AIX is hardly obsolete. Over half of our clients with large server systems use IBM hardware and AIX. IBM hardware tends to be cheaper than other vendors, and AIX itself is a very stable operating system and easy to configure and maintain via SMIT. There are many advantages to AIX: cheaper hardware, powerful POWER5 architecture to run on (IBM hardware scales quite nicely), decent support, and it is maintained by one of the oldest technology companies in America. Compared to Solaris and HP-UX, it's one of the best UNIX flavors out there, and doesn't have the stability problems seen with Linux. Linux is stable, but still quirky.
IBM still maintains AIX. It's not reaching end of support like Tru64 or OpenVMS, and with POWER6 and POWER7 coming in the future, will likely enjoy a long, long support future.
Ironically this article popped up on Slashdot just as I loaded it onto my laptop at the beginning of a two hour team meeting. On top of that, I just ate McDonald's.
I agree with the article. I believe the cloudy feeling that comes over me during meetings is probably due to the lack of mobility, several people in the same room trying to share oxygen, and psychological factors such as disinterest, disconnect and general boredom. I have been to very few interesting meetings, so I can imagine that people don't want to brainstorm during a typical meeting. I brainstorm best when it's a small group or I'm alone, and when my alertness is high. Meetings tend not to foster such an environment, and the room is darkened to help with the visibility of projection. It's just not good for thinking.
This is coming from someone who really, really tried to like and play RPGs, and never could. Final Fantasy 7 was the only RPG I've ever found interesting and entertaining enough to finish through to completion (unless you count Zelda OoT). The article makes a good point about one of the many problems I have with RPGs. The beginning of them (including Elder Scrolls IV) is just so empty to me. I played for four or five hours and still only had a couple of rusty swords and nearly died every time a wolf attacked me. Other RPGs I've tried (Diablo II, World of Warcraft, etc) had the same problem. It took so long to get to any level that was worth playing, and even that wasn't all that fun to me.
The other big thing that turned me off RPGs (especially single player ones) was the learning curve. Yes, it's fascinating to be able to customize your character down to the width of his nose and the parabolic equation that defines one of his eyebrows. But that takes almost an hour in and of itself unless you want the ugly default they supply you. Once you start playing, every two minutes after you kill something or look at something there's a new item that has no meaning to you yet (chipped ruby, bonemeal, etc) and you're not sure if it's worth keeping on you or if you should dump it so you have enough capacity to carry another potion. That and the statistics. Strength, will, dexterity, erectile ability, come on! I get basics, but some games have 30 or more statistics graphs along with experience, health, manna, and level.
Don't get me wrong. RPGs usually have gorgeous graphics, enthralling story bases and immense replay value. It just makes me sick trying to play one through--the amount of time it consumes (from the mundane tasks the author rants about to learning the items, statistics, spells and all the other junk you have to figure out how works together that I whined about) and the headaches it gives and the number of times I die trying to slay the level one rat is just not worth it.
"Haha you n00b! U just sux0rz at RPGs!"
Yeah, I do. I suck at RPGs because I can't stand it long enough to play it and get good. I guess it's just personal taste. I like FPS and racing games a lot more.
I'll stuff coal so far up your stocking you'll be coughing up diamonds!
It's good to see such a great show coming back. I hope they don't go outrageously over-the-top with it like Southpark and the Simpsons did. For a while, both those series were just trying to see how sick and offensive they could get, and it grew less funny. I think they've finally figured that out and are becoming funny again.
Microsoft is very focused on end users. Yes, corporate desktops are a large segment, but there are millions more citizens than office lackeys, such as people who have a computer at home but would never use one at work--construction workers, janitors, blue-collar workers, etc. Vista Home Premium has many personal user options--an improved Media Center, Windows DVD Maker, a new version of Movie Maker, and more. Do you think that Aero was made for business users? Business users generally don't care about the GUI, save for maybe personalizing the desktop. I keep my office PC on the default themes, not loaded with extra themes and whizbang graphics effects. My home PC, now running Vista, is much better looking than XP and is visually appealing.
I think Microsoft is trying to make money ultimately. To make money, you have to a) have an appealing product, b) avoid negative publicity, c) have a product that works, and d) have happy consumers. Any market segment that gets marginalized will hurt profits. With the amount of money Microsoft has, I doubt they decided marginalizing home users was worth focusing on the exclusive large enterprise market. I am pretty sure they can afford both.
How dare you forget Mel Brooks and Monty Python...you yellow bastard! I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelled of elderberries!
Q: How many legislators does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. But get a rich lobbyist from the fluorescent light bulb industry into it and it only takes one.
Banning incandescent light bulbs is kind of like a nerd dumping Halle Berry. Everyone would wonder how it happened in the first place, and then think you're a complete idiot.
*bam bam bam* Open up, in the name of the law!
What the hell?
*glass shatters, tear gas canisters begin to hiss.*
Move in, now! *door breaks down. A California SWAT team swarms inside* Just as I thought. *checks under a lamp shade* An incandescent bulb. Do you know the penalty for using incandescent? *another officer rips the cord out of the socket* That is just sick. You're going away for life.
*press release next day* It was one of the most horrible crime scenes I've ever witnessed in fifteen years as a police officer. So many incandescent bulbs...so much wasted energy...at least five cents a month. I'm thankful to our fine SWAT team for bringing this to light. Months of investigative work led up to this raid. Tomorrow, we're going to be invading private homes to make sure no one is running Windows Vista, because that's even worse for the environment.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say I like Vista so far. I bought it last night at midnight on a new HP machine, and so far, it's really nice. Of course, I got a 22" LCD monitor to go with it, which makes reading Slashdot almost magical.:-)
I installed Doom 3 and Quake IV on the system (the newest games I have since I bought an Xbox 360 a few months ago) and they ran just fine. I got about 60 fps on both games at high (not maximum) detail settings and no noticable lag or excess hard drive activity. I had no sound problems or video problems. Granted, being a brand new Vista system the driver issues others were seeing are probably moot.
So far, I'm impressed. Vista is light-years beyond XP and is right up there with Mac OSX. I have a Mac laptop and I'll say they are a little similar, but not a rip-off. The main similarities to me are the login screen and the gadget sidebar, which looks an awful lot like the Dashboard mated with the Dock. For gaming, Vista is top-notch. I've also heard (not verified) that a game for Vista will be able to play someone on the Xbox360 on my home network in the same game. If that's true, that would give me good reason to buy lots of new games for both platforms and have people over.
Anyone else ever try to download big files from your school's higher speed Internet connection and then use WinZip or PKZIP to try and zip it up over 40 floppies, only to find when you got home, disk #40 had a bad sector in the readme.txt file and the entire archive was bad?
With as many Word documents I had to rescue for friends from those things with ScanDisk, and as many went bad after 6 months or less, I say good riddance to bad rubbish. Of course, the quality went to hell around the era of Windows 95. Before that, companies actually made good floppies that would last on the order of years.
I've read a lot of the comments on this article, and much of it seems to be complaining about Windows installations.
Kill me for complaining, but I've had ten times more problems installing Red Hat Linux or SuSE than I ever had installing Windows. I've never had a Windows installation freeze up on me and then leave my computer in a totally unusable state. Windows has never suddenly rejected CDs from a clean, verified burn for absolutely no reason and refused to continue installing. I've never had to boot from an emergency disc to try and figure out what in the hell the installer didn't like about my hardware. Windows may not be the most nerd-friendly operating system around, but hell, it installs just fine. I'll admit I have to ratchet up security on Windows once it's installed (firewall, anti-virus and OS patches) but at least it runs on most of my hardware. One installation of Linux has given me more obscure, PITA installation problems than five spyware, virus-laden Windows system run by my computer-illiterate, Neo-Napster using friends. Some I've actually been able to figure out by doing some combination of Ctrl+F2 or F3 to switch to the non-GUI install screen and actually see the freaking error message. I've only used Windows Vista RC1 briefly, but the install was clean and without problems. I can never say that about any Linux upgrades or installs I've done. I do have a Mac, and the re-install of OS X I did after the hard drive went was fairly clean too.
I have some news for Linux fans--the user interface isn't the killer. It's the difficulty in finding a distro (I have to scour the Net for 30 minutes just to find an appropriate ISO) and then installing the damn thing.
Well, I'd say iTunes is getting more attention than any other DRM system because iTunes is the largest. It's similar to criticism of Microsoft, McDonald's or Wal-Mart. They are the largest, so their problems that are common throughout the industry are magnified and villified much more than anyone else's. It's rare you hear of Target not having unionized employees or low pay, but it's similar to Wal-Mart.
Anyway, iTunes did't get to market leader because of monopoly or chance. iTunes is market leader because it's easy to use, the product is an elegant design, and iTunes has a policy of DRM that is agreeable to the entities that legally own the content, allowing the largest selection of legal downloads. This, combined with clever marketing, allowed the iPod to rocket to the top.
My point is that DRM in itself is not evil. It's when DRM interferes with the user experience. In a market economy such as the United States, a content owner has the right to distribute the content as they please as long as it's not ilegal, in the sense it becomes fraud, false advertising or some other crime. If DRM was truly a consumer nightmare, the demand would decrease to the point of bankrupting Apple. Users would choose "open" sources of music. OK, I can see the point that "open" sources of music don't exist, since the RIAA owns most all content. However, you could choose "indie" music much like you choose Linux over Microsoft Windows. Most indie music is open because it's becoming established.
If I'm not mistaken, Norway is a socialist or near-socialist economy (or maybe that's Sweden, but I think the countries' economies are similar). Sure, the government has the power to say iTunes is illegal much like China can tell its citizenry that it can't read democratic blogs, but that's interfering with our style of economy. I think Norway is going the wrong way here. Of course it sounds like "a stand against the tyrannical RIAA and evil DRM" to anti-copyright activists, but the fact is it's nothing more than limiting user choice, far more than iTunes ever did. iTunes gives users a choice, namely thousands of songs.
Actually, Microsoft is hardly getting a free pass in Europe. The EU has regularly been slapping Microsoft with enormous, record fines because the company hasn't released enough of their source code or hasn't made the required changes to the operating system. Yes, they still have the market share there, but not without a rather large penalty.
Well, I understand where you're coming from, but I'm only citing one or two examples out of probably hundreds of incidents over a 13 year period. Most of them I was minding my own business and continued to ignore them in the hopes they'd "go away." I guess my parents could have tried to do more, but they didn't ever want to get anyone involved--we were middle class and all, but they couldn't afford lawyers to either sue the school or press charges against bullies. But I imagine the bullies and their families would have counter-sued or charged terroristic threatening, since I had screamed things in response.
I actually tried a psychiatrist shortly after starting my first job, since my social issues were following me even after the fact. Of course, it hasn't been a decade--it's been about five years since high school. She said there was nothing wrong with me. For a while I had thought I had gone all that time with undiagnosed ADHD and that's what made me a target. Apparently that was not the case. She told me I simply hadn't learned social skills since I never had a chance in school due to the constant bullying and rejection.
You're right, retaliation is usually a bad idea, especially when it's only words. However, as I said in my first post, the constancy of the situation will make you simmer and boil until you explode, and what that guy said made me snap. Sometimes it simmers and boils until someone takes a gun to school. Like I said, I'm not that crazy, but I knew people that were.
I grew up a little too early in the 90s to be subject to cyber-bulling, but I was a victim of bullying for 13 miserable years. Trust me, it doesn't just fade. We can deny it all we want, try to be as manly as we want, but if you've ever endured more than a few episodes of bullying, you know how horrible it can be and how much the effects still linger under the surface. Even as an adult, I have trouble socializing because I go into every situation with new people expecting rejection, because that's all I got in school.
It's bad enough when 800 students at a high school, middle school, or worse yet, elementary school where recess allows more physical interaction know how much of a target you can be. If the entire Internet community and news-watching audience knows because of MySpace or Youtube, I can see suicide being viable. Bullying isn't a joke, it's not merely a fact of life. It's a horribly destructive, mentally anguishing scenario that seems to have no escape. What's worse is when you've had enough and you retaliate. I only retaliated four or five times that I can remember, when I had truly had enough and snapped. Luckily I didn't break out the AK-47 (someone else in my district did in 1997, though, if you remember Heath High School). I only usually punched the guy once or twice, or in one instance all I did was scream "I'm going to kill you." In every instance I got an enormous punishment, much greater than the bully did. For example, the bully got detention one day, and I got alternative school for twenty days. In my school, if you defended yourself you were a goner. Not because the bully would royally pound you--because the school system would. Especially after the school shooting, they were zero-tolerance. The victim always gets the maximum punishment, the bully the minimum. It's a sad, sick fact of school administration.
As far as school authority, in our district the school had "authority from when you entered the school bus until you entered the door of your house." This meant that if you got into a fight in your own yard, and the bus driver saw it, you were in trouble at school. Happened to me too! Some bully followed me home on my bike and started talking down to me, so I rushed him. The bus driver saw it and reported me. I can see how schools would have authority over this sort of thing--and it's no different than a workplace being able to fire you for off-work postings to the Internet that are related to work. What the child does online, if it involves the school in any way--then the school has some degree of authority.
Slashdot Mirror
When we ballpark hardware for a proposal, IBM hardware is usually 20%-50% cheaper than HP or Sun, and a mere fraction of Alpha hardware.
AIX is hardly obsolete. Over half of our clients with large server systems use IBM hardware and AIX. IBM hardware tends to be cheaper than other vendors, and AIX itself is a very stable operating system and easy to configure and maintain via SMIT. There are many advantages to AIX: cheaper hardware, powerful POWER5 architecture to run on (IBM hardware scales quite nicely), decent support, and it is maintained by one of the oldest technology companies in America. Compared to Solaris and HP-UX, it's one of the best UNIX flavors out there, and doesn't have the stability problems seen with Linux. Linux is stable, but still quirky.
IBM still maintains AIX. It's not reaching end of support like Tru64 or OpenVMS, and with POWER6 and POWER7 coming in the future, will likely enjoy a long, long support future.
In Soviet Russia...ahem, Soviet Britain...
Ironically this article popped up on Slashdot just as I loaded it onto my laptop at the beginning of a two hour team meeting. On top of that, I just ate McDonald's.
I agree with the article. I believe the cloudy feeling that comes over me during meetings is probably due to the lack of mobility, several people in the same room trying to share oxygen, and psychological factors such as disinterest, disconnect and general boredom. I have been to very few interesting meetings, so I can imagine that people don't want to brainstorm during a typical meeting. I brainstorm best when it's a small group or I'm alone, and when my alertness is high. Meetings tend not to foster such an environment, and the room is darkened to help with the visibility of projection. It's just not good for thinking.
This is coming from someone who really, really tried to like and play RPGs, and never could. Final Fantasy 7 was the only RPG I've ever found interesting and entertaining enough to finish through to completion (unless you count Zelda OoT). The article makes a good point about one of the many problems I have with RPGs. The beginning of them (including Elder Scrolls IV) is just so empty to me. I played for four or five hours and still only had a couple of rusty swords and nearly died every time a wolf attacked me. Other RPGs I've tried (Diablo II, World of Warcraft, etc) had the same problem. It took so long to get to any level that was worth playing, and even that wasn't all that fun to me.
The other big thing that turned me off RPGs (especially single player ones) was the learning curve. Yes, it's fascinating to be able to customize your character down to the width of his nose and the parabolic equation that defines one of his eyebrows. But that takes almost an hour in and of itself unless you want the ugly default they supply you. Once you start playing, every two minutes after you kill something or look at something there's a new item that has no meaning to you yet (chipped ruby, bonemeal, etc) and you're not sure if it's worth keeping on you or if you should dump it so you have enough capacity to carry another potion. That and the statistics. Strength, will, dexterity, erectile ability, come on! I get basics, but some games have 30 or more statistics graphs along with experience, health, manna, and level.
Don't get me wrong. RPGs usually have gorgeous graphics, enthralling story bases and immense replay value. It just makes me sick trying to play one through--the amount of time it consumes (from the mundane tasks the author rants about to learning the items, statistics, spells and all the other junk you have to figure out how works together that I whined about) and the headaches it gives and the number of times I die trying to slay the level one rat is just not worth it.
"Haha you n00b! U just sux0rz at RPGs!"
Yeah, I do. I suck at RPGs because I can't stand it long enough to play it and get good. I guess it's just personal taste. I like FPS and racing games a lot more.
I'll stuff coal so far up your stocking you'll be coughing up diamonds!
It's good to see such a great show coming back. I hope they don't go outrageously over-the-top with it like Southpark and the Simpsons did. For a while, both those series were just trying to see how sick and offensive they could get, and it grew less funny. I think they've finally figured that out and are becoming funny again.
Microsoft is very focused on end users. Yes, corporate desktops are a large segment, but there are millions more citizens than office lackeys, such as people who have a computer at home but would never use one at work--construction workers, janitors, blue-collar workers, etc. Vista Home Premium has many personal user options--an improved Media Center, Windows DVD Maker, a new version of Movie Maker, and more. Do you think that Aero was made for business users? Business users generally don't care about the GUI, save for maybe personalizing the desktop. I keep my office PC on the default themes, not loaded with extra themes and whizbang graphics effects. My home PC, now running Vista, is much better looking than XP and is visually appealing.
I think Microsoft is trying to make money ultimately. To make money, you have to a) have an appealing product, b) avoid negative publicity, c) have a product that works, and d) have happy consumers. Any market segment that gets marginalized will hurt profits. With the amount of money Microsoft has, I doubt they decided marginalizing home users was worth focusing on the exclusive large enterprise market. I am pretty sure they can afford both.
How dare you forget Mel Brooks and Monty Python...you yellow bastard! I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelled of elderberries!
I hope you go to plaid for this mortal sin.
Q: How many legislators does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. But get a rich lobbyist from the fluorescent light bulb industry into it and it only takes one.
Banning incandescent light bulbs is kind of like a nerd dumping Halle Berry. Everyone would wonder how it happened in the first place, and then think you're a complete idiot.
*bam bam bam* Open up, in the name of the law!
What the hell?
*glass shatters, tear gas canisters begin to hiss.*
Move in, now! *door breaks down. A California SWAT team swarms inside* Just as I thought. *checks under a lamp shade* An incandescent bulb. Do you know the penalty for using incandescent? *another officer rips the cord out of the socket* That is just sick. You're going away for life.
*press release next day* It was one of the most horrible crime scenes I've ever witnessed in fifteen years as a police officer. So many incandescent bulbs...so much wasted energy...at least five cents a month. I'm thankful to our fine SWAT team for bringing this to light. Months of investigative work led up to this raid. Tomorrow, we're going to be invading private homes to make sure no one is running Windows Vista, because that's even worse for the environment.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say I like Vista so far. I bought it last night at midnight on a new HP machine, and so far, it's really nice. Of course, I got a 22" LCD monitor to go with it, which makes reading Slashdot almost magical. :-)
I installed Doom 3 and Quake IV on the system (the newest games I have since I bought an Xbox 360 a few months ago) and they ran just fine. I got about 60 fps on both games at high (not maximum) detail settings and no noticable lag or excess hard drive activity. I had no sound problems or video problems. Granted, being a brand new Vista system the driver issues others were seeing are probably moot.
So far, I'm impressed. Vista is light-years beyond XP and is right up there with Mac OSX. I have a Mac laptop and I'll say they are a little similar, but not a rip-off. The main similarities to me are the login screen and the gadget sidebar, which looks an awful lot like the Dashboard mated with the Dock. For gaming, Vista is top-notch. I've also heard (not verified) that a game for Vista will be able to play someone on the Xbox360 on my home network in the same game. If that's true, that would give me good reason to buy lots of new games for both platforms and have people over.
Anyone else ever try to download big files from your school's higher speed Internet connection and then use WinZip or PKZIP to try and zip it up over 40 floppies, only to find when you got home, disk #40 had a bad sector in the readme.txt file and the entire archive was bad?
With as many Word documents I had to rescue for friends from those things with ScanDisk, and as many went bad after 6 months or less, I say good riddance to bad rubbish. Of course, the quality went to hell around the era of Windows 95. Before that, companies actually made good floppies that would last on the order of years.
Unfortunately it doesn't break WildTangent. I had to uninstall the stuff off my new Vista HP machine.
I've read a lot of the comments on this article, and much of it seems to be complaining about Windows installations.
Kill me for complaining, but I've had ten times more problems installing Red Hat Linux or SuSE than I ever had installing Windows. I've never had a Windows installation freeze up on me and then leave my computer in a totally unusable state. Windows has never suddenly rejected CDs from a clean, verified burn for absolutely no reason and refused to continue installing. I've never had to boot from an emergency disc to try and figure out what in the hell the installer didn't like about my hardware. Windows may not be the most nerd-friendly operating system around, but hell, it installs just fine. I'll admit I have to ratchet up security on Windows once it's installed (firewall, anti-virus and OS patches) but at least it runs on most of my hardware. One installation of Linux has given me more obscure, PITA installation problems than five spyware, virus-laden Windows system run by my computer-illiterate, Neo-Napster using friends. Some I've actually been able to figure out by doing some combination of Ctrl+F2 or F3 to switch to the non-GUI install screen and actually see the freaking error message. I've only used Windows Vista RC1 briefly, but the install was clean and without problems. I can never say that about any Linux upgrades or installs I've done. I do have a Mac, and the re-install of OS X I did after the hard drive went was fairly clean too.
I have some news for Linux fans--the user interface isn't the killer. It's the difficulty in finding a distro (I have to scour the Net for 30 minutes just to find an appropriate ISO) and then installing the damn thing.
You can always burn your iTunes to disc and then re-rip them on a new PC. That effectively bypasses DRM in iTunes.
Well, I'd say iTunes is getting more attention than any other DRM system because iTunes is the largest. It's similar to criticism of Microsoft, McDonald's or Wal-Mart. They are the largest, so their problems that are common throughout the industry are magnified and villified much more than anyone else's. It's rare you hear of Target not having unionized employees or low pay, but it's similar to Wal-Mart.
Anyway, iTunes did't get to market leader because of monopoly or chance. iTunes is market leader because it's easy to use, the product is an elegant design, and iTunes has a policy of DRM that is agreeable to the entities that legally own the content, allowing the largest selection of legal downloads. This, combined with clever marketing, allowed the iPod to rocket to the top.
My point is that DRM in itself is not evil. It's when DRM interferes with the user experience. In a market economy such as the United States, a content owner has the right to distribute the content as they please as long as it's not ilegal, in the sense it becomes fraud, false advertising or some other crime. If DRM was truly a consumer nightmare, the demand would decrease to the point of bankrupting Apple. Users would choose "open" sources of music. OK, I can see the point that "open" sources of music don't exist, since the RIAA owns most all content. However, you could choose "indie" music much like you choose Linux over Microsoft Windows. Most indie music is open because it's becoming established.
If I'm not mistaken, Norway is a socialist or near-socialist economy (or maybe that's Sweden, but I think the countries' economies are similar). Sure, the government has the power to say iTunes is illegal much like China can tell its citizenry that it can't read democratic blogs, but that's interfering with our style of economy. I think Norway is going the wrong way here. Of course it sounds like "a stand against the tyrannical RIAA and evil DRM" to anti-copyright activists, but the fact is it's nothing more than limiting user choice, far more than iTunes ever did. iTunes gives users a choice, namely thousands of songs.
Actually, Microsoft is hardly getting a free pass in Europe. The EU has regularly been slapping Microsoft with enormous, record fines because the company hasn't released enough of their source code or hasn't made the required changes to the operating system. Yes, they still have the market share there, but not without a rather large penalty.
Well, I understand where you're coming from, but I'm only citing one or two examples out of probably hundreds of incidents over a 13 year period. Most of them I was minding my own business and continued to ignore them in the hopes they'd "go away." I guess my parents could have tried to do more, but they didn't ever want to get anyone involved--we were middle class and all, but they couldn't afford lawyers to either sue the school or press charges against bullies. But I imagine the bullies and their families would have counter-sued or charged terroristic threatening, since I had screamed things in response.
I actually tried a psychiatrist shortly after starting my first job, since my social issues were following me even after the fact. Of course, it hasn't been a decade--it's been about five years since high school. She said there was nothing wrong with me. For a while I had thought I had gone all that time with undiagnosed ADHD and that's what made me a target. Apparently that was not the case. She told me I simply hadn't learned social skills since I never had a chance in school due to the constant bullying and rejection.
You're right, retaliation is usually a bad idea, especially when it's only words. However, as I said in my first post, the constancy of the situation will make you simmer and boil until you explode, and what that guy said made me snap. Sometimes it simmers and boils until someone takes a gun to school. Like I said, I'm not that crazy, but I knew people that were.
I grew up a little too early in the 90s to be subject to cyber-bulling, but I was a victim of bullying for 13 miserable years. Trust me, it doesn't just fade. We can deny it all we want, try to be as manly as we want, but if you've ever endured more than a few episodes of bullying, you know how horrible it can be and how much the effects still linger under the surface. Even as an adult, I have trouble socializing because I go into every situation with new people expecting rejection, because that's all I got in school. It's bad enough when 800 students at a high school, middle school, or worse yet, elementary school where recess allows more physical interaction know how much of a target you can be. If the entire Internet community and news-watching audience knows because of MySpace or Youtube, I can see suicide being viable. Bullying isn't a joke, it's not merely a fact of life. It's a horribly destructive, mentally anguishing scenario that seems to have no escape. What's worse is when you've had enough and you retaliate. I only retaliated four or five times that I can remember, when I had truly had enough and snapped. Luckily I didn't break out the AK-47 (someone else in my district did in 1997, though, if you remember Heath High School). I only usually punched the guy once or twice, or in one instance all I did was scream "I'm going to kill you." In every instance I got an enormous punishment, much greater than the bully did. For example, the bully got detention one day, and I got alternative school for twenty days. In my school, if you defended yourself you were a goner. Not because the bully would royally pound you--because the school system would. Especially after the school shooting, they were zero-tolerance. The victim always gets the maximum punishment, the bully the minimum. It's a sad, sick fact of school administration. As far as school authority, in our district the school had "authority from when you entered the school bus until you entered the door of your house." This meant that if you got into a fight in your own yard, and the bus driver saw it, you were in trouble at school. Happened to me too! Some bully followed me home on my bike and started talking down to me, so I rushed him. The bus driver saw it and reported me. I can see how schools would have authority over this sort of thing--and it's no different than a workplace being able to fire you for off-work postings to the Internet that are related to work. What the child does online, if it involves the school in any way--then the school has some degree of authority.