Parents, teachers, etc need to get off their fat lazy asses and pay attention to what their kids are doing.
The internet should not be censored to "protect" anyone. If you don't like your kids seeing porn online, then you should stop them. Teachers should do the same. Review the history files afterwards also just in case, and let them know ahead of time you are going to check what sites the kids visited. I know that won't work against everyone but nothing is fullproof. Especially censorware.
It all goes down to our society not wanting to be responsible for anything. Parents want to blame video games, tv, the internet, music, etc. for how they fail to keep their own children in line. Smokers commit slow suicide by putting fire into their lungs, then sue tobacco companies because these people are too stupid to know better.
Gosh, thanks for explaining parenthood for us. Remember the good ol' days, when anyone could be a parent? You didn't have to have an MIS degree to understand and counter every internet hack your 10 year old learns. You didn't have to play through every last video game your kid brought home looking for excessive violence and gratuitous sexual content. You didn't have to get up with your kids on Saturday morning to screen out cartoons about turds and boogers. You didn't have to explain to your kid about anal sex and animal fetishes.
Reality check here...do you remember being a kid? Do you remember having an iron-clad determination to avoid everything your parents said was bad for you? Me neither! The problem is that there is now ten times the garbage available but parents are not ten times more knowlegable. I don't know that censorware is the best solution, either, but as a parent, I definitely feel as though my authority is being robbed of me, because I can't anticipate every last thing that is being thrown at my kids.
Does this guy at the Peacefire site really want adolescents filling their minds with all of the adult content out there? We're not talking about some kid having a couple of Playboys stashed away in his room, here...we're talking our children having the equivalent of several thousand porno mags and several thousand porno videos being only a few clicks away, filled with everything from graphic depections of sex acts to beastiality to S&M.
What's the solution, you say? "Don't let your kids on the internet, don't let them watch TV, don't let them play video games, don't let them read gamimg magazines." Hey, I'm not Amish...I just want my kids to grow up to be a decent, well-adjusted people, to not be plagued by sexual or chemical addictions, and maybe even to carry on the values that I'm trying to impart. I'm also not omnipotent; once they are outside of the range of my five senses, I no longer have control over them.
It's not a matter of "trust" or "upbringing"; kids by nature have an insatiable curiosity and will naturally gravitate to whatever is forbidden and easily accessible.
And what about the parents who aren't as attentive as I am? My kids are going to school with those kids, interacting with those kids, maybe even becoming friends with them; their influence will be felt. What we are building towards is not a parental problem, but a societal one.
You say that censorware isn't the answer. Fine. You also say that government intervention isn't the answer. That's fine, too, but tell me how you're going to shift the balance of power back in favor of the parents without doing these things.
First thing that occurs to me is how close this is getting to Rev. 13:16-18. How long before we need this kind of ID to go buy things, gain access to our workplaces, homes, etc...
This kind of stuff always sends a shiver down my spine...
I'm sure the military will be forced to be the early adopters (particularly in less democratic nations). You can also imagine it being used on oppressed people groups to control them.
I think ads should be placed at the start of TiVo and Replay TV shows. Get all of the ads out of the way up front, and then watch your program commercial-free, just like movies on VHS do today. Anyone who wants to watch it can watch it, and anyone who wants to fast forward can do that too.
I really don't mind most ads, but I hate having my show interrupted every 5 minutes. There are also those ads that are so idiotic that I will literally stop what I'm doing in whatever part of the house and dive for the remote to mute them. I will be soooo glad to never see that DiGiorno ad about the girl in the blindfold again...
My employer hasn't been complaining about massive drops in productivity recently, nor have my friends' employers. In my case, because my use of drugs *increases* when my general morale is better, i tend to be *more* productive when i'm using --- because both increased use and increased productivity are side-effects of morale improvement.
Are you saying that, based on your experience, no one ever gets addicted to crack or heroin and suffers from impaired judgement because of it?
I've known people who struggled with addiction. For every "best case" scenario you can give me, I can give you 100 "worst case" scenarios.
Don't take this the wrong way, but leagalizing drugs could be a good thing
When you consider what a large portion of crime is a result of (drug trade, abuse, etc). The leagalization of certain drugs could put them under control, in ways similar to the whole alchohol prohibition.
Yes, legalize drugs and transfer the money we are currently spending on law enforcement over to the health care system, as millions more fry their brains and their bodies on the "now legal" drugs.
Transfer more money over to the private sector where businesses are reeling in the significant drop in employee productivity as we deal with a national drug addiction.
Transfer more money to the unemployment agencies, so they can find minimum wage positions for a very large segment of the population that has lost all ambition in life.
Transfer more money to homeless shelters, as more and more irrational, incoherent people start wandering the streets.
Transfer more money to pediatric research, as more pregnant women with addictions give birth to horribly deformed babies.
Transfer more money still to drug rehabilitation clinics where a constant stream of people try to break addictions they started in their high school and college years, when they were young and foolish, and now find that it has cost them dearly.
Oh, and here's the good part: Transfer lots and lots more money back into law enforcement to keep children from using drugs and to attack a rise in crime from people who have seared any sense of social responsibility from their minds.
Crime will always be with us. The drug cartels are not about getting people addicted, they are about money. And they will find a way to get the money, be it drugs, guns, or whatever. You will not solve the problem of crime by doing away with drug money.
What you will succeed in doing, I believe, is eroding the middle class in the long run, and creating an impovershed, drug addicted underclass exploited by a wealthy upperclass.
It's Rob's site, but he invites everyone to come and participate. His site is a success because of US--everyone who reads, everyone who posts, everyone who moderates, everyone who clicks on the banner ads.
Sure, he can post all the trolling messages he wants; he can also watch the numbers dwindle and revenues decrease when people start leaving because of it.
I have to agree, though, the statement about GWB was a Troll, Offtopic, Overrated, and Flamebait, and not worthy of the reputation that/. has worked for years to build.
The current G3 "Pismo" PowerBook is awesome; I've bought two and could not be more pleased with them. Granted, I don't use a lot of PC laptops, but the G3 PB certainly blows away all of the PC laptops I've encountered in terms of speed, style, and simplicity. And it runs VirtualPC at an acceptable speed for Office-type applications (I haven't tested it with games).
Dell is trying to capitalize on the style craze by offering boxy PC laptops in colored plastics...ugh! Compaq is trying to add a few more curves to theirs, but the end result looks like a couple of growths that might be mistaken for speakers. Pismo is the only laptop on the market that could truly be called "elegant'.
The good news is that Apple just slashed the price on the Pismo line to make room for the upcoming Mercury models, according to ZDNet.
I question the project's validity for another reason...there's a book called Rare Earth that sums up the arguments against ET being out there quite nicely; in fact, it confirmed many of the things that I had already suspected.
That being said, I do participate in the SETI project, even though it is flawed on many levels, simply because I don't entirely rule out the possibility of ET's, and because I think it's a great model for distributed computing, a far more worthwhile endeavor than cracking encryption keys.
So, let's assume SETI is successful and we enter into conversation with an alien society of incredibly aggressive capitalists, as seems to me the only possible outcome. What will their attitude be towards us? I don't think you can expect anything like, "Oh, look, a young species, let's teach them how to grow and prosper in the intergalactic community!" No. More like, "Look, another third-world planet to exploit!"
No doubt the aliens will be looking to harvest minerals and vespene gases; it's imperitive that we build up a fleet of battlecruisers and cloacked wraiths before initiating contact. That will be a good front line defense; we'll also need a bunch of seige tanks, goliaths, firebats, and a whole lot of marines for the ground battle that is sure to follow.
Research is important, too. We need to make sure that all of our acadamies are advancing our weapon and armor strengths. Do we know how to make a seige tank go into seige mode yet? (Funny, you'd think the engineers would have automatically built a seige mode into something called a seige tank!)
Well, at least we know who the terrans are...the question is, will we be able to contact the Protoss before our psi-emitters lure the Zerg to our quadrant?
Aren't they going to have problems when AAPL sues them for taking their name? The even InterCapped the name.
Then again, I could go on about the silliness behind a name like AppleSoup. How strange
They are definitely trying to capitalize on the brand name that Apple has built up over the last 23 years, to give themselves instant recognition and credibility.
Reminds me of that shameless "Dodge Different" campaign that Chrysler is running.
I bet people would pay big money to see two teams of robots go at each other.
Actually, this robot reminds me of that Saturday Night Live commecial parody, where Sam Waterson is selling insurance for robot attacks on old people. Anyone know where that footage is on the web?
So plug a two-button wheel mouse into the USB port. If you need to right click in the Mac OS with a one-button mouse, though, you hold down the Control key as a modifier.
Anyone remember that TV show in the 70's where Ernest Borgnine owned a junkyard and built his own spacecraft? It was along the lines of "Fred Sanford meets Apollo 13"....
Anyone remember the Playstation launch? Sony found out about a golf promo thrown by Sega executives (during the Saturn days), and sent an actor dressed in Crash Bandicoot costume to grandstand in front of the media, embarrassing the Sega execs.
Maybe Sega should return the favor by sending a giant blue hedgehog to the PS2 launch, passing out copies of Bleemcast... : D
Encrypt the hard drive, put the unlock code on a key or dongle that's strapped to the wrist of the user. If you put a USB port on the front of the laptop, this should be easy to do without having the cord get in the way. Have the laptop go into sleep/secure mode whenever the dongle is removed.
For added security, three wrong dongles in a row plugged into the USB port causes the CD drive to pop open and the laser to slice through your brain.:-)
The PS 1 has had a high rate of return in its lifetime, and still managed to come out on top. I'd say that for most people, they aren't going to bang the thing around enough to kill it.
Sure, we want our kids to be more computer-literate, but laptops in grade school seems like a bad idea, at least at the current price points. The two biggest problems schools are going to face are going to be THEFT and ABUSE.
"Hey kid, here's an $800 laptop...don't drop it and don't lose it!" Yeah, sure...;-)
We only considered intel-based solution (ie not SGI, not iMac), but we decided to go with Windows.
Yeah, but Apple's the current leader in the DV market. You can't say that the market sucks based on your experiences with #2.
The iMac with iMovie is a consumer product. A G4-based system with Final Cut Pro (and possibly Premiere and After Effects) is what you should have looked at.
Also, you should know that Adobe optimizes their software for NT. I've supported their software on 95/98 systems, and quirky problems tend to crop up.
What does all that add up to? Probably that Windows is not poised to conquer the DV market just yet.
Q: How large of a BFS partition will I get? A: The 40MB download decompresses to a 500MB file in your Windows partition, into which the Be File System and BeOS is installed. Because BeOS 5 Personal Edition must reside on your C: drive, you'll need at least 600MB free on C:
Ummm...the act of being spiritual presupposes that you have a spirit. Humans believe that they have been endowed by their Creator with this supernatural gift, and that when they die, the spirit will survive the death of their physical body.
Supposing that computers do one day become self-aware, they will also know from day one that they are a machine, a product of human creation, and will know that it is beyond the ability of humans to impart something only God can create.
What concerns me, though, are the spiritual implications of what humans will do with technology, as it becomes more pervasive in our lives. The web is already one big red light district. Scientists are talking about enhancing human abilities with computer chips--great, I can't wait to lose my job to somebody who got three doctorates via an implant while people like myself refuse to participate in something so inherently distasteful on many levels. And what about cyber crimes? The golden rule applies..."Do unto others who know less than you."
Believe me, whether computers believe in God is the least of our problems.
Rather than resisting the trend toward digital distribution, artists and the RIAA need to start embracing it and looking for ways to exploit it. In spite of the piracy, what they are going through isn't that vastly different from what the web has done to newspapers, magazines, television, retail, and maybe a few other large industries that were unprepared for the internet revolution; it just hits some harder than others, and it's calling all industries that are in the business of communication to adapt or die.
One possible solution is to create a new music format that has the owner's information embedded in it. Take the Digimark watermark system that Photoshop is using; the owner's registration is embedded in the image itself through a code of shades that changes the image almost imperceptibly; it's impossible to remove, and it can be read even after filters are applied or if the image is scanned in from a magazine. How about an audio watermark that similarly cannot be removed without completely distorting the music? The watermark would be embedded at the time of download, and to play the music would require that you either enter your into a digital player, or swipe an ID card, or something. Music wouldn't be sold on CD's anymore, but you could download music and burn it onto CD's for your personal collection.
Are there ways around such a system? Sure there are. But, the pirates will always be out there, you just have to create a barrier to entry for the common person ("Keeping honest people honest," as they say).
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The internet should not be censored to "protect" anyone. If you don't like your kids seeing porn online, then you should stop them. Teachers should do the same. Review the history files afterwards also just in case, and let them know ahead of time you are going to check what sites the kids visited. I know that won't work against everyone but nothing is fullproof. Especially censorware.
It all goes down to our society not wanting to be responsible for anything. Parents want to blame video games, tv, the internet, music, etc. for how they fail to keep their own children in line. Smokers commit slow suicide by putting fire into their lungs, then sue tobacco companies because these people are too stupid to know better.
Gosh, thanks for explaining parenthood for us. Remember the good ol' days, when anyone could be a parent? You didn't have to have an MIS degree to understand and counter every internet hack your 10 year old learns. You didn't have to play through every last video game your kid brought home looking for excessive violence and gratuitous sexual content. You didn't have to get up with your kids on Saturday morning to screen out cartoons about turds and boogers. You didn't have to explain to your kid about anal sex and animal fetishes.
Reality check here...do you remember being a kid? Do you remember having an iron-clad determination to avoid everything your parents said was bad for you? Me neither! The problem is that there is now ten times the garbage available but parents are not ten times more knowlegable. I don't know that censorware is the best solution, either, but as a parent, I definitely feel as though my authority is being robbed of me, because I can't anticipate every last thing that is being thrown at my kids.
Does this guy at the Peacefire site really want adolescents filling their minds with all of the adult content out there? We're not talking about some kid having a couple of Playboys stashed away in his room, here...we're talking our children having the equivalent of several thousand porno mags and several thousand porno videos being only a few clicks away, filled with everything from graphic depections of sex acts to beastiality to S&M.
What's the solution, you say? "Don't let your kids on the internet, don't let them watch TV, don't let them play video games, don't let them read gamimg magazines." Hey, I'm not Amish...I just want my kids to grow up to be a decent, well-adjusted people, to not be plagued by sexual or chemical addictions, and maybe even to carry on the values that I'm trying to impart. I'm also not omnipotent; once they are outside of the range of my five senses, I no longer have control over them.
It's not a matter of "trust" or "upbringing"; kids by nature have an insatiable curiosity and will naturally gravitate to whatever is forbidden and easily accessible.
And what about the parents who aren't as attentive as I am? My kids are going to school with those kids, interacting with those kids, maybe even becoming friends with them; their influence will be felt. What we are building towards is not a parental problem, but a societal one.
You say that censorware isn't the answer. Fine. You also say that government intervention isn't the answer. That's fine, too, but tell me how you're going to shift the balance of power back in favor of the parents without doing these things.
This kind of stuff always sends a shiver down my spine...
I'm sure the military will be forced to be the early adopters (particularly in less democratic nations). You can also imagine it being used on oppressed people groups to control them.
I think ads should be placed at the start of TiVo and Replay TV shows. Get all of the ads out of the way up front, and then watch your program commercial-free, just like movies on VHS do today. Anyone who wants to watch it can watch it, and anyone who wants to fast forward can do that too.
I really don't mind most ads, but I hate having my show interrupted every 5 minutes. There are also those ads that are so idiotic that I will literally stop what I'm doing in whatever part of the house and dive for the remote to mute them. I will be soooo glad to never see that DiGiorno ad about the girl in the blindfold again...
Are you saying that, based on your experience, no one ever gets addicted to crack or heroin and suffers from impaired judgement because of it?
I've known people who struggled with addiction. For every "best case" scenario you can give me, I can give you 100 "worst case" scenarios.
When you consider what a large portion of crime is a result of (drug trade, abuse, etc). The leagalization of certain drugs could put them under control, in ways similar to the whole alchohol prohibition.
Yes, legalize drugs and transfer the money we are currently spending on law enforcement over to the health care system, as millions more fry their brains and their bodies on the "now legal" drugs.
Transfer more money over to the private sector where businesses are reeling in the significant drop in employee productivity as we deal with a national drug addiction.
Transfer more money to the unemployment agencies, so they can find minimum wage positions for a very large segment of the population that has lost all ambition in life.
Transfer more money to homeless shelters, as more and more irrational, incoherent people start wandering the streets.
Transfer more money to pediatric research, as more pregnant women with addictions give birth to horribly deformed babies.
Transfer more money still to drug rehabilitation clinics where a constant stream of people try to break addictions they started in their high school and college years, when they were young and foolish, and now find that it has cost them dearly.
Oh, and here's the good part: Transfer lots and lots more money back into law enforcement to keep children from using drugs and to attack a rise in crime from people who have seared any sense of social responsibility from their minds.
Crime will always be with us. The drug cartels are not about getting people addicted, they are about money. And they will find a way to get the money, be it drugs, guns, or whatever. You will not solve the problem of crime by doing away with drug money.
What you will succeed in doing, I believe, is eroding the middle class in the long run, and creating an impovershed, drug addicted underclass exploited by a wealthy upperclass.
Welcome to the Libertarian Utopia.
Sure, he can post all the trolling messages he wants; he can also watch the numbers dwindle and revenues decrease when people start leaving because of it.
I have to agree, though, the statement about GWB was a Troll, Offtopic, Overrated, and Flamebait, and not worthy of the reputation that /. has worked for years to build.
The current G3 "Pismo" PowerBook is awesome; I've bought two and could not be more pleased with them. Granted, I don't use a lot of PC laptops, but the G3 PB certainly blows away all of the PC laptops I've encountered in terms of speed, style, and simplicity. And it runs VirtualPC at an acceptable speed for Office-type applications (I haven't tested it with games).
Dell is trying to capitalize on the style craze by offering boxy PC laptops in colored plastics...ugh! Compaq is trying to add a few more curves to theirs, but the end result looks like a couple of growths that might be mistaken for speakers. Pismo is the only laptop on the market that could truly be called "elegant'.
The good news is that Apple just slashed the price on the Pismo line to make room for the upcoming Mercury models, according to ZDNet.
That being said, I do participate in the SETI project, even though it is flawed on many levels, simply because I don't entirely rule out the possibility of ET's, and because I think it's a great model for distributed computing, a far more worthwhile endeavor than cracking encryption keys.
No doubt the aliens will be looking to harvest minerals and vespene gases; it's imperitive that we build up a fleet of battlecruisers and cloacked wraiths before initiating contact. That will be a good front line defense; we'll also need a bunch of seige tanks, goliaths, firebats, and a whole lot of marines for the ground battle that is sure to follow.
Research is important, too. We need to make sure that all of our acadamies are advancing our weapon and armor strengths. Do we know how to make a seige tank go into seige mode yet? (Funny, you'd think the engineers would have automatically built a seige mode into something called a seige tank!)
Well, at least we know who the terrans are...the question is, will we be able to contact the Protoss before our psi-emitters lure the Zerg to our quadrant?
(* with apologies to StarCraft)
Then again, I could go on about the silliness behind a name like AppleSoup. How strange
They are definitely trying to capitalize on the brand name that Apple has built up over the last 23 years, to give themselves instant recognition and credibility.
Reminds me of that shameless "Dodge Different" campaign that Chrysler is running.
Now they just need to invent the laser blaster.
I bet people would pay big money to see two teams of robots go at each other.
Actually, this robot reminds me of that Saturday Night Live commecial parody, where Sam Waterson is selling insurance for robot attacks on old people. Anyone know where that footage is on the web?
Maybe he saw a prerelease of "Shaft"... :P
So plug a two-button wheel mouse into the USB port. If you need to right click in the Mac OS with a one-button mouse, though, you hold down the Control key as a modifier.
Anyone remember that TV show in the 70's where Ernest Borgnine owned a junkyard and built his own spacecraft? It was along the lines of "Fred Sanford meets Apollo 13"....
If you're in your late 50's/early 60's, then yes, you have something to look forward to. :)
"Additional Features: 18" McCulla retractable pneumatic saw blades."
Anybody else find this insanely funny?
My, how times have changed...methinks you've been playing Carmageddon too much. :)
Anyone remember the Playstation launch? Sony found out about a golf promo thrown by Sega executives (during the Saturn days), and sent an actor dressed in Crash Bandicoot costume to grandstand in front of the media, embarrassing the Sega execs.
Maybe Sega should return the favor by sending a giant blue hedgehog to the PS2 launch, passing out copies of Bleemcast... : D
For added security, three wrong dongles in a row plugged into the USB port causes the CD drive to pop open and the laser to slice through your brain. :-)
The PS 1 has had a high rate of return in its lifetime, and still managed to come out on top. I'd say that for most people, they aren't going to bang the thing around enough to kill it.
"Hey kid, here's an $800 laptop...don't drop it and don't lose it!" Yeah, sure... ;-)
Yeah, but Apple's the current leader in the DV market. You can't say that the market sucks based on your experiences with #2.
The iMac with iMovie is a consumer product. A G4-based system with Final Cut Pro (and possibly Premiere and After Effects) is what you should have looked at.
Also, you should know that Adobe optimizes their software for NT. I've supported their software on 95/98 systems, and quirky problems tend to crop up.
What does all that add up to? Probably that Windows is not poised to conquer the DV market just yet.
Q: How large of a BFS partition will I get?
A: The 40MB download decompresses to a 500MB file in your Windows partition, into which the Be File System and BeOS is installed. Because BeOS 5 Personal Edition must reside on your C: drive, you'll need at least 600MB free on C:
And the FAQ says that this 500 MB file has to reside on the C: drive.
Ack!
So much for that partition I've been saving for Be....
Ummm...the act of being spiritual presupposes that you have a spirit. Humans believe that they have been endowed by their Creator with this supernatural gift, and that when they die, the spirit will survive the death of their physical body.
Supposing that computers do one day become self-aware, they will also know from day one that they are a machine, a product of human creation, and will know that it is beyond the ability of humans to impart something only God can create.
What concerns me, though, are the spiritual implications of what humans will do with technology, as it becomes more pervasive in our lives. The web is already one big red light district. Scientists are talking about enhancing human abilities with computer chips--great, I can't wait to lose my job to somebody who got three doctorates via an implant while people like myself refuse to participate in something so inherently distasteful on many levels. And what about cyber crimes? The golden rule applies..."Do unto others who know less than you."
Believe me, whether computers believe in God is the least of our problems.
Rather than resisting the trend toward digital distribution, artists and the RIAA need to start embracing it and looking for ways to exploit it. In spite of the piracy, what they are going through isn't that vastly different from what the web has done to newspapers, magazines, television, retail, and maybe a few other large industries that were unprepared for the internet revolution; it just hits some harder than others, and it's calling all industries that are in the business of communication to adapt or die.
One possible solution is to create a new music format that has the owner's information embedded in it. Take the Digimark watermark system that Photoshop is using; the owner's registration is embedded in the image itself through a code of shades that changes the image almost imperceptibly; it's impossible to remove, and it can be read even after filters are applied or if the image is scanned in from a magazine. How about an audio watermark that similarly cannot be removed without completely distorting the music? The watermark would be embedded at the time of download, and to play the music would require that you either enter your into a digital player, or swipe an ID card, or something. Music wouldn't be sold on CD's anymore, but you could download music and burn it onto CD's for your personal collection.
Are there ways around such a system? Sure there are. But, the pirates will always be out there, you just have to create a barrier to entry for the common person ("Keeping honest people honest," as they say).