> The problem is when it's the _only_ side of your > "friend's" personality. IME at least, people's > "online personas" are often very shallow.
Funny you should say that. I find most people in real life to be just as shallow. If IM can help me sort out the shallow ones quicker, so much the better.
> The phones must be pretty bad where you are:)
Aren't they everywhere? Whenever I hear someone on the phone, they sound very different from their real life voice. I don't know exactly what causes it, but it certainly is not pleasant.
> The telephone does not rob you of two important > aspects of talking - intonation/inflection and timing.
Those things are not as important as you make it sound. Think of IM as lowering the bandwidth of your conversation; you can still say what you want to say, but you need to make it more explicit. I think that is a good practice anyway, as many people just won't notice your "intonation/inflection" and misunderstand your meaning. IM teaches you to say what you mean and not drop subtle hints that may or may not be seen. Women are particularly bad at this, since they spend more time in personal contact and fluff talk where nuance is of extreme importance. Then they try to talk to men and all their nuances and subtle cues get ignored, causing them to complain about men being "insensitive".
> I'm involved in a long-term, long-distance relationship.
Good luck with that. You'll need it. I personally don't believe a long-distance relationship can work at all. Personal contact is really the essential part, and if it's missing you'll have a hard time maintaining the relationship. Good luck anyway!
>> reading is, and always will be, faster than talking. > Reading might be, but typing rarely is - > particularly if you're actually *involved* in a discussion
But it is. I type pretty damn fast. But that's not really the point. When you are typing, you can edit what you type and come up with a more concise version of your thoughts than what would have came out of your mouth. Which brings me to:
> writing simply can't, IMHO, *improve* your grammar, vocab and spelling
It can and does improve your grammar and vocabulary simply because you get to look at the results longer and can rewrite them many times for clarity and concinnity. You can also think of better words for conveying your ideas; words that might not have immediately popped into your mind in a real-time conversation. When this process occurs with sufficient regularity, the words and effective sentence structures stay in your head and become easier to recall when you are talking and have to think faster.
> in other words, no matter how many times you > write a word incorrectly, you're not going to > get it right unless you somehow find out it's wrong
Well, no. I admit that spelling is mostly improved through reading rather than writing. However, if you are writing and are uncertain about a word's spelling you can look in the dictionary. A mispronounced word remains uncorrected in conversation.
> Or, to put it another way, even people who can barely > read and write are usually quite fluent in the spoken word
Fast talking is not something I would call fluency. In any case, you can indeed learn to speak well without being literate, but it would take longer and require a great deal of conversation practice. Nerds like me never get enough conversation for this to happen; on IM or off.
No, but I used to be one. I believe that qualifies me to pass judgement on poor parenting methods. (Although not necessarily to offer better ones)
> Issues like sexual predators and hate sites children may not fully understand.
I'm afraid that you are the one who doesn't understand the issues like sexual predators and hate sites. Sexual predators are so few in number, that your child is much more likely to be abducted by aliens than by one of them. It is the media that blows these things way out of proportion for the sake of sensationalism. Abused children are usually abused by people they know, like their parents or other close relatives. So, if you have children, chances are that instead of needing you to protect them from sexual predators, they are more likely to need to be protected from you. Of course, this is also a big media blow-up-doll. Most children are not abused in that manner, but rather grow up dull, neglected, and harassed.
As for hate sites, there aren't that many of those either. In fact I can't think of a single one, and I browse the net a lot. If there are any, then making sure your kid does not go there is just not enough. There are millions of charlatans in the world spewing all kinds of garbage. Your job as a parent should be not to prevent your child from seeing them, but to teach him how to tell truth from lies. It is a method called logic.
If you teach your child to live rationally and to ask for reasons before accepting any statements blindly (a behaviour that most people call "having an open mind", which I translate as "a mind into which anything goes with no resistance"), he will be able to deduce what statements are valid and which are not. At that point you can send him to any hate site as an exercise. Say: "go to this site, read everything on it, and then tell me why it's nonsense."
> A child is simply not responsable enough to know the > inns and outs of what is good / bad, safe / unsafe.
And why do you think he is not responsible? A four year old might not know what is good or bad, but at thirteen he should be absolutely certain. If he is still ignorant and irresponsible at that age, then perhaps it is because you have shielded him from all the "bad" things and thus prevented him from learning the consequences of his actions. Don't hide the world from your kids - show it to them whole, the good with the bad, and explain why you think the good is good and the bad is bad. Don't preach and insist that they adopt your moral code on faith. Remember that that is the worst thing you can do to a rational mind. Let them decide on your own what is good and what is bad, but be sure to show your thoughts and explain them nevertheless.
> why do you think issues of having kids put up websites > insulting and attacking a classmates character is becoming an issue?
Because it's "on the evil internet". Kids have been insulting and attacking the character of their classmates forever. Just go and try listening to "Kelly is a fat slob" day after day after day! I'd take a website over that any time.
> Also you think peer pressure isn't real?
You think I haven't been a kid? Of course peer pressure is real. What I wish my parents have taught me, is whose people's opinions should matter. In our culture there is the evil practice of "all opinions are equal". Just as you must place value upon people, you must place value upon their opinions, and to realize that even if the whole world hates you, it doesn't matter as long as you are right.
> If your child comes home drunk at age 13 you > don't think they should be punished?
Hell no! Confucius said "if you rule your people by punishment, they will try to avoid being punished, but will feel no shame." Punishment never does any good. Whenever it happened to me as a child, I felt nothing but hate, and resentment, and helplessness toward the punisher. Any thoughts about my a
> A lot of IMing will *not* prepare you well for - > nor should be considered the equivalent of - > "real" face-to-face social interaction.
Easy now. I wasn't suggesting that everyone just live in IM from birth. IM is not supposed to prepare you for anything, and neither is talking on the phone. It is about communication. Sure it is not as rich as a face-to-face meeting, but for most purposes it is perfectly adequate. People don't learn their social skills on IM just as they don't learn to swim by being dropped in the deep end of the ocean. A child does not learn social skills while using IM and I would not expect him to, but does it really matter if he is discussing some mundane subject, like whether there will be a snow day at school tomorrow, which sounds exactly the same on IM, the phone, or in person.
> people act substantially differently in IM-style social interactions
So what? I say it's a great way to see another side of your friend's personality.
> I'd hope not - the telephone is a vastly superior > "communcations method" than IM from a social perspective.
I would disagree. The phone robs you of all the same things; you see no body language and sound quality is pretty bad, making it harder to understand the subtleties of tone and inflection. At least in text mode you have to be explicit about what you mean, so there is much less chance of misunderstanding. So while I always prefer to meet in person, I would never use a phone when I can email or IM. I'd rather walk eight miles to your house.
> IM is vastly inferior to face-to-face communcations
Not for everything. I don't use IM myself, preferring email, where I can think before I type, but when your purpose is to actually communicate information nothing can beat async text. I can process an enormous amount of email in the time it would have taken me to deal with each person individually; reading is, and always will be, faster than talking. However, if you want to have a party, that's entirely different. There, being together is the whole point of the event, and neither IM, nor email, nor phone, nor any sort of electronic mediator will do.
> Then there's the bad habits, like poor spelling > and grammar, and shrinking vocabularies
Poor spelling, bad grammar, and small vocabularies are only going to get poorer, worse, and smaller if your kids never write anything. When was the last time you heard a teenager speak? You'd think their entire vocabulary consists of "like", "he goes", and "you know":) Obviously, it shows up in IM too, but real life conversations are just as bad, if not worse. From personal experience I can say that writing improves my vocabulary and grammar, and when I later speak to real people, I find that my vocabulary and grammar improve then as well.
> Explain to them that in order to run the instant > messenger, they will need to compile the desktop > environment for the latest kernel, meanwhile using wget.
I'm afraid on Linux a better suggestion is: "if you want to run instant messenger, you'll have to research the IM protocol and write the client yourself." Because whenever they want to do something right, this is where things will end up.
> I think its more he is concerned that maybe this is a > thing he should intervene to help build his kids' character.
How will refraining from IM build his kids' character? What I see is a parent who doesn't spend much time with his kids, but now sees they are on the Internet (oh, the evil Internet!) and by golly, he must "intervene" or else... or else... Well, I guess nothing that wouldn't have happened anyway.
From all the responses here I see a disturbing pattern of suggestions, no: demands! to be absolutely in control of what children do. This immediately strikes me as both immoral and futile. By trying to fit your child into a specific mold you are treating him like an object. An experimental object of "let's see how much better our kids can turn out if they don't do all the bad things we used to do!" You are basically trying to remove his free will and replace it with your own; to destroy any nascent moral thoughts he may be having and to install your own. From other comments I gather that most parents appear mostly concerned with pornography ("put the computer in a public area"), which is really sad. Sure, there are wars in the world, and school shootings, and hunger and starvation, and drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, fast food; but our children's lives will surely be destroyed by a sight of a woman's body. I won't even talk about the fact that whenever I've been in some male friend's room, I always saw some porn somewhere. I won't mention that your kids can just as easily hide it where you can't find it. I won't even mention those.jpg files on my father's computer (which get automatically added to his Documents' menu:) I guess if he knew how to prevent that, he wouldn't have to ask me to remove spyware, clean viruses, troubleshoot the network; *sigh*) I'll just say that whatever it is you are trying to "protect" your kids from, they will get anyway, and probably dislike you for trying. It's not that you don't mean well, it's that you don't understand the real problem. A boy wouldn't spend so much time looking at porn if he could spend time with a girlfriend. He wouldn't do drugs if he had a purpose in life; a purpose whose emergence you have prevented by trying to cram your own down his throat. He wouldn't do drugs if he had other ways of experiencing pleasure; from learning, for instance: there's nothing like the feeling "I can do this!" "I know how!" "Wow! I finally understand!"; or from sports: "I am strong and agile!", "I am in control of my body!"; or from social interactions: "people like me.", "I am a nice person", "I like meeting people and making friends." He wouldn't smoke if he knew when to try to fit in and when not to. If he knew what kind of people he liked (as opposed to being told whom to like) and why he liked them, he would have had a much better chance of finding friends instead of throwing himself into what he perceives to be the "cool" group in a desperate, futile attempt to belong somewhere, anywhere, to just not be so painfully lonely. He wouldn't be a bully if you had allowed him to develop self-confidence, which you have quashed with every "because I said so" and every restrictive little rule you imposed upon him without explanation. He wouldn't turn to violence if he could change things he hated without it. And you know what? If you keep at trying to make him your "perfect little boy", he'll run away from you. As far as possible. Maybe he'll wait until he goes to college, gets a job, and then never speaks to you again. Maybe not. But I can tell you that you won't be close and you won't be a family.
IM is just a communication method. Would you nag them as much if they were chatting on the phone instead? Even if you had more than one phone line? Do computers bother you because you don't understand technology and are afraid of it? Would you be equally concerned if they spent ten hours a day with their friends in real life? If your concern is simply with them being physically inactive, then say it, instead of making some vague "internet is evil" complaint. When teenagers hang out in the real world they are not very active either. Think about it.
The best thing I've done to my home directory is to make it read-only. This way I can prevent all those unnecessary configuration files that nearly every program wants to write, even if it really has no configuration data that's different from the default (what's up with that, developers?) And, of course, if I am ever dumb enough to try to write something at the root level, I get a polite reminder.
> What's the point of having a job if it destroys > your health and personal life? The current > conditions arn't tenable; ridding the US of such > labour practices, either by offshoring or > improvement, is necessary.
The problem is that this is eventually going to lead to all jobs being done by slaves, with little or no pay, and little or no choice in their employment. Most people don't care about slaves and the lack of quality in their lives, but when all the jobs are filled by slave labor, what are regular people to do? The choice narrows to: get a job and tolerate your own slavery, or starve. In a world of slaves, there is little room for free men to sell their skills. You might argue that slave labor can not do creative work. Consider how little work requires any creativity at all. Most programming jobs are nothing but assembly-line code factories where programs are slapped together with "proven" methodologies and any ideas "outside the box" are not only unwelcome, but are actively supressed. I suspect EA jobs fall into this category. You just can't get a job where you get to think any more. Sure, employers say they want intelligent people, but what they really are after is absolute obedience and just enough brains to do the job (and no more). This world is going to the dark ages, baby. And that's the only thing that will cure it.
Unions for assembly workers function much better than geek unions because assembly workers are regular people who actually talk to each other. So do coal miners and all the other normal folk. Geeks mostly keep to themselves and confine their discontent to Slashdot. It would be pretty hard to organize a strike when most of the participants don't know, or trust, each other. Geeks also don't respond well to rabble rousing. I speak from personal experience, mind you.
Have you totally forgotten that we are training to defeat the buggers? The scores mean nothing; let's just boycott them. When the buggers come back, nobody will care if Joe Hax0r had 1928841 points, so why should we now?
> Keep talking like that and you'll never win another election again.
Of course not. Politicians are not allowed to tell the truth when it hurts. If you take a stand on anything important, you will have enemies and they will make damn sure you will not win any election. After all, most people are dumb (at least 51% of them, according to the last election), and will believe whatever they hear last. Therefore, since the politician is one man and the dumb are a huge crowd, is it so surprizing that the majority opinion can shred any opposition? With enough sheep you can slaughter even the staunchiest pack of wolves.
> Democrats used to support working class rural > folk. Now they openly display disgust for them. > Turnyou back on your core voters and what do you think is going to happen?
Well, the last time this happened, the South seceded from the Union and we had a civil war. Perhaps things might turn out better this time around. Or not.
The election has made it pretty obvious that we have a country divided into two groups. Cities versus the countryside. The new versus the old. Education versus religion. The Smart versus the Dumb. It is really an inevitable split; all those little towns in the middle of nowhere, with their ultraconservative opinions, dull stolid lives, and unchanging placidity, are hell on earth for an intelligent young person. So what do they do? They pick up and move to the city, creating this cultural divide. So why not make it official and split the country in two? Look at the map of the election results and you'll see that they are geographically cohesive. Split the country into the Blue States of America and the Red States of America and be done with it. We might even want to have a separate state just for California, who are different anyway. They might want to join up with Mexico.
> If you've got ink on your thumb, you can't reregister or revote
This is so damn unfair and discriminating against hygiene-challenged voters. They would then be brutally forced to take a bath at least once every four years.
> From the "inalienable rights" referenced in the Declaration of Independence
You may decry that your rights are "inalienable" all you want, but unless the government forces me to grant them to you, I do not have to.
> the American tradition is that all rights not explicitly prohibited are allowed.
You need to add "by the government" here. The constitution specifies only what rights the government can not deny you by law (and the government has to date found ways to do it anyway). It says nothing about what rights other people must grant you.
> you should have to come up with a reasonable and > compelling argument to bar behavior you don't like.
Why don't you come up with a reasonable and compelling argument why the next man to come to your house should not kill you? Remember, personal opinions of your own worth, commands of Zeus, Thor, Ra, the Easter Bunny or YHWH do not meet the standard. Sorry.
> Aaah. So your argument against homosexuality boils down to the "proof" in the bible.
Go read my comment again. I only made the argument that God would be against homosexuality based on the "proof" in the Bible. Because the Bible is the only source of information about God, no other argument is possible. My own views on homosexuality have nothing to do with the Bible.
> It seems that you're saying that one makes a > choice to engage in homosexual activities, and by > choosing to do so, you violate a commonly accepted > (heck, just say absolute) standard of > decency/morals - you sin, in effect
I will correct you only by emphasising that I really would say "absolute". I believe that there is an absolute moral code and that it can be used to judge anyone's actions, regardless of their own opinion of them.
> I would say choice is a prerequisite to sin - > without a choice, one cannot sin. Do you agree?
I agree.
> Under this circumstance (direct biological cause > of homosexuality) - would you still feel that > there is a moral prohibition against homosexuality?
Whether homosexual preference is biological in nature or a choice, is completely irrelevant. I would not condemn a gay man's preference if he can not help it, just as I would not condemn a man who is suffering from diarrhea. But the actual homosexual act is always a choice. Nobody needs to have sex to survive, and there is no "I couldn't help it" argument possible here. Sex never happens accidentally.
> The real heart of the problem here is that > government is involved in marriage in the first > place, which should never have been the business of the state.
I agree completely.
> Marriage is a personal commitment, for some a > religious sacrament, and many other things to > many other people, but one thing it most > assuredly is NOT is any of YOUR business if > you're not one of the people in the particular > marriage in question.
If marriage were only a personal commitment, and I were not required by law to recognize it as such if I did not want to, then I agree that it would be none of my concern. I could then refuse to acknowledge any gay marriages and my life would be completely unaffected by some gay people living someplace I never have to go to. So get marriage out of the law and I will agree with you.
> Frankly, I'd be a lot more comfortable if every bigot > in this country wore his heart on his sleeve.
Which would be quite impossible if you outlaw bigotry, would it?
> why do you find it necessary to control the > activity of other people even when it does not affect you?
First of all, I don't find it necessary for the government to control undesirable activity if I can avoid people who engage in it. If I dislike someone, the world is big enough that I don't have to be around them. If this person lives next door, I don't have to go see him. But the problem is that by its "equal rights for every pervert" stance, the government makes this impossible in many cases. Suppose I own a company and have a job opening; an openly gay man applies for the job. In a small company I would have to work with him on a daily basis, spend days in his presence, and try painfully hard to forget what he is. Therefore, if the government does not force me to hire him, I'll politely tell him to look elsewhere and look for someone I actually can like. But if the government officially accepts gays as "normal" and forbids discrimination against them, it really would affect me very negatively, as I just described.
> I'm just trying to figure out why roughly 55% of > this country finds it neccessary to tell other > people how to live their lives
The purpose of government is to tell people how to live their lives. You can apply the same argument to any behaviour and against any law. "There is no reason to outlaw murder, if nobody wants to kill you. There is no reason to outlaw theft, if you have nothing worth stealing. There is no reason to outlaw child pornography if you have no children. There is no reason to outlaw drugs if you are not using."
> I find anal sex as disgusting as you, and I would > never consider doing crack... but I find the idea > of forcing that on other people even more reprehensible.
What you actually mean to say is that you don't think you should be allowed to pass any sort of judgement on other people's activity. These days it is considered a blasphemy to have a moral code and to judge other people's actions by it. "After all, his ways are as good as yours. Who are you to judge?" But some people, like me, believe that there is such a thing as an absolute moral code. That some actions are wrong no matter who is looking at them. That it is possible to be right regardless of anybody's opinion. And that one's moral code should be a logical certainty rather than a "feeling" for the expediency of the moment.
> The government doesn't allow one to snort crack, not even > in the privacy of your own home. Do you support that law?
I do. And if I had to vote for it, I would, because to do otherwise would be to give sanction to the behaviour.
> The government allows gay people to have sex (in privacy like > everyone else). Do you prefer the government outlaw that?
Not necessarily. But I don't want them to legalize it either by publicly endorsing gay marriage.
> So you would like to stop gay people from being gay and acting accordingly?
I would like to rid them of the delusion that what they do is normal and acceptable. A drug user knows he's wrong to do what he does. However he tries to rationalize his habit, he will never try to publicly announce it and he will not be proud of it. Likewise, gays should know that they are in the wrong and correct that wrong, either by therapy, or by abstinence.
> I guess you still haven't answered my question > as to how a gay marriage negatively affects you
But I have! I said it did not. But the thing is, if I am faced with a casting a vote for or against it, I have no doubt that I will vote against it. For me to do otherwise would be moral hypocrisy and I would be overwhelmed with guilt for allowing sanctioned sodomy into my world. Just as you are guilty of manslaughter if you allow a man to die by refusing some to take some simple action that would have prevented it, likewise you are guilty of a moral crime if you fail to refuse sanction to that which you consider immoral. I can not prevent the government from giving sanction to homosexuality if the majority votes for it, but if the government has the courtesy of asking for my opinion before enacting such legislation, I am certainly going to provide it.
> If a gay couple living right next door to you married, > how will your lifestyle be changed as a result of that marriage?
It will not change one bit. But I am a homebody; I don't even remember who my neighbours are. Someone who likes socializing with his neighbours would be affected more.
Slashdot Mirror
15 Libraries of Congress in 15 seconds? Great! Anybody got a copy?
> The problem is when it's the _only_ side of your
:)
> "friend's" personality. IME at least, people's
> "online personas" are often very shallow.
Funny you should say that. I find most people in real life to be just as shallow. If IM can help me sort out the shallow ones quicker, so much the better.
> The phones must be pretty bad where you are
Aren't they everywhere? Whenever I hear someone on the phone, they sound very different from their real life voice. I don't know exactly what causes it, but it certainly is not pleasant.
> The telephone does not rob you of two important
> aspects of talking - intonation/inflection and timing.
Those things are not as important as you make it sound. Think of IM as lowering the bandwidth of your conversation; you can still say what you want to say, but you need to make it more explicit. I think that is a good practice anyway, as many people just won't notice your "intonation/inflection" and misunderstand your meaning. IM teaches you to say what you mean and not drop subtle hints that may or may not be seen. Women are particularly bad at this, since they spend more time in personal contact and fluff talk where nuance is of extreme importance. Then they try to talk to men and all their nuances and subtle cues get ignored, causing them to complain about men being "insensitive".
> I'm involved in a long-term, long-distance relationship.
Good luck with that. You'll need it. I personally don't believe a long-distance relationship can work at all. Personal contact is really the essential part, and if it's missing you'll have a hard time maintaining the relationship. Good luck anyway!
>> reading is, and always will be, faster than talking.
> Reading might be, but typing rarely is -
> particularly if you're actually *involved* in a discussion
But it is. I type pretty damn fast. But that's not really the point. When you are typing, you can edit what you type and come up with a more concise version of your thoughts than what would have came out of your mouth. Which brings me to:
> writing simply can't, IMHO, *improve* your grammar, vocab and spelling
It can and does improve your grammar and vocabulary simply because you get to look at the results longer and can rewrite them many times for clarity and concinnity. You can also think of better words for conveying your ideas; words that might not have immediately popped into your mind in a real-time conversation. When this process occurs with sufficient regularity, the words and effective sentence structures stay in your head and become easier to recall when you are talking and have to think faster.
> in other words, no matter how many times you
> write a word incorrectly, you're not going to
> get it right unless you somehow find out it's wrong
Well, no. I admit that spelling is mostly improved through reading rather than writing. However, if you are writing and are uncertain about a word's spelling you can look in the dictionary. A mispronounced word remains uncorrected in conversation.
> Or, to put it another way, even people who can barely
> read and write are usually quite fluent in the spoken word
Fast talking is not something I would call fluency. In any case, you can indeed learn to speak well without being literate, but it would take longer and require a great deal of conversation practice. Nerds like me never get enough conversation for this to happen; on IM or off.
> You obviously don't have kids.
No, but I used to be one. I believe that qualifies me to pass judgement on poor parenting methods. (Although not necessarily to offer better ones)
> Issues like sexual predators and hate sites children may not fully understand.
I'm afraid that you are the one who doesn't understand the issues like sexual predators and hate sites. Sexual predators are so few in number, that your child is much more likely to be abducted by aliens than by one of them. It is the media that blows these things way out of proportion for the sake of sensationalism. Abused children are usually abused by people they know, like their parents or other close relatives. So, if you have children, chances are that instead of needing you to protect them from sexual predators, they are more likely to need to be protected from you. Of course, this is also a big media blow-up-doll. Most children are not abused in that manner, but rather grow up dull, neglected, and harassed.
As for hate sites, there aren't that many of those either. In fact I can't think of a single one, and I browse the net a lot. If there are any, then making sure your kid does not go there is just not enough. There are millions of charlatans in the world spewing all kinds of garbage. Your job as a parent should be not to prevent your child from seeing them, but to teach him how to tell truth from lies. It is a method called logic.
If you teach your child to live rationally and to ask for reasons before accepting any statements blindly (a behaviour that most people call "having an open mind", which I translate as "a mind into which anything goes with no resistance"), he will be able to deduce what statements are valid and which are not. At that point you can send him to any hate site as an exercise. Say: "go to this site, read everything on it, and then tell me why it's nonsense."
> A child is simply not responsable enough to know the
> inns and outs of what is good / bad, safe / unsafe.
And why do you think he is not responsible? A four year old might not know what is good or bad, but at thirteen he should be absolutely certain. If he is still ignorant and irresponsible at that age, then perhaps it is because you have shielded him from all the "bad" things and thus prevented him from learning the consequences of his actions. Don't hide the world from your kids - show it to them whole, the good with the bad, and explain why you think the good is good and the bad is bad. Don't preach and insist that they adopt your moral code on faith. Remember that that is the worst thing you can do to a rational mind. Let them decide on your own what is good and what is bad, but be sure to show your thoughts and explain them nevertheless.
> why do you think issues of having kids put up websites
> insulting and attacking a classmates character is becoming an issue?
Because it's "on the evil internet". Kids have been insulting and attacking the character of their classmates forever. Just go and try listening to "Kelly is a fat slob" day after day after day! I'd take a website over that any time.
> Also you think peer pressure isn't real?
You think I haven't been a kid? Of course peer pressure is real. What I wish my parents have taught me, is whose people's opinions should matter. In our culture there is the evil practice of "all opinions are equal". Just as you must place value upon people, you must place value upon their opinions, and to realize that even if the whole world hates you, it doesn't matter as long as you are right.
> If your child comes home drunk at age 13 you
> don't think they should be punished?
Hell no! Confucius said "if you rule your people by punishment, they will try to avoid being punished, but will feel no shame." Punishment never does any good. Whenever it happened to me as a child, I felt nothing but hate, and resentment, and helplessness toward the punisher. Any thoughts about my a
> A lot of IMing will *not* prepare you well for -
:) Obviously, it shows up in IM too, but real life conversations are just as bad, if not worse. From personal experience I can say that writing improves my vocabulary and grammar, and when I later speak to real people, I find that my vocabulary and grammar improve then as well.
> nor should be considered the equivalent of -
> "real" face-to-face social interaction.
Easy now. I wasn't suggesting that everyone just live in IM from birth. IM is not supposed to prepare you for anything, and neither is talking on the phone. It is about communication. Sure it is not as rich as a face-to-face meeting, but for most purposes it is perfectly adequate. People don't learn their social skills on IM just as they don't learn to swim by being dropped in the deep end of the ocean. A child does not learn social skills while using IM and I would not expect him to, but does it really matter if he is discussing some mundane subject, like whether there will be a snow day at school tomorrow, which sounds exactly the same on IM, the phone, or in person.
> people act substantially differently in IM-style social interactions
So what? I say it's a great way to see another side of your friend's personality.
> I'd hope not - the telephone is a vastly superior
> "communcations method" than IM from a social perspective.
I would disagree. The phone robs you of all the same things; you see no body language and sound quality is pretty bad, making it harder to understand the subtleties of tone and inflection. At least in text mode you have to be explicit about what you mean, so there is much less chance of misunderstanding. So while I always prefer to meet in person, I would never use a phone when I can email or IM. I'd rather walk eight miles to your house.
> IM is vastly inferior to face-to-face communcations
Not for everything. I don't use IM myself, preferring email, where I can think before I type, but when your purpose is to actually communicate information nothing can beat async text. I can process an enormous amount of email in the time it would have taken me to deal with each person individually; reading is, and always will be, faster than talking. However, if you want to have a party, that's entirely different. There, being together is the whole point of the event, and neither IM, nor email, nor phone, nor any sort of electronic mediator will do.
> Then there's the bad habits, like poor spelling
> and grammar, and shrinking vocabularies
Poor spelling, bad grammar, and small vocabularies are only going to get poorer, worse, and smaller if your kids never write anything. When was the last time you heard a teenager speak? You'd think their entire vocabulary consists of "like", "he goes", and "you know"
> Explain to them that in order to run the instant
> messenger, they will need to compile the desktop
> environment for the latest kernel, meanwhile using wget.
I'm afraid on Linux a better suggestion is: "if you want to run instant messenger, you'll have to research the IM protocol and write the client yourself." Because whenever they want to do something right, this is where things will end up.
> I think its more he is concerned that maybe this is a
> thing he should intervene to help build his kids' character.
How will refraining from IM build his kids' character? What I see is a parent who doesn't spend much time with his kids, but now sees they are on the Internet (oh, the evil Internet!) and by golly, he must "intervene" or else... or else... Well, I guess nothing that wouldn't have happened anyway.
From all the responses here I see a disturbing pattern of suggestions, no: demands! to be absolutely in control of what children do. This immediately strikes me as both immoral and futile. By trying to fit your child into a specific mold you are treating him like an object. An experimental object of "let's see how much better our kids can turn out if they don't do all the bad things we used to do!" You are basically trying to remove his free will and replace it with your own; to destroy any nascent moral thoughts he may be having and to install your own. From other comments I gather that most parents appear mostly concerned with pornography ("put the computer in a public area"), which is really sad. Sure, there are wars in the world, and school shootings, and hunger and starvation, and drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, fast food; but our children's lives will surely be destroyed by a sight of a woman's body. I won't even talk about the fact that whenever I've been in some male friend's room, I always saw some porn somewhere. I won't mention that your kids can just as easily hide it where you can't find it. I won't even mention those .jpg files on my father's computer (which get automatically added to his Documents' menu :) I guess if he knew how to prevent that, he wouldn't have to ask me to remove spyware, clean viruses, troubleshoot the network; *sigh*) I'll just say that whatever it is you are trying to "protect" your kids from, they will get anyway, and probably dislike you for trying. It's not that you don't mean well, it's that you don't understand the real problem. A boy wouldn't spend so much time looking at porn if he could spend time with a girlfriend. He wouldn't do drugs if he had a purpose in life; a purpose whose emergence you have prevented by trying to cram your own down his throat. He wouldn't do drugs if he had other ways of experiencing pleasure; from learning, for instance: there's nothing like the feeling "I can do this!" "I know how!" "Wow! I finally understand!"; or from sports: "I am strong and agile!", "I am in control of my body!"; or from social interactions: "people like me.", "I am a nice person", "I like meeting people and making friends." He wouldn't smoke if he knew when to try to fit in and when not to. If he knew what kind of people he liked (as opposed to being told whom to like) and why he liked them, he would have had a much better chance of finding friends instead of throwing himself into what he perceives to be the "cool" group in a desperate, futile attempt to belong somewhere, anywhere, to just not be so painfully lonely. He wouldn't be a bully if you had allowed him to develop self-confidence, which you have quashed with every "because I said so" and every restrictive little rule you imposed upon him without explanation. He wouldn't turn to violence if he could change things he hated without it. And you know what? If you keep at trying to make him your "perfect little boy", he'll run away from you. As far as possible. Maybe he'll wait until he goes to college, gets a job, and then never speaks to you again. Maybe not. But I can tell you that you won't be close and you won't be a family.
IM is just a communication method. Would you nag them as much if they were chatting on the phone instead? Even if you had more than one phone line? Do computers bother you because you don't understand technology and are afraid of it? Would you be equally concerned if they spent ten hours a day with their friends in real life? If your concern is simply with them being physically inactive, then say it, instead of making some vague "internet is evil" complaint. When teenagers hang out in the real world they are not very active either. Think about it.
The best thing I've done to my home directory is to make it read-only. This way I can prevent all those unnecessary configuration files that nearly every program wants to write, even if it really has no configuration data that's different from the default (what's up with that, developers?) And, of course, if I am ever dumb enough to try to write something at the root level, I get a polite reminder.
> But then I remember school being better when the
> trouble makers wern't there beating up us nerds..
You must have went to a girls' school...
> house or flashy car without thinking about how
> exactly there going to pay it off.
Well, you see, that's EA's fault too. People who spend a lot of time playing the Sims get a lot of really strange ideas about how life works:
> What's the point of having a job if it destroys
> your health and personal life? The current
> conditions arn't tenable; ridding the US of such
> labour practices, either by offshoring or
> improvement, is necessary.
The problem is that this is eventually going to lead to all jobs being done by slaves, with little or no pay, and little or no choice in their employment. Most people don't care about slaves and the lack of quality in their lives, but when all the jobs are filled by slave labor, what are regular people to do? The choice narrows to: get a job and tolerate your own slavery, or starve. In a world of slaves, there is little room for free men to sell their skills. You might argue that slave labor can not do creative work. Consider how little work requires any creativity at all. Most programming jobs are nothing but assembly-line code factories where programs are slapped together with "proven" methodologies and any ideas "outside the box" are not only unwelcome, but are actively supressed. I suspect EA jobs fall into this category. You just can't get a job where you get to think any more. Sure, employers say they want intelligent people, but what they really are after is absolute obedience and just enough brains to do the job (and no more). This world is going to the dark ages, baby. And that's the only thing that will cure it.
Unions for assembly workers function much better than geek unions because assembly workers are regular people who actually talk to each other. So do coal miners and all the other normal folk. Geeks mostly keep to themselves and confine their discontent to Slashdot. It would be pretty hard to organize a strike when most of the participants don't know, or trust, each other. Geeks also don't respond well to rabble rousing. I speak from personal experience, mind you.
Have you totally forgotten that we are training to defeat the buggers? The scores mean nothing; let's just boycott them. When the buggers come back, nobody will care if Joe Hax0r had 1928841 points, so why should we now?
> Keep talking like that and you'll never win another election again.
Of course not. Politicians are not allowed to tell the truth when it hurts. If you take a stand on anything important, you will have enemies and they will make damn sure you will not win any election. After all, most people are dumb (at least 51% of them, according to the last election), and will believe whatever they hear last. Therefore, since the politician is one man and the dumb are a huge crowd, is it so surprizing that the majority opinion can shred any opposition? With enough sheep you can slaughter even the staunchiest pack of wolves.
> Democrats used to support working class rural
> folk. Now they openly display disgust for them.
> Turnyou back on your core voters and what do you think is going to happen?
Well, the last time this happened, the South seceded from the Union and we had a civil war. Perhaps things might turn out better this time around. Or not.
The election has made it pretty obvious that we have a country divided into two groups. Cities versus the countryside. The new versus the old. Education versus religion. The Smart versus the Dumb. It is really an inevitable split; all those little towns in the middle of nowhere, with their ultraconservative opinions, dull stolid lives, and unchanging placidity, are hell on earth for an intelligent young person. So what do they do? They pick up and move to the city, creating this cultural divide. So why not make it official and split the country in two? Look at the map of the election results and you'll see that they are geographically cohesive. Split the country into the Blue States of America and the Red States of America and be done with it. We might even want to have a separate state just for California, who are different anyway. They might want to join up with Mexico.
> If you've got ink on your thumb, you can't reregister or revote
This is so damn unfair and discriminating against hygiene-challenged voters. They would then be brutally forced to take a bath at least once every four years.
Does this mean the stock will split too?
> From the "inalienable rights" referenced in the Declaration of Independence
You may decry that your rights are "inalienable" all you want, but unless the government forces me to grant them to you, I do not have to.
> the American tradition is that all rights not explicitly prohibited are allowed.
You need to add "by the government" here. The constitution specifies only what rights the government can not deny you by law (and the government has to date found ways to do it anyway). It says nothing about what rights other people must grant you.
> you should have to come up with a reasonable and
> compelling argument to bar behavior you don't like.
Why don't you come up with a reasonable and compelling argument why the next man to come to your house should not kill you? Remember, personal opinions of your own worth, commands of Zeus, Thor, Ra, the Easter Bunny or YHWH do not meet the standard. Sorry.
> Aaah. So your argument against homosexuality boils down to the "proof" in the bible.
Go read my comment again. I only made the argument that God would be against homosexuality based on the "proof" in the Bible. Because the Bible is the only source of information about God, no other argument is possible. My own views on homosexuality have nothing to do with the Bible.
> It seems that you're saying that one makes a
> choice to engage in homosexual activities, and by
> choosing to do so, you violate a commonly accepted
> (heck, just say absolute) standard of
> decency/morals - you sin, in effect
I will correct you only by emphasising that I really would say "absolute". I believe that there is an absolute moral code and that it can be used to judge anyone's actions, regardless of their own opinion of them.
> I would say choice is a prerequisite to sin -
> without a choice, one cannot sin. Do you agree?
I agree.
> Under this circumstance (direct biological cause
> of homosexuality) - would you still feel that
> there is a moral prohibition against homosexuality?
Whether homosexual preference is biological in nature or a choice, is completely irrelevant. I would not condemn a gay man's preference if he can not help it, just as I would not condemn a man who is suffering from diarrhea. But the actual homosexual act is always a choice. Nobody needs to have sex to survive, and there is no "I couldn't help it" argument possible here. Sex never happens accidentally.
> The real heart of the problem here is that
> government is involved in marriage in the first
> place, which should never have been the business of the state.
I agree completely.
> Marriage is a personal commitment, for some a
> religious sacrament, and many other things to
> many other people, but one thing it most
> assuredly is NOT is any of YOUR business if
> you're not one of the people in the particular
> marriage in question.
If marriage were only a personal commitment, and I were not required by law to recognize it as such if I did not want to, then I agree that it would be none of my concern. I could then refuse to acknowledge any gay marriages and my life would be completely unaffected by some gay people living someplace I never have to go to. So get marriage out of the law and I will agree with you.
> Frankly, I'd be a lot more comfortable if every bigot
> in this country wore his heart on his sleeve.
Which would be quite impossible if you outlaw bigotry, would it?
> why do you find it necessary to control the
> activity of other people even when it does not affect you?
First of all, I don't find it necessary for the government to control undesirable activity if I can avoid people who engage in it. If I dislike someone, the world is big enough that I don't have to be around them. If this person lives next door, I don't have to go see him. But the problem is that by its "equal rights for every pervert" stance, the government makes this impossible in many cases. Suppose I own a company and have a job opening; an openly gay man applies for the job. In a small company I would have to work with him on a daily basis, spend days in his presence, and try painfully hard to forget what he is. Therefore, if the government does not force me to hire him, I'll politely tell him to look elsewhere and look for someone I actually can like. But if the government officially accepts gays as "normal" and forbids discrimination against them, it really would affect me very negatively, as I just described.
> I'm just trying to figure out why roughly 55% of
> this country finds it neccessary to tell other
> people how to live their lives
The purpose of government is to tell people how to live their lives. You can apply the same argument to any behaviour and against any law. "There is no reason to outlaw murder, if nobody wants to kill you. There is no reason to outlaw theft, if you have nothing worth stealing. There is no reason to outlaw child pornography if you have no children. There is no reason to outlaw drugs if you are not using."
> I find anal sex as disgusting as you, and I would
> never consider doing crack... but I find the idea
> of forcing that on other people even more reprehensible.
What you actually mean to say is that you don't think you should be allowed to pass any sort of judgement on other people's activity. These days it is considered a blasphemy to have a moral code and to judge other people's actions by it. "After all, his ways are as good as yours. Who are you to judge?" But some people, like me, believe that there is such a thing as an absolute moral code. That some actions are wrong no matter who is looking at them. That it is possible to be right regardless of anybody's opinion. And that one's moral code should be a logical certainty rather than a "feeling" for the expediency of the moment.
> The government doesn't allow one to snort crack, not even
> in the privacy of your own home. Do you support that law?
I do. And if I had to vote for it, I would, because to do otherwise would be to give sanction to the behaviour.
> The government allows gay people to have sex (in privacy like
> everyone else). Do you prefer the government outlaw that?
Not necessarily. But I don't want them to legalize it either by publicly endorsing gay marriage.
> So you would like to stop gay people from being gay and acting accordingly?
I would like to rid them of the delusion that what they do is normal and acceptable. A drug user knows he's wrong to do what he does. However he tries to rationalize his habit, he will never try to publicly announce it and he will not be proud of it. Likewise, gays should know that they are in the wrong and correct that wrong, either by therapy, or by abstinence.
> I guess you still haven't answered my question
> as to how a gay marriage negatively affects you
But I have! I said it did not. But the thing is, if I am faced with a casting a vote for or against it, I have no doubt that I will vote against it. For me to do otherwise would be moral hypocrisy and I would be overwhelmed with guilt for allowing sanctioned sodomy into my world. Just as you are guilty of manslaughter if you allow a man to die by refusing some to take some simple action that would have prevented it, likewise you are guilty of a moral crime if you fail to refuse sanction to that which you consider immoral. I can not prevent the government from giving sanction to homosexuality if the majority votes for it, but if the government has the courtesy of asking for my opinion before enacting such legislation, I am certainly going to provide it.
> If a gay couple living right next door to you married,
> how will your lifestyle be changed as a result of that marriage?
It will not change one bit. But I am a homebody; I don't even remember who my neighbours are. Someone who likes socializing with his neighbours would be affected more.