The best thing to do is be loving and supportive without getting sucked in yourself. Try to be and remain his window on normalcy. Of the people that I've seen escape from Landmark and Scientology, it's because their friends and family stayed engaged and supportive.
I "escaped" from Landmark. Decided I'd had enough and moved on. No one followed me, or harrased me or tried to adversely effect my life, in fact a seminar leader I worked closely with congratulated me and basically said (to paraphrase) "good luck, go get 'em" and told me to get in touch if I ever wanted to review. The people I did it with still treated me as a freind, just as I remained freinds with those who weren't involved while I was doing it. Scientology is more than a little different to that.
The thing about the Landmark stuff is that it actually isn't a set of beliefs and it's very hard to construe it as a religion. It is a set of mental practices with its own language and is easily construed as a cult. The reason for the distinct language is to create a different context for understanding being - ontology being a major part of the teaching. This new context can free us up to look at our lives from another persective. I don't think "clear" has quite the same meaning as it does in scientology, nor is their any crap about thetans and space aliens.
I think the "cult" tag is attached to Landmark stuff becuase of the word of mouth nature of promotion combined with the training they give to promote it. The whole thing was started by a used car salesman and the training technique reflects this. Unfortunately, some people get this "used car sale" training and are so excited by the what the courses offer that they forget the important lesson that "no means no". I came across quite a few people like this in my time and I believe they are the people that create this sense of a pushy cult. I strongly believe that if they charged a little more for their courses and advertised in the mainstream, they would be very successful and wouldn't get labelled a cult. Some of the course would fit well in amongst others psychology, sociology and even MBA courses.
I still use the stuff I learned and find it particularly useful at work and in my family life. It helps me to be less judgemental, take greater responsibility for my life, funnily enough, makes it easier for me to not get "pressured" into things I don't want, but in a positive way rather than a "fuck off, don't pressure me" kind of way.
I understand that EST was pretty abusive and fucked quite a few people up, but I think while scientology followed a path toward a whacko extreme, Landmark through the forum moved to a more sensible place.
I don't do any seminars these days, haven't since 1992, but I may again in the future. That's my choice. If someone asks you if you want to do the forum and then doesn't accept no, if that is your answer, suggest to them that they may want to review the forum and have a breakthrough in effective communication.
It all depends on whether this is the Olympics or Special Olympics. If tyhis is the regular Olympics then he's not being descriminated against. If this is the special Olympics, he is. Disabled atheletes use prosthetics all the time, so technical advantage is part of the sport.
You wouldn't let someone run the 100 meters with shoes with wheels and a gasoline engine, would you?
As a matter of fact I would, followed by people sitting on solid fuel boosters attached to skateboards. Bugger the Olympics.
Re:"wtfismiddleware" tag
on
Oracle Buys BEA
·
· Score: 4, Informative
"Middleware" is IT-speak for "we've got this closed-source thing over there, and it doesn't talk at all to this closed-source thing over here, and we have no idea what their data formats or wire formats are but we've spent scads of money on both of them and now we need them to talk to each other, so can you please figure out how to make that work?
Bullshit.
While middleware is appropriate in the context you put forward, it is also appropriate in the "We have a mainframe app we built ourselves 15 years ago and we need to integrate it with a new web app we've developed and have those to apps work together with all our external partners and regulatory bodies" type scenario. Whether the source code of either system is open or closed is irrelevant if the interfaces are well defined. Middleware makes sense if you look at it from the point of view of a business performing a staged upgrade, whereby they can leave legacy systems which aint broke running, implement new functionality on new systems (which wont require them to hire a bunch of 70+ year old COBOL codgers to maintain it for the next 15 years) and then migrate the old functionality to newer tech. It all happens seemlessly with a good middleware solution, at least in theory.
Middleware is not a closed source tax, it is the mortar that helps keep solid infrastructure solid, whether you use open or closed source software.
I have at least ten "New Text Document.txt", "New Text Document (2).txt" files on my desktop right now. One of them has my address book in it.... let's see... is it (6)? Nope, that's my checking account register.
Yeah, I used to have a similar problem until I figured out the perfect solution.
First of all, create a directory for each file on the Desktop. Next, open all of the files until you find your checking account register, right-button drag the file to your newly created "checking account register" directory and select "Create shortcut here" from the menu that appears when you drop the file.
It will take a little bit of time to start with, but it's certainly worth it. For example, to open your checking file register, all you have to do is open "checking account register" on the desktop and the open "Shortcut to New Document (6).txt"!
Don't thank me. The knowledge that my small insight has helped another human being is all the thanks I need.
What audio programs are they using? They've got to record dialog somehow (unless it's a silent movie.)
They used Reaktor, which is a bit disappointing. Reaktor is more mature than OSS equivalents like om or its successor whose name eludes me now. I'm sure if they had chosen someone else to do sound, someone who knows Linux audio, they could have had fully open source production of the same technical quality. Of course artistic/creative quality can't be measured the same way.
The fact that they didn't use open source sound appears to be entirely because Jan Morgenstern didn't know the toolset and not becuase it was insufficient. It's a shame.
It would be great to see a project like this provide feedback for Ardour, Rosegarden, various plugin developers, etc, or even lead to closer interaction between blender and jack.
Blender was a fantastic UI which is very powerful if you haven't been polluted by other interfaces. But that's okay, you go back to using notepad, I'm happy with vi.
Moaning about the blender interface on/. is about as useful and interesting as me moaning about how slow and complicated Photoshop is to use because it's not like the GIMP. Seriously it took me a few minutes to figure out how to resize an image in Photoshop recently because I haven't used it in about seven years.
"Blender's UI sux" comments have been done to death. They are boring and pointless. If you have a need to use it, learn the UI, otherwise quit whining, or go and whine at say 3D Max developers for creating a UI that is so slow and inefficient and takes so much unhealthy mouse work to get basic things done that they have forever closed your mind to new possibilities.
The link you posted was to a similar story in the "YRO" section.
It was posted at a date/time design to best suit europeans. This story was posted at a date/time better suited to american geeks after work in the "Politics" section.
It was so done to keep most people happy and docile while the hardcore slashdotters who sit there hitting "refresh" around the clock could grow incensed.
Then people in Oceania and Asia could sit back and have a good belly laugh at all the typically paranoid american comments on the YRO story about how this is all just a political move by an EU who is trying to destroy US business and then sit back and wait for the comedic pragmatism of europeans complaining that the story has been posted to the "Politics" and has a USA flag on the banner when it is clearly a legitimate legal issue.
"Looks like your trying to conduct a logical debate with with a rabid mac fanboi troll. Would you like some help with that?" __ / / \ | | @ @ || || || || |\_/| \___/
I am not part of the hive. I do not always think the current fashionable thoughts. That is good, as far as I'm concerned.
My post responded to your question, specifically, "What's the huge issue for abuse?". The huge issue for abuse is that the act of implanting an RFID tag in someone against their will is abuse. The reasons of the objector are irrelevant.
Your original post seemed to make the assumption that there is no harm in having the tags implanted, although there is some evidence to the contrary, and that the only reasons people might have for objecting are religious or to do with privacy. I presented another. I don't see why I should have to fucking well have a foriegn object implanted under my skin. I see that as abuse. I think it is criminal. If they can already track me, good. That's all they fucking need then, isn't it?
Maybe I am creating an "us and them" situation here, but sometimes that happens in a world where we are not all livestock.
I'm certainly not a fundamentalist, probably not insane and not even particularly worried about whether or not this is used to track people.
If I was a criminal in any country under the crown and a government agency tried to implant an RFID tag in me, I would insist that the government agency be dissolved and all the members of said agency involved in my implant be charged. Just following orders is no defence.
As I said, I'm not fundamentalist, in fact I believe that we evolved to our form and guess what? We did it without RFID tags. According to my understanding of evolution, if I were implanted, I would not develop any biological relationship with the tag within my lifetime.
It would take generations. And what for? So that a bunch of control freaks can track everything because they are motivated by fear. Fuck them - actually no, fucking's fun. Spit at them, publicly ridicule them and if they get into a position of power, humiliate them, bring them down and have them charged.
My objection has nothing to do with religion, it has to do with the ideology of people who support such things. People like yourself who appear moderate but apologise for these sorts of things and allow fear mongers to gain a hold and people like Hitler who actively pursued such technology.
I'm writing this on a nokia N95 (seriously, one of our tubes sprung a leak and we only have wifi) and/. really sucks at this resolution. The only thing worse than the eye strain and constant scrolling is typing on the keypad because I am too cheap to buy a bluetooth keyboard.
Predictive text helps a bit but sometimes it gets things so ducking wrong that I am sure the people who program it are a deliberately unhelpful bunch of ducking aunts.
But, the whole reason to GO to a University, is to get the skills/education to make more money when finished, than you would have if you had not gone.
Didn't used to be. Used to be that the reason for going to University was to study and further knowledge. If you wanted to make money, you did an apprenticeship.
I still maintain that most people who go to University to learn CS would be better served by an apprenticeship because most people learn CS to get jobs where they end up using pre-existing tools and concepts to implement pre-existing solutions to problems - much like a plumber. Sure we may now talk about java and xml, but nothing has fundamentally changed since the 1960s. It just got more bloated and easier to understand as machines got quicker.
The industry at large would be better served too. At the moment business has to take risks on people who are qualified but lack a solid real world grounding in applying theory to day to day business problems. Some graddies come out already instinctively knowing how to fly, some take a while to get it and some never learn, but all of these types of people remain qualified and the idiots are able to jump from job to job for years building up their CV while bringing the trade into disrepute. At times a lot of graddies have problems finding work because when the economy is slower, business is less inclined to take that risk.
If more qualifications were gained through apprenticeships, a qualification would mean that not only has the person learned the theory, but they have a few years of real work experience which they have completed in a competent and timely manner.
True, some people may occasionally "invent" a new way of doing things using existing tools and concepts that catches on, but this is also true for plumbers. Plumbers have trade magazines, we have the internets. It is entirely in the technological realm and has nothing to do with science. It doesn't belong in University.
I agree. This is not "open as in source", this is "open as in goatse" as are so many things microsoft does.
It's also not value as in "good monetary" but value as in "family values the likes of which compel me to fucking kill anyone who diverges from my ideal" and subscription as in "subsribe to my philosophy or feel the chair!"
This cnet hack is making a mountain out of a molehill.
While HTML and CSS are important to know still, I can't help but wonder how many people actually still build websites with HTML and CSS and Java and such?
HTML CSS and Java? I put together a web interface recently using Java. Sure I could have gone through the pain of exposing the Java backend I was working via some intermediate protocol/whatever and present a UI through a CMS implemented in something other than Java, but at the end of the day, why would I want to do that? There are plenty of excellent libraries in Java that do all the work for me without the need for me to install a whole new backend.
There are plenty of people building and maintaining web sites in Java. That's why there are jobs advertised for IBM Websphere developers, that's why knowing JBoss, Tomcat etc. is handy. And so on and so forth.
Oh and by "Java" I'm assuming you actually mean Java and not Javascript. If not, please hand in your geek card at the counter.
Are you saying that before human life evolved, planets followed hexagonal paths round the sun?
You, sir, have no valid place in intelligent discourse.
Ad hominem attacks along the lines of "You say a theory isn't true therefore you are saying that some ridiculous contrary theory is" are pure idiocy. These are purely political and seeing as the most successful politician in the world is clearly an idiot, they offer nothing of value to the mater at hand. Elvis Presley is dead, but not all of the class of dead people is Elvis Presley.
Ad hominem attacks along the lines of "you are an idiot, bugger off" are of course perfectly valid....
Slashdot Mirror
I "escaped" from Landmark. Decided I'd had enough and moved on. No one followed me, or harrased me or tried to adversely effect my life, in fact a seminar leader I worked closely with congratulated me and basically said (to paraphrase) "good luck, go get 'em" and told me to get in touch if I ever wanted to review. The people I did it with still treated me as a freind, just as I remained freinds with those who weren't involved while I was doing it. Scientology is more than a little different to that.
The thing about the Landmark stuff is that it actually isn't a set of beliefs and it's very hard to construe it as a religion. It is a set of mental practices with its own language and is easily construed as a cult. The reason for the distinct language is to create a different context for understanding being - ontology being a major part of the teaching. This new context can free us up to look at our lives from another persective. I don't think "clear" has quite the same meaning as it does in scientology, nor is their any crap about thetans and space aliens.
I think the "cult" tag is attached to Landmark stuff becuase of the word of mouth nature of promotion combined with the training they give to promote it. The whole thing was started by a used car salesman and the training technique reflects this. Unfortunately, some people get this "used car sale" training and are so excited by the what the courses offer that they forget the important lesson that "no means no". I came across quite a few people like this in my time and I believe they are the people that create this sense of a pushy cult. I strongly believe that if they charged a little more for their courses and advertised in the mainstream, they would be very successful and wouldn't get labelled a cult. Some of the course would fit well in amongst others psychology, sociology and even MBA courses.
I still use the stuff I learned and find it particularly useful at work and in my family life. It helps me to be less judgemental, take greater responsibility for my life, funnily enough, makes it easier for me to not get "pressured" into things I don't want, but in a positive way rather than a "fuck off, don't pressure me" kind of way.
I understand that EST was pretty abusive and fucked quite a few people up, but I think while scientology followed a path toward a whacko extreme, Landmark through the forum moved to a more sensible place.
I don't do any seminars these days, haven't since 1992, but I may again in the future. That's my choice. If someone asks you if you want to do the forum and then doesn't accept no, if that is your answer, suggest to them that they may want to review the forum and have a breakthrough in effective communication.
Actually yes.
The first example I heard of was DeCSS, which helped me manage my right to make ligitimate backups of DVDs I bought.
It all depends on whether this is the Olympics or Special Olympics. If tyhis is the regular Olympics then he's not being descriminated against. If this is the special Olympics, he is. Disabled atheletes use prosthetics all the time, so technical advantage is part of the sport.
As a matter of fact I would, followed by people sitting on solid fuel boosters attached to skateboards. Bugger the Olympics.
Bullshit.
While middleware is appropriate in the context you put forward, it is also appropriate in the "We have a mainframe app we built ourselves 15 years ago and we need to integrate it with a new web app we've developed and have those to apps work together with all our external partners and regulatory bodies" type scenario. Whether the source code of either system is open or closed is irrelevant if the interfaces are well defined. Middleware makes sense if you look at it from the point of view of a business performing a staged upgrade, whereby they can leave legacy systems which aint broke running, implement new functionality on new systems (which wont require them to hire a bunch of 70+ year old COBOL codgers to maintain it for the next 15 years) and then migrate the old functionality to newer tech. It all happens seemlessly with a good middleware solution, at least in theory.
Middleware is not a closed source tax, it is the mortar that helps keep solid infrastructure solid, whether you use open or closed source software.
Yeah, I used to have a similar problem until I figured out the perfect solution.
First of all, create a directory for each file on the Desktop. Next, open all of the files until you find your checking account register, right-button drag the file to your newly created "checking account register" directory and select "Create shortcut here" from the menu that appears when you drop the file.
It will take a little bit of time to start with, but it's certainly worth it. For example, to open your checking file register, all you have to do is open "checking account register" on the desktop and the open "Shortcut to New Document (6).txt"!
Don't thank me. The knowledge that my small insight has helped another human being is all the thanks I need.
They used Reaktor, which is a bit disappointing. Reaktor is more mature than OSS equivalents like om or its successor whose name eludes me now. I'm sure if they had chosen someone else to do sound, someone who knows Linux audio, they could have had fully open source production of the same technical quality. Of course artistic/creative quality can't be measured the same way.
The fact that they didn't use open source sound appears to be entirely because Jan Morgenstern didn't know the toolset and not becuase it was insufficient. It's a shame.
It would be great to see a project like this provide feedback for Ardour, Rosegarden, various plugin developers, etc, or even lead to closer interaction between blender and jack.
I'm surprised you didn't identify closely with Proog.
Then again, on re-reading your post, it seems analogous to what I saw as the main thrust of the movie.
There's always one.
Blender was a fantastic UI which is very powerful if you haven't been polluted by other interfaces. But that's okay, you go back to using notepad, I'm happy with vi.
Moaning about the blender interface on /. is about as useful and interesting as me moaning about how slow and complicated Photoshop is to use because it's not like the GIMP. Seriously it took me a few minutes to figure out how to resize an image in Photoshop recently because I haven't used it in about seven years.
"Blender's UI sux" comments have been done to death. They are boring and pointless. If you have a need to use it, learn the UI, otherwise quit whining, or go and whine at say 3D Max developers for creating a UI that is so slow and inefficient and takes so much unhealthy mouse work to get basic things done that they have forever closed your mind to new possibilities.
The link you posted was to a similar story in the "YRO" section.
It was posted at a date/time design to best suit europeans. This story was posted at a date/time better suited to american geeks after work in the "Politics" section.
It was so done to keep most people happy and docile while the hardcore slashdotters who sit there hitting "refresh" around the clock could grow incensed.
Then people in Oceania and Asia could sit back and have a good belly laugh at all the typically paranoid american comments on the YRO story about how this is all just a political move by an EU who is trying to destroy US business and then sit back and wait for the comedic pragmatism of europeans complaining that the story has been posted to the "Politics" and has a USA flag on the banner when it is clearly a legitimate legal issue.
Looks like it worked a treat!
Pffft. Noone who knows anything about security uses telnet anymore.
Really real security experts ssh to port 80 and hand craft their HTTP requests.
pubic void foo()
... pubic
// heh heh
Not only that, but if you look closely enough, you can see it's just one of the faked moon photos upside down! Definitely a hoax!
"Looks like your trying to conduct a logical /
debate with with a rabid mac fanboi troll.
Would you like some help with that?"
__
/ \
| |
@ @
|| ||
|| ||
|\_/|
\___/
I just hope it's optional.
Prisoners should be given the option to say either, "Implant the chip under my skin", or "Shove it up your arse."
You seem to have reinforced my concern.
I am not part of the hive. I do not always think the current fashionable thoughts. That is good, as far as I'm concerned.
My post responded to your question, specifically, "What's the huge issue for abuse?". The huge issue for abuse is that the act of implanting an RFID tag in someone against their will is abuse. The reasons of the objector are irrelevant.
Your original post seemed to make the assumption that there is no harm in having the tags implanted, although there is some evidence to the contrary, and that the only reasons people might have for objecting are religious or to do with privacy. I presented another. I don't see why I should have to fucking well have a foriegn object implanted under my skin. I see that as abuse. I think it is criminal. If they can already track me, good. That's all they fucking need then, isn't it?
Maybe I am creating an "us and them" situation here, but sometimes that happens in a world where we are not all livestock.
I doubt pornographers will adopt this. While it is to be promoted as "touch-and-go", it's only good for 3cms.
I'm certainly not a fundamentalist, probably not insane and not even particularly worried about whether or not this is used to track people.
If I was a criminal in any country under the crown and a government agency tried to implant an RFID tag in me, I would insist that the government agency be dissolved and all the members of said agency involved in my implant be charged. Just following orders is no defence.
As I said, I'm not fundamentalist, in fact I believe that we evolved to our form and guess what? We did it without RFID tags. According to my understanding of evolution, if I were implanted, I would not develop any biological relationship with the tag within my lifetime.
It would take generations. And what for? So that a bunch of control freaks can track everything because they are motivated by fear. Fuck them - actually no, fucking's fun. Spit at them, publicly ridicule them and if they get into a position of power, humiliate them, bring them down and have them charged.
My objection has nothing to do with religion, it has to do with the ideology of people who support such things. People like yourself who appear moderate but apologise for these sorts of things and allow fear mongers to gain a hold and people like Hitler who actively pursued such technology.
It is absolutely disgusting.
Likewise the N95! Beautiful hardware and more than capable, but symbian really is a stinking load of horse shiv.
(ducking dictionary)
That is so true.
I'm writing this on a nokia N95 (seriously, one of our tubes sprung a leak and we only have wifi) and /. really sucks at this resolution. The only thing worse than the eye strain and constant scrolling is typing on the keypad because I am too cheap to buy a bluetooth keyboard.
Predictive text helps a bit but sometimes it gets things so ducking wrong that I am sure the people who program it are a deliberately unhelpful bunch of ducking aunts.
You forgot Lemmings... and hunt the wumpus
Didn't used to be. Used to be that the reason for going to University was to study and further knowledge. If you wanted to make money, you did an apprenticeship.
I still maintain that most people who go to University to learn CS would be better served by an apprenticeship because most people learn CS to get jobs where they end up using pre-existing tools and concepts to implement pre-existing solutions to problems - much like a plumber. Sure we may now talk about java and xml, but nothing has fundamentally changed since the 1960s. It just got more bloated and easier to understand as machines got quicker.
The industry at large would be better served too. At the moment business has to take risks on people who are qualified but lack a solid real world grounding in applying theory to day to day business problems. Some graddies come out already instinctively knowing how to fly, some take a while to get it and some never learn, but all of these types of people remain qualified and the idiots are able to jump from job to job for years building up their CV while bringing the trade into disrepute. At times a lot of graddies have problems finding work because when the economy is slower, business is less inclined to take that risk.
If more qualifications were gained through apprenticeships, a qualification would mean that not only has the person learned the theory, but they have a few years of real work experience which they have completed in a competent and timely manner.
True, some people may occasionally "invent" a new way of doing things using existing tools and concepts that catches on, but this is also true for plumbers. Plumbers have trade magazines, we have the internets. It is entirely in the technological realm and has nothing to do with science. It doesn't belong in University.
I agree. This is not "open as in source", this is "open as in goatse" as are so many things microsoft does.
It's also not value as in "good monetary" but value as in "family values the likes of which compel me to fucking kill anyone who diverges from my ideal" and subscription as in "subsribe to my philosophy or feel the chair!"
This cnet hack is making a mountain out of a molehill.
Pffft. Who needs wine?
For the cost of one copy of Vista Business, I'll gladly write a kernel patch that will brick most HP and Compaq laptops.
Anybody?
HTML CSS and Java? I put together a web interface recently using Java. Sure I could have gone through the pain of exposing the Java backend I was working via some intermediate protocol/whatever and present a UI through a CMS implemented in something other than Java, but at the end of the day, why would I want to do that? There are plenty of excellent libraries in Java that do all the work for me without the need for me to install a whole new backend.
There are plenty of people building and maintaining web sites in Java. That's why there are jobs advertised for IBM Websphere developers, that's why knowing JBoss, Tomcat etc. is handy. And so on and so forth.
Oh and by "Java" I'm assuming you actually mean Java and not Javascript. If not, please hand in your geek card at the counter.
You, sir, have no valid place in intelligent discourse.
Ad hominem attacks along the lines of "You say a theory isn't true therefore you are saying that some ridiculous contrary theory is" are pure idiocy. These are purely political and seeing as the most successful politician in the world is clearly an idiot, they offer nothing of value to the mater at hand. Elvis Presley is dead, but not all of the class of dead people is Elvis Presley.
Ad hominem attacks along the lines of "you are an idiot, bugger off" are of course perfectly valid....