Your great-grandparents lived in a world of Yes, they did. And they managed to bring up our parents in the same way their own parents did. Fact of the matter is still that if you think that the way you were brought up was a total fuck-up, then welcome to the party, because pretty much every generation for the history of mankind has had that feeling.
people have fallen away from the traditional centers of morality such as the Church and social organizations and replaced them with nothing. And that's as blatant a lie as I've seen in this thread. Two, actually. First, the church isn't and never was a center of morality, but you can go read some Hitchins for the detailed argument. The second is that nobody has replaced them with "nothing". Our modern-day replacements are just too diversified and individual to be lumped up in a simple statement. We still do get our morality from somewhere. It's just that Jane has hers from those six magazines and these four TV shows and her circle of friends, and her parents, and her youth group, and her school, and basically her entire environment, whereas Joes has his from his environment, which differs from Janes. Other than our grandparents, we didn't grow up in a homogeneous environment.
Speaking just for me, I certainly have morals. They're probably different from yours, but they're not "nothing".
the deleterious effects of premature sexualization I'd be interested to hear about that. Please send me your newsletter. No, seriously, for all I know, not teaching kids about sex causes actual, visible, considerable damage. I have yet to see a single study that shows that premature sex-education does any harm. I don't quite know what exactly you mean by "sexualization", but if it is what I think you mean then you should consider the fact that nothing - and I mean nothing creates more sexualization than repression does.
Prior methods of easing children into adult relationships by mixing the sexes in a controlled manner, such as camps and retreats and dances are being abandoned as hokey remnants of a prior century. It might just be that we found out that artifically keeping the sexes seperated is about as dumb as, say, keeping people seperated by skin colour.
Things like abortion and birth control are legal and prevalent, yet large numbers of people still don't use them responsibly. I agree on that. Do you think it's because those people know too much about sex or too little?
You can't just assume that everything's going to be okay. I don't. I agree it isn't that simple. But please follow the argument: If our current generation of decision makers was raised in a way that was totally fucked up, then why, tell me, can we trust their judgment on proper education? Shouldn't we look to those who were raised well instead?
They don't, no matter how much sex ed you give them, And that is the fault of the kids, or the fault of the sex ed?
I've been through sex ed as a kid. At least we had some. In hindsight, I realize it was the worst part of school, from an education perspective. I can only imagine what it's like in the US (do you even have sex ed in school?).
I'm not a teacher or other professional in the field of education, but I have a little amateur knowledge on the subject. That alone tells me the major things that are wrong in current sex ed:
Sex ed should start before the kids "feel funny" about it.
It shouldn't be anything special. Just like you teach kids how to brush their teeth, or how to call the police if they're ever in an emergency situation, you tell them the basics about sex.
Don't use fear. It screws people up and that's all it does. Hormones block out fear in the heat of the moment. It's a simple biological process, and if you don't understand biology that far, then what the fuck are you doing giving sex ed anyways?
They'll smash a "Start" menu into the lower-left corner, bloat it up with features nobody uses 99% of the time but who get always in the way, and it'll be jerky and ugly unless you own a PC from three years in the future.
Also, it will be remotely-exploitable to make copies of your fingerprints with a three-line Bluetooth hack.
The multitouch is fantastic, and at the same time still limited. If you have seen the original multitouch video then you know that there is incredible potential with that technology, way beyond what the iPhone does.
Yes but if you control the kindernet, you could introduce concepts such as sex in a tasteful, sensible & perhaps even educational fashion. After all, they wont know any different. The conservatives and xian right-wing would literally kill you for that. They have two core beliefs that everything else rests upon: 1.) There is a god, 2.) Sex is something awful.
Which is the whole beauty of it! The second thing I thought when watching the video was whether I could possible create a small game around that concept (I'm a hobbyist game developer).
It's so simple that you can do something with it, without having to wait for IBM, or Nintendo or any other big-$$$ company to bring out the relevant hardware in maybe 5 years.
The problem being, of course, that the "kindernet" will be of zero interest to exactly the kids this legislation wants to "protect".
Very small kids aren't interested in sex. It means nothing to them. At the age where kids start to get interested in sex, there's maybe one thing that rivals that desire: Doing whatever the adults are doing. Those 12 and 14 year olds won't stay in their "kindernet". They will get on the (adult) Internet, if only because that's what the adults are doing.
I mean, really, can you imagine a better invitation to come in and look around than a "you must be 18 years old to view this page. click below to indicate that you are that old, kids must go elsewhere" boilerplate? No matter if it takes the form of the current porn website front pages or some legislation. Kids will find a way past.
Because, you know, in a world of war, terrorism, economic depression and a climate change that just might wipe us out as a species, protecting the children from something their hormones will drive them to in five or ten years (if that) with a force that nukes pale against is certainly the most important thing to do.
I say fuck the children - not literally, except if they want to fuck each other, they've got my blessings as long as they know some basic health principles (for both physical and mental health). So how about we stop worrying about the children and start worrying about the real issues?
Because, when you think about it, things are very simple. Either, growing up the way past generations did wasn't totally fucked up, and the kids will be just fine, or if growing up the way past generations did was totally fucked up, and is something we must protect the kids from at all costs, then those who grew up in that fucked up way are the last ones you should entrust those decisions to.
Between those things and multi-touch, I am literally waiting for a revolution of computer input design. 10 years ago, there was the movement, but not the technology. Today we have the technology. Please, give us some games that use this, give us multitouch tablet Macs (sorry windos fanboys, microsoft could pull it off technologically, but it wouldn't be useable), give me a VR multitouch table! Now! The flying car can wait until next year...
What a misleading article. There are some technical details that are new, but capabilities are extremely old and have been available for Linux for almost a decade. They haven't seen much use, and that's the part that might change, but filing this as a new development is stupid. It'll only invite the windos shills to claim that windos is so much better because they've had granular permissions for sooo long (yes, they had, for about the same time Linux did. same story, almost nobody uses them.)
Yepp, typical lawyers, like you'll find in every company.
Disclaimer: I deal with lawyers almost daily in my day job.
This is so typical of lawyer-thinking. It's unbelievable. For 20 years or so, managers are taught about "win-win" and "synergy" and "cooperative negotiatitons". Lawyers, meanwhile, are stuck in a "us against them" and "we must win" mindset. All of them (with rare exceptions).
I don't know what, exactly, it is about the study of law that turns you into that kind of human, but I know CEOs of large companies, senior managers, the lot - and the lawyers are more aggressive and stubborn than almost all of them.
So, in summary, if your dog is too nice and didn't eat the last wannabe-burglar, buy a lawyer and chain him in the garden, he is guaranteed to be more vicious.
You don't need an inside scoop, you just need to read the news and use your brain.
Nintendo has ramped up production, considerably. However, demand is still strong. Building a new factory isn't a minor investment, and it takes months to do it. Which is why they are rightly cautious doing it, because if you guess wrong, and the demand wasn't permanent, you sit on a million-dollar factory and trucks of devices.
Everyone underestimated both the permanence and the amount of demand for the Wii. Which means Nintendo didn't get a chance to stock any overproduction during the summer for the christmas business, because there wasn't any overproduction.
Topic was something like "professional document and knowledge management". It was one week(!) full of building folders and excel tables. Also, some Google searching and the only part remotely interesting, the part about Wikis that was in the initial listing was announced as not going to happen.
What, exactly, is "professional" about this? Was the question I asked on the 2nd day. I didn't get a satisfying answer. I did get my money back.
Quite frankly, time and time again I am amazed at what low-level tools people use for jobs. In IT, in many areas, the decision makers are like artisans who work with stone-age tools and think that's the right thing to do. For almost every instance where I've seen an excel sheet being used, for example, there is a better tool in existence that does a better job for less effort. Except that it probably costs money and the guy who makes the decisions doesn't know it.
Ah, the usual "X has more Y than Z, so it must be better" strawman. With all the usual flaws. Didn't we have this discussion at least 50 times already?
So let me see, we will have:
The windos fanboys drooling "told you so"
The Mac fanboys screaming "it ain't so"
The math fanboys going on about how you should trust statistics unless you've forged them yourself
The nitpicker faction revealing that they are comparing different kinds of bugs
The wannabe-blackhatters outlining that these vulnerabilities were more vulnerable than those vulnerabilities and should count more
The I-read-the-web-all-day group pointing out a contradicting article in some other magazine
The tinfoil-hat wearers telling us that it's all bullshit anyways and the article is only meant to get us upset and create ad impressions
The meta-commentators who point out that we've already been through all this and do we really need to re-hash this discussion again?:-)
Whether or not the child was correct that he was adhering to the spirit of the request, he was not adhering to the letter of the request, and refusing to do so is still worthwhile grounds for punishment. So what you're saying is that the letter is more important than the spirit?
I'm getting old. You know, back in my days, the letters were the attempt to capture the spirit of the law in writing. People (including lawyers) were well aware that such an attempt was limited, due to the limits if language and all, and that the letter of the law needs interpretation. Which is why laws are usually published with voluminous commentaries outlining what exactly was meant, and are through the years refined with even more commentaries as courts and law experts work out the details.
The other way around, I always thought, was the realm of the religious and irrational - taking "the word" and abiding by it, no matter what.
Of course, if the customer experience is terrible, nobody would bother trying to pirate Windows. According to some statistics that I just pulled out of my hat, 12.43% of the population are slightly more more than slightly masochistic, so there is a market...
When are we going to feel tired bashing Vista? Until the next Windows release? When did we stop bashing WinME? Extrapolate from there.
i just don't see anything really bad with Vista. The problem most people are having is that they aren't seeing anything good, either.
For others, the eye candy worths everything. Isn't that what iPhone is all about? No, it isn't. The iPhone is about something that nothing from MS will ever be - useability.
Be aware of the concept of public space. Its vital to civilisation but is seen by the elites as merely space the private sector hasn't got a use for. Yet. It's actually worse than that. It's a space that the private sector doesn't have to pay for.
So from the perspective of a company it's "paid for, exclusive space" vs. "free, shared space".
It's called "Microsoft has the best product" An assumption without evidence that I'll counter with one of my own: If you were to make a survey among the IT departments of all companies, a large percentage of replies would tick the "because there is no alternative" option of the question "why do you use windos?".
"The reason Microsoft has a large marketshare these days is because that's where the applications are. The important question you have to ask yourself is which way the causality connection works. Is windos so widely used because so much software is only available for it, or is so much software written exclusively for windos because that's what most people use? History has the evidence: Back when Unix ruled, and there were a dozen or so different versions, software makers would offer their software for all of them, or at least the major ones, unless they had ties with one of the Unix companies. Only in a "market" where one product dominates can you afford to produce add-on products exclusively for that product. There is a market for iPod accessoires. There is no market for Scandisk MP3-Player accessoires, only for "generic MP3-Player" ones.
Exactly what "dirty trick" is Microsoft using at this point to lock people in? Put that into Google and you'll certainly get about 10 mio. pages of answers. Heck, put it into the/. search bar and you'll get thousands. Or read the court documents, where many of them are documented. Why should I repeat that all?
does Microsoft have a monopoly? Are there *no* viable alternatives? Is it impractically difficult to live a Microsoft free life, either at work or at home? I would say there are numerous Mac people who would say 'no', as well as numerous Linux people. And that means nothing. I say that as a Mac (and former Linux) person.
The (legal) definition of a monopoly is not that there are absolutely no alternatives. Which makes sense, if you think about it. Otherwise a monopolist would only have to fund a small garage company to produce some "competing" product, with a total market share of 0.00001% and he's home free. And lawyers aren't good with numbers, so they try not to base decisions like "monopoly? yes or no?" on some limit value like 95% or 98%. They look at the effects on the market, and that effect is very, very obvious. In a very competitive environment, there has been one attempt to introduce a new product into this specific market in the past what, 15 years? In a market that yields billions of potential profits. You have to be absolutely blind to economic reality to believe that competitors to such a highly profitable market would not line up by the dozens, if it weren't for some factor that tells them even trying is foolish. It can't be the sheer quality of the current market leader, we agree on that.
Microsoft has a dominant marketshare, but does *not* have a monopoly. Replace "dominant" with "dominating" and you pretty much have the legal definition of what a "monopoly" is. Again, a monopoly does not mean 100% market share, and it does not mean there are absolutely no other alternatives. It means the market does not work anymore, and the OS "market" certainly doesn't.
Prove me wrong. Find funding for a startup that produces an operating system. For what it's worth, find a VC company that doesn't laugh you out the door.
Sure, MS would still have a huge advantage in that they have more money. That's one of the problems of capitalism, that the market isn't really equal to everyone. However, they have the option, which is much more than they have now, plus we'd learn just how much MS really cares to deliver a browser to customers instead of just forcing one on them.
Opera, I could imagine, would concentrate on their local market first, for example. Mozilla would probably make a very nice download image so shops can burn their own CDs, or join up with some other companies and make them pay for the CDs in return for including their demos/advertisement on the CD. The point is that there is suddenly an option.
And no, I wouldn't want to pay. Why should I? My browser of choice (Firefox) is free.
That's silly. Of course a particular company is going to tend to standardize on one platform, on the average. Sure. In a healthy market, many particular companies would still standardize on one platform. But what do you call it when pretty much every company standardizes on the same platform? Coincidence? Please, I assume we both know enough math to calculate the chances of that.
Exactly my point. Microsoft has none of that. Put it this way: could Microsoft jack up the price of their basic Vista or XP to, say, $1000? And would people just eat it, because they have no choice? The answer is "no", because they do have alternatives. Yes, MS does have all that. Look at Vista. A sub-par product like that, worse than its own predecessor, would fail in every other market. The competition between MS Office and OpenOffice is non-existent despite the massive price difference. In a time where the bottom line is ultimately important, you'd think that a $1000 saving per work place would be an argument for at least a considerable number of companies to switch, wouldn't you? And yes, I do believe MS could jack up the price to $1000. Heck, they're already at half that with the Ultimate Edition or whatever they're called. People would complain loudly - and pay. The vast majority of companies are so very much locked-in that switching would be more expensive. The worst they would do is stay with whatever they currently have and skip one update cycle.
Today the idea is absurd. There are numerous alternatives to Microsoft. Which is why all the corporate networks are so diversified with many different systems you can choose from when you start a job?
Large marketshare does not make a monopoly. Both Wikipedia and Merriam-Webster disagree.
It's not the size of the market share. The question is not if you have 100%, 90% or 80% of the market, but whether you control the market, to the exclusion of others, and can dictate the price of the product. Or in other words: Whether the price-finding mechanics of the free market have been destroyed.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking just for me, I certainly have morals. They're probably different from yours, but they're not "nothing". the deleterious effects of premature sexualization I'd be interested to hear about that. Please send me your newsletter. No, seriously, for all I know, not teaching kids about sex causes actual, visible, considerable damage. I have yet to see a single study that shows that premature sex-education does any harm. I don't quite know what exactly you mean by "sexualization", but if it is what I think you mean then you should consider the fact that nothing - and I mean nothing creates more sexualization than repression does. Prior methods of easing children into adult relationships by mixing the sexes in a controlled manner, such as camps and retreats and dances are being abandoned as hokey remnants of a prior century. It might just be that we found out that artifically keeping the sexes seperated is about as dumb as, say, keeping people seperated by skin colour. Things like abortion and birth control are legal and prevalent, yet large numbers of people still don't use them responsibly. I agree on that. Do you think it's because those people know too much about sex or too little? You can't just assume that everything's going to be okay. I don't. I agree it isn't that simple. But please follow the argument: If our current generation of decision makers was raised in a way that was totally fucked up, then why, tell me, can we trust their judgment on proper education? Shouldn't we look to those who were raised well instead?
I've been through sex ed as a kid. At least we had some. In hindsight, I realize it was the worst part of school, from an education perspective. I can only imagine what it's like in the US (do you even have sex ed in school?).
I'm not a teacher or other professional in the field of education, but I have a little amateur knowledge on the subject. That alone tells me the major things that are wrong in current sex ed:
Yes, but as I said, it won't be useable.
They'll smash a "Start" menu into the lower-left corner, bloat it up with features nobody uses 99% of the time but who get always in the way, and it'll be jerky and ugly unless you own a PC from three years in the future.
Also, it will be remotely-exploitable to make copies of your fingerprints with a three-line Bluetooth hack.
Yes, I know. I happen to own an iPhone.
The multitouch is fantastic, and at the same time still limited. If you have seen the original multitouch video then you know that there is incredible potential with that technology, way beyond what the iPhone does.
Which is the whole beauty of it! The second thing I thought when watching the video was whether I could possible create a small game around that concept (I'm a hobbyist game developer).
It's so simple that you can do something with it, without having to wait for IBM, or Nintendo or any other big-$$$ company to bring out the relevant hardware in maybe 5 years.
The problem being, of course, that the "kindernet" will be of zero interest to exactly the kids this legislation wants to "protect".
Very small kids aren't interested in sex. It means nothing to them. At the age where kids start to get interested in sex, there's maybe one thing that rivals that desire: Doing whatever the adults are doing. Those 12 and 14 year olds won't stay in their "kindernet". They will get on the (adult) Internet, if only because that's what the adults are doing.
I mean, really, can you imagine a better invitation to come in and look around than a "you must be 18 years old to view this page. click below to indicate that you are that old, kids must go elsewhere" boilerplate? No matter if it takes the form of the current porn website front pages or some legislation. Kids will find a way past.
Because, you know, in a world of war, terrorism, economic depression and a climate change that just might wipe us out as a species, protecting the children from something their hormones will drive them to in five or ten years (if that) with a force that nukes pale against is certainly the most important thing to do.
I say fuck the children - not literally, except if they want to fuck each other, they've got my blessings as long as they know some basic health principles (for both physical and mental health). So how about we stop worrying about the children and start worrying about the real issues?
Because, when you think about it, things are very simple. Either, growing up the way past generations did wasn't totally fucked up, and the kids will be just fine, or if growing up the way past generations did was totally fucked up, and is something we must protect the kids from at all costs, then those who grew up in that fucked up way are the last ones you should entrust those decisions to.
Between those things and multi-touch, I am literally waiting for a revolution of computer input design. 10 years ago, there was the movement, but not the technology. Today we have the technology. Please, give us some games that use this, give us multitouch tablet Macs (sorry windos fanboys, microsoft could pull it off technologically, but it wouldn't be useable), give me a VR multitouch table! Now! The flying car can wait until next year...
What a misleading article. There are some technical details that are new, but capabilities are extremely old and have been available for Linux for almost a decade. They haven't seen much use, and that's the part that might change, but filing this as a new development is stupid. It'll only invite the windos shills to claim that windos is so much better because they've had granular permissions for sooo long (yes, they had, for about the same time Linux did. same story, almost nobody uses them.)
Yepp, typical lawyers, like you'll find in every company.
Disclaimer: I deal with lawyers almost daily in my day job.
This is so typical of lawyer-thinking. It's unbelievable. For 20 years or so, managers are taught about "win-win" and "synergy" and "cooperative negotiatitons". Lawyers, meanwhile, are stuck in a "us against them" and "we must win" mindset. All of them (with rare exceptions).
I don't know what, exactly, it is about the study of law that turns you into that kind of human, but I know CEOs of large companies, senior managers, the lot - and the lawyers are more aggressive and stubborn than almost all of them.
So, in summary, if your dog is too nice and didn't eat the last wannabe-burglar, buy a lawyer and chain him in the garden, he is guaranteed to be more vicious.
You don't need an inside scoop, you just need to read the news and use your brain.
Nintendo has ramped up production, considerably. However, demand is still strong. Building a new factory isn't a minor investment, and it takes months to do it. Which is why they are rightly cautious doing it, because if you guess wrong, and the demand wasn't permanent, you sit on a million-dollar factory and trucks of devices.
Everyone underestimated both the permanence and the amount of demand for the Wii. Which means Nintendo didn't get a chance to stock any overproduction during the summer for the christmas business, because there wasn't any overproduction.
Haven't you heard of date-zones? It's probably April Fools day somewhere...
Pssst. :-)
Topic was something like "professional document and knowledge management". It was one week(!) full of building folders and excel tables. Also, some Google searching and the only part remotely interesting, the part about Wikis that was in the initial listing was announced as not going to happen.
What, exactly, is "professional" about this? Was the question I asked on the 2nd day. I didn't get a satisfying answer. I did get my money back.
Quite frankly, time and time again I am amazed at what low-level tools people use for jobs. In IT, in many areas, the decision makers are like artisans who work with stone-age tools and think that's the right thing to do. For almost every instance where I've seen an excel sheet being used, for example, there is a better tool in existence that does a better job for less effort. Except that it probably costs money and the guy who makes the decisions doesn't know it.
Like any "reality show", they show at best a recreation of actual events.
So let me see, we will have:
I'm getting old. You know, back in my days, the letters were the attempt to capture the spirit of the law in writing. People (including lawyers) were well aware that such an attempt was limited, due to the limits if language and all, and that the letter of the law needs interpretation. Which is why laws are usually published with voluminous commentaries outlining what exactly was meant, and are through the years refined with even more commentaries as courts and law experts work out the details.
The other way around, I always thought, was the realm of the religious and irrational - taking "the word" and abiding by it, no matter what.
So from the perspective of a company it's "paid for, exclusive space" vs. "free, shared space".
The (legal) definition of a monopoly is not that there are absolutely no alternatives. Which makes sense, if you think about it. Otherwise a monopolist would only have to fund a small garage company to produce some "competing" product, with a total market share of 0.00001% and he's home free. And lawyers aren't good with numbers, so they try not to base decisions like "monopoly? yes or no?" on some limit value like 95% or 98%. They look at the effects on the market, and that effect is very, very obvious. In a very competitive environment, there has been one attempt to introduce a new product into this specific market in the past what, 15 years? In a market that yields billions of potential profits. You have to be absolutely blind to economic reality to believe that competitors to such a highly profitable market would not line up by the dozens, if it weren't for some factor that tells them even trying is foolish. It can't be the sheer quality of the current market leader, we agree on that. Microsoft has a dominant marketshare, but does *not* have a monopoly. Replace "dominant" with "dominating" and you pretty much have the legal definition of what a "monopoly" is. Again, a monopoly does not mean 100% market share, and it does not mean there are absolutely no other alternatives. It means the market does not work anymore, and the OS "market" certainly doesn't.
Prove me wrong. Find funding for a startup that produces an operating system. For what it's worth, find a VC company that doesn't laugh you out the door.
Sure, MS would still have a huge advantage in that they have more money. That's one of the problems of capitalism, that the market isn't really equal to everyone. However, they have the option, which is much more than they have now, plus we'd learn just how much MS really cares to deliver a browser to customers instead of just forcing one on them.
Opera, I could imagine, would concentrate on their local market first, for example. Mozilla would probably make a very nice download image so shops can burn their own CDs, or join up with some other companies and make them pay for the CDs in return for including their demos/advertisement on the CD. The point is that there is suddenly an option.
And no, I wouldn't want to pay. Why should I? My browser of choice (Firefox) is free.
It's not the size of the market share. The question is not if you have 100%, 90% or 80% of the market, but whether you control the market, to the exclusion of others, and can dictate the price of the product. Or in other words: Whether the price-finding mechanics of the free market have been destroyed.