Part of the reason that "nice" neighborhoods are "nice" is that all of the neighbors have some expectation (and definition) of what "nice" is.
Mine mostly involves a minimum of obnoxious noise -- and I'm lenient -- and a prime location. If I had kids I'd probably also want "good schools nearby", though that's a subject for another time...
But for me "prime location" means "in a major urban district". I want to walk places. I want to be near the clubs, the bars, the theatres, and the office in which I work. You are unlikely to find a place in any major city where an HOA does not exist -- at least, not in any city in which I've lived. As far as I can tell the choices are "Deal with an HOA, or move fifty miles away to some podunk hellhole where no one cares what you do." Nice choice.
I, myself, do not care about silly decorations the neighbors may use. I don't care if they have TV dishes or solar panels. I don't care if they leave a broom on their balcony. I don't care if they park a car on the street. As long as they aren't blasting music past midnight, destroying other people's property, or getting in my face, I just don't care. As far as I am concerned they can trash their place as much as they want as long as their filth doesn't enroach upon my space. Yet I'm forced into HOAs in which I must agree that I hate everything that anyone else might do which may disrupt the bland homogenity of the neighborhood.
You red shirt argument is now taking it to the extreme.
So are people whining about basketball goals. They rarely do so because of any noise it generates -- let's face it, most people use those things for about a week and never again. The whiners just don't like to see it. And they don't like to see TV dishes. Or solar panels. None of it is hurting them in any way -- they just don't like to see it. Well, I don't like to see red shirts. There really is no difference whatsoever.
Also, generally they must vote in order to change any laws, so one person hating red isn't going to get the entire community to ban it.
I completely agree. However, in general, the only people who bother voting on HOA regulations are the same type of people who are keeping an eye out for any minor infraction. People with nothing to do. People who wield no power over anything else in their lives. Petty people.
I have better things to do than attend HOA meetings to listen to five people bicker about old man Zimmerman parking his car on the street for three days. Consequently I don't attend them, and don't vote. The busybodies with nothing else to do are the ones attending, and voting. Don't assume the HOA vote represents what the community actually cares about. The rest of the community is out having a life while the HOA members decide what to ban this time.
Do you ever watch the show Frasier? There are a few episodes where he gets into it with his condo board, and they perfectly illustrate just how absurd the entire concept of an HOA really is. One episode revolved around Frasier hanging a rather neutral, completely tasteful door knocker on his door, having it flagged by the board, and spending the rest of the episode bickering and fighting with people about it -- except for a group of "rebels" who loathed the current HOA board because all the board did was tag people for idiotic violations.
Yet those "rebels" were never at the board meetings -- they had better things to do. The only people who attended were sour old bags who felt the need to seize authority wherever they could find it.
Great episodes, and all perfect examples of what I'm saying. Yes, there's a certain logic to requiring a few bits of decency in the community, but part of living in society, as I said, means putting up with the fact that not everyone is like you and some people are going to do things you don't like. HOAs do not exist to enforce community standards of living to defend property values, because the things they regulate have zero demonstrable effect on property values. HOAs exist for petty people to impose their will on others and be bullies. That is their purpose.
ou signed an agreement with your HOA, and for better or worse you have to put up with their rules.
Sure, but that was part of my point -- in many areas of the country, it isn't a realistic option to find property where there's not an HOA in force. You either live in the middle of nowhere, with all the commuting and other headaches that go along with it, or you have a nice place in a nice neighborhood and have to abide by some little totalitarian HOA. I understand that I signed the agreement, but it's not like I had a hell of a lot of choice. Like signing NCs with your employer -- you don't want to, and you "have the option" of refusing, getting fired, and finding a new job, but realistically no one's going to bother. They're forced into it by wanting/needing to keep the job they have.
Maybe the basketball goal is against the rules. My point is that it shouldn't be. There's a line to be drawn somewhere, I guess, but it's a freaking basketball goal. How far do people want to go with this? Maybe I think red is ugly and I don't want to live in a neighborhood where joggers are allowed to wear red shirts because I have to look out the window and see that -- should I be allowed to make it against the rules? Should a committee? Or should we all just grow up?
The broom example is even better -- that's something no one could possibly care about, and was probably just an oversight on the homeowner's part as they forgot to take it inside, but since it's technically against the rules, some officious nit can use the rule to bully him or her.
And that's really what the majority of HOAs are: small, petty people with no control over anything important in life, trying to bully other people with the one area they've found to seize power. No one really cares that there's a basketball goal or a broom and it doesn't actually decrease property values (which is what HOA rules are allegedly protecting). But little rules like those are convenient ways to badger someone when they have nothing else to do.
I think a huge problem is that, in many areas, it's nearly impossible to find property which doesn't come with a homeowner's association, local bylaws, or something similar. Yes, you could move out into the middle of nowhere, but some people might not want to commute sixty miles to work, or be so far away from their kid's school, just to avoid an HOA. It simply isn't practical in many areas, and in some, it isn't possible -- and the "you can just move" option is absurdly unrealistic. Moving requires capital which many people can't front in addition to their monthly expenses.
You may enjoy the fact that you don't have to look out the window and see that Clown House, and that's fine. Personally I can't imagine why you'd care, but that's your perogative, and I can even see some logic to wanting to keep the area civilized because it affects your property value.
But realistically your example is an extreme. These sort of rules and regulations are rarely used for any actual defense of property value; they are used by power-hungry jerks who want to lord over their penny-ante dictatorships and bully people for no reason.
Clown House there might affect property value because nobody wants to buy a home near it because it's absurd. But I can't really imagine a couple looking to buy a home, and saying "Oh honey, it's perfect! And so close to little Susie's school!" "Yes dear, but did you notice the house three doors over has solar panels on the roof? What a dump! We can't live near that!" Spare me.
Even that's a rather extraordinary example. Usually these sort of rules are used to badger people about much more mundane crap that no sane human would really care about. The basketball goal you installed in the driveway for your kid has to be taken down because the old bag across the street got in a snit and reported it to the HOA. You left a broom on your balcony the other day when you were sweeping it. You installed a two-foot TV dish on the side of the house that no one could even see if they weren't looking for it, but someone with nothing better to do had to go find trouble and make their fury known.
But to pull it back to the original discussion, solar panels on a roof are barely something the casual passerby would notice or care about, yet some areas act like it's pure evil to defile the local property values with them. It's a far cry from installing windmills or converting your house into Peewee's Playhouse, but to some people, there's no difference, and it's really time to stop letting hyper-sensitive clods like that have authority over these matters.
It's a lot easier psychologically to use a gun than some sort of melee weapon. The gun provides a disconnect from the act itself -- all you're doing is pulling a trigger -- whereas a knife or beating or whatever is a much more visceral experience. Someone may be willing to "just pull a trigger", but not to stab, where they'd have to feel the result of their deed.
There's a lot of cognitive dissonance there, but it's a real phenomenon.
Then make it a feature you have to explicitly enable, so your grandmother, who is using a default vanilla install, won't accidently switch to a new desktop. That's the solution, not "Just don't have the feature at all."
There are ways around the Clueless User aspect here, but you're arguing that any feature which might prove useful shouldn't exist because the most clueless people might get confused. Then again, I guess that is the Windows philosophy...
Part of the difference with Linux is that downloading random-ass crap from untrusted sources and blindly running an installer is not the usual way to install software. With the major distros, the user will get stuff out of the official repositories, which have been examined and vetted. This is especially true of the "clueless user" type you're describing.
Malware is so prevelent on Windows partially because Windows provides no way for a user to know what the hell is going on. The expected means of installing software is to visit random websites, owned by god-knows-who, download some executable, and run it. You rarely have any means of telling what it's actually installing, where it's installing, and just what these programs actually do. When this is the preferred way of doing things, is it any wonder that people download and install malicious stuff without even knowing it?
A fine example is Chrome, which I installed in the first few days it was released. I didn't notice that stupid Google Updater thing which was silently installed alongside, until much later when I was checking my running processes for unrelated reasons. Getting rid of it was a pain in the ass, too. I'm a veteran user who knows what the hell I'm doing, and Google "should be" a trusted source -- yet this slipped right by me. That thing could easiliy have been malicious (though to my mind, anything that "updates" unknown servers with unknown information about my computer is malicious).
The Linux repository and package management system isn't perfect but it is far and away lightyears ahead of the Windows method.
you'd have someone from Europe talking about how ignorant Americans/USians are for just saying "the president" and not being specific
Regardless of whether Slashdot is primarily a US-oriented discussion site, this particular story is about the American president. The only ignorance would be in not being able to derive, from context, which president is being discussed if someone were to say "the president". In a discussion about Russia's president, we'd all understand which presiednt was being discussed and I doubt you'd see any Americans whinging that we should say "POTRF" because it's too confusing or Russia-centric otherwise.
I realise you, specifically, didn't do this, but claiming that one must specify "of the United States" with every bloody reference to "the president" is absurd. Humans are allegedly good at contextual clues. Let's act like it.
When seeing acronyms in print, some people have a tendancy to read them as words, whether they should be read as such or not -- especially when the acronym is pronouncable, like "POTUS". Say it out loud and understand how silly it sounds. Beyond that, it just looks pretentious to use acronyms that are both non-standard and add nothing to the meaning. Using the ol' standby argument "it saves time" is just absurd -- we're talking about a few extra letters. If you can take the time to post you can certainly spare the additional milliseconds it takes to type an actual word, rather than barely-comprehensible acronyms, and come out looking a little more intelligent.
People who defend silliness like this are also some of the quickest to gripe about "txt speak", and really, what's the difference? Where do you draw the line?
Just because people aren't asking for it doesn't mean it's not a good idea. It's probably never even occured to most Windows users that such a thing is possible. Yet many of them have secondary monitors, so clearly, there's a significant number of them that would like extra screen real estate.
Really, I never knew how great virtual desktops were until I started using various Linux distros with Gnome. Before that I was stuck in XP Land and it never really dawned on me that there could be more than one "main screen". That's just sort of the view of Windows users.
Think about all the various bells and whistles in OS X -- do you think people were asking for something like Expose? They weren't. But Apple introduced it, told people about it, and now people won't shut up about how useful it is -- even though they never thought about it before and were getting on fine without it.
I don't recall anyone asking for an updated Office interface either. Menus make perfect sense to people since menus are what every application has had for twenty years. But along came Microsoft with their Ribbon thing and now everyone's stuck with it, for better or worse.
Microsoft's random UI changes or updates show they're perfectly willing to do this stuff without anyone asking for it. Their reluctance to set up virtual desktops has to stem from something else other than customer demand.
Personally, I agree, but allow me to play, ahem, devil's advocate. The theist's reply to this is usually something along the lines of "So you think God doesn't exist?"
The atheist then says "No, I just don't see any reason to think he exists."
"So you're saying he doesn't exist."
"I'm saying I just don't believe he does."
"Which means you think he doesn't."
"Well, come on, there's a difference between 'I'm convinced God doesn't exist' and 'I'm not convinced God does exist', right?"
"Either you believe God exists, or you don't."
"Yeah, but.. well, no.. I mean I'm not convinced. I see no evidence for God."
"Oh ho ho! So you're not really atheist. You're more like agnostic."
"No, agnostic would mean I believe the decision cannot be made. I'm saying it can be made, but there is no evidence for it so I'm defaulting."
"Defaulting to disbelief."
"More like nonbelief."
"So you're saying you think there is no God."
This goes on for a while, in my experience. The atheist tries to explain that he's more or less an innocent bystander willing to be convinced but hasn't yet, while the theist tries to say that the atheist, in his lack of belief, is making an assertion. Neither side gets anywhere.
You and I are, really, on the same page. But it is very easy for the theist to misunderstand, and it's very easy to see the theist's point of view on this topic.
Y'see, there is really no other serious subject of which I'm aware where neither side can "prove" themselves. Before, I made the analogy of Reptilians because it's absurd, and it was meant to demonstrate a point, but we can all have a good laugh because the concept of Reptilians is so far-fetched as to be ridiculous. But the notion of a supernatural entity is deeply rooted in our culture and society, and cannot be dismissed as easily as Reptilians. To a theist, "God exists" is virtually axiomatic and has been for thousands of years; to him, it's so self-evident that he does believe that the onus of proof is on the atheist for saying otherwise.
I'm not saying the theist is correct in this. But when you're dealing with such a deep-seated belief that transcends hundreds of societies and civilisations, all of which have had some notion of supernatural beings, simply saying "I see no evidence and I've yet to be convinced" sounds hollow... to a theist.
Hey. My personal beliefs aren't something I am trying to push, and I think I was clear to say that both theists and atheists can make compelling arguments for their respective sides. But to define "atheist" in a way that automatically makes the theist superior is an intellectually dishonest tactic -- that was my only point.
I think theology as a field of study is perfectly respectable and it doesn't matter which side of the fence you happen to believe -- there are many theologians who are devout, and many who are just as expert in the field but are atheist. A comprehensive understanding of the material doesn't imply a belief one way or the other, just as there are many who are fascinated by cryptozoology who don't necessarily believe in cryptids but find the lore of importance to our culture. Theology itself is a legitimate field of study regardless of whether or not theism is correct.
Citing my credentials in this area is pointless, because I'm not here to argue for one side or the other. I am quite capable of defending theism or atheism, as I'm capable of defending any side of a debate whether or not I, personally, agree with that side. My only point was that atheism has a clear definition, as has been argued by dozens upon dozens of theologians and philosophers, and defining it dishonestly gets us nowhere. Atheists are not immune to this criticism either, but that wasn't the topic of discussion at this time.
If "theism" is a belief in a god or gods, then what is "atheism"? When something is asymmetrical, it is without symmetry. If something is amoral, it is without morals -- which is, please note, different than being immoral. The prefix "a-" simply means "without, or lacking". Ergo, in its simplest form, atheism is "without a belief in a god or gods".
It's certainly true that some atheists take a more positive view and assert that a god or gods cannot or do not exist. But at its root, atheism does not require this assertion -- simply not having a belief is sufficient to be classified as atheist.
This gets twisted around a lot in theological arguments; the atheist will sit back and sneer that the theist is the one making the assertion ("A god exists.") and is therefore carrying the burden of proof. The theist will counter that the atheist is also making an assertion ("A god does not exist.") and is thus just as burdened to prove his claim as the theist.
The reason theists like this argument so much is because they realise that they carry some burden of proof, because they acknowledge they are making an assertion about the nature of reality. Yet they also find it difficult to present any objective evidence to back their claim. This puts the atheist at an advantage, until the theist uses the above argument. Suddenly the atheist is faced with an impossible situation -- how do you prove something doesn't exist, especially when the something in question is a god?
No matter what the atheist says, the theist can claim that the god somehow manipulated the observation or outcome. And thus, the theist has now placed himself on superior ground in the debate, for while the theist may be able to dredge up a few interesting things the atheist can't explain, there is nothing the atheist can say which cannot immediately be explained away by the theist as some whim of the deity.
It is disingenuous at best and intellectually dishonest at worst to consider both of these stances equal in terms of burden of proof. There are people who genuinely believe that Reptilians from other planets walk among us and have infiltrated the highest levels of our governments. Should you encounter such a person, I suggest you don't engage them in dialogue, but if you did, you might ask what their proof is. Would you feel it fair if the Reptile Believer countered that you should have to prove there aren't Reptilians? Do you consider yourself some sort of active disbeliever in Reptilians, or just someone without even a passing interest on the topic?
I'm not trying to say which side is correct here, as both can make compelling arguments, but clouding the issue with incorrect definitions does nothing to advance the debate.
Are you people forgeting that those employees only used windows for their entire lives ?? It's not something that can be learned in two hours (not at work, not as an essential tool.)
They may have "used" Windows but they don't "know" Windows any more than they know anything else. Most office employees who aren't in IT barely know more about computers than they absolutely require to do their job. Every day, legions of sales staff power up their computers, and dutifully open Outlook, Word, IE, maybe Excel or something. They use these things to do their work but emailing proposals to clients and typing numbers into spreadsheets doesn't mean they "know" Windows or Office. It means they've learned, mostly by rote, how to open a few applications.
Anything more complicated than that is beyond them, which is why their drives are always full of "Shortcut to New Word Document (1)(1)(1).doc.doc", files are saved in any of seven different locations with no rhyme or reason, IE is filled with idiotic "Free Smilies Toolbars", and the thing takes four minutes to boot because of all the crap they have on startup.
Saying they know Windows or Office because they can open a few applications is pretty meaningless. I could put any one of my salespeople in front of Ubuntu, tell them "This is the new Windows Longhorn," and they'd figure out how to open email, Firefox, and OO Writer within minutes. They'd also never know or care about the difference.
Remember that for the majority of people they aren't "using" Windows or any other OS, especially at work -- they are using applications to accomplish a very narrowly-defined, specific task. If Evolution lets them send mail, they don't care that it's not Outlook. If they can write letters to their clients they don't care that they're using Abiword or OO Writer instead of MS Word.
I'm well aware that many corporations use this or that propietary, Windows-only bit of software or whatever, and that may be a deal-breaker, but that has nothing to do with whether or not their rank-and-file staff "knows" Windows.
I believe Airtran, and all airlines, are required to hand the matter over to the authorities if anyone reports anything suspicious or threatening, yes -- even if that report is just some over-sensitive idiot misconstruing someone's casual remark, the authorities have to get involved.
Airtran wasn't necessarily wrong for following procedure in that. Airtran was wrong for refusing to allow the family on another flight after the FBI determined that there was nothing wrong. I cannot imagine what possible justification they had for that decision.
The problem is that most IT staff have jobs that are pretty vaguely worded compared to most other fields. A helpdesk monkey's job description might include something like "Provide support for Microsoft Office", but what does "support" mean? Only addressing actual errors and software problems, or hand-holding and educating the user? This is rarely spelled out. It spills into the higher echelons too -- I'm frequently called upon to help salespeople figure out how to do things; as an admin my job description includes the word "support" somewhere in there, so...
I will help with this stuff if I've time because I like my coworkers, but I work for a fairly small company where we all more or less know each other and get along. This isn't the case for the majority of IT workers out there, so I can see how it'd quickly get annoying to be asked to do hand-holding, especially for software the user should, by all rights, already know in order to have the job.
It is a decadent and depraved culture that finds images of nursing breasts "obscene" while elevating the display of non-nursing breasts to the status of idol.
I wish with you up until this statement, which is just bizarre. It's true that our culture reveres breasts, for better or worse, but the taboo against baring them in public isn't restricted to whether the woman is nursing or not. Public display of breasts in any way is considered "obscene" in most legal jurisdictions in the US, if not all, so let's not say that had the woman been flashing she'd have been idolized but since she was nursing, she was demonized.
One more thing:
infantile adults who find the true function of a female breast to be upsetting.
Nursing babies is one "true function" of the female breast, obviously. But offhand, I cannot think of any other mammal where the female's breasts are enlarged whether nursing or not -- most, if not all, other mammals only get enlarged breasts when they have suckling children. Human breasts are always prominent and are most definitely a secondary sexual characteristic. The reasons for this have been debated, but some plausible ones include symbols of fertility, obvious signal of gender, and myriad psychosexual theories which are part of the overall difference between human sexuality and just about every other animal sexuality.
All that having been said, you're right that this entire thing is stupid. Breastfeeding is necessary and with a kid's head in the way, no more is really being revealed than if the woman was simply wearing skimpy clothes. People who take offense to this sort of thing remind me of the people who actually think something like a picture of some two year old in the bathtub is "child porn" -- if they see something sexual in these situations, maybe they're the ones with the problem.
Finally, if you a)hand me a computer system with Office on it; b)announce that you don't provide user support/help for Office, then you have no right to expect that I will do anything but regard you with suspicion. Office is what users use - it is how they interact with the computer and you've just announced you're blowing them off
A user's lack of knowledge is not a technical problem. It's a managerial one, really. Why did this person get hired if they lack the basic skills required to get the job done (like, using Office)? If a salesperson can't read, HR doesn't dispatch someone to teach them; that person gets fired for lacking the ability to do their job.
Now if it's actually a technical problem, that's what support staff is for, but don't confuse "user ignorance" with "technical problem". I don't ask my mechanic to teach me how to drive, and hell, I'm paying him out of my own pocket!
Truthfully, I'll let even user ignorance slide if I can tell they've made an honest attempt to find the answer themselves, no matter how far down the wrong track they may have been. The fact that they tried before asking is good enough for me. But when a user displays a constant pattern of:
Run into minor difficulty (usually caused by their own actions, mind you)
Immediately screech to a halt and scream for help without any further ado
that's when I get annoyed. Or, as is frequently the case, when the user has an abusive attitude, like their incompetence is somehow IT's fault.
I'm not suggesting IT departments are staffed by saints who can do no wrong. But I don't look for ways to circumvent the NDAs and NCs the legal department made me sign -- why are they looking for ways to circumvent the filters we put in place? I don't try to find clever ways of violating HR's sexual harassment policies without getting caught -- why are they trying to violate my "no torrents" policy?
Most people are not IT Specialists they have other focuses and concerns in their life. Computers are not a big deal.
Fine. I'm not a car person, but that doesn't mean I can ignore the rules of the road and basic car maintainance. Driving is an incredibly complex task. You have to learn all the little weird laws and rules, and adhere to them. And if you want to own your own car, you now have to remember to put gas in it, change the oil every so often, update the tag every year, make sure the insurance is paid. There's quite a lot to something as commonplace as a car. Yet we all accept this, and we further accept that in order to drive, you have to first put in the time to learn how, and practice, and pass tests, before you're allowed a license.
And by the way, I don't ask my mechanic to teach me how to drive.:P
So, why is it that everyone is okay with the huge effort of learning how to drive responsibly, but if asked to learn just a little bit about basic computer operations, suddenly it's "I'm not a computer person, I don't care, I don't need to know!"
Lets use a car analogy, and the person didn't know if their car is front wheel drive, rear wheel drive, or all wheel drive
Can you imagine taking your car to the mechanic and telling him "It's broken"? The mechanic asks for specifics: What's broken? It won't start at all, the steering is loose, the brakes make noise, the windows won't roll down, the engine stalls, what? When did it start? How often does it happen, and under what conditions? You shrug and say you don't know, you're not a car person, just fix it, please. And despite the very obvious body damage indicating you recently rammed into something, you stand in front of the mechanic and insist that you didn't do anything. The car just "broke" by itself.
How long do you think the mechanic would put up with this? A few minutes at the outside, I'd wager, until he asked you to leave the shop at best, or agreed to fix your car and charged you $900 for a new "johnson rod" at worst.
In few other professional trades -- none that I can think of offhand, actually, but I'm making a concession for ones I haven't thought of -- is the customer base as openly hostile and dismissive of the people doing the work. A computer fails to connect to a file server. It worked yesterday, what's the problem? IT is always doing this. Word spreads that IT screwed up again. Someone else offers that Outlook isn't working, they've been waiting for an email for an hour and it hasn't come in yet. Don't any of these damn technicians know what they're doing? This is ridiculous, we can't work like this. On and on and on.
Most of the problems users experience are actually caused by users -- either failing to learn anything about these multi-thousand-dollar machines they've used eight hours a day, five days a week, for the past ten years. Or by deliberately fiddling with hardware or software settings they don't understand. Documentation was available but they didn't want to read it, it seemed faster to just scream for help. Something stopped working after they did X, but they never figure out that undoing X might make it right again. No. It's all IT's fault. Someone call technical support. Those damn snotty techs, why can't they make this simple?
Is there any other profession where highly-trained, knowledgable people, who have spent years on becoming educated in their field, are expected to do this sort of thing? Would you go to the doctor to put a band-aid on a paper cut, or ask why it hurts when you drop things on your foot?
And we, the IT workers, dutifully fix the problem. To figure out what happened we sometimes have to ask what the user did.
We're lied to: "I didn't touch it, it just stopped working," despite that log files say otherwise. If the problem was caused by the user, we try to educate, explain what happened, and how to avoid having it happen again. "I don't care,"
I was careful to stipulate that no other charges were involved in this little hypothetical.:P If someone starts dragging out rape accusations that changes the game significantly but that wasn't part of the original poster's scary story. And let me be clear -- it IS scary, and I'm sure it could happen, and likely has -- but assuming that the girl's only complaint to the cops is that you had sex with her and she's not of age, the myriad reasons you had for thinking she was of age would be defense enough.
I'm not sure even I'M quite that cynical.:) While situations like the above could happen, the more realistic outcome, provided you're otherwise clean, is that you defend yourself by pointing out that you had every reason to believe she was of age: She's in a club which checks IDs, she had ID on her, etc. There is only so far a person can be expected to go, unless the DA thinks you should have subjected her to radiometric dating techniques first.
If you have a record, or there are other offenses involved, or you have a shitty attitude, though, that's going to stack the odds against you. But I don't think things are quite as bad as the picture you're painting here.
You dislike the current law. What would you suggest as an alternative? What is you proposed solution?
Having prosecutors adhere to the spirit of the law, not the letter. The law itself is probably fine. The law was designed to protect children from being victimized by adults, not to "protect" a teenager from taking a picture of herself, and everyone knows it. That's the spirit of the law and it is why we have humans decide these things, instead of just blindly typing accusations into a database and having it determine a punishment.
Unfortunately, it seems that humans are frequently career-minded opportunists willing to enforce idiotic nonsense because they can get away with it as the law is written, regardless of what the law meant. And they do this because, quite simply, these sort of cases are easy targets, and our system rewards this sort of behavior (more convictions means more career gain).
Stop rewarding this, and maybe they'll stop going after easy but meaningless targets, and start paying attention to real crimes with real victims.
Child Porn laws, on the other hand are designed to try and protect children by dismantling Kiddie porn distribution networks and arresting those that partake of and help support Child Porn.
I think his problem wasn't with the laws on the books, but the way they're enforced, and used as weapons and threats. The same law that protects a ten year old from being victimized by pornography is also used "protect" seventeen year old high school kids sending nude pictures of themselves to each other online or with cellphones. Happens all the time and I believe it's even been covered here on Slashdot. It's a strange part of our laws that in most states, it's legal to have sex with a sixteen year old, but if you want to take pictures during, suddenly you're corrupting the "child". I'm not here to say whether that's right or wrong, but the conflicting views on this are interesting.
You claim that "Child Porn is most certainly NOT victimless," but it sounds increasingly hollow every time some muckity muck with an axe to grind tries to prosecute seventeen year olds for having pictures of themselves. It's that kind of selective enforcement and letter-not-spirit interpretation of the law that irks so many.
No one is denying that anti-child-porn laws exist for a reason. The gripe is that, at least as far as what gets reported in the media, a huge number of prosecutions seem to be just some DA or other politico causing a ruckus where none really exists, just to be seen doing something.
As more and more of us go to the Web for our video entertainment, Comcast and the other cable companies may become increasingly irrelevant and lose more and more of their market share.
Everything you said makes sense, but I couldn't let this line slide completely. This is true only to an extent; plenty of people rely on the local cable provider for their internet connection and in many areas there isn't much of a choice, if there's any choice at all. Keeping a stranglehold on people won't be difficult for entrenched service providers who can move between various industries at will.
But the original question had to do with people who had almost zero experience with computers, so we can safely assume that Windows will be just as much a mystery to them as Linux with Gnome. To them it's all a learning experience anyway, so what's the difference?
Now if my eldery relatives already had some familiarity with Windows, I'd consider an XP install for them, because yes, at that point they're probably entrenched, set in their ways, and won't want to learn anything else. But that would also depend on their level of experience. If all they do is surf the web and send emails to the grandkids, Thunderbird and Firefox are the same on both platforms, and they're too old and mystified by computers to even notice that they're using Gnome instead of Windows. As long as their websites work, they don't care, or even notice.
Put that stupid XP rolling-green-hills background up for them, and they'll likely never ask questions.
With computer-illiterate people, the truth is, they're going to panic and call you for help at the first sign of trouble anyway, just as you said. It doesn't matter to them that the trouble is XP trashing yet another dll, or some library issue in Linux; all they know is "the computer doesn't work, sonny, can you fix it?" They are no more capable of solving Windows problems than Linux problems, so what's the difference? To them, none, but to you, the differences might be:
1. Less problems with Linux. You won't get calls about problems caused with trojans and spyware and other inane crap. You won't have to clean inane toolbars out of their browser every time you visit. The security model is better from the ground up, and without root access there is a lot less an end-user can truly screw up.
2. With Linux you'd actually have good, secure remote access built right in, in the form of ssh and vnc. No third-party garbage which is just one more thing for them to worry about, and one more thing that might break when the vendor "updates", and no RDP nonsense which logs them out of their session, which makes them feel uneasy.
3. You can actually fix most Linux problems. There will be error logs somewhere, or you can run stuff from an xterm and see what's breaking. With Windows you're lucky to get some obscure OxDEADBEEF error which tells you absolutely nothing. 90% of the time the only "solution" is to reinstall something, up to and including the OS, which is not a good solution, especially when dealing with elderly people and you're doing this remotely.
kitten@minerva:~$ apt-cache search beneath beneath-a-steel-sky - a science fiction adventure game scummvm - free implementation of LucasArts' SCUMM interpreter
As you can see it's also in the apt repo of Debian and Ubuntu. Anyone using a Debian-based distro should see if you can just grab it that way -- it really is a fantastic game.
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Part of the reason that "nice" neighborhoods are "nice" is that all of the neighbors have some expectation (and definition) of what "nice" is.
Mine mostly involves a minimum of obnoxious noise -- and I'm lenient -- and a prime location. If I had kids I'd probably also want "good schools nearby", though that's a subject for another time...
But for me "prime location" means "in a major urban district". I want to walk places. I want to be near the clubs, the bars, the theatres, and the office in which I work. You are unlikely to find a place in any major city where an HOA does not exist -- at least, not in any city in which I've lived. As far as I can tell the choices are "Deal with an HOA, or move fifty miles away to some podunk hellhole where no one cares what you do." Nice choice.
I, myself, do not care about silly decorations the neighbors may use. I don't care if they have TV dishes or solar panels. I don't care if they leave a broom on their balcony. I don't care if they park a car on the street. As long as they aren't blasting music past midnight, destroying other people's property, or getting in my face, I just don't care. As far as I am concerned they can trash their place as much as they want as long as their filth doesn't enroach upon my space. Yet I'm forced into HOAs in which I must agree that I hate everything that anyone else might do which may disrupt the bland homogenity of the neighborhood.
You red shirt argument is now taking it to the extreme.
So are people whining about basketball goals. They rarely do so because of any noise it generates -- let's face it, most people use those things for about a week and never again. The whiners just don't like to see it. And they don't like to see TV dishes. Or solar panels. None of it is hurting them in any way -- they just don't like to see it. Well, I don't like to see red shirts. There really is no difference whatsoever.
Also, generally they must vote in order to change any laws, so one person hating red isn't going to get the entire community to ban it.
I completely agree. However, in general, the only people who bother voting on HOA regulations are the same type of people who are keeping an eye out for any minor infraction. People with nothing to do. People who wield no power over anything else in their lives. Petty people.
I have better things to do than attend HOA meetings to listen to five people bicker about old man Zimmerman parking his car on the street for three days. Consequently I don't attend them, and don't vote. The busybodies with nothing else to do are the ones attending, and voting. Don't assume the HOA vote represents what the community actually cares about. The rest of the community is out having a life while the HOA members decide what to ban this time.
Do you ever watch the show Frasier? There are a few episodes where he gets into it with his condo board, and they perfectly illustrate just how absurd the entire concept of an HOA really is. One episode revolved around Frasier hanging a rather neutral, completely tasteful door knocker on his door, having it flagged by the board, and spending the rest of the episode bickering and fighting with people about it -- except for a group of "rebels" who loathed the current HOA board because all the board did was tag people for idiotic violations.
Yet those "rebels" were never at the board meetings -- they had better things to do. The only people who attended were sour old bags who felt the need to seize authority wherever they could find it.
Great episodes, and all perfect examples of what I'm saying. Yes, there's a certain logic to requiring a few bits of decency in the community, but part of living in society, as I said, means putting up with the fact that not everyone is like you and some people are going to do things you don't like. HOAs do not exist to enforce community standards of living to defend property values, because the things they regulate have zero demonstrable effect on property values. HOAs exist for petty people to impose their will on others and be bullies. That is their purpose.
ou signed an agreement with your HOA, and for better or worse you have to put up with their rules.
Sure, but that was part of my point -- in many areas of the country, it isn't a realistic option to find property where there's not an HOA in force. You either live in the middle of nowhere, with all the commuting and other headaches that go along with it, or you have a nice place in a nice neighborhood and have to abide by some little totalitarian HOA. I understand that I signed the agreement, but it's not like I had a hell of a lot of choice. Like signing NCs with your employer -- you don't want to, and you "have the option" of refusing, getting fired, and finding a new job, but realistically no one's going to bother. They're forced into it by wanting/needing to keep the job they have.
Maybe the basketball goal is against the rules. My point is that it shouldn't be. There's a line to be drawn somewhere, I guess, but it's a freaking basketball goal. How far do people want to go with this? Maybe I think red is ugly and I don't want to live in a neighborhood where joggers are allowed to wear red shirts because I have to look out the window and see that -- should I be allowed to make it against the rules? Should a committee? Or should we all just grow up?
The broom example is even better -- that's something no one could possibly care about, and was probably just an oversight on the homeowner's part as they forgot to take it inside, but since it's technically against the rules, some officious nit can use the rule to bully him or her. And that's really what the majority of HOAs are: small, petty people with no control over anything important in life, trying to bully other people with the one area they've found to seize power. No one really cares that there's a basketball goal or a broom and it doesn't actually decrease property values (which is what HOA rules are allegedly protecting). But little rules like those are convenient ways to badger someone when they have nothing else to do.
I think a huge problem is that, in many areas, it's nearly impossible to find property which doesn't come with a homeowner's association, local bylaws, or something similar. Yes, you could move out into the middle of nowhere, but some people might not want to commute sixty miles to work, or be so far away from their kid's school, just to avoid an HOA. It simply isn't practical in many areas, and in some, it isn't possible -- and the "you can just move" option is absurdly unrealistic. Moving requires capital which many people can't front in addition to their monthly expenses.
You may enjoy the fact that you don't have to look out the window and see that Clown House, and that's fine. Personally I can't imagine why you'd care, but that's your perogative, and I can even see some logic to wanting to keep the area civilized because it affects your property value.
But realistically your example is an extreme. These sort of rules and regulations are rarely used for any actual defense of property value; they are used by power-hungry jerks who want to lord over their penny-ante dictatorships and bully people for no reason.
Clown House there might affect property value because nobody wants to buy a home near it because it's absurd. But I can't really imagine a couple looking to buy a home, and saying "Oh honey, it's perfect! And so close to little Susie's school!" "Yes dear, but did you notice the house three doors over has solar panels on the roof? What a dump! We can't live near that!" Spare me.
Even that's a rather extraordinary example. Usually these sort of rules are used to badger people about much more mundane crap that no sane human would really care about. The basketball goal you installed in the driveway for your kid has to be taken down because the old bag across the street got in a snit and reported it to the HOA. You left a broom on your balcony the other day when you were sweeping it. You installed a two-foot TV dish on the side of the house that no one could even see if they weren't looking for it, but someone with nothing better to do had to go find trouble and make their fury known.
But to pull it back to the original discussion, solar panels on a roof are barely something the casual passerby would notice or care about, yet some areas act like it's pure evil to defile the local property values with them. It's a far cry from installing windmills or converting your house into Peewee's Playhouse, but to some people, there's no difference, and it's really time to stop letting hyper-sensitive clods like that have authority over these matters.
It's a lot easier psychologically to use a gun than some sort of melee weapon. The gun provides a disconnect from the act itself -- all you're doing is pulling a trigger -- whereas a knife or beating or whatever is a much more visceral experience. Someone may be willing to "just pull a trigger", but not to stab, where they'd have to feel the result of their deed.
There's a lot of cognitive dissonance there, but it's a real phenomenon.
Then make it a feature you have to explicitly enable, so your grandmother, who is using a default vanilla install, won't accidently switch to a new desktop. That's the solution, not "Just don't have the feature at all."
There are ways around the Clueless User aspect here, but you're arguing that any feature which might prove useful shouldn't exist because the most clueless people might get confused. Then again, I guess that is the Windows philosophy...
Part of the difference with Linux is that downloading random-ass crap from untrusted sources and blindly running an installer is not the usual way to install software. With the major distros, the user will get stuff out of the official repositories, which have been examined and vetted. This is especially true of the "clueless user" type you're describing.
Malware is so prevelent on Windows partially because Windows provides no way for a user to know what the hell is going on. The expected means of installing software is to visit random websites, owned by god-knows-who, download some executable, and run it. You rarely have any means of telling what it's actually installing, where it's installing, and just what these programs actually do. When this is the preferred way of doing things, is it any wonder that people download and install malicious stuff without even knowing it?
A fine example is Chrome, which I installed in the first few days it was released. I didn't notice that stupid Google Updater thing which was silently installed alongside, until much later when I was checking my running processes for unrelated reasons. Getting rid of it was a pain in the ass, too. I'm a veteran user who knows what the hell I'm doing, and Google "should be" a trusted source -- yet this slipped right by me. That thing could easiliy have been malicious (though to my mind, anything that "updates" unknown servers with unknown information about my computer is malicious).
The Linux repository and package management system isn't perfect but it is far and away lightyears ahead of the Windows method.
I've had it with these motherfucking Presidents on these motherfucking planes!
you'd have someone from Europe talking about how ignorant Americans/USians are for just saying "the president" and not being specific
Regardless of whether Slashdot is primarily a US-oriented discussion site, this particular story is about the American president. The only ignorance would be in not being able to derive, from context, which president is being discussed if someone were to say "the president". In a discussion about Russia's president, we'd all understand which presiednt was being discussed and I doubt you'd see any Americans whinging that we should say "POTRF" because it's too confusing or Russia-centric otherwise.
I realise you, specifically, didn't do this, but claiming that one must specify "of the United States" with every bloody reference to "the president" is absurd. Humans are allegedly good at contextual clues. Let's act like it.
When seeing acronyms in print, some people have a tendancy to read them as words, whether they should be read as such or not -- especially when the acronym is pronouncable, like "POTUS". Say it out loud and understand how silly it sounds. Beyond that, it just looks pretentious to use acronyms that are both non-standard and add nothing to the meaning. Using the ol' standby argument "it saves time" is just absurd -- we're talking about a few extra letters. If you can take the time to post you can certainly spare the additional milliseconds it takes to type an actual word, rather than barely-comprehensible acronyms, and come out looking a little more intelligent.
People who defend silliness like this are also some of the quickest to gripe about "txt speak", and really, what's the difference? Where do you draw the line?
Just because people aren't asking for it doesn't mean it's not a good idea. It's probably never even occured to most Windows users that such a thing is possible. Yet many of them have secondary monitors, so clearly, there's a significant number of them that would like extra screen real estate.
Really, I never knew how great virtual desktops were until I started using various Linux distros with Gnome. Before that I was stuck in XP Land and it never really dawned on me that there could be more than one "main screen". That's just sort of the view of Windows users.
Think about all the various bells and whistles in OS X -- do you think people were asking for something like Expose? They weren't. But Apple introduced it, told people about it, and now people won't shut up about how useful it is -- even though they never thought about it before and were getting on fine without it.
I don't recall anyone asking for an updated Office interface either. Menus make perfect sense to people since menus are what every application has had for twenty years. But along came Microsoft with their Ribbon thing and now everyone's stuck with it, for better or worse.
Microsoft's random UI changes or updates show they're perfectly willing to do this stuff without anyone asking for it. Their reluctance to set up virtual desktops has to stem from something else other than customer demand.
Personally, I agree, but allow me to play, ahem, devil's advocate. The theist's reply to this is usually something along the lines of "So you think God doesn't exist?"
The atheist then says "No, I just don't see any reason to think he exists."
"So you're saying he doesn't exist."
"I'm saying I just don't believe he does."
"Which means you think he doesn't."
"Well, come on, there's a difference between 'I'm convinced God doesn't exist' and 'I'm not convinced God does exist', right?"
"Either you believe God exists, or you don't."
"Yeah, but.. well, no.. I mean I'm not convinced. I see no evidence for God."
"Oh ho ho! So you're not really atheist. You're more like agnostic."
"No, agnostic would mean I believe the decision cannot be made. I'm saying it can be made, but there is no evidence for it so I'm defaulting."
"Defaulting to disbelief."
"More like nonbelief."
"So you're saying you think there is no God."
This goes on for a while, in my experience. The atheist tries to explain that he's more or less an innocent bystander willing to be convinced but hasn't yet, while the theist tries to say that the atheist, in his lack of belief, is making an assertion. Neither side gets anywhere.
You and I are, really, on the same page. But it is very easy for the theist to misunderstand, and it's very easy to see the theist's point of view on this topic.
Y'see, there is really no other serious subject of which I'm aware where neither side can "prove" themselves. Before, I made the analogy of Reptilians because it's absurd, and it was meant to demonstrate a point, but we can all have a good laugh because the concept of Reptilians is so far-fetched as to be ridiculous. But the notion of a supernatural entity is deeply rooted in our culture and society, and cannot be dismissed as easily as Reptilians. To a theist, "God exists" is virtually axiomatic and has been for thousands of years; to him, it's so self-evident that he does believe that the onus of proof is on the atheist for saying otherwise.
I'm not saying the theist is correct in this. But when you're dealing with such a deep-seated belief that transcends hundreds of societies and civilisations, all of which have had some notion of supernatural beings, simply saying "I see no evidence and I've yet to be convinced" sounds hollow... to a theist.
Hey. My personal beliefs aren't something I am trying to push, and I think I was clear to say that both theists and atheists can make compelling arguments for their respective sides. But to define "atheist" in a way that automatically makes the theist superior is an intellectually dishonest tactic -- that was my only point.
I think theology as a field of study is perfectly respectable and it doesn't matter which side of the fence you happen to believe -- there are many theologians who are devout, and many who are just as expert in the field but are atheist. A comprehensive understanding of the material doesn't imply a belief one way or the other, just as there are many who are fascinated by cryptozoology who don't necessarily believe in cryptids but find the lore of importance to our culture. Theology itself is a legitimate field of study regardless of whether or not theism is correct.
Citing my credentials in this area is pointless, because I'm not here to argue for one side or the other. I am quite capable of defending theism or atheism, as I'm capable of defending any side of a debate whether or not I, personally, agree with that side. My only point was that atheism has a clear definition, as has been argued by dozens upon dozens of theologians and philosophers, and defining it dishonestly gets us nowhere. Atheists are not immune to this criticism either, but that wasn't the topic of discussion at this time.
So, would you kindly just chill.
If "theism" is a belief in a god or gods, then what is "atheism"? When something is asymmetrical, it is without symmetry. If something is amoral, it is without morals -- which is, please note, different than being immoral. The prefix "a-" simply means "without, or lacking". Ergo, in its simplest form, atheism is "without a belief in a god or gods".
It's certainly true that some atheists take a more positive view and assert that a god or gods cannot or do not exist. But at its root, atheism does not require this assertion -- simply not having a belief is sufficient to be classified as atheist.
This gets twisted around a lot in theological arguments; the atheist will sit back and sneer that the theist is the one making the assertion ("A god exists.") and is therefore carrying the burden of proof. The theist will counter that the atheist is also making an assertion ("A god does not exist.") and is thus just as burdened to prove his claim as the theist.
The reason theists like this argument so much is because they realise that they carry some burden of proof, because they acknowledge they are making an assertion about the nature of reality. Yet they also find it difficult to present any objective evidence to back their claim. This puts the atheist at an advantage, until the theist uses the above argument. Suddenly the atheist is faced with an impossible situation -- how do you prove something doesn't exist, especially when the something in question is a god?
No matter what the atheist says, the theist can claim that the god somehow manipulated the observation or outcome. And thus, the theist has now placed himself on superior ground in the debate, for while the theist may be able to dredge up a few interesting things the atheist can't explain, there is nothing the atheist can say which cannot immediately be explained away by the theist as some whim of the deity.
It is disingenuous at best and intellectually dishonest at worst to consider both of these stances equal in terms of burden of proof. There are people who genuinely believe that Reptilians from other planets walk among us and have infiltrated the highest levels of our governments. Should you encounter such a person, I suggest you don't engage them in dialogue, but if you did, you might ask what their proof is. Would you feel it fair if the Reptile Believer countered that you should have to prove there aren't Reptilians? Do you consider yourself some sort of active disbeliever in Reptilians, or just someone without even a passing interest on the topic?
I'm not trying to say which side is correct here, as both can make compelling arguments, but clouding the issue with incorrect definitions does nothing to advance the debate.
Are you people forgeting that those employees only used windows for their entire lives ?? It's not something that can be learned in two hours (not at work, not as an essential tool.)
They may have "used" Windows but they don't "know" Windows any more than they know anything else. Most office employees who aren't in IT barely know more about computers than they absolutely require to do their job. Every day, legions of sales staff power up their computers, and dutifully open Outlook, Word, IE, maybe Excel or something. They use these things to do their work but emailing proposals to clients and typing numbers into spreadsheets doesn't mean they "know" Windows or Office. It means they've learned, mostly by rote, how to open a few applications.
Anything more complicated than that is beyond them, which is why their drives are always full of "Shortcut to New Word Document (1)(1)(1).doc.doc", files are saved in any of seven different locations with no rhyme or reason, IE is filled with idiotic "Free Smilies Toolbars", and the thing takes four minutes to boot because of all the crap they have on startup.
Saying they know Windows or Office because they can open a few applications is pretty meaningless. I could put any one of my salespeople in front of Ubuntu, tell them "This is the new Windows Longhorn," and they'd figure out how to open email, Firefox, and OO Writer within minutes. They'd also never know or care about the difference.
Remember that for the majority of people they aren't "using" Windows or any other OS, especially at work -- they are using applications to accomplish a very narrowly-defined, specific task. If Evolution lets them send mail, they don't care that it's not Outlook. If they can write letters to their clients they don't care that they're using Abiword or OO Writer instead of MS Word.
I'm well aware that many corporations use this or that propietary, Windows-only bit of software or whatever, and that may be a deal-breaker, but that has nothing to do with whether or not their rank-and-file staff "knows" Windows.
I believe Airtran, and all airlines, are required to hand the matter over to the authorities if anyone reports anything suspicious or threatening, yes -- even if that report is just some over-sensitive idiot misconstruing someone's casual remark, the authorities have to get involved.
Airtran wasn't necessarily wrong for following procedure in that. Airtran was wrong for refusing to allow the family on another flight after the FBI determined that there was nothing wrong. I cannot imagine what possible justification they had for that decision.
The problem is that most IT staff have jobs that are pretty vaguely worded compared to most other fields. A helpdesk monkey's job description might include something like "Provide support for Microsoft Office", but what does "support" mean? Only addressing actual errors and software problems, or hand-holding and educating the user? This is rarely spelled out. It spills into the higher echelons too -- I'm frequently called upon to help salespeople figure out how to do things; as an admin my job description includes the word "support" somewhere in there, so...
I will help with this stuff if I've time because I like my coworkers, but I work for a fairly small company where we all more or less know each other and get along. This isn't the case for the majority of IT workers out there, so I can see how it'd quickly get annoying to be asked to do hand-holding, especially for software the user should, by all rights, already know in order to have the job.
It is a decadent and depraved culture that finds images of nursing breasts "obscene" while elevating the display of non-nursing breasts to the status of idol.
I wish with you up until this statement, which is just bizarre. It's true that our culture reveres breasts, for better or worse, but the taboo against baring them in public isn't restricted to whether the woman is nursing or not. Public display of breasts in any way is considered "obscene" in most legal jurisdictions in the US, if not all, so let's not say that had the woman been flashing she'd have been idolized but since she was nursing, she was demonized.
One more thing:
infantile adults who find the true function of a female breast to be upsetting.
Nursing babies is one "true function" of the female breast, obviously. But offhand, I cannot think of any other mammal where the female's breasts are enlarged whether nursing or not -- most, if not all, other mammals only get enlarged breasts when they have suckling children. Human breasts are always prominent and are most definitely a secondary sexual characteristic. The reasons for this have been debated, but some plausible ones include symbols of fertility, obvious signal of gender, and myriad psychosexual theories which are part of the overall difference between human sexuality and just about every other animal sexuality.
All that having been said, you're right that this entire thing is stupid. Breastfeeding is necessary and with a kid's head in the way, no more is really being revealed than if the woman was simply wearing skimpy clothes. People who take offense to this sort of thing remind me of the people who actually think something like a picture of some two year old in the bathtub is "child porn" -- if they see something sexual in these situations, maybe they're the ones with the problem.
A user's lack of knowledge is not a technical problem. It's a managerial one, really. Why did this person get hired if they lack the basic skills required to get the job done (like, using Office)? If a salesperson can't read, HR doesn't dispatch someone to teach them; that person gets fired for lacking the ability to do their job.
Now if it's actually a technical problem, that's what support staff is for, but don't confuse "user ignorance" with "technical problem". I don't ask my mechanic to teach me how to drive, and hell, I'm paying him out of my own pocket!
Truthfully, I'll let even user ignorance slide if I can tell they've made an honest attempt to find the answer themselves, no matter how far down the wrong track they may have been. The fact that they tried before asking is good enough for me. But when a user displays a constant pattern of:
that's when I get annoyed. Or, as is frequently the case, when the user has an abusive attitude, like their incompetence is somehow IT's fault.
I'm not suggesting IT departments are staffed by saints who can do no wrong. But I don't look for ways to circumvent the NDAs and NCs the legal department made me sign -- why are they looking for ways to circumvent the filters we put in place? I don't try to find clever ways of violating HR's sexual harassment policies without getting caught -- why are they trying to violate my "no torrents" policy?
Most people are not IT Specialists they have other focuses and concerns in their life. Computers are not a big deal.
:P
Fine. I'm not a car person, but that doesn't mean I can ignore the rules of the road and basic car maintainance. Driving is an incredibly complex task. You have to learn all the little weird laws and rules, and adhere to them. And if you want to own your own car, you now have to remember to put gas in it, change the oil every so often, update the tag every year, make sure the insurance is paid. There's quite a lot to something as commonplace as a car. Yet we all accept this, and we further accept that in order to drive, you have to first put in the time to learn how, and practice, and pass tests, before you're allowed a license.
And by the way, I don't ask my mechanic to teach me how to drive.
So, why is it that everyone is okay with the huge effort of learning how to drive responsibly, but if asked to learn just a little bit about basic computer operations, suddenly it's "I'm not a computer person, I don't care, I don't need to know!"
Lets use a car analogy, and the person didn't know if their car is front wheel drive, rear wheel drive, or all wheel drive
Can you imagine taking your car to the mechanic and telling him "It's broken"? The mechanic asks for specifics: What's broken? It won't start at all, the steering is loose, the brakes make noise, the windows won't roll down, the engine stalls, what? When did it start? How often does it happen, and under what conditions? You shrug and say you don't know, you're not a car person, just fix it, please. And despite the very obvious body damage indicating you recently rammed into something, you stand in front of the mechanic and insist that you didn't do anything. The car just "broke" by itself.
How long do you think the mechanic would put up with this? A few minutes at the outside, I'd wager, until he asked you to leave the shop at best, or agreed to fix your car and charged you $900 for a new "johnson rod" at worst.
In few other professional trades -- none that I can think of offhand, actually, but I'm making a concession for ones I haven't thought of -- is the customer base as openly hostile and dismissive of the people doing the work. A computer fails to connect to a file server. It worked yesterday, what's the problem? IT is always doing this. Word spreads that IT screwed up again. Someone else offers that Outlook isn't working, they've been waiting for an email for an hour and it hasn't come in yet. Don't any of these damn technicians know what they're doing? This is ridiculous, we can't work like this. On and on and on.
Most of the problems users experience are actually caused by users -- either failing to learn anything about these multi-thousand-dollar machines they've used eight hours a day, five days a week, for the past ten years. Or by deliberately fiddling with hardware or software settings they don't understand. Documentation was available but they didn't want to read it, it seemed faster to just scream for help. Something stopped working after they did X, but they never figure out that undoing X might make it right again. No. It's all IT's fault. Someone call technical support. Those damn snotty techs, why can't they make this simple?
Is there any other profession where highly-trained, knowledgable people, who have spent years on becoming educated in their field, are expected to do this sort of thing? Would you go to the doctor to put a band-aid on a paper cut, or ask why it hurts when you drop things on your foot?
And we, the IT workers, dutifully fix the problem. To figure out what happened we sometimes have to ask what the user did.
We're lied to: "I didn't touch it, it just stopped working," despite that log files say otherwise. If the problem was caused by the user, we try to educate, explain what happened, and how to avoid having it happen again. "I don't care,"
I was careful to stipulate that no other charges were involved in this little hypothetical. :P If someone starts dragging out rape accusations that changes the game significantly but that wasn't part of the original poster's scary story. And let me be clear -- it IS scary, and I'm sure it could happen, and likely has -- but assuming that the girl's only complaint to the cops is that you had sex with her and she's not of age, the myriad reasons you had for thinking she was of age would be defense enough.
I'm not sure even I'M quite that cynical. :) While situations like the above could happen, the more realistic outcome, provided you're otherwise clean, is that you defend yourself by pointing out that you had every reason to believe she was of age: She's in a club which checks IDs, she had ID on her, etc. There is only so far a person can be expected to go, unless the DA thinks you should have subjected her to radiometric dating techniques first.
If you have a record, or there are other offenses involved, or you have a shitty attitude, though, that's going to stack the odds against you. But I don't think things are quite as bad as the picture you're painting here.
You dislike the current law. What would you suggest as an alternative? What is you proposed solution?
Having prosecutors adhere to the spirit of the law, not the letter. The law itself is probably fine. The law was designed to protect children from being victimized by adults, not to "protect" a teenager from taking a picture of herself, and everyone knows it. That's the spirit of the law and it is why we have humans decide these things, instead of just blindly typing accusations into a database and having it determine a punishment.
Unfortunately, it seems that humans are frequently career-minded opportunists willing to enforce idiotic nonsense because they can get away with it as the law is written, regardless of what the law meant. And they do this because, quite simply, these sort of cases are easy targets, and our system rewards this sort of behavior (more convictions means more career gain).
Stop rewarding this, and maybe they'll stop going after easy but meaningless targets, and start paying attention to real crimes with real victims.
Child Porn laws, on the other hand are designed to try and protect children by dismantling Kiddie porn distribution networks and arresting those that partake of and help support Child Porn.
I think his problem wasn't with the laws on the books, but the way they're enforced, and used as weapons and threats. The same law that protects a ten year old from being victimized by pornography is also used "protect" seventeen year old high school kids sending nude pictures of themselves to each other online or with cellphones. Happens all the time and I believe it's even been covered here on Slashdot. It's a strange part of our laws that in most states, it's legal to have sex with a sixteen year old, but if you want to take pictures during, suddenly you're corrupting the "child". I'm not here to say whether that's right or wrong, but the conflicting views on this are interesting.
You claim that "Child Porn is most certainly NOT victimless," but it sounds increasingly hollow every time some muckity muck with an axe to grind tries to prosecute seventeen year olds for having pictures of themselves. It's that kind of selective enforcement and letter-not-spirit interpretation of the law that irks so many.
No one is denying that anti-child-porn laws exist for a reason. The gripe is that, at least as far as what gets reported in the media, a huge number of prosecutions seem to be just some DA or other politico causing a ruckus where none really exists, just to be seen doing something.
As more and more of us go to the Web for our video entertainment, Comcast and the other cable companies may become increasingly irrelevant and lose more and more of their market share.
Everything you said makes sense, but I couldn't let this line slide completely. This is true only to an extent; plenty of people rely on the local cable provider for their internet connection and in many areas there isn't much of a choice, if there's any choice at all. Keeping a stranglehold on people won't be difficult for entrenched service providers who can move between various industries at will.
But the original question had to do with people who had almost zero experience with computers, so we can safely assume that Windows will be just as much a mystery to them as Linux with Gnome. To them it's all a learning experience anyway, so what's the difference?
Now if my eldery relatives already had some familiarity with Windows, I'd consider an XP install for them, because yes, at that point they're probably entrenched, set in their ways, and won't want to learn anything else. But that would also depend on their level of experience. If all they do is surf the web and send emails to the grandkids, Thunderbird and Firefox are the same on both platforms, and they're too old and mystified by computers to even notice that they're using Gnome instead of Windows. As long as their websites work, they don't care, or even notice.
Put that stupid XP rolling-green-hills background up for them, and they'll likely never ask questions.
With computer-illiterate people, the truth is, they're going to panic and call you for help at the first sign of trouble anyway, just as you said. It doesn't matter to them that the trouble is XP trashing yet another dll, or some library issue in Linux; all they know is "the computer doesn't work, sonny, can you fix it?" They are no more capable of solving Windows problems than Linux problems, so what's the difference? To them, none, but to you, the differences might be:
1. Less problems with Linux. You won't get calls about problems caused with trojans and spyware and other inane crap. You won't have to clean inane toolbars out of their browser every time you visit. The security model is better from the ground up, and without root access there is a lot less an end-user can truly screw up.
2. With Linux you'd actually have good, secure remote access built right in, in the form of ssh and vnc. No third-party garbage which is just one more thing for them to worry about, and one more thing that might break when the vendor "updates", and no RDP nonsense which logs them out of their session, which makes them feel uneasy.
3. You can actually fix most Linux problems. There will be error logs somewhere, or you can run stuff from an xterm and see what's breaking. With Windows you're lucky to get some obscure OxDEADBEEF error which tells you absolutely nothing. 90% of the time the only "solution" is to reinstall something, up to and including the OS, which is not a good solution, especially when dealing with elderly people and you're doing this remotely.
kitten@minerva:~$ apt-cache search beneath
beneath-a-steel-sky - a science fiction adventure game
scummvm - free implementation of LucasArts' SCUMM interpreter
As you can see it's also in the apt repo of Debian and Ubuntu. Anyone using a Debian-based distro should see if you can just grab it that way -- it really is a fantastic game.