Laws might be laws, but they aren’t always just

Rob does bring up some good points, but I think that the experience of the rest of the world will back me up. If alcohol consumption in the late teens slows brain cell production, wouldn’t the majority of Europe be dumber than us? After all, many European countries have ridiculously low drinking ages and more accessibility to alcohol at any age. They aren’t any dumber than us, right?

About high school students getting their hands on alcohol, this is where my plan about needing a diploma comes in. Of course, even if the age were simply 18, I don’t think the effects on high schoolers would be as profound. In my experience, those in high school who wanted to drink were able to get their hands on it in some way or another, I honestly never knew how. Those who weren’t really interested in drinking didn’t worry about finding people to buy it for them, and I think this would stay the same, even if a few high school seniors were able to buy it.

I will stand by my earlier argument that drinking in 18-20 year olds would decrease, but I will modify it slightly from how Rob worded it. Drinking itself might not decrease, but binge drinking would. I know that the point of alcohol at a party is to loosen people up a bit, but if people were able to buy their own alcohol they wouldn’t be so prone to overdoing it when they go to a party. Sure, a few people just like drinking too much, and they would continue getting wasted no matter what, but I think that overall, less people would be among that crowd. Just like there are less adults over 21 who get wasted all the time than people who just drink a little to loosen up, I think the 18-20 crowd would become that way as well.

Finally, on Rob’s drunk driving argument: I don’t think lowering the drinking age would have much effect at all on drunk driving. This is unfortunate because we really need to find a way to lower the frequency of these tragedies, but I don’t think that lowering the drinking age would increase them. There are plenty of 16-21 year olds who drive drunk as it is now, and for the most part they are in the same crowd as those who drink too much routinely; they are going to continue in the same pattern whether it is legal or not. For the rest of us, the harsh drunk driving laws are deterrent enough to keep us off the road if we’ve been drinking, let alone the fear of death or killing someone. I don’t think that there is so much difference between 21 and 18 year olds that 18 year olds think it is OK to drive drunk. By the time we are 16 and we get our drivers licenses, we know that it is a horrible idea, and waiting until we are 21 isn’t going to cement that any more than it will already be cemented when we are 18.

Eighteen is not too young

This weeks debate is on whether the drinking age in America should be reformed. Last time, I took the “leave it as it is” stance on the BCS system in college football, but this time I’m going to have to propose reform.

First off: Minors should be allowed to be introduced to alcohol by their parents in their own homes. 20 states now forbid that. By forbidding this, they are maximizing the potential for people’s first drinking experience to be wild, crazy, and dangerous. If we learn about alcohol in a safe environment with our parents, we are less likely to lose control when with our peers.

Now: why 21 is too old.

We have the highest drinking age in the world. The only other countries that have drinking ages of 21 are Pakistan, Fiji, Palau, and Sri Lanka. Most other developed nations have a drinking age of 18, and many have drinking ages lower than 18. Why?

If we were to lower the drinking age, we would obviously have less underage drinking. Yes, part of that is because the standards would be lower, but another factor would be that kids don’t have to wait so long to try it out. When you are 18, it seems like an eternity until you will be 21. Many 18 year olds are just starting college, and most of the rest are just starting full time jobs. For the college students, it seems unfair to have to wait until your Junior year before you are allowed to drink. This also fosters binge drinking at parties, which is unsafe and can have drastic consequences, unplanned pregnancy being a big one. While lowering the drinking age to 18 (not exactly my plan, but keep reading) would not eliminate binge drinking, it would lower the frequency of it for most people. Some people just like to get trashed, every day, and will do so regardless of the legality of it. Most people enjoy bingeing less often, but do so more often because they don’t get many chances to drink, and drink as much as they can at one time to make up for it. Also, if it were legal for 18 year olds to buy alcohol, they might not have to go to large parties to get their booze, and small parties tend to generate less trouble than large parties do.

For most 18 year olds who do not go to college, the supervised portion of their lives is over. They don’t have school anymore, and they aren’t children anymore. Many of them move out of their parents homes, and start their own lives. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to drink? Nobody is telling them how to do anything else in their lives anymore, why try to control this?

And of course, the arguments that have been shouted for years, ever since the new drinking age was enforced: Old enough to vote, old enough to be imprisoned, old enough to go to war, but not old enough to drink. It just isn’t fair that we have so many adult responsibilities, and face adult consequences for all of our actions, but we don’t get all of the adult privileges.

Finally, the unlikely plan that I think should be implemented: The drinking age should be lowered to 18, with the stipulation that in order to legally drink, you must obtain a high school diploma, or some sort of equivalent. Otherwise, the drinking age is 20. I know that one of the major concerns about lowering the drinking age is that high school students would then be allowed to drink, but this would make it so it is still illegal to do so. It would also act as an encouragement for some students to stick through high school, which would help them later in life in ways that they can not imagine now. A class on alcohol safety could be added into the curriculum, just as sex education is now. I’m not sure if this would be implementable or even legal, but regardless I believe it is a good idea.

Alternatively, if that doesn’t work, I support a drinking age of 18 like most of the rest of the Western world.

Decision Time!

Now that you have heard our arguments, it is your turn to make your opinion heard. Is the BCS so bad it should be replaced, or does it have more benefits than any replacements would? Vote in our poll, leave a comment… Make your voice heard! Tell your friends to log on and vote too, the more votes we get, the better the results will be!

We look forward to seeing what you, our readers think. If you have any other thoughts, please leave a comment.

The BCS will live on

You may raise one Rob, but it no good to go all in on a pair of twos!

You did bring up some good points in your rebuttal, but unfortunately for you, I have a response to them all!

You say that the BCS only gives two teams a shot at the National Championship. While this is true in the end, every team has a chance of making it to #1 or #2 before the end of the season. And ultimately, the playoffs narrows it down to two teams as well. So its really all the same, but in your system the good teams play a few more games and get more tired for the big showdown. This brings me to my next point, where you suggest that, in order to keep the season at its current length, teams in the playoffs would give up their winter breaks. While this would shorten the season to the point that it is currently, it would also lower the caliber of play in the final games and increase the chances of injury as the teams would be playing more games and practicing less.

Back to my point about every team being in the running for a national championship until the very end, the BCS has a good system in place for those who don’t make the final showdown: the bowls. While you argued that they playoff games could easily be the same bowls we currently play, the winner of any given bowl would not be referred to as the “Orange Bowl Champion” but rather, the “5th best in the nation.” There is more respect in being called the bowl champion than just 5th best. Also, in this system, a team that loses miserably in a bowl game for 3rd and 4th place gets to be ranked 4th, while a team that blows out their opponents in the 5th and 6th place bowl is ranked 5th. They would win their bowl, and still be thought of as 5th best, behind that team that got destroyed in the X Bowl.

Now on to your argument about players not playing their best every week. I don’t think there are many people who like to see players getting injured out there, but they also don’t want to see a sub-par performance week to week. Also, while injuries are a threat to a players future NFL career, so is not playing well. I don’t think the current level of injuries is anything unexpected from football, so I don’t think it is necessary to lower the level of play to avoid them, rather I think it is important to practice more to be able to avoid them through conditioning and knowing how to not get hurt.

Finally, you mentioned how the bowl payouts are not nearly as good as they seem. I know this is true, but they are still better than leaving the school on their own to foot the bill. The payout may not profit the school that much directly, but it does allow them to afford the trip. This in turn, builds the schools prestige, and potentially increases their fan base, who then potentially buys more jerseys, tickets, etc. I fear that if the bowls are turned into playoff games, the sponsors would be less willing to offer big payouts to the schools and we might see the deterioration of the bowls altogether as schools lobby for something cheaper.

So, as I just showed, while many see the BCS as an unfair and inaccurate system, it has many benefits, and there are no alternatives that would improve the system while keeping these benefits. I foresee the BCS living on for quite a few more years, and maybe in time people will see the benefits that it actually brings.

The BCS is legit

College Football currently uses one of the most controversial championship systems ever. Many people say that it should be scrapped all together, while many others propose changing it drastically. This system, the Bowl Championship Series, is not actually as bad as the masses make it out to be. Is it perfect? No. But it gets the job done.

One of the main reasons the BCS was created was to ensure that there was only ever one national champion per year, and since its inception that has been the case. While there may be a team some years that claims they had a more legitimate claim to the #2 than who was awarded it, between the #1 and #2 teams there is no question who the champion should be. In any other system, there would be similar arguments about teams claiming they should have been higher than they were. In a 8 team playoff system that some favor, the #9 team would undoubtedly complain just as loudly as #3 does now, and in a 16 team playoff #17 would feel left in the cold.

What the BCS does well however, is that it forces teams to play their hardest every game of the season. ESPN has been using the catchphrase “every week can change the season,” and nothing could be more true under the BCS. Any loss seriously hurts a teams chances at the national championship, so teams have to make sure they don’t lose their focus against an opponent they expect to beat. By forcing teams to play their hardest every week, the caliber of play across the entire season increases, making the game more exciting and more competitive.

The BCS also keeps the bowls in play, which is important to the schools that play in them because they offer huge payouts. These payouts are used to offer scholarships, build new seating, training facilities, and so on. Under a playoff system, the bowls would lose importance and therefore sink into obscurity, taking their money with them. Also, the bowls are a great tradition that many fans are drawn to regardless of who is playing, just like the Superbowl. Anyone who is in favor of delegitimizing the Superbowl is not ok in my book.

Finally, the BCS promises a shorter season than playoffs would allow, at least for the successful teams. This is important to the players because they still have to keep up with their academics during the season. Adding two or three weeks to the season would be extremely taxing on the players and might even cause some key players to fall to academic ineligibility.

So, the BCS isn’t the greatest system ever invented, but it gets the job done well in a sport that is very different from any other. It may not be perfect, but it is the best that we have thought of so far, and thus should not be scrapped or drastically changed.

Take that Rob!

Its decision time!

So, the arguments are in, and now it is up to you to determine the winner of Bone of Contention’s first debate! Did Rob successfully defend PC’s right to their dominance, or did Aaron convince the world that Mac should be dominant? Or, as a few of you commented already, is Linux the answer to all our problems?

Feel free to leave a comment about what you thought of our first debate, or if there are any debate topics you would like for us to consider in the future.

Not buying it… More than once!

I must admit that Rob has made some decent points in his argument for PC’s. They play games better, they run more programs, they offer more variety. But when it comes down to it, I want a computer that isn’t going to break easily and that won’t get bogged down easily. Windows really does run slower than Mac OS X, especially if you are running an anti-virus program (which you should, because viruses are everywhere). As for the hardware, more competition can sometimes lead to innovation, but it can also sometimes lead to cutting corners to cut down on price. Unfortunately, the latter is true for a lot of the PC makers out there right now.

So, they might not be the best choice for all applications, but in the end, a Mac will work better and easier than a PC of the same value. If the price bothers you, think about buying two of the PC you are looking at, and if it is still cheaper than a Mac.

Apples: Delicious since 1984

First off, thank you Rob for a rousing argument for PC’s. Well said.

Unfortunately, I think you’re wrong.

Mac vs. PC has been the great debate of our time for tech-minded people and nerds alike, with everyone picking a side and sticking to it firmly, almost like a religion. Up until a year ago, I was firmly in the PC camp, spouting such well thought out insults as “They don’t play games!” or “They all look the same!” or, my favorite, “They just don’t work well!” Then, I was accepted to the E-Media program at UC, and saw that they had a computer requirement. Not just any computer though, they specifically required the MacBook Pro. I was not too happy about this, being the firm PC guy that I was, but I really liked the E-Media program so I decided that I could suck it up and buy the machine I hated most.

Fast forward one year, and here I am, writing this blog post about how much I love Macs, on that very laptop that changed my mind. The phrase I had heard used against me many times during my PC crusades now rings true in me: “Once you go Mac, you never go back!”

My favorite thing about my Mac: it is what I want it to be, and no matter what third party apps I install on it to make it more my own, it never stops working or even bogs down. Part of this is due to the hardware I am using: 4 GB of RAM definitely helps keep things running smoothly under pressure. But what I think really does it is the operation system, Mac OS X.

I have been on PC’s with identical hardware to my own that have not been able to handle the amount of processes and applications that I have running at once on my Mac. I don’t claim to know all the inner workings of either Windows or Mac OS, but I do know that this is in part due to the fact that Mac OS uses a lot fewer resources that Windows does, especially Windows Vista, the worlds largest resource hog. But even Windows XP runs considerably slower than Mac OS X on identical hardware.

Rob mentioned the price difference of Mac’s and PC’s for the same price. What I just mentioned is my justification for this difference. Sure, on paper, the PC is much cheaper per unit of speed (whatever that would be measured in), but Mac OS knows how to allocate these resources more efficiently to make them run better. So to truly match a Mac’s speed with a PC, you would have to have more raw processing speed and memory, increasing the price you have to spend. While I’m talking about the price argument, I might as well bring up the quality of Mac hardware in comparison to most PC developers. Apple truly creates higher quality machines than any other computer company. Sure, they break sometimes, and occasionally without warning or reason. Just like any machine. However, the truth is that Apple hardware does not fail as often as other PC makers, especially in the laptop market.

At school, I saw a lot of PCs fail, and I saw a few survive the whole year intact. But I never saw a Mac fail, and I saw a lot of Macs throughout the year (everyone in my program has a MacBook Pro, and many other college students have MacBooks.) The problems the PCs had ranged from hard drive failures to motherboard failures to faulty wiring. I even saw a kid open his PC, an HP I believe, from the box only to have it fail to boot properly. The hard drive was dead before he even had a chance to mess it up himself. And this was one of their highest end laptops (I can’t remember which one to be exact, but it was as expensive as my 17″ MacBook Pro, or in other words, expensive enough.) I did see one Mac break, but that was caused by a blunt trauma, and wasn’t really due to a natural failing of the machine itself, but rather its owner. They slammed it into a corner somewhere and the LCD screen was broken. They were able to return it to the Apple store and get a brand new one with no hassle at all, and they never had to deal with foreign techs who can’t speak English.

However much I love them though, Macs are not perfect. As Rob mentioned, they suffer from a lack of compatibility with a wide variety of programs, ranging from games to productivity software. I admit, I run Parallels so I can run Windows on my Mac for when I want to play a game. While this does work, it doesn’t work as well as just owning a PC for gaming, which I someday will, when I have money to blow. But I think that a lot of the problem with Macs compatibility is that developers are not working with Apple enough right now because in the past it hasn’t been profitable to based on the amount of people using Macs. Now, as more people use Macs, I see more programs and games becoming Mac compatible. Rob mentioned that PCs work just as well with media programs as Macs do, but sadly, I think he is wrong. I have used many of these programs, such as Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Pro Tools, and while they might be compatible with the PC, the Mac OS is more suited to working with the mass amount of windows these programs have open at once. This is something you would have to use to truly get, but Mac’s window panning and Spaces features really help to manage large amounts of windows quickly and easily. These are the features that drive Rob nuts when he uses my computer. I have hot corners on, which is a feature that Mac has that allows you to set Spaces or window panning to one of the corners of the screen, to be activated when you move the mouse to that corner. When Rob uses my computer he accidentally hits them all the time, making the the windows dance around the screen and causing him to get frustrated. I like the feature, but if you don’t, it is easily turned off, and is even off by default when you buy the computer.

My final argument is the virus issue. Macs don’t get many of them, PCs do. Sure, this could change as more people switch to Macs, but Mac OS is far less susceptible to viruses than Windows is. So, we might not be as safe in the future, but I don’t think us Mac users will ever have as many problems with viruses as do the PCs of today.

So take it from me, a guy who has been on both sides of the debate: Macs kick the crap out of PCs.