What is the point of having a big castle, with a moat, several feet inch walls and all that stuff if you then, quite literally, give away the keys to the castle?

Thank you good sir. I have learned something new today that I probably wouldn't have otherwise, as I can't bring my head to ever join the military. I was born with a need to ask "why" which I don't think flies very well with the military :)

Dirty Bernanke sounds... dirtier! sort of like a chilli dog for economics

<obligatory>1GB ought to be enough for anybody!</obligatory>

(it's our duty *not* to stop beating the dead horse)

*Yet*

I have come to believe that "the invisible hand of the free market" is an euphemism for "MY invisible hand ON the free market"

What is this maintainability thing in clothing? I ask this in all seriousness. Is it only about cleaning it or is there something else to it? Like, you can wear the fatigues more days without washing and still being presentable, as opposed to, say, Navy white uniforms which I would guess the tiniest bit of dust would make them look "dirty"?

Or do you refer to being more durable in that you could crawl around in the subfloor and the fatigues won't get torn so easily?

My point was that it can be done with parenting, not with technology.

The particular way my parents used is by no means special or anything, I was just making an example of what kind of solutions parents could work out for instead of buying a piece of software.

Similar things with smarphones. How about not giving your under-15 kid a smartphone and instead a regular one?

Maybe in a particular case you could put some logging appliance at the router so you could check once in a while where has your kid being surfing the net. Not to block it, but to be aware of it, and if the situation warrants it (i.e. been looking at an awful lot of bestiality or some other delicate subject) TALK to the kid. Not block it or punish him, but discussing what he was watching.

That's my whole point. That if parents do their jobs (to the best of their abilities, and of course with varying degrees of success) instead of relying on some program, then maybe you don't need to worry about your kid watching some gore or bestiality or 2 girls 1 cup sporadically. You CAN'T avoid it, that's for sure, like they say, kids will be kids. But you certainly CAN limit whatever damage could be done by looking at those things. And even better, you teach your kids things that will allow them to later make their own judgment on things (say drugs or hanging out with criminals or what have you) and be sure their judgment is going to be in line with what you taught them.

The critial part is that the learning steps (And thus maturity, etc) won't happen with a piece of software that can't tell the kid WHY it's not the best idea to look at those things,

Wow, it can do ALL those things?
I guess parenting is overrated!

Joking aside, it's worrysome how more and more, even discussed in Slashdot ad nauseaum, there are people developing parenting-avoiding tools.

Every time I see someone asking for some software to monitor their kids and avoid them going to unwanted internet pages I'm amused how my parents monitored me when I was young.

The answer? Put the computer in the living room where every one walking about the house could take a peek at the monitor. Up until maybe 13-14 years old it was this way. Later they allowed me to have it in my room after they had some "certainty" that I knew how to surf safely. Sure, I watched porn and even once in a while things that my parent probably wouldn't have approved of (gore and stuff like that), but by that point I had a pretty firm grasp of what I was "allowed" to do. Read: Allowed as in I trusted my parents to do what it was good for me.

If they prefered I stayed away from certain pages I would most certainly stay away, maybe taking a quick peek but in general nothing to worry about.

I mean, if you are not going to be (and I hope most people won't) glued to the side of your child so you can monitor it 24/7, why would anyone expect some software to actually do that? I believe that children behave for the most part, according to how the parenting went. So if your kid can't stay away from the smartphone in important events, the the issue is not with the techology (as usual) but with the way those parents raised their children.

After so many patents and technology products and ideas going in this direction, I wonder if some sci-fi writer is ever going to write some stories about how the future of humanity will be determined by how parents *configured* their kid's robo-nannies and even sue the robo-nanny maker because their child grew up spoiled, even when they bought the enhanced DLC for super-behaved children!

Perception doesn't seem to be everything. It IS everything

As someone told me once, politics or ars politica, is the art of negotiation. I would venture a guess that when negotiating something that's not directly "yours" i.e. on behalf of someone else (the people) perception is king. If you can fool your oponent into perceiving something as you would like it to be, you have much more leverage than if you don't. Lather, rinse and repeat and you have politicians choosing their words very very carefully, with the only intent of being able to change perceptions at will. So if it suits them to say something that makes the public believe it one way, but then it also allows them to later change that perception if things don't go as expected, you have a perception game after all.

Methinks.

Uhmm... good point. Maybe I picked the wrong examples.

When a new story comes out about how the government has adapt the law because of some technology advancement, we can all see how slow they are achieveing anything at all. We can see this clearly with patents, copyrights, sexting and any other number of subjects.

But how about when it has to do with money and taxes? Oh boy, so now they understand perfectly?

I actually never thought governments would move this fast to regulate BitCoins. How I wish they would move this fast to address other more important things...

Uhmm... no.. not Taco. I eat tacos for lunch and dinner though. Not kidding! I'm from Mexico.

THIS story and its comments is why I keep returning to /. despite having the many flaws we all know about.

Take any random idea and code it. Post it on /. and two things happen:

- People find prior art of it, to different degrees of precedence.
- People start finding ways to improve/cheat the system, to different degrees of sophistication, complexity and plausibility.

I mean, seriously. You can argue all you want about this community and its (our?) shortcomings, but you can't deny at some point just having a bunch of geeks or whatever you want to call us, discussing things like this story definitely gets interesting and fun.

Cheers fellow /.ers!

I believe the fundamental difference (in this context) between a phone call and text messages is not the input medium (voice/text) but the fact that text messaging is asynchronous. So, what the GP is proposing is a system to communicate by sending/receiving "voice mails" of sorts (without hearing the annoying recorded greeting every time I would hope). One for each message. One of the things that make SMS messages so attractive is not the fact that it's a written message but the fact that I can send it and not worry about an immediate response. And as a receiver of a message, I know I can read it when I want, and even chose to avoid response.

I'm not aware of a system that does what the GP says (althought it shouldn't be too hard) and it seems it could be a nice addition to text messages. I could send the spoken message, but don't need to hear the answer until later.