American's are hesitant to take that wealth away because if they do, then they can't go on pretending they have the ability to obtain it themselves.
Ummm, I think we also might be hesitant to "take that wealth away" because we are not, in general, in favor of the whole idea of communist revolution. Stealing from the rich, at least in our way of looking at things, is still stealing.
Open simpletext. Leave the blank untitled document window open. Slelect the text that you wish to have read. Drag it to the simpletext doc and drop. Apple-J to speak selection.
Not perfect, but perfection could do less to encourage them to find a better solution.
...at least for your kids. Home school. It's safe and legal in all 50 states. No, your kids will not end up "unsocial". They will likely recoil in horror at stories like the ones here, though, becaues they won't believe that people really treat one another like that. They you'll show them how the holocaust, Sri Lanka, passed-down child abuse, and many other examples demonstrate that ordinary people in bad situations often choose to become extremely cruel.
But anyway--yes, your kids will have to be more important to you than the money or "fulfillment" that would theoretically come from both parents working.
And don't assume home schooling is the same all-day affair as regular school. You can cover a regular day in about two hours. If you want to. Unschooling is a very viable option (harder in the more Nazi-esque states, but still doable).
Search on "Growing Without Schooling" at google for more on that. Read "Learning all the time" or "how children fail" by John Holt. Read "The teenage liberation Handbook"
Graham says apprenticing isn't economically viable now, but he certainly doesn't prove it. People do apprentice at a lot of different things. True, it's nt the default, but that doesn't mean you can't or that it's not available.
If you want to save the world, start by saving your own family. Then you have allies to help you save the world later. Well, that's what I'm guessing. But I need to get off this thing and go play with my kids:).
He is not saying that being smart makes people unpopular.
That is not what the story is about. It is about the social structure that emerges when people are shoved into a place together and forced to be around each other, like it or not. Your three simple rules would be eagerly followed if that was really all that it took for people to overcome what they face in many schools.
Um, I think that is the conclusion of the article--the artificial togetherness of school causes an emergent, unhealthy social structure that leads to bullying.
But, I agree, you said it a lot more simply.:) And it was hard to wade through his, I thought, just to get to that point. But I think he is still coming to the conclusion, and it's harder to be succinct at that point in your thinking. But to be fair, he does also give what I think it s pretty accurate look at the mechanics of what specifically happens when you put those random people in the same place and force them to be together.
He said that that is what people defensively think, and then he said that it was really for other reasons. Not that it was really all that clearly, and definitely not succinctly, stated. The main thrust of the argument was that nerds are at the bottom because they aren't interested enough in the social game to play the social game. Not that they don't lament their position or envy the people who get the girls, just that they are interested enough in something else that they don't put enough effort into being popular to avoid being at the bottom of the heap.
The main thrust was that it is the pointlessness of nearly everything that happens at most schools that causes the unhealthy social structure to emerge in the first place.
Although I do agree that it had definite hints of leftover "they hate me because I'm smart" in it, I don't think it was his main point.
I'm in college right now, and it'd be ideal for me to go out and find a middle school kid who fits the nerd profile and help them learn to program.
Ideal, yes, but much easier to post about than do, right?:)
If only the internet existed, then we could have mentorcenter.org that would pair up the willing.
But that's easier for me to post about than do...:)
Actually, I do mentor Perl a little for some of the interns at http://www.shodor.org , where I used to work. That is one place where kids can go and see what "nerds" do in the real world. (By the way, they were the ones that come up with the term "mentor center", although I don't know that they ever cosidered registering the domain name).
Anyway, I heartily agree with you, mentoring is very useful in fixing the problem.
that was just for fun. (Well, actually it was also promptes by the fact that 'Apocalypses" sounds weird, and so I just grabbed another pluralization rule.)
But I didn't really know the real place to use that rule, so it was nice to have the chance to learn something. Thanks.
ps In case anyone is wondering, if you are talking about a _lot_ of Apocalypses, the correct rendering is "Apocaloodles".
I know, I know, IHBT, IHL, HAND. I have wondered (some of) the same things when reading the Apocalypsen. I can't help but wonder a couple of other things, though.
One, I'll bet a lot of people said a lot of the same stuff about Perl 5, no? I know that people still despise the OO stuff, but, hey, some people will hate any OO implementation until it's C++, when what they should really be doing is hating it until it's Smalltalk. But I wouldn't be surprised if at the Perl 4->5 transition people were complaining that Perl was losing what it was good for/at, and I think it survived that pretty well. Past performance blah blah blah, and maybe this transition is completely different (well, ok, it is pretty unarguably completely different in a lot of ways), but I think the burden of proof is on the detractors.
Two, I learned pattern matching with Perl. In time I learned to use the pattern matching in things like grep and vi, and only then did I learn the extreme usefulness of Larry's inspiration to make the special chars require escaping to be non-special, rather than the other way around.
Given that he has one huge win in pattern-matching reform, I think I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on what he's talking about doing with the new pattern matching stuff.
But the most important thing is that the design goal stays the same--"how can I make this language easier to get things done with?". I don't care enough to dig into all the flamewar on Perl 6, but I really don't think it's going to be The End Of Perl as people so often predict. It may be The End Of Perl As We Know It, but as long as it's still Larry asking the same "how can I make easy things easy and hard things possible" question, I still have faith that I will Feel Fine.
Did you look at Win4Lin? Despite the fact that I used to work for NeTraverse, I don't really know if what you're talking about is in the Win4Lin focus area. The stuff that they try to do, they do well, they just don't try to do everything, being a small shop.
what warrants a "meh... it's not rocket science, hell, there's no other way to do it, even if he hadn't looked at the code, this is the logical solution anyone with half a brain would come to..."
You are actually asking two questions, and that should be amplified. One is about brevity, and one is about something that pretty much anyone would write the same code to do. That could conceivably apply to longer pieces of code, and in that case it would definitely NOT be a time where the GPLness of the original code is invalid. One of the main advantages of open source is that you don't have to re-code the same thing over and over and over. When person X made that thing GPLed, he was thinking "This way, no one else will have to re-code this thing. And anyone who wants to take advantage of the fact that they don't have to re-code it (if they use my GPLed code) will need to put whatever they are using it for under the GPL, too. And that is more important to me than trying to make money with this, so I'll put it under the GPL."
And if you ignore that because "well, anyone else would have written it this way anyway", you are violating both the spirit and the letter of the law by removing the benefit that the original offer hoped to derive/convey.
Let me reply in two ways. First, I think the parallel is very apt, given that I was replying to this "logic":
Now, what he did, while LEGALLY wrong is something that DID a great service, in part thanks to the exageration that happened with the case. People learned that there were so many things that were at fault, not just the security of their computers, but the people that work there. Without intending to, he showed us that there were huge gaping security holes in the software and procedures of the companies that hold our financial future in their records. For one, I would be GLAD that those were exposed. Would you rather that you went through life not knowing that your credit card is sitting in a file somewhere that anyone with just a little knowledge can get? At least once its stolen and then publicized, you can easily prove that those charges on your card are NOT yours. Otheriwse, you get to go through hell to prove it to your company.
Now, according to that, showing people flaws in their security system, especially when that gets overhyped by the media, is a "great service" to those people that we should be thankful for, supposedly because it will force us to re-think our security.
Well, that is exactly what happened here with the WTC takedown. We learned that a couple of guys can board a plane with boxcutters and take out a skyscraper. Security, was, in fact, increased as a result of that. (Well, at least for non-arabs. I doubt that arabs in this country feel more secure now than they did before.)
The second point is that the WTC is a perfect example of something that has been overhyped. Three thousand people dead--that was a huge victory on the part of the engineers that built it and the security/evacuation people that got so many out. We are not used to tragedy in America, so it was big by our standards, but 3,000 people is a small number of people to lose.
Compare the reaction and media coverage of this to the reaction and media coverage of the eight HUNDRED thousand people that were massacred in Rwanda.
Or, for something more fresh, compare the 18 dead in a bus that ran over a landmine in Afghanistan to the 7 that died on the shuttle.
Americans are very picky about who they mourn and for how long.
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm, I think we also might be hesitant to "take that wealth away" because we are not, in general, in favor of the whole idea of communist revolution. Stealing from the rich, at least in our way of looking at things, is still stealing.
"The attachment foo.doc was garbled. Please re-send in .txt format"
I wonder if this news will slashdot mysql.com and postgresql.com with people looking to switch...
That's the best
Open simpletext. Leave the blank untitled document window open. Slelect the text that you wish to have read. Drag it to the simpletext doc and drop. Apple-J to speak selection.
Not perfect, but perfection could do less to encourage them to find a better solution.
the guy that wrote a million liines of code and died trying to make the big money.
...at least for your kids. Home school. It's safe and legal in all 50 states. No, your kids will not end up "unsocial". They will likely recoil in horror at stories like the ones here, though, becaues they won't believe that people really treat one another like that. They you'll show them how the holocaust, Sri Lanka, passed-down child abuse, and many other examples demonstrate that ordinary people in bad situations often choose to become extremely cruel.
:).
But anyway--yes, your kids will have to be more important to you than the money or "fulfillment" that would theoretically come from both parents working.
And don't assume home schooling is the same all-day affair as regular school. You can cover a regular day in about two hours. If you want to. Unschooling is a very viable option (harder in the more Nazi-esque states, but still doable).
Search on "Growing Without Schooling" at google for more on that. Read "Learning all the time" or "how children fail" by John Holt. Read "The teenage liberation Handbook"
Graham says apprenticing isn't economically viable now, but he certainly doesn't prove it. People do apprentice at a lot of different things. True, it's nt the default, but that doesn't mean you can't or that it's not available.
If you want to save the world, start by saving your own family. Then you have allies to help you save the world later. Well, that's what I'm guessing. But I need to get off this thing and go play with my kids
Contact them and apologize. I did today. I feel a little better already.
mike
...or at least the middle!
He is not saying that being smart makes people unpopular.
That is not what the story is about. It is about the social structure that emerges when people are shoved into a place together and forced to be around each other, like it or not. Your three simple rules would be eagerly followed if that was really all that it took for people to overcome what they face in many schools.
Um, I think that is the conclusion of the article--the artificial togetherness of school causes an emergent, unhealthy social structure that leads to bullying.
:) And it was hard to wade through his, I thought, just to get to that point. But I think he is still coming to the conclusion, and it's harder to be succinct at that point in your thinking. But to be fair, he does also give what I think it s pretty accurate look at the mechanics of what specifically happens when you put those random people in the same place and force them to be together.
But, I agree, you said it a lot more simply.
He said that that is what people defensively think, and then he said that it was really for other reasons. Not that it was really all that clearly, and definitely not succinctly, stated. The main thrust of the argument was that nerds are at the bottom because they aren't interested enough in the social game to play the social game. Not that they don't lament their position or envy the people who get the girls, just that they are interested enough in something else that they don't put enough effort into being popular to avoid being at the bottom of the heap.
The main thrust was that it is the pointlessness of nearly everything that happens at most schools that causes the unhealthy social structure to emerge in the first place.
Although I do agree that it had definite hints of leftover "they hate me because I'm smart" in it, I don't think it was his main point.
Ideal, yes, but much easier to post about than do, right?
If only the internet existed, then we could have mentorcenter.org that would pair up the willing.
But that's easier for me to post about than do...
Actually, I do mentor Perl a little for some of the interns at http://www.shodor.org , where I used to work. That is one place where kids can go and see what "nerds" do in the real world. (By the way, they were the ones that come up with the term "mentor center", although I don't know that they ever cosidered registering the domain name).
Anyway, I heartily agree with you, mentoring is very useful in fixing the problem.
mike
(subject says it all)
s/can't/shouldn't/ :)
that was just for fun. (Well, actually it was also promptes by the fact that 'Apocalypses" sounds weird, and so I just grabbed another pluralization rule.)
But I didn't really know the real place to use that rule, so it was nice to have the chance to learn something. Thanks.
ps In case anyone is wondering, if you are talking about a _lot_ of Apocalypses, the correct rendering is "Apocaloodles".
..that mysterious extra "o" in "loose"...
Too bad moderators can't use their points to re-categorize this under "It's funny, laugh" isn't it?
Hey, this is the internet. Later you'll be able to pretend you did.
I know, I know, IHBT, IHL, HAND. I have wondered (some of) the same things when reading the Apocalypsen. I can't help but wonder a couple of other things, though.
One, I'll bet a lot of people said a lot of the same stuff about Perl 5, no? I know that people still despise the OO stuff, but, hey, some people will hate any OO implementation until it's C++, when what they should really be doing is hating it until it's Smalltalk. But I wouldn't be surprised if at the Perl 4->5 transition people were complaining that Perl was losing what it was good for/at, and I think it survived that pretty well. Past performance blah blah blah, and maybe this transition is completely different (well, ok, it is pretty unarguably completely different in a lot of ways), but I think the burden of proof is on the detractors.
Two, I learned pattern matching with Perl. In time I learned to use the pattern matching in things like grep and vi, and only then did I learn the extreme usefulness of Larry's inspiration to make the special chars require escaping to be non-special, rather than the other way around.
Given that he has one huge win in pattern-matching reform, I think I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on what he's talking about doing with the new pattern matching stuff.
But the most important thing is that the design goal stays the same--"how can I make this language easier to get things done with?". I don't care enough to dig into all the flamewar on Perl 6, but I really don't think it's going to be The End Of Perl as people so often predict. It may be The End Of Perl As We Know It, but as long as it's still Larry asking the same "how can I make easy things easy and hard things possible" question, I still have faith that I will Feel Fine.
Did you look at Win4Lin? Despite the fact that I used to work for NeTraverse, I don't really know if what you're talking about is in the Win4Lin focus area. The stuff that they try to do, they do well, they just don't try to do everything, being a small shop.
yeah, but save it for an alternate punchline--
then the applied mathematician removed one section of fence and made a triangle, or something like that.
actually that was probably the part that got the "funny" mod points...
speak for yourself. I was imagining a Beowulf cluster of geek jokes. (alternate ending--"whaddya mean? This IS a beowulf cluster of tech jokes")
You are actually asking two questions, and that should be amplified. One is about brevity, and one is about something that pretty much anyone would write the same code to do. That could conceivably apply to longer pieces of code, and in that case it would definitely NOT be a time where the GPLness of the original code is invalid. One of the main advantages of open source is that you don't have to re-code the same thing over and over and over. When person X made that thing GPLed, he was thinking "This way, no one else will have to re-code this thing. And anyone who wants to take advantage of the fact that they don't have to re-code it (if they use my GPLed code) will need to put whatever they are using it for under the GPL, too. And that is more important to me than trying to make money with this, so I'll put it under the GPL."
And if you ignore that because "well, anyone else would have written it this way anyway", you are violating both the spirit and the letter of the law by removing the benefit that the original offer hoped to derive/convey.
Now, according to that, showing people flaws in their security system, especially when that gets overhyped by the media, is a "great service" to those people that we should be thankful for, supposedly because it will force us to re-think our security.
Well, that is exactly what happened here with the WTC takedown. We learned that a couple of guys can board a plane with boxcutters and take out a skyscraper. Security, was, in fact, increased as a result of that. (Well, at least for non-arabs. I doubt that arabs in this country feel more secure now than they did before.)
The second point is that the WTC is a perfect example of something that has been overhyped. Three thousand people dead--that was a huge victory on the part of the engineers that built it and the security/evacuation people that got so many out. We are not used to tragedy in America, so it was big by our standards, but 3,000 people is a small number of people to lose.
Compare the reaction and media coverage of this to the reaction and media coverage of the eight HUNDRED thousand people that were massacred in Rwanda.
Or, for something more fresh, compare the 18 dead in a bus that ran over a landmine in Afghanistan to the 7 that died on the shuttle.
Americans are very picky about who they mourn and for how long.