So the defense against his straw man is to prop up your straw man so that he is bigger? You are basically arguing that your straw man can beat up his straw man.
But to neglect the Soviet involvement in the War as much as some have in this thread borders on criminal. It's a widely held opinion in UK history (and I'm sure other European countries) that the decision to take the war to 2 fronts is the most critical mistake Hitler made.
I completely agree with your post, except for that section I quoted above. Sure I was not on Stalin's staff, but historical documents have shown that Stalin was already planning on moving west once Germany had stalled in its attack. The German army had no choice but to attack before Stalin could get his war machine up and running.
Hitler and his generals made plenty of mistakes during the attack (changing objectives being one of the most terrible), but the decision to attack was not really a choice.
Actually schools represent our biggest customer base; although our B2B is the highest traffic on a daily basis. Most schools use it to announce all manner of things that are coming up (including several emergency lock downs). However, it is weather closings that really stress the system. Several geographically centered locations all hammering their full list at the same time. All of these calls will terminate into the same exchanges.
It is strange to see the system spike, investigate it and find that a nearby school has just be locked down because of a gunman on campus grounds. The supers can sound surprisingly calm when informing the parents not to be alarmed that someone with a gun is on campus and they have everything under control.
I understand the hatred towards robo-calling, but there are many legitimate uses as well. At the end of the day I do not feel sleazy about my code, or my company, because our system is emergency and B2B based. We do not do UCEs.
I'd like to take a moment to thank you for your tireless efforts to make the world a better place.
Thanks, and here I thought all my long hours and years of experience writing online gambling and delinquent bill collection software would go to waste. Maybe if I am lucky I can move up the ladder and write software automatically identify stressed mortgages and purchase them at fire sale prices from the banks so they can be foreclosed and re-sold - I heard that market is hot right now.:)
Seriously, those were my two previous positions. Dealing with the Colombian gambling interests was a very unique experience and my boss never seemed to tire of telling bad "necktie" jokes. The Colombians themselves were great, but dealing with currency really sucked. I had to take US Dollars, Colombian pesos, Euros, and Company Script (mixed within the same transaction) into the register - place all bets in US Dollars (with US and Caribbean Companies) - payoff all winners in whatever mix of currency they wanted. Of course, the drawer had to balance at the end of the shift.
Of all the times not to hit the "Post Anonymous" check box.
Why? I take a great deal of pride in the work that I have done on this software. Currently with minimal resources my code can sustain about 2000 simultaneous calls all day long. We also do bulk emails, pagers, and faxes with IMs happening sometime next year.
There is a difference between taking pride in the code as written and the way it is used. However, on that second point I have no complaints either. Our customers are first responders, government entities, and businesses (of the non-telemarketer variety). We send out school closings, drug/food recalls, hospital/doctor reminder calls, pharmacy pickup reminders, school absentee notifications, amber alerts, and emergency alerts.
The only slightly yuck moment came when the CTO put forward the idea (which was shot down) to sell time slices of our system to make calls for American Idol. One the evil scale that is Dr. Horrible level at best.
I would post the name of my company, but our poor corporate server would last only seconds against Slashdot.
The most annoying calls now are the "robo-calls." What really infuriates me about them is that I can't seem to hang up on them (if you try to hang up and pick up the phone later, the message is still playing). This pisses me off because it means that my phone company is somehow in cahoots with these bastards and is essentially letting them hijack my phone line without my permission. What if I needed to make an emergency call and had to wait for the robo-call to go through all its "great offers" before I could even dial out?
I write robo-call software and when something like that happens it is the fault of your local carrier. Many of the local carriers in the US have been getting lazy about sending the proper signals when a connection is disconnected. It is up to the carriers to send this signal. I can regularly call my boss' landline and get a difference of 30 seconds between when he hangs up and when I finally get the signal has been disconnected.
My reading of that is that he wants to use the material in version B in his book/lecture. The original author wrote A. It has be changed in minor ways (less that 10%) by other people which is now called version B. He then wants to use this new version B because it has some information he must deem useful.
He may be the sole author of version A and C (from your example), but if it is under the GFDL he cannot claim full rights to version B.
If I understand the original premise and your counter-example.
But it is a tax on the people. How much would you pay for oil if taxes weren't there? How much would you pay on the goods you buy? How much more would your employer pay you, if there wasn't a tax burden? I think you're missing the point here too.
Actually you cannot know unless you can find several identical companies with identical products selling into the same market with one taxed and one not. If Exxon's tax burden was 0% or 40% you cannot extrapolate how much you would still pay for a barrel of oil.
That's the idea. Any "secure" site that can be bothered with the hassle of running legitimately probably isn't worth/shouldn't be visited.
thats your decision. the average web surfer has to decide it for themselves, not coerced into making that decision by arrogant self righteous programmers.
That is exactly what FF3 has done. They have put control into the hands of the user instead of the programmer. This is neither arrogant or self-righteous - if they were going to be arrogant they would have not allowed any self-signed. Instead they push up a page stating exactly what is happening - giving the user the complete control to decide what to do next - even providing them a click right from that page.
This allows the average web surfer to decide for themselves.
Yes I can see how relevant a review from 2005 is when it is 2008. Considering that no video player has advanced since 2005 you would be foolish to use Theora.
It was the truth in 2005, but that is no longer true.
Before you post you might want to get your head out of Steve Ballmer's derriere. This is no fof story as I work with both XP and Vista on a daily basis.
My work has new Vista Business machines for the developers, the production boxes range from 4x4 to 2x2 core machines. The oldest machine or router in our production system is 2 years old. The production boxes are running Win2k3 Server. We have a smattering of older equipment mostly in the test system and for non-technical people. At home I am running AMD x2s with WinXP Pro - nothing really fancy but it gets the job done. Both my work box and my home box have 4G RAM and like processors so they are functional the same. I also have a pair of Win2k boxes and a single Linux box on my network acting various servers. So I get to work every day with both Vista, XP, and Win2k.
IMO Vista has several things in its favor. The dark color choice is easier on my eyes that XP's Candy theme (I have fixed XP with Stardock at home). Vista does not crash repeatedly, but then again XP does not crash either. I disabled the UAC so I can actually get something done in Vista.
However, if there is one thing that is a piece of crap above all else it is the crappy file system used by Vista. That alone makes Vista a dog pile and it should be scorned by any except the most MS fanboy. Our master code base is about 268M including dlls, code, etc. - so it is not that huge, but not trivial either. I can regularly copy that code base from either my machine through our SonicWall VPN and to a production box faster than my Vista box on the local lan. It is even worse for Vista going the other way. We have actually kept one of our old XP machines on the network just to do file copies. The process is to build locally, check-in, then go to the XP machine and pull down the code, final build, and push. This is faster than simply using Vista and our development machines.
Hot swapping RAM, CPUs, Video cards and the like is simply rah-rah crap. It will be useful whenever the server version finally cripples out of the barn, but until then its simply a bullet point for an OS that has very little over its predecessor.
That sounds nice, but it relies on ISPs not overselling capacity.
You can get service with ISPs that don't oversell, and actually have enough upstream bandwidth to service all their customers downloading and uploading at max speed all the time. It costs 20-30 times as much, but it's available. After all, most ISPs operate at a contention ratio of between 10:1 and 30:1, where they have enough bandwidth for 1 fully utilized connection for every 10-30 signed customers.
What might be a more reasonable compromise is for ISPs to reserve a fixed 64kbps or so per user. Even that, though, will quickly get expensive. They really need to be allowed to use QoS to provide acceptable performance for latency-sensitive applications while continuing to service bulk traffic - and doing it all cheaply.
Actually it will still work with oversell. The ISP is simply taking a chance that the number of people currently pushing the envelope does not exceed their capacity. It is a simple SLA. They tell each customer they get x bandwidth at any given time where x is based upon how much they pay.
The ISP can then make the determination by studying their load to see what percentage of x*sales they must actually have. So they can go around selling service to many people that will never use their bandwidth allotment, then balance that against those that will use their full allotment. Obviously an ISP will want many more of the former customers and as few as possible of the latter.
So a Microsoft (MS) Project Manager got a bunch of quotes from ex-Google people currently working at MS, or people that selected MS over Google for his column. Is his results at all surprising? Would someone return to MS only to give a quote to a MS PM that he much preferred his time at Google?
Funny.
My EIGHT YEAR OLD computer came with a pentium 4 2.8GHz, 1GB or RAM, Radeon 9800 Pro, and today, with nothing more than a RAM upgrade to 2GB, runs Vista Ultimate perfectly fine, including the "bells and whistles" like AERO.....
Just because someone makes an uninformed or poor decision, doesn't mean everyone else does.
Dear god! If you are going to lie at least make it somewhat within the boundaries of reality. The processor you have in your machine was released by Intel in August 2002, yet you claim to have in a EIGHT YEAR OLD computer. I am sure that Intel would love to find out how you got a machine with a processor from 2 years in to the future. That has to be some amazing feat to reach across the barriers of time to grab yourself a hot new processor. Does Stephen Hawking regularly show up at your house to see what other amazing feats you can accomplish?
I don't know why people spend tons of money on a computer only to throw in a cheap sound card, or even worse - rely on onboard sound.
My sound card - a Turtle Beech Catalina cost about what this does and was worth every penny, especially when teamed up with Bose PC speakers and sub.
Okay, that is fair but why couple a good sound card with crappy speakers - you have the equivalent of a German car with an American transmission. Buying a good sound card but then not mating it with good speakers is rather pointless. It is not that Bose speakers are not crappy, they are definitely not that, but they are not good by any stretch of the imagination. They make a perfect match for on-board sound. If you want a good setup then you need both a good sound card and good speakers - plus not listen to MP3s.
Hypothesis 3: Something is more likely to break when its older than when it is new
I know it may be difficult to see anything past your tinfoil hat, but really your two examples do not even come close to Occam's razor. In fact, they are so far off the bend that you begin to head in Tom Cruise terrain.
or maybe this one...
Hypothesis 4: Iran really is not offline - only a single router used for test.
I know that one is a bit of a stretch, but just try it out and I am sure that you may begin to see the light. Not everything is driven by some evil conspiracy, sometimes old things break. Sometimes Slashdot summaries are wrong. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
If Vista is so terrible, how come every single retail shop sells it first and foremost? OEMs don't get forced into buying Vista after all, and it's not like Macs aren't selling either so it's clearly not just a Windows thing.
I will assume that you are new to this because things have been this way since the Pentiums first rolled out. There is nothing illegal, immoral or anything else wrong. It has nothing to do with liking or even if the OS is useful to their customers. It all comes down to availability and profit. It is not even limited to the computer industry as Games Workshop does the same thing.
Shops will sell what has the highest profit margin and what they can get their hands on. The two computer shops near my house could not get access to retail WinXP licenses after Vista shipped. There was nothing to be had as Microsoft stopped selling them through their channel. They had no choice but to put Vista on the shelves. The second company (much bigger than the first) actually got a nice sized "advertising" cost offset from Microsoft channels to display/sell Vista. The limitation was that they had to remove XP from the shelves and really push Vista to make up the numbers, thus giving them more offsets.
OEMs love it because they are paid to love it. For the same reason there is that the Intel Inside sticker was put on everything. Microsoft pays them in advertising dollars for each time they run something with the Vista logo.
Good or bad has nothing to do with why companies place Vista so highly. Companies could care less about Vista except that it has the capability to drive more expensive purchases. Its all about the money.
I get what you are saying about the potential for vote buying... and it is a Valid point.
But as a voter, that is so much less of a fear to me than the ability for someone or an entity to be able to electronically rig an election (if not just part). Allowing the voter to lookup to "verify" their vote choices *after the fact* is the point!
How do I know if my vote was electronically changed to a different choice than the one I made? Buy looking it up!
Using statistics to prove a system is secure sure sounds like telling an individual their vote does not count. I want to look mine up! After all the money spent on political ads and other advertising, there's no way for a specific voter to vbe able to verify their vote? Even my local cable company can look up mt account and verify what choices I made on my channel and data plan selections. I have had some of those changed without mt permission, I verified my choices and resolved the error. Verification is key to trust.
Of course the system would never show you one thing - yet tabulate something else. That is sheer madness to think something like that could even happen. That is nothing more than false security, which is far worse than no security - because you have your "timestamped" ticket that you feel you have true security.
I have 3 kids (7,5,3) and all of them play games. My oldest started with Star Wars, Scooby-Doo, and SpongeBob on the Cube when he was 4. Mostly he would hand the controller to me and then mimic my moves - by five he would play pretty well with me so that we could game together. On the PC he players RCT3, Zoo Tycoon 2, and the Reader Rabbit stuff. My 5yo plays Catz2 and many of the Reader Rabbit stuff as well. My 3yo mostly just loves to watch and play eXcite Truck on the Wii.
Frankly, none of the kids are overweight (unlike their parents), they all love to play other things as well, and generally do well around other kids.
Measuring up to my parents personally I consider myself a pretty crappy parent, but I do the best that I can given what and I know and what I can do about it. VideoGames are not some big boogie man rotting our kids anymore than pool halls, comic books, or RPGs were in their time. Some people are always looking for someone or something to blame for their ills.
Including a link to Joel in a development article is like pulling a Godwin. I am sure he means well and maybe in real life he may be quite different, but like all bloggers with an ax he swings it in the most mindless page-snagging way. Being strongly opinionated is far more important than actually saying something intelligent. Like Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror who I swear must huff before it sits down to blog about something as he pulls a strange stream of thought from beginning to end.
The reason Safari for Windows might actually be a serious competitor on the browser market, is because Apple has something many others have not: Talented GUI oriented developers who can add that extra "spice" that will make ordinary people actually switch IE7 with something else.
If that is true then why does Safari on Windows suck so bad. The interface looks like some throwback to Borland's "stamped tinfoil" in the BCC 5.0 days. I do understand it is supposed to be part of the "Mac" experience, but it smacks too much of the same crappy Java Swing interface where every Java program looks and acts like a Java program instead of a native application (thank the gods for SWT).
Slashdot Mirror
So the defense against his straw man is to prop up your straw man so that he is bigger? You are basically arguing that your straw man can beat up his straw man.
But to neglect the Soviet involvement in the War as much as some have in this thread borders on criminal. It's a widely held opinion in UK history (and I'm sure other European countries) that the decision to take the war to 2 fronts is the most critical mistake Hitler made.
I completely agree with your post, except for that section I quoted above. Sure I was not on Stalin's staff, but historical documents have shown that Stalin was already planning on moving west once Germany had stalled in its attack. The German army had no choice but to attack before Stalin could get his war machine up and running.
Hitler and his generals made plenty of mistakes during the attack (changing objectives being one of the most terrible), but the decision to attack was not really a choice.
Actually schools represent our biggest customer base; although our B2B is the highest traffic on a daily basis. Most schools use it to announce all manner of things that are coming up (including several emergency lock downs). However, it is weather closings that really stress the system. Several geographically centered locations all hammering their full list at the same time. All of these calls will terminate into the same exchanges.
It is strange to see the system spike, investigate it and find that a nearby school has just be locked down because of a gunman on campus grounds. The supers can sound surprisingly calm when informing the parents not to be alarmed that someone with a gun is on campus and they have everything under control.
I understand the hatred towards robo-calling, but there are many legitimate uses as well. At the end of the day I do not feel sleazy about my code, or my company, because our system is emergency and B2B based. We do not do UCEs.
I'd like to take a moment to thank you for your tireless efforts to make the world a better place.
Thanks, and here I thought all my long hours and years of experience writing online gambling and delinquent bill collection software would go to waste. Maybe if I am lucky I can move up the ladder and write software automatically identify stressed mortgages and purchase them at fire sale prices from the banks so they can be foreclosed and re-sold - I heard that market is hot right now. :)
Seriously, those were my two previous positions. Dealing with the Colombian gambling interests was a very unique experience and my boss never seemed to tire of telling bad "necktie" jokes. The Colombians themselves were great, but dealing with currency really sucked. I had to take US Dollars, Colombian pesos, Euros, and Company Script (mixed within the same transaction) into the register - place all bets in US Dollars (with US and Caribbean Companies) - payoff all winners in whatever mix of currency they wanted. Of course, the drawer had to balance at the end of the shift.
"And you, sir, are worse than Hitler."
Really? I have killed millions? I have plunged the world into war? Don't you think you are stretching things just a wee bit too far?
I write robo-call software
Of all the times not to hit the "Post Anonymous" check box.
Why? I take a great deal of pride in the work that I have done on this software. Currently with minimal resources my code can sustain about 2000 simultaneous calls all day long. We also do bulk emails, pagers, and faxes with IMs happening sometime next year.
There is a difference between taking pride in the code as written and the way it is used. However, on that second point I have no complaints either. Our customers are first responders, government entities, and businesses (of the non-telemarketer variety). We send out school closings, drug/food recalls, hospital/doctor reminder calls, pharmacy pickup reminders, school absentee notifications, amber alerts, and emergency alerts.
The only slightly yuck moment came when the CTO put forward the idea (which was shot down) to sell time slices of our system to make calls for American Idol. One the evil scale that is Dr. Horrible level at best.
I would post the name of my company, but our poor corporate server would last only seconds against Slashdot.
The most annoying calls now are the "robo-calls." What really infuriates me about them is that I can't seem to hang up on them (if you try to hang up and pick up the phone later, the message is still playing). This pisses me off because it means that my phone company is somehow in cahoots with these bastards and is essentially letting them hijack my phone line without my permission. What if I needed to make an emergency call and had to wait for the robo-call to go through all its "great offers" before I could even dial out?
I write robo-call software and when something like that happens it is the fault of your local carrier. Many of the local carriers in the US have been getting lazy about sending the proper signals when a connection is disconnected. It is up to the carriers to send this signal. I can regularly call my boss' landline and get a difference of 30 seconds between when he hangs up and when I finally get the signal has been disconnected.
My reading of that is that he wants to use the material in version B in his book/lecture. The original author wrote A. It has be changed in minor ways (less that 10%) by other people which is now called version B. He then wants to use this new version B because it has some information he must deem useful. He may be the sole author of version A and C (from your example), but if it is under the GFDL he cannot claim full rights to version B. If I understand the original premise and your counter-example.
But it is a tax on the people. How much would you pay for oil if taxes weren't there? How much would you pay on the goods you buy? How much more would your employer pay you, if there wasn't a tax burden? I think you're missing the point here too.
Actually you cannot know unless you can find several identical companies with identical products selling into the same market with one taxed and one not. If Exxon's tax burden was 0% or 40% you cannot extrapolate how much you would still pay for a barrel of oil.
That's the idea. Any "secure" site that can be bothered with the hassle of running legitimately probably isn't worth/shouldn't be visited.
thats your decision. the average web surfer has to decide it for themselves, not coerced into making that decision by arrogant self righteous programmers.
That is exactly what FF3 has done. They have put control into the hands of the user instead of the programmer. This is neither arrogant or self-righteous - if they were going to be arrogant they would have not allowed any self-signed. Instead they push up a page stating exactly what is happening - giving the user the complete control to decide what to do next - even providing them a click right from that page.
This allows the average web surfer to decide for themselves.
Yes I can see how relevant a review from 2005 is when it is 2008. Considering that no video player has advanced since 2005 you would be foolish to use Theora. It was the truth in 2005, but that is no longer true.
Before you post you might want to get your head out of Steve Ballmer's derriere. This is no fof story as I work with both XP and Vista on a daily basis.
My work has new Vista Business machines for the developers, the production boxes range from 4x4 to 2x2 core machines. The oldest machine or router in our production system is 2 years old. The production boxes are running Win2k3 Server. We have a smattering of older equipment mostly in the test system and for non-technical people. At home I am running AMD x2s with WinXP Pro - nothing really fancy but it gets the job done. Both my work box and my home box have 4G RAM and like processors so they are functional the same. I also have a pair of Win2k boxes and a single Linux box on my network acting various servers. So I get to work every day with both Vista, XP, and Win2k.
IMO Vista has several things in its favor. The dark color choice is easier on my eyes that XP's Candy theme (I have fixed XP with Stardock at home). Vista does not crash repeatedly, but then again XP does not crash either. I disabled the UAC so I can actually get something done in Vista.
However, if there is one thing that is a piece of crap above all else it is the crappy file system used by Vista. That alone makes Vista a dog pile and it should be scorned by any except the most MS fanboy. Our master code base is about 268M including dlls, code, etc. - so it is not that huge, but not trivial either. I can regularly copy that code base from either my machine through our SonicWall VPN and to a production box faster than my Vista box on the local lan. It is even worse for Vista going the other way. We have actually kept one of our old XP machines on the network just to do file copies. The process is to build locally, check-in, then go to the XP machine and pull down the code, final build, and push. This is faster than simply using Vista and our development machines.
Hot swapping RAM, CPUs, Video cards and the like is simply rah-rah crap. It will be useful whenever the server version finally cripples out of the barn, but until then its simply a bullet point for an OS that has very little over its predecessor.
That sounds nice, but it relies on ISPs not overselling capacity.
You can get service with ISPs that don't oversell, and actually have enough upstream bandwidth to service all their customers downloading and uploading at max speed all the time. It costs 20-30 times as much, but it's available. After all, most ISPs operate at a contention ratio of between 10:1 and 30:1, where they have enough bandwidth for 1 fully utilized connection for every 10-30 signed customers.
What might be a more reasonable compromise is for ISPs to reserve a fixed 64kbps or so per user. Even that, though, will quickly get expensive. They really need to be allowed to use QoS to provide acceptable performance for latency-sensitive applications while continuing to service bulk traffic - and doing it all cheaply.
Actually it will still work with oversell. The ISP is simply taking a chance that the number of people currently pushing the envelope does not exceed their capacity. It is a simple SLA. They tell each customer they get x bandwidth at any given time where x is based upon how much they pay. The ISP can then make the determination by studying their load to see what percentage of x*sales they must actually have. So they can go around selling service to many people that will never use their bandwidth allotment, then balance that against those that will use their full allotment. Obviously an ISP will want many more of the former customers and as few as possible of the latter.
So a Microsoft (MS) Project Manager got a bunch of quotes from ex-Google people currently working at MS, or people that selected MS over Google for his column. Is his results at all surprising? Would someone return to MS only to give a quote to a MS PM that he much preferred his time at Google?
The article is pure PR crap - nothing more.
Except of course for the whole "Developers cheating to help themselves and their friends" issue that plagues Eve.
Wow, humor just seems to fly right over you without even pausing to take a dump on your head.
Dear god! If you are going to lie at least make it somewhat within the boundaries of reality. The processor you have in your machine was released by Intel in August 2002, yet you claim to have in a EIGHT YEAR OLD computer. I am sure that Intel would love to find out how you got a machine with a processor from 2 years in to the future. That has to be some amazing feat to reach across the barriers of time to grab yourself a hot new processor. Does Stephen Hawking regularly show up at your house to see what other amazing feats you can accomplish?
Okay, that is fair but why couple a good sound card with crappy speakers - you have the equivalent of a German car with an American transmission. Buying a good sound card but then not mating it with good speakers is rather pointless. It is not that Bose speakers are not crappy, they are definitely not that, but they are not good by any stretch of the imagination. They make a perfect match for on-board sound. If you want a good setup then you need both a good sound card and good speakers - plus not listen to MP3s.
Hypothesis 3: Something is more likely to break when its older than when it is new
I know it may be difficult to see anything past your tinfoil hat, but really your two examples do not even come close to Occam's razor. In fact, they are so far off the bend that you begin to head in Tom Cruise terrain.
or maybe this one...
Hypothesis 4: Iran really is not offline - only a single router used for test.
I know that one is a bit of a stretch, but just try it out and I am sure that you may begin to see the light. Not everything is driven by some evil conspiracy, sometimes old things break. Sometimes Slashdot summaries are wrong. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
I will assume that you are new to this because things have been this way since the Pentiums first rolled out. There is nothing illegal, immoral or anything else wrong. It has nothing to do with liking or even if the OS is useful to their customers. It all comes down to availability and profit. It is not even limited to the computer industry as Games Workshop does the same thing.
Shops will sell what has the highest profit margin and what they can get their hands on. The two computer shops near my house could not get access to retail WinXP licenses after Vista shipped. There was nothing to be had as Microsoft stopped selling them through their channel. They had no choice but to put Vista on the shelves. The second company (much bigger than the first) actually got a nice sized "advertising" cost offset from Microsoft channels to display/sell Vista. The limitation was that they had to remove XP from the shelves and really push Vista to make up the numbers, thus giving them more offsets.
OEMs love it because they are paid to love it. For the same reason there is that the Intel Inside sticker was put on everything. Microsoft pays them in advertising dollars for each time they run something with the Vista logo.
Good or bad has nothing to do with why companies place Vista so highly. Companies could care less about Vista except that it has the capability to drive more expensive purchases. Its all about the money.
Of course the system would never show you one thing - yet tabulate something else. That is sheer madness to think something like that could even happen. That is nothing more than false security, which is far worse than no security - because you have your "timestamped" ticket that you feel you have true security.
I have 3 kids (7,5,3) and all of them play games. My oldest started with Star Wars, Scooby-Doo, and SpongeBob on the Cube when he was 4. Mostly he would hand the controller to me and then mimic my moves - by five he would play pretty well with me so that we could game together. On the PC he players RCT3, Zoo Tycoon 2, and the Reader Rabbit stuff. My 5yo plays Catz2 and many of the Reader Rabbit stuff as well. My 3yo mostly just loves to watch and play eXcite Truck on the Wii.
Frankly, none of the kids are overweight (unlike their parents), they all love to play other things as well, and generally do well around other kids.
Measuring up to my parents personally I consider myself a pretty crappy parent, but I do the best that I can given what and I know and what I can do about it. VideoGames are not some big boogie man rotting our kids anymore than pool halls, comic books, or RPGs were in their time. Some people are always looking for someone or something to blame for their ills.
Too bad they do not want to protect the "value of their trademark" and stop producing shitty vehicles.
Including a link to Joel in a development article is like pulling a Godwin. I am sure he means well and maybe in real life he may be quite different, but like all bloggers with an ax he swings it in the most mindless page-snagging way. Being strongly opinionated is far more important than actually saying something intelligent. Like Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror who I swear must huff before it sits down to blog about something as he pulls a strange stream of thought from beginning to end.
If that is true then why does Safari on Windows suck so bad. The interface looks like some throwback to Borland's "stamped tinfoil" in the BCC 5.0 days. I do understand it is supposed to be part of the "Mac" experience, but it smacks too much of the same crappy Java Swing interface where every Java program looks and acts like a Java program instead of a native application (thank the gods for SWT).