To repeat: I set up and supported 200 of these. For over two years. Mine were admittedly running Windows, so I'm glad you are having a good Linux experience, but I guess our opinions just differ. In an extreme fashion. To be fair, there were pluses: it's very light, they didn't break a lot unless users were stupid, the screen was good quality even though it has an incredibly terrible aspect ratio and isn't tall enough for real work, and the keyboard is good, like in all ThinkPads. So it's not all bad.
But the heat issues and the terrible fan noise would be disqualifying for me.
As a North American (Portland, OR) I can tell you me and all my friends and family kids of the 1970's had swords, shields, and guns. My uncle even made me, out of wood, a very authentic WW II M1 rifle and a .50 cal machine gun with tripod so we could play war more accurately in our numerous foxholes we'd dug around the farm. I loved those toys. I still have my childhood plywood shield. It's barely holding together.
None of those friends and family own guns (or swords, heh) as adults. I've never even fired a pistol in real life. We all skew fairly left and would favor a lot more gun control. I'm a supporter of the military and our troops, but I worry about us sending them all over the place for who knows what end. It takes a heavy toll on us and them.
I honestly don't think having weapons as toys has much affect on you as an adult. It's all fun and games until you're old enough to learn some history and actually comprehend the horrors of war, and then you can only look back fondly on those innocent days.
Ehh sometimes kids like guns. My aunt was telling me how she wasn't going to let her kids have toy guns or watch violent shows. One morning she made toast, and my cousin had bitten his toast into the shape of a gun. He's now a writer for wacky kids shows.
Sister's barbie held by arms with legs poiting at target? Gun.
Toast with bite out of it? Gun.
Weapons are basic, ancient tools. In fact, the oldest human artifacts ever found were weapons[0]. It should come as no surprise that they are popular children's toys, whether we like it or not.
To be clear -- I do not mind it, but the guns depicted here are realistic enough to potentially cause confusion for people with actual guns and should probably never be taken out of the house......
That's a very American view. In most places around the world, guns are so rare that nobody will mistake a realistic toy as a gun.
In India, it is somewhat common for kids to have toy guns which make a loud sound if you insert a 'cap' and pull the trigger. This is sold as a firework, and can be seen everywhere on the streets during festivals.
You're not wrong but this is a pretty heavy "nature" argument vs. "nurture".
No kid is being raised in isolation of their culture. I'd assume there would be strong correlation to being exposed to movies and TV with people using guns to you gun purchases/affinity.
Children love anything that is remotely a symbol of power in their cultures.
For boys is ofter guns or superheros, for girls is a doll as long as is clear that it represents an alpha female. Girls and boys earn social power by beging linked with "powerful people" and toys simbolize this association.
I would blame the media, Hollywood and video games for the popularity of toy guns though I am not saying this is a real problem since here in Europe there are no guns anyway and there is no evidence that movies or games have effects on children or adults, I never seen one and I don't know people that have guns.
I know the guns topic is a sensitive one and I am not having here an opinion about that topic, just mentioning that the gun culture is exported around the world with the US media.
I am referring to guns, not about defending the tribe, so maybe you can make your point clear, are you from Europe and as a child you seen guns outside movies and video games?
I could be wrong, I can't perform an experiment where I remove games and movies with guns and then measure if children will play more with cars and airplanes then guns.
I grew up in Norway without TV and with no guns in the house. Was still interested in guns. Don't know how I became interested, it happened before I can remember.
(and no, I'm no gun nut but I was very interested in guns as a kid - as many other kids.)
Thank you for your perspective, it is interesting, can you recall maybe stories involving guns? In my case I was told stories involving swords and bows and as children we were creating swords and bows, we were also making guns but I think we saw those in american police movies that were very popular at that time.
I guess I might have picked up the idea from other kids somehow - but
- I don't have older siblings
- I didn't go to kindergarten
- and I generally can't recall playing much with other kids except for my younger brothers before I started in school
There must be an explanation - I don't think this was a miracle and I also think guns hasn't existed mong enough to make an impression on our genes - but I don't know it.
If you remove guns, children (boys) will use sticks as swords and hit each other with them.
If they have no knowledge of swords, they'll hit each other with sticks. Can't get much more primitive than a stick.
What would that relative measurement tell you? Nothing. The mixture is different for each kid. But I can tell you the play fight, with whatever tools they think are appropriate, is 100% universal.
In fact if a boy didn't do that at all, I'd honestly have him tested for a developmental delay.
I have a picture of me at age 4 on the wall behind my computer, out camping. I've got a stick. To this day, when walking through the woods, I see a stick and think, "Hmm, that's a pretty good one, might pick that up."
I have always just assumed, once being boys, that other men understood that the allure of a weapon, even just a stick, is so instinctive that we all understood it intrinsically.
Whenever we go hiking the kids pick up tons of sticks (both boys and girls). Not just one or two, but so many that their pockets and hands are stuffed and they are trying to get me to carry some for them. They insist on taking them home, but fortunately quickly lose interest in them once we are home so we can quietly get rid of them.
it is true, and I was not trying to blame anyone , if you try to re-read again where my comments started, I was trying(and probably failing) to explain why some gun related images will be shocking for someone is Europe where for someone in US is natural and I was trying to explain how are guns so popular even if there are no guns that you can actually see(again there is no blame since I don't think there is something bad that someone plays with a toy gun or with a gun in a video game).
Other example of shocking image/video for someone like me , a father sending his 10(or younger son in the house to bring his shotgun outside, or a different father training his 10 years old daughter to shoot a shotgun (or maybe are rifles I don't know exactly what the guns were)
You’re absolutely right, it’s cultural. I’m a youth firearms instructor and it’s been interesting to learn the parents’ reasons for encouraging their children.
China isn’t that influenced by Hollywood. There are plenty of kids in China that have never seen a Hollywood film before. Chinese media on the other hand has no problem exposing kids to guns even if guns are completely illegal in the PRC.
May need to be more specific. Maybe in Europe it’s not like that? I had a ton of toy guns as a kid in Bangladesh. The kind of shit you can’t even get in America. Realistic pistols (with jagged metal edges) made in Pakistan. I had a realistic military uniform, with jagged metal buckles. (Kids’ costumes in America are plastic crap, I assume because metal and stitching is some sort of safety hazard).
> Realistic pistols (with jagged metal edges) made in Pakistan. I had a realistic military uniform, with jagged metal buckles. (Kids’ costumes in America are plastic crap, I assume because metal and stitching is some sort of safety hazard).
I disagree with that generalization. I grew up in the 1980s playing with quasi-realistic metal toy pistols (revolvers) and so did pretty much every other boy that I knew. Maybe that has changed a lot in the last ~15-20 years, however the majority of adults today that grew up playing with toy guns in the US would have at some point come across metal guns as well the plastic fare. Until more recently it was a very common type of toy. As recently as the mid 1990s, it would not have been strange at all to see metal pistols played with in kindergartens across the US. And then further it varies heavily by location, you're still going to commonly see metal toy guns in places like Texas and surrounding states, the midwest and the southern states.
You can go to yard sales all over the US and buy toy metal guns. Or just take a look at Amazon or eBay, they're still commonly sold in new form (search for toy metal guns and variations). Metal toy cap guns in particular remain popular in the US.
I had a wide array of weapons. I don't think the same would be acceptable for my kids, in fact my (much) younger brothers weren't allowed guns, but as another commenter pointed out, every stick and piece of Lego became a gun for them anyway.
When LotR came out they did persuade their grandad to make them smoking pipes, I found that disturbing!
Gold isn't going to save you from a zombie apocalypse, nor can you eat it.
It will however transport your wealth from one side of a currency crisis to the other while retaining value - as opposed to plastic notes with arbitrary numbers of zeros printed on them.
My 9yo son is willing to give you his life savings of $41.56 to have an at home kit of this machine :)
I've played with OpenCV and tried for fun to train a HAAR cascade classifier to recognise a minifigure. It didn't work which made me realise one has to really understand under the hood of machine learning like this in order to give it good training data.
L(ego)S(sorting)ASAS would be very popular with the families I know, a little van that pulls up outside, dump the lot in and get back the bits sorted by kits :)
