The difference is that this cell may become a human, was there not a Slashdot article on here a week or so back that brain cells had been discovered in a fetus, earlier than previously thought possible?
I'd counter, that most humans do not gain true consciousness or true sentience (at least more than a chimpanzee) until 3-5 years old. I for one can not remember anything before my first year of kindergarten and I suppose had I died then, my mind would not have been able to comprehend what death entails nor would I have been really concerned about the ordeal. Not that I'm advocating the use of small children in lab experiments just because they don't really have souls or anything, but if we are arguing when life begins then we have to argue what is more important... The biological definition of life or conscious sentient life.
If you get down to it, conscious sentient life is more important than life that is not. If I am in a vegetable coma state for 20 years, I'm all for them puling the plug and using my body for science while others in such a state would prefer them to hold out as long as possible until a cure is found in the future (even cryogenics).
However, the dilemma is of course if you are no longer sentient or were never sentient to begin with is then you can't really voice your desire one way or another. Or even be able to have desire for anything for that matter.
I don't think any of us have a good answer for that.
imagine a world where there's an open source electronic voting software package that everybody used... wouldn't you want the voting machine to be able to reject software that wasn't say verified by a voting auditing board and signed?
Why would a voting machine use anything other than what the voting board put on them? Are you saying that voting machines could be easily tampered with by local officials?
In that case all one would have to do is taper with the source code and cause a machine to fail to be recognized by the code and therefore have a denial of service attack against districts in which you know people are going to vote against what you want.
You also have the right to not buy a piece of hardware that doesn't do what you want (e.g. run unsupported stuff). Don't like it, don't buy it
And the original author of the open source software has the right to refuse the company from using his software that he wrote in such a way that undermines the spirit of GPLv3. That is the point of open software.
If they company doesn't want to comply they can write their own software too and use whatever license they want.
Such behavior brought the Lego company back from the grave and iRobot seems to be fostering quite a bit of a community around hacking with the Rhoomba devices.
Otherwise known as "free marketing and development".
Problem 3: No, seriously, get it through your thick skull - that network isn't open because the guy who owns it reads slashdot and agrees with you. It's open because the guy doesn't know any better. However, his "stupidity" (reality: lack of interest in technology to the degree of yours) does not give you the "right" to steal.
So if I setup a web server and connect it to the net, leave port 80 wide open, and people connect to this server and read the content on the webpages and maybe download a few pictures... Well... Is that stealing?
Seriously it is the same thing as what we are doing here with bandwidth if we try to make it a tangible thing.
Now, if I wanted my web server to be only accessible to myself and I put up an.htaccess page with a firewall that only limits connections from certain IP addresses you can be sure as hell if someone still downloads the webpage that is stealing.
Why? Because you violated a security measure.
But you would say "But if I leave my house unlocked and you come in that is still tresspassing!"
Well... No... Because the internet and the wireless networks is considered open and public by default
Could you imagine the pain it would be to contact every free wireless operators or web hosts and go "Hey guys... Mind if I use your free service?"
Just as a web server is on the internet with port 80 anything on the FCC public wireless network is by default considered open and free to use unless you specifically make it so they can't connect.
Think of it like having an adult webserver that people pay to connect to get that information... Thats fine and dandy and heck... You could do the same with wireless technology so unless you specifically say... "Hey! Don't connect to my network! Provide me some authentification first!" then this is the case.
Its kind of like running a web server from your cable modem or DSL... Even if you didn't publicly submit the site to Google or even register the DNS for it, if someone connects to an open port 80 then that is not stealing your bandwidth because you are saying "here! have it for free!"
The more serious and disturbing outcome of this story is in that it presents a case for how wardrivers can have their passwords and personal information stolen through a clever phishing attack using a proxy.
What's preventing a guy from parking his van outside a Starbucks in a well to do neighborhood and having his his SSID say "Starbucks Free Wirless" and wait for people to connect and log all their actions through a proxy server.
I suppose he'd have to pull the current internet connection from the real starbucks router so he could route them legitimate pages first.
Most people don't know jack about security, and if the router works right out of the box, why are they going to bother poking around the settings? They're not.
Speaking of which, if Joe Six Pack sees two "linksys" in his available networks, how does he know which one is his?
Yes, but citizens cannot buy a radio scanner that covers the band which cell phones use.
Um... Let me guess?
Because the FCC said so?
Why doesn't this make sense to people.
FCC says these certain frequencies are private and certain frequencies are public. If you want a private frequency, then go talk to the FCC and buy one.
You sir, are running your routers on public domain. By law (which the grand parent has stated) anyone is allowed to receive these transmissions and send information back to the receiver. If you do not want people to be able to use these networks beyond these points then you spend the 90 seconds needed to turn on some minimal security measures.
I let you into my house, you dont automatically have permission to use my telephone to call your aunt in China. You can connect to my wifi but nothing short of written or spoken permission from myself gives you leave to use my internet connection.
FFS man. What part of anologies don't work for this doesn't make sense? Wireless connection implies that there will be an internet connection. It's like saying the person was at your door asking if they could come in to make a phone call. Why else would you connect to a wireless network?
Secondly, if you are saying this is your property... The get your damn property off mine because people sitting in my yard meaning to connect to my open network keep connecting to yours by accident because it just happened to be at the top of the list. Seriously... It takes 3 mouse clicks in your router setup to turn off your SSID broadcast.
Otherwise we'll have to to disconnect you from the Matrix.
But seriously, it is a big philosophical problem that has crept into the quantum physics issue since we have discovered thought problems such as Schreodinger's cat and what happened before the big bang.
Descartes (aka the "I think therefore I am" aka one of the founding fathers of englightened mathematics in the 17th century) had postulated in his Evil Demon arguement:
* If we cannot be certain that our senses do not deceive us, then we cannot know anything with certainty. * We cannot know whether or not our senses deceive us. * Therefore, we cannot know anything about the world.
Other philosophical dilemas about existence are quite interesting too such as the Brain in a vat, Dream Argument, and the 5 minute earth.
The simulation argument, claimed by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, investigates the possibility that we may be living in a simulation. The argument attempts to prove the disjunction of three hypotheses (that is, that at least one of the following three propositions must be true), that:
either
1. the human race will never reach a level of technology where we can run simulations of reality so detailed they can be mistaken for reality; or
2. races who do reach such a level do not tend to run such simulations; or
3. we are almost certainly living in such a simulation.
Proofs that Black Holes exist have always been a matter of elimination--it isn't a duck or a neutron star, ergo it must be a Black Hole. If there is another viable alternative, the proof goes by the wayside until more information is discovered.
The problem being is that Black Holes (if they do exist) are themselves unobservable and can only find them by looking for observable effects caused by them.
What is has is a trusted and fool-proof means of getting and receiving messages that you can trust with your life and the lives of your unit.
Unfortunately, your laptop was made by the lowest bidder.
You know that no foreign agent or enemy can break in and send info to you or anyone else in the system, pretending to be someone you trust.
Unfortunately, with this belief set hard in stone in your mind that TPM can not be hacked, you ignore signs that someone has indeed sending you bad intel because the enemy nation has bribed or tricked a top official at the Pentagon to give out his password through some sort of social engineering.
If your unit is overrun and you lose your laptop, anyone trying to use it without authentication or by hacking, will cause the laptop to self-destruct.
Unfortunately, you were captured during this event and spent 14 days being tortured and watching the summary execution of your squad mates until you gave the password and biometric info.
It is the Army who owns the computer. They own the software. They own the system. They own the TMP.
Well technically, the American taxpayer's own the computer. It is just that the Army gets a nice permanent lease on these items.;)
3) Populations with a good, liberal education that isn't just focused on math and science.
Umm... No.
If you haven't been paying attention most of those 3rd world nations are getting better because they are sending their kids here to get taught in math and science.
Sorry to say... A PHD in Philosophy, Political Science, or Liberal Arts isn't going to feed your family. Sure it might do wonders for culture, but I know so many friends who are art majors who actually do other things for a living than what they went to school:(
In truth there is a shortage of Medical Doctors, Scientists, and Engineers in the States and many of these people come here to help out and in turn improve conditions for their family back at their home country.
As a math teacher, she saw that many students relied on their (graphing) calculators to do even simple arithmetic as a result.
Depends... As one person said:
"Never memorize anything that you can look up." -Albert Einstin
Depends on how basic that math is and if you will always have access to do that calculator. If I need to find out if my $20 dollars is enough to by eggs, milk, and a six pack of beer I should be able to do that in my head.
However, if I need to calculate the velocity and trajectory of a swallow travling at two knots after being hit the 747 traveling at 258 mphs... I should get better tools.
Truth is... Its not memorization that makes man great, but the ability to utilize his tools. Without Google and Wikipedia, most of us would be nothing... But the same could be said if tomorrow we woke up with electricty, running water, and gasoline and were forced to live in caves.
The people that will be successful in the future will be those who can utilize those tools better than others. Sure today we don't have a TI calculator on us at all times (well most of us anyways) but someday kids will have computers implanted directly into their neural nets and the need to manually do calcuation of how much my $20 will buy in the year 2045 (well not much) will become a moot point... Because not only are they able to do it without memorization, but they can do it faster than a fellow with just a non-enchanced brain.
Same goes with a kid with a laptop and a kid without....
Re:Nice attempt at not connecting the dots.
on
The 64% Violent Pacman
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Do you expect me to purchase a game and play it through before I give it to my children?
No.
Because if your children become mass murderers, drug addicts, or sex offenders when they grow up... Then chances are it wasn't because they played Doom or looked at a Playboy magazine.
I'd say it will have to do something to the fact you did not take interest in their lives or didn't love them unconditionally. That and teach them a good moral framework and the ability to discern fantasy from reality (and the importance of higher education and getting a job)
Many of us 20-30 somethings today as kids played D&D, listened to "satanic" heavy metal, looked at playboys, played violent video games (Wolf3d and Doom), read really violent comics, and even tried to smoke a cigarrette before we were 13 back in the late 80's and early 90s... Yet today 99.99% of us slashdotters are well adjusted people who are very successful in what we do who are starting to have families on their own.
You could let your kids play GTA all they want (as long as it doesn't interfere with sleep, school, and social activities) and they won't turn into criminal or evil person.
The reason kids do turn out bad is because video games are often used in lieu of a parent. It doesn't matter if it Pac Man, Doom3, Mortal Kombat, My Little Pony, EQ, Barney Loves Kids, or Mario Brothers.
If you think raising kids means simply means putting your kid in front of a TV or computer and letting them sit there forever without ever being involved in their life... Then well... You are going to be suprised when they don't come home after 3 in the morning and are failing every class they have in school.
At the same time... A kid who plays Doom and GTA can still have good grades and social skills if you moderate his playing time and have him do other activities like chores, reading books, and schoolwork.
Even then you still can make those things fun... Give your 12 year old the Lord of the Rings trilogy book and after he reads them let him watch the movie. Your 8 year old passes his grade with flying colors... Go buy him a video game... Don't be as much concerned about the content of the game as how he reacts to it. As in... Just because he sees people behave in a certain way or say certain words that it isn't ok for them to say it or do those things.
The issue, though, is one of moderation. Why would a desktop user want 8 cores, which are drawing insane amounts of power, when they're not even utilizing 4 to full advantage? Word processing, accounting, and surfing the web don't need any of this.
Unless of course you work with Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark, Final Cut Pro, Premiere or anything in the desktop publishing multimedia business. Those people want their 8 cores and they want them now.
It's a shame that I have to protect my router somehow, especially because one of my devices (a Nintendo DS) doesn't support WPA at all.
I've got the same problem with my DS, but I've just setup MAC address filtering and not publicly broadcast the SSID. The DS plays just fine and the average person in my neighborhood isn't smart enough to know that there is a wireless network at all and I'd doubt they'd be smart enough to sniff the packets and modify their wifi to match my list addresses.
Sure half of Slashdot would be able to beat my security in 5 minutes, but when I want to keep my Joe sixpack neighbors from using my network its enough.
Secondly, this minimal amount of security does say "Hey! This wifi network is offlimits! There is no chance of accidental unauthorized use so if you use this without my permission by sniffing MAC address from the packets then it does violate intrusion laws."
So with security with obscurity, I get the local freeloaders off my network and I can play my DS Wifi.
Frankly, I've never understood the demonizing of ActiveX technology...But really, why do you single ActiveX out?
Two reasons:
1. Malware
2. Websites that don't function on non-Windows computers. (Linux and Mac)
I could go into a diatribe on how even the IE for the Mac OS doesn't have Active X either. I can't tell you how many times I had to deal with problematic banking, finacial, or other sites that needed Active X in the early 2000's that wouldn't work properly on Linux or Mac OS 9 and then OS X. (I was tech support for a major ISP who did Mac support and when people's banking sites wouldn't load they'd call us and complain.)
Fortunatley, these days most major websites have the consideration to make their pages compatible with Safari or Firefox.
Then I guess she shouldn't have entered into a contract that was a bad business deal for her.
I'm sick of this stupid hivemind attitude where the artists are so downtrodden and abused. Like it or lump it, these people aren't being mugged of their rights, they have to willingly sign them away. If they don't understand what they're signing, they should get a lawyer.
You are correct, but you forgot to mention one thing...
American musicians have no real alternatives to the RIAA!
Sure there are many Indie labels out there (such as my own), but we don't have the ability to put our CDs in walmart, put music videos on TV, and send our musicans on tours that cost ten's of thousands of dollars (have you ever looked into the logistics of having a road crew and a tour bus... it ain't cheap)
I will have to admit, if it weren't for the internet I wouldn't be able to do what I do today with promotion, sales, and distribution but we aren't making enough money to quit our day jobs.
So unless you have enough money to make your own label, an underground musician won't be able to compete with the RIAA's music.... Unless of course you don't mind doing it for free and the love of the music (which many do).
On the other hand... European major labels tend to be a bit more diverse and fair to their musicians.
You're the parents, you make the rules. Pull the plug, take the computer away, do something, anything.
Depends on where you live and if you fear for your life with your kid. One of the major problems in inner cities on the east coast is many single mothers fear their 15-18 year old that is in a gang and is involved with drugs and guns.
So much to a fact that they fear if they stand up to their kids they will be physically hurt by them or a gang member. I remember reading in a newspaper about one single mom turned her kid into the police for robbery and it was heradled in the right direction for reforming children.
Of course I live in a city with over 300 murders per year and many people are killed for just being a "snitch" and many of the inner city poor are afraid to talk to the police, but I can understand when some parents actually live in fear their kids.
However... If your kid lives in surburbia and you afraid to discipline him from taking away your game cube because it will hurt his feelings then... Well you are bad parent.
With that said, if I'm downloading a huge ISO or other multimedia file from a site on my 2.5GB connection, and the remote site is sitting on a 256K upstream cable modem, then I'm going to get no more than 256K.
Downloading your ISO's or other multimedia files via bit torrent would bypass the problem since you would be receiving data from many 256K upstream cable modems...
Or DSL... Or FiOS... Or whatever the others happen to be using at their end.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd prefer something longer lasting (and faster) than flash memory.
;)
Well... That rules out my old Seagate hard drive.
Hey at least at least Seagate's RMA process was painless no matter how many times you had to send it back
The able must serve the unable in our culture, so where's the benefit to being one of the able?
Being able to make the unable suffer... painfully.
Well at least until they pay large sums of money.
The difference is that this cell may become a human, was there not a Slashdot article on here a week or so back that brain cells had been discovered in a fetus, earlier than previously thought possible?
I'd counter, that most humans do not gain true consciousness or true sentience (at least more than a chimpanzee) until 3-5 years old. I for one can not remember anything before my first year of kindergarten and I suppose had I died then, my mind would not have been able to comprehend what death entails nor would I have been really concerned about the ordeal. Not that I'm advocating the use of small children in lab experiments just because they don't really have souls or anything, but if we are arguing when life begins then we have to argue what is more important... The biological definition of life or conscious sentient life.
If you get down to it, conscious sentient life is more important than life that is not. If I am in a vegetable coma state for 20 years, I'm all for them puling the plug and using my body for science while others in such a state would prefer them to hold out as long as possible until a cure is found in the future (even cryogenics).
However, the dilemma is of course if you are no longer sentient or were never sentient to begin with is then you can't really voice your desire one way or another. Or even be able to have desire for anything for that matter.
I don't think any of us have a good answer for that.
imagine a world where there's an open source electronic voting software package that everybody used... wouldn't you want the voting machine to be able to reject software that wasn't say verified by a voting auditing board and signed?
Why would a voting machine use anything other than what the voting board put on them? Are you saying that voting machines could be easily tampered with by local officials?
In that case all one would have to do is taper with the source code and cause a machine to fail to be recognized by the code and therefore have a denial of service attack against districts in which you know people are going to vote against what you want.
You also have the right to not buy a piece of hardware that doesn't do what you want (e.g. run unsupported stuff). Don't like it, don't buy it
And the original author of the open source software has the right to refuse the company from using his software that he wrote in such a way that undermines the spirit of GPLv3. That is the point of open software.
If they company doesn't want to comply they can write their own software too and use whatever license they want.
Where does it actually help the manufacturer?
Such behavior brought the Lego company back from the grave and iRobot seems to be fostering quite a bit of a community around hacking with the Rhoomba devices.
Otherwise known as "free marketing and development".
Problem 3: No, seriously, get it through your thick skull - that network isn't open because the guy who owns it reads slashdot and agrees with you. It's open because the guy doesn't know any better. However, his "stupidity" (reality: lack of interest in technology to the degree of yours) does not give you the "right" to steal.
.htaccess page with a firewall that only limits connections from certain IP addresses you can be sure as hell if someone still downloads the webpage that is stealing.
So if I setup a web server and connect it to the net, leave port 80 wide open, and people connect to this server and read the content on the webpages and maybe download a few pictures... Well... Is that stealing?
Seriously it is the same thing as what we are doing here with bandwidth if we try to make it a tangible thing.
Now, if I wanted my web server to be only accessible to myself and I put up an
Why? Because you violated a security measure.
But you would say "But if I leave my house unlocked and you come in that is still tresspassing!"
Well... No... Because the internet and the wireless networks is considered open and public by default
Could you imagine the pain it would be to contact every free wireless operators or web hosts and go "Hey guys... Mind if I use your free service?"
Just as a web server is on the internet with port 80 anything on the FCC public wireless network is by default considered open and free to use unless you specifically make it so they can't connect.
Think of it like having an adult webserver that people pay to connect to get that information... Thats fine and dandy and heck... You could do the same with wireless technology so unless you specifically say... "Hey! Don't connect to my network! Provide me some authentification first!" then this is the case.
Its kind of like running a web server from your cable modem or DSL... Even if you didn't publicly submit the site to Google or even register the DNS for it, if someone connects to an open port 80 then that is not stealing your bandwidth because you are saying "here! have it for free!"
The more serious and disturbing outcome of this story is in that it presents a case for how wardrivers can have their passwords and personal information stolen through a clever phishing attack using a proxy.
What's preventing a guy from parking his van outside a Starbucks in a well to do neighborhood and having his his SSID say "Starbucks Free Wirless" and wait for people to connect and log all their actions through a proxy server.
I suppose he'd have to pull the current internet connection from the real starbucks router so he could route them legitimate pages first.
Most people don't know jack about security, and if the router works right out of the box, why are they going to bother poking around the settings? They're not.
Speaking of which, if Joe Six Pack sees two "linksys" in his available networks, how does he know which one is his?
Yes, but citizens cannot buy a radio scanner that covers the band which cell phones use.
Um... Let me guess?
Because the FCC said so?
Why doesn't this make sense to people.
FCC says these certain frequencies are private and certain frequencies are public. If you want a private frequency, then go talk to the FCC and buy one.
You sir, are running your routers on public domain. By law (which the grand parent has stated) anyone is allowed to receive these transmissions and send information back to the receiver. If you do not want people to be able to use these networks beyond these points then you spend the 90 seconds needed to turn on some minimal security measures.
I let you into my house, you dont automatically have permission to use my telephone to call your aunt in China. You can connect to my wifi but nothing short of written or spoken permission from myself gives you leave to use my internet connection.
FFS man. What part of anologies don't work for this doesn't make sense? Wireless connection implies that there will be an internet connection. It's like saying the person was at your door asking if they could come in to make a phone call. Why else would you connect to a wireless network?
Secondly, if you are saying this is your property... The get your damn property off mine because people sitting in my yard meaning to connect to my open network keep connecting to yours by accident because it just happened to be at the top of the list. Seriously... It takes 3 mouse clicks in your router setup to turn off your SSID broadcast.
Not. That. Hard.
Otherwise we'll have to to disconnect you from the Matrix.
But seriously, it is a big philosophical problem that has crept into the quantum physics issue since we have discovered thought problems such as Schreodinger's cat and what happened before the big bang.
Descartes (aka the "I think therefore I am" aka one of the founding fathers of englightened mathematics in the 17th century) had postulated in his Evil Demon arguement:
Other philosophical dilemas about existence are quite interesting too such as the Brain in a vat, Dream Argument, and the 5 minute earth.
Personally, I perfer the Simulated Reality argument myself:
Proofs that Black Holes exist have always been a matter of elimination--it isn't a duck or a neutron star, ergo it must be a Black Hole. If there is another viable alternative, the proof goes by the wayside until more information is discovered.
The problem being is that Black Holes (if they do exist) are themselves unobservable and can only find them by looking for observable effects caused by them.
What is has is a trusted and fool-proof means of getting and receiving messages that you can trust with your life and the lives of your unit.
;)
Unfortunately, your laptop was made by the lowest bidder.
You know that no foreign agent or enemy can break in and send info to you or anyone else in the system, pretending to be someone you trust.
Unfortunately, with this belief set hard in stone in your mind that TPM can not be hacked, you ignore signs that someone has indeed sending you bad intel because the enemy nation has bribed or tricked a top official at the Pentagon to give out his password through some sort of social engineering.
If your unit is overrun and you lose your laptop, anyone trying to use it without authentication or by hacking, will cause the laptop to self-destruct.
Unfortunately, you were captured during this event and spent 14 days being tortured and watching the summary execution of your squad mates until you gave the password and biometric info.
It is the Army who owns the computer. They own the software. They own the system. They own the TMP.
Well technically, the American taxpayer's own the computer. It is just that the Army gets a nice permanent lease on these items.
3) Populations with a good, liberal education that isn't just focused on math and science.
:(
Umm... No.
If you haven't been paying attention most of those 3rd world nations are getting better because they are sending their kids here to get taught in math and science.
Sorry to say... A PHD in Philosophy, Political Science, or Liberal Arts isn't going to feed your family. Sure it might do wonders for culture, but I know so many friends who are art majors who actually do other things for a living than what they went to school
In truth there is a shortage of Medical Doctors, Scientists, and Engineers in the States and many of these people come here to help out and in turn improve conditions for their family back at their home country.
As a math teacher, she saw that many students relied on their (graphing) calculators to do even simple arithmetic as a result.
Depends... As one person said:
"Never memorize anything that you can look up." -Albert Einstin
Depends on how basic that math is and if you will always have access to do that calculator. If I need to find out if my $20 dollars is enough to by eggs, milk, and a six pack of beer I should be able to do that in my head.
However, if I need to calculate the velocity and trajectory of a swallow travling at two knots after being hit the 747 traveling at 258 mphs... I should get better tools.
Truth is... Its not memorization that makes man great, but the ability to utilize his tools. Without Google and Wikipedia, most of us would be nothing... But the same could be said if tomorrow we woke up with electricty, running water, and gasoline and were forced to live in caves.
The people that will be successful in the future will be those who can utilize those tools better than others. Sure today we don't have a TI calculator on us at all times (well most of us anyways) but someday kids will have computers implanted directly into their neural nets and the need to manually do calcuation of how much my $20 will buy in the year 2045 (well not much) will become a moot point... Because not only are they able to do it without memorization, but they can do it faster than a fellow with just a non-enchanced brain.
Same goes with a kid with a laptop and a kid without....
Do you expect me to purchase a game and play it through before I give it to my children?
No.
Because if your children become mass murderers, drug addicts, or sex offenders when they grow up... Then chances are it wasn't because they played Doom or looked at a Playboy magazine.
I'd say it will have to do something to the fact you did not take interest in their lives or didn't love them unconditionally. That and teach them a good moral framework and the ability to discern fantasy from reality (and the importance of higher education and getting a job)
Many of us 20-30 somethings today as kids played D&D, listened to "satanic" heavy metal, looked at playboys, played violent video games (Wolf3d and Doom), read really violent comics, and even tried to smoke a cigarrette before we were 13 back in the late 80's and early 90s... Yet today 99.99% of us slashdotters are well adjusted people who are very successful in what we do who are starting to have families on their own.
You could let your kids play GTA all they want (as long as it doesn't interfere with sleep, school, and social activities) and they won't turn into criminal or evil person.
The reason kids do turn out bad is because video games are often used in lieu of a parent. It doesn't matter if it Pac Man, Doom3, Mortal Kombat, My Little Pony, EQ, Barney Loves Kids, or Mario Brothers.
If you think raising kids means simply means putting your kid in front of a TV or computer and letting them sit there forever without ever being involved in their life... Then well... You are going to be suprised when they don't come home after 3 in the morning and are failing every class they have in school.
At the same time... A kid who plays Doom and GTA can still have good grades and social skills if you moderate his playing time and have him do other activities like chores, reading books, and schoolwork.
Even then you still can make those things fun... Give your 12 year old the Lord of the Rings trilogy book and after he reads them let him watch the movie. Your 8 year old passes his grade with flying colors... Go buy him a video game... Don't be as much concerned about the content of the game as how he reacts to it. As in... Just because he sees people behave in a certain way or say certain words that it isn't ok for them to say it or do those things.
The issue, though, is one of moderation. Why would a desktop user want 8 cores, which are drawing insane amounts of power, when they're not even utilizing 4 to full advantage? Word processing, accounting, and surfing the web don't need any of this.
Unless of course you work with Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark, Final Cut Pro, Premiere or anything in the desktop publishing multimedia business. Those people want their 8 cores and they want them now.
It's a shame that I have to protect my router somehow, especially because one of my devices (a Nintendo DS) doesn't support WPA at all.
I've got the same problem with my DS, but I've just setup MAC address filtering and not publicly broadcast the SSID. The DS plays just fine and the average person in my neighborhood isn't smart enough to know that there is a wireless network at all and I'd doubt they'd be smart enough to sniff the packets and modify their wifi to match my list addresses.
Sure half of Slashdot would be able to beat my security in 5 minutes, but when I want to keep my Joe sixpack neighbors from using my network its enough.
Secondly, this minimal amount of security does say "Hey! This wifi network is offlimits! There is no chance of accidental unauthorized use so if you use this without my permission by sniffing MAC address from the packets then it does violate intrusion laws."
So with security with obscurity, I get the local freeloaders off my network and I can play my DS Wifi.
Frankly, I've never understood the demonizing of ActiveX technology...But really, why do you single ActiveX out?
Two reasons:
1. Malware
2. Websites that don't function on non-Windows computers. (Linux and Mac)
I could go into a diatribe on how even the IE for the Mac OS doesn't have Active X either. I can't tell you how many times I had to deal with problematic banking, finacial, or other sites that needed Active X in the early 2000's that wouldn't work properly on Linux or Mac OS 9 and then OS X. (I was tech support for a major ISP who did Mac support and when people's banking sites wouldn't load they'd call us and complain.)
Fortunatley, these days most major websites have the consideration to make their pages compatible with Safari or Firefox.
Then I guess she shouldn't have entered into a contract that was a bad business deal for her.
I'm sick of this stupid hivemind attitude where the artists are so downtrodden and abused. Like it or lump it, these people aren't being mugged of their rights, they have to willingly sign them away. If they don't understand what they're signing, they should get a lawyer.
You are correct, but you forgot to mention one thing...
American musicians have no real alternatives to the RIAA!
Sure there are many Indie labels out there (such as my own), but we don't have the ability to put our CDs in walmart, put music videos on TV, and send our musicans on tours that cost ten's of thousands of dollars (have you ever looked into the logistics of having a road crew and a tour bus... it ain't cheap)
I will have to admit, if it weren't for the internet I wouldn't be able to do what I do today with promotion, sales, and distribution but we aren't making enough money to quit our day jobs.
So unless you have enough money to make your own label, an underground musician won't be able to compete with the RIAA's music.... Unless of course you don't mind doing it for free and the love of the music (which many do).
On the other hand... European major labels tend to be a bit more diverse and fair to their musicians.
You're the parents, you make the rules. Pull the plug, take the computer away, do something, anything.
Depends on where you live and if you fear for your life with your kid. One of the major problems in inner cities on the east coast is many single mothers fear their 15-18 year old that is in a gang and is involved with drugs and guns.
So much to a fact that they fear if they stand up to their kids they will be physically hurt by them or a gang member. I remember reading in a newspaper about one single mom turned her kid into the police for robbery and it was heradled in the right direction for reforming children.
Of course I live in a city with over 300 murders per year and many people are killed for just being a "snitch" and many of the inner city poor are afraid to talk to the police, but I can understand when some parents actually live in fear their kids.
However... If your kid lives in surburbia and you afraid to discipline him from taking away your game cube because it will hurt his feelings then... Well you are bad parent.
With that said, if I'm downloading a huge ISO or other multimedia file from a site on my 2.5GB connection, and the remote site is sitting on a 256K upstream cable modem, then I'm going to get no more than 256K.
Downloading your ISO's or other multimedia files via bit torrent would bypass the problem since you would be receiving data from many 256K upstream cable modems...
Or DSL... Or FiOS... Or whatever the others happen to be using at their end.
a concept which seems to go over OK in Asia and Europe, but not so OK in North America.
Ummm... That would be true but you have to say "but not so OK in North America except for Canada".
When all you have are silver bullets, all problems look like a werewolf.