The point is that the whole "Windows is an evil, buggy, crashy mess" is patently intellectually dishonest. If the top post is flamebait in and of itself, what right does anyone actually have to expect otherwise from respondents?
Little Johnny Everykid of Bumblefuck, NE has been charged with several million counts of various felony charges, including murder, grand theft auto, grand larceny, mayhem, racketeering as well as several thousands of misdemeanor charges including malicious mischief, vandalism, and petty theft.
One of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City's most ardent fans, Johnny played the game nearly nonstop for two years after its initial release. Since in-game crime is now treated in the same manner as actual crime, the youngster, who is all of thirteen years old, now faces nearly 3 million consecutive life sentences for accrued in-game criminal activities.
Johnny's lawyer, Joe Shyster, of the firm Wynken, Blynken, and Nod, has submitted briefs to the court stating that most of the charges should be dropped. Shyster said that since the activities occurred in game in the year 1986, the statute of limitations on most of them has been expired at least 2 years.
Additionally, since most of the activities occurred within the confines of Vice City proper, that certain jurisdictional issues apply. Shyster claims that most of the charges can technically only be brought by the legal apparatus of Vice City, and that the court is required to gain the prosecutorial interest of the district attorney of Vice City in order to have a case.
Since Vice City and its DA are fictitious, Shyster predicts that most of the charges will be dropped within the next week.
Maybe its me, but it seems that being Anti-Monopolistic doesn't necessarily mean that you are Anti-Profit, so the leap to "free software" has got me a little confused. I mean, it's not like they're saying their switching to Macs, right? This would be in keeping with their Anti-Monopolistic thing right?
Sounds to me like they just want free stuff.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, I'm just saying, the leaps needed clarification. Or maybe they didn't. I dunno. Meh.
I always wondered what would have happen to some of the world's major religions if copyright law in its current convoluted form existed at the time of Moses. Would the Ten Commandments be copyrighted? Would Gutenberg have had to pay royalties? Would he have had to pay God? Check or money order? Would churches now have to get a volume license to relate the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah? Would Cain and Abel have gotten 'points'? Gross or net? And when Cain killed Abel, who bought up his rights from his estate?
If the first letter of Paul to the Ephesians was read out loud to the Ephesians by someone other than Paul without Paul consenting in writing, could Paul sue for damages? Or does this qualify as fair use?
If God liked DRM, would the first Bibles be like a big sheaf of blank pages, and when you pay your licensing fee, the words magically appear (only partially illegible due to compression loss)? Or would he just temporarily blind you every time you looked at it until you paid.
Along the same lines, you know how people like to quote scripture? Would God give you a case of laryngitis if you tried to quote scripture without accepting a EULA first? Does the fact that God is omniscient and knows what you're thinking constitute a 'rootkit'?
A text file containing my own IT Manifesto... a few excerpts:
"While it probably wouldn't take too long to fix your PC, I find the suggestion that using cousin Frieda's bridal shower or a calm Sunday brunch as the time for some IT support (pro bono, no less) as somewhat of an inappropriate time for such requests."
"Until you realize that your wireless router is not a piece of furniture, and that the PC is not a receptacle for cold coffee, I see no purpose in enabling such behaviors by restoring your systems to functioning condition."
"The immediacy of the problem from your point of view does not translate into immediacy of action from mine."
Of course, this usually meets with scowls and epithets. So I have a backup:
A single.pdf file containing the names and numbers of people who give a shit. (Yes, it's blank)
Within the realm of probability, IT is least likely to steal your lunch, however, I have reasonably good sources confirming, AS WE SPEAK, that IT is the most likely to shake people down for milk money.
Where are the hall monitors when you need them? Unscheduled bathroom breaks and they're ALL OVER YOU. Some real crime going down and you can hear crickets chirping.
...I hope no one's looking into practical applications for this. It's dangerous.
I once knew a girl who was permanently cheerful. Everyone around her kept trying to commit suicide.
I believe if all this is turns out to be a size issue then we should be calling the 'plutons' Barneys, and all the big planets Freds.
This way, everyone will see how this is very friggin' silly and we should go back to more important discussions, you know, like the variegation and complexity in master strategies of sock drawer arrangements, or the infinitely subtle nuances of to-MAY-to versus to-MAH-to.
We could conclude it with an open dialogue on the merits of older versus newer Pez dispensers.
And wouldn't that be fun?
If dolphin's brains are not built for information processing, why the hell do they seem to do it so well? There is a lot of data out there to suggest that glial cells and the abundance of synaptic connections that they help create are the basis for intelligence, not necessarily neuron quantity.
Maybe Douglas Adams was right...
It goes Mice, Dolphins, Us.
The findings make sense for the theory which states that an off-center impact of a largish planetesimal merged with the nascent earth 'momentarily', then threw off a globule roughly the same size as that planetesimal. It makes sense if you consider that the earth's mantle is made primarily of molten silicate rock and light metals, so an impact which 'punctured' the earth and 'kept on going' would have passed through the mantle and taken the mantle rock with it. The moon, if the samples brought back are any indicator, is more than likely nothing more than a solidified blob of ejected mantle collapsed to a sphere due to its mass.
Of course, the fact that the moon is slowly moving away is another good indication of a birthing impact as it seems to suggest a point of origin. The earth is probably too small to have captured a body the size of the moon anyway. Another good piece of evidence is the fact that the moon always faces the earth on the same side, a coincidence of angular momentum that suggests that the moon was once a part of earth.
It has to be a hybrid approach. Newton's 4th Law states that two like entities cannot occupy the same zany thermodynamic paradox at the same time.
And having a single piece of bread buttered on both sides won't work either. Only a piece of buttered bread buttered on one side seems to exerts the required rotational force. All experiments to save costs by using this method have seen that the two buttered sides merely fight each other for dominance. Even if we get the amount of butter precisely equal, the bread just lands on its side.
I've dabbled in the quantum realm, however my testing has revealed another, even more astonishing application... TELEPORTATION!!!
Shhhh... not so loud.
If the Feline Buttered Bread Commutation is essentially lossless, that means that I can continuously feed the produced energy BACK INTO THE APPARATUS!
Shhhh... not so loud.
Since the problem with quantum tunneling, the basic principle of quantum mechanics that states that teleportation is possible, is that to tunnel anything larger than a subatomic particle across a barrier of width greater than a subatomic particle requires remarkable energy. I figure with this feedback loop, I can essentially turn a cat and a piece of buttered bread into an INFINITE BATTERY! Strapping a car, or chair, or person to the apparatus should then make the TELEPORTER AS UBIQUITOUS AS CATS AND BUTTERED BREAD!!!
Shhhh... not so loud.
Of course, I'm all about small steps, and as a proof of concept, I'm going to use this feedback apparatus to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity to power my TIME-TRAVELING DELOREAN!!!
Have you read every EULA? On every piece of software you've bought? No? Didn't think so.
Well guess what, sunshine, Microsoft ain't the only one throwing garbage like this into its EULAs. De facto "contracts" like this are like the fine print on warranties. The only thing that any of them do is to take away your rights, and promise to do precisely nothing beneficial to you should you be materially harmed.
Seriously, you've probably agreed to have your firstborn impaled on a spike by now in at least ONE of the EULAs you've "agreed" to. Of course, I assume love and care for the firstborn which may not be true, so this may not be the best example.
The one great thing about signing your life away is that you can't materially do it twice. I say, go ahead and install the patches and if all the software companies you've sold your soul to ever try to collect, they'll be engaged in the biggest custody battle in the history of the universe.
I already have the patent on several "free" energy sources, but they aren't strictly free.
There's the Feline Buttered Bread Commutator for example. It operates by strapping a piece of buttered bread buttered face up to a cat's back, then dropping it from a height. Since a cat always lands on its feet and buttered bread always lands butter side down, the whole apparatus simply hovers and spins in midair. By adding a wire coil to the cat and by putting a strong magnet in close proximity, voila! Free energy.
Of course, it's not that there isn't any loss. For example, the cat needs to be fed and the bread gets stale. The cat tends to vomit occasionally, so there is some clean up involved.
Unfortunately, I believe that retooling an existing system in such disrepair as the copyright system with patchwork alternative licensing schemes is just creating complexity which wouldn't adjusted existing law, which is the root of the problem.
The original intent of copyright law was to foment the creativity by creating a system where a person's intellectual work was protected for a period of time. During this period of time, the initial work's integrity was guaranteed and gave control over its dissemination to its creator. By integrity, I mean it could not be altered from its original form without permission and attribution, and by control, I mean it couldn't be disseminated without permission. Of course, it was up to the creator to decide whether either of these would be pursued in the case of infringement.
Note that the original intent was not to give the creator of intellectual property perpetual license to profit from his work. This would have given the creator no reason to continue creating since he/she would be able to profit in perpetuity, so the amount of time was intentionally finite, judged to be the amount of time to become (if it was of significant import) ubiquitous to the culture, on the order of 20 years or so. It should also be noted that copyright law does not explicitly give the creator the right to profit from the work, although this is implied in his/her rights of control.
The principle of fair use has always been a part of copyright law principles because an important right to freedom of expression is public debate and political satire. Essentially fair use states that nominal, attributed citation of portions of another's intellectual property for the creation of another intellectual work is not only protected speech, but vital to the political and cultural health of the nation.
However, because of the implicit ability to profit over intellectual works, it was only a matter of time before distribution organizations would pop up, and it was only a matter of a little more time before the laws were amended to maximize the profits of copyright holders, both through the ability to extend copyrights beyond their bounds, lengthening of the interval of copyright protection, and wholesale relinquishment of rights through draconian licensing agreements.
Right now, I believe that if you publically perform a rendition of Happy Birthday, you owe someone a royalty (and if you do so without the holder's prior permission, you are infringing, and thus liable for damages). Given the cultural ubiquity of Happy Birthday, one can reasonably argue that copyright law no longer protects intellectual property in a manner consistent with its inception.
At this point, especially with regard to entertainment media, we have a licensing system that no longer embraces the spirit of copyright law. It has gotten so far out of hand, what with the civil prosecution of juveniles, and the otherwise shotgun-blast method of doling out lawsuits to scare people into settlements, that the law must be changed. Specifically, it must be changed to embrace its heritage, not protect those interested in using it as an instrument of extorting exorbitant sums from people they have the nerve to call their customers.
There are a pile of other keys that should be retired for various reasons:
With the advent of the GUI and mouse:
All keys F1-F12: Essentially a DOS holdover, these are antiquated "action" keys. Esc: The escape key rarely escapes anything. Get rid of it. Windows key/Menu Key: You have a mouse... use it!
Disused keys:
Tilde/Backquote, Caps Lock, the numeric keypad, Scroll Lock, Pause/Break
Others:
We can also get rid of the Shift and Backspace keys, because it seems that people are no longer interested in capitalizing or correcting typos, judging by most of the posts and emails I receive. I guess we can get rid of insert/home/pgup/pgdn/delete/end as well.
For that matter, let's get rid of all of the letter and number keys. With all the 1337, usage of 'teh', etc. it's clear that most people operating a keyboard are intent on vandalizing the language, so let's just take it out of their hands and be done with it.
And no one I know uses the right CTRL key, so that can go too. Since we don't have text, who needs a space bar. Bye-bye.
So that leaves Print Screen and the left CTRL key on our streamlined keyboard...
That's a little sparse, but the addition of a single button will offer most computer users the functionality they need, and that button is...
Find pR0N ([CTRL+Find pR0N] gets you to the pay sites). We'll leave the Print Screen just in case they need some 'hard'copy.
You buy a car from Ford, GM, or Mazda containing one of these iPod thingies... say... $25,000 for a decent model...
Then, you load up your iPod with music that the RIAA sues you for having... say... whatever you had left and indentured servitude for the rest of your life...
You know, it costs so MUCH to be broke and destitute nowadays.
If you can't see them, they're below the water line. I'm actually kind of surprised you don't see it, even though outright bullying and scamming has been replaced with subtlety.
Duplicitous manipulators at your job? Plenty. 'Friends' who only seem to want things from you and conveniently disappear from view when you're in need? Most assuredly. Belligerent people at social gatherings? Of course. Knowing how to deal with antagonistic people is absolutely a necessary skill. True that most people outgrow such behavior, but still a goodly many do not.
Maybe you're just lucky and are fortunate to know few, if any, of those people, or you're not looking in the right places, I don't know. But they are there.
If we must analogize, it's a public pool with lifeguards and swim instructors... and if you're still drowning then... you're TRYING to.
Life isn't a game of patty-cake. Never was. And to survive in the water you'd better be able to deal with the sharks.
But I believe that your social skills argument neglects something very important.
You said:
The most common question we get about it is "what about social skills". A lot of people who homeschool make very conscious efforts to make sure their kids receive social skills.
Now I apologize if I'm making an erroneous assumption, but I would assume that the social skills you are talking about are acquired voluntarily, i.e. with children more likely to be friends with your children than not.
Social skills in a traditional school environment is a double-edged sword. Sure your kids will make friends, but it is more than that. The development of social skills is not just about how to interact with people who are incipiently friendly to you, but also how to deal with the unfriendlies, such as bullies or manipulators. In fact, there are some who would argue that the latter lessons are by and large the most useful to the development of a child socially, myself included. In the same way a debater learns nothing more than what he/she already knows about debate from someone who always agrees with them, a child attempting to develop social skills learn more about social skill from dealing with people who are antagonists rather than friends.
My concern would be that in the interest of protecting the child as parents are wont to do by nature that perhaps these extracurriculars are too much by choice. The traditional school system forces diversely behaved children into a common space where these skills must be developed, whereas the home school social environment is more 'hand-picked' as to the interactions that take place.
Like I said, I don't disagree with your points, and even if I were so inclined to do so, I wouldn't be able to do so except in a conceptual sense, having no direct experience with home schooling. But the lack of choice in who sits next to you in homeroom or who is on your team in gym forces you to deal with that person, whether as friend, foe, or otherwise, which I believe is an argument for, rather than against, the traditional school system.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the motivation to fix it in an Open Source environment? Altruistic tendencies?
The point is that the whole "Windows is an evil, buggy, crashy mess" is patently intellectually dishonest. If the top post is flamebait in and of itself, what right does anyone actually have to expect otherwise from respondents?
Little Johnny Everykid of Bumblefuck, NE has been charged with several million counts of various felony charges, including murder, grand theft auto, grand larceny, mayhem, racketeering as well as several thousands of misdemeanor charges including malicious mischief, vandalism, and petty theft.
One of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City's most ardent fans, Johnny played the game nearly nonstop for two years after its initial release. Since in-game crime is now treated in the same manner as actual crime, the youngster, who is all of thirteen years old, now faces nearly 3 million consecutive life sentences for accrued in-game criminal activities.
Johnny's lawyer, Joe Shyster, of the firm Wynken, Blynken, and Nod, has submitted briefs to the court stating that most of the charges should be dropped. Shyster said that since the activities occurred in game in the year 1986, the statute of limitations on most of them has been expired at least 2 years.
Additionally, since most of the activities occurred within the confines of Vice City proper, that certain jurisdictional issues apply. Shyster claims that most of the charges can technically only be brought by the legal apparatus of Vice City, and that the court is required to gain the prosecutorial interest of the district attorney of Vice City in order to have a case.
Since Vice City and its DA are fictitious, Shyster predicts that most of the charges will be dropped within the next week.
My math is a little off today.
OK, so "Democratic and progressive" = "free software".
Err... OK...
Well, let me back up a little and try again:
"Democratic and progressive" = "Antimonopolistic" = "free software".
Err... eh, yeah.
One more try:
"Democratic and progressive" = "Antimonopolistic" = "Anti Microsoft" = "free software".
Err... Well, better... but still...
Maybe its me, but it seems that being Anti-Monopolistic doesn't necessarily mean that you are Anti-Profit, so the leap to "free software" has got me a little confused. I mean, it's not like they're saying their switching to Macs, right? This would be in keeping with their Anti-Monopolistic thing right?
Sounds to me like they just want free stuff.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, I'm just saying, the leaps needed clarification. Or maybe they didn't. I dunno. Meh.
Always a fun topic.
I always wondered what would have happen to some of the world's major religions if copyright law in its current convoluted form existed at the time of Moses. Would the Ten Commandments be copyrighted? Would Gutenberg have had to pay royalties? Would he have had to pay God? Check or money order? Would churches now have to get a volume license to relate the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah? Would Cain and Abel have gotten 'points'? Gross or net? And when Cain killed Abel, who bought up his rights from his estate?
If the first letter of Paul to the Ephesians was read out loud to the Ephesians by someone other than Paul without Paul consenting in writing, could Paul sue for damages? Or does this qualify as fair use?
If God liked DRM, would the first Bibles be like a big sheaf of blank pages, and when you pay your licensing fee, the words magically appear (only partially illegible due to compression loss)? Or would he just temporarily blind you every time you looked at it until you paid.
Along the same lines, you know how people like to quote scripture? Would God give you a case of laryngitis if you tried to quote scripture without accepting a EULA first? Does the fact that God is omniscient and knows what you're thinking constitute a 'rootkit'?
DRM, always a fun topic.
Hmm. Lessee.
.pdf file containing the names and numbers of people who give a shit. (Yes, it's blank)
A text file containing my own IT Manifesto... a few excerpts:
"While it probably wouldn't take too long to fix your PC, I find the suggestion that using cousin Frieda's bridal shower or a calm Sunday brunch as the time for some IT support (pro bono, no less) as somewhat of an inappropriate time for such requests."
"Until you realize that your wireless router is not a piece of furniture, and that the PC is not a receptacle for cold coffee, I see no purpose in enabling such behaviors by restoring your systems to functioning condition."
"The immediacy of the problem from your point of view does not translate into immediacy of action from mine."
Of course, this usually meets with scowls and epithets. So I have a backup:
A single
Within the realm of probability, IT is least likely to steal your lunch, however, I have reasonably good sources confirming, AS WE SPEAK, that IT is the most likely to shake people down for milk money. Where are the hall monitors when you need them? Unscheduled bathroom breaks and they're ALL OVER YOU. Some real crime going down and you can hear crickets chirping.
...I hope no one's looking into practical applications for this. It's dangerous. I once knew a girl who was permanently cheerful. Everyone around her kept trying to commit suicide.
I believe if all this is turns out to be a size issue then we should be calling the 'plutons' Barneys, and all the big planets Freds. This way, everyone will see how this is very friggin' silly and we should go back to more important discussions, you know, like the variegation and complexity in master strategies of sock drawer arrangements, or the infinitely subtle nuances of to-MAY-to versus to-MAH-to. We could conclude it with an open dialogue on the merits of older versus newer Pez dispensers. And wouldn't that be fun?
The Murphy Corollary... yes, I've heard of this. Fortunately, I've paid Murphy off so he quits causing all of these frigging problems.
If dolphin's brains are not built for information processing, why the hell do they seem to do it so well? There is a lot of data out there to suggest that glial cells and the abundance of synaptic connections that they help create are the basis for intelligence, not necessarily neuron quantity. Maybe Douglas Adams was right... It goes Mice, Dolphins, Us.
The findings make sense for the theory which states that an off-center impact of a largish planetesimal merged with the nascent earth 'momentarily', then threw off a globule roughly the same size as that planetesimal. It makes sense if you consider that the earth's mantle is made primarily of molten silicate rock and light metals, so an impact which 'punctured' the earth and 'kept on going' would have passed through the mantle and taken the mantle rock with it. The moon, if the samples brought back are any indicator, is more than likely nothing more than a solidified blob of ejected mantle collapsed to a sphere due to its mass. Of course, the fact that the moon is slowly moving away is another good indication of a birthing impact as it seems to suggest a point of origin. The earth is probably too small to have captured a body the size of the moon anyway. Another good piece of evidence is the fact that the moon always faces the earth on the same side, a coincidence of angular momentum that suggests that the moon was once a part of earth.
It has to be a hybrid approach. Newton's 4th Law states that two like entities cannot occupy the same zany thermodynamic paradox at the same time.
And having a single piece of bread buttered on both sides won't work either. Only a piece of buttered bread buttered on one side seems to exerts the required rotational force. All experiments to save costs by using this method have seen that the two buttered sides merely fight each other for dominance. Even if we get the amount of butter precisely equal, the bread just lands on its side.
Then the cat comes along and shreds it.
But at least I can then say I own a stainless steel car. That would be enough for me.
Of course it works... Both the cat and the bread WANT to LAND... It's what bread and cats DO... It's like... their overarching purpose or something.
While you're correct in theory, the problem is one of simple common sense.
Have you ever tried strapping a piece of bread to a cats paws without
a) cleaving the bread in twain?
b) the cat licking the butter off the bread?
or
c) the cat scratching the shit out of you?
If you have, well then you know what I'm talking about. Yessir.
I've dabbled in the quantum realm, however my testing has revealed another, even more astonishing application... TELEPORTATION!!!
Shhhh... not so loud.
If the Feline Buttered Bread Commutation is essentially lossless, that means that I can continuously feed the produced energy BACK INTO THE APPARATUS!
Shhhh... not so loud.
Since the problem with quantum tunneling, the basic principle of quantum mechanics that states that teleportation is possible, is that to tunnel anything larger than a subatomic particle across a barrier of width greater than a subatomic particle requires remarkable energy. I figure with this feedback loop, I can essentially turn a cat and a piece of buttered bread into an INFINITE BATTERY! Strapping a car, or chair, or person to the apparatus should then make the TELEPORTER AS UBIQUITOUS AS CATS AND BUTTERED BREAD!!!
Shhhh... not so loud.
Of course, I'm all about small steps, and as a proof of concept, I'm going to use this feedback apparatus to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity to power my TIME-TRAVELING DELOREAN!!!
Shhhh... not so loud.
Have you read every EULA? On every piece of software you've bought? No? Didn't think so.
Well guess what, sunshine, Microsoft ain't the only one throwing garbage like this into its EULAs. De facto "contracts" like this are like the fine print on warranties. The only thing that any of them do is to take away your rights, and promise to do precisely nothing beneficial to you should you be materially harmed.
Seriously, you've probably agreed to have your firstborn impaled on a spike by now in at least ONE of the EULAs you've "agreed" to. Of course, I assume love and care for the firstborn which may not be true, so this may not be the best example.
The one great thing about signing your life away is that you can't materially do it twice. I say, go ahead and install the patches and if all the software companies you've sold your soul to ever try to collect, they'll be engaged in the biggest custody battle in the history of the universe.
I already have the patent on several "free" energy sources, but they aren't strictly free. There's the Feline Buttered Bread Commutator for example. It operates by strapping a piece of buttered bread buttered face up to a cat's back, then dropping it from a height. Since a cat always lands on its feet and buttered bread always lands butter side down, the whole apparatus simply hovers and spins in midair. By adding a wire coil to the cat and by putting a strong magnet in close proximity, voila! Free energy. Of course, it's not that there isn't any loss. For example, the cat needs to be fed and the bread gets stale. The cat tends to vomit occasionally, so there is some clean up involved.
Unfortunately, I believe that retooling an existing system in such disrepair as the copyright system with patchwork alternative licensing schemes is just creating complexity which wouldn't adjusted existing law, which is the root of the problem.
The original intent of copyright law was to foment the creativity by creating a system where a person's intellectual work was protected for a period of time. During this period of time, the initial work's integrity was guaranteed and gave control over its dissemination to its creator. By integrity, I mean it could not be altered from its original form without permission and attribution, and by control, I mean it couldn't be disseminated without permission. Of course, it was up to the creator to decide whether either of these would be pursued in the case of infringement.
Note that the original intent was not to give the creator of intellectual property perpetual license to profit from his work. This would have given the creator no reason to continue creating since he/she would be able to profit in perpetuity, so the amount of time was intentionally finite, judged to be the amount of time to become (if it was of significant import) ubiquitous to the culture, on the order of 20 years or so. It should also be noted that copyright law does not explicitly give the creator the right to profit from the work, although this is implied in his/her rights of control.
The principle of fair use has always been a part of copyright law principles because an important right to freedom of expression is public debate and political satire. Essentially fair use states that nominal, attributed citation of portions of another's intellectual property for the creation of another intellectual work is not only protected speech, but vital to the political and cultural health of the nation.
However, because of the implicit ability to profit over intellectual works, it was only a matter of time before distribution organizations would pop up, and it was only a matter of a little more time before the laws were amended to maximize the profits of copyright holders, both through the ability to extend copyrights beyond their bounds, lengthening of the interval of copyright protection, and wholesale relinquishment of rights through draconian licensing agreements.
Right now, I believe that if you publically perform a rendition of Happy Birthday, you owe someone a royalty (and if you do so without the holder's prior permission, you are infringing, and thus liable for damages). Given the cultural ubiquity of Happy Birthday, one can reasonably argue that copyright law no longer protects intellectual property in a manner consistent with its inception.
At this point, especially with regard to entertainment media, we have a licensing system that no longer embraces the spirit of copyright law. It has gotten so far out of hand, what with the civil prosecution of juveniles, and the otherwise shotgun-blast method of doling out lawsuits to scare people into settlements, that the law must be changed. Specifically, it must be changed to embrace its heritage, not protect those interested in using it as an instrument of extorting exorbitant sums from people they have the nerve to call their customers.
There are a pile of other keys that should be retired for various reasons:
With the advent of the GUI and mouse:
All keys F1-F12: Essentially a DOS holdover, these are antiquated "action" keys.
Esc: The escape key rarely escapes anything. Get rid of it.
Windows key/Menu Key: You have a mouse... use it!
Disused keys:
Tilde/Backquote, Caps Lock, the numeric keypad, Scroll Lock, Pause/Break
Others:
We can also get rid of the Shift and Backspace keys, because it seems that people are no longer interested in capitalizing or correcting typos, judging by most of the posts and emails I receive. I guess we can get rid of insert/home/pgup/pgdn/delete/end as well.
For that matter, let's get rid of all of the letter and number keys. With all the 1337, usage of 'teh', etc. it's clear that most people operating a keyboard are intent on vandalizing the language, so let's just take it out of their hands and be done with it.
And no one I know uses the right CTRL key, so that can go too.
Since we don't have text, who needs a space bar. Bye-bye.
So that leaves Print Screen and the left CTRL key on our streamlined keyboard...
That's a little sparse, but the addition of a single button will offer most computer users the functionality they need, and that button is...
Find pR0N ([CTRL+Find pR0N] gets you to the pay sites). We'll leave the Print Screen just in case they need some 'hard'copy.
Hmm...
Let's see here.
You buy a car from Ford, GM, or Mazda containing one of these iPod thingies... say... $25,000 for a decent model... Then, you load up your iPod with music that the RIAA sues you for having... say... whatever you had left and indentured servitude for the rest of your life... You know, it costs so MUCH to be broke and destitute nowadays.
The rest of the universe:
We want you to use your PC and fall in love with someone special.
Microsoft:
We want you to fall in love with your PC and use someone special.
If you can't see them, they're below the water line. I'm actually kind of surprised you don't see it, even though outright bullying and scamming has been replaced with subtlety. Duplicitous manipulators at your job? Plenty. 'Friends' who only seem to want things from you and conveniently disappear from view when you're in need? Most assuredly. Belligerent people at social gatherings? Of course. Knowing how to deal with antagonistic people is absolutely a necessary skill. True that most people outgrow such behavior, but still a goodly many do not. Maybe you're just lucky and are fortunate to know few, if any, of those people, or you're not looking in the right places, I don't know. But they are there.
If we must analogize, it's a public pool with lifeguards and swim instructors... and if you're still drowning then... you're TRYING to. Life isn't a game of patty-cake. Never was. And to survive in the water you'd better be able to deal with the sharks.
But I believe that your social skills argument neglects something very important.
You said:
The most common question we get about it is "what about social skills". A lot of people who homeschool make very conscious efforts to make sure their kids receive social skills.
Now I apologize if I'm making an erroneous assumption, but I would assume that the social skills you are talking about are acquired voluntarily, i.e. with children more likely to be friends with your children than not.
Social skills in a traditional school environment is a double-edged sword. Sure your kids will make friends, but it is more than that. The development of social skills is not just about how to interact with people who are incipiently friendly to you, but also how to deal with the unfriendlies, such as bullies or manipulators. In fact, there are some who would argue that the latter lessons are by and large the most useful to the development of a child socially, myself included. In the same way a debater learns nothing more than what he/she already knows about debate from someone who always agrees with them, a child attempting to develop social skills learn more about social skill from dealing with people who are antagonists rather than friends.
My concern would be that in the interest of protecting the child as parents are wont to do by nature that perhaps these extracurriculars are too much by choice. The traditional school system forces diversely behaved children into a common space where these skills must be developed, whereas the home school social environment is more 'hand-picked' as to the interactions that take place.
Like I said, I don't disagree with your points, and even if I were so inclined to do so, I wouldn't be able to do so except in a conceptual sense, having no direct experience with home schooling. But the lack of choice in who sits next to you in homeroom or who is on your team in gym forces you to deal with that person, whether as friend, foe, or otherwise, which I believe is an argument for, rather than against, the traditional school system.