Indeed. When I first got this notebook I groused about the fact that the casing scratches when you look at it cross-eyed... and then I realized that as a direct consequence, it looks beat to shit even though it works great. Since it weighs less than... well, a lot of things, theft is a concern overall. At the same time, who's going to steal a computer that looks beat to shit?
Just turning off JavaScript is horribly shortsighted.
As per the cousin post, there are good reasons for pop-ups in an application context; because JavaScript variables can be retrieved from spawned windows, pop-ups also make a good alternative to session cookies without placing anything in local magnetic storage.
But no sane developer is willing to rely on such an approach, mostly because of BOFH's with attitudes like that.
This battle is barely on developer radar, as far as I know. Those on the bleeding edge are using.NET and/or XUL as per ideology and having a great time.
The mantra for nine years has been that one needs to validate on the server, because the client can't be trusted.
This comes down to servers vs. clients in the end... server manufacturers and server software publishers want to be able to control the whole pipeline through the standards, at the potential cost of breaking backwards compatibility in web user agents, and bloating their code in the bargain.
Meanwhile the w3c is far out in front, the same way it's been with CSS2/3 and other tech.
The Web Standards Project, to which I am attached, has taken a wait-and-see approach. This is due mostly to resource constraints, but also because we're loath (as a group) to take the side of any publisher or group of publishers except in defense of active Recommendations, or in opposition to precedents that would hurt the user community as a whole (such as RAND licensing and the Eolas suit).
When everything's said and done, the greater interest is in a fair standard that's likely to be followed, even if it doesn't manifest the most intelligent solution.
Why
is it when Microsoft pays for benchmarks, people freak out, but when Apple PERFORMS benchmarks, people believe them instantly?
...Uhh, maybe because Microsoft is a lot less respectful of... practically every group (out of users, developers, vendors, customers) with which it comes into contact, as compared to Apple?
Also, when you don't obfuscate the sponsor of the test, accountability in the face of bullshit is a lot easier to determine, hmm?
...Not saying Apple doesn't have its moments (such as when it decides to compete with third party software titles), but even then, come on.
Person B might be performing a desirable service, or might just be complicating Person A's efforts to maintain coherent ID.
Person C is likely trying to make money (directly or indirectly) from the fruits of Person A's labor without Person A's consent (as is true in this case), which is a Bad Thing according to every code of law or ethics of which I've heard.
Meanwhile, on another trio of nodes:
Person A makes a digital audio track.
Person B downloads it from $p2p_network for personal use.
Person C not only downloads it, but might try to pass the work off as their own, and puts it up for sale.
Meanwhile, out of a sense of entitlement the entertainment industry cartels are trying to wring every last penny they can from the institution of copyright (which gets tricky when copyrighted works can be said to have been around long enough to be considered part of cultural heritage), and attempting to preserve their monopoly on channels of distribution so that they can wring as much money as possible from all but the most notable performers. This creates a system in which the lion's share of the benefit goes not to those who create the art, but to those who are most capable of selling it. The ethical and artistic downsides of that state of affairs should be obvious, as should the parallels between the cartels' activity and that of the hypothetical 'Person C' in each of the scenarios I described above.
Peace.
...But according to the responsible judge, guilty of providing aid and comfort to enemies of the United States or somesuch. His name is Mike (Maher) Hawash, no doubt there's stuff all over Google.
It's a case that's local to me, not to mention a case of the PATRIOT Act in action, so I've taken mild interest.
I'd much rather have.05% of 100,000 checking than 50% of 10.
...Especially since that group is self-selecting, and in a larger population of users is likely by comparison to have a much higher degree of technical skill when compared to the median.
In other words, an armchair statistician is saying, me too.
Re:Improve and go on until a third accident
on
More on Columbia
·
· Score: 1
I call bullshit.
Last I checked, service life for aircraft was measured in hours-of-operation. By this standard, the shuttle somewhere on the map, not horrid as a lot of people seem to think. Given the environmental stresses placed on Orbiters, I don't think that using such a measurement is unfair to anyone...
Capsule travel can be considered safer, but then by any measure the tolerances they need to withstand are a lot lower when measured in aggregate terms. And because those too are complex systems, there are problems. Two Soyuz flights experienced loss-of-crew (four deaths total). Two Mercury flights (and one Gemini flight IIRC) likewise experienced serious problems. Then we have AS-204, Apollo 13, and issues with one of the Skylab stays.
Space is not safe.
Meanwhile...
The Shuttle system is designed to do many things, none of them extremely well (as a result of compromises made during the design phase).
The economies of scale hoped for never materialized.
When I stand back, it occurs to me that the idea of a reusable spacecraft is not poppycock; it's just been twisted, spindled, and mutilated because NASA's been asked to do lots of things half-assed instead of doing a few things well...
There is a need for vision-in-practice. Where are we (planet-wise) going to be with space in, say, 46 years?
From my uninformed perspective, I see four high-level goals worthy of exploration:
Terraforming Mars
Interstellar, er, activity
Space applications in terrestrial, lunar, or solar orbit
Collecting knowledge of the solar system
The second of these is still almost entirely in the realm of theory, natch, theory I know little about.
In the case of the first and third points, a lot of medical research needs to be conducted; in short, we have to figure out how we might get live human beings to survive at length in an environment they're not suited for.
The fourth is being done, though how well depends on whom you ask.
...Which brings us back to the existing order of things.
...Which brings us back to the faster better cheaper bit that's currently got folks' panties in a knot.
The result is a stalemate that can only be broken with more money and better management.
In Portland (assuming the Left Coast version here) newer construction increasingly makes one or more T1's available.
I worked briefly for one of first companies in the area to bid the Internet access contracts (long since out of business), and while part of the hassle was doubtless to do with the fact that everyone was going by the seat of their pants, the fact of the matter is that a lot of real estate developers are not going to have the patience to deal with the inevitable (and unending) issues that always seem to result when the decision to offer onsite fiber is made...
Again, earlier posters have already pointed to the possibility that the FSF is putting the cart before the horse here...
IANAL but in any event code is protected by copyright, and ideas are protected by patent. Doubtless someone with good IP law chops can skewer that statement, but that's the general outline, hmm-kay?
Let's suppose that I come up with a universal site taxonomy (just the concept, mind you). I can patent that. (Not that it'd be worth a damn, goodness knows LIS experts gave up on those projects a long time ago.)
Any code libraries I might write by way of implementing that concept are protected by copyright.
So that takes care of the patent-vs.-copyright issue.
But Microsoft owns the patent on CSS you say.
That's right, because that's a system - an idea mind you - for representing presentation information, in this case as part of a Web document.
If I write a stylesheet, I own the copyright on that stylesheet. Microsoft nominally owns the underlying technology.
Given the scope of W3C Recommendations, it would seem to me that example posited above is stretch.
Besides which, let's suppose that Co. X comes up with a standard and puts it on the W3C Recommendation Track.
What's to stop them from writing one patent with scope limited to the Web, and another with scope limited to another medium/environment, and so on?
For the W3C to discourage such an approach to IP rights would rigtfully result in howls of protest from likely generators of IP...
...And ultimately that is what the FSF is demanding they do.
The W3C Royalty-Free Patent Policy governs the handling of patents in the process of producing Web standards. The goal of this policy is to assure that Recommendations produced under this policy can be implemented on a royalty-free basis.
...Which almost happened in the days following the initial meltdown.
For one reason or another (containment?) the authorities thought it a good idea to dump sand from helicopters, which had the unintended (but foreseeable) consequence of moderating the fuel present in the slag.
The Realtors' system is called MLS, for Multiple Listing Service.
As for self-diagnosis... having the presence of mind to look up my symptoms on Google may well have saved me several hundred dollars last spring, mostly by keeping me out of a state of panic.
What really gets is the automagic nature in which people expect things - computers at least - to work.
It's like, they should include a copy of a well edited 32 or 40 page book that explains things like:
The difference between RAM and storage
Why it's a good idea to save in progress
BSOD's aren't as foreboding as they look, most of the time
The metaphor empoloyed by modern GUI's
Such a book would also have the words "DON'T PANIC" - say, 2 inches high - printed on the cover. That could be the title of the book.
Back in the day they handed us that info in our Computer Literacy classes (I'm 27, if you want the point of reference)... and while the curriculum was written for the benefit of children, that doesn't meen the same introductory information wouldn't be useful to the less-savvy.
To which I might add, those who are interested in learning more about CSS and its Real World applications can subscribe to a list that Eric moderates (and actively participates in). The subscribe URL is:
I can say with immense confidence that a Linux/BSD/etc. consituency would be enthusiastically welcomed (since the current composition is overwhelmingly right-brained), provided the strict-constructionist flames are kept to a minimum, and spewed on a foundation of merit.
A sibling post mentioned that especially on the Web, there are de facto standards as well as de jure standards.
...To which I might add that most browsers aren't able to implement an entire high-level spec... you get most of HTML4, most of CSS1, most of DOM1, and so forth. Nor are the holes necessarily filled up with proprietary extensions.
Another sibling post mentions that overdesigned crap tends to go hand-in-hand with robust JavaScript/DOM support. This is somewhat true. But it's what folks get paid to build. Deal with it... Money talks, bulls--t walks.
A third post talks about Opera, and folks, I've gotta news flash for ya - just because you've set it to "identify as MSIE" doesn't mean it can't be detected as Opera, provided you do a positive check for Opera, rather than a positive check for {document.all|MSIE} followed by an if statement:
if (navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Opera") != -1) {...}
will in practically all cases detect Opera. To get around that, you have to tweak the UA identifier the browser sends... and if you do, you get what you deserve, because on a cross-platform basis Opera's W3C DOM method support sucks badly. In most cases you probably won't care less, but it is possible to do neat and useful things with W3C DOM properties and methods. For one, accessing the W3C DOM makes it a lot easier to build usable Web application UI's. And Opera doesn't support the published standard worth a damn. Unfortunately. [At least that's not the case with CSS.]
1) Just because something is popular, and people want it, does not mean it should come to pass. Of course getting music for free is popular -- what do you expect?
Here's a distinction that I think EVERYONE misses - to quote Theodore Sturgeon, "90% of everything is crap."
I have approximately 100 CD's in my collection. They all have good tracks. Of those CD's, perhaps eight or ten are ones that are made up entirely of great tunes... the rest, there are always one or two tracks that I suffer through because I'm a good sport.
To which I might add, this is just as much a function of preference as of quality.
Filesharing - even if it was sold on a term or per-use basis - would allow consumers to grab only the stuff they really care to listen to.
Not that the entertainment conglomos particlarly give a s--t.
2) The Russian economy is in the shitter; I wouldn't be holding them up as an example the music industry should follow.
But the Russian economy, as opposed to the music industry, is a sump of corruption...
...Oh, never mind.
Re:Combustibles plus pure oxygen = disaster
on
Apollo 1
·
· Score: 1
What was not known to the Americans was in the early 1960's during a series of tests to develop Soviet manned space vehicles a fire broke out in a test space capsule design with a cosmonaut in it when it was filled with pure O2--the cosmonaut burned to death.
...Almost. At least two Soyuz capsules have experienced catastrophic failure. The first one was due to a rushed timeline, the second to (I can only assume) a manufacturing error - though the description given in the following link suggests design problems as well.
Site bloat has a lot more to do with clients In My Not So Humble (And Experience-Based) Opinion. You do get your cliques of developers and designers who expect you to download the equivalent of the EB before actually doing anything with their site, but where you see bloat, flash (literal and/or metaphorical) or gratuitous (useless, as opposed to poorly-designed) content, my money says that The Client Did It.
Nor am I discussing the WYSIWYG jockeys - all but a small fraction of those are amateurs, and most of them will admit to it when pressed. You get what you ask for, ya know?
Yah, gotta concur that "early Nineties" is about right. Hell, my Jr. Hi. Computer Literacy courses (1987/88) were taught on C64's; my HS still had a ][gs lab when I was there (you had to be enrolled in certain classes to use the PC lab, and I wasn't, bah).
I distinctly recall that they were still releasing loads of game titles, licensed from household-name properties, for the C64/128 as late as '88 or '89.
No matter what, C64/128 graphics smoked anything I saw on a desktop machine until the 386 had been around for a couple of years.
We all know stories like this. Teenagers are just the right age to pick up these kinds of abstrat technical concepts, and they enjoy the work. Of course, in the process they show up old farts like me. Hence the resentment.
Amen to that, brutha.
For some time now, I've been visiting sites by people with a fraction of my experience who show that they are able to mop the floor with my work, at least in regard to particular specialties (esp. illustration and graphic art).
I've been building sites long enough that I shrink a fraction of an inch every time that happens. I'm like... two feet tall lately.
So I feel the same way as the parent poster.
However, there are areas of expertise in which I've consistently shown up lotsa people without meaning to, so I know exactly where RJ is coming from.
My thought is, if you're that precoccious, do whatever it takes to go into business for yourself. Find somebody who's got a healthy (as opposed to bloated) ego to serve as the "public face" of the outfit, and never forget that you will always have lots to learn...
Yes, it's possible. As the parent poster indicates, there are plenty of intelligent guys out there who'll recognize talent... and some of them will even appreciate it.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. When I first got this notebook I groused about the fact that the casing scratches when you look at it cross-eyed... and then I realized that as a direct consequence, it looks beat to shit even though it works great. Since it weighs less than... well, a lot of things, theft is a concern overall. At the same time, who's going to steal a computer that looks beat to shit?
Thus a flaw becomes a feature.
...Certainly can (when it's sunny). My favorite OP is the top of the Marquam Bridge, though there are others.
...I've submitted a note to the Eds. about a brief e-mail interview with Hyatt in which he makes it crystal clear that KHTML is easy to work with.
FYI.
Just turning off JavaScript is horribly shortsighted.
As per the cousin post, there are good reasons for pop-ups in an application context; because JavaScript variables can be retrieved from spawned windows, pop-ups also make a good alternative to session cookies without placing anything in local magnetic storage.
But no sane developer is willing to rely on such an approach, mostly because of BOFH's with attitudes like that.
[What follow are my opinions.]
This battle is barely on developer radar, as far as I know. Those on the bleeding edge are using .NET and/or XUL as per ideology and having a great time.
The mantra for nine years has been that one needs to validate on the server, because the client can't be trusted.
This comes down to servers vs. clients in the end... server manufacturers and server software publishers want to be able to control the whole pipeline through the standards, at the potential cost of breaking backwards compatibility in web user agents, and bloating their code in the bargain.
Meanwhile the w3c is far out in front, the same way it's been with CSS2/3 and other tech.
The Web Standards Project, to which I am attached, has taken a wait-and-see approach. This is due mostly to resource constraints, but also because we're loath (as a group) to take the side of any publisher or group of publishers except in defense of active Recommendations, or in opposition to precedents that would hurt the user community as a whole (such as RAND licensing and the Eolas suit).
When everything's said and done, the greater interest is in a fair standard that's likely to be followed, even if it doesn't manifest the most intelligent solution.
The parent is written:
...Uhh, maybe because Microsoft is a lot less respectful of... practically every group (out of users, developers, vendors, customers) with which it comes into contact, as compared to Apple?
Also, when you don't obfuscate the sponsor of the test, accountability in the face of bullshit is a lot easier to determine, hmm?
...Not saying Apple doesn't have its moments (such as when it decides to compete with third party software titles), but even then, come on.
...STANDARDS IGNORE YOU.
Person A builds a site.
Person B mirrors it.
Person C plagiarizes is.
Person B might be performing a desirable service, or might just be complicating Person A's efforts to maintain coherent ID.
Person C is likely trying to make money (directly or indirectly) from the fruits of Person A's labor without Person A's consent (as is true in this case), which is a Bad Thing according to every code of law or ethics of which I've heard.
Meanwhile, on another trio of nodes:
Person A makes a digital audio track.
Person B downloads it from $p2p_network for personal use.
Person C not only downloads it, but might try to pass the work off as their own, and puts it up for sale.
Meanwhile, out of a sense of entitlement the entertainment industry cartels are trying to wring every last penny they can from the institution of copyright (which gets tricky when copyrighted works can be said to have been around long enough to be considered part of cultural heritage), and attempting to preserve their monopoly on channels of distribution so that they can wring as much money as possible from all but the most notable performers. This creates a system in which the lion's share of the benefit goes not to those who create the art, but to those who are most capable of selling it. The ethical and artistic downsides of that state of affairs should be obvious, as should the parallels between the cartels' activity and that of the hypothetical 'Person C' in each of the scenarios I described above. Peace.
Yes.
A few points of interest, as he was a:
...But according to the responsible judge, guilty of providing aid and comfort to enemies of the United States or somesuch. His name is Mike (Maher) Hawash, no doubt there's stuff all over Google.
It's a case that's local to me, not to mention a case of the PATRIOT Act in action, so I've taken mild interest.
Pardon the offtopicness.
I call bullshit.
Last I checked, service life for aircraft was measured in hours-of-operation. By this standard, the shuttle somewhere on the map, not horrid as a lot of people seem to think. Given the environmental stresses placed on Orbiters, I don't think that using such a measurement is unfair to anyone...
Capsule travel can be considered safer, but then by any measure the tolerances they need to withstand are a lot lower when measured in aggregate terms. And because those too are complex systems, there are problems. Two Soyuz flights experienced loss-of-crew (four deaths total). Two Mercury flights (and one Gemini flight IIRC) likewise experienced serious problems. Then we have AS-204, Apollo 13, and issues with one of the Skylab stays.
Space is not safe.
Meanwhile...
The Shuttle system is designed to do many things, none of them extremely well (as a result of compromises made during the design phase).
The economies of scale hoped for never materialized.
When I stand back, it occurs to me that the idea of a reusable spacecraft is not poppycock; it's just been twisted, spindled, and mutilated because NASA's been asked to do lots of things half-assed instead of doing a few things well...
There is a need for vision-in-practice. Where are we (planet-wise) going to be with space in, say, 46 years?
From my uninformed perspective, I see four high-level goals worthy of exploration:
The second of these is still almost entirely in the realm of theory, natch, theory I know little about.
In the case of the first and third points, a lot of medical research needs to be conducted; in short, we have to figure out how we might get live human beings to survive at length in an environment they're not suited for.
The fourth is being done, though how well depends on whom you ask.
...Which brings us back to the existing order of things.
...Which brings us back to the faster better cheaper bit that's currently got folks' panties in a knot.
The result is a stalemate that can only be broken with more money and better management.
In Portland (assuming the Left Coast version here) newer construction increasingly makes one or more T1's available. I worked briefly for one of first companies in the area to bid the Internet access contracts (long since out of business), and while part of the hassle was doubtless to do with the fact that everyone was going by the seat of their pants, the fact of the matter is that a lot of real estate developers are not going to have the patience to deal with the inevitable (and unending) issues that always seem to result when the decision to offer onsite fiber is made...
Again, earlier posters have already pointed to the possibility that the FSF is putting the cart before the horse here...
IANAL but in any event code is protected by copyright, and ideas are protected by patent. Doubtless someone with good IP law chops can skewer that statement, but that's the general outline, hmm-kay?
Let's suppose that I come up with a universal site taxonomy (just the concept, mind you). I can patent that. (Not that it'd be worth a damn, goodness knows LIS experts gave up on those projects a long time ago.)
Any code libraries I might write by way of implementing that concept are protected by copyright.
So that takes care of the patent-vs.-copyright issue.
But Microsoft owns the patent on CSS you say.
That's right, because that's a system - an idea mind you - for representing presentation information, in this case as part of a Web document.
If I write a stylesheet, I own the copyright on that stylesheet. Microsoft nominally owns the underlying technology.
Given the scope of W3C Recommendations, it would seem to me that example posited above is stretch.
Besides which, let's suppose that Co. X comes up with a standard and puts it on the W3C Recommendation Track.
What's to stop them from writing one patent with scope limited to the Web, and another with scope limited to another medium/environment, and so on?
For the W3C to discourage such an approach to IP rights would rigtfully result in howls of protest from likely generators of IP...
...And ultimately that is what the FSF is demanding they do.
Feh.
Also of note:
Working Draft, W3C Patent Policy...
Abstract:
...Which almost happened in the days following the initial meltdown.
For one reason or another (containment?) the authorities thought it a good idea to dump sand from helicopters, which had the unintended (but foreseeable) consequence of moderating the fuel present in the slag.
http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/backlist/030814. htm
The Realtors' system is called MLS, for Multiple Listing Service.
As for self-diagnosis... having the presence of mind to look up my symptoms on Google may well have saved me several hundred dollars last spring, mostly by keeping me out of a state of panic.
Kidney stones are THAT painful.
What really gets is the automagic nature in which people expect things - computers at least - to work.
It's like, they should include a copy of a well edited 32 or 40 page book that explains things like:
Such a book would also have the words "DON'T PANIC" - say, 2 inches high - printed on the cover. That could be the title of the book.
Back in the day they handed us that info in our Computer Literacy classes (I'm 27, if you want the point of reference)... and while the curriculum was written for the benefit of children, that doesn't meen the same introductory information wouldn't be useful to the less-savvy.
http://two.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/css-discu ss [Preview tells me that the HREF is kosher]
I can say with immense confidence that a Linux/BSD/etc. consituency would be enthusiastically welcomed (since the current composition is overwhelmingly right-brained), provided the strict-constructionist flames are kept to a minimum, and spewed on a foundation of merit.
Whoo-whee!
A sibling post mentioned that especially on the Web, there are de facto standards as well as de jure standards.
...To which I might add that most browsers aren't able to implement an entire high-level spec... you get most of HTML4, most of CSS1, most of DOM1, and so forth. Nor are the holes necessarily filled up with proprietary extensions.
Another sibling post mentions that overdesigned crap tends to go hand-in-hand with robust JavaScript/DOM support. This is somewhat true. But it's what folks get paid to build. Deal with it... Money talks, bulls--t walks.
A third post talks about Opera, and folks, I've gotta news flash for ya - just because you've set it to "identify as MSIE" doesn't mean it can't be detected as Opera, provided you do a positive check for Opera, rather than a positive check for {document.all|MSIE} followed by an if statement:
will in practically all cases detect Opera. To get around that, you have to tweak the UA identifier the browser sends... and if you do, you get what you deserve, because on a cross-platform basis Opera's W3C DOM method support sucks badly. In most cases you probably won't care less, but it is possible to do neat and useful things with W3C DOM properties and methods. For one, accessing the W3C DOM makes it a lot easier to build usable Web application UI's. And Opera doesn't support the published standard worth a damn. Unfortunately. [At least that's not the case with CSS.]
1) Just because something is popular, and people want it, does not mean it should come to pass. Of course getting music for free is popular -- what do you expect?
Here's a distinction that I think EVERYONE misses - to quote Theodore Sturgeon, "90% of everything is crap."
I have approximately 100 CD's in my collection. They all have good tracks. Of those CD's, perhaps eight or ten are ones that are made up entirely of great tunes... the rest, there are always one or two tracks that I suffer through because I'm a good sport.
To which I might add, this is just as much a function of preference as of quality.
Filesharing - even if it was sold on a term or per-use basis - would allow consumers to grab only the stuff they really care to listen to.
Not that the entertainment conglomos particlarly give a s--t.
2) The Russian economy is in the shitter; I wouldn't be holding them up as an example the music industry should follow.But the Russian economy, as opposed to the music industry, is a sump of corruption...
...Oh, never mind.
You mean, this cosmonaut?
...Almost. At least two Soyuz capsules have experienced catastrophic failure. The first one was due to a rushed timeline, the second to (I can only assume) a manufacturing error - though the description given in the following link suggests design problems as well.
Soyuz 1: Komarov
Soyuz 11: Dobrovolsky, Patsayev, Volkov
Bzzzt! You're WRONG. Thanks for playing.
Site bloat has a lot more to do with clients In My Not So Humble (And Experience-Based) Opinion. You do get your cliques of developers and designers who expect you to download the equivalent of the EB before actually doing anything with their site, but where you see bloat, flash (literal and/or metaphorical) or gratuitous (useless, as opposed to poorly-designed) content, my money says that The Client Did It.
Nor am I discussing the WYSIWYG jockeys - all but a small fraction of those are amateurs, and most of them will admit to it when pressed. You get what you ask for, ya know?
Yah, gotta concur that "early Nineties" is about right. Hell, my Jr. Hi. Computer Literacy courses (1987/88) were taught on C64's; my HS still had a ][gs lab when I was there (you had to be enrolled in certain classes to use the PC lab, and I wasn't, bah).
I distinctly recall that they were still releasing loads of game titles, licensed from household-name properties, for the C64/128 as late as '88 or '89.
No matter what, C64/128 graphics smoked anything I saw on a desktop machine until the 386 had been around for a couple of years.
Amen to that, brutha.
For some time now, I've been visiting sites by people with a fraction of my experience who show that they are able to mop the floor with my work, at least in regard to particular specialties (esp. illustration and graphic art).
I've been building sites long enough that I shrink a fraction of an inch every time that happens. I'm like... two feet tall lately.
So I feel the same way as the parent poster.
However, there are areas of expertise in which I've consistently shown up lotsa people without meaning to, so I know exactly where RJ is coming from.
My thought is, if you're that precoccious, do whatever it takes to go into business for yourself. Find somebody who's got a healthy (as opposed to bloated) ego to serve as the "public face" of the outfit, and never forget that you will always have lots to learn...
Yes, it's possible. As the parent poster indicates, there are plenty of intelligent guys out there who'll recognize talent... and some of them will even appreciate it.