You are kidding, right?

Maybe the kids are right.

I truly think school is a waste of the child's time because it teaches things the children don't want to learn and in most of the cases it teaches things children won't be needing anyway.

School is mostly a Sisyphean task. Paying kids to transform this into a Sisyphean job is not a good choice. Wouldn't it be better to change what school is into something that kids can make sense of?

Children want to learn, what they don't want is to be answered questions they didn't ask. If you hear a child, you'll notice he's constantly asking questions. I don't think motivation is an issue, the problem is motivating kids to do many pointless things.

Well.. maybe there's a flaw with the school system that requires to be fixed.

My point is almost the same as yours. Although we differ in conclusions. I think school is flawed for the same reasons you mentioned. And we should correct that. You think we should give money to the children so they don't question why they have to go to school in the first place.

In my experience, kids are bottomless pits of curiosity, unless you teach them not to be. Kids really enjoy learning, but you have to answer what they want to know and not just throwing random knowledge to them.

Last week my sister started asking me questions. She wanted to know what was the "optical things on the mouse, cameras, and remote controls". It took me a while to realize she was talking about LEDs. And after that, just by her inquiry, we went from LED to semiconductors to GaAs to the mining and production process. And I didn't have to push any knowledge (or money) on her, it was just her curiosity alone.

It is work, but it is not a job. That's why you don't get payment. There are many things you must work in without getting any payment. In particular, knowledge is a capital you must build. You don't get money to learn, but you learn in order to then apply your knowledge and get money. That's the right lesson.

I wasn't taught school was work (I'm spanish speaker, so I guess it's an idiomatic thing, the Spanish word is 'tarea' which means something like 'task').

Now, I personally think that school is wrong in many senses. I was pondering the other day, comparing my little sister (who is 15 years younger than me and is on high school) with myself and my jobs, and the amount of effort she has to put on and stress she is under is insane. I've never again been as tired and bored as I was on school.

But the solution is not throwing money on the problem, the solution in my opinion is greatly reducing the amount of hours and useless knowledge you give to the kids. And trying to help kids finding what they really like learning and feed that interest. Probably home schooling.

And of course, leaving them time for them to discover the world around them.

It's an entitlement. Because you are not supposed to get payed for eduction: education is a service that is provided to you!

Later in life they'll have to pay to get a college degree, a PhD, and so on.

What you should be teaching your son is that if they don't finish school they won't be able to get a job.

On the other hand, it will be a shock when they find out that the only real way of getting money is doing an effort for other people and not for themselves.

If you want to teach your kid the value of work that's great. But do it with actual work (mawing the lawn, doing the dishes) and not with "make believe work".

Does it really work?

You see, being paid is not the only reason adults do anything hard. There are other things like passion, responsibility, self improvement and so on.

Teaching children that school is work is, in my opinion, the wrong lesson. Because it is a false lesson. School is not work, school (i.e. getting knowledge) is what gets you from no payment into eventually getting payed and into better payscales. And that's a lesson you'll have to learn sooner or later.

Nobody is going to pay your son to get through Law School. And you better teach that to your son early in life or he'll just ditch Law School to get an easy buck as soon as possible.

You want to teach him the value of work? Great! that's a perfect lesson. But require your son doing some actual work (mawing the lawn, doing the dishes).

If you teach them to expect payment for doing something for themselves, you'll make things worse. When they grow up they'll only get payed for doing something for other people.

An example of how bad was Alice 3D in comparison with Avatar 3D are subtitles.

In Avatar 3D, subtitles were placed were the action was happening. So if you were watching somebody talking, you just moved your eyes a little and read the subtitles.

On the other hand, Alice has the subtitles in the regular place, at the bottom of the screen. This would be ok in a 2d movie, but in 3d there is another problem and that's that you have to refocus each time you want to read. So the result is very annoying, focusing back and forth from the scene to the subtitles.

Of course there's also the problem of the movie being too dark. And too boring :D

I disagree, I learned about big O notation and algorithms in college, I'm a Physics graduate. This is basic knowledge you need to have if you are working on numerical simulation.

On the other hand, what you don't need, is the capacity to create a reusable program. Just big number crunching programs that solve a specific problem.

What I see that I'm lacking is the capacity to create a complex system with a clean architecture. I'm not sure about design patterns for example, even if I know the basics.

I use it as a human-powered net of blog posts, web pages and news recommendations.

I use two twitter accounts, in one I get frequent updates on political and economical news of my country, in the other I get updates about game programming. In both I get obscure articles I wouldn't get just by googling, and I get them faster than google indexes them.

It is not a perfect recommendation system, I get some "lol, look at my catz" lines, but it works. You get interesting posts most of the times. But I also found out some new blogs via twitter, which I subscribed in my RSS feed reader. I also have followers that read my blog posts when I tweet them.

I also found it a good way to know people. You tweet about a topic, and start knowing people that's into the same things you are. If you find somebody particularly smart, funny, insightful, you move to IM and mail, but twitter is a great place to know them. I happened to know two guys who work at home as I do and have the same interests and now we chat frequently.

Why not using Facebook instead? Well, I use facebook from time to time, but my contacts there are people I know IRL, which are not very technically inclined and most of the time post photos of their family or keep me updated on their advances on Farmville. Twitter is just an unobtrusive medium, Facebook tries too hard to be a platform where you do things.

As always, this will annoy the casual user, and expose him to security breaches, while being useless against those who want to do something bad like violating copyright.

It's like those stupid "right-click popup a copyright alert" javascript scripts. It is useless against web developers who are willing to steal source code or content, but it annoys casual users who just wanted to "Send page via email" to a friend.

"How can Sylar pick-up a person and throw him against a wall? "

Static friction?

mmm...

No, thank you, I think I rather just buy the iPod and download as many apps as I feel "entitled" to.

It is not as if you had a compelling reason not to.

Sorry, but "this jackass" didn't know that he wasn't going to be able to pay for the apps. He thought that having a paypal account was enough.

You are making all those assumptions and abstract deductions about how developers are going to rush in to develop applications. Well, there are two parts to that:
1. Great! Let them do it, I'll buy the apps. Why aren't they doing it already. Oh, yes, I know... BECAUSE THEY CAN'T SELL THE APPLICATION. I can't buy the application from those "innovative developers" because I still don't have an international credit card. And if I did have an international credit card, guess what, I would have already bought the app from some random guy in the USA or India.
2. Back to reality, I copied a $2 App nobody was going to sell me... So what? you still failed to explain how is this morally wrong, who is being hurt in the process. You only threw around some fairy tales about fair market in a market you clearly don't know and created some fallacious analogies to back you up.

So not only you are making false assumptions, pretending to have a higher moral stand because you follow a set of dogmatic conventions you decide to abide blindly (copyright infringement is bad mmkey) based on your fantasies about how the world would be a better place if I didn't copied those 1s and 0s, you also insulted me in the process... Please, step down from your high horse.

"Just because an action does not cause harm or loss to someone does not necessarily mean that it is the right thing to do."

You are correct. It doesn't mean it is right. It doesn't mean it is wrong either. It is an innocuous action.

We could argue for the rest of our lives if 'piracy' of a product "I wasn't going to buy anyway" is right or wrong. But I think there isn't any discussion about 'piracy' of a product "You weren't going to sell me anyway".

"Write your own app to do the same thing and fill the gap in the market yourself. "

Umm.. yeah right.. you mean writing it and then begging Apple for their approval so I can put the app on the app store and then I can't buy it anyway? or do you mean breaking Apple's Terms of Agreement by jailbreaking and uploading the app to my iPhone?

Not all piracy is because people are assholes. See, iTunes is not available in my country (Argentina) without an international credit card. They won't even take my paypal account unless it has a valid US address. Most of the time they won't even allow me to subscribe to free podcasts (!!!).

So I went to a Mac Store and asked them if they sold Gift cards, nope...

Then I contacted the company who makes the app I wanted (I was willing to pay the $2 they asked, using paypal) but nope... They only do business through Apple.

Ok, screw them. I just downloaded the app, uploaded it to my iPhone and run it.

Something similar happens with the Wiistore. And don't get me started about PC games, that cost several times their US cost.

No wonder piracy is so widespread.