And they'll have no support options either. Who will they call when the software needs maintence? Or when they want to apply the next version?
You say this like they get support with MS Office. Last time I called Microsoft with a problem, they wanted $200 before they'd even attempt to help me. I'm sure you could call up Sun or whoever and pay them to give you support as well.
Also, lets show the kids something they'll never see at an actual job or even at home, if they aren't running Linux there.
There's many companies that use Open(or Star)Office. Also, as for home use, with open source the schools can give the software for them to use at home, so they don't have to spend money on MS Office, and since they have the same software there's no drama with documents messing up between different versions of Word, or the poor student trying to use Works to work with his school projects.
Yes, it's so terrible that your state wants taxpayer money to go to schools that otherwise couldn't afford to buy new textbooks, let alone computers, instead of letting your school buy overpriced software. Gee, I feel so sorry for you.
I'm sure your students are getting by just fine with StarOffice, in fact, I'm sure they'd get along just fine with OpenOffice (and then you could give them copies to take home). It's not like MS Office and Star/OpenOffice are so different that they'll never ever be able to learn the other. Purchasing MS Office licenses is such a waste of money for a school, especially when there's so many schools that could use the money for textbooks and more teachers and other things that are necessary and you can't get reasonable alternatives for free.
Your average non-IT user these days sits down at a PC and panics if they don't see the same program. Forget that they know the fundamentals and principles of how it all works, they see "OpenOffice.org" and say "But I only know Microsoft Office! This is different and I don't like different and it's going to hurt my productivity!"
Then maybe this is why it would be a good idea for schools to not just teach students Microsoft's programs, but to expose them to different programs so they don't freak out every time they see something different.
Do you think that all white male doctors in the 1950's were unproven, because all universities and med schools were selecting white men over women and minorities? Or do you think graduating med school might have proved them as doctors?
Do you think if you were randomly admitted into med school today that you'd be able to graduate with ease?
Affirmative action doesn't carry anyone through life, it just gives people opportunities. I don't really agree with it, but I don't assume the people who've benefited from it aren't as good or don't deserve to be where they are. If they've graduated and have a successful career then they've proven themselves. I also don't believe I can tell someone benefited from affirmative action just by looking at them.
Some colleges have so many female applicants that they're now doing affimative action in favor of men. Does this shake your belief that male doctors might be better because they got there on the wrong side of affirmative action?
I'm not trying to justify affirmative action to you; but I'd like you to stop using it to justify racism and sexism.
find it really sad that I find myself doubting the competence of women and people who are neither white nor Asian.
Then don't. No one's forcing you to.
Even with affirmative action, do you really think idiots can make it through med school just because they're black and/or female? Affirmative action will help them into school, but they still have to know their shit to get through it.
Also, do you really think sexism and racism has just gone away? Do you really think that there's no black women who ever got rejected from med school because of her gender or race, or never had a teacher who didn't treat her fairly because he didn't think she should be there? Do you think most black people start out life with the same resources as most white people, equal schools, equal financial resources, equal encouragement to be doctors or even go to college at all?
Not every black person is poor, but not every black person has everything handed to them because of affirmative action. When you meet someone, you don't know their experience, their opportunities, their skills, etc. You can't just assume, based solely on their gender or race, that they are an inferior doctor (lawyer, programmer, etc) because that makes you a racist/sexist dick, no matter what your reasons are.
You're ignoring the chance that the shy nerd might be the same gender as the sexually attractive coworker, or that the frisky couple might also be the same gender.
While your parents encouraged you to be more well-rounded by going outside, I bet they never indicated to you that you shouldn't be interested at all in computers, by putting the "family" computer in your brother's room as if you'd never need to use it and ignoring your requests for more opportunities to learn about computers. There's still parents that do this to girls, and even parents who try to be equal can inadvertantly overlook their daughters' computer interests because of stereotypes. Also, I bet you never had to walk into a computer classroom where you were the only one that was *different*. In college, one class I took had three girls and the guys made a huge fuss over this ("OMG, I didn't know there were 3 girls in the school!"). It's not hard, as the only girl in class after class, to get teh impression that you just don't belong. It's very lonely as well.
It's not that women need step-by-step hand holding the entire way, it's that it would be nice to have *some* encouragement, to know that not everyone expects you stop playing with computers and go do something more girly, or even to know that computer science is even an *option* for women.
Why do people have to make up claims of reverse-sexism whenever sexism is brought up? No, nitwit, it would be no more ok for women to exclude men because it might mess up their girls' club than it is is for men to exclude women from their boys' club. Get the chip off your shoulder and stop arguing with the imaginary stawman in your head that says it's ok for women but not for men.
Also note that another reason womyn are not attracted to free software is because referring to it as 'open source' puts them off.
No, refering to it as open source puts of people like Richard Stallman. He's basically saying that if he was a woman, he would prefer free software to open software, which, duh. People who are big on free software philosophies are turned off by open source, but if you notice, most women aren't big on free software. Women are turned off by terms they don't understand, but knowing what open source is would probably be a good prerequisite to working on GNOME projects, so I don't think that's an issue here.
Also:
This tutorial also recommends womyn to use GNU Emacs with the 'viper' vi-emulation mode to edit files.
WTF? Maybe viper vi-emulation mode is easier for newbs, but that's what they should say then. There's nothing inherent about women that makes a particular mode better for all women, and they shouldn't be discouraged from using the default as if it's "too hard" or "only for men". Please.
For instance, I think of a few RPGs which had a strong religious/church element in them...but later it turns out the church is actually the "bad" guy and the game ends up bashing organized religion pretty badly when your party ends up killing "god".
Then keep the heavy RPGs away from them until they're at an age where they can analyze stuff they (and you) disagree with. Once they're at an age where they can discuss and analyze things, games like this can lead to conversations that can really teach a kid to strech his/her mind and think philosophically and analytically instead of just being a passive consumer of entertainment.
Unless of course you're against your kid seeing or hearing anything about religion that you disagree with, in which case anything with strong religious themes are out of the question, because it's not likely to be *your* religious ideas. But if you're that restrictive, then you probably already know that.
I get that. But we should be paying farmers to farm, then send the food to homeless shelters and third world countries. We shouldn't be paying farmers to sit on their asses, and we should never pay them to farm food and then let it rot. It's shameful for us to do that while people in our own country, not to mention others, are starving.
The post I was replying to was claiming that he could change his contract by claiming he didn't understand the contract. I was explaining that was not possible, because someone else had already explained that it was not true.
Here on slashdot, it is also your responsibility to pay attention.
I'm not saying there shouldn't be a law against the sale of rated M games to minors. I think there should be restrictions on that the same way that a 15 year old cannot get into a rated R movie without a guardian, or into a NC-17 movie at all
There aren't any laws saying that 15 year olds can't see an NC-17 movie. The movie theatres self-regulate. I don't think it has to be different for game stores.
Not only is the ESRB pretty one-sided, it is only the game industry making an effort, the retail outlets are not organized like many theaters are.
Not organized? Most game stores are owned by one company (Gamestop), so they don't need to have a collective organization, and they work closely with the ESRB (notice how their stores and magazine are covered with ESRB ads?) and have very clear policies against selling M games to minors. 90% of the games not sold by a Gamesop store are sold by an equally large or larger company (Wal-Mart, Blockbuster, Amazon) that also sells DVDs so they're used to complying with ratings.
The problem isn't retailers, it's parents. I used to work at a Gamestop, and while I never saw my coworkers sell an M rated game to a minor, almost every day I had to try to explain to a parent that they probably shouldn't buy an M rated game for their kid. Despite my pleadings, the vast majority of times they would say "Oh, he'll just play it at his friend's house anyways" or brush me off with something equally stupid.
Oh, and the laws wouldn't punish the retailers; they'd punish the poor bastard working for $6 an hour and probably doesn't make the amount of the fine in a month. They also don't follow the ESRB, they give out some vague guildlines in confusing legalspeak, technically expecting each individual retail clerk to act as the ESRB and figure out what a game should be rated, and if they guess wrong hope they can afford the fines. Now, I'm sure that's not how they were intended or would probably work in reality (as in, if you follow the ESRB you should be fine), but laws should be written to reflect how they are intended to be practiced, yet none of the proposed game legislation has done that. That's because they can't write laws based on what an independent organization does *and may stop or change at any time*, so the only laws they can make are either vague and stupid or would involve making a new ESRB-like committee in the government, taking on the role of rating all the games itself, and that's just going way to far.
The situation with games should not be changed by law, it should be changed by people learning that games are not all for children. Which, given that the current generation of new parents grew up with games, and more and more adults are gaming, I see that just naturally happening, no panic and radical solutions necessary. Of course, the democrats want something to rant about, and I guess this is the best they could find.
Well, ok, but let's think of the children still living in rotting-away housing in New Orleans, the children going to falling apart schools while politicians are embezzling money away from the states, the children dying of hunger, etc, etc, BEFORE we worry about the children who might buy an M rated video game.
The parents bitching for game regulation seem like they could use some parents for themselves. Someone to say "No dear, a game named after a felony probably isn't the best choice for your 6-year-old" because obviously they don't have the braincells to put that together themselves.
After I installed the Vista beta I can no longer access my hard drive. Linux fdisk, Partition Magic: nothing will let me back in (can't even repartition!).
Can't get much more secure than that...
Seriously, though, the drive really is unreadable. Don't know if Vista managed to kill it (how?!?!) or if it's just a strange coincidence.
According to the article:
On the hardware level, Microsoft has implemented BitLocker full disk encryption. Using a TPM chip located on the motherboard or USB stick, BitLocker literally encrypts data while it is being written to the disk. If a laptop were stolen, the hard drive would be inaccessible without a recovery key.
Maybe it encrypted your drive from anything else accessing it?
I thought he made more than that. Still, $100k is still pretty nice.
The greedy bastards at the RIAA probably make way more off him though, but we can hope that as less and less people buy RIAA music and more artists go independent that the RIAA doesn't have much longer. We can hope.
You really should have studied harder in school, and learned some things that others find valuable. Weird Al isn't rich by a longshot, so it sounds like you're on the left side of the income bellcurve. I'm sorry.
Assuming your sibling post is correct and he makes $100,000 a year, then, while he makes less than I thought he did, and only slightly more than my husband's and my incomes, he's still very rich. We're in the top 0.6% of the richest people in the world, I think that puts us far on the right side of the bellcurve.
I don't know if the problem is the ERSB so much as the ESRB's failure to let parents know that they exist and that they need their help enforcing their rating system. Why not run an ad campaign to let parents know about the issue?
Oh, like the "Ok to Play?" campaign they've been running for years? Or the new Penny Arcade campaign they're starting?
Yeah, they're already on that. Anyways, I think it's the parents' responsibility to figure out that there's a rating system; the ESRB's job is not to find every single parent and explain. The MPAA doesn't advertise their rating system at all, and their ratings and content descripters are much less intuitive and detailed than the ESRB's, yet it's the ESRB that always gets bitched at. Fuck that shit. Parents just need to read the fucking label, it's not that hard.
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Also, lets show the kids something they'll never see at an actual job or even at home, if they aren't running Linux there. There's many companies that use Open(or Star)Office. Also, as for home use, with open source the schools can give the software for them to use at home, so they don't have to spend money on MS Office, and since they have the same software there's no drama with documents messing up between different versions of Word, or the poor student trying to use Works to work with his school projects.
Yes, it's so terrible that your state wants taxpayer money to go to schools that otherwise couldn't afford to buy new textbooks, let alone computers, instead of letting your school buy overpriced software. Gee, I feel so sorry for you.
I'm sure your students are getting by just fine with StarOffice, in fact, I'm sure they'd get along just fine with OpenOffice (and then you could give them copies to take home). It's not like MS Office and Star/OpenOffice are so different that they'll never ever be able to learn the other. Purchasing MS Office licenses is such a waste of money for a school, especially when there's so many schools that could use the money for textbooks and more teachers and other things that are necessary and you can't get reasonable alternatives for free.
Do you think that all white male doctors in the 1950's were unproven, because all universities and med schools were selecting white men over women and minorities? Or do you think graduating med school might have proved them as doctors?
Do you think if you were randomly admitted into med school today that you'd be able to graduate with ease?
Affirmative action doesn't carry anyone through life, it just gives people opportunities. I don't really agree with it, but I don't assume the people who've benefited from it aren't as good or don't deserve to be where they are. If they've graduated and have a successful career then they've proven themselves. I also don't believe I can tell someone benefited from affirmative action just by looking at them.
Some colleges have so many female applicants that they're now doing affimative action in favor of men. Does this shake your belief that male doctors might be better because they got there on the wrong side of affirmative action?
I'm not trying to justify affirmative action to you; but I'd like you to stop using it to justify racism and sexism.
Even with affirmative action, do you really think idiots can make it through med school just because they're black and/or female? Affirmative action will help them into school, but they still have to know their shit to get through it.
Also, do you really think sexism and racism has just gone away? Do you really think that there's no black women who ever got rejected from med school because of her gender or race, or never had a teacher who didn't treat her fairly because he didn't think she should be there? Do you think most black people start out life with the same resources as most white people, equal schools, equal financial resources, equal encouragement to be doctors or even go to college at all?
Not every black person is poor, but not every black person has everything handed to them because of affirmative action. When you meet someone, you don't know their experience, their opportunities, their skills, etc. You can't just assume, based solely on their gender or race, that they are an inferior doctor (lawyer, programmer, etc) because that makes you a racist/sexist dick, no matter what your reasons are.
You're ignoring the chance that the shy nerd might be the same gender as the sexually attractive coworker, or that the frisky couple might also be the same gender.
While your parents encouraged you to be more well-rounded by going outside, I bet they never indicated to you that you shouldn't be interested at all in computers, by putting the "family" computer in your brother's room as if you'd never need to use it and ignoring your requests for more opportunities to learn about computers. There's still parents that do this to girls, and even parents who try to be equal can inadvertantly overlook their daughters' computer interests because of stereotypes. Also, I bet you never had to walk into a computer classroom where you were the only one that was *different*. In college, one class I took had three girls and the guys made a huge fuss over this ("OMG, I didn't know there were 3 girls in the school!"). It's not hard, as the only girl in class after class, to get teh impression that you just don't belong. It's very lonely as well.
It's not that women need step-by-step hand holding the entire way, it's that it would be nice to have *some* encouragement, to know that not everyone expects you stop playing with computers and go do something more girly, or even to know that computer science is even an *option* for women.
Why do people have to make up claims of reverse-sexism whenever sexism is brought up? No, nitwit, it would be no more ok for women to exclude men because it might mess up their girls' club than it is is for men to exclude women from their boys' club. Get the chip off your shoulder and stop arguing with the imaginary stawman in your head that says it's ok for women but not for men.
Also:
WTF? Maybe viper vi-emulation mode is easier for newbs, but that's what they should say then. There's nothing inherent about women that makes a particular mode better for all women, and they shouldn't be discouraged from using the default as if it's "too hard" or "only for men". Please.
I'm a sister. :)
Unless of course you're against your kid seeing or hearing anything about religion that you disagree with, in which case anything with strong religious themes are out of the question, because it's not likely to be *your* religious ideas. But if you're that restrictive, then you probably already know that.
I get that. But we should be paying farmers to farm, then send the food to homeless shelters and third world countries. We shouldn't be paying farmers to sit on their asses, and we should never pay them to farm food and then let it rot. It's shameful for us to do that while people in our own country, not to mention others, are starving.
The post I was replying to was claiming that he could change his contract by claiming he didn't understand the contract. I was explaining that was not possible, because someone else had already explained that it was not true.
Here on slashdot, it is also your responsibility to pay attention.
The problem isn't retailers, it's parents. I used to work at a Gamestop, and while I never saw my coworkers sell an M rated game to a minor, almost every day I had to try to explain to a parent that they probably shouldn't buy an M rated game for their kid. Despite my pleadings, the vast majority of times they would say "Oh, he'll just play it at his friend's house anyways" or brush me off with something equally stupid.
Oh, and the laws wouldn't punish the retailers; they'd punish the poor bastard working for $6 an hour and probably doesn't make the amount of the fine in a month. They also don't follow the ESRB, they give out some vague guildlines in confusing legalspeak, technically expecting each individual retail clerk to act as the ESRB and figure out what a game should be rated, and if they guess wrong hope they can afford the fines. Now, I'm sure that's not how they were intended or would probably work in reality (as in, if you follow the ESRB you should be fine), but laws should be written to reflect how they are intended to be practiced, yet none of the proposed game legislation has done that. That's because they can't write laws based on what an independent organization does *and may stop or change at any time*, so the only laws they can make are either vague and stupid or would involve making a new ESRB-like committee in the government, taking on the role of rating all the games itself, and that's just going way to far.
The situation with games should not be changed by law, it should be changed by people learning that games are not all for children. Which, given that the current generation of new parents grew up with games, and more and more adults are gaming, I see that just naturally happening, no panic and radical solutions necessary. Of course, the democrats want something to rant about, and I guess this is the best they could find.
The phenomenon of sarcasm.
The parents bitching for game regulation seem like they could use some parents for themselves. Someone to say "No dear, a game named after a felony probably isn't the best choice for your 6-year-old" because obviously they don't have the braincells to put that together themselves.
I wish we could have tests for parenting.
On the hardware level, Microsoft has implemented BitLocker full disk encryption. Using a TPM chip located on the motherboard or USB stick, BitLocker literally encrypts data while it is being written to the disk. If a laptop were stolen, the hard drive would be inaccessible without a recovery key.
Maybe it encrypted your drive from anything else accessing it?
I thought he made more than that. Still, $100k is still pretty nice.
The greedy bastards at the RIAA probably make way more off him though, but we can hope that as less and less people buy RIAA music and more artists go independent that the RIAA doesn't have much longer. We can hope.
Assuming your sibling post is correct and he makes $100,000 a year, then, while he makes less than I thought he did, and only slightly more than my husband's and my incomes, he's still very rich. We're in the top 0.6% of the richest people in the world, I think that puts us far on the right side of the bellcurve.
Yeah, they're already on that. Anyways, I think it's the parents' responsibility to figure out that there's a rating system; the ESRB's job is not to find every single parent and explain. The MPAA doesn't advertise their rating system at all, and their ratings and content descripters are much less intuitive and detailed than the ESRB's, yet it's the ESRB that always gets bitched at. Fuck that shit. Parents just need to read the fucking label, it's not that hard.
Red Hat and Mozilla and other free/open source companies still make money, even though anyone can copy their products.