I had a path similar to the one you described - gifted high school, Ivy League college, burnout. Though instead of "civil service" I have ended up in a dilbert corporate cubicle job to pay the mortgage.
I hope this boy doesn't get Lost in the Meritocracy like I did.
Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever by Walter Kirn
--
I don't measure a man's success by how high he climbs but how high he bounces when he hits bottom.
General George S. Patton
Great link Frallon. I enjoyed the story. Reminds me a lot of my Sisters experiences in medical school. At least as far as the tendency to be socially ostracized since she was there on her merits and missing one well off family. You can succeed on merit in America but only so far. But what is life really all about anyway? Am I more of a success because I have a faithful wife and healthy children or is it something else?
"logically and by all reason they should succeed"?!? That's bullshit.
Your absolutely right that was my point. So called "gifted" children are told that they will succeed because they are so gifted and when harsh reality sets in they often burn out. Your Lucky if your not smart enough to figure that out till college. Then at least you might meet someone who can get you a decent job. However I would say like hard work persistence is it's own reward.
I feel a lot more successful since I changed my priorities. Not lowering the bar just realizing it didn't even matter.
You see this happen all the time they push kids who are really smart so hard they fizzle out. I went to a special school for "gifted" children and most of my friends were burned out by their mid 20's. Not to mention depressed because they didn't make their first million by the age of 25. I "gave up" dropped contact with all my smart friends and got a "civil service" job. Ignorance truly is bliss, if your not freaked out by the state of the world you probably don't understand what is going on. The world doesn't know what to do with gifted people and gifted people are sideswiped by the fact that even though logically and by all reason they should succeed they don't. The world just doesn't work that way.
So "Bing" is another name for MS search but we are supposed to believe they jumped Yahoo by changing the name?... But, knowing Microsoft, maybe they did an OS patch which "fixed" the default search field for everyone using Windows and now they all use Bing.
Yes, in this way I have accidentally used live search in the past. Without good results and when I heard of bind I tried it next to a window with Google and their results still blow Bing away. I am surprised with this being/. that more people haven't pointed out that this is just a name change no new tech/algorithms. Even the preview feature a lot of people keep mentioning isn't really new or groundbreaking and possibly open to litigation.
I totally agree. Although I think there is some value to a college education. The value is just not what most people think it is.
My wife and I joke about it all the time how when I was younger I had managed to get some experience at the company I worked for on maintaining their AS400 and training other employees. When I would go to job interviews they would say wow your experience looks great but we need someone with a degree. Then after I got my degree I went to interviews and they said wow you have a degree but we would like to see more experience.
I finally figured out that I really needed to know someone to get hired. I volunteered at a large government agency for 6 months before I got a job with a vendor. They key was to treat the volunteer gig like a real job while focusing on building relationships with everyone there. It was then really easy to get a job since I knew people. I am hoping that now that I work in the industry I trained for that I can make contacts and move back into private service industry where there is more money to be made.
So a gay porn screen saver with a short delay would be great... The wanna be macho guys would leave it alone and the girls would "trust" you:-D
Uhmm... No! You definitely would enter the "Friend" zone with the girls. Or alternatively get laid a lot more just not in the way you may have thought. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Why does slashdot allow people to submit stories about their own blog posts? It seems like that bypasses an important filter - someone else finding the story and deciding it's important. Clearly, this story wouldn't have made it to slashdot if the author hadn't submitted it, because 90% of it is just nitpicking at minor details of a system that hasn't even been released yet.
I am kind of surprised that the story made it through. But it is not like they have a lot of choice in stories. I posted several stories myself. I later went back and found that they looked like they had been posted by a drunken baboon with a twitch after a night of freebasing. Perhaps you could contribute some yourself and see if you can improve on that.
It's a fair bet when Biden cries for the artists, this isn't the sort of artist he cries for. More examples of artists (real artists, not corporations posing as artists) being ripped off here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
...
That is the greatest idea I have ever seen. Those "Hollywood Accountants" are geniuses. Now I just need to figure out a way to apply that to my life. I joke I joke. I actually knew a guy who did just that. He formed a limited liability company and when he got hired at a normal job it was as a contractor. The llc then paid his rent and food and car. This was supposed to save him money on taxes but instead he got a nice audit from the IRS. lol
... Part of Freedom was allowing people to choose their own set of rules (precisely what globalism seeks to take away). Unfortunately, that all ended in the early 1900's when Federal income tax was instituted and senators became popularly elected. The "masses", as you put it, are much easier to manipulate than 50 state governments. People believe the news when they see it.
So we lost our freedom with a couple seemingly innocuous swishes of a pen. In theory the same thing could win it back. All we have to do is make it sound to them like they are gaining more power and sound to the masses like they are saving the planet or think of the children mentality. I am open to suggestions.
they are selling it at a loss. A device like this is usually sold as a loss leader as they intend to make up the lost revenue in the sale of the consumables(in this case the ebooks).
People who roll back the odometer arn't thinking that far ahead unfortunatly to many people operate in that mode.
Funny you should mention Fable 1 as I just downloaded it to my 360 since the 3 copies I purchased didn't work playing from the game disk. It was 800 points. So far the download works with only the occational loud but brief fuzz noise comming from the speakers. 15 bucks for fable one is stupid along with 49 bucks for a used fable 2 disk. I also had to copy the fable 2 to the disk to stop it from freezing every 5 minutes but that was borrowed from a friend so I have to wait till fable 2 gets more resonable before I can acually play the game since even though it is on the 120G HDD I can't play that one without a disk.
Anyway I don't think there is any question that what they are doing is wrong. If I pay for new it should be new not gently used. Ofcourse because they are so overpriced the last game I got was Halo3 a friend bought it used for me had to take the first copy back as unplayable. The second copy wont load several levels(I haven't had a chance to copy to HDD since I just got the 120G) Before that I bought Pinata Island only because my kids begged me for it I wont make that mistake again.
I for one am glad for the air usage tax. Paid of course to the RAIA Regional Air Industry Association. Who would protect our air if they didn't. The government? pushah! Finally someone is doing something about the air shortage. I look forward to the new legislation which will only allow people to breath once every 3 minutes. I already have my bumper sticker "Don't Be an Air Hog" If you don't like it you can pay the higher cost "Air Hog Tax". These criminals who believe in sharing air are sick. Don't rich people who can afford to pay for it deserve more air.
Now that's funny! I love when they "acknowledge" that the company owns patents filed by their employees. They say it backwards so you may not notice it at first. That makes me wonder if you recorded this patent app with a text reader and played it backwards would you hear Satan?
How is building a pile of stones to throw different than a bird building a nest before laying eggs?
Because building a nest is genetically wired into the bird. Make the bird sterile, and it'll keep building nests anyway. Moreover, it's a behavior which has existed for millions of years. It's a completely different phenomenon than a chimp learning to use objects as weapons.
The big thing is that it demonstrates that chimpanzees have some rudimentary understanding of time. He's obviously able to observe his current situation, remember it as a past event, detect a recurring pattern, deduce that it's likely to repeat in the future, decide on an action to be carried out at a future time, and prepare materials required to carry it out. That's no small feat.
This is obviously a feel good anthropomorphic article(no I didn't RTFA) But it has been shown chimps are naturally paranoid as a survival trait. This could just be an extension of that.
Indeed. I can see the convenience of the thing. I do like to read several books during the week, putting each down when I reach my tolerance level.
If all books for the Kindle were $10 (similar to the one price of iTunes) then it would be worthwhile to me, providing that computer books were available. I spend, on average, about $50/month on two to three books.
It would be nice to have my entire computer book collection available (as I do on my laptop). The space savings in my library alone would be awesome.
But the biggest downside is that I can't lend out the books anymore. Of the six books I bought in the past couple months, four of them are now on loan to friends.
Your typical user, maybe. Off the top of my head I can guess: Online banking, ebay, e-mail, Reuters, and a search engine. I don't think my mother or father use more than 25 websites on a regular basis. Not even I do on a daily basis unless if I am looking into a specific topic.
I was going to say you forgot/. but then I realized you were talking about the average user who if they've even heard of it gets it confused with.hack//SIGN
The idea that IE8 is faster in any way is laughable. I applaud the OP for lightening my day.
I spit my coffee all over my keyboard when I read this headline. That is the funniest thing I have ever heard. After 15 years in the IT industry using every operating system from win3.11 to Solaris as well as almost every browser (once you get past the GUI there are really only a handful of engines). I use Chrome at home Because it is wicked fast both to start up and to render pages. I use Firefox at work when I can. IE is most defiantly the slowest browser overall Chrome being the fastest I have tried lately. Maybe that is why Microsoft websites block Chrome. Admittedly the turtle that is IE8 I have at home is a beta version running on XP but still come on.
Or a positive correlation. Games are more expensive, so knife crime is down. Might even be causative: no money left after buying games to buy knives. Should be easy to check. Is spoon or fork crime up?
Right off the bat, there's some serious overgeneralizing in that statement. However, if it is the case, then the solution is simple in concept but difficult in execution.
Show young people that the system can work for them. That involves thousands of hours of education in basic finance, civics, and law.
Show young people that the system can work against them. That involves an effective police force and appropriate punishments.
Question for you:
If the majority of the population are retired, and they vote for the young minority to work double shifts to support them, and the police enforce the will of the majority vote, is that freedom, or is it slavery?
No that's my new retirement plan. You are a genius!
The solutions usually are simple but that doesn't mean we should let a moron like Taylor, bless his heart, decide what those solutions are. If they ban or limit through taxation video games something else will set off these unstable individuals.
The real sad truth is there is nothing at all that Taylor could have done to save his son. We can mitigate risk but any sense of control that you think you have is an illusion. Senseless acts will still happen all the time. Life is pain anyone who tells you different is selling something.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a path similar to the one you described - gifted high school, Ivy League college, burnout. Though instead of "civil service" I have ended up in a dilbert corporate cubicle job to pay the mortgage.
I hope this boy doesn't get Lost in the Meritocracy like I did.
Check out: Lost in the Meritocracy - The Atlantic (January/February 2005)
Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever by Walter Kirn
-- I don't measure a man's success by how high he climbs but how high he bounces when he hits bottom. General George S. Patton
Great link Frallon. I enjoyed the story. Reminds me a lot of my Sisters experiences in medical school. At least as far as the tendency to be socially ostracized since she was there on her merits and missing one well off family. You can succeed on merit in America but only so far. But what is life really all about anyway? Am I more of a success because I have a faithful wife and healthy children or is it something else?
"logically and by all reason they should succeed"?!? That's bullshit.
Your absolutely right that was my point. So called "gifted" children are told that they will succeed because they are so gifted and when harsh reality sets in they often burn out. Your Lucky if your not smart enough to figure that out till college. Then at least you might meet someone who can get you a decent job. However I would say like hard work persistence is it's own reward.
I feel a lot more successful since I changed my priorities. Not lowering the bar just realizing it didn't even matter.
You see this happen all the time they push kids who are really smart so hard they fizzle out. I went to a special school for "gifted" children and most of my friends were burned out by their mid 20's. Not to mention depressed because they didn't make their first million by the age of 25. I "gave up" dropped contact with all my smart friends and got a "civil service" job. Ignorance truly is bliss, if your not freaked out by the state of the world you probably don't understand what is going on. The world doesn't know what to do with gifted people and gifted people are sideswiped by the fact that even though logically and by all reason they should succeed they don't. The world just doesn't work that way.
So "Bing" is another name for MS search but we are supposed to believe they jumped Yahoo by changing the name? ... But, knowing Microsoft, maybe they did an OS patch which "fixed" the default search field for everyone using Windows and now they all use Bing.
Yes, in this way I have accidentally used live search in the past. Without good results and when I heard of bind I tried it next to a window with Google and their results still blow Bing away. I am surprised with this being /. that more people haven't pointed out that this is just a name change no new tech/algorithms. Even the preview feature a lot of people keep mentioning isn't really new or groundbreaking and possibly open to litigation.
I totally agree. Although I think there is some value to a college education. The value is just not what most people think it is.
My wife and I joke about it all the time how when I was younger I had managed to get some experience at the company I worked for on maintaining their AS400 and training other employees. When I would go to job interviews they would say wow your experience looks great but we need someone with a degree. Then after I got my degree I went to interviews and they said wow you have a degree but we would like to see more experience.
I finally figured out that I really needed to know someone to get hired. I volunteered at a large government agency for 6 months before I got a job with a vendor. They key was to treat the volunteer gig like a real job while focusing on building relationships with everyone there. It was then really easy to get a job since I knew people. I am hoping that now that I work in the industry I trained for that I can make contacts and move back into private service industry where there is more money to be made.
So a gay porn screen saver with a short delay would be great... The wanna be macho guys would leave it alone and the girls would "trust" you :-D
Uhmm... No! You definitely would enter the "Friend" zone with the girls. Or alternatively get laid a lot more just not in the way you may have thought. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
All of ye have given good technical answers, and they would most-likely work, but I think ye overlooked the most practical solution:
"No."
Except he went to an "art-oriented institution" to get laid. Yelling "No." at all the pretty girls won't further that goal.
What he really wants but is to embarrassed to ask to a way to make the laptop hypnotize females when he lets them use it.
Why does slashdot allow people to submit stories about their own blog posts? It seems like that bypasses an important filter - someone else finding the story and deciding it's important. Clearly, this story wouldn't have made it to slashdot if the author hadn't submitted it, because 90% of it is just nitpicking at minor details of a system that hasn't even been released yet.
I am kind of surprised that the story made it through. But it is not like they have a lot of choice in stories. I posted several stories myself. I later went back and found that they looked like they had been posted by a drunken baboon with a twitch after a night of freebasing. Perhaps you could contribute some yourself and see if you can improve on that.
Just get her a small cheap phone and teach her how to use it. If she gets lost due to the school or her own demise, she can call and say where she is.
Wow, which carriers have coverage in Purgatory?
All of them, that is where their customer service is located.
Whole Grain food is not a drug.
Now that's funny Cheerios Warning
My favorite comment was from Dr Kim
I hope it remains over-the-counter
lol
Next I'll have to get a prescription for my Quaker Oats
until Voyager returns from the edge as Vyger and answers all our questions or are we in an alternate timeline now?
It's a fair bet when Biden cries for the artists, this isn't the sort of artist he cries for. More examples of artists (real artists, not corporations posing as artists) being ripped off here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
...
That is the greatest idea I have ever seen. Those "Hollywood Accountants" are geniuses. Now I just need to figure out a way to apply that to my life. I joke I joke. I actually knew a guy who did just that. He formed a limited liability company and when he got hired at a normal job it was as a contractor. The llc then paid his rent and food and car. This was supposed to save him money on taxes but instead he got a nice audit from the IRS. lol
... Part of Freedom was allowing people to choose their own set of rules (precisely what globalism seeks to take away). Unfortunately, that all ended in the early 1900's when Federal income tax was instituted and senators became popularly elected. The "masses", as you put it, are much easier to manipulate than 50 state governments. People believe the news when they see it.
So we lost our freedom with a couple seemingly innocuous swishes of a pen. In theory the same thing could win it back. All we have to do is make it sound to them like they are gaining more power and sound to the masses like they are saving the planet or think of the children mentality. I am open to suggestions.
they are selling it at a loss. A device like this is usually sold as a loss leader as they intend to make up the lost revenue in the sale of the consumables(in this case the ebooks).
Perhaps Microsoft should consider adopting a six months interval between updates...
Little known history Bill Gates wanted to do this but nobody would pay $100+ for the new OS twice a year.
People who roll back the odometer arn't thinking that far ahead unfortunatly to many people operate in that mode.
Funny you should mention Fable 1 as I just downloaded it to my 360 since the 3 copies I purchased didn't work playing from the game disk. It was 800 points. So far the download works with only the occational loud but brief fuzz noise comming from the speakers. 15 bucks for fable one is stupid along with 49 bucks for a used fable 2 disk. I also had to copy the fable 2 to the disk to stop it from freezing every 5 minutes but that was borrowed from a friend so I have to wait till fable 2 gets more resonable before I can acually play the game since even though it is on the 120G HDD I can't play that one without a disk.
Anyway I don't think there is any question that what they are doing is wrong. If I pay for new it should be new not gently used. Ofcourse because they are so overpriced the last game I got was Halo3 a friend bought it used for me had to take the first copy back as unplayable. The second copy wont load several levels(I haven't had a chance to copy to HDD since I just got the 120G) Before that I bought Pinata Island only because my kids begged me for it I wont make that mistake again.
They could just as well try to sell air. ;)
I for one am glad for the air usage tax. Paid of course to the RAIA Regional Air Industry Association. Who would protect our air if they didn't. The government? pushah! Finally someone is doing something about the air shortage. I look forward to the new legislation which will only allow people to breath once every 3 minutes. I already have my bumper sticker "Don't Be an Air Hog" If you don't like it you can pay the higher cost "Air Hog Tax". These criminals who believe in sharing air are sick. Don't rich people who can afford to pay for it deserve more air.
Now that's funny! I love when they "acknowledge" that the company owns patents filed by their employees. They say it backwards so you may not notice it at first. That makes me wonder if you recorded this patent app with a text reader and played it backwards would you hear Satan?
Because building a nest is genetically wired into the bird. Make the bird sterile, and it'll keep building nests anyway. Moreover, it's a behavior which has existed for millions of years. It's a completely different phenomenon than a chimp learning to use objects as weapons.
The big thing is that it demonstrates that chimpanzees have some rudimentary understanding of time. He's obviously able to observe his current situation, remember it as a past event, detect a recurring pattern, deduce that it's likely to repeat in the future, decide on an action to be carried out at a future time, and prepare materials required to carry it out. That's no small feat.
This is obviously a feel good anthropomorphic article(no I didn't RTFA) But it has been shown chimps are naturally paranoid as a survival trait. This could just be an extension of that.
Indeed. I can see the convenience of the thing. I do like to read several books during the week, putting each down when I reach my tolerance level.
If all books for the Kindle were $10 (similar to the one price of iTunes) then it would be worthwhile to me, providing that computer books were available. I spend, on average, about $50/month on two to three books.
It would be nice to have my entire computer book collection available (as I do on my laptop). The space savings in my library alone would be awesome.
But the biggest downside is that I can't lend out the books anymore. Of the six books I bought in the past couple months, four of them are now on loan to friends.
You could always lend them your kindle.
(who only views 25 sites?)
Your typical user, maybe. Off the top of my head I can guess: Online banking, ebay, e-mail, Reuters, and a search engine. I don't think my mother or father use more than 25 websites on a regular basis. Not even I do on a daily basis unless if I am looking into a specific topic.
I was going to say you forgot /. but then I realized you were talking about the average user who if they've even heard of it gets it confused with .hack//SIGN
The idea that IE8 is faster in any way is laughable. I applaud the OP for lightening my day.
I spit my coffee all over my keyboard when I read this headline. That is the funniest thing I have ever heard. After 15 years in the IT industry using every operating system from win3.11 to Solaris as well as almost every browser (once you get past the GUI there are really only a handful of engines). I use Chrome at home Because it is wicked fast both to start up and to render pages. I use Firefox at work when I can. IE is most defiantly the slowest browser overall Chrome being the fastest I have tried lately. Maybe that is why Microsoft websites block Chrome. Admittedly the turtle that is IE8 I have at home is a beta version running on XP but still come on.
Or a positive correlation. Games are more expensive, so knife crime is down. Might even be causative: no money left after buying games to buy knives. Should be easy to check. Is spoon or fork crime up?
No but spork crime is on the rise.
I'm not smart enough to understand why he doesn't advocate simply taxing knives to reduce knife related crimes.
Insanity: The behavior whereby a person flouts societal norms and becomes a danger to himself and others.
Quick call the men in white coats we've identified another one.
It goes something like in the land of the insane the sane man is insane.
We live in a perverse world don't we?
Right off the bat, there's some serious overgeneralizing in that statement. However, if it is the case, then the solution is simple in concept but difficult in execution. Show young people that the system can work for them. That involves thousands of hours of education in basic finance, civics, and law. Show young people that the system can work against them. That involves an effective police force and appropriate punishments.
Question for you:
If the majority of the population are retired, and they vote for the young minority to work double shifts to support them, and the police enforce the will of the majority vote, is that freedom, or is it slavery?
No that's my new retirement plan. You are a genius!
The solutions usually are simple but that doesn't mean we should let a moron like Taylor, bless his heart, decide what those solutions are. If they ban or limit through taxation video games something else will set off these unstable individuals.
The real sad truth is there is nothing at all that Taylor could have done to save his son. We can mitigate risk but any sense of control that you think you have is an illusion. Senseless acts will still happen all the time. Life is pain anyone who tells you different is selling something.