Sure would make a nice meal much nicer if you didn't have to worry about some inconsiderate parents bringing out a child that is too young to maintain themselves in a public manner.
My daughter has had good restaurant manners since the age of 2. I personally get rather annoyed when we get stuck in a section filled with parents who haven't taught their children to behave just because our daughter is the wrong age. Why should we have to suffer just because some people can't teach their children proper etiquette? She has misbehaved in a restaurant exactly once, at the age of 4. We packed up immediately and left, and she's never done it again.
That's wonderful, but I'm sure that you have had an active role in helping her develop that imagination, whether you actively encouraged it or not. There are probably millions of children in the U.S. alone whose parents use the television and video games as babysitters, and give the kid barely a whiff of personal attention.
Ahhh, but that is not the subject at hand - electronic entertainment cannot be blamed for the poor state of parenting in this country today. I would most definitely agree that the general quality of parenting today does seem worse than the quality of parenting when I was young.
Your closing statement where you say:
it is an example of one child growing up faster (in at least one sense) after excessive exposure to electronic entertainment
... does not, IMO, have any bearing whatsoever with the rest of your statement. Looking at this logically, my daughter has high exposure to electronic entertainment and has a good imagination. Your nephew has high exposure to electronic entertainment and has a bad imagination. Therefore, high exposure to electronic entertainment cannot be said to be indicative of either result.
Now, admittedly, this is a pretty small sample group but I still stand by my statement - bad parenting, not electronic entertainment, is to blame for your poor nephew's situation.
Additionally, the premise that kids are not as imaginative today as they were "in the good old days" is a complete crock! I have a 9 year old girl, and she is just as imaginative as I was when I was her age... and lots of her imagination comes from her exposure to all of the forms of entertainment we have these days. She invents and draws incredibly original characters, much more original than when I used to do the same thing. She's even learning how to program and create her own video games because of electronic entertainment.
It sounds to me like just another knee-jerk "things used to be better when we were young" sort of thing, and I call bullshit on it.
Technology wise, I agree, this is pretty kewl. Ideally, they'll just start releasing all their movies in this format and the DVDs you buy now (and can play now) will later on also contain the HD content you want for when you get the HD-DVD player at a more reasonable price.
That just sounds way too optimistic though. I'm sure they'll screw up this good bit of tech. somehow, you know, with markting and sales:)
It's really hard to say... only one of the movie companies has to have an executive with a bit of vision to see that this would help to fuel the move to HD and the rest of them would have to follow suit or risk losing in a price war. There are occasionally executives in MegaCorp America with vision and insight, as popular as it is to believe otherwise.
The idea as you present it is the obvious way to handle the situation, so I wouldn't be terribly surprised to see them leverage it this way.
i thought windows 2000 supported dual cores. any other reason?
Dude! Thank you for correcting me! You are right, I am wrong. I'm switching back to 2k this weekend, I hate XP.
Unfortunately, I'm a game developer so I don't think I'm going to be able to get away with this for long - the DirectX SDK will no longer install to 2k unless you use a version that's a few years out of date.
Indeed, it will be a good thing for the company to take the FTC to court and get the law struck down, not only as unconstitutional, but hopefully as stupid also. That might send a message to legislators who cry out "But think of the children!" and pass dumb laws as part of their election campaigns.
I'm afraid I don't have enough faith in the system to believe that the law would be struck down. The "think of the children" angle is incredibly effective, that's why it gets used so much for easy points in the polls.
As has been mentioned repeatedly in the conversation, though, Xanga failed to utilize the data they had at hand for the age of these children. It sounds like technical oversight to me based on what I read, but that is neither here nor there - whether malicious or not, they did not practice due diligence. I do not follow cases closely, but I think I'd have heard of a case where somebody got dinged hard in an unreasonable fashion, tied to how difficult it is to truly verify the age of the potential user... but they seem to accept that there is only so much one can do - and therefore, I'm not so sure that in practice, the law is unjust.
I found 2k to be incredibly stable, but when I bought a new setup I got a 64 bit CPU and bought XP x64 because I figured I was supposed to have a 64 bit OS to go with my 64 bit CPU.
XP x64 is not stable. At all. It crashes like a Win98 box. I haven't had a huge problem with drivers, but it's still unstable as hell. I'm considering downgrading to regular XP to see if it would be more stable.
I just had to get a multi-core CPU, didn't I? heh.
I'd be surprised if more than $1 mil came from Alaska due to its low population and relatively small economy.
Apparently you haven't heard about that thing they've got in Alaska called Prudhoe Bay? Giant oil fields, biggest oil field in the nation in fact... more than twice the size of the East Texas field.
Yeah, Alaska doesn't contribute a damn thing to the economy of the United States with it's weak economy.
Is anyone playing Everquest 2 these days? I've been playing it the past couple of days and it seems way better than WoW.
Really? I installed EQ2 because I got myself a buff new box and wanted to push it, and I'm able to turn everything up all the way in EQ2 but I gotta say I was very underwhelmed. The textures were for the most part terrible, the terrain engine was ugly and generally speaking I failed to get what so many of my friends that are harcore EQ fans mean when they say "it looks so realistic!"
Vanguard, OTOH, looks like it's going to be good looking. Hope it plays well too.
The thing is - words in use to describe something should not have the ability to be Trademarked for that respective industry.
The trademark only covers the name of their (now defunct) web server, not any use of the term website. So nobody else would be able to create a web server and call it "Website". That's it. It's not like they were trademarking the general term... if you go and look at the trademark application, it quite specifically mentions that it refers to their web server software. Trademarks do not give universal domain to a term, only very specific domain in one area of trade.
Additionally, if they had had evil intentions for the trademark (assuming they could afford to legally obfuscate the issue enough by dragging the case out until their opponents folded, which I'm not so sure of in the case of O'Reilly), I would've thought they'd have already started execution of their nefarious plans.;-)
As far as books go, though... I've gotten to the point these days where the only computer books I'll buy are WROX. Hopefully they'll stay awesome for a while.
and therein lies the rub - the trademark was post WWW and the web, and by extension, the term "web site", which was commonly used by those working with the technology.
Post by a very short period of time. Was the term website actually in use before then? Was it commonly used? I don't know, and quite frankly I don't care. My point in all this has just been that there's a big difference between a term that's been used for a very long time and a term that has not actually reached common use yet.
I understand that everyone here has political reasons for being pissy about this, and I don't disagree with those... but the argument being used in this case is not particularly valid based on how they are being used. Not quite as invalid as when people got angry at them for having a trademark on the term Web 2.0, which they coined, but still...
Hell, wanna get pissy at them? Get pissy about how much their books have gone south! (I bet that one really starts folks flaming me now. heheheheh)
Well, let's say I was sitting down at a computer in 1980. There weren't many computers, so I should have been able to trademark "Computer" and then sue everyone everywhere?
Invalid argument. The term computer had been in use for a good 50 years before that time. If you were to have tried to trademark the term "Computer" in, say, the 1930s then you might have had a valid trademark - though the term had been in use for quite some time (centuries) before that to refer to an individual who performed mathematics with mechanical aid, such as an abacus.
Before the advent of the World Wide Web, there was no previous meaning to the word "website."
I'm pretty sure we did call them sites, but my point was that they were not common in the way that was meant by the article I was responding to... it was a pretty obscure term for a technology that hadn't finished catching on quite yet - especially by the mainstream like it is today.
Your analogy is flawed, those are made up words that were trademarked and then became common words. Not common words that were trademarked.
Your own argument is flawed - website is also a made up word. In fact, as has been stated elsewhere in this article, the application they had that was called Website was from 1994 (and ran on 3.1!)... a point in time at which the term website was most definitely not a common term. I know I was still spending most of my time in newsgroups and IRC at the time.
I'd say that depends on how you define faith. In broad strokes, I'd say faith is a strong conviction that what you believe is correct. There are significant differences in the specific nature of how this is expressed by different beliefs, but that is also shown to be true just from one kind of religion to another.
Educated believers are willing to be challenged, and accept anything that has sufficient evidence.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree with you here. A very surprising number of scientists, today and throughout history, are just as unwilling to have their beliefs challenged as the fundamentalists. It expresses itself differently, but your statement is false when applied to as broad a group as you attempt to apply it to.
However, it is fair to say that some scientists embrace challenges to their belief, but by the same token... I have met fundamentalists who were willing to embrace similar challenges.
Science for some is just another flavor of religion. Once mankind gets involved with something that involves any kind of faith, even educated faith, then he will have a tendency toward irrational behavior when his faith is challenged.
Why is it so hard for people to believe life exists beyond earth? The probabilities and facts dictate the earth is not the center of the universe.
It is possible to believe that life exists elsewhere in the universe while still having a scientific responsibility to prove that the artifacts in the Mars meteorite could have happened by inorganic processes.
Why is it that so many folks here whine about nobody following scientific process until it proves that something they want to believe in may not be true, and then suddenly their knee starts jerking.
Slashdot Mirror
My daughter has had good restaurant manners since the age of 2. I personally get rather annoyed when we get stuck in a section filled with parents who haven't taught their children to behave just because our daughter is the wrong age. Why should we have to suffer just because some people can't teach their children proper etiquette? She has misbehaved in a restaurant exactly once, at the age of 4. We packed up immediately and left, and she's never done it again.
Ahhh, but that is not the subject at hand - electronic entertainment cannot be blamed for the poor state of parenting in this country today. I would most definitely agree that the general quality of parenting today does seem worse than the quality of parenting when I was young.
Your closing statement where you say:
... does not, IMO, have any bearing whatsoever with the rest of your statement. Looking at this logically, my daughter has high exposure to electronic entertainment and has a good imagination. Your nephew has high exposure to electronic entertainment and has a bad imagination. Therefore, high exposure to electronic entertainment cannot be said to be indicative of either result.
Now, admittedly, this is a pretty small sample group but I still stand by my statement - bad parenting, not electronic entertainment, is to blame for your poor nephew's situation.
Additionally, the premise that kids are not as imaginative today as they were "in the good old days" is a complete crock! I have a 9 year old girl, and she is just as imaginative as I was when I was her age... and lots of her imagination comes from her exposure to all of the forms of entertainment we have these days. She invents and draws incredibly original characters, much more original than when I used to do the same thing. She's even learning how to program and create her own video games because of electronic entertainment.
It sounds to me like just another knee-jerk "things used to be better when we were young" sort of thing, and I call bullshit on it.
Man, I just knew them damn Microsoft® Magnets(TM) I bought were defective... now I'm going to have to call in an RMA.
It's really hard to say... only one of the movie companies has to have an executive with a bit of vision to see that this would help to fuel the move to HD and the rest of them would have to follow suit or risk losing in a price war. There are occasionally executives in MegaCorp America with vision and insight, as popular as it is to believe otherwise.
The idea as you present it is the obvious way to handle the situation, so I wouldn't be terribly surprised to see them leverage it this way.
When it's my choice, I tend to use OpenGL or an engine that does both... but when someone else is paying for it, I use what I'm being paid to use.
I'm hoping that with the cluster*bleep* that is DirectX 10 and Vista, we'll see the game industry return to OpenGL on a broader scale.
Dude! Thank you for correcting me! You are right, I am wrong. I'm switching back to 2k this weekend, I hate XP.
Unfortunately, I'm a game developer so I don't think I'm going to be able to get away with this for long - the DirectX SDK will no longer install to 2k unless you use a version that's a few years out of date.
If only that were 100% true... I'd still be running Win2k. But when I bought my dual core box, my choice in Microsoft offerings was XP or XP.
I'm afraid I don't have enough faith in the system to believe that the law would be struck down. The "think of the children" angle is incredibly effective, that's why it gets used so much for easy points in the polls.
As has been mentioned repeatedly in the conversation, though, Xanga failed to utilize the data they had at hand for the age of these children. It sounds like technical oversight to me based on what I read, but that is neither here nor there - whether malicious or not, they did not practice due diligence. I do not follow cases closely, but I think I'd have heard of a case where somebody got dinged hard in an unreasonable fashion, tied to how difficult it is to truly verify the age of the potential user... but they seem to accept that there is only so much one can do - and therefore, I'm not so sure that in practice, the law is unjust.
I found 2k to be incredibly stable, but when I bought a new setup I got a 64 bit CPU and bought XP x64 because I figured I was supposed to have a 64 bit OS to go with my 64 bit CPU.
XP x64 is not stable. At all. It crashes like a Win98 box. I haven't had a huge problem with drivers, but it's still unstable as hell. I'm considering downgrading to regular XP to see if it would be more stable.
I just had to get a multi-core CPU, didn't I? heh.
Actually, there are some places that public drunk driver registries.
I believe the phrase you were looking for is "they'll shoot their eyes out!"
Allow me to append that Stevens is still an asshole, though.
Apparently you haven't heard about that thing they've got in Alaska called Prudhoe Bay? Giant oil fields, biggest oil field in the nation in fact... more than twice the size of the East Texas field.
Yeah, Alaska doesn't contribute a damn thing to the economy of the United States with it's weak economy.
Really? I installed EQ2 because I got myself a buff new box and wanted to push it, and I'm able to turn everything up all the way in EQ2 but I gotta say I was very underwhelmed. The textures were for the most part terrible, the terrain engine was ugly and generally speaking I failed to get what so many of my friends that are harcore EQ fans mean when they say "it looks so realistic!"
Vanguard, OTOH, looks like it's going to be good looking. Hope it plays well too.
The trademark only covers the name of their (now defunct) web server, not any use of the term website. So nobody else would be able to create a web server and call it "Website". That's it. It's not like they were trademarking the general term... if you go and look at the trademark application, it quite specifically mentions that it refers to their web server software. Trademarks do not give universal domain to a term, only very specific domain in one area of trade.
Additionally, if they had had evil intentions for the trademark (assuming they could afford to legally obfuscate the issue enough by dragging the case out until their opponents folded, which I'm not so sure of in the case of O'Reilly), I would've thought they'd have already started execution of their nefarious plans. ;-)
As far as books go, though... I've gotten to the point these days where the only computer books I'll buy are WROX. Hopefully they'll stay awesome for a while.
Post by a very short period of time. Was the term website actually in use before then? Was it commonly used? I don't know, and quite frankly I don't care. My point in all this has just been that there's a big difference between a term that's been used for a very long time and a term that has not actually reached common use yet.
I understand that everyone here has political reasons for being pissy about this, and I don't disagree with those... but the argument being used in this case is not particularly valid based on how they are being used. Not quite as invalid as when people got angry at them for having a trademark on the term Web 2.0, which they coined, but still...
Hell, wanna get pissy at them? Get pissy about how much their books have gone south! (I bet that one really starts folks flaming me now. heheheheh)
Invalid argument. The term computer had been in use for a good 50 years before that time. If you were to have tried to trademark the term "Computer" in, say, the 1930s then you might have had a valid trademark - though the term had been in use for quite some time (centuries) before that to refer to an individual who performed mathematics with mechanical aid, such as an abacus.
Before the advent of the World Wide Web, there was no previous meaning to the word "website."
That is an excellent point, wish I had some points to mod you up with.
I'm pretty sure we did call them sites, but my point was that they were not common in the way that was meant by the article I was responding to... it was a pretty obscure term for a technology that hadn't finished catching on quite yet - especially by the mainstream like it is today.
That's what this entire thread has been about.
Your own argument is flawed - website is also a made up word. In fact, as has been stated elsewhere in this article, the application they had that was called Website was from 1994 (and ran on 3.1!)... a point in time at which the term website was most definitely not a common term. I know I was still spending most of my time in newsgroups and IRC at the time.
I'd say that depends on how you define faith. In broad strokes, I'd say faith is a strong conviction that what you believe is correct. There are significant differences in the specific nature of how this is expressed by different beliefs, but that is also shown to be true just from one kind of religion to another.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree with you here. A very surprising number of scientists, today and throughout history, are just as unwilling to have their beliefs challenged as the fundamentalists. It expresses itself differently, but your statement is false when applied to as broad a group as you attempt to apply it to.
However, it is fair to say that some scientists embrace challenges to their belief, but by the same token... I have met fundamentalists who were willing to embrace similar challenges.
Science for some is just another flavor of religion. Once mankind gets involved with something that involves any kind of faith, even educated faith, then he will have a tendency toward irrational behavior when his faith is challenged.
Why is it so hard for people to believe life exists beyond earth? The probabilities and facts dictate the earth is not the center of the universe.
It is possible to believe that life exists elsewhere in the universe while still having a scientific responsibility to prove that the artifacts in the Mars meteorite could have happened by inorganic processes.
Why is it that so many folks here whine about nobody following scientific process until it proves that something they want to believe in may not be true, and then suddenly their knee starts jerking.