rules are more personal choice and the way you were raised.
For me, as a 26 year old, I try not to swear around family. I try not to swear around people older than me (I'm not sure why; I also have a hard time calling people who are older than me by their first names, like the parents of friends, even when they ask me to). On the other hand if I'm alone and something makes me angry I'll swear; if I'm chatting with friends, in person or online, I'll swear sometimes. It's all about appropriate and inappropriate behavior for given situations.
And the good news is, the skill to differentiate appropriate and inappropriate behaviors for a given situation is something he'll use all the time in his life, it's not just specific to bad language. So really, you're killing two birds with one stone and more importantly, you're not asking anybody else to shape themselves to your personal standards. Wins all across the board.
Well, on the plus side, there's no need to feel bad for her. She's likely to file--and win--a substantial lawsuit against the city for wrongful termination which will not only net her her job back (if she wants it) but also her pension and a decent chunk of change for her troubles.
Such is the power of firing people for no reason and ignoring an arbiter who told you that you did so.
"What we have is the history profession, the experts, seem to have a left-wing tilt, so what we were doing is trying to restore some balance to the standards," board member Don McLeroy said in March.
In other words: "Despite being a two-bit politician on a school board, I'm going to ignore what even I call the experts' views and bend curriculum to support my political whims because I am a fucking retard."
Because you totally need to bring a hard drive into the country to bring along CP, you can't use those newfangled technologies like encrypted network connections and proxies to get around it.
Look, I don't support this rule at all. I think it's ridiculous on so many levels. But come on! You're giving the average criminal way too much credit.
Can he use encrypted network connections and proxies to get around it? Of course. Will the average criminal even have any idea what encrypted network connections or proxies ARE, much less how to go about setting up and using one? I very much doubt it. "But but but we can't catch everybody, only 90%!" is a pretty lame reason for not doing something.
This law/rule should be thrown out because it is invasive, time consuming, ineffective, has the potential to hurt them economically (business travelers with secure data, etc), ill-defined and any number of other things. A handful of people who could get around it with a proxy isn't one of them.
But just because there are some good reasons, some of the time, to lock up some medical knowledge or access to the tools of the trade, doesn't mean that there won't be hundreds if not thousands of motivated individuals that want to try to tackle their own medical problems the same way they do home improvement projects.
Erm, what?
Medical knowledge is not locked up. Nobody is stopping you from buying the exact same textbooks as the doctors. Nobody is stopping you from knowing pretty much everything a doctor knows. Pretty much the only thing you can't learn on your own is whatever you learn by cutting up a cadaver.
If you're looking to dispense your own drugs, well, that's not going to happen, nor is it a case of "some good reasons, some of the time, to lock [it up]." It's a horrible idea in most cases, horrendously prone to abuse that people will literally die from. That is the same reason you don't get to practice because you passed the $70 Internet Doctor course. You're going to kill people. Lots of them. If you want to use your newfound knowledge, use it by talking to your doctor and having him run whatever test you want -- most doctors will capitulate even if they think it's stupid.
Why don't doctors create peer-reviewed, well-written websites to counter all of the confusion and pseudo-science currently available online?
People are dumb. Sorry, but they are.
For starters, they believe things for stupid reasons including advertising, placebo effect, "my best friend told me so and he's smart," etc. Do you have any idea how many millions of dollars were made by "HEAD ON! APPLY DIRECTLY TO FOREHEAD!?" It's a ball of freaking wax. Same with most herbal supplements. Some of them work to some degree; most do not. Then there's things like vaccines causing autism, that some people just believe no matter how many peer-reviewed studies on well-written websites tell them otherwise. There's a show on HGTV calling "Selling New York" about high-priced real estate, where one guy brings in "[his] energy guy" to cleanse the bad energies out of an apartment before selling it. What can anybody possibly say to people like this?
Second, I suspect he was trying to be nice. I think the problem is less the bad information as it is people making themselves paranoid. I have, as we speak, little rash spots on various parts of my body and a headache. It could be meningitis and I could be dying as I type. Or more likely, it could be allergies and dyshydrotic eczema since I know I have both. Many highly fatal diseases present as a cold. If people are Googling about it, it means they're already bothered by it enough that they don't think "get some rest and drink lots of fluids" is getting the job done. That's going to instantly tilt their perceptions toward something more serious than the most likely culprits, even with no particular evidence.
Medicine is difficult, especially diagnosing a problem. Lots of things present as other things, and many of those "other things" are "wuh oh, you're dead." They're also uncommon. You have to use a blend of symptoms, tests (if available), previous history and just plain odds to make a diagnosis. Testing for every possible thing not only would be a collossal waste of the doctor's time and the lab's time, but also money on the part of patients and insurance companies (circling back around to patients). It's good that people are becoming involved in their own healthcare, but it doesn't mean it isn't ultimately a waste of time in the vast majority of circumstances.
All that said: WebMD. Peer-reviewed, excellent source of information, excellent and easy way of getting a huge list of what you might have based on your symptoms.
To pretend the Founders were not Christians is anti-truth and makes you no better than the Texan book-writers.
With all due respect, you have an extremely simplistic view of history and you're using that as the basis of a diatribe.
Some of the founders were Christians; there is no doubt of that. Many of them were not. Most of them were theists; it takes a special kind of arrogance that only Christians seems to hold to equate theism with Christianity. Jefferson is generally considered a Deist, as was Franklin and Thomas Paine, probably the most influential of our founders aside from Jefferson. A handful more (perhaps Jefferson here as well) were considered Unitarians. The reality is that it is hard to tell, not only because of the passage of time but because of how people--quite on the topic actually--all want to claim great people. It's much the same as both parties claiming that Thomas Jefferson would belong with them if he were alive today. It's hard to separate the truth from the fiction. Suffice it to say that there were many different religious leanings among our founding fathers.
However, it is also undeniable that whatever their personal beliefs, most wanted to keep them away from government. They put it in the first damn amendment, without which the Constitution would not have passed. When one claims a "Christian backing," even insofar as many of them were personally Christians, it paints a different picture than history seems to support.
It is also worth noting two things: One, that people wrangle over the very definition of Christian such that it may include everybody under the sun or not--usually those pushing Christianity as the great truth, I suppose. To me the definition is simple; it's what separates the major religions of the planet: Was Jesus Christ the son of God and God himself? It is called Christianity after all. Under that definition you can throw aside the Deists and the vast majority of Unitarians (those who believe he was a supernatural power is a gray area to me) out from under the umbrella. And the second thing to note is the claim of many Christians that, essentially, everything good comes from them. Many Christians even claim that morality comes from Christianity, as if it never existed for the first several thousand years of human history or those of us (myself included) who do not believe are barbarians answerable to no one. I mention this because many people claim the country was founded on a "Christian morality" despite the idea that so many of the most influential founders were not, themselves, Christian.
So no, even acknowledging that many of the founders were Christians and most were theists, I don't think it is "anti-truth" to say the country was not founded on a Christian base. It was founded primarily on the belief in reason and free thought, on the backs of Jefferson and Paine who were probably among history's biggest advocates of both. Jefferson, for example, is famously quoted as entreating us* to "question with boldness even the existence of a God." Regardless of his personal conclusions, it's pretty clear he valued thought above them. (As a personal aside, I find religion--not belief--to be the antithesis of that, which I could pull another Jefferson quote about but I'm sure you know it.)
* "Us" through the lens of history. I think the quote actually comes from a letter written to his nephew, but I cannot recall for certain.
depending on the notion that absence of proof constitutes sufficient proof of absence for all intents and purposes.
You're right; God will never be disproven because it's not possible to disprove. If nothing else, there always remains the possibility that there is a God who wants it to seem as if there is not. That's the problem with claiming limitless power and omnipotence I suppose. It tends to throw a wrench in any scientific process.
That said, when something is LITERALLY impossible to disprove then perhaps absence of proof isn't as bad as you make it out to be. It's not perfect, but it's the best we have.
In fact, one could easily point out that the proof there is a God might be found in many of the hearts and minds of those who believe in him, but such proofs are discarded as delusions by people who do not believe in God _BECAUSE_ they don't believe in God.
I discount it because it's retarded. You can't rant for half a paragraph about how somebody saying "there is no God" is false because it relies on itself and then make a statement like "God exists because people believe he exists." It's nothing more than double-talk to push an agenda.
Do you know what people believing in God means? That people believe in God. Nothing more, nothing less. Children believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny with an unshakable, passionate believe (until they're older anyway!); that doesn't make them real.
Second, allow anyone to submit comments regarding any prior art relevant to the claims of any patent application. So if someone posts an application with claims X, Y and Z and it's a rehash of an old idea, someone can just post a comment "Yo examiner, this was done in FVWM in 1995. Reject this shit."
I don't know if this would actually be useful. Just reading the comments on Slashdot, for example, in just about any patent case makes you want to jam something sharp into all of the commenter's throats. Half of them don't even read beyond the abstract, which is the only damn part of a patent application that has no meaning whatsoever. Other think that anything that is vaguely similar even through 15 layers of abstraction ("well really all a computer does is manipulate bits and we've done that since computing existed!") is prior art, and have no problems whatsoever posting this opinion as gospel and then remaking on how stupid patent examiners are to have missed it.
If that sort of trend were to continue on the USPTO website--and I have no reason to believe it wouldn't--the examiners would quickly be overwhelmed with ultimately bogus leads that they had to track down. You'd occasionally get some that they actually did use to invalidate a patent, but it would be the vast minority of comments. More information can be good, but only as good as that information is.
All of that, by the way, ignores the possibility of information being simply bogus instead of accurate but not prior art. There will be all sorts of people with agendas -- competitors, the anti-patent crowd, etc.
It doesn't matter what programming language or technology you use to make your one-click shopping possible. Amazon own the very idea of one-click.
Honestly, that doesn't bother me that much. "Lulz! I implemented your idea using your exact algorithm in a different language!" shouldn't be a way around a patent any more than changing some variable names should be. The problem is that something as silly as one-click was granted a patent to begin with.
I honestly don't know where I stand on software patents in general. Some things like one-click make me want to throw up. Other things seem like they need enough thought and research that they probably should be protected by a patent, at least to me -- though I admit I'm not exactly a computer scientist (hmm, correct term?) or anything. The question I wrestle with in my head is if there is any way to semi-reliably deny stupid patents and allow good ones; and if not, whether the problems are worth the benefits or if the system should just go.
You're both spinning it in opposite directions, which is easy to do because you're both right.
Google is trying to make money. I don't think they will ever claim otherwise. That said, if the things they do, the things they give away (in exchange for your data), the ways that data gives them an edge in their core functionalities doesn't improve the users' experience, the users are going to slowly bleed off to competitors. And obviously that's bad for the cash flow.
Seeing relevant ads is still far better than seeing irrelevant ones. So is seeing unobtrusive text-based ads instead of Flash ads that are allowed to take 25% of your screen if you accidentally mouse over them. And of course Gmail is not only a fantastic web-based email service, but it literally single-handedly changed the industry. Remember email hosts with 25 megs of storage? Yeahhh... as we speak, Google is offering me 7.4 gigabytes. Of course that's far beyond what I will ever use, but it moved the entire industry with its initial limits.
And, at least to me, Google still returns the best search results. That keeps me coming back to their search engine, using their services, seeing their ads. Making them money -- by keeping me happy.
Now in the real world, you'll lose some fraction of your original customers by pissing them off with DRM.
I'm not disagreeing with your main point, but I do think you're missing some things. Of course you will lose some of your customers by pissing them off with DRM, but those aren't the only costs:
1. Developing, licensing, implementing and testing the DRM in the first place
2. Increased support for legitimate customers impacted by the DRM
3. Depending on the type of DRM, the deployment, maintenance and usage fees (bandwidth, etc) for DRM servers
4. Less tangibles, such as bad publicity associated with it -- particularly if anything goes wrong with steps 1-3 (see: Ubisoft). The way I see it, if companies get to monetize "goodwill" on their balance sheets then "bad will" is a valid cost too.
All this for a process that almost certainly WILL be cracked, usually within the first few weeks, and which, in your words, will convert no more than 10% into sales. I have no trouble believing that all this extra work might add 10% to the costs of a game. More to the point, take those costs out of the game cost and what effect does it have on the demand curve? In other words, if you were able to make a $50 game $45 instead--without losing money because it's money you didn't spend--how many more copies would be sold?
It's just not well thought out, and unfortunately the trend seems to be more expensive, more onerous, more error-prone DRM with each generation of game coming out. It's only going to get worse. They're just chasing their own tail.
That's primarily because they are in full lock down right now due to their deep minority status. Unity is their only hope for stopping the opposition, even on bills that the individuals disagree with the party on. When there is some wiggle room in the balance of power certain legislators are able to put their vote counter to the party because it won't matter.
Hmm? If they're in a deep minority status, it doesn't matter if they vote against their party because they're too far buried to make a difference. It's when the votes are close that people jumping ship make a difference. If it's 60-40 for the majority, it really doesn't matter if the vote ends up 60-40 or 70-30. You still lose. If it's 50-50 then a single person jumping ship matters a great deal. Obviously these are extremes.
However, I also don't agree with your premise. It isn't because they're the minority; they did the same thing as the majority party. It's just that, for whatever reasons, the Republicans are much better at walking in lock-step than the Democrats are. Even when they had their filibuster-proof majority, what did they really do with it? They could have passed health care, economic reform, appointed whoever they pleased as Supreme Court justices, put Obama's face on the twenty dollar bill -- anything.
Instead they did very little that wouldn't have passed anyway. The reason? Because the democrats' gains in the previous elections actually came from moderate-to-conservative democrats who aren't inclined to simply fall in line.
The way I see it, there are two possibilities for students who do not attend classes:
1. They pass the class anyway. Either because they know the material, they study on their own, they get lucky -- whatever. In this case, why should a student who passes a class instead be failed because they did so without attending many of the lectures? Personally I'd rather applaud students who can effectively learn on their own. It's an extremely valuable trait.
2. The student fails because, well, he doesn't know the material. In which case his attendance is not the factor that determines whether he should pass or fail; it is his performance.
What you're talking about really gets into the purpose of instructors. In my mind, especially at the college level, it is not their job to motivate anybody into passing his/her classes. The students (or their parents) are paying a lot of money to attend. If that isn't motivation enough, well, so be it. These are probably students who never should have been there to begin with, at least not until they sorted other aspects of their life out.
People are entitled to feel differently, but to me the entire idea of trying to force people to care about something that they obviously don't is counterproductive. Instead of spending the first 5-10 minutes of class (especially if you have to sign as to validity!) trying to bully people who don't want to be there into attending, how about instructors use the suddenly lower class size to spend more time with students who actually want their help?
I think you're missing the point, along with a lot of others in this thread. This story was not created and posted because a smoking application was approved for the iPhone. I really doubt anybody here cares, much less objects. In fact most probably would prefer the app DOES exist because most people here are all about letting each individual make these choices for themselves.
Rather, this story is here because Apple has appointed themselves gatekeeper of the application universe for iPhone, and because their decisions are seldom intelligible or predictable. An application for a Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist gets banned (until public disgust forces them to reconsider). An application where you shake a baby to death is approved (though later removed.) Applications for lingerie are banned. If memory serves, even ones that do not have any sort of model shots, just the products themselves, are banned. Meanwhile an app for Playboy is passed. Now, an app about smoking a joint* with your friends has no trouble passing muster. I would not be surprised in the least if it turns out these people wrote the app explicitly to see whether or not Apple's ever-inconsistent "morality" would catch it.
I don't think it was worth a story here (Wired is free to write whatever they want for whatever reason they want), because I find the value in Slashdot to be the discussions and this is not the type of story that will encourage a decent one. There will be fanbois and haters going back and forth with little actual thought put into anything, which is almost reason enough NOT to post it for me.
But anyway. Nobody cares that this app was approved, they care that this app was approved relative to other ones that have been rejected. It's entire purpose is to take shots at Apple for playing gatekeeper, and for doing it in such a wildly inconsistent manner. I'm not sure it's worth posting on that basis alone, but the reason it is on Slashdot, at least, has nothing to do with whether or not it encourages smoking.
* Sorry, a "cigarette." Yeah, right. When's the last time anybody sat around in a circle passing a cigarette around with five of their friends?
Don't let your children have money or visit their friends' houses until they are eighteen. Fucking really? Exactly how bad are you trying to screw these kids up?
This advice is so unbelievably ridiculous that I can't decide if you're really so deluded as to believe it, or if it is some sort of meta troll where you try to present having a say in what games your kids play as such a horrible alternative that nobody should ever pick it.
In either event, I hope to god you don't become a parent before you do some serious growing up.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with some of what you said, but this one made me stop in my tracks.
You seem to be under the impression that getting fired has the same negative effects on executives of some of the biggest companies in the world that they do on the average working joe. It simply isn't the case.
Yes, some top executives will likely be fired -- and they'll be sent on their way with huge severance packages to ultimately join the board of some other massive corporations. After all, "CEO of BP" is an impressive resume bullet and he can quite easily make a strong case that it wasn't really his fault.
I also strongly disagree with your premise that BP has already been punished. Of course they lost market cap; this is a horrendous PR disaster in addition to the environmental disaster, and share prices are going to reflect that.
However, that does not mean that the market cap will not bounce back some time after they get this thing fixed and the PR disaster part starts to abate. It also doesn't mean that people thinking your company is worse now than they did yesterday is a suitable punishment even if the loss stuck. The only REAL loss I've seen so far is the actual oil. It's unfortunate for them, and it is a real loss -- but it is not a punishment. Reports I've seen leaking out that they may have know there were problems weeks before the accident and chose to ignore them--now to the tune of billions of dollars of various types of damage due to their negligence--makes me believe that they do need to be punished. I don't always possess that attitude toward accidents, but in this case it seems appropriate.
And ultimately, why should anybody other than BP pay for the damages they've caused and the money they've cost other people from their mistakes?
I have no particular problem with the idea of observing passengers for suspicious behavior. It's security theater because it doesn't work.
Read the Nature article that was linked, and you'll see the following statistic: From January 2006 to November 2009, these SPOT officers singled out over 232,000 people for further inspection. Of these, 1,710 were arrested. Of THOSE, zero were terrorists.
Let's set aside the fact that these programs are ostensibly about stopping terrorism and instead consider it a victory if anybody was arrested for anything at all--a metric which makes it look much better. 1710/232000 is 0.74%. They have a success rate equal to grabbing one out of every 134 people who pass through the security checkpoints randomly.
Now I'm not sure what a philosophical debate on what a successful program is would turn up, but surely we can agree that 1% success rate is a failure? And this aspires to that level of failure. If these 3,000 officers make $50,000 a year each, we paid $575,000,000 in that approximately 46 month time period to catch 1,710 people of various, non-terrorism-related crimes. Or about $336,257 per arrest. Roughly two officers employed in the program per arrest made.
Now fast forward back to reality where the purpose of these programs is to make airports and air travel more safe and realize its complete and utter lack of success. Go further in understanding that while these numbers are helpful in making an evaluation, these numbers are PEOPLE who are questioned, searched, potentially delayed and detained to arrest a criminal less than one percent of the time. Take another step and consider the philosophical implications of detaining people because they look wrong to you, and the horrendous abuses--conscious or unconscious--that this permits.
Hoo boy. That's why this is ridiculous security theater, and why it needs to be stopped.
What's the solution, you ask? Honestly, I agree with another reply to you: The solution is to accept that there is a risk in flying and move on. The reality is that there is more risk of you dying in a plane crash than a terrorist activity aboard your plane, and obviously far less risk of dying related to air travel than there is simply driving to work in the mornings. And really, the best this airport security can ever hope to accomplish is to force a terrorist to detonate their bombs in crowded security lines instead of crowded airplanes.
Why we've spent hundreds of millions on this program and billions overall on the charade... well it isn't beyond me, it's politics. It's not about safety. It's about an illusion of safety. There's some value to that, but not so much as we spend.
They should sue the casino and, frankly, should win. That's who their beef is with; they supposedly won $X but weren't given it because they casino--in sole possession of the machines at all times, including before inspection by the way--deemed it faulty. And hell, maybe it was. Why is that the player's problem?
If there is a legitimate malfunction, it should then be up to the casino to sue the manufacturers or maintainers of the devices, or the people who certified them as properly functioning, and prove their case. That's who THEIR beef is with. Somewhere in this chain is a responsible party, and it is not the player.
Things are already SEVERELY skewed in the direction of the casinos (and that's fine). They shouldn't be able to evade responsibility for a jackpot by simply going "oh, no, see, I'm pretty sure this malfunctioned. Let me take this machine into a back room where we can hold it until it's evaluated. Hmm? No, you definitely don't need to be allowed access to our super secret casino holding chambers to ensure it isn't tampered with!" (If you don't think that's how it's happening, just make a quick Google search for payouts that weren't paid because of malfunctions.) As others have pointed out, you'd be laughed out of the joint if you claimed you need the machine inspected because you lost.
You and I are responsible for maintaining our vehicles, our property, our equipment, things we produce; why am I responsible for a malfunctioning machine in their favor but nobody is responsible for a malfunctioning machine in my favor? I'm not looking to zing anybody, I'm not looking to help the "little guy" get rich -- I just want fairness and responsibility. Sometimes that means walloping somebody so hard that they make sure the problem never happens again.
Hey, cool, no problem. In order to appease Slashdotters, I think both principals should expunge the suspensions from the students' records and apologize for grossly overstepping their bounds. Then, they should walk next door to the next court and bankrupt the students' parents, forcing them to pursue a defense against a libel case they would almost certainly lose.
Of course that would have Slashdotters raging mad too, so apparently if you're a public school principal you simply have no recourse whatsoever when you're libeled and called a pedophile -- in a job in which you work directly with children every day.
It's a ten day suspension, and frankly both students deserved it. Get the hell over it. If they wanted to powertrip over the kids, they could literally ruin their parents' lives. And they would be legally in the right to do it. Is that really what people want? It's good for all parties involved, including the students themselves, who learn that there are consequences to being an idiot. Done in a manner that teaches a lesson but doesn't ruin somebody's life like that EXACT behavior could do in the future.
She is just fishing for a settlement, like most lawsuits are. If it went to court I would expect it to be a joint liability between the driver and her. Without knowing the specifics of how she got hit I couldn't guess as to how the blame will be apportioned.
I disagree.
Imagine for a moment that we live in a world where the RIAA et al's schemes are 100% accurate. They never accuse somebody falsely, their automated programs never claim copyright over something that isn't theirs, nothing they flag is ever a case of fair use, etc. In other words, let's given them the complete benefit of the doubt, even though we know from past history that all of these assumptions are wrong.
This best-case scenario leads to the following conclusion: A certain IP address downloaded the files. With some fishing around in the ISP logs, you can narrow that down further to "a certain household downloaded the files."
There is no way to determine, beyond that, who actually did the infringement. Why should I be forced to pay for my brother's infringement? Or my roommate's? Or my (hypothetical) adult children? Punishing people who are actually responsible for the crime or tort is fundamental to any justice system, and I fail to see why it should be abandoned just because it's too hard. Our entire justice system is based around the idea that it's better for guilty men to go free than innocent men to go to prison; why should the civil justice system be any different? Especially when the damages can be so horrendously out of whack that it has every possibility to ruin a person's life as effectively as jail time?
I realize that puts labels and studios in a sticky spot in terms of trying to stop infringement, and I honestly can't proffer any solution to it. I also don't particularly care. It's far less important than the concept of punishing the guilty and leaving the rest of us the hell alone. Better to let a thousand guilty men go free and all that.
All of this ignores, of course, the outrageous and wholly disproportional nature of the damage awards, the damn near extortionary tactics based on the premise that even litigating a winning defense can be crippling, the dubious and possibly even illegal tactics the RIAA and their ilk use (such as bundling unrelated lawsuits, dropping lawsuits if it looks like they might lose, etc), the fact that our assumptions are knowingly false, and any number of other potential issues.
At the very least, I hope we can agree that it's not as simple as you paint it to be. Punishing guilty people is good, but so is the integrity of the entire system and its proceedings, the belief that those punished actually are guilty, and that at the end of the day, justice was served -- whoever won. Maybe there's a good solution for both, but if I have to choose I'm damn well giving up on the punishment. Especially in this context.
Maybe I'm reading too much into but I'm somewhat bothered by the wording that you're trying to get him into coding, as if you have some personal interest in it happening. If that's the case, perhaps the first step would be to examine your own motives and ensure that whatever you do about it from that point onward is in his best interests and not pushing him excessively toward somewhere he does not want to be.
Once you do that I think it becomes really simple: Just have somebody sit down and talk to him about it. "Hey junior, have you ever considered giving programming a try? Maybe one day you can code your own video game." He'll either say yes in which case you have your easy in, no he's never considered it in which case just talk to him about the possibilities and see where it leads, or that he's considered it but for whatever reason decided against it and you should probably let the matter drop (unless it's something self-defeating like "I'm not smart enough;" it may even ultimately be true but it's probably a really bad reason to let a fourteen year old avoid trying something).
If somebody is a decent programmer themselves (you, his parents, etc) it would be a helpful tool to have somebody who could show him the ropes and who he could turn to for answers when he inevitably gets stuck. Show him some things you created, especially some of your older stuff. Assuming he accepts the premise some others have given decent choices for where to start: Game modding/scripting, frameworks, etc. Just help him temper his expectations so he understands that if he's not coding Quake his second week that it isn't a failure or a waste of time. I think it takes time to even realize how little computers actually know how to do before you understand the complexity of giving it the necessary instructions.
Because they didn't do that with cease and desist letters before the DMCA existed? The threat of legal action on frivolous claims has always been a severe deterrent, even when the receiving party knows they have no merit. The reality is that the little guy can seldom even afford to win a lawsuit, much less lose it.
That said, I like the DMCA, at least as far as the takedown process is concerned. The problem is you have to understand it has little to do with the copyright holder and the person the notice is sent against. They file a takedown notice so you file a notice of "we coo', we coo'." The host (Google in this case) has immunity from whatever happens between you two, and it proceeds from there exactly as if the DMCA didn't exist; ie, they can choose to file a lawsuit against you or not. It's pretty fair process to me, and one which provides an important ability for places like Google to offer to host anything of yours at all.
It does. For starters, the takedown notice is made under penalty of perjury. You're also allowed to file a lawsuit for damages against the party filing a false takedown notice, without needing to prove actual damages. A group called "Online Policy Group" won $125,000 from Diebold in 2004 for false notices.
That said, the penalties are probably not high enough and the burden to acquire them too high. That should be addressed.
Moreover, they generally accept cases that either have a serious constitutional issue to address or issues which lower courts have reached wildly inconsistent decisions on. Being as innocent infringement would be a construct of Congress I see no constitutional issue on that point. I don't know if lower courts are being inconsistent on the issue, but this is the first case I know about that's addressing it -- a bad sign for whether or not the court will grant certiorari.
I don't see it happening. There are simply too much more important cases for them to accept.
Well, too bad. It's going to happen in public and there's simply nothing you can do about it.
For what it's worth, you're doing the right thing. The proper approach isn't to shield him from the language itself, but rather to help him understand what he should and shouldn't say in certain situations. Just as there are rules of grammar for when to use certain words, so too are there rules of etiquette. To some degree those rules are more personal choice and the way you were raised.
For me, as a 26 year old, I try not to swear around family. I try not to swear around people older than me (I'm not sure why; I also have a hard time calling people who are older than me by their first names, like the parents of friends, even when they ask me to). On the other hand if I'm alone and something makes me angry I'll swear; if I'm chatting with friends, in person or online, I'll swear sometimes. It's all about appropriate and inappropriate behavior for given situations.
And the good news is, the skill to differentiate appropriate and inappropriate behaviors for a given situation is something he'll use all the time in his life, it's not just specific to bad language. So really, you're killing two birds with one stone and more importantly, you're not asking anybody else to shape themselves to your personal standards. Wins all across the board.
Well, on the plus side, there's no need to feel bad for her. She's likely to file--and win--a substantial lawsuit against the city for wrongful termination which will not only net her her job back (if she wants it) but also her pension and a decent chunk of change for her troubles.
Such is the power of firing people for no reason and ignoring an arbiter who told you that you did so.
"What we have is the history profession, the experts, seem to have a left-wing tilt, so what we were doing is trying to restore some balance to the standards," board member Don McLeroy said in March.
In other words: "Despite being a two-bit politician on a school board, I'm going to ignore what even I call the experts' views and bend curriculum to support my political whims because I am a fucking retard."
Look, I don't support this rule at all. I think it's ridiculous on so many levels. But come on! You're giving the average criminal way too much credit.
Can he use encrypted network connections and proxies to get around it? Of course. Will the average criminal even have any idea what encrypted network connections or proxies ARE, much less how to go about setting up and using one? I very much doubt it. "But but but we can't catch everybody, only 90%!" is a pretty lame reason for not doing something.
This law/rule should be thrown out because it is invasive, time consuming, ineffective, has the potential to hurt them economically (business travelers with secure data, etc), ill-defined and any number of other things. A handful of people who could get around it with a proxy isn't one of them.
Erm, what?
Medical knowledge is not locked up. Nobody is stopping you from buying the exact same textbooks as the doctors. Nobody is stopping you from knowing pretty much everything a doctor knows. Pretty much the only thing you can't learn on your own is whatever you learn by cutting up a cadaver.
If you're looking to dispense your own drugs, well, that's not going to happen, nor is it a case of "some good reasons, some of the time, to lock [it up]." It's a horrible idea in most cases, horrendously prone to abuse that people will literally die from. That is the same reason you don't get to practice because you passed the $70 Internet Doctor course. You're going to kill people. Lots of them. If you want to use your newfound knowledge, use it by talking to your doctor and having him run whatever test you want -- most doctors will capitulate even if they think it's stupid.
People are dumb. Sorry, but they are.
For starters, they believe things for stupid reasons including advertising, placebo effect, "my best friend told me so and he's smart," etc. Do you have any idea how many millions of dollars were made by "HEAD ON! APPLY DIRECTLY TO FOREHEAD!?" It's a ball of freaking wax. Same with most herbal supplements. Some of them work to some degree; most do not. Then there's things like vaccines causing autism, that some people just believe no matter how many peer-reviewed studies on well-written websites tell them otherwise. There's a show on HGTV calling "Selling New York" about high-priced real estate, where one guy brings in "[his] energy guy" to cleanse the bad energies out of an apartment before selling it. What can anybody possibly say to people like this?
Second, I suspect he was trying to be nice. I think the problem is less the bad information as it is people making themselves paranoid. I have, as we speak, little rash spots on various parts of my body and a headache. It could be meningitis and I could be dying as I type. Or more likely, it could be allergies and dyshydrotic eczema since I know I have both. Many highly fatal diseases present as a cold. If people are Googling about it, it means they're already bothered by it enough that they don't think "get some rest and drink lots of fluids" is getting the job done. That's going to instantly tilt their perceptions toward something more serious than the most likely culprits, even with no particular evidence.
Medicine is difficult, especially diagnosing a problem. Lots of things present as other things, and many of those "other things" are "wuh oh, you're dead." They're also uncommon. You have to use a blend of symptoms, tests (if available), previous history and just plain odds to make a diagnosis. Testing for every possible thing not only would be a collossal waste of the doctor's time and the lab's time, but also money on the part of patients and insurance companies (circling back around to patients). It's good that people are becoming involved in their own healthcare, but it doesn't mean it isn't ultimately a waste of time in the vast majority of circumstances.
All that said: WebMD. Peer-reviewed, excellent source of information, excellent and easy way of getting a huge list of what you might have based on your symptoms.
With all due respect, you have an extremely simplistic view of history and you're using that as the basis of a diatribe.
Some of the founders were Christians; there is no doubt of that. Many of them were not. Most of them were theists; it takes a special kind of arrogance that only Christians seems to hold to equate theism with Christianity. Jefferson is generally considered a Deist, as was Franklin and Thomas Paine, probably the most influential of our founders aside from Jefferson. A handful more (perhaps Jefferson here as well) were considered Unitarians. The reality is that it is hard to tell, not only because of the passage of time but because of how people--quite on the topic actually--all want to claim great people. It's much the same as both parties claiming that Thomas Jefferson would belong with them if he were alive today. It's hard to separate the truth from the fiction. Suffice it to say that there were many different religious leanings among our founding fathers.
However, it is also undeniable that whatever their personal beliefs, most wanted to keep them away from government. They put it in the first damn amendment, without which the Constitution would not have passed. When one claims a "Christian backing," even insofar as many of them were personally Christians, it paints a different picture than history seems to support.
It is also worth noting two things: One, that people wrangle over the very definition of Christian such that it may include everybody under the sun or not--usually those pushing Christianity as the great truth, I suppose. To me the definition is simple; it's what separates the major religions of the planet: Was Jesus Christ the son of God and God himself? It is called Christianity after all. Under that definition you can throw aside the Deists and the vast majority of Unitarians (those who believe he was a supernatural power is a gray area to me) out from under the umbrella. And the second thing to note is the claim of many Christians that, essentially, everything good comes from them. Many Christians even claim that morality comes from Christianity, as if it never existed for the first several thousand years of human history or those of us (myself included) who do not believe are barbarians answerable to no one. I mention this because many people claim the country was founded on a "Christian morality" despite the idea that so many of the most influential founders were not, themselves, Christian.
So no, even acknowledging that many of the founders were Christians and most were theists, I don't think it is "anti-truth" to say the country was not founded on a Christian base. It was founded primarily on the belief in reason and free thought, on the backs of Jefferson and Paine who were probably among history's biggest advocates of both. Jefferson, for example, is famously quoted as entreating us* to "question with boldness even the existence of a God." Regardless of his personal conclusions, it's pretty clear he valued thought above them. (As a personal aside, I find religion--not belief--to be the antithesis of that, which I could pull another Jefferson quote about but I'm sure you know it.)
* "Us" through the lens of history. I think the quote actually comes from a letter written to his nephew, but I cannot recall for certain.
You're right; God will never be disproven because it's not possible to disprove. If nothing else, there always remains the possibility that there is a God who wants it to seem as if there is not. That's the problem with claiming limitless power and omnipotence I suppose. It tends to throw a wrench in any scientific process.
That said, when something is LITERALLY impossible to disprove then perhaps absence of proof isn't as bad as you make it out to be. It's not perfect, but it's the best we have.
I discount it because it's retarded. You can't rant for half a paragraph about how somebody saying "there is no God" is false because it relies on itself and then make a statement like "God exists because people believe he exists." It's nothing more than double-talk to push an agenda.
Do you know what people believing in God means? That people believe in God. Nothing more, nothing less. Children believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny with an unshakable, passionate believe (until they're older anyway!); that doesn't make them real.
I don't know if this would actually be useful. Just reading the comments on Slashdot, for example, in just about any patent case makes you want to jam something sharp into all of the commenter's throats. Half of them don't even read beyond the abstract, which is the only damn part of a patent application that has no meaning whatsoever. Other think that anything that is vaguely similar even through 15 layers of abstraction ("well really all a computer does is manipulate bits and we've done that since computing existed!") is prior art, and have no problems whatsoever posting this opinion as gospel and then remaking on how stupid patent examiners are to have missed it.
If that sort of trend were to continue on the USPTO website--and I have no reason to believe it wouldn't--the examiners would quickly be overwhelmed with ultimately bogus leads that they had to track down. You'd occasionally get some that they actually did use to invalidate a patent, but it would be the vast minority of comments. More information can be good, but only as good as that information is.
All of that, by the way, ignores the possibility of information being simply bogus instead of accurate but not prior art. There will be all sorts of people with agendas -- competitors, the anti-patent crowd, etc.
Honestly, that doesn't bother me that much. "Lulz! I implemented your idea using your exact algorithm in a different language!" shouldn't be a way around a patent any more than changing some variable names should be. The problem is that something as silly as one-click was granted a patent to begin with.
I honestly don't know where I stand on software patents in general. Some things like one-click make me want to throw up. Other things seem like they need enough thought and research that they probably should be protected by a patent, at least to me -- though I admit I'm not exactly a computer scientist (hmm, correct term?) or anything. The question I wrestle with in my head is if there is any way to semi-reliably deny stupid patents and allow good ones; and if not, whether the problems are worth the benefits or if the system should just go.
You're both spinning it in opposite directions, which is easy to do because you're both right.
Google is trying to make money. I don't think they will ever claim otherwise. That said, if the things they do, the things they give away (in exchange for your data), the ways that data gives them an edge in their core functionalities doesn't improve the users' experience, the users are going to slowly bleed off to competitors. And obviously that's bad for the cash flow.
Seeing relevant ads is still far better than seeing irrelevant ones. So is seeing unobtrusive text-based ads instead of Flash ads that are allowed to take 25% of your screen if you accidentally mouse over them. And of course Gmail is not only a fantastic web-based email service, but it literally single-handedly changed the industry. Remember email hosts with 25 megs of storage? Yeahhh... as we speak, Google is offering me 7.4 gigabytes. Of course that's far beyond what I will ever use, but it moved the entire industry with its initial limits.
And, at least to me, Google still returns the best search results. That keeps me coming back to their search engine, using their services, seeing their ads. Making them money -- by keeping me happy.
Spin it whichever way you please.
I'm not disagreeing with your main point, but I do think you're missing some things. Of course you will lose some of your customers by pissing them off with DRM, but those aren't the only costs:
1. Developing, licensing, implementing and testing the DRM in the first place
2. Increased support for legitimate customers impacted by the DRM
3. Depending on the type of DRM, the deployment, maintenance and usage fees (bandwidth, etc) for DRM servers
4. Less tangibles, such as bad publicity associated with it -- particularly if anything goes wrong with steps 1-3 (see: Ubisoft). The way I see it, if companies get to monetize "goodwill" on their balance sheets then "bad will" is a valid cost too.
All this for a process that almost certainly WILL be cracked, usually within the first few weeks, and which, in your words, will convert no more than 10% into sales. I have no trouble believing that all this extra work might add 10% to the costs of a game. More to the point, take those costs out of the game cost and what effect does it have on the demand curve? In other words, if you were able to make a $50 game $45 instead--without losing money because it's money you didn't spend--how many more copies would be sold?
It's just not well thought out, and unfortunately the trend seems to be more expensive, more onerous, more error-prone DRM with each generation of game coming out. It's only going to get worse. They're just chasing their own tail.
Hmm? If they're in a deep minority status, it doesn't matter if they vote against their party because they're too far buried to make a difference. It's when the votes are close that people jumping ship make a difference. If it's 60-40 for the majority, it really doesn't matter if the vote ends up 60-40 or 70-30. You still lose. If it's 50-50 then a single person jumping ship matters a great deal. Obviously these are extremes.
However, I also don't agree with your premise. It isn't because they're the minority; they did the same thing as the majority party. It's just that, for whatever reasons, the Republicans are much better at walking in lock-step than the Democrats are. Even when they had their filibuster-proof majority, what did they really do with it? They could have passed health care, economic reform, appointed whoever they pleased as Supreme Court justices, put Obama's face on the twenty dollar bill -- anything.
Instead they did very little that wouldn't have passed anyway. The reason? Because the democrats' gains in the previous elections actually came from moderate-to-conservative democrats who aren't inclined to simply fall in line.
The way I see it, there are two possibilities for students who do not attend classes:
1. They pass the class anyway. Either because they know the material, they study on their own, they get lucky -- whatever. In this case, why should a student who passes a class instead be failed because they did so without attending many of the lectures? Personally I'd rather applaud students who can effectively learn on their own. It's an extremely valuable trait.
2. The student fails because, well, he doesn't know the material. In which case his attendance is not the factor that determines whether he should pass or fail; it is his performance.
What you're talking about really gets into the purpose of instructors. In my mind, especially at the college level, it is not their job to motivate anybody into passing his/her classes. The students (or their parents) are paying a lot of money to attend. If that isn't motivation enough, well, so be it. These are probably students who never should have been there to begin with, at least not until they sorted other aspects of their life out.
People are entitled to feel differently, but to me the entire idea of trying to force people to care about something that they obviously don't is counterproductive. Instead of spending the first 5-10 minutes of class (especially if you have to sign as to validity!) trying to bully people who don't want to be there into attending, how about instructors use the suddenly lower class size to spend more time with students who actually want their help?
And the grandparent is implying that it wouldn't even take an adult to see how horribly the guards were acting; even other children would get it.
I think you're missing the point, along with a lot of others in this thread. This story was not created and posted because a smoking application was approved for the iPhone. I really doubt anybody here cares, much less objects. In fact most probably would prefer the app DOES exist because most people here are all about letting each individual make these choices for themselves.
Rather, this story is here because Apple has appointed themselves gatekeeper of the application universe for iPhone, and because their decisions are seldom intelligible or predictable. An application for a Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist gets banned (until public disgust forces them to reconsider). An application where you shake a baby to death is approved (though later removed.) Applications for lingerie are banned. If memory serves, even ones that do not have any sort of model shots, just the products themselves, are banned. Meanwhile an app for Playboy is passed. Now, an app about smoking a joint* with your friends has no trouble passing muster. I would not be surprised in the least if it turns out these people wrote the app explicitly to see whether or not Apple's ever-inconsistent "morality" would catch it.
I don't think it was worth a story here (Wired is free to write whatever they want for whatever reason they want), because I find the value in Slashdot to be the discussions and this is not the type of story that will encourage a decent one. There will be fanbois and haters going back and forth with little actual thought put into anything, which is almost reason enough NOT to post it for me.
But anyway. Nobody cares that this app was approved, they care that this app was approved relative to other ones that have been rejected. It's entire purpose is to take shots at Apple for playing gatekeeper, and for doing it in such a wildly inconsistent manner. I'm not sure it's worth posting on that basis alone, but the reason it is on Slashdot, at least, has nothing to do with whether or not it encourages smoking.
* Sorry, a "cigarette." Yeah, right. When's the last time anybody sat around in a circle passing a cigarette around with five of their friends?
Don't let your children have money or visit their friends' houses until they are eighteen. Fucking really? Exactly how bad are you trying to screw these kids up?
This advice is so unbelievably ridiculous that I can't decide if you're really so deluded as to believe it, or if it is some sort of meta troll where you try to present having a say in what games your kids play as such a horrible alternative that nobody should ever pick it.
In either event, I hope to god you don't become a parent before you do some serious growing up.