Start with games, as they are simpler, but encourage your children to use computers for creative purposes. I was inspired to program through curiosity when I found QBASIC all those years ago, but I doubt my experience is typical.
On a more dire not I personally would avoid exposing a child to social networking/instant messanging/etc for a long time. My reasoning comes from comparing myself to my younger relative and friends. I am young enough that my highschool years coincided with the main-stream use of AIM and the like, which meant that livejournal and myspace only came into popularity around the time I was looking in to going to college. This situation meant that I wound up using IMing and social networking sites to augment my interations with real, living, tangible and local friends.
My younger peers though, use things like instant messanging and myspace to make friends almost exclusively, which has had a noticeable negative impact on their ability to interact with people in person. One of my cousins has been glued to her computer, to AIM, myspace and livejournal in particular, for the past two years.
Using only text to communicate means that two important secondary communication vectors are lost, body langauge and vocal inflections. If a child were to develop exclusively in entirely virtual social setting forming real relationships would be extraordinarily difficult. Not to mention the fact that text-only communcation encourages the use of slang and shorthand to make it easier to type. Alot of this typing turns in to muscle memory, which in turn makes it pretty hard to write an essay or anything intelligble. Just read an average myspace page and you should know what I mean.
Computers and the internet are obviously a great thing, but nowadays you don't have to be a geek to let your computer totally ruin your social life.
In the article they say taht they have applied their method to a variety of materials, namely plastic, glass and metal. There is a common thread there though, in that all three are higly regular materials. In an earthen levee, or even a contcrete one, the materials used to make are way more irregular than what they have tested their methods with. It sounds like the connection to New Orleans levees is really premature to me.
Maybe EA will realize they can't work their Devs to death rehashing old games and still keep people interested. Maybe MS will start making a *nix OS. Maybe pigs will sprout wings. It's a strange world we live in after all.
Norton Systemworks has pulled all these "security and optimization" things together for a while now, and all I've ever seen it do is gobble up memory and CPU time while pretty much not doing anything but actually making the system MORE unstable. Is it really such a great idea to have so many program with different agendas all sinking their API hooks in to your windows environment? I personally couldn't trust any package of independently developed applications to not accidently bump in to each other. Just look at all the weird behaviors older Norton Systemworks suites had a habit of introducing (i.e. breaking dos compatibility, even in 98!) and now that we have a new package being pulled together, it's another opportunity for the same mistakes to be made over again, only this time with a suite of more intensive, more invasive types of applications.
This law really is going about things the wrong way. If the sale of video games to minors is going to get restricted the ESRB needs to be given an actual meaning in law or as a regulatory agency.
An ESRB with teeth is not what is needed though. Restricting sales to minors won't stop them from getting what they want, it will just reduce the official sales numbers while the kids who do get their parents to get the game copy the game for their less fortunate freinds. The net effect wont be increased parently responsibility so much as it will be a rise in piracy. As the games become more unobtainable, they become more desireable to minors, and then even kids who would not have wanted the game on its merits alone will want it because they cannot have it. Situation sound like some other heavily legislated 'goods'? This is definitely not a new situation we have on our hands.
Of course the proper solution is increased parental responsibility. If the state or nation were to mandate, say, a class on parental responsibilty, parenting, licenses, or anything like that there would be riots in the streets.
It would be nice if people started noticing a pattern about social legislation. It is ineffective and nobody likes it. The only way this issue will be solved is if parents start thinking about the problem for themselves and maybe pay attention to their kids once and a while; but I don't see that happening anytime soon, do you?
Well it's never been a judges job to uphold the law, just interpret it. If they couldn't even do that then there wouldn't be much point in having a judiciary would there?
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Start with games, as they are simpler, but encourage your children to use computers for creative purposes. I was inspired to program through curiosity when I found QBASIC all those years ago, but I doubt my experience is typical.
On a more dire not I personally would avoid exposing a child to social networking/instant messanging/etc for a long time. My reasoning comes from comparing myself to my younger relative and friends. I am young enough that my highschool years coincided with the main-stream use of AIM and the like, which meant that livejournal and myspace only came into popularity around the time I was looking in to going to college. This situation meant that I wound up using IMing and social networking sites to augment my interations with real, living, tangible and local friends.
My younger peers though, use things like instant messanging and myspace to make friends almost exclusively, which has had a noticeable negative impact on their ability to interact with people in person. One of my cousins has been glued to her computer, to AIM, myspace and livejournal in particular, for the past two years.
Using only text to communicate means that two important secondary communication vectors are lost, body langauge and vocal inflections. If a child were to develop exclusively in entirely virtual social setting forming real relationships would be extraordinarily difficult. Not to mention the fact that text-only communcation encourages the use of slang and shorthand to make it easier to type. Alot of this typing turns in to muscle memory, which in turn makes it pretty hard to write an essay or anything intelligble. Just read an average myspace page and you should know what I mean.
Computers and the internet are obviously a great thing, but nowadays you don't have to be a geek to let your computer totally ruin your social life.
In the article they say taht they have applied their method to a variety of materials, namely plastic, glass and metal. There is a common thread there though, in that all three are higly regular materials. In an earthen levee, or even a contcrete one, the materials used to make are way more irregular than what they have tested their methods with. It sounds like the connection to New Orleans levees is really premature to me.
Maybe EA will realize they can't work their Devs to death rehashing old games and still keep people interested. Maybe MS will start making a *nix OS. Maybe pigs will sprout wings. It's a strange world we live in after all.
Norton Systemworks has pulled all these "security and optimization" things together for a while now, and all I've ever seen it do is gobble up memory and CPU time while pretty much not doing anything but actually making the system MORE unstable. Is it really such a great idea to have so many program with different agendas all sinking their API hooks in to your windows environment? I personally couldn't trust any package of independently developed applications to not accidently bump in to each other. Just look at all the weird behaviors older Norton Systemworks suites had a habit of introducing (i.e. breaking dos compatibility, even in 98!) and now that we have a new package being pulled together, it's another opportunity for the same mistakes to be made over again, only this time with a suite of more intensive, more invasive types of applications.
This law really is going about things the wrong way. If the sale of video games to minors is going to get restricted the ESRB needs to be given an actual meaning in law or as a regulatory agency.
An ESRB with teeth is not what is needed though. Restricting sales to minors won't stop them from getting what they want, it will just reduce the official sales numbers while the kids who do get their parents to get the game copy the game for their less fortunate freinds. The net effect wont be increased parently responsibility so much as it will be a rise in piracy. As the games become more unobtainable, they become more desireable to minors, and then even kids who would not have wanted the game on its merits alone will want it because they cannot have it. Situation sound like some other heavily legislated 'goods'? This is definitely not a new situation we have on our hands.
Of course the proper solution is increased parental responsibility. If the state or nation were to mandate, say, a class on parental responsibilty, parenting, licenses, or anything like that there would be riots in the streets.
It would be nice if people started noticing a pattern about social legislation. It is ineffective and nobody likes it. The only way this issue will be solved is if parents start thinking about the problem for themselves and maybe pay attention to their kids once and a while; but I don't see that happening anytime soon, do you?
Well it's never been a judges job to uphold the law, just interpret it. If they couldn't even do that then there wouldn't be much point in having a judiciary would there?