The program you were in sounds very similar to the program that I was in as a kid. We were ushered off into a separate class for about eight hours a week where we were sort of gently nudged through an advanced curriculum that was separate from our normal schoolwork. The class however, made me lazy when it came to anything that I wasn't personally interested in and if a subject didn't interest me, I had trouble summoning the necessary will power to work on it. It's a problem I have spent years correcting, and only recently have I made any real headway with it.
The gifted student program I was in as a child was bled completely dry by an effort to "better care" for special needs students. It is a pity because some of my fondest memories of grade school come from that class and I hate to think that other deserving children are missing out on the fun and challenging things I got to experience. I think it indicates an error in the current model of education in the US. Instead of cultivating those who have the ready potential to do more than the average person, we force them to act like they are average and to avoid making others feel bad about themselves. I understand the human tendency toward uniformity, but I think we are severely undercutting ourselves in this case.
The article smells an awful bit fishy to me. The fact that the article borrows pretty heavily from the wikipedia article while still not showing an understanding of how the force works (not so much an attraction as the surfaces are "pushed" together by vacuum energies) and the fact that the term "lens" is used, implying that the author understands the phenomena to be some sort of beam or light. And then of course there is this: "The practicalities of designing the lens to do this are daunting but not impossible and levitation "could happen over quite a distance"." which makes very little sense to me, considering the very Wikipedia article they quote (without citation) states: "Because the strength of the force falls off rapidly with distance, it is only measurable when the distance between the objects is extremely small."
I think that I'd love to see frictionless bearings and hoverboards as much as any slashdotter, but I am afraid that I'm just far too much of a skeptic to buy that a magic lens can produce long-range matter repulsion.
Ironically, I'm probably not supposed to say this on slashdot, but
Fuck That
And any manner of other "inappropriate" words for that matter. The idea of allowing the government to filter for us what is appropriate is absolutely absurd and anyone who thinks that the law-making body is the one best suited toward deciding the standards of decency for a socity needs some serious education in sociology.
When you hand the job of deciding what's appropriate over to an organization whose job is to define laws, sooner or later laws, what's appropriate, and of course the personal agendas of those who are in power all become the same thing and the people are left with nothing.
I say please, give our fore-fathers their due respect! They were wise men, though not perfect by any means they knew a lot better than any living American today what a totalitarian government looks like and they fashioned their government to be the opposite.
I have ranted on Slashdot and in another of other public outlets for years about the concept of incrementalism and how bad governments are rarely made overnight, but rather they're over several decades. Those with agendas make lots of small, seemingly insignificant incremental changes that are relatively painless when they're made, but add up over time to full-blown oppression. There is a saying to this affect that goes something like, "If you throw a frog in boiling water, it will hop out, if you put a frog in cool water and slowly raise the temperature, you'll boil it alive."
My friends, I assure you, we are being boiled alive. Some point left, some point right, but the truth is that it comes from both sides and the animated characatures of political parties that you see today are nothing more than sock puppets meant to distract you from the real agendas. The fact of the matter is, the water is getting hotter, and we're to the point in which it no longer matters whose fault it is, and we aren't granted the luxury of time to point fingers, we must act.
Speak out, write letters and editorials, post videos to YouTube, really exercise your freedom of speech. Use it or lose it. Get people involved, get them out of their complacency and get them mad about the loss of their rights. When people speak out about the loss of freedom of speech, media outlets and politicians deftly paint those people as crazy extremists. They conjure images of things like Waco and other nonsense, they say that freedom of speech is for crazy people. It's a simple tool, and it's very effective.
Those of us who are worried about our future, however, need to work to change that image. We need to show everyone that the guy who values his rights isn't an unstable misanthrope, or a cult member, it's the guy in the next cubicle, it's the IT manager, or the nice old man across the street, in short, it's real Americans. These people aren't radicals, they aren't perverts, and they care about their children, but they also care about their rights. They would much rather risk the oh-so-terrible possibility of their child hearing a naughty word, or seeing a risque picture, and have to guide their children through that, than lose their freedom of speech entirely in exchange for the warm, comfy, controlling blanket of government decency enforcement.
Patriotism is not plastic flags and bumper stickers, it's not t-shirts with bald eagles and pictures of the WTC on them, it's not regurgitating the verbal vomit of television pundits, it's standing up for yourself. This country was founded when a group people stood up for what they percieved their rights to be, that's what made them Americans. The most patriotic thing you can do isn't to blanketly support your president, or hang ribbons, or support the troops; the most patriotic thing you can do is to fight for your rights, no matter who is trying to take them away.
Is the Microsoft trackball explorer, but to my knowledge they don't make it anymore. The buttons and wheel are oriented on the thumb, and the ball is controlled with the rest of your fingers. It's ergonomic, precise, and the best pointing device I've ever owned. It makes no sense to me that Microsoft stopped making them, they were by far one of their best pointing devices.
If we start being "responsible" and go filtering the internet in developing countries, then we are off to a bad start. We, especially in the West, seem to like deferring the burden of reality as long as possible and it provides us with nothing but half-developed, immature adults. Childhood is a great thing, and I miss mine that's for sure, but the clarity of being an adult has its own pleasures. The fact of the matter is, pornography exists and teenage boys want to see it. You can filter the internet all you want, you can hide it under counters, hell you can even flat-out ban it, but you'll never overcome the creativity and the ingenuity of the horny teenage boy's mind and that's a fact.
You have digressed into obscurity, and I am fairly confident that you fail to understand my point. In spite of that, I will reiterate it once more:
The problem isn't that material is somehow inherently bad, it's when people forgo their responsibilities or ethics in order to acquire it. I point this out as a single example of the societal problems which are contributing to youth violence. The point of my post wasn't to say that you can't have things, the point was that there are problems much that are harder to assess and fix than violence in video games at fault for these actions. While it is true, and always will be true that some people are just messed up, you'll find that a lot of the children who act out do so for a reason. They aren't getting the attention and proper home socialization that children require in order to be healthy adults. Look at the school shootings, look at Columbine. Those kids were white supremacists, neo-nazis, and their parents were far more concerned about maintaining their social status amongst other adults to even notice. The media focused on the fact that the kids played the game Doom, but that had nothing to do with their actions, it was because they weren't given the necessary attention needed to keep them from becoming psychopaths.
There will always be exceptions to the rules, and I'm certain you will call those out. But exceptions are just that, unusual quirks in contrast to a general rule.
With that, I declare this thread dead. Unless you actually start paying attention to what I'm saying, we won't be going anywhere useful.
There isn't anything inherently wrong with wanting a chicken sandwich or wanting a new graphics card. Problems, however, arise when you're more concerned about a quarter million dollar house in a trendy neighborhood at the expense of attentive parenting or a new BMW at the expense of an employee's pension. Like everything else, it's shades of grey and complex webs of dependent bits of information.
I'm not implying that materialism is an attribute of only the rich. Materialism is a societal issue that extends not just to the rich, but nearly all income levels, castes and locations within first-world countries. Look at nearly all popular culture media, the focus on acquiring material things is purvasive and has no explanation. No one knows why they want these things, they just know they want them.
Unfortunately, however, this is a digression from the purpose of my post. I was simply pointing out that the reason that people find the supposed connection between video games and violence so comforting is because it gives them something that's easy to blame. It doesn't require them to look hard at the deeper problems in society which are actually at fault and it doesn't require them to actually do anything.
In ancient times on the holiday of Yom Kippur, Jewish tribes would take a sacrificial goat and symbolically imbue it with all of the sins and misfortunes of the village that year. They would then drive the goat into the wilderness as a means of expelling the misdeeds of the village inhabitants.
The point here is that for as long as we've had civilization, we have had the compulsion toward placing blame for the wrongs of society on some outside force, hence the term, "scapegoat."
Video games are yet another in a long line of popular items to blame the collective wrongs of society upon in order to keep us from having to confront the real problems in society. Whether these problems are those purely indicative of cultural shift over time, or more serious issues like teenagers murdering their classmates, something easy is always found to blame. Nevermind the fact that we live in an exceedingly materialistic culture (that forsakes the bonds of families and friends for monetary gains) or the fact that parents these days don't seem to pay the same kind of attention to their kids that they used to, it's just a lot easier to blame something popular for the decay of society rather than society itself.
An IDE, though useful, is pretty intuitive to learn. Command line tools and archaic text editors usually are not. I would be an advocate of teaching them the unintuitive first, and letting them pick up the intuitive on their own.
This made me laugh, it kind of reminded me of the issue of 2600 when the whole DeCSS thing broke and it was plastered with pictures of SWAT teams with their uniforms photoshopped to say "MPAA" storming a McDonalds. Funny stuff.
*Equips Nephroth's Trollbasher - Plus 21 damage to luddite trolls!*
There is a radio tower on the roof, just like there are radio towers on the roofs of thousands upon thousands of buildings all over the globe. Just because one building had a statistically anomalous number of brain tumors, doesn't implicate the radio tower, it implicates the location as a whole.
You can't just assume that because there is a cell tower and you so desperately want cell phones to cause cancer, doesn't mean that they do. The vast majority of the evidence (the fact that this is one isolated incident) suggests that the cause is elsewhere.
Yes, Bush is bad. But the only difference between what Bush has been doing and what previous presidents have done, is that Bush has flaunted it. Instead of being secretive about taking our freedoms, he's created a unique political climate in which people aren't angry about it, they're actually cheering him on.
People are encouraging it, and if you don't want to wipe your ass with the constitution, you're not a patriot.
Unfortunately, our point of view is pretty unpopular as it tends to be pretty hard for people to think back that far. They just want to deal with the little arguments that are fed to them to keep them busy, all the while their precious rights are stolen away in the name of "safety." Safety from whom, I ask?
It's not an issue of democrats and republicans or libertarians, it's an issue of the powerful wanting more power, the rich wanting more money, and ultimately, greed.
I can agree with the notion that some FOSS is too complex for most users, but I think that is mostly indicative of a few poorly designed programs.
Let's take GIMP, for example. It is free, and easy to install, but the ease of use ends there as it bears very very little similarity to other graphics editors of similar calibur such as Photoshop, Illustrator, or (my personal favorite) Paint Shop Pro. Now, it is possible to learn and become proficient with GIMP, I have had to and I can appreciate the software, but users hate to click and see nothing happen.
GIMP is an exception to the rules, however, as I have found most open-source software to be relatively intuitive and easy to use. Albeit, much of that software asks a little more of its users than the equivalent Windows software, but not much. Using the command line, or having a cursory knowledge of what one is doing is not an unreasonable demand for a user.
In fact, I would be more prone to saying that it is far more unreasonable to demand that software developers make software that anyone can use without any prior knowledge of the software. There are very few devices, electronic or otherwise, that require no prior knowledge on their use on the part of the user, and software shouldn't be expected to be the exception.
There is also a certain amount of freedom that comes from complexity. A number of my open source applications offer me a wealth of options that their closed-source counterparts lack. This adds to complexity, but I am rewarded for my efforts to learn by saved time and effort, and specific control over what I'm doing.
I understand the point the author is trying to make, but I think they are being very short-sighted. Applications such as Word and Excel are very complex, it's just that most users are ignorant to the complexity, and the applications are made to be tolerant of their ignorance. Someone who is familiar with page formatting on more advanced systems, however, tends to find applications like Word (and it's "auto-formatting") very frustrating.
I suppose the point that I'm trying to make is this: If you don't have the prior knowledge necessary to use a piece of software, that is in no way the fault of the developer. If you want to do something, do the work necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
The program you were in sounds very similar to the program that I was in as a kid. We were ushered off into a separate class for about eight hours a week where we were sort of gently nudged through an advanced curriculum that was separate from our normal schoolwork. The class however, made me lazy when it came to anything that I wasn't personally interested in and if a subject didn't interest me, I had trouble summoning the necessary will power to work on it. It's a problem I have spent years correcting, and only recently have I made any real headway with it.
If the program had teachers who knew less about the topics than the students, then it was clearly poorly engineered.
The gifted student program I was in as a child was bled completely dry by an effort to "better care" for special needs students. It is a pity because some of my fondest memories of grade school come from that class and I hate to think that other deserving children are missing out on the fun and challenging things I got to experience. I think it indicates an error in the current model of education in the US. Instead of cultivating those who have the ready potential to do more than the average person, we force them to act like they are average and to avoid making others feel bad about themselves. I understand the human tendency toward uniformity, but I think we are severely undercutting ourselves in this case.
I don't know what gifted program you were in, but the one I participated in was nothing like that.
I think that I'd love to see frictionless bearings and hoverboards as much as any slashdotter, but I am afraid that I'm just far too much of a skeptic to buy that a magic lens can produce long-range matter repulsion.
The point is that this is a step. First they offer you the option of censoring yourself or your children, then a time later, it's no longer an option.
Fuck That
And any manner of other "inappropriate" words for that matter. The idea of allowing the government to filter for us what is appropriate is absolutely absurd and anyone who thinks that the law-making body is the one best suited toward deciding the standards of decency for a socity needs some serious education in sociology.
When you hand the job of deciding what's appropriate over to an organization whose job is to define laws, sooner or later laws, what's appropriate, and of course the personal agendas of those who are in power all become the same thing and the people are left with nothing.
I say please, give our fore-fathers their due respect! They were wise men, though not perfect by any means they knew a lot better than any living American today what a totalitarian government looks like and they fashioned their government to be the opposite.
I have ranted on Slashdot and in another of other public outlets for years about the concept of incrementalism and how bad governments are rarely made overnight, but rather they're over several decades. Those with agendas make lots of small, seemingly insignificant incremental changes that are relatively painless when they're made, but add up over time to full-blown oppression. There is a saying to this affect that goes something like, "If you throw a frog in boiling water, it will hop out, if you put a frog in cool water and slowly raise the temperature, you'll boil it alive."
My friends, I assure you, we are being boiled alive. Some point left, some point right, but the truth is that it comes from both sides and the animated characatures of political parties that you see today are nothing more than sock puppets meant to distract you from the real agendas. The fact of the matter is, the water is getting hotter, and we're to the point in which it no longer matters whose fault it is, and we aren't granted the luxury of time to point fingers, we must act.
Speak out, write letters and editorials, post videos to YouTube, really exercise your freedom of speech. Use it or lose it. Get people involved, get them out of their complacency and get them mad about the loss of their rights. When people speak out about the loss of freedom of speech, media outlets and politicians deftly paint those people as crazy extremists. They conjure images of things like Waco and other nonsense, they say that freedom of speech is for crazy people. It's a simple tool, and it's very effective.
Those of us who are worried about our future, however, need to work to change that image. We need to show everyone that the guy who values his rights isn't an unstable misanthrope, or a cult member, it's the guy in the next cubicle, it's the IT manager, or the nice old man across the street, in short, it's real Americans. These people aren't radicals, they aren't perverts, and they care about their children, but they also care about their rights. They would much rather risk the oh-so-terrible possibility of their child hearing a naughty word, or seeing a risque picture, and have to guide their children through that, than lose their freedom of speech entirely in exchange for the warm, comfy, controlling blanket of government decency enforcement.
Patriotism is not plastic flags and bumper stickers, it's not t-shirts with bald eagles and pictures of the WTC on them, it's not regurgitating the verbal vomit of television pundits, it's standing up for yourself. This country was founded when a group people stood up for what they percieved their rights to be, that's what made them Americans. The most patriotic thing you can do isn't to blanketly support your president, or hang ribbons, or support the troops; the most patriotic thing you can do is to fight for your rights, no matter who is trying to take them away.
Also, a quick look on eBay Shows that pretty much everyone else agrees with me
Is the Microsoft trackball explorer, but to my knowledge they don't make it anymore. The buttons and wheel are oriented on the thumb, and the ball is controlled with the rest of your fingers. It's ergonomic, precise, and the best pointing device I've ever owned. It makes no sense to me that Microsoft stopped making them, they were by far one of their best pointing devices.
If we start being "responsible" and go filtering the internet in developing countries, then we are off to a bad start. We, especially in the West, seem to like deferring the burden of reality as long as possible and it provides us with nothing but half-developed, immature adults. Childhood is a great thing, and I miss mine that's for sure, but the clarity of being an adult has its own pleasures. The fact of the matter is, pornography exists and teenage boys want to see it. You can filter the internet all you want, you can hide it under counters, hell you can even flat-out ban it, but you'll never overcome the creativity and the ingenuity of the horny teenage boy's mind and that's a fact.
No, not really. In fact most financial transactions are pretty insecure.
The problem isn't that material is somehow inherently bad, it's when people forgo their responsibilities or ethics in order to acquire it. I point this out as a single example of the societal problems which are contributing to youth violence. The point of my post wasn't to say that you can't have things, the point was that there are problems much that are harder to assess and fix than violence in video games at fault for these actions. While it is true, and always will be true that some people are just messed up, you'll find that a lot of the children who act out do so for a reason. They aren't getting the attention and proper home socialization that children require in order to be healthy adults. Look at the school shootings, look at Columbine. Those kids were white supremacists, neo-nazis, and their parents were far more concerned about maintaining their social status amongst other adults to even notice. The media focused on the fact that the kids played the game Doom, but that had nothing to do with their actions, it was because they weren't given the necessary attention needed to keep them from becoming psychopaths.
There will always be exceptions to the rules, and I'm certain you will call those out. But exceptions are just that, unusual quirks in contrast to a general rule.
With that, I declare this thread dead. Unless you actually start paying attention to what I'm saying, we won't be going anywhere useful.
Enron.
There isn't anything inherently wrong with wanting a chicken sandwich or wanting a new graphics card. Problems, however, arise when you're more concerned about a quarter million dollar house in a trendy neighborhood at the expense of attentive parenting or a new BMW at the expense of an employee's pension. Like everything else, it's shades of grey and complex webs of dependent bits of information.
Unfortunately, however, this is a digression from the purpose of my post. I was simply pointing out that the reason that people find the supposed connection between video games and violence so comforting is because it gives them something that's easy to blame. It doesn't require them to look hard at the deeper problems in society which are actually at fault and it doesn't require them to actually do anything.
The point here is that for as long as we've had civilization, we have had the compulsion toward placing blame for the wrongs of society on some outside force, hence the term, "scapegoat."
Video games are yet another in a long line of popular items to blame the collective wrongs of society upon in order to keep us from having to confront the real problems in society. Whether these problems are those purely indicative of cultural shift over time, or more serious issues like teenagers murdering their classmates, something easy is always found to blame. Nevermind the fact that we live in an exceedingly materialistic culture (that forsakes the bonds of families and friends for monetary gains) or the fact that parents these days don't seem to pay the same kind of attention to their kids that they used to, it's just a lot easier to blame something popular for the decay of society rather than society itself.
Production scaled back, sorry. It matters not, however, because this is pretty much the death sentence for the format.
Um... PSPs used to play movies. Sony has announced that the UMD movie format will be retired...
An IDE, though useful, is pretty intuitive to learn. Command line tools and archaic text editors usually are not. I would be an advocate of teaching them the unintuitive first, and letting them pick up the intuitive on their own.
This made me laugh, it kind of reminded me of the issue of 2600 when the whole DeCSS thing broke and it was plastered with pictures of SWAT teams with their uniforms photoshopped to say "MPAA" storming a McDonalds. Funny stuff.
There is a radio tower on the roof, just like there are radio towers on the roofs of thousands upon thousands of buildings all over the globe. Just because one building had a statistically anomalous number of brain tumors, doesn't implicate the radio tower, it implicates the location as a whole.
You can't just assume that because there is a cell tower and you so desperately want cell phones to cause cancer, doesn't mean that they do. The vast majority of the evidence (the fact that this is one isolated incident) suggests that the cause is elsewhere.
People are encouraging it, and if you don't want to wipe your ass with the constitution, you're not a patriot.
Unfortunately, our point of view is pretty unpopular as it tends to be pretty hard for people to think back that far. They just want to deal with the little arguments that are fed to them to keep them busy, all the while their precious rights are stolen away in the name of "safety." Safety from whom, I ask?
It's not an issue of democrats and republicans or libertarians, it's an issue of the powerful wanting more power, the rich wanting more money, and ultimately, greed.
Let's take GIMP, for example. It is free, and easy to install, but the ease of use ends there as it bears very very little similarity to other graphics editors of similar calibur such as Photoshop, Illustrator, or (my personal favorite) Paint Shop Pro. Now, it is possible to learn and become proficient with GIMP, I have had to and I can appreciate the software, but users hate to click and see nothing happen.
GIMP is an exception to the rules, however, as I have found most open-source software to be relatively intuitive and easy to use. Albeit, much of that software asks a little more of its users than the equivalent Windows software, but not much. Using the command line, or having a cursory knowledge of what one is doing is not an unreasonable demand for a user.
In fact, I would be more prone to saying that it is far more unreasonable to demand that software developers make software that anyone can use without any prior knowledge of the software. There are very few devices, electronic or otherwise, that require no prior knowledge on their use on the part of the user, and software shouldn't be expected to be the exception.
There is also a certain amount of freedom that comes from complexity. A number of my open source applications offer me a wealth of options that their closed-source counterparts lack. This adds to complexity, but I am rewarded for my efforts to learn by saved time and effort, and specific control over what I'm doing.
I understand the point the author is trying to make, but I think they are being very short-sighted. Applications such as Word and Excel are very complex, it's just that most users are ignorant to the complexity, and the applications are made to be tolerant of their ignorance. Someone who is familiar with page formatting on more advanced systems, however, tends to find applications like Word (and it's "auto-formatting") very frustrating.
I suppose the point that I'm trying to make is this: If you don't have the prior knowledge necessary to use a piece of software, that is in no way the fault of the developer. If you want to do something, do the work necessary.
Are a little mad anyway ;)