The article is based on a completely incorrect premise. Publishers decide to put on DRM or not; there's a fuckton of DRM-free books available in the Kindle store. No barriers to jump over, and even if you don't feel like converting them, you can simply move the book over to Kindle for PC, Kindle for Android, Kindle for IOS, etc.
I love steam. As someone that uses multiple computers, it's great to have an easy way to move games around. I do keep the client open all the time, and use it as an IM program. Also, it makes it easier to find and start my games, since I have too many to put shortcuts on the desktop. It doesn't add minutes to start-up time, even when I didn't always keep it open. I like the logging of what and how long I play, and in fact I still use xfire to do that, and have hopes that steam update that feature to work more like xfire. It also lets me know what games my friends are playing, making it easy to join. And steam makes it easy to take screenshots, where in the past I was running a separate program to do that. The ads are always relevant to me.
The few times in the past few years I have been without a working internet connection on my computer, it was either because the power went out - in which case, internet or no, I'm not playing PC games - or I was busy getting the internet fixed. Anyone that is without the internet frequently is probably going to plan ahead, or at the very least has some non-steam games to play.
There's never any guarantee that you'll still be able to play your games in the future. There are games I have the disks or discs of that don't work anymore because I no longer have a compatible OS. There's a fuckton of games that I purchased in the past, which require a disc to play, where I lost the disc. There's plenty of games that require online cd-key authentication where the authentication servers aren't up anymore, or offline cd-key authentication where I lost the cd-key. But there are ways around that, emulators, cracks, etc. and there will be the same for steam games (and there already is) if anything ever happens to steam. Nevermind the fact that when you buy a game you are not buying the actual game, to do with as you wish; you're buying a license to play the game on the publisher's terms.
Show me a more light-handed method of DRM than Steam. Yes, it's DRM, and that is inherently bad in some ways. But Steam is DRM that makes many things more convenient, and personally, that's part of what gets me to purchase things (wanting to support the creators being the main factor, but this is part); purchasing being more convenient than pirating.
I have bought DRMed books, and then wanted to let my children or husband read them - but I'm not going to buy it again, and I'm not going to let them take my ereader or computer. If the book is limited to just my desktop computer, they aren't going to be physically able to take the book anywhere. Though I just strip the DRM, to someone that doesn't know how to do that or is unwilling to do that, I can see how it would be a show stopper.
It's very easy to convert kindle books to other formats. If ALL those formats - mobi, epub, pdf, etc. go away, I'm sure there will be at the very least an easy way to convert from pdf to the newest format.
Publishers selling on Amazon can decide to add DRM or not. There are many ebooks on Amazon without DRM. Those books are easily converted to other formats if you don't like using Amazon's software to view them.
Actually, we do have the ability to play electronic "purchased" material in the car. I can watch netflix, crunchyroll, and Amazon Instant Video on my phone, tablet or on a tethered laptop. If I were partial to watching movies in the car, it would certainly be possible to connect a car-mounted monitor to the laptop or mount the tablet.
What about the children that are physically unable to knock out bullies? Or the bullies with a big brother that is going to come knock you out for knocking out his little brother? I do not think a child should ever be put into the position to need to defend themselves in that way. More parents should be willing to deal with school bullies in the way that real-life bullies are dealt with - shunning. Taking their kids out of the school. If someone is a bully at a workplace, they are fired, or if no one will fire them, the bullied person moves to a different job, until the company starts to look at why people keep leaving. Outside of school and as an adult, if a friend is a bully, you stop being friends with him. Etc.
IMO one of the big reasons there are school bullies is because the bullies know they aren't going to be kicked out permanently and the other kids can't leave. Since schools are paid based on attendance, being willing to remove bullied children would force school administration to take action; they'd be willing to stop bullying, or in extreme cases kick the 1 bully out, if it means they won't lose 5 other kids.
Though I wonder if it is an issue of parents not knowing that removing their child from the school is an option, and that there are free alternatives, or an issue of parents being unwilling.
I would think that as a psychologist you'd know interacting with a child that is your own - though not necessarily biologically - is often quite different than interacting with children that aren't yours. A child can spend all day with a teacher, uncle, etc. and act one way, but act a different way with their parents (or adoptive parents, or foster parents, or custodial persons) because they know their parents must put up with them no matter what, or because they get grumpy at a certain time of night, or etc. while the teacher can switch them to a different class, the uncle can stop visiting, they don't see the child at the grumpy time, etc.
But anyway...
As a psychologist, what would you suggest should be done when a child is doing something unsafe and the child doesn't see it as unsafe, and therefore sees any punishment as unjust, so keeps doing the unsafe action?
"part of the point of raising a child is to modify behavior" I gotta disagree with that. The whole point of raising a person (because the goal should not be to raise children - though sadly many people in the US nowadays do just that) is to teach them the skills needed to be independent, to function on their own and within society. It seems like you think children are by default jerks, and you must modify this behavior; that isn't the case. Barring mental disability, children become the type of person the people around them model.
Good luck getting anyone to take you seriously if you say you have a self-taught university-equivalent education. There's a difference between "hoarded" and "forbidden".
Yes, that's what SHOULD happen in classrooms. But when you've got 30 students and 1 teacher, and a set amount of information that must be memorized before the test, and the teacher doesn't have much time to keep up with their area of expertise, it usually doesn't work out that way.
I would expect a 14 year old to not just take what one person types or says as true, even if it were a teacher; I'd expect them to know how to consult several sources and discern which is true/correct. A 7 year old, not as much, but I'd expect someone older to be guiding them and teaching them this. Schools are not the only places that have equipment, consumables, and other people.
If 1 teacher has 180 students (6 classes, 30 students per class), he can not have time to look at the content of each essay portion of the tests for each student.
"Does every job where all you need is internet access and a phone, suck?" Definitely not. But technology making it possible for jobs to be outsourced means it is possible to do them anywhere; that includes this country, too. Want to be an English teacher, and teach those people in Asia that will be working at call centers? You no longer have to move to Asia to do that. Also, there are new "jobs" (or maybe they should be called "ways of making a living") now. People can make a living playing video games, people can make a living talking about their day on youtube. Can that be done from Asia? Sure, but it can be done from anywhere. The people that watch me may watch me if I move to Asia, but getting them to switch over to someone that already lives in Asia would be a bit more difficult, and if anything they would watch both of us. People can make a living out of being advertised to, or by being living advertisements and influencing trends of people around them. While that CAN be done purely virtually, it's not quite as effective as the person actually being in the same country as the people you want to convince to buy more of your stuff (at least not yet). Anyone anywhere can write a book and publish it on Amazon now, but the majority of bestsellers in America are books written by Americans, and the next most common are by British people.
If what you really want to do is work for a call center, make things (as in factory work), it's still possible to do that in America. You can make things on your own and sell them, or if you're a damn good call center operator you can work for a call center from your home. If that isn't good enough for you, and you want that real factory or call center experience, you can move to Asia. But so few people actually want to do those jobs that it's silly to fight to keep them here. We Americans want more blue collar jobs just for the sake of having jobs, I guess, but no one wants to do them, and when they are there we whine that they aren't safe or they don't pay enough or they're simply beneath us. This is because in the US we don't NEED those jobs like we claim/think we do. Here the poor live in luxury - not what the average or rich in the US would consider luxury, but certainly what the poor in many other countries would consider luxury. No one in the US is starving to death - it's quite the opposite, many people in the US are overeating themselves to death! We all have access to food and water, even if we have no job at all. We WANT to be rich, but we don't need to be, so the jobs we are willing to do must either pay enough to outweigh the shittyness, or have the promise of leading a future job that will do so.
If you convince yourself that all you can do is work for a call center, but you're unwilling to be paid the same salary as people that do it in Asia, then I suppose call center jobs all being outsourced would suck. But in the US you can pretty much do whatever you enjoy doing, and there is SOME way to make money from it. Heck if all you want to do is sit on your couch and pick your nose all day, there are enough weirdos in the world that will pay you to let them watch that you can do it. We don't HAVE to work shitty anymore. So I say leave them to the people that either want to, or are more willing to do them.
But you could have students that press play themselves while a parent guides them. And instead of DVDs, you could put the videos on the internet so that they are more easily accessible. We have the ability to spread knowledge around the world, yet we still hold on to the archaic idea that knowledge must be hoarded and given only to people that sit in certain classrooms...
Perhaps we could have such things submitted via computers, and the computer knows who submitted the paper and attaches the grade to that student, but the teacher does not know.
Even the career-welfare people tend to like sitting at home using computers more than going to a call center and reading a script. They just don't know how to turn that into making money.
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Your phone only works in population centers? The only time I have an issue is in some remote mountain areas.
The article is based on a completely incorrect premise. Publishers decide to put on DRM or not; there's a fuckton of DRM-free books available in the Kindle store. No barriers to jump over, and even if you don't feel like converting them, you can simply move the book over to Kindle for PC, Kindle for Android, Kindle for IOS, etc.
I love steam. As someone that uses multiple computers, it's great to have an easy way to move games around. I do keep the client open all the time, and use it as an IM program. Also, it makes it easier to find and start my games, since I have too many to put shortcuts on the desktop. It doesn't add minutes to start-up time, even when I didn't always keep it open. I like the logging of what and how long I play, and in fact I still use xfire to do that, and have hopes that steam update that feature to work more like xfire. It also lets me know what games my friends are playing, making it easy to join. And steam makes it easy to take screenshots, where in the past I was running a separate program to do that. The ads are always relevant to me.
The few times in the past few years I have been without a working internet connection on my computer, it was either because the power went out - in which case, internet or no, I'm not playing PC games - or I was busy getting the internet fixed. Anyone that is without the internet frequently is probably going to plan ahead, or at the very least has some non-steam games to play.
There's never any guarantee that you'll still be able to play your games in the future. There are games I have the disks or discs of that don't work anymore because I no longer have a compatible OS. There's a fuckton of games that I purchased in the past, which require a disc to play, where I lost the disc. There's plenty of games that require online cd-key authentication where the authentication servers aren't up anymore, or offline cd-key authentication where I lost the cd-key. But there are ways around that, emulators, cracks, etc. and there will be the same for steam games (and there already is) if anything ever happens to steam. Nevermind the fact that when you buy a game you are not buying the actual game, to do with as you wish; you're buying a license to play the game on the publisher's terms.
Show me a more light-handed method of DRM than Steam. Yes, it's DRM, and that is inherently bad in some ways. But Steam is DRM that makes many things more convenient, and personally, that's part of what gets me to purchase things (wanting to support the creators being the main factor, but this is part); purchasing being more convenient than pirating.
It would be nice to be able to read the link, too bad ads keep getting in my way.
I have bought DRMed books, and then wanted to let my children or husband read them - but I'm not going to buy it again, and I'm not going to let them take my ereader or computer. If the book is limited to just my desktop computer, they aren't going to be physically able to take the book anywhere. Though I just strip the DRM, to someone that doesn't know how to do that or is unwilling to do that, I can see how it would be a show stopper.
It's very easy to convert kindle books to other formats. If ALL those formats - mobi, epub, pdf, etc. go away, I'm sure there will be at the very least an easy way to convert from pdf to the newest format.
Publishers selling on Amazon can decide to add DRM or not. There are many ebooks on Amazon without DRM. Those books are easily converted to other formats if you don't like using Amazon's software to view them.
Actually, we do have the ability to play electronic "purchased" material in the car. I can watch netflix, crunchyroll, and Amazon Instant Video on my phone, tablet or on a tethered laptop. If I were partial to watching movies in the car, it would certainly be possible to connect a car-mounted monitor to the laptop or mount the tablet.
I see every pirate as a future customer or friend of a future customer.
Yeah, when they started doing that with movies, it ended movie piracy!
People pirate books that were never legally released as ebooks too. Book pirating was around long before legal ebooks.
What about the children that are physically unable to knock out bullies? Or the bullies with a big brother that is going to come knock you out for knocking out his little brother? I do not think a child should ever be put into the position to need to defend themselves in that way. More parents should be willing to deal with school bullies in the way that real-life bullies are dealt with - shunning. Taking their kids out of the school. If someone is a bully at a workplace, they are fired, or if no one will fire them, the bullied person moves to a different job, until the company starts to look at why people keep leaving. Outside of school and as an adult, if a friend is a bully, you stop being friends with him. Etc.
IMO one of the big reasons there are school bullies is because the bullies know they aren't going to be kicked out permanently and the other kids can't leave. Since schools are paid based on attendance, being willing to remove bullied children would force school administration to take action; they'd be willing to stop bullying, or in extreme cases kick the 1 bully out, if it means they won't lose 5 other kids.
Though I wonder if it is an issue of parents not knowing that removing their child from the school is an option, and that there are free alternatives, or an issue of parents being unwilling.
I'm not pro-spanking, but using "infant" do describe 12 month - 4 year olds is certainly not accurate.
I would think that as a psychologist you'd know interacting with a child that is your own - though not necessarily biologically - is often quite different than interacting with children that aren't yours. A child can spend all day with a teacher, uncle, etc. and act one way, but act a different way with their parents (or adoptive parents, or foster parents, or custodial persons) because they know their parents must put up with them no matter what, or because they get grumpy at a certain time of night, or etc. while the teacher can switch them to a different class, the uncle can stop visiting, they don't see the child at the grumpy time, etc.
...
But anyway
As a psychologist, what would you suggest should be done when a child is doing something unsafe and the child doesn't see it as unsafe, and therefore sees any punishment as unjust, so keeps doing the unsafe action?
Physical abuse, when it is seen/noticed, is taken pretty seriously. Mental/emotional abuse is not.
"part of the point of raising a child is to modify behavior" I gotta disagree with that. The whole point of raising a person (because the goal should not be to raise children - though sadly many people in the US nowadays do just that) is to teach them the skills needed to be independent, to function on their own and within society. It seems like you think children are by default jerks, and you must modify this behavior; that isn't the case. Barring mental disability, children become the type of person the people around them model.
Good luck getting anyone to take you seriously if you say you have a self-taught university-equivalent education. There's a difference between "hoarded" and "forbidden".
The method of testing is based on what is possible to grade.
Yes, that's what SHOULD happen in classrooms. But when you've got 30 students and 1 teacher, and a set amount of information that must be memorized before the test, and the teacher doesn't have much time to keep up with their area of expertise, it usually doesn't work out that way.
I would expect a 14 year old to not just take what one person types or says as true, even if it were a teacher; I'd expect them to know how to consult several sources and discern which is true/correct. A 7 year old, not as much, but I'd expect someone older to be guiding them and teaching them this. Schools are not the only places that have equipment, consumables, and other people.
If 1 teacher has 180 students (6 classes, 30 students per class), he can not have time to look at the content of each essay portion of the tests for each student.
"Does every job where all you need is internet access and a phone, suck?" Definitely not. But technology making it possible for jobs to be outsourced means it is possible to do them anywhere; that includes this country, too. Want to be an English teacher, and teach those people in Asia that will be working at call centers? You no longer have to move to Asia to do that. Also, there are new "jobs" (or maybe they should be called "ways of making a living") now. People can make a living playing video games, people can make a living talking about their day on youtube. Can that be done from Asia? Sure, but it can be done from anywhere. The people that watch me may watch me if I move to Asia, but getting them to switch over to someone that already lives in Asia would be a bit more difficult, and if anything they would watch both of us. People can make a living out of being advertised to, or by being living advertisements and influencing trends of people around them. While that CAN be done purely virtually, it's not quite as effective as the person actually being in the same country as the people you want to convince to buy more of your stuff (at least not yet). Anyone anywhere can write a book and publish it on Amazon now, but the majority of bestsellers in America are books written by Americans, and the next most common are by British people.
If what you really want to do is work for a call center, make things (as in factory work), it's still possible to do that in America. You can make things on your own and sell them, or if you're a damn good call center operator you can work for a call center from your home. If that isn't good enough for you, and you want that real factory or call center experience, you can move to Asia. But so few people actually want to do those jobs that it's silly to fight to keep them here. We Americans want more blue collar jobs just for the sake of having jobs, I guess, but no one wants to do them, and when they are there we whine that they aren't safe or they don't pay enough or they're simply beneath us. This is because in the US we don't NEED those jobs like we claim/think we do. Here the poor live in luxury - not what the average or rich in the US would consider luxury, but certainly what the poor in many other countries would consider luxury. No one in the US is starving to death - it's quite the opposite, many people in the US are overeating themselves to death! We all have access to food and water, even if we have no job at all. We WANT to be rich, but we don't need to be, so the jobs we are willing to do must either pay enough to outweigh the shittyness, or have the promise of leading a future job that will do so.
If you convince yourself that all you can do is work for a call center, but you're unwilling to be paid the same salary as people that do it in Asia, then I suppose call center jobs all being outsourced would suck. But in the US you can pretty much do whatever you enjoy doing, and there is SOME way to make money from it. Heck if all you want to do is sit on your couch and pick your nose all day, there are enough weirdos in the world that will pay you to let them watch that you can do it. We don't HAVE to work shitty anymore. So I say leave them to the people that either want to, or are more willing to do them.
But you could have students that press play themselves while a parent guides them. And instead of DVDs, you could put the videos on the internet so that they are more easily accessible. We have the ability to spread knowledge around the world, yet we still hold on to the archaic idea that knowledge must be hoarded and given only to people that sit in certain classrooms...
Unfortunately, with the teacher to student ratio most schools have today, there just isn't time to fix that problem...
Perhaps we could have such things submitted via computers, and the computer knows who submitted the paper and attaches the grade to that student, but the teacher does not know.
Even the career-welfare people tend to like sitting at home using computers more than going to a call center and reading a script. They just don't know how to turn that into making money.