I'm getting really tired of people predicting how vista or anything will do based on anecdotal evidence.
Anecdotal evidence is still evidence.
At least for the person using Vista. If I installed Vista on my box and it didn't work as intended, then that is all the evidence I need for it to not work for my setup.
However, it may work just fine with different hardware, drivers, or another user.
How is it un-natural just because we influenced it? Aren't we a part of nature? Matter (which includes the elements composing Carbon and Oxygen) cannot be created or destroyed, so our behavior is simply re-arranging pre-existing (or "natural") matter. That act is neither good nor bad, normal, nor abnormal, but has (arguably) measureable consequences.
Hrm... With that definition, Atomic bombs could be considered natural because we are assisting in natural atoms splitting.
It is like a chef having to give up his secret recipe just because he used GPL Spices.
Then don't use GPL spices. The point of GPL is that if you use it and contribute to it then you are obligated to share your "recipe".
If you don't want to do this and share, then don't use GPL recipes and either make your own from scratch or use BSD recipes.
GPL is for people who want to release their work to the public so they can modify and not have some one come along and use it as their own without contributing to this effort.
So if you don't want to contribute... Again... Don't use it because that is just free loading off the authors have released their work under GPL.
yeah, i broke it too - burn to cd, rip to MP3. Done and done
Yeah... The quality is crap too after going from lossy AAC to cd and then back to lossy.
Personally, AAC is a horid format and OGG and MP3 are 100 times better if you are an audifile.
I will have to credit with Apple keeping the file sizes down though with AAC.
Besides the DRM and bad quality I don't buy iTunes AACs because they screw the artists.
Its still easier for me to go to my indie privatley owned local CD shop and buy the CD and then rip it at highest quality MP3. It sounds better and I feel better by giving more money to the artist and local folks.
If you would like to actually demonstrate a scalable example where a market works on "honesty" instead of basic economic principles, please be my guest.
Black market gun sales and drug dealers.
There are no legal or economic ramnifications in those illegal areas, and yet most of the time the buyer and seller have nothing to go on other than honesty...
If they have to follow the british law, they have to follow it, else get sued like MS is getting sued by the EU.
Just because its illegal doesn't make it wrong nor because its legal make it right.
I mean what if we were a US Newspaper censoring articles to readers in 1936 Germany about attacks on Jewish people. Sure it would be illegal in Germany for a newspaper to publish a pro-jewish or anti-story, but that doesn't mean it makes it right.
I hope future games have better player communication and lobby rooms. As it is now, most Wifi games just feel like you are playing a really smart AI (or not smart depending)
I think more communication between players would make the online experience more enjoyable, but although having communication allows people to scream and curse at each other.
Not like we have a ton of obscene Mario Kart logos as it is....
I must have missed that article in the Constitution protecting people's rights to digitally copy and distribute other people's work.
To refresh everyone's memory...
An author's exclusive right to his creation is mandated in the US Constitution in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, also known as the Intellectual Property Clause, which also gives Congress the power to enact statutes: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
So in theory after a limited time the public should be legally able to digitally copy and distributes others work and secondly your work must promote Science and useful Arts.
If it fails these criteria... Then it fails the spirit of the copyright law. DRM breaks this comprimise since it is forever and often promotes neither science nor arts.
No, the people who are complaining the most and trying to find software to break DRM protections are the people who don't want to pay for the latest CD they heard on the radio. That is all that this discussion is about.
Umm... No. People that Pirate don't give a fuck about DRM because they are already circumventing it and hence do not complain. These people are either using audio video hijack programs and analog loop holes and don't really care about quality as long as its free.
The people that are complaining about DRM are those who are getting fucked by it or can't buy online media because they don't want to have to be tied in to that companies DRM and loose all their music when the company goes bankrupt or a software glitch hoses their authorization key.
Its why I won't buy iTunes music... I really don't like the idea of a hard drive crash killing my music and I have to pay for it all over again because I had to jumps through hoops of fire to back that data up (yeah I could burn it to audio cd and then back again but each time you burn from lossey and re-encode to lossey formats from that cd you loose quality big time. Not to mention you will have to manually type in the CD track names over again).
Until I get unecumbered MP3 downloads, I won't pay for it online. I'll stick to going to the local indie store and buying it there and then ripping it.
On the same note, I won't pirate a song either because the music I like is hard to find and online music sounds like crap or cuts out at the end. I'm willing ot spend that extra money for the quality but at the same time I don't want to pay for it twice if something goes wrong on the technical side of DRM.
"Those bodies affected by the Sun's gravitational pull in such a way they form a circular type orbit around it shall be called planets. Those bodies affected by an individual planet's gravitational pull shall be called moons."
If we did that then Saturn would technically have thousands of moons and we'd have hundreds of planets because some asteroids are larger than some of the smaller moons.
Actually, their goal is world domination under their hardline view of Islam.
Believe it or not Osama's goals were more secular than religeous.
After he returned from Afghanistan he was sort of a semi-hero in his home country of Saudi Arabia. When Saddam invaded Kutwait in 91, Osama personally offered King Saudi access to Al Queda's 100,000 volunteers and his personal fortune to fight off Saddam from a Saudi invasion.
But... The King's delegation (Osama wasn't allowed to talk to the royal family himself) laughed at Osama's offer because Saddam had over 1,000,000 troops and they were well armed at that.
Then King Saudi invited the American to be based in Saudi and attack an attack on Iraq. This infuriated Osama because no only was his offer rebuffed, but infidels were on holy ground. At that moment he swore revenge and packed his bags and moved to Sudan.
Later... Osama assisted the muslims in Somalia to drive out the Americans. His support was negliable and some say didn't really help as much as he said he did.
The problem with this was that Osama mistakenly thought that if you killed a few Americans they would run with their tails behind their legs because they had no stomach for fighting.
So he mistakenly went about and concocted 9/11 thinking if he brought the fight to their home land the Americans would give in and leave Saudi Arabia.
Of course we know that he was horribly mistaken and would have done better attacking military targets in Saudi Arabia, but that is neither here nor there but there are very secular reasons or at least political reasons that the terrorists do what they are trying to do to us.
Many of them use the banner of religion to carry out that agenda.
So why exactly is this guy's blog any more valid than the other things we've heard out of the vast media machine?
Occam's Razor fails horribly when we deal with popular belief of things that aren't true and of course free will and illogical behavior.
Otherwise, Goebbels was telling the truth during all his speeches because Germany's newspapers were saying the same thing and every one believed what was told to them.
Remember, just because its simpler and more logical for someone to tell you the truth doesn't mean they will.
Of course this guy could be lying as well... The point of the matter of what I'm trying to say is when you are dealing with politics is that you must understand the simplest explanation may not be the right one because people and politics are very complex beasts.
Linux will remain behind of commercial OSes in the realm of media, not because it is Linux, but becuase of DRM.
If you think that the majority of space on all the iPods in the world is filled up with music from iTunes... Well you've got another thing comming.
Besides, people don't buy iPods because they support fairplay DRM. They buy them because they play music on a fashionable easy to use device. They could care less as long as DRM is invisible and non-intrusive.
As soon as that DRM starts screwing them over, Joe six pack gets pissy and returns products to stores.
Take installation. Linux zealots are now saying "oh installing is so easy, just do apt-get install package or emerge package": Yes, because typing in "apt-get" or "emerge" makes so much more sense to new users than double-clicking an icon that says "setup".
Well... If you use Ubuntu, you can just check off the application you want to install instead of using apt-get.
If you use Red Hat... Well... I dunno.
Personally, I use a Mac, but Ubuntu isn't that hard to use if you want to use it.
Saying that MMOGs Promote Sociability is like saying that playing Counter Strike all day long improves your skills of teamwork, makes you react better, and will let you easily survive if someone attacks you. Gah
To be fair, Jack Thompson's military friend (that Sgt military guy... can't remember his name) said that playing Doom will turn you into a lethal killing machine just like the marines. *snickers*
If any of you recall the "interweb wars" between Somethingawful.com, YTMND.com, Albinoblacksheep vs Ebaumsworld.com over the issue of Eric Ebaum stealing the Lindsey Lohan animation. Apparently Ebaum was litteraly harrased into the ground and even got FBI invovled about people were shoing up at their corporate headquarters.
Not that Ebaum deserved it, but I'd say it was an intense movement against him via phone, email, postal, and people showing up at his office to question said theft.
From Wikipedia (keep in cultural context that before the collapse of the Soviet Union that when you got a hotel room you often shared it with other people you didn't know)
A hotel. A room for four with four strangers. Three of them soon open a bottle of vodka and proceed to get acquainted, then drunk, then noisy, singing and telling political jokes. The fourth one desperately tries to get some sleep; finally, frustrated, he surreptitiously leaves the room, goes downstairs, and asks the lady concierge to bring tea to Room 67 in ten minutes. Then he returns and joins the party. Five minutes later, he bends over an ashtray and says with utter nonchalance: "Comrade Major, some tea to Room 67, please." In a few minutes, there's a knock at the door, and in comes the lady concierge with a tea tray. The room falls silent; the party dies a sudden death, and the conspirator finally gets to sleep. The next morning he wakes up alone in the room. Surprised, he runs downstairs and asks the concierge where his neighbors had gone. "Oh, the KGB has arrested them!" she answers. "B-but... but what about me?" asks the guy in terror. "Oh, well, they decided to let you go. You made Comrade Major laugh a lot with your tea joke."
The Max Media player look interesting but then I saw one that instead of the DS passthrough and the flash on the GBA card that there was a new DS cart that had flash memory on it.
Easy. Anyone under the age of 18 -- with virtually no exception.
Hrm... But isn't it easier to track your kids with a cell phone.
Before cell phones kids would just tell their friends to cover them while they go someplace their not and not show up until like 4 in the morning.
With cell phones the parent can keep calling till the kid either answer or turn off the phone. I suppose they could turn it off but you could punish them for not answer the 5 voice messages and not returning the call to explain where the hell they were at 11pm instead of being home.
That and cell phones are good for kids when they get into trouble like being stranded somewhere and need someone to pick them up or to let their parents know there is an emergency.
Cell phones aren't just for talking to friends... Personally, I keep one on me at all times because I'm paranoid about car trouble or needing immediate medical attention becaue I drive so much on highways.
You never know how far the nearest pay phone is and they are getting few and far inbetween.
I don't get it. Maybe I'm just too old, but they hold practically zero interest for me.
I think there a growing crowd of aging people on slashdot that is either not motivated with following the herd or just not for new technologies and very doubtful of the future (For example, every time a new technology is mentioned we get someone yelling about "Where are those flying cars you promised?! We'll never see this in 20 years!")
Then we get those who often complain about Flash video when every knows the net is being dragged screaming and kicking to use flash video technology. Its just the way things are moving.
The same with social sites. Personally, I'm an old live journal user (well if you think 2001 is old) and would never blog on myspace, but yet I keep a my space site just so I can keep a presence there.
I'm late twenties almost thirties so I'm kind of old for that age group, but I can't tell you how many people from my old high school have contacted me through my space. Its endearing if nothing else, but as far as spending more than 5 minutes on the site per week, I seriously doubt I would ever do that.
So the point being is that it appears that most technology nerds on slashdot (including me) aren't really up on technology trends as much as we should. Maybe we don't care... Or maybe we cling to are old ancient technologies and refuse to give up the ghost.
Still we shouldn't scoff at it and nay say because it obviously these things are bigger than all of us combined like it or not. It's like the old war generals saying cavalry still trumps everything on the battlefield only to get them run over by those new fangled tanks.
The idea that they just worked harder, or rather, better than you is uncomfortable. It means that you're just lazy, don't have the necessary drive or don't know how to train.
It's much easier to believe that they are just innately better and it's not really your fault that you can't reach their level.
The problem is not general effort into all things. One can simply work harder by doing methadone and putting themselves in situations where the mind is more chemically adaptive to learning, but thats not a really good solution.
However, I'm a firm believer in genetic disposition.
Mostly because I can often repeat tasks with little or no boredom. As in... I don't get addicted to cigarrettes even if I smoked them for a year and then quit cold turkey, I can listen to the same album over and over again without getting bored of it. This of course annoys many people I carpool...
That and I can't really find WoW and online level up games fun because I don't really get that seratonin fix.
But I know this is most likley due to my genetic disposition rather than my personal habbits because I have always been like this as a child.
This of course helped me at tasks that needed repetative work with set rules(math), but was not so helping in other tasks that required critical thiking solutions and gray rules (English and Grammar) so I had to work harder at those subjects.
So... I'm ok with saying that some people are disposed at better subjects and at the same time one has to work, but I do not believe people are equal in a sense they are genetically, chemically, and physically equal. (as if you eat certain foods and get a good nights sleep you may be better predisposed to learning than someone who is malnourished and tired)
Still everyone has the same rights and abilities to learn as a human but sometimes it does take a more work in some areas if you aren't naturally inclined with. You know... The kids who can ace a test and never study vs the kids that do.
Good lord! What little kid would want to have one of these as their best friends... I could just just imagine the thing sitting at the end of their bed staring at them all night.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm getting really tired of people predicting how vista or anything will do based on anecdotal evidence.
Anecdotal evidence is still evidence.
At least for the person using Vista. If I installed Vista on my box and it didn't work as intended, then that is all the evidence I need for it to not work for my setup.
However, it may work just fine with different hardware, drivers, or another user.
How is it un-natural just because we influenced it? Aren't we a part of nature? Matter (which includes the elements composing Carbon and Oxygen) cannot be created or destroyed, so our behavior is simply re-arranging pre-existing (or "natural") matter. That act is neither good nor bad, normal, nor abnormal, but has (arguably) measureable consequences.
Hrm... With that definition, Atomic bombs could be considered natural because we are assisting in natural atoms splitting.
Ice that has been in my freezer for a few months tastes different from that fresh made.
For one, there are no leftovers in the antartic/antartica to transfer the flavor...
Secondly this ice is burried under meters upon meters of packed ice.
And lastly... You should really consider leaving a box of Arm and Hammer in your freezer.
Seriously man... The last thing I want to taste with my cold lemonade is left over fish or mother's ham "suprise".
It is like a chef having to give up his secret recipe just because he used GPL Spices.
Then don't use GPL spices. The point of GPL is that if you use it and contribute to it then you are obligated to share your "recipe".
If you don't want to do this and share, then don't use GPL recipes and either make your own from scratch or use BSD recipes.
GPL is for people who want to release their work to the public so they can modify and not have some one come along and use it as their own without contributing to this effort.
So if you don't want to contribute... Again... Don't use it because that is just free loading off the authors have released their work under GPL.
yeah, i broke it too - burn to cd, rip to MP3. Done and done
Yeah... The quality is crap too after going from lossy AAC to cd and then back to lossy.
Personally, AAC is a horid format and OGG and MP3 are 100 times better if you are an audifile.
I will have to credit with Apple keeping the file sizes down though with AAC.
Besides the DRM and bad quality I don't buy iTunes AACs because they screw the artists.
Its still easier for me to go to my indie privatley owned local CD shop and buy the CD and then rip it at highest quality MP3. It sounds better and I feel better by giving more money to the artist and local folks.
Has any other US president ever done as much damage to the US as Bush has?
Herbert Hoover and then maybe Andrew Johnson, but to be fair neither of those actually caused the problems they failed to deal with.
Although Johnson kind of did a bad job with the occupation of the southern states which Grant had to fix.
If you would like to actually demonstrate a scalable example where a market works on "honesty" instead of basic economic principles, please be my guest.
Black market gun sales and drug dealers.
There are no legal or economic ramnifications in those illegal areas, and yet most of the time the buyer and seller have nothing to go on other than honesty...
And of course threat of force.
If they have to follow the british law, they have to follow it, else get sued like MS is getting sued by the EU.
Just because its illegal doesn't make it wrong nor because its legal make it right.
I mean what if we were a US Newspaper censoring articles to readers in 1936 Germany about attacks on Jewish people. Sure it would be illegal in Germany for a newspaper to publish a pro-jewish or anti-story, but that doesn't mean it makes it right.
I hope future games have better player communication and lobby rooms. As it is now, most Wifi games just feel like you are playing a really smart AI (or not smart depending)
I think more communication between players would make the online experience more enjoyable, but although having communication allows people to scream and curse at each other.
Not like we have a ton of obscene Mario Kart logos as it is....
To refresh everyone's memory...
So in theory after a limited time the public should be legally able to digitally copy and distributes others work and secondly your work must promote Science and useful Arts.
If it fails these criteria... Then it fails the spirit of the copyright law. DRM breaks this comprimise since it is forever and often promotes neither science nor arts.
No, the people who are complaining the most and trying to find software to break DRM protections are the people who don't want to pay for the latest CD they heard on the radio. That is all that this discussion is about.
Umm... No. People that Pirate don't give a fuck about DRM because they are already circumventing it and hence do not complain. These people are either using audio video hijack programs and analog loop holes and don't really care about quality as long as its free.
The people that are complaining about DRM are those who are getting fucked by it or can't buy online media because they don't want to have to be tied in to that companies DRM and loose all their music when the company goes bankrupt or a software glitch hoses their authorization key.
Its why I won't buy iTunes music... I really don't like the idea of a hard drive crash killing my music and I have to pay for it all over again because I had to jumps through hoops of fire to back that data up (yeah I could burn it to audio cd and then back again but each time you burn from lossey and re-encode to lossey formats from that cd you loose quality big time. Not to mention you will have to manually type in the CD track names over again).
Until I get unecumbered MP3 downloads, I won't pay for it online. I'll stick to going to the local indie store and buying it there and then ripping it.
On the same note, I won't pirate a song either because the music I like is hard to find and online music sounds like crap or cuts out at the end. I'm willing ot spend that extra money for the quality but at the same time I don't want to pay for it twice if something goes wrong on the technical side of DRM.
Beating your competition is the side effect that you derive from pleasing customers. It is not the goal.
True but...
If you eliminated the competition, then you don't have to waste time or money pleasing customers.
Hey, it worked for Microsoft.
"Those bodies affected by the Sun's gravitational pull in such a way they form a circular type orbit around it shall be called planets. Those bodies affected by an individual planet's gravitational pull shall be called moons."
If we did that then Saturn would technically have thousands of moons and we'd have hundreds of planets because some asteroids are larger than some of the smaller moons.
Actually, their goal is world domination under their hardline view of Islam.
Believe it or not Osama's goals were more secular than religeous.
After he returned from Afghanistan he was sort of a semi-hero in his home country of Saudi Arabia. When Saddam invaded Kutwait in 91, Osama personally offered King Saudi access to Al Queda's 100,000 volunteers and his personal fortune to fight off Saddam from a Saudi invasion.
But... The King's delegation (Osama wasn't allowed to talk to the royal family himself) laughed at Osama's offer because Saddam had over 1,000,000 troops and they were well armed at that.
Then King Saudi invited the American to be based in Saudi and attack an attack on Iraq. This infuriated Osama because no only was his offer rebuffed, but infidels were on holy ground. At that moment he swore revenge and packed his bags and moved to Sudan.
Later... Osama assisted the muslims in Somalia to drive out the Americans. His support was negliable and some say didn't really help as much as he said he did.
The problem with this was that Osama mistakenly thought that if you killed a few Americans they would run with their tails behind their legs because they had no stomach for fighting.
So he mistakenly went about and concocted 9/11 thinking if he brought the fight to their home land the Americans would give in and leave Saudi Arabia.
Of course we know that he was horribly mistaken and would have done better attacking military targets in Saudi Arabia, but that is neither here nor there but there are very secular reasons or at least political reasons that the terrorists do what they are trying to do to us.
Many of them use the banner of religion to carry out that agenda.
So why exactly is this guy's blog any more valid than the other things we've heard out of the vast media machine?
Occam's Razor fails horribly when we deal with popular belief of things that aren't true and of course free will and illogical behavior.
Otherwise, Goebbels was telling the truth during all his speeches because Germany's newspapers were saying the same thing and every one believed what was told to them.
Remember, just because its simpler and more logical for someone to tell you the truth doesn't mean they will.
Of course this guy could be lying as well... The point of the matter of what I'm trying to say is when you are dealing with politics is that you must understand the simplest explanation may not be the right one because people and politics are very complex beasts.
Linux will remain behind of commercial OSes in the realm of media, not because it is Linux, but becuase of DRM.
If you think that the majority of space on all the iPods in the world is filled up with music from iTunes... Well you've got another thing comming.
Besides, people don't buy iPods because they support fairplay DRM. They buy them because they play music on a fashionable easy to use device. They could care less as long as DRM is invisible and non-intrusive.
As soon as that DRM starts screwing them over, Joe six pack gets pissy and returns products to stores.
Take installation. Linux zealots are now saying "oh installing is so easy, just do apt-get install package or emerge package": Yes, because typing in "apt-get" or "emerge" makes so much more sense to new users than double-clicking an icon that says "setup".
Well... If you use Ubuntu, you can just check off the application you want to install instead of using apt-get.
If you use Red Hat... Well... I dunno.
Personally, I use a Mac, but Ubuntu isn't that hard to use if you want to use it.
Saying that MMOGs Promote Sociability is like saying that playing Counter Strike all day long improves your skills of teamwork, makes you react better, and will let you easily survive if someone attacks you. Gah
To be fair, Jack Thompson's military friend (that Sgt military guy... can't remember his name) said that playing Doom will turn you into a lethal killing machine just like the marines. *snickers*
If any of you recall the "interweb wars" between Somethingawful.com, YTMND.com, Albinoblacksheep vs Ebaumsworld.com over the issue of Eric Ebaum stealing the Lindsey Lohan animation. Apparently Ebaum was litteraly harrased into the ground and even got FBI invovled about people were shoing up at their corporate headquarters.
Not that Ebaum deserved it, but I'd say it was an intense movement against him via phone, email, postal, and people showing up at his office to question said theft.
I've been looking around for a long time and seen a great deal of DS and GBA cards to choose from. ( http://wiki.pocketheaven.com/Category:DS_Flash_Car ds )
The Max Media player look interesting but then I saw one that instead of the DS passthrough and the flash on the GBA card that there was a new DS cart that had flash memory on it.
Easy. Anyone under the age of 18 -- with virtually no exception.
Hrm... But isn't it easier to track your kids with a cell phone.
Before cell phones kids would just tell their friends to cover them while they go someplace their not and not show up until like 4 in the morning.
With cell phones the parent can keep calling till the kid either answer or turn off the phone. I suppose they could turn it off but you could punish them for not answer the 5 voice messages and not returning the call to explain where the hell they were at 11pm instead of being home.
That and cell phones are good for kids when they get into trouble like being stranded somewhere and need someone to pick them up or to let their parents know there is an emergency.
Cell phones aren't just for talking to friends... Personally, I keep one on me at all times because I'm paranoid about car trouble or needing immediate medical attention becaue I drive so much on highways.
You never know how far the nearest pay phone is and they are getting few and far inbetween.
I don't get it. Maybe I'm just too old, but they hold practically zero interest for me.
I think there a growing crowd of aging people on slashdot that is either not motivated with following the herd or just not for new technologies and very doubtful of the future (For example, every time a new technology is mentioned we get someone yelling about "Where are those flying cars you promised?! We'll never see this in 20 years!")
Then we get those who often complain about Flash video when every knows the net is being dragged screaming and kicking to use flash video technology. Its just the way things are moving.
The same with social sites. Personally, I'm an old live journal user (well if you think 2001 is old) and would never blog on myspace, but yet I keep a my space site just so I can keep a presence there.
I'm late twenties almost thirties so I'm kind of old for that age group, but I can't tell you how many people from my old high school have contacted me through my space. Its endearing if nothing else, but as far as spending more than 5 minutes on the site per week, I seriously doubt I would ever do that.
So the point being is that it appears that most technology nerds on slashdot (including me) aren't really up on technology trends as much as we should. Maybe we don't care... Or maybe we cling to are old ancient technologies and refuse to give up the ghost.
Still we shouldn't scoff at it and nay say because it obviously these things are bigger than all of us combined like it or not. It's like the old war generals saying cavalry still trumps everything on the battlefield only to get them run over by those new fangled tanks.
The idea that they just worked harder, or rather, better than you is uncomfortable. It means that you're just lazy, don't have the necessary drive or don't know how to train.
It's much easier to believe that they are just innately better and it's not really your fault that you can't reach their level.
The problem is not general effort into all things. One can simply work harder by doing methadone and putting themselves in situations where the mind is more chemically adaptive to learning, but thats not a really good solution.
However, I'm a firm believer in genetic disposition.
Mostly because I can often repeat tasks with little or no boredom. As in... I don't get addicted to cigarrettes even if I smoked them for a year and then quit cold turkey, I can listen to the same album over and over again without getting bored of it. This of course annoys many people I carpool...
That and I can't really find WoW and online level up games fun because I don't really get that seratonin fix.
But I know this is most likley due to my genetic disposition rather than my personal habbits because I have always been like this as a child.
This of course helped me at tasks that needed repetative work with set rules(math), but was not so helping in other tasks that required critical thiking solutions and gray rules (English and Grammar) so I had to work harder at those subjects.
So... I'm ok with saying that some people are disposed at better subjects and at the same time one has to work, but I do not believe people are equal in a sense they are genetically, chemically, and physically equal. (as if you eat certain foods and get a good nights sleep you may be better predisposed to learning than someone who is malnourished and tired)
Still everyone has the same rights and abilities to learn as a human but sometimes it does take a more work in some areas if you aren't naturally inclined with. You know... The kids who can ace a test and never study vs the kids that do.
Good lord! What little kid would want to have one of these as their best friends... I could just just imagine the thing sitting at the end of their bed staring at them all night.