I don't believe in age limits, but I think medical limits are a good idea. Simples tests demonstrating good vision, health and competence are a given in the aviation world...why not among ground pounders? (Better yet, why not among politicians?)
I often wish that the barriers to entry to driving were a little higher, too. It is distressingly easy to put a large moving vehicle in the hands of a person that you would ordinarily not trust to mow your lawn.
...from the/. crowd. Would it cost you all your geek cred to admit that Flash is a useful web technology whose shortcomings are more the fault of how it's used than anything inherently wrong about it?
Seriously, flash was there long before everyone started going on about web 2.0, and the geeks still crapped on it. It was there when no one else could come up with a universally workable video delivery solution, and the geeks crapped on it. It was there with a useable vector graphic solution long before every geek's favorite non-starter, the SVG. Now Adobe has overcome one of the most serious shortcomings of the format and all you guys can do is crap on it some more. They fully intend to meld it with the PDF to give you guys the multimedia rich e-books of the future you've all dreamed about, and I expect you will all still keep crapping on it.
Meanwhile, the best web design technology the purists have managed to offer up since HTML is CSS...an almost unusable and completely unpredictable triumph of geekeneering over the less tech savvy minions (that is, those unwashed masses often sneered at by programmers, but responsible for 90% of what geeks like to call "content")
When Flash sucks, it's not because it doesn't work...it's because some yo-yo doesn't know the first thing about designing a decent GUI, or wants to pelt you with ads, or thinks his obnoxious public-domain techno music sounds awesome at 80 decibels. In this sense, Flash developers are no different from other web developers...they just have more power to do ill.
Since empowering the common man with technology is the crux of the geek manifesto, I would think you would all be raving about Flash. I don't think it's Flash you guys hate at all. I think you either hate Adobe (right there witya) or the idea that someone with a piece of software and an idea can create multimedia just as impressive as some geek with years of experience in the arcane art of programming. In which case...welcome to the future you built.
Constipation and bad junk are the worst hazards of Heroin abuse you can think of? Really? What about overdoses due to increased tolerance from overuse? What about a physical addiction so powerful people have killed for pocket change to buy their next fix? What about underage women pushed into a habit that they are forced to work the streets to afford? What about AIDS? Homelessness?
I agree with you that US anti-drug efforts are problematical in many ways, but Heroin is not some benign recreational chemical given a bad rap by enforcement efforts. It is a dangerous drug that enslaves and destroys lives. It is illegal in most of the world because it is widely recognized as such.
There are way too many news items on this (and every other) news site about fascinating, exciting or terrible things that MIGHT happen. Maybe. If the stars are right.
Isn't news supposed to be about what DID happen, or inevitably WILL happen?
And if you distill this significantly smaller portion of the news down to that which is actually relevant to the reader...that is, things that may truly affect them that they am not already keenly aware of (no point in telling someone about the rain if they're already wet)...then I think the news could be neatly summed up over dinner on one of those little slips of paper found in a fortune cookie.
In fact, that would be a good place for this news.
Trademark law is designed to prevent brand confusion in the marketplace among similar products. If you try to sell a car that looks like a Ford and has the Ford emblem on it, you are in violation of trademark. However, selling a calendar with pictures of cars in it (unless, perhaps, they are all Fords, or you are reproducing the Ford logo on the front of the calendar as if it were an official Ford product) is most likely permissable.
Corporations have rapidly become increasingly aggressive about this sort of behavior, though, as they know very well that few people have pockets deep enough to challenge them in court. Ubisoft publishes an excellent flight sim which features every major aircraft of World War II in it...except for a handful of Grumman aircraft, because Grumman sent them cease and desist letters. I suspect the only rational for this was that, if they didn't, they somehow risked their trademark. I can't see them as construing any other benefit from the action, nor any other motive other than greed that has grown so ravenous they are blind to the fact that no small company could afford to pay the fees they demand. Many aircraft companies did this to the plastic model companies years ago, which is one reason you don't see resin model kits any more...their sales were too small to offset licensing fees demanded by the aircraft manufacturers.
Imagine what WILL be: We are not far from a future where it will be possible to manufacture almost any durable good from a machine if we can but visualize it using 3-D software tools. In a world where everyone can own their own replicator, who will control what is replicated?
Am I the only one who finds this strip badly drawn and entirely unfunny? I promised myself that when I hit forty, I wouldn't lose touch, but I am beginning to feel a bit old: I appear to be the only person not carrying a bible who thinks the endless torrent(no pun intended) of graphic violence, profanity and scatalogical humor pouring from the web to be more boorish than humorous. Am I alone?
I'm so tired of Flash rants I could puke a big steaming puddle of CSS. Flash is bad because bad designers use it to make bad websites...yet bad designers make crappy HTML sites all the time. Flash is bad because it crashes the browser...yet Java (or whatever the latest buggy cross-platform solution of the moment is) is the second coming despite it's chronic habit of doing the same thing. Flash is bad because it's proprietary...except that it isn't: the SWF file format was open-sourced a long time ago. Flash is bad because it isn't search engine friendly...yet one of the most popular websites in the world used it to reinvent how we experience video on the web. SVG is better, for reasons only geeks can appreciate...but no one supports it, so who cares?
In my opinion, every web technology sucks pretty mightily, for one reason or another. They are either abused by malevolent advertisers or 13 year olds, not supported uniformly by all platforms or browsers, and are a pain in the ass to design with. Dynamic HTML is a bad joke. Javascript invented pop-up hell. And praise CSS all you like, it's a strategy only a programmer could love. You can't center things reliably with it no matter how many hoops you jump through. That's something even HTML 1.0 could manage.
My own clients LOVE Flash sites. They insist on them. They want animations, and sound, and websites that look the same in every browser. (Flash's ability to proportionately scale content to the window is a thing of beauty, and one of the most underused talents of the plug-in. Why some Flash designers insist on manipulating the window size instead is beyond me) The only people who don't love Flash sites are other programmers. And I'm more than happy to take their business.
Hating Flash for bad Flash sites is like hating scientists for making gunpowder possible. Live in a teepee or run a casino...your choice.
Even this study, which the AP was quick to hit the panic button about, states that your odds of dying on any given airline flight is one in 4.5 million. Your odds of dying in any sort of air travel accident in your liftetime (on average...obviously, odds vary according to how often you fly) are about one in 20,000. You odds of dying in a car are about one in a hundred. Your odds of dying in an airliner hijacked by terrorists are about 1 in 55 million. So, obviously, the government is spending billions to combat terrorism, millions on air safety, and hardly anything on automotive safety.
Does anyone in government ever bother to READ the reports they spend so much time and money writing and classifying?
Y'know, I think if someone conclusively proved video games caused global warming, the slashdot crowd would still be screaming about parental involvment while poo pooing any attempt by society to pry their bent little fingers from their joysticks.
And you guys wonder why many people think of the stuff as digital crack.
Face it, these things are going to be so immersive in less than twenty years that they'll have to be a controlled substance. Otherwise, when the apocalypse comes, no one is even going to notice until their controller stops working.
Has it occurred to anyone that there will most likely NEVER be another successful hijacking of an airliner BECAUSE of 9/11? Any effort to do so will result in another Flight 93. It's not hard to be a hero when you know the only other option is death...I doubt any group of American passengers is likely to sit quietly the next time an Arab with a box cutter starts barking orders.
The over-the-top security measures at our airports are simply political theater and not effective policing methods. I can't believe they still have everyone removing their shoes...thank goodness no one tried to smuggle an IED on board in a bodily orifice. And if anyone swiped MY kid's formula bottle because of some Kubrickian fear of fluids, I'd be on my way to Gitmo for attempting to bend a TSA agent into a pretzel.
Why can't they simply take a nod from Israeli Airlines and stick a guy with an Uzi on board each plane? Lord knows I've been on flights where his presence would have been welcome, if only to subdue the toothless trailer park escapee trying to open the window at 30,000 feet.
And why aren't these same security procedures in place at U-Haul? After all, they haven't always used airplanes to blow up buildings...
All of the money being spent on this bloated home security apparatus, all of the money spent keeping the military stocked with munitions, all of the money spent devising better prosthetic limbs before all of the returning veterans hobbling around begin to make 'victory' in Iraq seem a bit of an oxymoron,,,all of this money might have been better spent reducing our dependence on fossil fuels three decades ago when it first became obvious how vulnerable we were to the vagaries of Middle-Eastern politics. If we'd spent even half the money we have wasted making ourselves feel safe from threats both real and imaginary since 9/11 on alternative fuel research ten years ago, Bin Laden would be penniless and living quietly in a tent in some arid desert, pulling the legs off of scorpions for his sick amusement, instead of enjoying eternal life as the bogeyman of the 21st century.
It would be wise to remember that, througout history, many more people have been killed or imprisoned by their own government than any foreign power. It's probably not such a good idea to make it easy for them.
The exodus away from tech rags that offer little more than glossed over advertising as content is not suprising, but it does kind of serve to illustrate a conundrum of advertising: If your ads are too subtle and too well targetted, your market readership falls off because they can no longer distinguish ads from information. But if your ads are not well targetted and obvious, your drive away your readership because they find them annoying and irrelevant.
Google has farmed this process out to a third party, stopbadware.org, thereby insuring that an understaffed company is forced to deal with tons of irate web users trying desperately to get their site traffic restored before their business goes belly up.
THANKyou. I'm glad I'm not the only webmaster who believes the manic SEO of most web designers is a fool's game.
I am currently redesigning a website for a client whose previous...perfectly legitimate...website was flagged as malware (we still can't figure out why) by Google. Google has farmed the appeals process for such flagging out to stopbadware.org, which is far too understaffed to provide any useful assistance in a reasonable amount of time. It will actually be easier for him to change his domain name and hosting provider than deal with Google's misguided nannying.
If his business relied purely on search engine traffic, it would be doomed, all because Google mistakenly blacklisted him. Fortunately, he does not rely on search engine traffic. But he would obviously appreciate it if Google was making life difficult for him.
Ever since Google went public, their policy of "do no evil" has begun to reveal a few cracks in it. Between conflict of interests in their business model (selling ads while trying to filter sites that exist soley to raise ad revenue), misguided and heavy-handed attempts to police the net(like their badware campaign), and providing information to foreign(or local) government powers that may assist in human rights abuses, I think we may be seeing the first stumblings of the search engine colossus as it begins its mighty fall.
I'm not so worried about the kids. You teach them right from wrong and let them make their own choices. It can't be any other way...there is not time enough in the day to try to shield them from the constant bombardment of porn, violence and profanity that saturate a city with wall to wall LCD's and hyper-networked gizmos in every pocket. You'd have to lock them in a box and bury them in a Quaker village to shield them from it all.
I am, however, worried about the adults that seem more interested in cranking out this crap for the amusement of an increasingly obese populace than trying to do something creative and worthwhile. I'm worried about the adults that are so filled with avarice that "content" has become an annoying afterthought to be shoehorned in between commericals and plastered with animated pop-up ads. I'm worried about a medium that attracts billions of dollars every year from advertisers and politicians because they believe it can shape public opinion, but is resolutely defended by producers who claim it has no influence on human behavior at all whenever a rash of copycat acts of violence threatens to negatively impact its ratings. I'm worried that the source of news people most depend is owned by a handful of people who don't really want you to get the facts, just the products being sold between the facts. I'm worried that almost any entry-level marketer thinks of the press release as free advertising. I'm worried that documentaries on channels billed as educational have titles like "When Naked Animals Attack" and "The Science of the Bible". I'm worried that people are STILL watching too much TV, even with all this crap on the air.
The kids at least have enough sense to play video games instead.
Many doctors, firemen and cops indulge in "gallows humor", which is really more of a defense mechanism than an effort to degrade their patients. Their profession is very stressful: they are bombarded by death, pain and suffering every day and empathizing with their patients would (and does) rapidly lead to emotional burn out and an inability to do their jobs.
I do not believe it is fair to equate that with the arrogance of some hygienically-challenged geek who finally found something he can feel superior about.
While their are overcompensating social misfits in every profession, I think someone willing to run into a burning house and drag my sorry butt out into the fresh air has a lot more right to call me an idiot for smoking in bed than some cranky, 19-year-old call desk slave has to berate me for not being born with the innate knowledge of my I.P. address.
The word Autism is a catchall for a wide spectrum of disorders, from severly impaired kids to the fashionably diagnosed little darlings belonging to attention-starved suburban housewives, which tends to muddy the diagnostic waters a bit. Most seriously Autistic children manifest symptons almost from birth. Despite what some parents claim as a regression during the toddler years, I suspect kids are born with it. It's simply difficult to diagnose a child with a psychological disorder before they are old enough to even walk or talk.
If you want a controlled study, here it is: I have two children, by the same wife. One is perfectly normal. The other is autistic. I suspected there was something wrong with the Autistic one by the time he was nine months old. (Most babies love to be held. This one was completely hyper, and would squirm out of everyone's arms as soon as he was physically capable of it. He rarely slept. He walked early, but displayed odd mannerisms. While many toddlers are fascinated by television, he manifested no interest in watching it at that age at all.) But he was not diagnosed until he was three, because there was very little diagnostic criteria to go one. Babies really don't do much other than cry, eat, sleep and poop.
They both watched plenty of TV by the time they were three. Just like I did in the sixties. They are 10 and 11 now. I taught the eldest to read the usual way, and he is a voracious reader. He still loves TV. And video games. And fart jokes, and every other thing a normal eleven year old loves. He's still not autistic. The youngest, the Autistic one, would rarely sit still for a story. He liked to flip through books, but didn't want to be read to. He can read now, though. Know why? I turned the English subtitles on whenever he watched his favorite DVD's.
He learned to read watching television.
This study is bunk. It's not a theory. It's more like the plot to Halloween III.
Until the 70's, there was a despicable tendency to blame the parenting of autistic children for their condition. If you've ever SEEN an autistic child (a real one, not some attention-starved suburban housewive's fashionably diagnosed little chowderhead...the difference is immediately obvious) with his family, you will intuitively realize just how ridiculous this idea is. It is an idea that resulted in guilt-ridden parents, broken families and absolutely no progress in the research for decades.
Do everyone a favor and resist the temptation to perpetuate that myth. Please.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't believe in age limits, but I think medical limits are a good idea. Simples tests demonstrating good vision, health and competence are a given in the aviation world...why not among ground pounders? (Better yet, why not among politicians?)
I often wish that the barriers to entry to driving were a little higher, too. It is distressingly easy to put a large moving vehicle in the hands of a person that you would ordinarily not trust to mow your lawn.
...from the /. crowd. Would it cost you all your geek cred to admit that Flash is a useful web technology whose shortcomings are more the fault of how it's used than anything inherently wrong about it?
Seriously, flash was there long before everyone started going on about web 2.0, and the geeks still crapped on it. It was there when no one else could come up with a universally workable video delivery solution, and the geeks crapped on it. It was there with a useable vector graphic solution long before every geek's favorite non-starter, the SVG. Now Adobe has overcome one of the most serious shortcomings of the format and all you guys can do is crap on it some more. They fully intend to meld it with the PDF to give you guys the multimedia rich e-books of the future you've all dreamed about, and I expect you will all still keep crapping on it.
Meanwhile, the best web design technology the purists have managed to offer up since HTML is CSS...an almost unusable and completely unpredictable triumph of geekeneering over the less tech savvy minions (that is, those unwashed masses often sneered at by programmers, but responsible for 90% of what geeks like to call "content")
When Flash sucks, it's not because it doesn't work...it's because some yo-yo doesn't know the first thing about designing a decent GUI, or wants to pelt you with ads, or thinks his obnoxious public-domain techno music sounds awesome at 80 decibels. In this sense, Flash developers are no different from other web developers...they just have more power to do ill.
Since empowering the common man with technology is the crux of the geek manifesto, I would think you would all be raving about Flash. I don't think it's Flash you guys hate at all. I think you either hate Adobe (right there witya) or the idea that someone with a piece of software and an idea can create multimedia just as impressive as some geek with years of experience in the arcane art of programming. In which case...welcome to the future you built.
Been paying attention to the global rice shortage? Because restaurants have. Rice has doubled in price already.
Constipation and bad junk are the worst hazards of Heroin abuse you can think of? Really? What about overdoses due to increased tolerance from overuse? What about a physical addiction so powerful people have killed for pocket change to buy their next fix? What about underage women pushed into a habit that they are forced to work the streets to afford? What about AIDS? Homelessness?
I agree with you that US anti-drug efforts are problematical in many ways, but Heroin is not some benign recreational chemical given a bad rap by enforcement efforts. It is a dangerous drug that enslaves and destroys lives. It is illegal in most of the world because it is widely recognized as such.
If iTunes is homosexual, why don't they have AC/DC?
There are way too many news items on this (and every other) news site about fascinating, exciting or terrible things that MIGHT happen. Maybe. If the stars are right.
Isn't news supposed to be about what DID happen, or inevitably WILL happen?
And if you distill this significantly smaller portion of the news down to that which is actually relevant to the reader...that is, things that may truly affect them that they am not already keenly aware of (no point in telling someone about the rain if they're already wet)...then I think the news could be neatly summed up over dinner on one of those little slips of paper found in a fortune cookie.
In fact, that would be a good place for this news.
Trademark law is designed to prevent brand confusion in the marketplace among similar products. If you try to sell a car that looks like a Ford and has the Ford emblem on it, you are in violation of trademark. However, selling a calendar with pictures of cars in it (unless, perhaps, they are all Fords, or you are reproducing the Ford logo on the front of the calendar as if it were an official Ford product) is most likely permissable.
Corporations have rapidly become increasingly aggressive about this sort of behavior, though, as they know very well that few people have pockets deep enough to challenge them in court. Ubisoft publishes an excellent flight sim which features every major aircraft of World War II in it...except for a handful of Grumman aircraft, because Grumman sent them cease and desist letters. I suspect the only rational for this was that, if they didn't, they somehow risked their trademark. I can't see them as construing any other benefit from the action, nor any other motive other than greed that has grown so ravenous they are blind to the fact that no small company could afford to pay the fees they demand. Many aircraft companies did this to the plastic model companies years ago, which is one reason you don't see resin model kits any more...their sales were too small to offset licensing fees demanded by the aircraft manufacturers.
Imagine what WILL be: We are not far from a future where it will be possible to manufacture almost any durable good from a machine if we can but visualize it using 3-D software tools. In a world where everyone can own their own replicator, who will control what is replicated?
This copyfight is just beginning...
Am I the only one who finds this strip badly drawn and entirely unfunny? I promised myself that when I hit forty, I wouldn't lose touch, but I am beginning to feel a bit old: I appear to be the only person not carrying a bible who thinks the endless torrent(no pun intended) of graphic violence, profanity and scatalogical humor pouring from the web to be more boorish than humorous. Am I alone?
I'm so tired of Flash rants I could puke a big steaming puddle of CSS. Flash is bad because bad designers use it to make bad websites...yet bad designers make crappy HTML sites all the time. Flash is bad because it crashes the browser...yet Java (or whatever the latest buggy cross-platform solution of the moment is) is the second coming despite it's chronic habit of doing the same thing. Flash is bad because it's proprietary...except that it isn't: the SWF file format was open-sourced a long time ago. Flash is bad because it isn't search engine friendly...yet one of the most popular websites in the world used it to reinvent how we experience video on the web. SVG is better, for reasons only geeks can appreciate...but no one supports it, so who cares?
In my opinion, every web technology sucks pretty mightily, for one reason or another. They are either abused by malevolent advertisers or 13 year olds, not supported uniformly by all platforms or browsers, and are a pain in the ass to design with. Dynamic HTML is a bad joke. Javascript invented pop-up hell. And praise CSS all you like, it's a strategy only a programmer could love. You can't center things reliably with it no matter how many hoops you jump through. That's something even HTML 1.0 could manage.
My own clients LOVE Flash sites. They insist on them. They want animations, and sound, and websites that look the same in every browser. (Flash's ability to proportionately scale content to the window is a thing of beauty, and one of the most underused talents of the plug-in. Why some Flash designers insist on manipulating the window size instead is beyond me) The only people who don't love Flash sites are other programmers. And I'm more than happy to take their business.
Hating Flash for bad Flash sites is like hating scientists for making gunpowder possible. Live in a teepee or run a casino...your choice.
Even this study, which the AP was quick to hit the panic button about, states that your odds of dying on any given airline flight is one in 4.5 million. Your odds of dying in any sort of air travel accident in your liftetime (on average...obviously, odds vary according to how often you fly) are about one in 20,000. You odds of dying in a car are about one in a hundred. Your odds of dying in an airliner hijacked by terrorists are about 1 in 55 million. So, obviously, the government is spending billions to combat terrorism, millions on air safety, and hardly anything on automotive safety.
Does anyone in government ever bother to READ the reports they spend so much time and money writing and classifying?
Y'know, I think if someone conclusively proved video games caused global warming, the slashdot crowd would still be screaming about parental involvment while poo pooing any attempt by society to pry their bent little fingers from their joysticks.
And you guys wonder why many people think of the stuff as digital crack.
Face it, these things are going to be so immersive in less than twenty years that they'll have to be a controlled substance. Otherwise, when the apocalypse comes, no one is even going to notice until their controller stops working.
Has it occurred to anyone that there will most likely NEVER be another successful hijacking of an airliner BECAUSE of 9/11? Any effort to do so will result in another Flight 93. It's not hard to be a hero when you know the only other option is death...I doubt any group of American passengers is likely to sit quietly the next time an Arab with a box cutter starts barking orders.
The over-the-top security measures at our airports are simply political theater and not effective policing methods. I can't believe they still have everyone removing their shoes...thank goodness no one tried to smuggle an IED on board in a bodily orifice. And if anyone swiped MY kid's formula bottle because of some Kubrickian fear of fluids, I'd be on my way to Gitmo for attempting to bend a TSA agent into a pretzel.
Why can't they simply take a nod from Israeli Airlines and stick a guy with an Uzi on board each plane? Lord knows I've been on flights where his presence would have been welcome, if only to subdue the toothless trailer park escapee trying to open the window at 30,000 feet.
And why aren't these same security procedures in place at U-Haul? After all, they haven't always used airplanes to blow up buildings...
All of the money being spent on this bloated home security apparatus, all of the money spent keeping the military stocked with munitions, all of the money spent devising better prosthetic limbs before all of the returning veterans hobbling around begin to make 'victory' in Iraq seem a bit of an oxymoron,,,all of this money might have been better spent reducing our dependence on fossil fuels three decades ago when it first became obvious how vulnerable we were to the vagaries of Middle-Eastern politics. If we'd spent even half the money we have wasted making ourselves feel safe from threats both real and imaginary since 9/11 on alternative fuel research ten years ago, Bin Laden would be penniless and living quietly in a tent in some arid desert, pulling the legs off of scorpions for his sick amusement, instead of enjoying eternal life as the bogeyman of the 21st century.
It would be wise to remember that, througout history, many more people have been killed or imprisoned by their own government than any foreign power. It's probably not such a good idea to make it easy for them.
...if you put a fat friend and a skinny friend in a room together, will the skinny one get fat, or will the fat one get skinny?
The exodus away from tech rags that offer little more than glossed over advertising as content is not suprising, but it does kind of serve to illustrate a conundrum of advertising: If your ads are too subtle and too well targetted, your market readership falls off because they can no longer distinguish ads from information. But if your ads are not well targetted and obvious, your drive away your readership because they find them annoying and irrelevant.
How best to walk this fine line? Comments?
Google has farmed this process out to a third party, stopbadware.org, thereby insuring that an understaffed company is forced to deal with tons of irate web users trying desperately to get their site traffic restored before their business goes belly up.
Not a good idea.
THANKyou. I'm glad I'm not the only webmaster who believes the manic SEO of most web designers is a fool's game.
I am currently redesigning a website for a client whose previous...perfectly legitimate...website was flagged as malware (we still can't figure out why) by Google. Google has farmed the appeals process for such flagging out to stopbadware.org, which is far too understaffed to provide any useful assistance in a reasonable amount of time. It will actually be easier for him to change his domain name and hosting provider than deal with Google's misguided nannying.
If his business relied purely on search engine traffic, it would be doomed, all because Google mistakenly blacklisted him. Fortunately, he does not rely on search engine traffic. But he would obviously appreciate it if Google was making life difficult for him.
Ever since Google went public, their policy of "do no evil" has begun to reveal a few cracks in it. Between conflict of interests in their business model (selling ads while trying to filter sites that exist soley to raise ad revenue), misguided and heavy-handed attempts to police the net(like their badware campaign), and providing information to foreign(or local) government powers that may assist in human rights abuses, I think we may be seeing the first stumblings of the search engine colossus as it begins its mighty fall.
Isn't God supposed to be all about free will and choice? Wasn't that the argument behind the value of faith?
So wouldn't hardwiring religious devotion be stacking the deck?
I'm not so worried about the kids. You teach them right from wrong and let them make their own choices. It can't be any other way...there is not time enough in the day to try to shield them from the constant bombardment of porn, violence and profanity that saturate a city with wall to wall LCD's and hyper-networked gizmos in every pocket. You'd have to lock them in a box and bury them in a Quaker village to shield them from it all.
I am, however, worried about the adults that seem more interested in cranking out this crap for the amusement of an increasingly obese populace than trying to do something creative and worthwhile. I'm worried about the adults that are so filled with avarice that "content" has become an annoying afterthought to be shoehorned in between commericals and plastered with animated pop-up ads. I'm worried about a medium that attracts billions of dollars every year from advertisers and politicians because they believe it can shape public opinion, but is resolutely defended by producers who claim it has no influence on human behavior at all whenever a rash of copycat acts of violence threatens to negatively impact its ratings. I'm worried that the source of news people most depend is owned by a handful of people who don't really want you to get the facts, just the products being sold between the facts. I'm worried that almost any entry-level marketer thinks of the press release as free advertising. I'm worried that documentaries on channels billed as educational have titles like "When Naked Animals Attack" and "The Science of the Bible". I'm worried that people are STILL watching too much TV, even with all this crap on the air.
The kids at least have enough sense to play video games instead.
I think if they want it to catch on, they are going to have to change the word.
It may be great software, but it's a stupid name.
Many doctors, firemen and cops indulge in "gallows humor", which is really more of a defense mechanism than an effort to degrade their patients. Their profession is very stressful: they are bombarded by death, pain and suffering every day and empathizing with their patients would (and does) rapidly lead to emotional burn out and an inability to do their jobs.
I do not believe it is fair to equate that with the arrogance of some hygienically-challenged geek who finally found something he can feel superior about.
While their are overcompensating social misfits in every profession, I think someone willing to run into a burning house and drag my sorry butt out into the fresh air has a lot more right to call me an idiot for smoking in bed than some cranky, 19-year-old call desk slave has to berate me for not being born with the innate knowledge of my I.P. address.
They may not belong in school, but it sounds like he probably could have used a box of them on his nightstand...
Ah, but if they are forced to wear gloves to defeat the alcohol-detection system, then they can't send text messages, either, can they?
I was going to try it, but the poster obviously has the only copy of IE7 for Mac OSX that was ever released...
The word Autism is a catchall for a wide spectrum of disorders, from severly impaired kids to the fashionably diagnosed little darlings belonging to attention-starved suburban housewives, which tends to muddy the diagnostic waters a bit. Most seriously Autistic children manifest symptons almost from birth. Despite what some parents claim as a regression during the toddler years, I suspect kids are born with it. It's simply difficult to diagnose a child with a psychological disorder before they are old enough to even walk or talk.
If you want a controlled study, here it is: I have two children, by the same wife. One is perfectly normal. The other is autistic. I suspected there was something wrong with the Autistic one by the time he was nine months old. (Most babies love to be held. This one was completely hyper, and would squirm out of everyone's arms as soon as he was physically capable of it. He rarely slept. He walked early, but displayed odd mannerisms. While many toddlers are fascinated by television, he manifested no interest in watching it at that age at all.) But he was not diagnosed until he was three, because there was very little diagnostic criteria to go one. Babies really don't do much other than cry, eat, sleep and poop.
They both watched plenty of TV by the time they were three. Just like I did in the sixties. They are 10 and 11 now. I taught the eldest to read the usual way, and he is a voracious reader. He still loves TV. And video games. And fart jokes, and every other thing a normal eleven year old loves. He's still not autistic. The youngest, the Autistic one, would rarely sit still for a story. He liked to flip through books, but didn't want to be read to. He can read now, though. Know why? I turned the English subtitles on whenever he watched his favorite DVD's.
He learned to read watching television.
This study is bunk. It's not a theory. It's more like the plot to Halloween III.
Until the 70's, there was a despicable tendency to blame the parenting of autistic children for their condition. If you've ever SEEN an autistic child (a real one, not some attention-starved suburban housewive's fashionably diagnosed little chowderhead...the difference is immediately obvious) with his family, you will intuitively realize just how ridiculous this idea is. It is an idea that resulted in guilt-ridden parents, broken families and absolutely no progress in the research for decades.
Do everyone a favor and resist the temptation to perpetuate that myth. Please.