It's not that he gave a name to it, it's that they had a blood test for it.
What really gets me, in the end, though, isn't the stupid MIDI chlorines or whatever the fuck they're called.
It's the fact that Luke Skywalker, in just a few months of training, most of them spent away from his master, became an ass-kissing Jedi--er, ass-kicking Jedi capable of facing Darth Vader and almost winning (he would've won if the Emperor hadn't saved Vader's lousy ass), meanwhile Vader is a jedi of the old times. You know, he was "too old to begin to train" himself when he became a Pad-o-wan learner, and there were several decades worth of Vader being evil and dueling remotes and he slaughtered hundreds of Jedis in the process!
And from this we think that Luke, without the aid of the standard Hollywood Heroic Sucker Punch, was able to defeat Vader? (He didn't kill him because he was being nice).
Luke was "too old to begin to train" when he was like 20 or something, and he only gave it a few months and then he was a freaking Jedi?
I question his Jedi-ness. He was a self-appointed Jedi, no doubt going to hold the others at much higher standards than he himself had to meet.
Luke/Lucas, and they both just suck. Just plain suck. You know the only reason Luke kisses Leia is because Lucas always dreamed about french-kissing his own sister?
Let's say you take out a full-page ad in the newspaper for your wonderful, BSD-licensed webserver that has 1000 developers. You *must* list ALL of those developers in your ad. How much space do you have left to make your actual advertisement message?
The GPL does not require you to say *who* wrote the program in your advertising. It doesn't even address any sort of commercial use of the program (other than disclaiming warranty, but that's not just for commercial use). RMS may *want* credit, but you don't see his license requiring it, now, do you?
That's the difference. RMS is asking nicely, in some areas he's being heavy-handed, but nowhere does he attempt to force anyone. He makes it very clear that "it's your choice, but I think it's wrong".
So yeah, an anonymous coward missed the point again. Surprise!
NOt the same thing. The reason the BSD advertising clause is obnoxious is because you have to list *all* developers in your advertising. So your advertisement might have to list 100 developers (how many are there just for Linux right now?). RMS just wants you to list one project, GNU. So it's not the same.:)
I have to say I agree with RMS about wanting to make sure people are aware of the Free Software philosophy, but in practice I find I'm better off saying "Linux" and "open source". If I say Free Software, people think "cheapskate" or "I can get it for free". If I say "open source", people want to know more, and then I jump in with "GNU did this and GNU did that, and then later some guys corporatized it etc etc...". So *not* inserting GNU and Free Software in everything I say is actually a better way to start conversations on the subject.:)
SO my point is that RMS's motivation is to make sure people are educated on GNU, GNU's mission, and the Free SOftware philosophy. So it's only like 1 part credit to GNU and 2 parts education on Free Software, the user's rights to the source code, and so forth. In the long run, satisfying RMS's motivation by explicitly *not* satisfying his actual requirement will associate Linux and Open Source with him and GNU and completely undermine RMS's two nemesi, Linus Torvalds and ERS, and give RMS the mechanism under which he will default to receiving all the credit.
If you want to leave RMS and GNU out of it completely, then he gets pissed. If you work it (like I am) so that he and GNU wind up with the credit, he gets pissed. SO his solution is reasonable, in that sense.
I can't believe you'd side with the Register on the grounds of "bias". I read the Register because their bias + their sense of humor = excellent reading, facts notwithstanding.
You're right, but I thought I'd throw in some extra details.:)
If you distribute the binary, then you must make available the source code to anyone that receives *your* binary. So let's say I give you a binary of my GPL application, but you don't know it's GPL because I didn't tell you (violation of the license, I have to at least tell you). You copy it for a buddy, and he recognizes it as a GPL application. He asks you for the source, you don't have it. He can climb the ladder to me and ask for it and I have to comply.
In Apple's case, they only have to provide the source code to KHTML (with their modifications) to the people who receive a binary for Safari. And that's it. Not the KHTML team, not KDE, not you (unless you have a copy of Safari), and not me.
A little side point that's worth mentioning.:) Both the GPL and LGPL require you to mark your modifications to the code. You can't just change the code and claim ownership to it. If you change my GPL code and don't put your name around the parts that are yours, then you have just given me your code. You haven't licensed your code to me under the terms of the GPL, you've given it to me. Later on, I decide to take my GPL code and wrap it up as shareware and start charging all users of it. Since you didn't mark your code, you have no claim of ownership on it, you can't force me to back off and release my now proprietary code as GPL again.
what's the moral of the story? Apple needs to be marking their changes to KHTML. It's part of the license. So these complaints about the code not being easy to see what they changed are actually valid--the license does require it. Without doing so, Apple can't claim ownership of that code.
SO all you open source developers out there, make sure you put your own copyright notice in the patches you send in!
Realistically, using version control reports and stuff as evidence APple can probably get a court to respect their ownership of the code they wrote that wound up in KHTML, but why go through all that expense for the sake of promoting bad coding habits? Mark your code if you own it, otherwise don't bitch about it when someone claims it as theirs.
I think the underlying problem is we're used to the first couple of renditions of a book in movie form being pure shit, so we're expecting this to be pure shit.
Then add to it that douglas adams himself kept changing the story, now we're very much afraid that we'll knock the movie for changing the story only to find out when we go meet him sitting out in front of the pearly gates he's going to tell us "Can't let you in, sorry, you're a jerk".
And we're very much afraid we'll like something Disney stuck in there because we'll think Douglas Adams wanted it.
Then we'll launch two huge spacefleets against one another and fight over whose interpretation of the film version of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy made after his death by people trying to interpret stuff we don't know about is the more correct and "true to the original" version.
I think you can probably fill in the rest of the story from here...
Man, I had always pictured Ford as this tall, well-dressed guy. When I first saw him in the TV series I thought they picked the wrong guy. Turns out I was wrong.:) He's an excellent Ford Prefect, I'd drive him anywhere, even if, like all other Fords, he has problems with wiring and a tendency to spontaneously catch on fire for no reason that engineers can truly understand without themselves spontaneously catching on fire.
I went to see the movie, but when I got there they said they had already shown the last screening of it for the day.
Jokes aside, I'm probably going to find some way to watch it that doesn't include actually giving any money to Disney, the MPAA, and Douglas Adams's's's survivors.
And something deep down inside of me tells me Douglas himself would probably agree with that. Too bad he's not here to chime in on it himself.:(
A kneebiter is a tall, hairy, sex legged humanoid with no arms, no head, no hair, and no penis. It enjoys eating mostly fish without the meat, bones, or organs, and breathes by sucking in CO2. Unfortunately, it finds both carbon and oxygen toxic to its system and usually spends the days whining. They can be found in many parts of the country, most noteably in Seattle, where they are either elected to hold public office (being representative of the people) or they join rock bands and tour the nation.
I've had that happen to, in a support call to my ISP. He swore up and down the network was running and the problem was my computer (I could just hear him thinking I was some other idiot). My neighbor called and found out the regular cable network was down, and that it included internet.
And yeah, the guy asked which version of Windows it was.
Having been a mechanic, I divorced a number of problems without even touching the car. Yes, there are times when you are better off not taking the work.
A shop I used to work at refused to believe that if you install dealer pads with dealer shims and hardware on a Honda accord, you can put out the brake job with no noise. The car came back 3 times. The fourth time they went to court. I don't know if they lost or not, it was something of a frivolous lawsuit. After that, gunshy, they stopped taking brakes on Honda accords.
Idiots. I've done hundreds of brakes on Honda accords and never had a one come back with noise.
The point is, just because I take money for performing a certain service doesn't mean I'm willing to do any job that falls under that heading. Right now I'll only build a website for a local rock band, for example. How's that for narrowing your audience? And that's because I want to help local rock bands become successful without resorting to major record label deals. Even so, I probably wouldn't take a new one, I'm just too busy with other stuff anyway.
So I think the answer that "with OSS *you* can provide better service" resolves the question of the article. Because the answer to "Why should you care when the business doesn't?" is the parent poster's reputation, his work ethic, and his sense of service to his clients. All too often these days, ESPECIALLY in the IT business, we throw at least two of those concepts out the window.
That, of course, wouldn't hack it in any of the mechanic shops I've worked.:) (Except for that one....)
Jesus fucking christ. Since when did word processors become bleeding-edge application? Haven't the last 30 years of word processing pretty much established what is needed in a file format? Come on, we had web standards in faarrrr less time. We've had all sorts of different standards appear in the last 15 years, but still no one can figure out that word processing just isn't that complicated and establish a standard.
I'm about ready to write a word processor that uses HTML as its file format because HTML support everything every user needs in a word processor format.
And I just don't know what I'm gonna do if someone comes along and tells me just one more time that word processors are sooooo complex mission-critical applications that we have to have forced upgrades every 3 years just to support the latest and greatest features that we haven't needed since mutherfucking wordperfect came out in 1985!
I received an interesting little device the other day. It appears to be a newspaper that has dropped backwards in time by 2000 years. Here's an excerpt of what I've been able to translate:
While contentious, it appears that the Penguin was not an actual living being, but rather some sort of symbol idolized by a small minority. It is not clear when the Penguin first appeared in literature, but it is clear that the Penguin existed long before it appeared in mass publication. The earliest surviving record we have of the penguin has been dated to about 2100 CE, but it is in a weird language called "C". Most archaeologists are agreed that "C" was never a spoken language, but many offshoot Penguinists consider that to be blasphemy and continue to conduct mass in C.
The people who develop weapons are a tool themselves. My point is that they're a tool that gets used and rewarded in small or large ways by the people in power, who *are* aggressive.
You know, the Von Braugn guy said he was willing to develop Hitler's missiles precisely because he felt the development would lead to spaceflight. Boy was he...ummm, I don't know, was he right or wrong?
Anyway, the discussion is interesting but seems to ignore a few things.
Human society sat at the stone age for thousands of years
At the start of civilization, we were in the bronze age, no iron. Bronze was used as a tool for warfare (and other reasons) before agriculture (maybe there are exceptions, but I seem to remember the Mesopotamians having bronze weapons)
For another few thousands of years, technological advance was slow and generally not war related, although each new was applied to war.
At some point in the fairly recent past, technological innovation significantly increased, and has continued to increase dramatically.
So, with all that in mind, here are my questions.
At what point did humans begin developing technology specifically for war?
At what point did humans begin developing technology to improve their daily lives? (agriculture, while the founding practice of civilization, is an application of several interesting technologies)
Why was technological innovation so slow for so long?
Why did technoloical innovation increase in pace?
I realize that there are several historical factors, such as the printing press leading to widespread publishing, literacy, and education (which doesn't explain modern America, but ok). The technological innovation seems to have started a little before the rennaissance. Before that it was in spurts, but it seems to have been a pretty steady and increasing progression until starting in the 19th century it really began to take off.
It's easy to look at *now* and theorize about how evolution brought us here, but "now" is only a snapshot. We need to look at what happened then and follow it through the years.
Seriously, I don't know the answers to my questions, except I can probably dig up dates for them. Or rather, I don't know the reasons these things happened when they happened.
Re:Exactly how many tax dollars did I pay for this
on
The Space Shuttle Returns
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Better check your facts. Soyuz isn't the wonderfully safe rollercoaster ride. In fact, it was Soyuz that had three astronauts come in from MIR with a typically perfect landing only to find all three of them dead from asphyxiation more or less immediately upon separation from MIR.
Soyuz only seems safer, when in reality, the two are about even. It is true that when you factor in total deaths on Spache Shuttles you come up with a larger number. Soyuz crew: 3, Space Shuttle crew: 7. Crash for crash, bodies pile up faster from space shuttle crashes, and that's when they have the same failure rate.
Failure rate and fatality rate are different ratios, and "safer" is so damn subjective....
Man, you actually made me feel dumber reading your post. 48 volt battery charger? Really??? If they can build a box that small that has that much more power in it, WHY AM I DRIVING A GASOLINE-POWERED CAR???
Heh. I guess it's not funny. OTOH, I used to have one of those battery chargers, and they are pretty handy. Not as handy as carrying a real car battery around, but a lot safer than carrying a real car battery around.
Speaking of stupid flashlights, I actually received as a Christmas present one year a flashlight that had three power options. Ready for this?
1. 2 AA batteries (lasted about 30 seconds)
2. An internal NiCad battery that could be charged in one of two ways:
A. You could turn this little crank on it
B. You could put it out in the sun (solar cells)
The box said I'd never have to buy batteries again! Of course, it didn't say "If you actually need a flashlight, you need to buy another one that's not like this one at all."
Still, I got a chuckle out of actually owning a solar-powered flashlight.:) Then I threw it away. That was fun, too.
I'm not sure if pulling the plug is the answer, the actual right answer varies from kid to kid.
My kids do alright with well-regulated TV time (we don't get cable or even any antenna stations, so TV time means DVDs). If we let it get out of hand, so do they. Aged 6, 4, and 1 (almost 2).
As for candy, which is a narcotic to kids that young, they don't do so well. They also don't do well when they eat hamburgers, french fries, potato chips, etc. They do really well with fruit snacks (you know, apples, cherries, and stuff), but with strawberries it's almost like giving them candy. (I'm slowly getting the message around to all the grandparents, aunts and uncles that I consider giving a kid candy to be abusive, and slowly the tide of do-gooders giving my kids candy is coming under control)
In both activites, anyway, the key is well-regulation. And also, while not specifically using the stuff as rewards, they are required to maintain a certain minimum standard of behavior just to have access to this stuff at all. (I've actually banned chips of all kinds from the house like three times already, my son straightens out and my wife fills him up with chips again:( ) So your psychology dude will probably tell you that I am using it as positive reinforcement, and that's fine.:) That same minimum standard of behavior gives them the opportunity to take on additional responsibilities possibly for pay, at their option, so they've started setting goals too. It's great.:)
Slashdot Mirror
You are George Lucas, aren't you?
It's not that he gave a name to it, it's that they had a blood test for it.
What really gets me, in the end, though, isn't the stupid MIDI chlorines or whatever the fuck they're called.
It's the fact that Luke Skywalker, in just a few months of training, most of them spent away from his master, became an ass-kissing Jedi--er, ass-kicking Jedi capable of facing Darth Vader and almost winning (he would've won if the Emperor hadn't saved Vader's lousy ass), meanwhile Vader is a jedi of the old times. You know, he was "too old to begin to train" himself when he became a Pad-o-wan learner, and there were several decades worth of Vader being evil and dueling remotes and he slaughtered hundreds of Jedis in the process!
And from this we think that Luke, without the aid of the standard Hollywood Heroic Sucker Punch, was able to defeat Vader? (He didn't kill him because he was being nice).
Luke was "too old to begin to train" when he was like 20 or something, and he only gave it a few months and then he was a freaking Jedi?
I question his Jedi-ness. He was a self-appointed Jedi, no doubt going to hold the others at much higher standards than he himself had to meet.
Luke/Lucas, and they both just suck. Just plain suck. You know the only reason Luke kisses Leia is because Lucas always dreamed about french-kissing his own sister?
YOu act like you never saw Luke fire a blaster.
You completely missed the point.
Let's say you take out a full-page ad in the newspaper for your wonderful, BSD-licensed webserver that has 1000 developers. You *must* list ALL of those developers in your ad. How much space do you have left to make your actual advertisement message?
The GPL does not require you to say *who* wrote the program in your advertising. It doesn't even address any sort of commercial use of the program (other than disclaiming warranty, but that's not just for commercial use). RMS may *want* credit, but you don't see his license requiring it, now, do you?
That's the difference. RMS is asking nicely, in some areas he's being heavy-handed, but nowhere does he attempt to force anyone. He makes it very clear that "it's your choice, but I think it's wrong".
So yeah, an anonymous coward missed the point again. Surprise!
Heh, I'm with you on that. :) I definitely disagree with the GNU/LInux thing even if I agree with the fundamental motivations.
NOt the same thing. The reason the BSD advertising clause is obnoxious is because you have to list *all* developers in your advertising. So your advertisement might have to list 100 developers (how many are there just for Linux right now?). RMS just wants you to list one project, GNU. So it's not the same. :)
I have to say I agree with RMS about wanting to make sure people are aware of the Free Software philosophy, but in practice I find I'm better off saying "Linux" and "open source". If I say Free Software, people think "cheapskate" or "I can get it for free". If I say "open source", people want to know more, and then I jump in with "GNU did this and GNU did that, and then later some guys corporatized it etc etc ...". So *not* inserting GNU and Free Software in everything I say is actually a better way to start conversations on the subject. :)
SO my point is that RMS's motivation is to make sure people are educated on GNU, GNU's mission, and the Free SOftware philosophy. So it's only like 1 part credit to GNU and 2 parts education on Free Software, the user's rights to the source code, and so forth. In the long run, satisfying RMS's motivation by explicitly *not* satisfying his actual requirement will associate Linux and Open Source with him and GNU and completely undermine RMS's two nemesi, Linus Torvalds and ERS, and give RMS the mechanism under which he will default to receiving all the credit.
If you want to leave RMS and GNU out of it completely, then he gets pissed. If you work it (like I am) so that he and GNU wind up with the credit, he gets pissed. SO his solution is reasonable, in that sense.
I can't believe you'd side with the Register on the grounds of "bias". I read the Register because their bias + their sense of humor = excellent reading, facts notwithstanding.
If you distribute the binary, then you must make available the source code to anyone that receives *your* binary. So let's say I give you a binary of my GPL application, but you don't know it's GPL because I didn't tell you (violation of the license, I have to at least tell you). You copy it for a buddy, and he recognizes it as a GPL application. He asks you for the source, you don't have it. He can climb the ladder to me and ask for it and I have to comply.
In Apple's case, they only have to provide the source code to KHTML (with their modifications) to the people who receive a binary for Safari. And that's it. Not the KHTML team, not KDE, not you (unless you have a copy of Safari), and not me.
A little side point that's worth mentioning. :) Both the GPL and LGPL require you to mark your modifications to the code. You can't just change the code and claim ownership to it. If you change my GPL code and don't put your name around the parts that are yours, then you have just given me your code. You haven't licensed your code to me under the terms of the GPL, you've given it to me. Later on, I decide to take my GPL code and wrap it up as shareware and start charging all users of it. Since you didn't mark your code, you have no claim of ownership on it, you can't force me to back off and release my now proprietary code as GPL again.
what's the moral of the story? Apple needs to be marking their changes to KHTML. It's part of the license. So these complaints about the code not being easy to see what they changed are actually valid--the license does require it. Without doing so, Apple can't claim ownership of that code.
SO all you open source developers out there, make sure you put your own copyright notice in the patches you send in!
Realistically, using version control reports and stuff as evidence APple can probably get a court to respect their ownership of the code they wrote that wound up in KHTML, but why go through all that expense for the sake of promoting bad coding habits? Mark your code if you own it, otherwise don't bitch about it when someone claims it as theirs.
Then add to it that douglas adams himself kept changing the story, now we're very much afraid that we'll knock the movie for changing the story only to find out when we go meet him sitting out in front of the pearly gates he's going to tell us "Can't let you in, sorry, you're a jerk".
And we're very much afraid we'll like something Disney stuck in there because we'll think Douglas Adams wanted it.
Then we'll launch two huge spacefleets against one another and fight over whose interpretation of the film version of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy made after his death by people trying to interpret stuff we don't know about is the more correct and "true to the original" version.
I think you can probably fill in the rest of the story from here...
You need to take an English literature class.
Man, I had always pictured Ford as this tall, well-dressed guy. When I first saw him in the TV series I thought they picked the wrong guy. Turns out I was wrong. :) He's an excellent Ford Prefect, I'd drive him anywhere, even if, like all other Fords, he has problems with wiring and a tendency to spontaneously catch on fire for no reason that engineers can truly understand without themselves spontaneously catching on fire.
Jokes aside, I'm probably going to find some way to watch it that doesn't include actually giving any money to Disney, the MPAA, and Douglas Adams's's's survivors.
And something deep down inside of me tells me Douglas himself would probably agree with that. Too bad he's not here to chime in on it himself. :(
seriously.
I thought the first time was the worst. And the second time? That was the worst too. After that I went into a bit of a decline...
A kneebiter is a tall, hairy, sex legged humanoid with no arms, no head, no hair, and no penis. It enjoys eating mostly fish without the meat, bones, or organs, and breathes by sucking in CO2. Unfortunately, it finds both carbon and oxygen toxic to its system and usually spends the days whining. They can be found in many parts of the country, most noteably in Seattle, where they are either elected to hold public office (being representative of the people) or they join rock bands and tour the nation.
currently laughing out loud
I've had that happen to, in a support call to my ISP. He swore up and down the network was running and the problem was my computer (I could just hear him thinking I was some other idiot). My neighbor called and found out the regular cable network was down, and that it included internet.
And yeah, the guy asked which version of Windows it was.
Having been a mechanic, I divorced a number of problems without even touching the car. Yes, there are times when you are better off not taking the work.
A shop I used to work at refused to believe that if you install dealer pads with dealer shims and hardware on a Honda accord, you can put out the brake job with no noise. The car came back 3 times. The fourth time they went to court. I don't know if they lost or not, it was something of a frivolous lawsuit. After that, gunshy, they stopped taking brakes on Honda accords.
Idiots. I've done hundreds of brakes on Honda accords and never had a one come back with noise.
The point is, just because I take money for performing a certain service doesn't mean I'm willing to do any job that falls under that heading. Right now I'll only build a website for a local rock band, for example. How's that for narrowing your audience? And that's because I want to help local rock bands become successful without resorting to major record label deals. Even so, I probably wouldn't take a new one, I'm just too busy with other stuff anyway.
So I think the answer that "with OSS *you* can provide better service" resolves the question of the article. Because the answer to "Why should you care when the business doesn't?" is the parent poster's reputation, his work ethic, and his sense of service to his clients. All too often these days, ESPECIALLY in the IT business, we throw at least two of those concepts out the window.
That, of course, wouldn't hack it in any of the mechanic shops I've worked. :) (Except for that one....)
It really kicks ASS.
If you need a better reason, stay an inch or two out of kicking distance...
Jesus fucking christ. Since when did word processors become bleeding-edge application? Haven't the last 30 years of word processing pretty much established what is needed in a file format? Come on, we had web standards in faarrrr less time. We've had all sorts of different standards appear in the last 15 years, but still no one can figure out that word processing just isn't that complicated and establish a standard.
I'm about ready to write a word processor that uses HTML as its file format because HTML support everything every user needs in a word processor format.
And I just don't know what I'm gonna do if someone comes along and tells me just one more time that word processors are sooooo complex mission-critical applications that we have to have forced upgrades every 3 years just to support the latest and greatest features that we haven't needed since mutherfucking wordperfect came out in 1985!
I received an interesting little device the other day. It appears to be a newspaper that has dropped backwards in time by 2000 years. Here's an excerpt of what I've been able to translate:
The people who develop weapons are a tool themselves. My point is that they're a tool that gets used and rewarded in small or large ways by the people in power, who *are* aggressive.
You know, the Von Braugn guy said he was willing to develop Hitler's missiles precisely because he felt the development would lead to spaceflight. Boy was he...ummm, I don't know, was he right or wrong?
Anyway, the discussion is interesting but seems to ignore a few things.
So, with all that in mind, here are my questions.
I realize that there are several historical factors, such as the printing press leading to widespread publishing, literacy, and education (which doesn't explain modern America, but ok). The technological innovation seems to have started a little before the rennaissance. Before that it was in spurts, but it seems to have been a pretty steady and increasing progression until starting in the 19th century it really began to take off.
It's easy to look at *now* and theorize about how evolution brought us here, but "now" is only a snapshot. We need to look at what happened then and follow it through the years.
Seriously, I don't know the answers to my questions, except I can probably dig up dates for them. Or rather, I don't know the reasons these things happened when they happened.
Blah, I'm done.
tell me, when did you last explore a Trekkie?
More importantly, why would you want to?
Soyuz only seems safer, when in reality, the two are about even. It is true that when you factor in total deaths on Spache Shuttles you come up with a larger number. Soyuz crew: 3, Space Shuttle crew: 7. Crash for crash, bodies pile up faster from space shuttle crashes, and that's when they have the same failure rate.
Failure rate and fatality rate are different ratios, and "safer" is so damn subjective....
Man, you actually made me feel dumber reading your post. 48 volt battery charger? Really??? If they can build a box that small that has that much more power in it, WHY AM I DRIVING A GASOLINE-POWERED CAR???
Heh. I guess it's not funny. OTOH, I used to have one of those battery chargers, and they are pretty handy. Not as handy as carrying a real car battery around, but a lot safer than carrying a real car battery around.
Speaking of stupid flashlights, I actually received as a Christmas present one year a flashlight that had three power options. Ready for this?
1. 2 AA batteries (lasted about 30 seconds)
2. An internal NiCad battery that could be charged in one of two ways:
A. You could turn this little crank on it
B. You could put it out in the sun (solar cells)
The box said I'd never have to buy batteries again! Of course, it didn't say "If you actually need a flashlight, you need to buy another one that's not like this one at all."
Still, I got a chuckle out of actually owning a solar-powered flashlight. :) Then I threw it away. That was fun, too.
My kids do alright with well-regulated TV time (we don't get cable or even any antenna stations, so TV time means DVDs). If we let it get out of hand, so do they. Aged 6, 4, and 1 (almost 2).
As for candy, which is a narcotic to kids that young, they don't do so well. They also don't do well when they eat hamburgers, french fries, potato chips, etc. They do really well with fruit snacks (you know, apples, cherries, and stuff), but with strawberries it's almost like giving them candy. (I'm slowly getting the message around to all the grandparents, aunts and uncles that I consider giving a kid candy to be abusive, and slowly the tide of do-gooders giving my kids candy is coming under control)
In both activites, anyway, the key is well-regulation. And also, while not specifically using the stuff as rewards, they are required to maintain a certain minimum standard of behavior just to have access to this stuff at all. (I've actually banned chips of all kinds from the house like three times already, my son straightens out and my wife fills him up with chips again :( ) So your psychology dude will probably tell you that I am using it as positive reinforcement, and that's fine. :) That same minimum standard of behavior gives them the opportunity to take on additional responsibilities possibly for pay, at their option, so they've started setting goals too. It's great. :)