"Kids should not get their hands on these games, but that's the responsibility of the parents. They have the tools."
Correction... it should read "My Kids should not get their hands on these games, but that's the responsibility of the parents. They have the tools."
When you state that universally "kids" should not get their hands on the games, you validate the idea of creating a law. After all, if it is an absolute truth that "kids" should not get their hands on the games, then the only time the law would go into effect is when a parent is not doing their job. Add to that, that what a "kid" is, is a political mess. The government still considers people kids up to a decade or more ofter reaching puberty.
Also, no disrespect intended with this, but, I'm not any more comfortable with you defining what my child should and should not be exposed to than I am with some politician making the same decision.
The reason they miss the sign is because of the number of unneeded signs in the world. We have learned to ignore paper with words on it unless we assume it pertains to us. Really, it is the only way to function in modern society. The reason that they go to the circulation desk is because they assume the same thing that I do. That the circulation desk is there to answer questions. They assumed that the circulation desk was there before they ever entered. They may even already know where it is, and also make the assumption that the circulation desk knows where the forms are.
It's more like walking across someones lawn. I don't know how it works in the UK, but unless you have specifically posted a no trespassing sign or specifically asked them to leave your property, you cannot have someone arrested for trespassing on your front lawn here in the US. It has an implied invitation. Now, if the guy had actually accessed a computer on there internal network, maybe...just maybe, it could be likened to entering an unlocked house.
As the great great great grandson of Bagie McDouche, sole surviving heir to the McDouche blood line, and caretaker to vast tracts of Doucheland, I have to inform you that representing the parent poster as a Douche Lord is a violation of the Douchland Clean Water Act, and the Treaty of Summer Breeze Scent.
"Seriously, an operating system release is just not worth invoking such strong emotions."
I have to disagree with this. Many, many people's lives and careers are intimately tied to their ability to use a computer. Given that MS is a monopoly, and for all intents and purposes hundreds of millions of people will have no other choice but to spend many hours a day interacting with MS's OS, it is absolutely fair to have it invoke very strong emotions. If you had said the same about a game console, where there are really three good choices, and millions of peoples livelihoods didn't depend on it, I would agree with you. We are not talking about that though. We are talking about something that is as much a part of our infrastructure as telephones, electricity, and gasoline. If the electric company sent out a memo tomorrow that told us they were going to seriously increase the cost of electricity, everyone would have to upgrade their breaker boxes, and a bunch of your existing electric uses will be incompatible with their new system, you can bet that people would be swearing. At this point Windows is a utility and will cause just as much frustration when MS does bad things to the customers.
Speaking of H&R Block... I'm trying to figure out who in their right mind would want tax preparation done by a business that advertises a lottery as good financial planning.
You had better also read the agreement carefully. When DirectTV was pulling this stunt, they were including a blurb where you admitted to having committed copyright violation. Given that there are now criminal penalties on the books for copyright violation, you could very well be paying $3000 for a nice vacation to 'pound you in the ass prison'.
I would go a step farther and say that MySpace has an immediate and obvious educational value. The fact that schools all over the nation have had, and still have music programs indicates that they feel music is in fact an educational endeavor. MySpace oddly enough is an exceedingly good resource for researching music.
The lights and siren are so the cop doesn't kill someone while going through a light. The police are not doing anyone a favor by killing pedestrians to possibly catch a drug dealer. I could probably be convinced that lights only would be acceptable, but certainly not beyond that. The "We have to break the law so we can enforce it" excuse is BS.
It's very simple. A cop should never, under any circumstances go through a red light without his lights and siren. Anything less is an clear, immediate and unnecessary danger to lives of the citizens in the area. Any time the lights and siren go on, the computer that is now standard equipment in police cars should be logging that the emergency system was turned on. At the end of the day/week/whatever the calls logged should match 100% with the computer log. Any missing call logs should require an explanation.
Given that the police officer is indicating that he is operating in a situation extrodiary enough that he must break the law, there is no excuse for keeping a record.
I don't entirely disagree with you, in that this is a serious problem. Where I do agree with you is where the problem is. I don't believe that this principal would have shut down classes and spent thousands of dollars trying to hunt down the perpetrator if it was one of his students that had this happen to them. If he is unwilling to spend those resources on the students, it indicates that he doesn't see this a problem, he sees it as a problem when it happens to him.
It is a little like the father of the bully who I outraged when one of his kid's victims finds the bully alone at night in some ally, and uses a tool, and the bully gets sent home with a broken collar bone. The assault at night is not where the problem started.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that the principal deserved it. The problem is that the US public school system is broken, and is unfixable in it's current form. The problems start with the parent, and go all the way up to the President of the United States (who referred to the smart kids as 'The Nerd Patrol'). Parents don't want to bother raising their kids. Schools have become a business, and students are treated the same way that the local phone company treats their "customers". And, the government sees a way to increase power of the unwashed masses.
I consistently tell people that when discussing MP3 players. If the other players in the market want to compete with the iPod, they need to get together and produce a standard interface that can do the things that the iPods interface can do. The interface needs to allow complete control of the audio player from the external accessory, allow charging, syncing, audio in, audio out, and have a standard physical size for the player itself, so that you can just plug the whole player in without fiddling with wires. For the player size, they should just make the accessory slot big enough for a larger sized player, and have simple clips of some kind so that you can drop an adapter (which is just a piece of plastic) in to make the accessory fit your player exactly.
At this point iPod is king for the same reason AC is king for home electrical wiring. It works pretty well, and there are more and cheaper accessories for plugging into it.
The question is, though, do teens make bad decisions because they have not been considered adults, or because of a physical limitation. I would say that the number of stupid decisions I see 18-25 year olds make, indicates that the problem isn't "teens make bad decisions", but instead is "people tend to make bad decision until they have been considered an adult for a few years."
It is good to see that you agree whole heartedly with the parent poster, as we all know that complaining about spelling is an admission that all of the points are 100% correct.
Your head is in the sand. Work permits are simply not available to minors who's parents will not support them, and the fact that a 15 year old's parents will not support this is a problem, does not change the fact that it happens all the time. I certainly don't understand how you can say that there is no reason for a 14 or 15 year old to work more than 18 hours a week to support themselves. $7.80 is the highest minimum wage in the country. That means the 15 year old (if they can even get a permit) would be trying to support themselves off of ~$550 a month. Could you support yourself on $550 a month? Of course, many of these 15 year olds cannot get a permit at all. Can you support yourself off of $0 a month?
Saying that parents SHOULD be good to their children is no excuse for criminalizing those minors whose parents are not. And sorry to be blunt, but, whether we like it or not, our child labor laws mean that some 15 year old girl will be taking it in the ass from some random stranger tonight so that she doesn't have to go hungry tomorrow.
I'm not going to go through all 50 states, but as far as I know there are not ANY states in the US that do not severely limit the number of hours a minor can work. Tell me this... What do you think a 15 year old girl is going to do when it is a crime for a legitimate employer to hire her, going to the police to report that her parents are fulfilling their legal requirements to support her will lead to her arrest, and she hasn't eaten for 3 days?
This doesn't even take into account that they need a special permit that often cannot be obtained.
Even worse, every state in the US has laws that severely limits how much you can work under 18. It is a pretty bad situation for those people under 18 that have to support themselves.
What in the world does how long you will live have to due with when you become an adult?!?!?! If we get our life spans up to 200, does that mean that 40 year olds will no longer be adults? The "But we live longer" excuse is a total non- sequitur, but someone always pulls it out.
But that's also an oversimplification of what I was saying. I was giving an illustration of one benefit of the way modern society is structured which requires at least some proportion of "adults" with substantially deeper educations and abilities than can be achieved by the vast majority of 13-year-olds -- that is, if the common expected level of education didn't go past seventh grade or so, the Internet wouldn't exist, or at least not in anything near its current form. And it's hard to get around the fact that once someone is out in the world fending mostly for themselves (i.e. "an adult" in common usage), it will be much harder for them to devote themselves to the long-term full-time education and development that would be required to maintain modern technological standards in a society where we really considered a 13-year-old an adult in the same sense as we currently do (say) a 25-year-old.
You contradict yourself. You say that a 13 year old adult could not get the any education beyond 13 because an adult cannot get further education, then use people who DID get further education after becomeing adults as your example. Which is it? Can an adult continue to go to school or not?
You say this in the same paragraph that you mention reading and writing, which I think is inconsistent. Especially since your original post was talking about the past 100,000 years of human history. True, basic literacy is frequently achieved by the age of 13, to varying degrees. For most of the past 100,000 years that is already far more than was expected of adults, so we do expect more in some ways. I would also strongly question your claim that reading and writing is "generally covered" by the age of 13, since there is a noticeable difference between the reading/writing level of the average 13-year-old and the average college, or even high school, graduate
13 years old is 7th grade. You might want to believe differently, but most people do not get much beyond that in any practical way. Those that do, will become better readers and writers through day to day practice. You have to exclude anyone who goes on to higher education, as this group obviously would continue education past a legal adulthood, as they are already doing that, so as soon as you use college students as a comparator, you are arguing against yourself again.
But to be more pragmatic and concrete: I would challenge you to turn a 13-year-old into a professional-quality automotive engineer. Being generous, perhaps one in a thousand could do it, but this proportion of educated professionals is far too low to keep society functioning at anything near our current technological level. Simplifying the much greater complexity of the typical modern career down to "Adults may have more opportunities to do more" doesn't work. Most people in our society may have the opportunity to do more, but this comes with the inability not to if they want to have a secure long-term career. Our economy needs a certain fraction of people who have had a deeper education than has even been possible for much of history. It is no longer practical in most cases to support a large family with only basic physical labor and hunting ability.
What percent of the automotive engineer profession is made up of high school graduates that have no higher education? Yeah, pretty small group right? You keep using the argument that identifying people as adults at 13 is bad because we need people with post adult education by giving examples of people who have post adult education. The physical labor comment is an obvious straw man, as I have consistently indicated a 7th grade education. If you are implying that the only thing you learn in school up until the 7th grade is hunting and physical labor, you are just plain wrong, and most jobs do not need greater than a 7th grade education.
Our ability to converse online has absolutely nothing to do with when humans become adults. Saying that "modern society has benefits and calling 17 year olds children is part of modern society, thus calling 17 year olds children is a benefit" is a logical fallacy. I suspect that you already understand why so I won't go and get a link to a logic site.
We do not expect more from from adults now than we did in the past. That is just a false statement. Adults may have more opportunities to do more, but more is not expected of them. Yes, there is more reading an writing, but that is generally covered before the age of 13.
There is also a serious logic flaw in your statement that because we don't have to do something, that means we should not do something. Just because we do not HAVE to consider 13 year olds adults, does not mean that we SHOULD not.
Combine this with the fact that anyone trying to claim we are not biologically adults once we have hit puberty, is either lying, or seriously confused.
No, I am not serious about DDT. I don't believe for a second that our species genetic code has become damaged, but I am in the minority. The reason that blokes "grow up around 18" is because that is when much of society considers them adults. If they were considered adults at 14, they would be grown up at 14. Of course your statement that at 20, you look back at 13 and say you were a bit immature, and that you expect to see your 20 year old self as immature at 40, just shows that if you really think about it, you understand the problem. If you are a healthy human, you should continue to grow and mature until the day you die. That does not mean you are not an adult until you are dead.
Slashdot Mirror
"Kids should not get their hands on these games, but that's the responsibility of the parents. They have the tools."
Correction... it should read "My Kids should not get their hands on these games, but that's the responsibility of the parents. They have the tools."
When you state that universally "kids" should not get their hands on the games, you validate the idea of creating a law. After all, if it is an absolute truth that "kids" should not get their hands on the games, then the only time the law would go into effect is when a parent is not doing their job. Add to that, that what a "kid" is, is a political mess. The government still considers people kids up to a decade or more ofter reaching puberty.
Also, no disrespect intended with this, but, I'm not any more comfortable with you defining what my child should and should not be exposed to than I am with some politician making the same decision.
"By your logic, if I make a burger at home, I'm stealing from McDonald's."
Only if you put thousand island dressing on it.
The reason they miss the sign is because of the number of unneeded signs in the world. We have learned to ignore paper with words on it unless we assume it pertains to us. Really, it is the only way to function in modern society. The reason that they go to the circulation desk is because they assume the same thing that I do. That the circulation desk is there to answer questions. They assumed that the circulation desk was there before they ever entered. They may even already know where it is, and also make the assumption that the circulation desk knows where the forms are.
...affirmative action = discrimination.
It's more like walking across someones lawn. I don't know how it works in the UK, but unless you have specifically posted a no trespassing sign or specifically asked them to leave your property, you cannot have someone arrested for trespassing on your front lawn here in the US. It has an implied invitation. Now, if the guy had actually accessed a computer on there internal network, maybe...just maybe, it could be likened to entering an unlocked house.
Dear Sir,
As the great great great grandson of Bagie McDouche, sole surviving heir to the McDouche blood line, and caretaker to vast tracts of Doucheland, I have to inform you that representing the parent poster as a Douche Lord is a violation of the Douchland Clean Water Act, and the Treaty of Summer Breeze Scent.
"Seriously, an operating system release is just not worth invoking such strong emotions."
I have to disagree with this. Many, many people's lives and careers are intimately tied to their ability to use a computer. Given that MS is a monopoly, and for all intents and purposes hundreds of millions of people will have no other choice but to spend many hours a day interacting with MS's OS, it is absolutely fair to have it invoke very strong emotions. If you had said the same about a game console, where there are really three good choices, and millions of peoples livelihoods didn't depend on it, I would agree with you. We are not talking about that though. We are talking about something that is as much a part of our infrastructure as telephones, electricity, and gasoline. If the electric company sent out a memo tomorrow that told us they were going to seriously increase the cost of electricity, everyone would have to upgrade their breaker boxes, and a bunch of your existing electric uses will be incompatible with their new system, you can bet that people would be swearing. At this point Windows is a utility and will cause just as much frustration when MS does bad things to the customers.
Speaking of H&R Block... I'm trying to figure out who in their right mind would want tax preparation done by a business that advertises a lottery as good financial planning.
You had better also read the agreement carefully. When DirectTV was pulling this stunt, they were including a blurb where you admitted to having committed copyright violation. Given that there are now criminal penalties on the books for copyright violation, you could very well be paying $3000 for a nice vacation to 'pound you in the ass prison'.
I would go a step farther and say that MySpace has an immediate and obvious educational value. The fact that schools all over the nation have had, and still have music programs indicates that they feel music is in fact an educational endeavor. MySpace oddly enough is an exceedingly good resource for researching music.
Which means the current exemptions from the law are not doing any good at all, so the law should be enforced equally.
The lights and siren are so the cop doesn't kill someone while going through a light. The police are not doing anyone a favor by killing pedestrians to possibly catch a drug dealer. I could probably be convinced that lights only would be acceptable, but certainly not beyond that. The "We have to break the law so we can enforce it" excuse is BS.
It's very simple. A cop should never, under any circumstances go through a red light without his lights and siren. Anything less is an clear, immediate and unnecessary danger to lives of the citizens in the area. Any time the lights and siren go on, the computer that is now standard equipment in police cars should be logging that the emergency system was turned on. At the end of the day/week/whatever the calls logged should match 100% with the computer log. Any missing call logs should require an explanation.
Given that the police officer is indicating that he is operating in a situation extrodiary enough that he must break the law, there is no excuse for keeping a record.
I don't entirely disagree with you, in that this is a serious problem. Where I do agree with you is where the problem is. I don't believe that this principal would have shut down classes and spent thousands of dollars trying to hunt down the perpetrator if it was one of his students that had this happen to them. If he is unwilling to spend those resources on the students, it indicates that he doesn't see this a problem, he sees it as a problem when it happens to him.
It is a little like the father of the bully who I outraged when one of his kid's victims finds the bully alone at night in some ally, and uses a tool, and the bully gets sent home with a broken collar bone. The assault at night is not where the problem started.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that the principal deserved it. The problem is that the US public school system is broken, and is unfixable in it's current form. The problems start with the parent, and go all the way up to the President of the United States (who referred to the smart kids as 'The Nerd Patrol'). Parents don't want to bother raising their kids. Schools have become a business, and students are treated the same way that the local phone company treats their "customers". And, the government sees a way to increase power of the unwashed masses.
I consistently tell people that when discussing MP3 players. If the other players in the market want to compete with the iPod, they need to get together and produce a standard interface that can do the things that the iPods interface can do. The interface needs to allow complete control of the audio player from the external accessory, allow charging, syncing, audio in, audio out, and have a standard physical size for the player itself, so that you can just plug the whole player in without fiddling with wires. For the player size, they should just make the accessory slot big enough for a larger sized player, and have simple clips of some kind so that you can drop an adapter (which is just a piece of plastic) in to make the accessory fit your player exactly.
At this point iPod is king for the same reason AC is king for home electrical wiring. It works pretty well, and there are more and cheaper accessories for plugging into it.
(Whoo hoo! It's not a car analogy!)
That is a good argument for a flash device, not a good argument against a hard drive device.
The question is, though, do teens make bad decisions because they have not been considered adults, or because of a physical limitation. I would say that the number of stupid decisions I see 18-25 year olds make, indicates that the problem isn't "teens make bad decisions", but instead is "people tend to make bad decision until they have been considered an adult for a few years."
It is good to see that you agree whole heartedly with the parent poster, as we all know that complaining about spelling is an admission that all of the points are 100% correct.
Your head is in the sand. Work permits are simply not available to minors who's parents will not support them, and the fact that a 15 year old's parents will not support this is a problem, does not change the fact that it happens all the time. I certainly don't understand how you can say that there is no reason for a 14 or 15 year old to work more than 18 hours a week to support themselves. $7.80 is the highest minimum wage in the country. That means the 15 year old (if they can even get a permit) would be trying to support themselves off of ~$550 a month. Could you support yourself on $550 a month? Of course, many of these 15 year olds cannot get a permit at all. Can you support yourself off of $0 a month?
Saying that parents SHOULD be good to their children is no excuse for criminalizing those minors whose parents are not. And sorry to be blunt, but, whether we like it or not, our child labor laws mean that some 15 year old girl will be taking it in the ass from some random stranger tonight so that she doesn't have to go hungry tomorrow.
http://dllr.state.md.us/labor/empm.html
/ erd_9212_p.pdf
. html#8
r .pdf/$FILE/MLLPoster.pdf
http://dwd.wisconsin.gov/dwd/publications/erd/pdf
http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/ChildLaborPamphlet2000
http://198.234.41.198/w3/webwh.nsf/Files/MLLPoste
I'm not going to go through all 50 states, but as far as I know there are not ANY states in the US that do not severely limit the number of hours a minor can work. Tell me this... What do you think a 15 year old girl is going to do when it is a crime for a legitimate employer to hire her, going to the police to report that her parents are fulfilling their legal requirements to support her will lead to her arrest, and she hasn't eaten for 3 days?
This doesn't even take into account that they need a special permit that often cannot be obtained.
Even worse, every state in the US has laws that severely limits how much you can work under 18. It is a pretty bad situation for those people under 18 that have to support themselves.
What in the world does how long you will live have to due with when you become an adult?!?!?! If we get our life spans up to 200, does that mean that 40 year olds will no longer be adults? The "But we live longer" excuse is a total non- sequitur, but someone always pulls it out.
You contradict yourself. You say that a 13 year old adult could not get the any education beyond 13 because an adult cannot get further education, then use people who DID get further education after becomeing adults as your example. Which is it? Can an adult continue to go to school or not?
13 years old is 7th grade. You might want to believe differently, but most people do not get much beyond that in any practical way. Those that do, will become better readers and writers through day to day practice. You have to exclude anyone who goes on to higher education, as this group obviously would continue education past a legal adulthood, as they are already doing that, so as soon as you use college students as a comparator, you are arguing against yourself again.
What percent of the automotive engineer profession is made up of high school graduates that have no higher education? Yeah, pretty small group right? You keep using the argument that identifying people as adults at 13 is bad because we need people with post adult education by giving examples of people who have post adult education. The physical labor comment is an obvious straw man, as I have consistently indicated a 7th grade education. If you are implying that the only thing you learn in school up until the 7th grade is hunting and physical labor, you are just plain wrong, and most jobs do not need greater than a 7th grade education.
Our ability to converse online has absolutely nothing to do with when humans become adults. Saying that "modern society has benefits and calling 17 year olds children is part of modern society, thus calling 17 year olds children is a benefit" is a logical fallacy. I suspect that you already understand why so I won't go and get a link to a logic site.
We do not expect more from from adults now than we did in the past. That is just a false statement. Adults may have more opportunities to do more, but more is not expected of them. Yes, there is more reading an writing, but that is generally covered before the age of 13.
There is also a serious logic flaw in your statement that because we don't have to do something, that means we should not do something. Just because we do not HAVE to consider 13 year olds adults, does not mean that we SHOULD not.
Combine this with the fact that anyone trying to claim we are not biologically adults once we have hit puberty, is either lying, or seriously confused.
No, I am not serious about DDT. I don't believe for a second that our species genetic code has become damaged, but I am in the minority. The reason that blokes "grow up around 18" is because that is when much of society considers them adults. If they were considered adults at 14, they would be grown up at 14. Of course your statement that at 20, you look back at 13 and say you were a bit immature, and that you expect to see your 20 year old self as immature at 40, just shows that if you really think about it, you understand the problem. If you are a healthy human, you should continue to grow and mature until the day you die. That does not mean you are not an adult until you are dead.