Grace Hopper, one of the most accomplished computer scientists not just of her day but ever. Rose to dizzying heights in the US military because they needed her so much. A towering giant of the field. So when the picture of her comes up on screen, does the speaker say any of this? Does he acknowledge her greatness? No. He says she's wearing a cute hat. All her accomplishments and ability reduced to how she looks in a hat.
The problem here has absolutely nothing to do with the hat.
This debate is entirely moot without context. I imagined/read it as something like:
>"...Ah, and this absolutely brilliant woman started that trend. Just look at her, a beacon blahblahblah wrapped in that cute hat."
If neither of us have been there, its pointless arguing the statement. My point is simply that when I do such talks I frequently inject humor into it, just the way he had. Reading it as a completely isolated comment seems highly unrealistic to me.
When you give your talks with humour injected, do people in the audience come to you afterwards and suggest that your remarks were unhelpful to some people in the audience, as someone did in this case? In essence, do people politely complain to you about what you said?
If they did, would you ignore them and carry on injecting your humour?
It's a training course that the people building the product need to go on (which, in this case, is a single person). Some kickstarters might send two of their people on a 3D animation course. Some might buy an expensive set of textbooks and other such training material. This one sends someone on a residential RPG course. Some kickstarters might need to buy some expensive hardware that she could not otherwise afford. That's exactly what this one is doing.
I could not disagree more that it counts as "fund my life". "Fund my life" would be paying for things that she was going to have to do anyway, such as paying the rent and bills (which she probably doesn't, being 8 or however old she is, but that kind of thing is "fund my life").
I'm not saying it's a clear-cut case of policy violation. But in my opinion, asking for money to go to something as normal as summer camp (by "normal" I mean very common for kids her age) -- and then using additional funds to buy something as standard as a laptop -- veers way too close to the policy I called out, even if there are ways of explaining around it.
Regardless of whether it violates policies, I'm more worried that it sends the wrong message. Call it "training" all you like, It's ultimately just a week-long class for children who want to learn RPG Maker. And don't get me wrong -- I'm a huge fan of that particular piece of software. (I taught myself to use RPG Maker 2000 back when I was 11 years old.) But let's call it what it is -- at best, an impromptu scholarship for this girl, and at worst, a hand-out.
Again, I'm hoping that the girl and her mother can use the overwhelming success of the funding to turn this into something great -- something far bigger in scope than the original proposal. But until I see that happen I'll continue to be skeptical.
No, you've missed the point completely. In English, "vacation" and "training course" do not have the same meaning; don't be fooled by the fact that they both involve living away from home.
The Kickstarter policies are clearly listed on their page, but the point is that you have to be making something; producing a product. If you'd checked, you'd have seen that vacation is explicitly listed as forbidden.
For example, you could be making a book about European art, and to do this, you need to go to Europe.
In this case, one could argue that she's getting money for tuition, which is against the rules, but it's part of the disallowed "fund my life", which implies that it's things that are already part of her life. Without the kickstarter, she's not going on the training course; it's not part of her life. It's an essential part of producing the product at the end of the kickstarter.
Perhaps you have a small child, preferably a girl, who needs training on how to shoot better pictures? You could probably write the kickstarter from your child's POV, too. If enough people want to see the resulting snapshots, they'll probably kick in enough to cover a new camera as well as the plane ticket you've already bought!
"I had a list of 10 young women who went to my high school, their birthdays, profile photos, class schedules, the television shows they watch, the people they've dated, the parties they went to, where they eat on which days, and even a handful of mobile and home phone numbers. Did I purposefully cause chance meetings with people at my high school? I did. Did I go on dates with a number of those people? I did. Do they, to this day, have any idea how we came to meet each other? Not in the slightest."
What's creepy? That he described what he did or that it's possible to do now (quite easily, in fact). Your comment implies the former but I find the latter more interesting.
Do you really think this the only guy or girl who's tried this?
It's always been possible to stalk people and gather lots of information about them in order to increase ones chances of striking up a romantic relationship with them. it's always been possible to do this with many people at once.
It's always been creepy.
"Do you really think this the only guy or girl who's tried this?"
How did you get that? He didn't say anything like that. He pointed out that this is creepy. Just because people have been creepy for as long as there have been people doesn't change that.
So how do you justify where you draw your own line? Is it okay for you to murder someone because every day somewhere there is a massacre? No? Well then, is it okay for you to shoplift because someone else, somewhere, is stealing much more than you? Is it okay for you to push someone over because every day, somewhere, someone gets assaulted?
The list goes on and on. If you draw the line anywhere then you've applied the exact same principle you just espoused against; you just choose to draw the line in a slightly different place.
I think what you are looking for is called "common sense".
You won't be going around murdering people since it is common sense and you are brought up this way.
Murder and dirty joke is not the same thing if you have any common sense and that's why usually murder has priority over dirty jokes in court. You usually don't get sued for dirty joke. That's why we don't call dirty jokes a murder nor we call murder a joke.
And the common sense is what should set our priorities. Who would you rather see in court first mass murderer or a thief? And on what grounds do you decide this? How do YOU decide which is more offensive? Do we have scales for it?
"Common sense" is not much more than a myth now that (many, including those of the majority of the posters here) societies are not homogenous and not filled with people all subscribing to a very narrow view of what is right and wrong. I believe "common sense" is, in this context, a way of stating a belief without feeling that any evidence is required. A bit like religion.
There was a thread around here somewhere in which the correct, acceptable behaviour of a society (real, not an imaginary example, unless I radically misread it) involved boys becoming men by giving oral sex (and swallowing) to older men. A neighbouring society decided anal sex was the way to go. This is simply "common sense" in those societies. Everyone agrees.
We live in societies where one person's "common sense" is another person's completely unacceptable behaviour.
"Who would you rather see in court first mass murderer or a thief?"
Will you be petitioning the courts to refuse to try thieves unless everyone accused of murder has been tried already? That would essentially legalise theft.
I think you miss my point. Where I come from, nobody - and that can be taken very literally - will be offended by a joke about penises between to friends. Why not? Because it is not something to be offended about. There is a lot of crap happening in the world today and jokes about penises is not one of them. That's all there is to it. If you do make this a big priority in your live, and even feel offended by it, your brain is kind of broken. Like when you believe in God and thus think it's OK to murder others that don't follow your beliefs. That's a broken brain symptom.
So it's not so much about drawing a line as there should be no need to draw it.
Is this not taking a literal interpretation of his words a bit too far? Is your scenario really that because someone can stick their hands in their pockets and refuse to take the US dollars (and then a court declares that the debt has been paid), they didn't actually HAVE to accept US dollars because they can just stick their hands in their pockets? By that reasoning, I don't HAVE to not murder people, you can't make me, it's just that the courts will put me away for life. The whole conversation becomes meaningless.
Well, no; the point is that the legal tender status of US dollars is only relevant if and when an outstanding debt becomes the subject of litigation. How often does that happpen?
Further, an agreement could say something to the effect of "borrower will repay lender the sum of $1000, or 50 BTC", stipulating an effective exchange rate that makes repayment in dollars entirely unrealistic.
They still have it installed on some of the PCs at my school, but it's never used. But yeah, they way they deal with whatever they do teach is pitiful. No generics, exception handling, threading etc with Java. :-/ (worst part: kids are taught to tack on "throws IOException" at the end of the signature every method "where they want to use I/O" without any explanation of why that is the case.) They still use an ancient (and bugged) version of JDK and insist upon using deprecated classes.
The main problem here is that the teachers themselves aren't up to date and don't really know what they're teaching that well.
Raising hand as one of the suspicious number of very new commenters. :p As suspicious as I look, however, I don't belong to them and it's not my first post either.
How necessary is that? Does it depend on the eReader? I use a Sony 300 series (which I personally think is about the high point of the eReader evolution, with the exception of the 350 for more screen space in an almost identical sized casing) which is as thankfully dumb and disconnected as eReaders get. It plugs in like an external hard drive and I simply copy epub files onto it.
You couldn't pay me to have a kindle (well, you could, but you'd have to pay me a lot and I'd just sell it and get another Sony).
There are two issues with e-readers which need to be considered. One is obvious, the other is not.
1. e-readers like the Kobo, Kindle, Nook etc (ones tied to a store) phone home and report reading progress and are DRM encumbered. The Kobo even gamifies reading which is just insane if you ask me.
2. The second issue applies to all e-readers and that is that they promote distribution of epub files. The source of epub files is usually illegitimate (as everyone pushes stuff through stores) and the hosts are about as dodgy as can be as well.
Books can also change hands easily.
If you're going to get an e-reader, your approach is the best.
Grace Hopper, one of the most accomplished computer scientists not just of her day but ever. Rose to dizzying heights in the US military because they needed her so much. A towering giant of the field. So when the picture of her comes up on screen, does the speaker say any of this? Does he acknowledge her greatness? No. He says she's wearing a cute hat. All her accomplishments and ability reduced to how she looks in a hat.
The problem here has absolutely nothing to do with the hat.