I don't care if it's for profit or not. He didn't commit rape, murder, assault and battery, armed robbery, grand theft auto or any other actual "crime". He infringed someone's copyright via reverse engineering and modification. How is copyright infringement type of violations even the business of the government? They should be of concern only to private parties -- individuals or corporations -- and they should be able to take people to civil court and forced to pay restitution (not saying I agree with this stupid legislation in the first place, but since we're stuck with it...).
Otherwise, why don't we just put people in prison and steal a decade of their entire life just for breaking their cell phone contract? If we're going to start sticking people in prison on behalf of corporations for non-criminal "crimes".... why the fuck not?!
As someone else pointed out, you can't boycott something if it has no advertising when you paid $15 or $20 for it and months later they bring ads to it. You've already paid the money. All you can do is stop playing the game, which is kind of silly when you've already paid for and own it. All you can really do is contact the companies behind the game and tell them how upset you are and that you'll re-consider ever purchasing their games in the future.
I can almost tolerate in-game advertising in certain situations. However, if I have PAID for a game, I don't want advertisements on my loading screens and I don't want any kind of interstitial. Are they really so hard up that they need your money AND advertising instead of charging for it OR making it ad-sponsored only?
I'd been thinking of buying Wipeout and the new expansion to it. I've changed my mind.
I'm surprised they're even still in business. When was the last time anyone shopped at a Radio Shack? Was it even in this past decade?
The only reason to go to Radio Shack:
+ You need an expensive knock-off version of a product you could find elsewhere of better quality. + You need a random electronic or electrical doo-dad or component that you could find cheaper elsewhere in your town if you spend 30 seconds looking at a phone book. + You enjoy handing over your private information every single time. + You get a lot of joy being hassled for a new cell plan or other promotion EVERY FUCKING TIME YOU HIT THE CASH REGISTER.
Well, as someone who has run a site for about 80,000 members for more than a decade without accepting any advertising, I'm more than happy to have an ad-free internet. Not everything has to be "for bucks". It's okay to do something just because it's fun. You know, like thousands of sysops did for a couple decades with BBSes and the beginning of the web...?
Oh well, I don't even know why I'm replying. You probably find Tivo immoral, too...
I hope you're right, but the problem is that when you write for a large audience, you have to have some tact. I can't be the only one who interpreted the response as "No shit, Sherlock".
As much as I would love to, I would never *EVER* respond to someone with "that seems obvious" unless I meant it as a gentle slight, because the moment I wrote it I would think "oh crap, that's going to come across as me being a total dick".
More, in the context of his exchange in the rest of the thread (and his reputation), it gives such an interpretation even greater weight.
Like I say, I hope it was misinterpreted, but others of his comments are quite clear and I think my general point of egotistical prima-donas stands. As others have pointed out, the most accomplished and capable people I know are constantly striving to measure-up and treat everyone with a lot of respect in every situation, because the best people usually suffer from the belief that they're *NOT* great or special and that they just lucked into it and will be "found out" any day.
I dig Linus. Occasional ass or not, I have a great deal of respect for him and have benefited greatly from his work. He was obviously rather frustrated in his ongoing discussion in those threads and it clearly could have been a lot worse than it was, but at a certain point you have to stand back and reassess things.
Anyway, I do appreciate the clarification that I seemed to have misread his intonation with his reply to that guy. (And I've obviously been on the receiving end of my fair share of dickhead responses to have instantly read it as such, so I won't deny that either).
You pretty much just summed up my experience, too. School reading assignments were always painful for me from my first year up through my last.
My mother read a book to me every night starting about the time I could crawl. I was reading on my own by about the age of two or so. By the time I was in first grade, I was toting around several books and by third grade, I was reading TommyKnockers and The Stand, followed the following year or two by lots of typical stuff -- Douglas Adams, Piers Anthony, David Eddings, Peter Straub... and lots of schlock like John Saul, Dean Koontz, Robert Mccammon...
Meanwhile, school reading assignments were "read this ethnically diverse three page story out of the text book about a girl named Pablo that runs a fruit stand in New York and all the elderly people with very diverse sounding names that she interacts with every day!".
I understand everyone goes at their own pace, but by the time you reach middle school, your teachers should begin assigning you meaningful works of some importance. If nothing else, so that you can have some historical literary context in which to approach life or at least discussions with other people. Sure, not all "great literature" of the 19th and 20th centuries are as amazing as they're purported to be (Wuthering Heights?! good god, I'll pass) -- but it does a great disservice to have kids wasting their education picking up the finer points of a dinosaur amusement park.
And if it wasn't a phone, it would be a book. Or a comic. Or a toy. Or drawing pictures. Or writing notes. Nothing has changed over the generations in this respect, except for the devices we use to pre-occupy us in class or at assemblies.
And don't any of the rest of you adults pretend that you and I haven't played with our laptops or phones or portable gaming devices during meetings! Especially if they're teleconference meetings and nobody can see what you're doing!
Er... I mean, I wouldn't do that and never have. But I know most of you other adults that aren't me have done that!:P
I can't contradict your anecdotal evidence with anything but my own anecdotal evidence, so I will have to concede that some schools and areas may be much worse than others. However, I do contend that the nightmare atmosphere most people seem to have in their head about how wild-west schools are for the most part are ridiculous exaggerations based off of what they've seen in "caring white dudly-do-right teacher rescues unfortunate urban kids" movies and a dash of exaggerated tales from teachers whose best interest it is to over-play their plights.
I don't buy this claim from teachers that you always hear about. I'm not that old that it was very long ago *I* was in the school system and while society was constantly repeating the "teachers have no control over their classrooms and the little monsters going nuts in them!" even then, it was not true. If kids acted up, they were punished or sent to the principal and disciplined. Detention. Suspension. Expulsion. The occasional kid was a problem in class now and then, but schools are not zoos or insane asylums. They are controlled and calm 99.95% of the time and teachers are able to instruct to a quiet, polite, calm class.
Yes, things are insane OUTSIDE of the classroom and when kids pick on each other or bully each other or abuse each other, teachers often look the other way (I actually had to stop three guys from force-dry-humping a girl back in highschool while a teacher looked off in the distance, uninterested and uninvolved only yards away). But in the classroom, shit is usually locked down rather well.
There may be the rare anecdotal "the kids just run wild and control the classroom and we can't tell them to be quiet or take their toys or punish them because we'll get sued!" crap, but for the most part, I don't find it believable in the least.
Odds of being... -killed in school shooting: 1,700,000 to 1 (*1) -struck by lightning in entire life: 5,000 to 1 (*2) -a boy sexually abused before adulthood: 6 to 1 (*3) -a girl being sexually abused before adulthood: 4 to 1 (*3)
Without even delving into it or doing any research at all, you could probably already construe that your child is more likely to be molested by a teacher than struck by lightning or killed in a school shooting. If there are an estimated 50mil school aged children right now, fewer than 30 will be killed in a school shooting, fewer than 10,000 will be struck by lightning (in their *entire* life), and 10mil will be sexually abused.
So even if only one-tenth-of-one-percent (.001) of molestations are ever committed by teachers, that is still 10,000 -- which is more than are struck by lightning in their entire lives and far more than are killed in school shootings.
Sexual abuse is often an issue of proximity. Family, friends, mom's boyfriend, trusted authority figures with opportunity, etc. Far more often than just being abducted and molested by some random stranger in a scary white van.
Now, while exact statistics on sexual molestation done by teachers are hard to come by, the anecdotal evidence is aplenty. And remember that a lot of teachers are never reported or caught. And often when they are, the school district covers it up (you can google plenty of stories where that has happened). And, while sometimes it may be the only single offense, there are plenty of those who have molested MANY times over their careers and either never got caught at all or eventually got caught for just one. Who knows how many they molesed before being caught.
Hell, simply count how many stories you see about a teacher molesting a student in a year versus being hit by lightning. And then remember that everyone is likely to come forward about being struck by lightning, but far fewer will report molestation. Hell, I even new girls who were involved with teachers when I was in school. And even as a young adult, I still knew at least one girl who wasn't even old enough to drive but was involved with a phys-ed teacher in her district. I suspect almost everyone knew of at least one kid in school that was involved with at least one teacher.
Achromatic gave your the reference for my factual statements, except for all the incidents of molestation. Since that's a major one (you are DEFINITELY more likely to be molested by a teacher than shot up in a school or even struck by lightning), I'll give you a quick reference.
This is an attempt at a PARTIAL list of ONLY FEMALE teachers who molested their students as of THREE YEARS AGO. This doesn't include all incidents. It doesn't include male teachers. And it doesn't include the past three years. And look how large it is. This alone outstrips probably every school shooting in North America in the entire history of the country.
Granted, the article is on WorldNetDaily which is a bunch of biased right wing shit, but you can still verify each incident that is documented with google.
To my count, that article lists SEVENTY-SEVEN female school teachers who have molested students. Of course, some molested multiple students. And we've seen MANY more reports since that article which was posted in 2006.
Glad to see factual statements still count as flamebait on Slashdot.
You're more likely to get STRUCK BY LIGHTNING than you are to be shot up in a school.
Meanwhile, you read about another teacher molesting a student on a daily basis. Not to mention the stories of pre-pubescent girls being strip-searched because someone is missing a pen or something (actual events that have actually happened).
But hey, don't let my factual statements get in the way when you could just mark me as flamebait.
And anyone who marked my comment flamebait has obviously not talked to very many of today's teachers from whom it's not too often difficult to get an admission that they simply don't give a fuck. Not necessarily because they're just shitty people (though that is some times true), but because they've given up all hope and have been shat out by the system that doesn't reward or support excellence.
Both, plus the news outlets covering it. Everyone knows "wi-fi allergy" has already been disproved, which means there is no story. They might as well be running news articles and segments about how some guy claims to have gotten aids from a hug. UNLESS, they're covering it with the same "what a moron" treatment they would give that "woman claims daughter got pregnant from swimming pool" moron. But of course, they didn't. They sensationalized it because that's easier than spending three minutes googling the truth. Most of today's "journalists" can sucking cuck a fock, as far as I care.
I'm one of those "what the fuck does a kid need a cell phone for?" people, but I'm also one of those "as long as they're not whipping it out in class and turn the ringer off, who the fuck cares?" people.
You don't need a signal jammer to keep kids from using their phones during class. You just need a teacher to tell them not to do it and follow through on consequences for using phones in class. Seems simple enough to me. I can, however, see the appeal of a cell jammer from the administration's point of view. After all, considering all of the violations teacher's are found guilty of in school -- from smacking a kid, to duct-taping a kid's mouth shut, to duct-taping them to their desk, to going on angry tirades, to strip searching half a dozen pre-pubescent girls because someone said their pencil was stolen or whatever, the LAST thing you want is for a student to be able to make a phone call right away to get help from an adult who will act as some sort of advocate for the child. Much better to keep them stuck in school, on school grounds, without a way to contact anyone in such cases so that you have until the end of the school day to think up an excuse, explanation, scape-goat or otherwise manipulate the situation and the information.
Hell, your child is more likely to be abused or molested by their teacher in school than they are being shot up by a classmate.
There is a simple solution to this. They'll take away the ability to take notes in the future.
Also, I have no problem with Amazon taking books off their market. However, you can't require that someone return an item you already sold them. THAT is pure bullshit. If I buy something from your store and take it home and then you decide to take it off the market for ANY reason, you can't come to my house and take it back.
He probably went to public and you probably went to private. When I went to school, our reading material was the crap out of generic text books (you know, ethnically diverse touchy feely crap by authors you've never heard of that write about crap you don't care about). When actual books were assigned, they weren't anything like Antigone, but were more like... Jurassic Park (an actual book that was actually assigned).
Oh, yes. Dissecting the true literary classics... like Jurassic Park.
I think what you and I define as "basics" differs greatly. I'm talking things only government as a collective can address, like defense. Individuals can send their kids to a school without my taxes paying for it if they stop squirting kids out before they've put aside a significant nest-egg first.
Who wins? All the idiots who went out and bought houses even though they barely made enough money to pay for the occasional night out at a burger joint while the rest of us tried to be responsible and wait until we had enough saved up for a house. Yay! Free housing for every selfish dick!
Imagine how much money would be available if they just stuck to funding the basics and letting people fend for themselves for things that don't absolutely require the effort of the collective population. Oh well, I'll never get elected anything with a "let's not woo every voter with their own special program or giveaway" attitude like that.
Arizona's actual long-term plan is to sell all of their Capitol buildings and replace them with Lowercase buildings and pocketing the difference in caost.
I can't really get into judging a generation's music. I don't buy the claim that "no good music was made after I reached adult hood" any more than I can agree that good music ceased being made once my parents or grand parents reached adulthood. We might not like it, listen to it, understand it, or be able to tell it apart, but it's the ultimate old-person indicator to claim that kids just listen to crap these days.
Sure, there IS a lot of manufactured crap. There's also a lot of fantastic great new stuff and kids are more likely than ever to come across this lesser commercialized, more independent, creative stuff and give it a chance than any other generation was (thanks to more outlets which also tend to be further outside of big label control).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't care if it's for profit or not. He didn't commit rape, murder, assault and battery, armed robbery, grand theft auto or any other actual "crime". He infringed someone's copyright via reverse engineering and modification. How is copyright infringement type of violations even the business of the government? They should be of concern only to private parties -- individuals or corporations -- and they should be able to take people to civil court and forced to pay restitution (not saying I agree with this stupid legislation in the first place, but since we're stuck with it...).
Otherwise, why don't we just put people in prison and steal a decade of their entire life just for breaking their cell phone contract? If we're going to start sticking people in prison on behalf of corporations for non-criminal "crimes".... why the fuck not?!
As someone else pointed out, you can't boycott something if it has no advertising when you paid $15 or $20 for it and months later they bring ads to it. You've already paid the money. All you can do is stop playing the game, which is kind of silly when you've already paid for and own it. All you can really do is contact the companies behind the game and tell them how upset you are and that you'll re-consider ever purchasing their games in the future.
I can almost tolerate in-game advertising in certain situations. However, if I have PAID for a game, I don't want advertisements on my loading screens and I don't want any kind of interstitial. Are they really so hard up that they need your money AND advertising instead of charging for it OR making it ad-sponsored only?
I'd been thinking of buying Wipeout and the new expansion to it. I've changed my mind.
Maybe Alan Cox can step in as maintainer, now that he has a little free time off his TTY maintainer position?
I'm surprised they're even still in business. When was the last time anyone shopped at a Radio Shack? Was it even in this past decade?
The only reason to go to Radio Shack:
+ You need an expensive knock-off version of a product you could find elsewhere of better quality.
+ You need a random electronic or electrical doo-dad or component that you could find cheaper elsewhere in your town if you spend 30 seconds looking at a phone book.
+ You enjoy handing over your private information every single time.
+ You get a lot of joy being hassled for a new cell plan or other promotion EVERY FUCKING TIME YOU HIT THE CASH REGISTER.
Well, as someone who has run a site for about 80,000 members for more than a decade without accepting any advertising, I'm more than happy to have an ad-free internet. Not everything has to be "for bucks". It's okay to do something just because it's fun. You know, like thousands of sysops did for a couple decades with BBSes and the beginning of the web...?
Oh well, I don't even know why I'm replying. You probably find Tivo immoral, too...
I hope you're right, but the problem is that when you write for a large audience, you have to have some tact. I can't be the only one who interpreted the response as "No shit, Sherlock".
As much as I would love to, I would never *EVER* respond to someone with "that seems obvious" unless I meant it as a gentle slight, because the moment I wrote it I would think "oh crap, that's going to come across as me being a total dick".
More, in the context of his exchange in the rest of the thread (and his reputation), it gives such an interpretation even greater weight.
Like I say, I hope it was misinterpreted, but others of his comments are quite clear and I think my general point of egotistical prima-donas stands. As others have pointed out, the most accomplished and capable people I know are constantly striving to measure-up and treat everyone with a lot of respect in every situation, because the best people usually suffer from the belief that they're *NOT* great or special and that they just lucked into it and will be "found out" any day.
I dig Linus. Occasional ass or not, I have a great deal of respect for him and have benefited greatly from his work. He was obviously rather frustrated in his ongoing discussion in those threads and it clearly could have been a lot worse than it was, but at a certain point you have to stand back and reassess things.
Anyway, I do appreciate the clarification that I seemed to have misread his intonation with his reply to that guy. (And I've obviously been on the receiving end of my fair share of dickhead responses to have instantly read it as such, so I won't deny that either).
You pretty much just summed up my experience, too. School reading assignments were always painful for me from my first year up through my last.
My mother read a book to me every night starting about the time I could crawl. I was reading on my own by about the age of two or so. By the time I was in first grade, I was toting around several books and by third grade, I was reading TommyKnockers and The Stand, followed the following year or two by lots of typical stuff -- Douglas Adams, Piers Anthony, David Eddings, Peter Straub... and lots of schlock like John Saul, Dean Koontz, Robert Mccammon...
Meanwhile, school reading assignments were "read this ethnically diverse three page story out of the text book about a girl named Pablo that runs a fruit stand in New York and all the elderly people with very diverse sounding names that she interacts with every day!".
I understand everyone goes at their own pace, but by the time you reach middle school, your teachers should begin assigning you meaningful works of some importance. If nothing else, so that you can have some historical literary context in which to approach life or at least discussions with other people. Sure, not all "great literature" of the 19th and 20th centuries are as amazing as they're purported to be (Wuthering Heights?! good god, I'll pass) -- but it does a great disservice to have kids wasting their education picking up the finer points of a dinosaur amusement park.
And if it wasn't a phone, it would be a book. Or a comic. Or a toy. Or drawing pictures. Or writing notes. Nothing has changed over the generations in this respect, except for the devices we use to pre-occupy us in class or at assemblies.
And don't any of the rest of you adults pretend that you and I haven't played with our laptops or phones or portable gaming devices during meetings! Especially if they're teleconference meetings and nobody can see what you're doing!
Er... I mean, I wouldn't do that and never have. But I know most of you other adults that aren't me have done that! :P
I can't contradict your anecdotal evidence with anything but my own anecdotal evidence, so I will have to concede that some schools and areas may be much worse than others. However, I do contend that the nightmare atmosphere most people seem to have in their head about how wild-west schools are for the most part are ridiculous exaggerations based off of what they've seen in "caring white dudly-do-right teacher rescues unfortunate urban kids" movies and a dash of exaggerated tales from teachers whose best interest it is to over-play their plights.
I don't buy this claim from teachers that you always hear about. I'm not that old that it was very long ago *I* was in the school system and while society was constantly repeating the "teachers have no control over their classrooms and the little monsters going nuts in them!" even then, it was not true. If kids acted up, they were punished or sent to the principal and disciplined. Detention. Suspension. Expulsion. The occasional kid was a problem in class now and then, but schools are not zoos or insane asylums. They are controlled and calm 99.95% of the time and teachers are able to instruct to a quiet, polite, calm class.
Yes, things are insane OUTSIDE of the classroom and when kids pick on each other or bully each other or abuse each other, teachers often look the other way (I actually had to stop three guys from force-dry-humping a girl back in highschool while a teacher looked off in the distance, uninterested and uninvolved only yards away). But in the classroom, shit is usually locked down rather well.
There may be the rare anecdotal "the kids just run wild and control the classroom and we can't tell them to be quiet or take their toys or punish them because we'll get sued!" crap, but for the most part, I don't find it believable in the least.
A little googling found the following.
Odds of being...
-killed in school shooting: 1,700,000 to 1 (*1)
-struck by lightning in entire life: 5,000 to 1 (*2)
-a boy sexually abused before adulthood: 6 to 1 (*3)
-a girl being sexually abused before adulthood: 4 to 1 (*3)
Without even delving into it or doing any research at all, you could probably already construe that your child is more likely to be molested by a teacher than struck by lightning or killed in a school shooting. If there are an estimated 50mil school aged children right now, fewer than 30 will be killed in a school shooting, fewer than 10,000 will be struck by lightning (in their *entire* life), and 10mil will be sexually abused.
So even if only one-tenth-of-one-percent (.001) of molestations are ever committed by teachers, that is still 10,000 -- which is more than are struck by lightning in their entire lives and far more than are killed in school shootings.
Sexual abuse is often an issue of proximity. Family, friends, mom's boyfriend, trusted authority figures with opportunity, etc. Far more often than just being abducted and molested by some random stranger in a scary white van.
Now, while exact statistics on sexual molestation done by teachers are hard to come by, the anecdotal evidence is aplenty. And remember that a lot of teachers are never reported or caught. And often when they are, the school district covers it up (you can google plenty of stories where that has happened). And, while sometimes it may be the only single offense, there are plenty of those who have molested MANY times over their careers and either never got caught at all or eventually got caught for just one. Who knows how many they molesed before being caught.
Hell, simply count how many stories you see about a teacher molesting a student in a year versus being hit by lightning. And then remember that everyone is likely to come forward about being struck by lightning, but far fewer will report molestation. Hell, I even new girls who were involved with teachers when I was in school. And even as a young adult, I still knew at least one girl who wasn't even old enough to drive but was involved with a phys-ed teacher in her district. I suspect almost everyone knew of at least one kid in school that was involved with at least one teacher.
You could spend days finding story after story about it. Here's just one drastic example of a teacher who admitted to molesting more than *200* students in ONLY THREE YEARS: http://crime.about.com/b/2006/08/06/teacher-claims-he-molested-200-students.htm
Here's a google search for "teacher accused of sex with student": http://tr.im/uYYk
Go ahead and browse through page after page after page of the 2.5 million results.
(*1) http://www.arsafeschools.com/Files/ProbabilityFactSheet.pdf
(*2) http://www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov/medical.htm
(*3) http://www.darkness2light.org/KnowAbout/statistics_2.asp
Achromatic gave your the reference for my factual statements, except for all the incidents of molestation. Since that's a major one (you are DEFINITELY more likely to be molested by a teacher than shot up in a school or even struck by lightning), I'll give you a quick reference.
This is an attempt at a PARTIAL list of ONLY FEMALE teachers who molested their students as of THREE YEARS AGO. This doesn't include all incidents. It doesn't include male teachers. And it doesn't include the past three years. And look how large it is. This alone outstrips probably every school shooting in North America in the entire history of the country.
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53479
Granted, the article is on WorldNetDaily which is a bunch of biased right wing shit, but you can still verify each incident that is documented with google.
To my count, that article lists SEVENTY-SEVEN female school teachers who have molested students. Of course, some molested multiple students. And we've seen MANY more reports since that article which was posted in 2006.
Glad to see factual statements still count as flamebait on Slashdot.
You're more likely to get STRUCK BY LIGHTNING than you are to be shot up in a school.
Meanwhile, you read about another teacher molesting a student on a daily basis. Not to mention the stories of pre-pubescent girls being strip-searched because someone is missing a pen or something (actual events that have actually happened).
But hey, don't let my factual statements get in the way when you could just mark me as flamebait.
I didn't say 'MOST', I said 'MANY'.
And anyone who marked my comment flamebait has obviously not talked to very many of today's teachers from whom it's not too often difficult to get an admission that they simply don't give a fuck. Not necessarily because they're just shitty people (though that is some times true), but because they've given up all hope and have been shat out by the system that doesn't reward or support excellence.
Both, plus the news outlets covering it. Everyone knows "wi-fi allergy" has already been disproved, which means there is no story. They might as well be running news articles and segments about how some guy claims to have gotten aids from a hug. UNLESS, they're covering it with the same "what a moron" treatment they would give that "woman claims daughter got pregnant from swimming pool" moron. But of course, they didn't. They sensationalized it because that's easier than spending three minutes googling the truth. Most of today's "journalists" can sucking cuck a fock, as far as I care.
Teachers don't give a shit. Many of them don't even want to bother getting off their asses and teaching - much less keeping them in line in class.
I'm one of those "what the fuck does a kid need a cell phone for?" people, but I'm also one of those "as long as they're not whipping it out in class and turn the ringer off, who the fuck cares?" people.
You don't need a signal jammer to keep kids from using their phones during class. You just need a teacher to tell them not to do it and follow through on consequences for using phones in class. Seems simple enough to me. I can, however, see the appeal of a cell jammer from the administration's point of view. After all, considering all of the violations teacher's are found guilty of in school -- from smacking a kid, to duct-taping a kid's mouth shut, to duct-taping them to their desk, to going on angry tirades, to strip searching half a dozen pre-pubescent girls because someone said their pencil was stolen or whatever, the LAST thing you want is for a student to be able to make a phone call right away to get help from an adult who will act as some sort of advocate for the child. Much better to keep them stuck in school, on school grounds, without a way to contact anyone in such cases so that you have until the end of the school day to think up an excuse, explanation, scape-goat or otherwise manipulate the situation and the information.
Hell, your child is more likely to be abused or molested by their teacher in school than they are being shot up by a classmate.
There is a simple solution to this. They'll take away the ability to take notes in the future.
Also, I have no problem with Amazon taking books off their market. However, you can't require that someone return an item you already sold them. THAT is pure bullshit. If I buy something from your store and take it home and then you decide to take it off the market for ANY reason, you can't come to my house and take it back.
He probably went to public and you probably went to private. When I went to school, our reading material was the crap out of generic text books (you know, ethnically diverse touchy feely crap by authors you've never heard of that write about crap you don't care about). When actual books were assigned, they weren't anything like Antigone, but were more like... Jurassic Park (an actual book that was actually assigned).
Oh, yes. Dissecting the true literary classics... like Jurassic Park.
I think what you and I define as "basics" differs greatly. I'm talking things only government as a collective can address, like defense. Individuals can send their kids to a school without my taxes paying for it if they stop squirting kids out before they've put aside a significant nest-egg first.
Who wins? All the idiots who went out and bought houses even though they barely made enough money to pay for the occasional night out at a burger joint while the rest of us tried to be responsible and wait until we had enough saved up for a house. Yay! Free housing for every selfish dick!
Imagine how much money would be available if they just stuck to funding the basics and letting people fend for themselves for things that don't absolutely require the effort of the collective population. Oh well, I'll never get elected anything with a "let's not woo every voter with their own special program or giveaway" attitude like that.
BEEP you, David Pogue!
Arizona's actual long-term plan is to sell all of their Capitol buildings and replace them with Lowercase buildings and pocketing the difference in caost.
I can't really get into judging a generation's music. I don't buy the claim that "no good music was made after I reached adult hood" any more than I can agree that good music ceased being made once my parents or grand parents reached adulthood. We might not like it, listen to it, understand it, or be able to tell it apart, but it's the ultimate old-person indicator to claim that kids just listen to crap these days.
Sure, there IS a lot of manufactured crap. There's also a lot of fantastic great new stuff and kids are more likely than ever to come across this lesser commercialized, more independent, creative stuff and give it a chance than any other generation was (thanks to more outlets which also tend to be further outside of big label control).