You're talking dog-years, right? Otherwise that's ludicrously long
Yeah, most software is long dead by 7 years. I think they shouldn't have software parents; copyright protects whole programs from being ripped off, but the general concept of a program should be copied and done different ways so that we can find the best ways of doing something.
but why does that mean that time has to be shifted twice every year? why not just shift time by an hour once, just one time, and be done with the nonsense forever? why is it necessary to go back to "real" time in the winter?
Because then the little kids would have to stand in the dark to wait for their buses. Which they do anyways if they live north enough. You're right, it is stupid.
The developmental tasks of a five year old are tough enough. They need to develop the attention span, visual discrimination, and other pre-reading skills necessary to begin reading.
Do average kids really just start on pre-reading skills by kindergarten? I know I and all my friends had started reading by the time we got to school. I guess it depends on the parents, and kids do develop differently, but I'd think they'd at least be able to learn to read in kindergarten. Also, can 5 year olds really ride bikes and play organized sports? I was 10 before I started bike riding, and my sports weren't organized until about then either. Maybe I was a really unusual kid, but it seems like your descriptions of what 5 year olds do seems off.
As for technology, the goal is not to learn technology but to use technology to learn. Text RPGs will encourage kids to learn to read better, and math games will keep their attention much better than flash cards. You can also use the computer to find children's videos to teach them about about certain subjects (PBS has many of its shows online). Some things might be better taught in a traditional way, but where technology can help, it should be used.
Depending on the stats of your computer and the system requirements of the game you can run them through wine. I know because I have a wierd compulsion for anything Hello Kitty and I've gotten a couple games to work on my Ubuntu box. Though, you might want to keep with the oss stuff for your kids, because the most "educational" thing I've found with Hello Kitty is making ice cream sundays and saving penguins from water. Maybe Dora would teach them Spanish, but she'll also convince them that you need to buy them overpriced Dora shoes and Dora stickers and plenty of other things they don't need.
There was an article recently in the SF Chronicle which said a correlation exists between autism and increased time kids spend in front of the tv.
I think it's more than autism causes increased TV watching more than TV watching causes autism. My best friend's brother acts autistic (different diagnosis but simular disease) and he watches TV because he can't do much else and he's still (at 25) at a mental level where the pretty colors fascinate him. My friend also nannies for autistic children and others with mental disabilities and I've meet some of them and I can tell you that autism is not just watching too much TV, it's a severe mental illness.
If there is some weirdness around price that is simply a mis-pricing of a product then the consumer morally just thought they were getting a good deal, that happens all the time. When the consumer knows what the price should be, and sees that it is to low, and orders anyway? That is steal, and the people that took advantage of this are slimeballs with no morals.
They might not have noticed. Maybe they did much of their Christmas shopping on Amazon, telling themselves they'd stop when they hit $300 or $500 or whatever they can afford (that's what I did, though I didn't order the DVD sets). After picking out a number of items with discounts, applying for the special $30 off credit card deal and whatever, checking the price for every item in a dozen or so item cart becomes a bit of a hassle, especially if the list price of the DVDs is on itemized section and then subtracted in a miscellanous "sales and discounts" number. At that point, it's easy to just look at the final total and see if that's acceptable to you (not like you can argue with the computer if the price is wrong anyways) and agree to that price. If they didn't know the price is wrong you can't blame them. It's like going to going to Walmart and buying a cartful of stuff, and one's missing a bar code so the cashier just throws it in the bag. They can't go after you after you've paid and left. The customers never agreed to this price, so Amazon should just take the hit (since it's their fault) instead of charging people without warning. What if someone's credit card was actually a debit card and this unexpected charge overdrew their account? Amazon's not going to cover their overdraft charges. I've been an Amazon customer for years, but I'm going to rethink shopping there after this.
You order, eat, and in the end the waiter says "oops, some promotions were calculated wrongly" and charging extra money on your credit card without giving you any other option. Yes, you read me right, without giving you any other option.
Yes. What if your credit card was actually a debit card and this unexpected charge overdrew your account? Amazon should have sent out bills, or just forgotten about it since it was their mistake.
This would work both ways though. People only use Google as their address bar because they are pretty certain the website will come up.... If people typed in searches like 'www.nytimes.com', 'www.cnn.com', 'www.bbc.co.uk' into google and it didn't mention the respective websites then a lot of people would probably start switching their homepage away from Google.
If people type a full url into google, it's pretty safe to say that they don't know what the address bar does. Can you imagine these people changing their home pages?
Your analogy is very poor. It is odds on that Google is the sole stream of revenue for these sites. Google is an advertising agency. As the a provider reselling adspace on a site, it would make a lot of sense for Google to be aware of the content.
Try this on for size. You own a motel, rent rooms, etc. You're business isn't going too well. This guy comes along and says he can get people to come to your motel and pay for your rooms. You just have to pay him $10/room/hour. You agree and the next day business is booming. Turns out the guy is a pimp. He let's people screw his girls for free. Don't you think it makes sense to be aware of the people you are doing business with?
That's an even stupider analogy. First of all, if they don't pay, it's not prostitution ($10/hr is not even remotely enough to pay a prostitute). Basically, you'd be paying him to advertise to horny people that you have a hotel, which there's nothing wrong with. Even if they are prostituting in the hotel, I'm pretty sure that the law only applies against the actual people involved, not hotels that can't have their employees in the room to make sure no money exchanges hands illicitly. Anyways, prostitution has nothing to do with pirate websites. Find a better analogy next time you tell someone theirs is poor.
Imagine your a second-hand computer store that realises that the guy who turns up every monday with a bunch of new PCs is quite clearly stealing them from nearby offices. Do you think you have a leg to stand on when you say its nothing to do with you?
That's a slightly different scenerio, because that's receiving stolen goods, which is very clearly a crime. A more apt analogy is if the guy next store keeps bringing in new, appearently stolen computers to his store, and then comes to you to buy flowers to decorate the store. Google had nothing to do with distributing the pirated things on these websites, they just bought adspace from them, which is completely legal.
Most of those kids will just get their parents to buy it. I used to work at Gamestop, and I used to card kids, and invariably they'd just drag Mom or Dad in to pay for it and bitch at me for doing my job. They'd stay stupid things like "Yes, I know it has swearing" and I'd tell them it has hookers and you can beat people with dildos or whatever, and they'd just glare at me like I had just dared to question their parenting ability. Yeah. I really don't think sales are going to drop much at all.
In the next version though, Ubuntu will ship with proprietary software.
The next version isn't shipping with proprietary software. It's shipping with scripts that will help you install proprietary software, so if you click on a.avi, for example, it will say you don't have the right codec, and will ask if you want to install it (the codecs will be in the extra repositories, like they've always been). If you don't try to do anything that needs proprietary software, or you tell it not to install when you do, then your install will continue to be free.
Ubuntu is almost entirely free. The only compromises with a base install are some drivers and such that otherwise some systems wouldn't be able to run without (they even skip non-free wireless and 3d vid card drivers, because a system can run without them). It doesn't include mp3 support, DVD, flash, or even java. You have to enable the repositories that hold them and then you can choose to install them. I can't imagine it's that much different from Fedora in this regard.
People are used to having consoles in their living room connected to the TV. They aren't used to connecting computers to them.
Not everyone has a console in their living room, and not everyone wants one. If you're not a console gamer, you're never going to buy a 360 to watch movies. However, plenty of non-gamers who don't know the first thing about using a 360 have iPods and/or use iTunes. Those people will buy an AppleTV without even considering a 360.
Just because all your gamer friends have 360s does not mean that's the solution for everyone.
If it's in schools/libraries/wherever you'd put this, they'd be better off with Linux or donated software. Kids should be learning, not staring at ads, and I can't imagine any other situation where the hassle of looking at ads or the computer turns off is worth not paying for a Windows (or Mac OS) license or just dealing with Linux.
Yes, making and sending those pictures will have consequences, but that's no reason to make even worse consequences for them. Sending her to jail will do nothing to prevent those pictures from going up all over school. Sending her to jail will probably not even prevent other girls from doing this, because if you're too dense to think that maybe your boyfriend will show all his friends when you break up then you're too dense to think you'd go to jail. If the police left them alone, they'd learn the consequences. It wouldn't be nice, but if you can't protect teens from the consequences of being dumb then you at least shouldn't make them much much worse.
This stupid situation doesn't apply to all astronauts, just female astronauts that happen to be in the crazed state of womanhood (post-womanhood?) known as menopause.
My mom and all her friends got through menopause without driving across the country in a diaper to try to kill someone. I think this stupid situation applies to Lisa Nowak, not astronauts and/or women in menopause.
I find it unlikely that in the event of a major pandemic folks would be denied medical assistance due to lack of insurance coverage. Besides, I'd suspect that medical bills would be the least of our concerns were that to happen.
In a major pandemic resources to help the sick would be scarce, so the ones who can pay the most for it will get it. I wouldn't put it past drug companies to artifically reduce the supply or raise the prices because they can. Even once the medicine becomes not scarce, the US government only requires hospitals to give emergency treatment to those who can't pay, so unless the disease and drug are fast enough that you can take the drug within hours of the disease otherwise killing you, emergency rooms won't be much help for the poor. If you have to take the drug before the disease progresses to a dangerous point, then the hospitals don't have to help you, and if the drug requires several doses over a period of time then all they'll do is give you a prescription, and if you can't pay the pharmacist you're out of luck. We might like to think that the government would change things in the result of an emergency, but in a major pandemic they'd probably be more worried about themselves than changing the healthcare system. If we want the poor to be taken care of in a major pandemic, we need to make sure the poor can taken care of when it's not a national emergency.
"My father sold his entire music collection to the public in MP3 form without Digital Rights Management restrictions... ONCE."
It's not like the music sold with DRM doesn't wind up on pirate sites anyways. All it takes is one person to convert a song to mp3 and it's all over the net. Might as well give your paying customers the benefits of mp3.
GMail is by far the best client, IMHO. It has very advanced AJAX, context-sensitive ads
I think it's funny that people list the ads as a feature of GMail. Though, the ads are rather amusing in themselves. Whenever my friend Jesse emails me, I get an ad about Jesse Duplantis who will raise the dead. I also get ads about invisible men's underwear and taco holders. I guess that's better than the stupid flash ads like hit the fly for an ipod, but it seems wierd to claim that ads are a feature.
A lot of people do have access to the internet almost all the time. I have internet at home, at work, and at my night classes. What I don't have is access to the same computer all day. With Google, I can make a document (or edit my calendar) and work on it where ever I am without worrying about carrying around thumb drives and forgetting them at home or running out of space, and I can even use a library or a friend's computer without having to make sure my preferred office suite is running on it. So Google works for me. It sounds like it doesn't work for you, which is fine, because I don't think offline office suites are dying anytime soon.
I think that people should focus on reducing how much they use their cars, but most people can't give up their cars altogether. Even when I lived at college and walked to all my classes, I still had a car I used every few weeks. Being under 25 I couldn't rent a car, so I had to have a car to visit home once in a while and randomly visit friends at other colleges. Right now I live in a city where public transportation does not go anywhere I'd like to go (to my job, to church, to my friends' houses) and there's very few things within walking distance (the grocery store a block away has closed, and it looks like the rest of the stores are leaving as well) so even reducing my car use is difficult, and getting rid of my car would be completely impossible. I don't think most people could give up their cars, though we could probably reduce how much we drive.
If it was geared toward "women" or "females", whatever; but "girl" has connotations of being for a less mature group with unrefined tastes (think "Barbie Horse Adventures").
At 25 I am still called a "girl", yet I don't freak out and tell everyone that I'm a mature adult who hates Barbie Horse Adventures. Having your games labeled girl games can't be that offensive.
I don't know where you got your definition of "poor" from, but the poor people I know don't have heat in their houses this winter, and some winters they didn't have houses. The only person I know on welfare (actually, disability) barely gets enough money to afford rent, food, and driving back and forth to her doctor appointments (she can't even visit her friends, because gas costs too much). They didn't choose to live like that, and with some bad circumstances you could be there too. You think you have enough money to cover any medical problems (and I hope when you listed car accidents you don't mean you go without car insurance, too) but medical costs add up really fast. What if you were disabled? Do you have enough money if you couldn't work ever again that you could support yourself? No, no one does, and you'd wind up being supported by medicaid and the other social programs you despise so much.
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As for technology, the goal is not to learn technology but to use technology to learn. Text RPGs will encourage kids to learn to read better, and math games will keep their attention much better than flash cards. You can also use the computer to find children's videos to teach them about about certain subjects (PBS has many of its shows online). Some things might be better taught in a traditional way, but where technology can help, it should be used.
Depending on the stats of your computer and the system requirements of the game you can run them through wine. I know because I have a wierd compulsion for anything Hello Kitty and I've gotten a couple games to work on my Ubuntu box. Though, you might want to keep with the oss stuff for your kids, because the most "educational" thing I've found with Hello Kitty is making ice cream sundays and saving penguins from water. Maybe Dora would teach them Spanish, but she'll also convince them that you need to buy them overpriced Dora shoes and Dora stickers and plenty of other things they don't need.
I always thought she was white, but now that I think about it, she could be asian. But there's no way she's black.
Most of those kids will just get their parents to buy it. I used to work at Gamestop, and I used to card kids, and invariably they'd just drag Mom or Dad in to pay for it and bitch at me for doing my job. They'd stay stupid things like "Yes, I know it has swearing" and I'd tell them it has hookers and you can beat people with dildos or whatever, and they'd just glare at me like I had just dared to question their parenting ability. Yeah. I really don't think sales are going to drop much at all.
Ubuntu is almost entirely free. The only compromises with a base install are some drivers and such that otherwise some systems wouldn't be able to run without (they even skip non-free wireless and 3d vid card drivers, because a system can run without them). It doesn't include mp3 support, DVD, flash, or even java. You have to enable the repositories that hold them and then you can choose to install them. I can't imagine it's that much different from Fedora in this regard.
Just because all your gamer friends have 360s does not mean that's the solution for everyone.
If it's in schools/libraries/wherever you'd put this, they'd be better off with Linux or donated software. Kids should be learning, not staring at ads, and I can't imagine any other situation where the hassle of looking at ads or the computer turns off is worth not paying for a Windows (or Mac OS) license or just dealing with Linux.
Yes, making and sending those pictures will have consequences, but that's no reason to make even worse consequences for them. Sending her to jail will do nothing to prevent those pictures from going up all over school. Sending her to jail will probably not even prevent other girls from doing this, because if you're too dense to think that maybe your boyfriend will show all his friends when you break up then you're too dense to think you'd go to jail. If the police left them alone, they'd learn the consequences. It wouldn't be nice, but if you can't protect teens from the consequences of being dumb then you at least shouldn't make them much much worse.
A lot of people do have access to the internet almost all the time. I have internet at home, at work, and at my night classes. What I don't have is access to the same computer all day. With Google, I can make a document (or edit my calendar) and work on it where ever I am without worrying about carrying around thumb drives and forgetting them at home or running out of space, and I can even use a library or a friend's computer without having to make sure my preferred office suite is running on it. So Google works for me. It sounds like it doesn't work for you, which is fine, because I don't think offline office suites are dying anytime soon.
I think that people should focus on reducing how much they use their cars, but most people can't give up their cars altogether. Even when I lived at college and walked to all my classes, I still had a car I used every few weeks. Being under 25 I couldn't rent a car, so I had to have a car to visit home once in a while and randomly visit friends at other colleges. Right now I live in a city where public transportation does not go anywhere I'd like to go (to my job, to church, to my friends' houses) and there's very few things within walking distance (the grocery store a block away has closed, and it looks like the rest of the stores are leaving as well) so even reducing my car use is difficult, and getting rid of my car would be completely impossible. I don't think most people could give up their cars, though we could probably reduce how much we drive.
I don't know where you got your definition of "poor" from, but the poor people I know don't have heat in their houses this winter, and some winters they didn't have houses. The only person I know on welfare (actually, disability) barely gets enough money to afford rent, food, and driving back and forth to her doctor appointments (she can't even visit her friends, because gas costs too much). They didn't choose to live like that, and with some bad circumstances you could be there too. You think you have enough money to cover any medical problems (and I hope when you listed car accidents you don't mean you go without car insurance, too) but medical costs add up really fast. What if you were disabled? Do you have enough money if you couldn't work ever again that you could support yourself? No, no one does, and you'd wind up being supported by medicaid and the other social programs you despise so much.