That's simply incorrect. The literal translation of the Greek Sophos (Slashdot doesn't allow greek, but put Σοφος in your browser) is able, skilled or clever, and was applied as a title to those with the training to read the future from objects, as opposed to the innate ability. The word is in specific opposition to the modern term "wisdom." There isn't a word in ancient Greek for Wisdom, as they seperate between scholarly-attained internal wisdom and naturally-attained internal wisdom as two distinct topics. In Greek, scholarly wisdom is called skholastikos, and innate wisdom is referred to with the now largely forgotten word bleptor (which has largely been replaced by the Latin "vidensi" whence we retain "evident.")
A philosopher is a lover of knowlege, skill, ability, and cleverness, not a lover of wisdom, experience, or history. The word you're looking for is the extinct term "philobleptorist," which you can see in several contemporary references to Greek great minds, particularly Herotodeus, Aristotle, Anaximander, Democritus, Protagoras and so on; it's also occasionally used in the proto-Renaissance during the "omg Latin = smart" phase, and so you see it bandied about for people like Bacon, Newton and Galileo often.
By example, consider Mike Michaelmiker from WZZZ TV, John Brown from the Brown Family Farm and The Great Mage Darkcloud from Avalon. All three people are able to read the weather. Mike uses doppler radar. John uses what farmers have figured out over the last few thousand years. Darkcloud summons a demon and binds it to just go look at the future.
Mike Michaelmiker is a philosopher of weather. He understands how weather works. He understands why a tornado happens, and can evaluate data to estimate the likely upcoming weather patterns. With sufficient tools, his predictions are highly accurate in the near future. Mike doesn't need significant historical data for the local terrain; a map, some hardware and a few hours are sufficient for him to get up and going. However, without tools he cannot function.
John Brown is a philoblapterer of weather. He is aware of the historic trends for weather in the area. He knows dozens of signals from the natural world - if the air smells like metal, then an electrical storm is likely; if the air feels wet and drops rapidly in temperature, then rain is likely; if the wind seems faster at the ground than ten feet up, then local weather is about to turn from cloudy to clear. He doesn't know that the metallic smell is loose ozone from electrical interactions in the clouds, or so on; he just knows that that smell is an indicator of a well known process. With a few weeks to get a sense of the pattern and provided that his knowledge is locationally appropriate, his predictions are also highly accurate, but for completely different reasons. John is only effective in terrain he knows the history of, because even similar terrain can have radically different weather contexts, but needs no real tools other than some time.
Darkcloud is meteonephelamancia, and lord only knows how he works. The point was to distinguish between academics and learned innate knowledge. The Greeks believed that there was a block of knowledge waiting to be unlocked piecemeal inside each of us, and went as far as to distinguish that from scholastic information right in the language. Sophos is clearly knowledge of skill, not innate wisdom, by the very nature of the Greek lexicon.
The counterpart by scholarly skill is an academician; it was common but not required for a philosopher to be an academician. Counterexamples, however, include Pythagoras, who never attended a day of school in his life and proudly attested to that (people who call the Akousmatos a school are mistaken; it was a think-tank and a borderline cult. People went there to work, not to learn.) Pythagoras is remembered among other things as a great Philosopher, but it would be a mistake to call him an academic. Granted
Yeah, and if DSL wasn't oversold 150:1, that'd be a great idea.
T1s are still selling because there's still a need for them. Frame devices have guaranteed throughput, guaranteed uptime, service level contracts and so on. Bound DSL just isn't a responsible choice for a business.
Gee I love going through a post looking for numbers and switching them for their english counterparts. That way, when I write 39 workers and convert to text, I can forget the thirty and look like an idiot.
My reasoning is... Given that ALL small businesses starting out are cash-strapped
Yeah, um. Most aren't, actually. See, Slashdot has a very strange perspective on business, because a tremendous (by comparison to the typical world) percentage of developers, especially web developers. Back in the real world, you can't start a business on two guys, a good idea and two months of secret hard work. Sure, it works on the web. It doesn't work for any business with a brick and mortar presence. It doesn't work for any business which needs significant equipment. It doesn't work for any business which needs staff to develop its first product. Etc.
Back in the real world, a business operating on a startup budget of less than three million dollars is considered efficient. It's easier to get a million in venture capital than $200k, because venture capitalists look at margins and multipliers, and the volume on <1M just isn't interesting to them. When you're a startup with three million, and you want to choose between $1500 for a domain people can remember and $10 for one they can't, you'd be a fool not to buy the $1500 domain. No matter how simple its interface, Google would not have succeeded if it was on www.zarqu7ar.com.
Say what you will about squatters - immoral because they speculated on a resource you now want, disgusting because they want to make a profit in a capitalist society. One thing they are not, however, is stupid. Those prices are that high because that's what the market will bear, and that's what the market will bear because sometimes you need to shell out a little cash to be memorable.
perhaps you can locate a local college where you might get a dispassionate third party to help fix you a nice big bowl of Reality Checks.
Yes. Spend $20k on tuition because $1500 on a domain is going to put you out of business. You, by the way, should spend $1.50 on a calculator.
But if you keep doing things like seriously considering spending $1500
Yeah, a business with startup costs, that's absurd. Why, nevermind that professionals are saying that startup costs on a software firm may be as low as half a million dollars now. Nevermind that the typical marketing expenditure for a startup is 7-12%, suggesting a marketing budget on the value software industry of $40-60k. Nevermind that short, germane domains have been shown to have as much as a two-order-of-magnitude impact on name retention, suggesting a marketing value of $4m-$6m.
No, $1500 is totally out of the question. (cough)
I don't want to sound harsh, but I do think you really need to step back and reconsider your plans - perhaps you can locate a local college
Tu quoque. As the founder of several successful businesses, I openly question whether you've ever started or managed a business, and whether you're qualified to determine what caused the failure of other businesses you've worked for. Don't get rankled - I used to work for a software place in Pittsburgh which seemed like it was on the perpetual edge of failure, a VC money sink run by incompetants who spent more time instant messaging than doing actual work.
And you know what? They're still around, and profitable, while all these "well-run" businesses from software engineers who'd "seen the mistakes" their old bosses had made and "knew better."
The fact of the matter is simple. If someone who wasn't an engineer came up to us and told us not to use some software design technique because they'd seen a lot of other businesses use that technique and fail, we would laugh in their faces. The software design technique is far less important than using said technique correctly, and neither can fix a fundamentally flawed premise, even if it's something that from the outside sounds perfectly grea
Thank you. I'll be clearer, since most people don't know this, and people who do tend to not realize it needs to be said.
Philosophy is not even remotely related to what popular media suggests it is. Philosophy is the study of knowledge. It is in every sense a meta-discipline; for any discipline with significant known content, there is a phi of that discipline. Philosophy is the basis of logic, and logic is the core of philosophy; phi teaches people to break things down, study them, refactor them, categorize them, analyze them, find assumptions, faults, bad connections, implicit connections, fallacies and so on.
Logic and philosophy are two sides of the same coin. If logic is a sword, philosophy is swordplay; they are useless without one another.
While a class on CS and philosophy would certainly be appreciated, it is probably a rare find.
It's pretty much a common staple of any university with a strong phi and a strong CS department. America's best phi of CS departments are at U Pitt, U Chicago, UNC Chapel Hill, Harvard, Yale, UC Berkeley, SUNY Bighamton, Rutgers and Cal Tech, in that order. That said, there's a respectable Phi of CS department in maybe half of the universities in the nation.
So why not do what a lot of others have done and just roll your own so to speak.
For the same reason you don't roll other college classes which can't be learned from a textbook, like art history and discretionary writing: because you need someone to show you the ropes. Phi is a remarkably complex endeavor, possibly the most complex in the history of mankind; it is the meta-study which studies other studies.
The distinction you draw between philosphy and mathematics can be summed up as "truth is a stronger notion than proof" (re:Godel). But it is usefull to keep in the back of your mind that everything we do, even in mathematics, is based on faith.
There is a large difference between faith and experiental evidence. Mathematics is drawn from observation: without fail, when you put one object with another object, you have two objects. Mathematics has real and well-understood application in the real world, and has no apparent counter-examples in the history of mankind.
Faith is believing something because someone told you so. This is experience. There is a huge difference. Math is not faith. Math is a measurement system derived from real life.
The mind body problem is the conflict between Plato's dualist and Aristotle's materialist viewpoints as regards the potential seperation of soul and flesh. How exactly does that apply to artificial intelligence? Logic isn't a component of philosophy. It's an upshot of philosophy. It sounds like you haven't finished your freshman classes yet.
I would think Dijkstra, Knuth, Hofstadter, Sussman, Drescher, Moon, Dreyfuss, Belnap, Conant, Brandom, Keynes and so on would disagree with you. A huge, arguably disproportionate number of our great researchers in CS have a philosophy background. The kind of enlightenment you get from philosophy helps you sort facts from expectations, beliefs from truths, meaning from relationship. It's one of the most powerful discretionary tools known to mankind, and was deeply important when exploring the new CS space.
Philosophy is the aggregation, study, refinement and analysis of knowledge as a whole. The word itself means "the love of knowledge." If you think that has no impact on the real world, I feel very sad for you.
There is no point at which the teachers have threatened murder. Whereas I understand that this kid hasn't, the teachers who expelled him were making the same mistake as the post to which you replied did.
It's not about censorship at all. It's because they're dumb and they think he's a burgeoning murderer.
A threat must be direct and immediate for it to fall outside of first amendment restrictions. His "threats" are vague, indirect, and unlikely to result in any real consequences.
This is both the smartest thing I've read in this discussion so far, and frustratingly short of view. You're 90% of the way there.
The court is expected to make narrow readings of the law in this fashion. The school is not expected to have this skill, and has a priority on the safety of its students. Other than that this is blatantly obviously just bad writing, the school is essentially in the right to act.
The problem is that their act is far over what it should be. The school's appropriate action would be to consult a psychologist to determine how real the threat is. (Mind you, that's what the court will do too.) Once the psychologist the school has hired has answered, if the answer is greater than or equal to maybe, the school should expel (and no sooner.)
Then, the court acts. The court gets several psychologists of high caliber, some attorneys in each direction, and a judge who's been to school on the law for about a bujillion years together. His job is to say if the answer is less than or equal to maybe, then the kid's okay.
See, the court and the school have to act differently on a maybe. Granted, the school acted prematurely; they did not seek a qualified maybe, and that was their fundamental error. If a psychologist had been involved, the answer would have been a clear "no," and the school would more likely have sent him to the school counsellor instead of gym one day to find out what's going on about the bullying.
Let me be perfectly clear about this: the error that the school made was not to act. The error that the school made was that they failed to involve an expert in determining the legitimacy of the threat.
My reading is that the Columbine post was posted AFTER the school threatened expulsion, though the article is very unclear.
Indeed, the article is unclear. The post which makes the Columbine remark is the reason for the expulsion, and it is in fact the case that they misread him as making a threat. This isn't about censorship. This is because they think he's going to bring a gun.
Schools, the press & the public are so concerned over issues like Columbine that they still just don't get it. These poor kids keep on getting abused over & over again. The teachers won't do anything, the principal won't do anything even when you bring it to their attention.
I feel bad that you were unable to get help in school; however the vast majority of my friends were in fact able to. This is the fallacy of Biased Induction, itself a special case of the Biased Sample, and is a very easy mistake to make; lord knows I do it all the time. The news tells us all the time about kids who snapped because they couldn't find help, or school systems whose students are failing because they can't get tutelage, or whatever. The thing is, we've got 65,000 schools in the country, and only enough examples to fill maybe one or two news slots a year on the topic. The rest of what we hear is them ruminating. Remember, the news will talk about an event like Columbine for three months. If you hear about it for half of the year - six months - that means it only actually happened twice that year. (Sure those numbers are made up, but it's the point of seperating immediate news from editorials which is germane.)
The biassed induction is thus: you think all schools are failing to protect their students because yours did, and because the only schools you ever hear about are schools which failed. Nobody tells you about the schools which succeeded.
Yes, there are a fair number of totally useless principals in the system. It sounds like you had one. The person who was made principal of my school the year after I left was another; I got out just in time. That said, the vast majority of them are in fact competant and caring people. Most teachers are teachers because they want to be teachers, because it's what they enjoy doing, because they see it as important, becuase they love children, whatever. They sure as hell don't do it for the pay or the job security. Principals represent the teachers who have done very well and who have shown bureaucratic skills. Yes, particularly in small areas or areas with damaged economies, there may not be enough people available that statistics can find a good one. Sure, sometimes the wrong person is chosen, or they were right for most reasons and just their protect-the-kid circuit is misfiring.
But, by and on the whole, principals are good people who do good work. If you have a thousand teenagers, it's just not possible to be aware of everything going on, and a lot of bullying is kept secret over shame or fear of escalation. The number of principals who are aware it's gotten really bad and don't act, though, is actually very small. If it wasn't, you'd be hearing about this sort of thing a lot more than twice a year.
Here we're talking about schools, schools' rights regarding controlling the children inside and outside of the school.
No, we aren't. That's a bunch of Slashdot soapboxers who want to use this to make the case that schools are tyrannical mind control, who've spun this situation ass-backwards.
What's really going on is some kid who sucks at writing wanted to talk about how serious it can be to a teenager to feel bullied. He used the most severe case he could think of: Columbine. However, the way he wrote it, it's very very easy to misunderstand him to mean he's about to go shoot up his own school.
Some teacher was watching this kid's blog, presumably because they think the kid's unbalanced. We had an art teacher like that in my high school: back then it was Goths and Marilyn Manson, and if you showed up wearing black lipstick she thought you were crucifying frogs and trying to invoke Baalzebub. She too watched kids she thought were threats.
The difference was, when she saw someone she thought was a real problem, she didn't go to the board. She went to the school psychologist. The school psychologist knows the difference between angst plus low writing skills and a kid showing warning signs. If the teacher who saw this xanga post had done that, the whole mess would have been averted.
Hanlon's Razor: never attribute to malice what may adequately be explained by stupidity. These aren't monsters trying to quash some kid's right to criticize them. These are dumbasses overreacting to some kid they thought was going to shoot people. The world isn't horrible. It's disappointing. They meant well, and are simply failing at life.
Frankly, this kind of thing happens all the time. High Schools are becoming less an institution of learning and more an institution of mass propaganda, control, and, dare I say it? tyranny.
Oh, get over it, you drama queen. There are sixty five thousand highschools in this country. You hear about four doing bad things and suddenly the whole system is tyrranical mind control.
The best part is that if you would read what's actually going on, you'd know that this isn't about censorship or freedom of speech at all. Slashdot has spun this horribly backwards. What's really going on is some kid who sucks at writing tried to co-opt the tragedy of Columbine to show how serious a kid's feelings of being bullied can be, and some teacher mistook him to mean that he was going to go shoot up his school.
The school is acting on a false threat. It's not censorship. It's an attempt to do the right thing based on a misunderstanding. The problem isn't the school or the school board. It's the teacher who told them this kid was making threats.
The school can't suspend a student for what they say in a blog, UNLESS the student was using a school computer during school time to do the blog.
Sure they can, and the misunderstanding that caused this is a great example. The school could suspend the student if on his blog he wrote the administrator password for the school's gradekeeping system. The school could suspend the student if on his blog there were photographs of him pouring paint on a teacher (say he didn't get caught but then he bragged on his blog.) The school could suspend the student if he gave the location of a communal drug cache. Don't laugh - this has happened several times on usenet.
The reason the school is trying to expel the student has nothing to do with criticism, and that slashdot has tried to spin this into a freedom of speech issue is sad. What really happened is that this kid sucks at writing. First he says he feels bullied, then he says Columbine happened because those kids felt bullied. Now, what he's really trying to do is co-opt someone else's tragedy to lend credence to his personal emotions.
However, the way he wrote it makes it very, very easy to misunderstand him to mean he's about to go shoot the shit out of his school. And, you know what? If that were true - yes yes, it's not, but if it was - then what they did would have been both legal and correct. If there really was a burgeoning murderer, the appropriate thing to do would be to get him away from the other kids while you arrange to get him help.
This is a misunderstanding. In my school, it was an art teacher who watched all the goths, because she thought they were painting hymnals to Satan in each other's blood on the bathroom ceilings. This just got way out of control because this kid chose a horrible tragedy to make himself feel important, and because some teacher misunderstood and went to protect the kids without talking to the school psychologist first.
One good sober hand could have prevented this whole mess. It's not about freedom of speech. It's about dumbasses trying to do the right thing and failing.
Okay, does his teacher have the same rights? Does the school? Can they say anything they want about him?
As long as it's factual, yes. However, Slashdot has completely blown this out of proportion into a censorship and right to speech issue. That's not what's going on at all.
This is a simple misunderstanding which has gone way too far. Read what the kid actually wrote: there's a point at which he says he feels threatened, then later there's a point where he says the Columbine kids did what they did because they felt threatened. Granted, he does vaguely hand-wave the threat away, but it's an easy mistake to make to believe this kid is himself making such a threat.
The school board is reacting to some teacher who told them this kid was about to become a murderer. The problem isn't the school or the school board. It's that teacher going straight to the board, instead of talking to the school psychologist first. If a sober person who understood teachers had read that post, they could have stopped this whole mess right at the gate.
It's not about the critcism. It's dumbasses who think he's threatening to shoot people.
Read it again, and pretend you're a 65-year-old who's completely lost touch with the social cues of youth. Imagine that you're scared in your job because of school murders, and that you're scared of specifically this kid because he wears goth gear and listens to Marilyn Manson or whoever this year's shock band is. Consider that you as this hypothetical teacher mean well, but have become a douche in your old age as so many do, and that you think this kid is sacrificing rats in the bathroom while reciting the necronomicon backwards in pig latin.
Now, read what he wrote again.
From that mindset, it is really, really easy to misunderstand this kid as meaning he's going to shoot up his school. Yes, you and I know that's not what he's saying at all. But it's an easy mistake to make, and that's what happened. The school thinks it's protecting itself from a child murderer.
I was expelled from an Illinois public school for an online speech related issue as well. I set up a web (cgi) based proxy at home, and then informed students at school that it could be used to get around the school filter's censorship of the web.
See, you need to RTFA, because what you did and what's going on here aren't even remotely related.
This kid's getting expelled because some teacher thought he was threatening another Columbine. He's not, but to be frank he sucks at writing, and it's an easy mistake to make. You got expelled because you chose to facilitate the circumvention of school policy. There's a big difference. You deserved it and he doesn't.
See, it's all well and good to pretend that your cgi is somehow this facilitation of free speech, that you're an epic crusader for the rights of good, and that any attempt to quash you is a 1984-style brain censorship which threatens the deep fabric of the nation. The problem is, it's nonsense. The fact of the matter is that school isn't your time. Teenagers seem to be unable to comprehend this. When you're on the job, looking at porn will get you fired. Why? It's not because of the porn itself; nobody can punish you for something protected under the first amendment and blah blah blah. Whatever.
More importantly, you're fucking around at work. That gets you fired. You did the same thing at school, but not just personally. The better metaphor for what you did would be to distribute CDs full of porn to all your coworkers, and told them to watch it at work too. But, it's actually worse than that, because the school has custodial obligations, and you're also opening their interior network to threats like child predators and information/identity thieves.
See, when you're at school, you don't need to be on boobfuck.net . It's really that simple. You didn't have the right to alter the school's network, and you did it anyway. And you know what? You deserved the expulsion.
What's up with schools and a fear of anything electronic these days?
Read what the kid said. He sucks at writing. It's really easy to misread him as threatening another Columbine, especially if you stop reading at the sentence where he says Columbine. Basically, he says he feels threatened, then says the kids at Columbine did what they did because they felt threatened. Later he does vaguely hedge that he's not making an actual threat, that it's just him trying to co-opt someone else's tragedy to make his personal grief seem more important, but frankly the way he wrote it, it's really easy to come to the wrong conclusions.
This is the combination of a kid who needs writing classes and a smack in the head plus a teacher who overreacted and reported a threat that wasn't there. The school and the school board aren't the problem: if the information they had gotten about there being a threat was correct, what they did would have been appropriate - to remove the kid from being able to hurt the other kids while you work on getting him help. The problem is the person who thought what he wrote was a threat in the first place, and a child who was willing to take personal emotional credit for someone else's tragedy.
Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." The teacher meant to do the right thing. They just don't understand kids. Can you honestly say there wasn't a teacher like that in your school too?
Slashdot Mirror
I love it when people get modded up for reciting other people's quality without citation.
And your delivery, sir, is less than half that of Billy West's.
It's not funny if you have to explain it. Heeeeeeey.
That's simply incorrect. The literal translation of the Greek Sophos (Slashdot doesn't allow greek, but put Σοφος in your browser) is able, skilled or clever, and was applied as a title to those with the training to read the future from objects, as opposed to the innate ability. The word is in specific opposition to the modern term "wisdom." There isn't a word in ancient Greek for Wisdom, as they seperate between scholarly-attained internal wisdom and naturally-attained internal wisdom as two distinct topics. In Greek, scholarly wisdom is called skholastikos, and innate wisdom is referred to with the now largely forgotten word bleptor (which has largely been replaced by the Latin "vidensi" whence we retain "evident.")
A philosopher is a lover of knowlege, skill, ability, and cleverness, not a lover of wisdom, experience, or history. The word you're looking for is the extinct term "philobleptorist," which you can see in several contemporary references to Greek great minds, particularly Herotodeus, Aristotle, Anaximander, Democritus, Protagoras and so on; it's also occasionally used in the proto-Renaissance during the "omg Latin = smart" phase, and so you see it bandied about for people like Bacon, Newton and Galileo often.
By example, consider Mike Michaelmiker from WZZZ TV, John Brown from the Brown Family Farm and The Great Mage Darkcloud from Avalon. All three people are able to read the weather. Mike uses doppler radar. John uses what farmers have figured out over the last few thousand years. Darkcloud summons a demon and binds it to just go look at the future.
Mike Michaelmiker is a philosopher of weather. He understands how weather works. He understands why a tornado happens, and can evaluate data to estimate the likely upcoming weather patterns. With sufficient tools, his predictions are highly accurate in the near future. Mike doesn't need significant historical data for the local terrain; a map, some hardware and a few hours are sufficient for him to get up and going. However, without tools he cannot function.
John Brown is a philoblapterer of weather. He is aware of the historic trends for weather in the area. He knows dozens of signals from the natural world - if the air smells like metal, then an electrical storm is likely; if the air feels wet and drops rapidly in temperature, then rain is likely; if the wind seems faster at the ground than ten feet up, then local weather is about to turn from cloudy to clear. He doesn't know that the metallic smell is loose ozone from electrical interactions in the clouds, or so on; he just knows that that smell is an indicator of a well known process. With a few weeks to get a sense of the pattern and provided that his knowledge is locationally appropriate, his predictions are also highly accurate, but for completely different reasons. John is only effective in terrain he knows the history of, because even similar terrain can have radically different weather contexts, but needs no real tools other than some time.
Darkcloud is meteonephelamancia, and lord only knows how he works. The point was to distinguish between academics and learned innate knowledge. The Greeks believed that there was a block of knowledge waiting to be unlocked piecemeal inside each of us, and went as far as to distinguish that from scholastic information right in the language. Sophos is clearly knowledge of skill, not innate wisdom, by the very nature of the Greek lexicon.
The counterpart by scholarly skill is an academician; it was common but not required for a philosopher to be an academician. Counterexamples, however, include Pythagoras, who never attended a day of school in his life and proudly attested to that (people who call the Akousmatos a school are mistaken; it was a think-tank and a borderline cult. People went there to work, not to learn.) Pythagoras is remembered among other things as a great Philosopher, but it would be a mistake to call him an academic. Granted
Yeah, and if DSL wasn't oversold 150:1, that'd be a great idea.
T1s are still selling because there's still a need for them. Frame devices have guaranteed throughput, guaranteed uptime, service level contracts and so on. Bound DSL just isn't a responsible choice for a business.
Gee I love going through a post looking for numbers and switching them for their english counterparts. That way, when I write 39 workers and convert to text, I can forget the thirty and look like an idiot.
My reasoning is ... Given that ALL small businesses starting out are cash-strapped
.
Yeah, um. Most aren't, actually. See, Slashdot has a very strange perspective on business, because a tremendous (by comparison to the typical world) percentage of developers, especially web developers. Back in the real world, you can't start a business on two guys, a good idea and two months of secret hard work. Sure, it works on the web. It doesn't work for any business with a brick and mortar presence. It doesn't work for any business which needs significant equipment. It doesn't work for any business which needs staff to develop its first product. Etc.
Back in the real world, a business operating on a startup budget of less than three million dollars is considered efficient. It's easier to get a million in venture capital than $200k, because venture capitalists look at margins and multipliers, and the volume on <1M just isn't interesting to them. When you're a startup with three million, and you want to choose between $1500 for a domain people can remember and $10 for one they can't, you'd be a fool not to buy the $1500 domain. No matter how simple its interface, Google would not have succeeded if it was on www.zarqu7ar.com
Say what you will about squatters - immoral because they speculated on a resource you now want, disgusting because they want to make a profit in a capitalist society. One thing they are not, however, is stupid. Those prices are that high because that's what the market will bear, and that's what the market will bear because sometimes you need to shell out a little cash to be memorable.
perhaps you can locate a local college where you might get a dispassionate third party to help fix you a nice big bowl of Reality Checks.
Yes. Spend $20k on tuition because $1500 on a domain is going to put you out of business. You, by the way, should spend $1.50 on a calculator.
But if you keep doing things like seriously considering spending $1500
Yeah, a business with startup costs, that's absurd. Why, nevermind that professionals are saying that startup costs on a software firm may be as low as half a million dollars now. Nevermind that the typical marketing expenditure for a startup is 7-12%, suggesting a marketing budget on the value software industry of $40-60k. Nevermind that short, germane domains have been shown to have as much as a two-order-of-magnitude impact on name retention, suggesting a marketing value of $4m-$6m.
No, $1500 is totally out of the question. (cough)
I don't want to sound harsh, but I do think you really need to step back and reconsider your plans - perhaps you can locate a local college
Tu quoque. As the founder of several successful businesses, I openly question whether you've ever started or managed a business, and whether you're qualified to determine what caused the failure of other businesses you've worked for. Don't get rankled - I used to work for a software place in Pittsburgh which seemed like it was on the perpetual edge of failure, a VC money sink run by incompetants who spent more time instant messaging than doing actual work.
And you know what? They're still around, and profitable, while all these "well-run" businesses from software engineers who'd "seen the mistakes" their old bosses had made and "knew better."
The fact of the matter is simple. If someone who wasn't an engineer came up to us and told us not to use some software design technique because they'd seen a lot of other businesses use that technique and fail, we would laugh in their faces. The software design technique is far less important than using said technique correctly, and neither can fix a fundamentally flawed premise, even if it's something that from the outside sounds perfectly grea
Thank you. I'll be clearer, since most people don't know this, and people who do tend to not realize it needs to be said.
Philosophy is not even remotely related to what popular media suggests it is. Philosophy is the study of knowledge. It is in every sense a meta-discipline; for any discipline with significant known content, there is a phi of that discipline. Philosophy is the basis of logic, and logic is the core of philosophy; phi teaches people to break things down, study them, refactor them, categorize them, analyze them, find assumptions, faults, bad connections, implicit connections, fallacies and so on.
Logic and philosophy are two sides of the same coin. If logic is a sword, philosophy is swordplay; they are useless without one another.
While a class on CS and philosophy would certainly be appreciated, it is probably a rare find.
It's pretty much a common staple of any university with a strong phi and a strong CS department. America's best phi of CS departments are at U Pitt, U Chicago, UNC Chapel Hill, Harvard, Yale, UC Berkeley, SUNY Bighamton, Rutgers and Cal Tech, in that order. That said, there's a respectable Phi of CS department in maybe half of the universities in the nation.
So why not do what a lot of others have done and just roll your own so to speak.
For the same reason you don't roll other college classes which can't be learned from a textbook, like art history and discretionary writing: because you need someone to show you the ropes. Phi is a remarkably complex endeavor, possibly the most complex in the history of mankind; it is the meta-study which studies other studies.
The distinction you draw between philosphy and mathematics can be summed up as "truth is a stronger notion than proof" (re:Godel). But it is usefull to keep in the back of your mind that everything we do, even in mathematics, is based on faith.
There is a large difference between faith and experiental evidence. Mathematics is drawn from observation: without fail, when you put one object with another object, you have two objects. Mathematics has real and well-understood application in the real world, and has no apparent counter-examples in the history of mankind.
Faith is believing something because someone told you so. This is experience. There is a huge difference. Math is not faith. Math is a measurement system derived from real life.
The mind body problem is the conflict between Plato's dualist and Aristotle's materialist viewpoints as regards the potential seperation of soul and flesh. How exactly does that apply to artificial intelligence? Logic isn't a component of philosophy. It's an upshot of philosophy. It sounds like you haven't finished your freshman classes yet.
Actually, a lot of embedded machines and high-security servers are Harvard architectures.
I would think Dijkstra, Knuth, Hofstadter, Sussman, Drescher, Moon, Dreyfuss, Belnap, Conant, Brandom, Keynes and so on would disagree with you. A huge, arguably disproportionate number of our great researchers in CS have a philosophy background. The kind of enlightenment you get from philosophy helps you sort facts from expectations, beliefs from truths, meaning from relationship. It's one of the most powerful discretionary tools known to mankind, and was deeply important when exploring the new CS space.
Philosophy is the aggregation, study, refinement and analysis of knowledge as a whole. The word itself means "the love of knowledge." If you think that has no impact on the real world, I feel very sad for you.
There is no point at which the teachers have threatened murder. Whereas I understand that this kid hasn't, the teachers who expelled him were making the same mistake as the post to which you replied did.
It's not about censorship at all. It's because they're dumb and they think he's a burgeoning murderer.
A threat must be direct and immediate for it to fall outside of first amendment restrictions. His "threats" are vague, indirect, and unlikely to result in any real consequences.
This is both the smartest thing I've read in this discussion so far, and frustratingly short of view. You're 90% of the way there.
The court is expected to make narrow readings of the law in this fashion. The school is not expected to have this skill, and has a priority on the safety of its students. Other than that this is blatantly obviously just bad writing, the school is essentially in the right to act.
The problem is that their act is far over what it should be. The school's appropriate action would be to consult a psychologist to determine how real the threat is. (Mind you, that's what the court will do too.) Once the psychologist the school has hired has answered, if the answer is greater than or equal to maybe, the school should expel (and no sooner.)
Then, the court acts. The court gets several psychologists of high caliber, some attorneys in each direction, and a judge who's been to school on the law for about a bujillion years together. His job is to say if the answer is less than or equal to maybe, then the kid's okay.
See, the court and the school have to act differently on a maybe. Granted, the school acted prematurely; they did not seek a qualified maybe, and that was their fundamental error. If a psychologist had been involved, the answer would have been a clear "no," and the school would more likely have sent him to the school counsellor instead of gym one day to find out what's going on about the bullying.
Let me be perfectly clear about this: the error that the school made was not to act. The error that the school made was that they failed to involve an expert in determining the legitimacy of the threat.
My reading is that the Columbine post was posted AFTER the school threatened expulsion, though the article is very unclear.
Indeed, the article is unclear. The post which makes the Columbine remark is the reason for the expulsion, and it is in fact the case that they misread him as making a threat. This isn't about censorship. This is because they think he's going to bring a gun.
Schools, the press & the public are so concerned over issues like Columbine that they still just don't get it. These poor kids keep on getting abused over & over again. The teachers won't do anything, the principal won't do anything even when you bring it to their attention.
I feel bad that you were unable to get help in school; however the vast majority of my friends were in fact able to. This is the fallacy of Biased Induction, itself a special case of the Biased Sample, and is a very easy mistake to make; lord knows I do it all the time. The news tells us all the time about kids who snapped because they couldn't find help, or school systems whose students are failing because they can't get tutelage, or whatever. The thing is, we've got 65,000 schools in the country, and only enough examples to fill maybe one or two news slots a year on the topic. The rest of what we hear is them ruminating. Remember, the news will talk about an event like Columbine for three months. If you hear about it for half of the year - six months - that means it only actually happened twice that year. (Sure those numbers are made up, but it's the point of seperating immediate news from editorials which is germane.)
The biassed induction is thus: you think all schools are failing to protect their students because yours did, and because the only schools you ever hear about are schools which failed. Nobody tells you about the schools which succeeded.
Yes, there are a fair number of totally useless principals in the system. It sounds like you had one. The person who was made principal of my school the year after I left was another; I got out just in time. That said, the vast majority of them are in fact competant and caring people. Most teachers are teachers because they want to be teachers, because it's what they enjoy doing, because they see it as important, becuase they love children, whatever. They sure as hell don't do it for the pay or the job security. Principals represent the teachers who have done very well and who have shown bureaucratic skills. Yes, particularly in small areas or areas with damaged economies, there may not be enough people available that statistics can find a good one. Sure, sometimes the wrong person is chosen, or they were right for most reasons and just their protect-the-kid circuit is misfiring.
But, by and on the whole, principals are good people who do good work. If you have a thousand teenagers, it's just not possible to be aware of everything going on, and a lot of bullying is kept secret over shame or fear of escalation. The number of principals who are aware it's gotten really bad and don't act, though, is actually very small. If it wasn't, you'd be hearing about this sort of thing a lot more than twice a year.
Here we're talking about schools, schools' rights regarding controlling the children inside and outside of the school.
No, we aren't. That's a bunch of Slashdot soapboxers who want to use this to make the case that schools are tyrannical mind control, who've spun this situation ass-backwards.
What's really going on is some kid who sucks at writing wanted to talk about how serious it can be to a teenager to feel bullied. He used the most severe case he could think of: Columbine. However, the way he wrote it, it's very very easy to misunderstand him to mean he's about to go shoot up his own school.
Some teacher was watching this kid's blog, presumably because they think the kid's unbalanced. We had an art teacher like that in my high school: back then it was Goths and Marilyn Manson, and if you showed up wearing black lipstick she thought you were crucifying frogs and trying to invoke Baalzebub. She too watched kids she thought were threats.
The difference was, when she saw someone she thought was a real problem, she didn't go to the board. She went to the school psychologist. The school psychologist knows the difference between angst plus low writing skills and a kid showing warning signs. If the teacher who saw this xanga post had done that, the whole mess would have been averted.
Hanlon's Razor: never attribute to malice what may adequately be explained by stupidity. These aren't monsters trying to quash some kid's right to criticize them. These are dumbasses overreacting to some kid they thought was going to shoot people. The world isn't horrible. It's disappointing. They meant well, and are simply failing at life.
Frankly, this kind of thing happens all the time. High Schools are becoming less an institution of learning and more an institution of mass propaganda, control, and, dare I say it? tyranny.
Oh, get over it, you drama queen. There are sixty five thousand highschools in this country. You hear about four doing bad things and suddenly the whole system is tyrranical mind control.
The best part is that if you would read what's actually going on, you'd know that this isn't about censorship or freedom of speech at all. Slashdot has spun this horribly backwards. What's really going on is some kid who sucks at writing tried to co-opt the tragedy of Columbine to show how serious a kid's feelings of being bullied can be, and some teacher mistook him to mean that he was going to go shoot up his school.
The school is acting on a false threat. It's not censorship. It's an attempt to do the right thing based on a misunderstanding. The problem isn't the school or the school board. It's the teacher who told them this kid was making threats.
The school can't suspend a student for what they say in a blog, UNLESS the student was using a school computer during school time to do the blog.
Sure they can, and the misunderstanding that caused this is a great example. The school could suspend the student if on his blog he wrote the administrator password for the school's gradekeeping system. The school could suspend the student if on his blog there were photographs of him pouring paint on a teacher (say he didn't get caught but then he bragged on his blog.) The school could suspend the student if he gave the location of a communal drug cache. Don't laugh - this has happened several times on usenet.
The reason the school is trying to expel the student has nothing to do with criticism, and that slashdot has tried to spin this into a freedom of speech issue is sad. What really happened is that this kid sucks at writing. First he says he feels bullied, then he says Columbine happened because those kids felt bullied. Now, what he's really trying to do is co-opt someone else's tragedy to lend credence to his personal emotions.
However, the way he wrote it makes it very, very easy to misunderstand him to mean he's about to go shoot the shit out of his school. And, you know what? If that were true - yes yes, it's not, but if it was - then what they did would have been both legal and correct. If there really was a burgeoning murderer, the appropriate thing to do would be to get him away from the other kids while you arrange to get him help.
This is a misunderstanding. In my school, it was an art teacher who watched all the goths, because she thought they were painting hymnals to Satan in each other's blood on the bathroom ceilings. This just got way out of control because this kid chose a horrible tragedy to make himself feel important, and because some teacher misunderstood and went to protect the kids without talking to the school psychologist first.
One good sober hand could have prevented this whole mess. It's not about freedom of speech. It's about dumbasses trying to do the right thing and failing.
Okay, does his teacher have the same rights? Does the school? Can they say anything they want about him?
As long as it's factual, yes. However, Slashdot has completely blown this out of proportion into a censorship and right to speech issue. That's not what's going on at all.
This is a simple misunderstanding which has gone way too far. Read what the kid actually wrote: there's a point at which he says he feels threatened, then later there's a point where he says the Columbine kids did what they did because they felt threatened. Granted, he does vaguely hand-wave the threat away, but it's an easy mistake to make to believe this kid is himself making such a threat.
The school board is reacting to some teacher who told them this kid was about to become a murderer. The problem isn't the school or the school board. It's that teacher going straight to the board, instead of talking to the school psychologist first. If a sober person who understood teachers had read that post, they could have stopped this whole mess right at the gate.
It's not about the critcism. It's dumbasses who think he's threatening to shoot people.
RTFX(anga Post). This isn't opinion censorship. This is a bunch of people who thought this kid was threatening another Columbine, and overreacted.
Read it again, and pretend you're a 65-year-old who's completely lost touch with the social cues of youth. Imagine that you're scared in your job because of school murders, and that you're scared of specifically this kid because he wears goth gear and listens to Marilyn Manson or whoever this year's shock band is. Consider that you as this hypothetical teacher mean well, but have become a douche in your old age as so many do, and that you think this kid is sacrificing rats in the bathroom while reciting the necronomicon backwards in pig latin.
Now, read what he wrote again.
From that mindset, it is really, really easy to misunderstand this kid as meaning he's going to shoot up his school. Yes, you and I know that's not what he's saying at all. But it's an easy mistake to make, and that's what happened. The school thinks it's protecting itself from a child murderer.
I was expelled from an Illinois public school for an online speech related issue as well. I set up a web (cgi) based proxy at home, and then informed students at school that it could be used to get around the school filter's censorship of the web.
See, you need to RTFA, because what you did and what's going on here aren't even remotely related.
This kid's getting expelled because some teacher thought he was threatening another Columbine. He's not, but to be frank he sucks at writing, and it's an easy mistake to make. You got expelled because you chose to facilitate the circumvention of school policy. There's a big difference. You deserved it and he doesn't.
See, it's all well and good to pretend that your cgi is somehow this facilitation of free speech, that you're an epic crusader for the rights of good, and that any attempt to quash you is a 1984-style brain censorship which threatens the deep fabric of the nation. The problem is, it's nonsense. The fact of the matter is that school isn't your time. Teenagers seem to be unable to comprehend this. When you're on the job, looking at porn will get you fired. Why? It's not because of the porn itself; nobody can punish you for something protected under the first amendment and blah blah blah. Whatever.
More importantly, you're fucking around at work. That gets you fired. You did the same thing at school, but not just personally. The better metaphor for what you did would be to distribute CDs full of porn to all your coworkers, and told them to watch it at work too. But, it's actually worse than that, because the school has custodial obligations, and you're also opening their interior network to threats like child predators and information/identity thieves.
See, when you're at school, you don't need to be on boobfuck.net . It's really that simple. You didn't have the right to alter the school's network, and you did it anyway. And you know what? You deserved the expulsion.
What's up with schools and a fear of anything electronic these days?
Read what the kid said. He sucks at writing. It's really easy to misread him as threatening another Columbine, especially if you stop reading at the sentence where he says Columbine. Basically, he says he feels threatened, then says the kids at Columbine did what they did because they felt threatened. Later he does vaguely hedge that he's not making an actual threat, that it's just him trying to co-opt someone else's tragedy to make his personal grief seem more important, but frankly the way he wrote it, it's really easy to come to the wrong conclusions.
This is the combination of a kid who needs writing classes and a smack in the head plus a teacher who overreacted and reported a threat that wasn't there. The school and the school board aren't the problem: if the information they had gotten about there being a threat was correct, what they did would have been appropriate - to remove the kid from being able to hurt the other kids while you work on getting him help. The problem is the person who thought what he wrote was a threat in the first place, and a child who was willing to take personal emotional credit for someone else's tragedy.
Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." The teacher meant to do the right thing. They just don't understand kids. Can you honestly say there wasn't a teacher like that in your school too?