To borrow the Ford Pinto analogy from previous posts, it seems somewhat like somebody cutting your brake lines and then you suing Ford for making the lines so easily accessible.
No, it's more like suing Ford for designing the car so that the brake lines are dragging on the ground, making it *inevitable* that the brakes will fail catastrophically.
Ford's defence would be "you should have known that this would happen when you bought the car. Besides, we told everyone six months before to use duct tape to fix them to the undercarriage".
Stupid design flaws are stupid design flaws. It's one of the main reasons that there are laws in many places that ensure civic engineers Know What They Are Doing.
Nice buzzword. Too bad it means "really small leap," and not "fundamental change in the way things work."
And no, economies suffer because of blowhards and the massive speculation bubbles they blow, not because of the natural order of things. Unless you include massive, sheep-like stupidity like that as part of the natural order of things.
Ya, so the users complain about it, but they'll get over.
What kind of users are you talking about? The non-paying kind methinks, because the paying kind do not complain when they don't get their way, they just go away and stop paying you - that is if they ever paid you in the first place.
This is the primary reason that Frontpage extensions still exist at all, despite the fact that no Unix sysadmin would touch it with a 10 foot pole if they had the choice. They can argue until they're blue in the face that it's insecure, it breaks standards, it makes webmasters look like morons, and it kicked your dog, but it all comes down to the fact that it's blazingly simple to use and it already comes with Office.
Sure, you converted 30,000+ users, but they don't exactly have a choice about which server they can use. Try doing that with paying customers at an ISP and you'll hear your boss using words like "attrition rate" and "loss of revenue", terms he damn sure doesn't want to utter, and you don't want to hear used in your direction. In commercial environments, offering more services - thus giving consumers more choice - is the way to do business.
Why would ssh offer less vulerabilities than ftp??
In no small part because FTP was a horrible, horrible design. The protocol itself is broken beyond words, and had to be patched just so that it could work with firewalled and NATed clients, nevermind security.
Quite honestly I wish that FTP had disappeared years ago.
The vast majority of the rest of the internet couldn't keep up with a 1 MB connection on a good day with the wind blowing in the right direction anyway.
Our local cable company provides 5Mbps connections (for downloads). And guess what, 99% of the time download speeds aren't any faster than the 1.5 Mbps connections dsl providers provide. Unless you're downloading from their local network (ie, their news server) the liklihood of getting a faster-than-dsl download rate is laughably slim.
Most download speeds I get from any given site top out at maybe 25-50KB/s instead of the expected 120+KB/s that is the practical maximum of my DSL connection.
I see no reason why a home connection would need to be faster than this, unless you had a good many parallel connections going.
Except they did anyway.
on
Nuke-Lobbing
·
· Score: 1
If you read further into the article, you'll notice that there was a good deal of talk amongst the pilots about how a) you probably won't survive the drop, no matter how much they told you you would,[1] and b) either your carrier group would be gone when you got back, or much of the rest of the world would be. [2]
This is pretty good proof that noone present was harbouring any delusions about the liklihood of survival, although plan B was always there in the slight chance that they might.
[1] In the letters to the editor, there was one story about how one pilot, in a training run with the full warhead (minus fissionable material) executed the manoevre perfectly, but the warhead only exploded about 1100 feet from his position, meaning that he would have been inside the fireball, had it not been a test.
[2] Some of the pilots made plans to land and hole up in some remote location in a nearby friendly nation for some period of time, without bothering to return to their carrier group to check if it were there or not. There were also real plans made by their superiors to land at grass strips someplace.
Um, you could use a *radio* as a geiger counter. You just won't get a guage to determine the exact amount of radiation emitted... you'd just have to kind of play it by ear.
What they've done is they've just developed a program that uses the radio receiver in the GPS/wireless card to determine the amount of gamma radiation being received.
Not much hotter than the tritium illuminator sources in the standard issue compasses carried by infantry.
Sure, maybe a single bullet is not much hotter... of course when you're spewing them forth from the nose of an A-10 Warthog at the rate of 6000 per minute, then things on the ground tend to get a little warm. Not to mention all that uranium dust that results from those bullets actually impacting something, like the ground or even its intended target.
And then you even have to recognize the fact that Tritium is no longer used in watches or clocks, simply because people got tired of having pesky malignant tumours on their wrists.
So while using depleted Uranium looks like a good idea on paper when you're coming up with good ways to pierce steel armour three inches thick, and it certainly looks like a good idea to Americans who probably won't see anyone using it against them on their own soil anytime soon, but the rest of us don't see it as a good thing.
As much as I like Google, it has a monopoly on non-suckiness of search engines.
The thing here is that Google has it's "monopoly" because it doesn't suck. Because they *aren't* evil, and they *aren't* exploiting their position to fuck us all over. For all intents and purposes, they got to be what they are by giving us exactly what we wanted.
You should thank them, not call them evil for their own popularity.
The term "engineer" has become so diluted that anyone can call themselves one. The Texas Society of Professional Engineers is trying to keep the title of engineer something that is earned, not something that is handed out like popcorn.
An engineer is a Professional, not someone who just decided to add the title to their business card.
Okay, I have a palm m105, but I'm making sure this (or something like it, with wireless networking) will be something I'll buy sometime soon.
At any rate, I consider a PDA to be an essential part of my life. I'm an inherently disorganized person, and I needed an organizer (but didn't have one of any kind) long before I bought my palm last October. For years I've been trying to make my computer run reminder programs to tell me when important events were happening, but have always lamented that I didn't have it around all the time. Since I take my palm with me everywhere, I no longer have that problem. Keeping addresses, notes, and to-do's I've always done with paper, but this replaces all those with one tiny package, and it's far easier to sort, coallate, reorganize, and search.
Combined with a my full-sized keyboard, I could have easily used this thing for taking notes in College, and I wish I had (even though it would have been more expensive back then). Currently, I use it for putting in the copious notes I need at work for things that would normally require a scrap of paper. And the to-do list quite handily rids me of the mess of post-it notes that I used to have on my desk. The reason I could really use one that uses wireless networking is so I could paste my notes (often entries from our database) into it so that they can be sneakernetted somewhere else.
One of the other great things that I like to do with this thing is get books in text format so that I can read them while I commute. It's worth the price of a PDA for that reason alone since the palm is way lighter than anything bigger than a paperback. This makes it a great tool for reading books that tend to be quite large, like technical manuals (or The Lord of the Rings, which I'm currently reading - it's 1.2 megabytes if you're curious) for instance. And since my public library has books online that you can only read in a web browser, that wireless functionality suddenly becomes a great boon indeed.
And of course, it's also a great toy for when your travelling or otherwise bored.
Maybe this helps you get more out of your PDA... that's my intention anyway.:)
Enjoyment and challenge on the job is not something that is pointed out to you; it is something you must find for yourself.
Wow. You have lots of experience in this I can see.
Right now time spent at my job consists of about 80% talking to customers on the phone - usually about how their internet connection or their mail doesn't work - and other asinine things like licking and folding, or manually putting payments through a credit card machine. The other 20% consists of doing real work (sysadminning). Occasionally, during busy periods that balance will turn into 100% techsupport/licking/folding, and 0% real work, and if I'm lucky, I'll get lunch breaks.
Let me tell you something about tech support for people with Outlook express and a dialup account. It is mind-numbingly boring. Everyone asks you the same damn questions every day. You don't need to think, you don't even need to spend time discovering what the customer means by "it doesn't work," you just need to read their connection logs and give them the answer you learned five years previous.
If you can find enjoyment and challenge in this somewhere, you deserve a nobel prize.
You might get as much junk mail if the sender pays but you know what? You won't get the same quality of spam. You will get ads from your local grocery store instead of "MAKE MONEY FAST!!!!!!!" and "Add 12 inches to your penis!!"
Spam largely consists of cheap bullshit products, scams, porn, and crap that appeals to the insecurities of stupid people. Do you know why this is?
It's because the individuals who "run" the "businesses" in question are getting something for nothing. In other words, they're all just running scams. If you were to charge $0.05 for every e-mail sent, then it would become a cheap way to advertise, rather than a *free* way to advertise. Suddenly, sending out 5 million e-mails costs you $250,000 instead of $250 (if you include your own labour). For the paltry 0.01% (or less... I don't know what kind of numbers spammers get) response rate, suddenly it becomes a big losing game for everyone that's selling Viagra and porn and pyramid scams. That advertising would be replaced by people selling cars and groceries and books, and while they may still be capitalist scum, the products they're hawking are orders of magnitude less offensive than the crap that's currently being hawked by e-mail.
$0.05 per e-mail isn't going to break the bank for us regular joes - a couple hundred e-mails a month comes out to all of $10.00. Don't forget that it actually costs money to run an e-mail server, and it would be the people running that server that would be collecting the postage. It might even be a good idea to hand the whole system over to your friendly neighbourhood national post office.
Personally, I think this would be a small price to pay for vastly improving the quality (not to mention stemming the quantity) of the advertising in my mailbox. I'll also be happy with the fact that the people doing the advertising would be paying to support the e-mail system instead of working hard to bring about its collapse. As far as I can tell, this is a simple, elegant solution.
Ground level ozone and the stratosphere.
on
Ozone As Pesticide
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· Score: 1
There is no connection between ground level ozone and the stratosphere.
Is this because ground level ozone reacts with other chemicals in the air before it becomes stratospheric ozone? If not, then such a statement means that if the ozone we produce doesn't have anything to do with stratospheric ozone, one could easily deduce that other chemicals we produce have nothing to do with stratospheric ozone as well.
Not that it's really an issue anymore or anything. Replacing CFC's in various manufacturing processes and household appliances is both a process that's finished and proof that other such adjustments for the benefit of the environment are nowhere near as hard or as expensive as industry often complains. Remember when American industries were complaining fervently about how much damage to the economy such a change would make? They're sure quiet about it now.
There are health issues - though probably not that big - perhaps more free radicals in the air to give you lung cancer, and whatever you get when the ozone recombines with other gases, etc.
You mean besides the fact that Ozone is toxic to humans too?
Ozone sickness is a real danger for pilots that operate above 35,000 feet in unsealed aircraft cockpits or cockpits that use fresh air from outside. This is one of the reasons commercial airliners recycle their air.
I'm more worried about them seeing stuff like "American Idol," "Survivor," and "Joe Millionaire," and deciding we should all be exterminated, not subjugated.
Especially if they're a race of ultra-violent beings who can't stand to miss a single episode?:)
The two statements "this is what I'd tell myself" and "this is what I should tell my kids" are closely related. Here's mine:
High school is prison. The inmates are savages. And it's absolutely nothing like the outside. This is what the Lord of the Flies is about. (btw, read it now, before they make you)
You're smart. Study psychology. It'll give you great insight as to how to socialize yourself, not to mention explain the behaviour of your peers.
Bit of useful psychology #1: when you're depressed, you're mean to yourself, and when you're hard on yourself, you're hard on others. Take a hard good look at the mean people around you.
Bit of useful psychology #2: people hate having their bubbles burst. Keep this in mind while exercising #1. This is a great way to make enemies.
If you haven't already, learn how to make friends. Use this knowledge to realize when other, more outgoing people are trying to make friends with you. It's a skill that you'll need throughout your life.
Don't be afraid to make friends with geeks, especially when she's as pretty as Megan B was.:)
Learn to be a good lover. This might not win you points with the popular girls in high school (see that bit about how HS is not real life), but for the most part they're stupid and shallow anyway. Following this path will ensure that your every possible sexual fantasy is fulfilled. It worked for me.:)
You're a brand-new engineer out of college. (smart) You sign up at a company that makes widgets and you come up with an idea for a new product the company can sell that's so ingenious it makes the wheel look not quite so revolutionary. (also smart) You work 80 hours a week to design and build the prototype, then you continue to work 80 hours a week getting it through the manufacturing stage. (hard working) The public just doesn't get it, and/or hates the idea. The company goes bankrupt, you're out of a job, and you're starting again at square one.
Wow, um, all that hard work and intelligence just went to waste, now didn't it? You're just treading water, and get to go through this cycle all over again, perhaps many times over. This happens a lot by the way. Companies and projects fail all the time because of luck, bad timing, or bad moves, through no fault of your own. You might be working your ass off, but if the marketing department doesn't make good decisions, you're screwed. You might be working your ass off in marketing, but if your engineers are making bad decisions, you're screwed. Repeat as necessary for customer service, management, and support personnel. Most people spend their lives going through this cycle time and time again, and you're completely forgetting that success happens with a large component of luck.
The formula goes something like this: 1 part skill + 1 part hard work + 2 parts luck = success.
Just because *you* are smart, worked hard, and succeeded, and all the people you know who have succeeded are smart and worked hard doesn't mean that that's all you need to succeed. For every 1 person like you, there are 50 just like you in every respect except that they're failures. You don't see that in your position though, because the entire experience is completely subjective for you. Equally subjective is the exposure you've had to poor people. How many of them have you actually met? How many have been your friends at one time or another? What experience do you have to judge them for anything at all, let alone ascertain reasons as to why they are where they are? I've known idiots that were rich and poor people who were graduates.
Just look at the components of luck in your three reasons: #1 is bloody obvious, there's a chance, however small, that your contraception won't work. #2 The smarter you are the more likely you are to fail at high school. The opposite is also true, and for mostly the same reasons. It's simply not a world that either represents reality in any way shape or form, or even for the most part teaches you anything of any real worth. Smart people do their best to find a way to opt out of it and get that all-important diploma anyway. #3 I can't argue with however.
Heh. You've obviously never done tech support. Or, for that matter, dealt with the general public as part of your job.
We've managed to prove that human stupidity isn't infinite by the sheer fact that we haven't yet left the planet for the cockroaches, but I assure you that value is very, very large indeed.
It's not about good engineering. It's about great real-world hacks using Oxy-acetylene, duct tape, and whatever else you can lay your hands on. Typically the machines they build need to last all of about 20 minutes anyway.
It's also the logical spinoff of MIT's engineering competitions, where engineers got a box of junk and need to build a robot or a submarine or something.
Slashdot Mirror
To borrow the Ford Pinto analogy from previous posts, it seems somewhat like somebody cutting your brake lines and then you suing Ford for making the lines so easily accessible.
No, it's more like suing Ford for designing the car so that the brake lines are dragging on the ground, making it *inevitable* that the brakes will fail catastrophically.
Ford's defence would be "you should have known that this would happen when you bought the car. Besides, we told everyone six months before to use duct tape to fix them to the undercarriage".
Stupid design flaws are stupid design flaws. It's one of the main reasons that there are laws in many places that ensure civic engineers Know What They Are Doing.
They'd probably get a tax break for it too, so in a round about way, it will all be thanks to the American public. :)
Nice buzzword. Too bad it means "really small leap," and not "fundamental change in the way things work."
And no, economies suffer because of blowhards and the massive speculation bubbles they blow, not because of the natural order of things. Unless you include massive, sheep-like stupidity like that as part of the natural order of things.
You don't suppose that this stock analyst had anything to gain by making wild claims with no ground in reality do you?
Speculation bubbles like this are nothing new. There's no reason for that kind of thing to stop now.
Ya, so the users complain about it, but they'll get over.
What kind of users are you talking about? The non-paying kind methinks, because the paying kind do not complain when they don't get their way, they just go away and stop paying you - that is if they ever paid you in the first place.
This is the primary reason that Frontpage extensions still exist at all, despite the fact that no Unix sysadmin would touch it with a 10 foot pole if they had the choice. They can argue until they're blue in the face that it's insecure, it breaks standards, it makes webmasters look like morons, and it kicked your dog, but it all comes down to the fact that it's blazingly simple to use and it already comes with Office.
Sure, you converted 30,000+ users, but they don't exactly have a choice about which server they can use. Try doing that with paying customers at an ISP and you'll hear your boss using words like "attrition rate" and "loss of revenue", terms he damn sure doesn't want to utter, and you don't want to hear used in your direction. In commercial environments, offering more services - thus giving consumers more choice - is the way to do business.
Why would ssh offer less vulerabilities than ftp??
In no small part because FTP was a horrible, horrible design. The protocol itself is broken beyond words, and had to be patched just so that it could work with firewalled and NATed clients, nevermind security.
Quite honestly I wish that FTP had disappeared years ago.
The vast majority of the rest of the internet couldn't keep up with a 1 MB connection on a good day with the wind blowing in the right direction anyway.
Our local cable company provides 5Mbps connections (for downloads). And guess what, 99% of the time download speeds aren't any faster than the 1.5 Mbps connections dsl providers provide. Unless you're downloading from their local network (ie, their news server) the liklihood of getting a faster-than-dsl download rate is laughably slim.
Most download speeds I get from any given site top out at maybe 25-50KB/s instead of the expected 120+KB/s that is the practical maximum of my DSL connection.
I see no reason why a home connection would need to be faster than this, unless you had a good many parallel connections going.
If you read further into the article, you'll notice that there was a good deal of talk amongst the pilots about how a) you probably won't survive the drop, no matter how much they told you you would,[1] and b) either your carrier group would be gone when you got back, or much of the rest of the world would be. [2]
This is pretty good proof that noone present was harbouring any delusions about the liklihood of survival, although plan B was always there in the slight chance that they might.
[1] In the letters to the editor, there was one story about how one pilot, in a training run with the full warhead (minus fissionable material) executed the manoevre perfectly, but the warhead only exploded about 1100 feet from his position, meaning that he would have been inside the fireball, had it not been a test.
[2] Some of the pilots made plans to land and hole up in some remote location in a nearby friendly nation for some period of time, without bothering to return to their carrier group to check if it were there or not. There were also real plans made by their superiors to land at grass strips someplace.
Um, you could use a *radio* as a geiger counter. You just won't get a guage to determine the exact amount of radiation emitted... you'd just have to kind of play it by ear.
What they've done is they've just developed a program that uses the radio receiver in the GPS/wireless card to determine the amount of gamma radiation being received.
Not much hotter than the tritium illuminator sources in the standard issue compasses carried by infantry.
Sure, maybe a single bullet is not much hotter... of course when you're spewing them forth from the nose of an A-10 Warthog at the rate of 6000 per minute, then things on the ground tend to get a little warm. Not to mention all that uranium dust that results from those bullets actually impacting something, like the ground or even its intended target.
And then you even have to recognize the fact that Tritium is no longer used in watches or clocks, simply because people got tired of having pesky malignant tumours on their wrists.
So while using depleted Uranium looks like a good idea on paper when you're coming up with good ways to pierce steel armour three inches thick, and it certainly looks like a good idea to Americans who probably won't see anyone using it against them on their own soil anytime soon, but the rest of us don't see it as a good thing.
Heh. You know, there's always the tried-and-true method of talking to women...
It turns out a good chunk of them are looking to get laid.
As much as I like Google, it has a monopoly on non-suckiness of search engines.
The thing here is that Google has it's "monopoly" because it doesn't suck. Because they *aren't* evil, and they *aren't* exploiting their position to fuck us all over. For all intents and purposes, they got to be what they are by giving us exactly what we wanted.
You should thank them, not call them evil for their own popularity.
The term "engineer" has become so diluted that anyone can call themselves one. The Texas Society of Professional Engineers is trying to keep the title of engineer something that is earned, not something that is handed out like popcorn.
An engineer is a Professional, not someone who just decided to add the title to their business card.
Patched and there's only 3 comments posted. Damn I'm good! :)
I would like to thank CERT for sending this security notification on a Saturday that I was working, rather than on a Saturday that I was not.
Okay, I have a palm m105, but I'm making sure this (or something like it, with wireless networking) will be something I'll buy sometime soon.
:)
At any rate, I consider a PDA to be an essential part of my life. I'm an inherently disorganized person, and I needed an organizer (but didn't have one of any kind) long before I bought my palm last October. For years I've been trying to make my computer run reminder programs to tell me when important events were happening, but have always lamented that I didn't have it around all the time. Since I take my palm with me everywhere, I no longer have that problem. Keeping addresses, notes, and to-do's I've always done with paper, but this replaces all those with one tiny package, and it's far easier to sort, coallate, reorganize, and search.
Combined with a my full-sized keyboard, I could have easily used this thing for taking notes in College, and I wish I had (even though it would have been more expensive back then). Currently, I use it for putting in the copious notes I need at work for things that would normally require a scrap of paper. And the to-do list quite handily rids me of the mess of post-it notes that I used to have on my desk. The reason I could really use one that uses wireless networking is so I could paste my notes (often entries from our database) into it so that they can be sneakernetted somewhere else.
One of the other great things that I like to do with this thing is get books in text format so that I can read them while I commute. It's worth the price of a PDA for that reason alone since the palm is way lighter than anything bigger than a paperback. This makes it a great tool for reading books that tend to be quite large, like technical manuals (or The Lord of the Rings, which I'm currently reading - it's 1.2 megabytes if you're curious) for instance. And since my public library has books online that you can only read in a web browser, that wireless functionality suddenly becomes a great boon indeed.
And of course, it's also a great toy for when your travelling or otherwise bored.
Maybe this helps you get more out of your PDA... that's my intention anyway.
Enjoyment and challenge on the job is not something that is pointed out to you; it is something you must find for yourself.
Wow. You have lots of experience in this I can see.
Right now time spent at my job consists of about 80% talking to customers on the phone - usually about how their internet connection or their mail doesn't work - and other asinine things like licking and folding, or manually putting payments through a credit card machine. The other 20% consists of doing real work (sysadminning). Occasionally, during busy periods that balance will turn into 100% techsupport/licking/folding, and 0% real work, and if I'm lucky, I'll get lunch breaks.
Let me tell you something about tech support for people with Outlook express and a dialup account. It is mind-numbingly boring. Everyone asks you the same damn questions every day. You don't need to think, you don't even need to spend time discovering what the customer means by "it doesn't work," you just need to read their connection logs and give them the answer you learned five years previous.
If you can find enjoyment and challenge in this somewhere, you deserve a nobel prize.
Slashdot is now fabricated with 100% recycled bits. No CFCs were used in its manufacture. YMMV. IANAL.
HAND.
You might get as much junk mail if the sender pays but you know what? You won't get the same quality of spam. You will get ads from your local grocery store instead of "MAKE MONEY FAST!!!!!!!" and "Add 12 inches to your penis!!"
Spam largely consists of cheap bullshit products, scams, porn, and crap that appeals to the insecurities of stupid people. Do you know why this is?
It's because the individuals who "run" the "businesses" in question are getting something for nothing. In other words, they're all just running scams. If you were to charge $0.05 for every e-mail sent, then it would become a cheap way to advertise, rather than a *free* way to advertise. Suddenly, sending out 5 million e-mails costs you $250,000 instead of $250 (if you include your own labour). For the paltry 0.01% (or less... I don't know what kind of numbers spammers get) response rate, suddenly it becomes a big losing game for everyone that's selling Viagra and porn and pyramid scams. That advertising would be replaced by people selling cars and groceries and books, and while they may still be capitalist scum, the products they're hawking are orders of magnitude less offensive than the crap that's currently being hawked by e-mail.
$0.05 per e-mail isn't going to break the bank for us regular joes - a couple hundred e-mails a month comes out to all of $10.00. Don't forget that it actually costs money to run an e-mail server, and it would be the people running that server that would be collecting the postage. It might even be a good idea to hand the whole system over to your friendly neighbourhood national post office.
Personally, I think this would be a small price to pay for vastly improving the quality (not to mention stemming the quantity) of the advertising in my mailbox. I'll also be happy with the fact that the people doing the advertising would be paying to support the e-mail system instead of working hard to bring about its collapse. As far as I can tell, this is a simple, elegant solution.
There is no connection between ground level ozone and the stratosphere.
Is this because ground level ozone reacts with other chemicals in the air before it becomes stratospheric ozone? If not, then such a statement means that if the ozone we produce doesn't have anything to do with stratospheric ozone, one could easily deduce that other chemicals we produce have nothing to do with stratospheric ozone as well.
Not that it's really an issue anymore or anything. Replacing CFC's in various manufacturing processes and household appliances is both a process that's finished and proof that other such adjustments for the benefit of the environment are nowhere near as hard or as expensive as industry often complains. Remember when American industries were complaining fervently about how much damage to the economy such a change would make? They're sure quiet about it now.
There are health issues - though probably not that big - perhaps more free radicals in the air to give you lung cancer, and whatever you get when the ozone recombines with other gases, etc.
You mean besides the fact that Ozone is toxic to humans too?
Ozone sickness is a real danger for pilots that operate above 35,000 feet in unsealed aircraft cockpits or cockpits that use fresh air from outside. This is one of the reasons commercial airliners recycle their air.
I'm more worried about them seeing stuff like "American Idol," "Survivor," and "Joe Millionaire," and deciding we should all be exterminated, not subjugated.
:)
Especially if they're a race of ultra-violent beings who can't stand to miss a single episode?
The two statements "this is what I'd tell myself" and "this is what I should tell my kids" are closely related. Here's mine:
:)
:)
High school is prison. The inmates are savages. And it's absolutely nothing like the outside. This is what the Lord of the Flies is about. (btw, read it now, before they make you)
You're smart. Study psychology. It'll give you great insight as to how to socialize yourself, not to mention explain the behaviour of your peers.
Bit of useful psychology #1: when you're depressed, you're mean to yourself, and when you're hard on yourself, you're hard on others. Take a hard good look at the mean people around you.
Bit of useful psychology #2: people hate having their bubbles burst. Keep this in mind while exercising #1. This is a great way to make enemies.
If you haven't already, learn how to make friends. Use this knowledge to realize when other, more outgoing people are trying to make friends with you. It's a skill that you'll need throughout your life.
Don't be afraid to make friends with geeks, especially when she's as pretty as Megan B was.
Learn to be a good lover. This might not win you points with the popular girls in high school (see that bit about how HS is not real life), but for the most part they're stupid and shallow anyway. Following this path will ensure that your every possible sexual fantasy is fulfilled. It worked for me.
You're a brand-new engineer out of college. (smart) You sign up at a company that makes widgets and you come up with an idea for a new product the company can sell that's so ingenious it makes the wheel look not quite so revolutionary. (also smart) You work 80 hours a week to design and build the prototype, then you continue to work 80 hours a week getting it through the manufacturing stage. (hard working) The public just doesn't get it, and/or hates the idea. The company goes bankrupt, you're out of a job, and you're starting again at square one.
Wow, um, all that hard work and intelligence just went to waste, now didn't it? You're just treading water, and get to go through this cycle all over again, perhaps many times over. This happens a lot by the way. Companies and projects fail all the time because of luck, bad timing, or bad moves, through no fault of your own. You might be working your ass off, but if the marketing department doesn't make good decisions, you're screwed. You might be working your ass off in marketing, but if your engineers are making bad decisions, you're screwed. Repeat as necessary for customer service, management, and support personnel. Most people spend their lives going through this cycle time and time again, and you're completely forgetting that success happens with a large component of luck.
The formula goes something like this:
1 part skill + 1 part hard work + 2 parts luck = success.
Just because *you* are smart, worked hard, and succeeded, and all the people you know who have succeeded are smart and worked hard doesn't mean that that's all you need to succeed. For every 1 person like you, there are 50 just like you in every respect except that they're failures. You don't see that in your position though, because the entire experience is completely subjective for you. Equally subjective is the exposure you've had to poor people. How many of them have you actually met? How many have been your friends at one time or another? What experience do you have to judge them for anything at all, let alone ascertain reasons as to why they are where they are? I've known idiots that were rich and poor people who were graduates.
Just look at the components of luck in your three reasons: #1 is bloody obvious, there's a chance, however small, that your contraception won't work. #2 The smarter you are the more likely you are to fail at high school. The opposite is also true, and for mostly the same reasons. It's simply not a world that either represents reality in any way shape or form, or even for the most part teaches you anything of any real worth. Smart people do their best to find a way to opt out of it and get that all-important diploma anyway. #3 I can't argue with however.
Heh. You've obviously never done tech support. Or, for that matter, dealt with the general public as part of your job.
We've managed to prove that human stupidity isn't infinite by the sheer fact that we haven't yet left the planet for the cockroaches, but I assure you that value is very, very large indeed.
It's not about good engineering. It's about great real-world hacks using Oxy-acetylene, duct tape, and whatever else you can lay your hands on. Typically the machines they build need to last all of about 20 minutes anyway.
It's also the logical spinoff of MIT's engineering competitions, where engineers got a box of junk and need to build a robot or a submarine or something.