Your old sig seemed much more ironically appropriate: "Two wrongs don't make a right; it takes three or four."
I never said anything about Sparta, and I don't really care that much about Sparta. People are by nature stupid and mean, and trying to pretend they (we) aren't is pointless. Of course it's always been tough, but I don't think the appropriate response to "he's being a jerk" is "people have always been jerks".
I wasn't really trying to make a point, other than if you feel school is causing you too much stress, get out... it's not a crime. I meant it more as just telling my rambly story.
The line between civil and criminal trials has been so blurred it is barely noticable. In legal terms, you're right, but I'd say most any large civil case in recent memory has the feel of a criminal prosecution.
Proving the conjecture false would mean that modern encryption technology, the foundation of electronic commerce, would be open to easy attack.
The article was cool except for this. Every single technology article has to be related to "e-commerce". Commerce this, commerce that. This has nothing to do with freaking COMMERCE! I'm sick of it. Take your stupid money and your stupid analysts and your STUPID EXECUTIVES and get them out of here!
When the stories started coming out of Columbine, I was horrified--not because I couldn't believe things like that would happen ("yeah, they were freaks, so we called them fags and squirted ketchup on them") but because the things I had run into myself had actually been carried out to the extent of driving somebody to kill. These people snapped, and in a way I'm selfishly glad they just shot a bunch of random people. I don't condone their actions at all, but if they had actually gone after their tormentors and left innocent people alone, I don't know how much I would have been able to hold it against them. There is only so much abuse a person can be expected to take, and the stuff getting thrown at you in high school would make a sadistic Nazi guard proud.
I always feel kind of bad mentioning this stuff, because I know it's nowhere near the magnitude of what I see others going through, but I had a very hard time in school. I didn't go out of my way to avoid people; I tried (every day!) to make friends. But for some reason I just didn't fit, and so a number of people decided to make me their primary target.
For those of you who haven't experienced what I'm talking about, imagine that you are required to report to a certain place every day, and throughout the whole day someone is right by your side, publically insulting you. The idea of schools being a place of education is a joke, because aside from them being tuned only to a specific learning style, it's impossible to learn when you dread going to your most interesting class because some guy in it has decided you deserve public humiliation. You don't dare try to actively learn because you know it will attract more attention, and therefore mockery.
Oh yeah, girls. I wouldn't consider myself incredibly attractive, but I'm not so low on self-esteem to consider myself repulsive. And yet girls didn't ever talk to me, except if they needed, say, help with their calculator or something. I got to the point of slapping myself romantically if I even noticed a girl and just thinking "Don't bother. You'll just get hurt." When you see everyone holding hands with their current romantic obsessions, and you have to keep yourself from even entertaining the smallest crush, that's gotta do some damage.
Thing is, my little adventures notwithstanding, I'd say I didn't even go through a significant fraction of the stuff I hear about, and I could feel myself ready to snap. My mind just bent under the pressure until I actually wished I would just start ranting and screaming in class and I could let it out; maybe it would get some attention and things would ease up a little. But I didn't. I have to point out that Mr. Gill, my history teacher, helped significantly in this regard. I'm not sure he ever really understood fully why many of the assignments were intellectually offensive to me and why I couldn't seem to have a social life, but he made a little time to listen, and that was important.
It's true - the world after high school is a big, beautiful place.
I'll second that. I made up my mind to quit after my junior year, and I went and took my GED (2.5 months ago, I think). I planned to just go on to college, but things didn't happen that way, and now I've got a full-time programming job. Salary, benefits, and everything; I've got my own apartment, and life is good. There's still a ton of stress, but it's amazing how life can be a little bit less horrible when the people around you aren't actively tormenting you for amusement.
Interestingly, I was on the train home from work last night when I saw some kids (I'd guess high school age) riding the same car as me. I instantly tensed up; my primitive Pavlovian response was to expect them to point and snicker, or maybe walk over and taunt me. That they didn't was an incredible relief.
If you're in a similar situation, and the pressure just keeps building up, my advice is get out. My guess is it's distracting you from getting "good grades" anyway. You've probably arrogantly told yourself "I know most of this stuff; I can do it better than they're teaching it." Okay, prove it. If you're willing to work hard and know what you're doing, you can at least scrape by, and I know I would rather do that than suffer what I know must be going on in the lives of so many kids.
Yeah, and this loser didn't plead not guilty either, so he deserved what he got? There is something to be said for "not dignifying the charges with a response".
- Every window uses the "Side Titlebar" style, which in enlightenment is only used for some windows where the width is too short and the height is longer.
Unless you hack the theme, like I did because I thought the side titlebar was cooler. I think it was a different theme, though... "Hand of God" maybe.
Seriously. I've got a 400MHz K6-II running FreeBSD and a 333MHz iMac running Linux. Now, I'm not a gamer, so my outlook may be different, but I considered these to be, if not top-of-the-line, at least pleasantly high-performance. Now they're not even "low end"? I'm going to cry myself to sleep tonight...
This is what I do, and I'm planning to give free shells to friends I know. You might consider doing something similar: get together with some friends of yours, hook a box up with DSL or possibly stick it in co-lo, and you now have your very own mail provider.
That's it. Next census, I'm filling out name, age, and gender, and marking all the rest "refuse to answer". I will not sit idly by while the government uses this information against its own citizens.
I believe software for these critical applications should be written by [...] people who
have sworn to obey a code of ethics[, not] a bunch of long-hair idealists.
Yeah, like those crazy doctors with their Hippocratic oath and all. If I were injured, I would prefer my operation to be performed by professionals, not long-hair idealists who swear idealistic oaths to do no harm.
I'd feel reasonably safe if my hospital used PostgreSQL, though, since it supports transactions and such, and operates in full write-through mode by default.
I think I'd probably be okay with it, but I'd want to know ahead of time, so I could put a lot more effort into the layout and double-checking of my code. If I had already written something and I got a message telling me it was being used in a hospital, I'd probably go back and take a good hard look at things. If I didn't understand something, I'd be disposed to do a clean rewrite of that piece, taking copious notes.
It's not my skills I'm worried about, just my normal less-than-perfect coding habits.
Me too. In fact I used those same words when this article showed up on Kuro5hin recently. Actually, I'm quite disappointed that this even showed up on Slashdot, because this can only lend credence to Jorrit's apparent belief that he has done something useful for the hacker community with this interview.
RMS made a few simple meta-requests for this interview, and Jorrit abided by absolutely none of them. In fact, a number of statements almost seem to be calculated to have the precise effect of pissing RMS off, which is odd, since this whole affair was ostensibly for the purpose of getting helpful advice from him. I'm proud of RMS for exercising the amount of patience and control that he did.
Bills could be presented on TV and voted on by the people every evening.
Do you have the time or inclination to understand, in detail, every piece of IT-related legislation that goes before the legislature of the various
jurisdictions you live in? I doubt it - and that's in an area of policy where you presumably have some interest and expertise. Now, consider the
thousands of other pieces of legislation that pass before those bodies in the course of a year. Can you be expected to understand, even cursorily,
more than a few of them without devoting your life to the job?
I wouldn't have a problem of that, because I would automatically vote "no" on almost all of them. "Thousands of pieces of legislation" is the problem... The Federal government, at least, is set up the way it is specifically to prevent the government from making too many laws. The government should stay out of anything that is not an extreme emergency, and even then they should stay out of it unless they have been granted the authority to deal with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Your old sig seemed much more ironically appropriate: "Two wrongs don't make a right; it takes three or four."
I never said anything about Sparta, and I don't really care that much about Sparta. People are by nature stupid and mean, and trying to pretend they (we) aren't is pointless. Of course it's always been tough, but I don't think the appropriate response to "he's being a jerk" is "people have always been jerks".
I wasn't really trying to make a point, other than if you feel school is causing you too much stress, get out... it's not a crime. I meant it more as just telling my rambly story.
The line between civil and criminal trials has been so blurred it is barely noticable. In legal terms, you're right, but I'd say most any large civil case in recent memory has the feel of a criminal prosecution.
The article was cool except for this. Every single technology article has to be related to "e-commerce". Commerce this, commerce that. This has nothing to do with freaking COMMERCE! I'm sick of it. Take your stupid money and your stupid analysts and your STUPID EXECUTIVES and get them out of here!
</rant>
Whoa cool. Where can I find an MP3? If it doesn't completely suck, I will definitely buy the CD.
That was Taco's comment. They posted it under "JonKatz" so the people who complain wouldn't have to see it.
When the stories started coming out of Columbine, I was horrified--not because I couldn't believe things like that would happen ("yeah, they were freaks, so we called them fags and squirted ketchup on them") but because the things I had run into myself had actually been carried out to the extent of driving somebody to kill. These people snapped, and in a way I'm selfishly glad they just shot a bunch of random people. I don't condone their actions at all, but if they had actually gone after their tormentors and left innocent people alone, I don't know how much I would have been able to hold it against them. There is only so much abuse a person can be expected to take, and the stuff getting thrown at you in high school would make a sadistic Nazi guard proud.
I always feel kind of bad mentioning this stuff, because I know it's nowhere near the magnitude of what I see others going through, but I had a very hard time in school. I didn't go out of my way to avoid people; I tried (every day!) to make friends. But for some reason I just didn't fit, and so a number of people decided to make me their primary target.
For those of you who haven't experienced what I'm talking about, imagine that you are required to report to a certain place every day, and throughout the whole day someone is right by your side, publically insulting you. The idea of schools being a place of education is a joke, because aside from them being tuned only to a specific learning style, it's impossible to learn when you dread going to your most interesting class because some guy in it has decided you deserve public humiliation. You don't dare try to actively learn because you know it will attract more attention, and therefore mockery.
Oh yeah, girls. I wouldn't consider myself incredibly attractive, but I'm not so low on self-esteem to consider myself repulsive. And yet girls didn't ever talk to me, except if they needed, say, help with their calculator or something. I got to the point of slapping myself romantically if I even noticed a girl and just thinking "Don't bother. You'll just get hurt." When you see everyone holding hands with their current romantic obsessions, and you have to keep yourself from even entertaining the smallest crush, that's gotta do some damage.
Thing is, my little adventures notwithstanding, I'd say I didn't even go through a significant fraction of the stuff I hear about, and I could feel myself ready to snap. My mind just bent under the pressure until I actually wished I would just start ranting and screaming in class and I could let it out; maybe it would get some attention and things would ease up a little. But I didn't. I have to point out that Mr. Gill, my history teacher, helped significantly in this regard. I'm not sure he ever really understood fully why many of the assignments were intellectually offensive to me and why I couldn't seem to have a social life, but he made a little time to listen, and that was important.
I'll second that. I made up my mind to quit after my junior year, and I went and took my GED (2.5 months ago, I think). I planned to just go on to college, but things didn't happen that way, and now I've got a full-time programming job. Salary, benefits, and everything; I've got my own apartment, and life is good. There's still a ton of stress, but it's amazing how life can be a little bit less horrible when the people around you aren't actively tormenting you for amusement.
Interestingly, I was on the train home from work last night when I saw some kids (I'd guess high school age) riding the same car as me. I instantly tensed up; my primitive Pavlovian response was to expect them to point and snicker, or maybe walk over and taunt me. That they didn't was an incredible relief.
If you're in a similar situation, and the pressure just keeps building up, my advice is get out. My guess is it's distracting you from getting "good grades" anyway. You've probably arrogantly told yourself "I know most of this stuff; I can do it better than they're teaching it." Okay, prove it. If you're willing to work hard and know what you're doing, you can at least scrape by, and I know I would rather do that than suffer what I know must be going on in the lives of so many kids.
Yeah, and this loser didn't plead not guilty either, so he deserved what he got? There is something to be said for "not dignifying the charges with a response".
Jurors are obligated to find you not guilty of disobeying an unjust law.
Yeah, my high school had that turned on too. [snicker] "MUST" indeed.
...if they'd at least tell us what they got the source to...
Unless you hack the theme, like I did because I thought the side titlebar was cooler. I think it was a different theme, though... "Hand of God" maybe.
Wow. Someone else has heard of Strunk and White too. I liked their example of "Charles'" versus "Charles's".
Seriously. I've got a 400MHz K6-II running FreeBSD and a 333MHz iMac running Linux. Now, I'm not a gamer, so my outlook may be different, but I considered these to be, if not top-of-the-line, at least pleasantly high-performance. Now they're not even "low end"? I'm going to cry myself to sleep tonight...
This is the class's constructor.
This is what I do, and I'm planning to give free shells to friends I know. You might consider doing something similar: get together with some friends of yours, hook a box up with DSL or possibly stick it in co-lo, and you now have your very own mail provider.
That's it. Next census, I'm filling out name, age, and gender, and marking all the rest "refuse to answer". I will not sit idly by while the government uses this information against its own citizens.
Yeah, like those crazy doctors with their Hippocratic oath and all. If I were injured, I would prefer my operation to be performed by professionals, not long-hair idealists who swear idealistic oaths to do no harm.
Thank you.
I'd feel reasonably safe if my hospital used PostgreSQL, though, since it supports transactions and such, and operates in full write-through mode by default.
Here is an article from American Scientist. I suspect the information it has might help you.
It's not my skills I'm worried about, just my normal less-than-perfect coding habits.
I think this sort of capability is best provided by the GNU Hurd.
Think of it as a geeky in medias res...
Me too. In fact I used those same words when this article showed up on Kuro5hin recently. Actually, I'm quite disappointed that this even showed up on Slashdot, because this can only lend credence to Jorrit's apparent belief that he has done something useful for the hacker community with this interview.
RMS made a few simple meta-requests for this interview, and Jorrit abided by absolutely none of them. In fact, a number of statements almost seem to be calculated to have the precise effect of pissing RMS off, which is odd, since this whole affair was ostensibly for the purpose of getting helpful advice from him. I'm proud of RMS for exercising the amount of patience and control that he did.
Anyway, I would urge you to read my comment at the time, linked this way in case /. screws up the links again: ht tp: //www.kuro5hin.org/?op=comments;sid=2000/10/10/319 24/280;pid=0;cid=26#26
~ $ make point
make: *** No rule to make target `point'. Stop.
Apparently not...
I wouldn't have a problem of that, because I would automatically vote "no" on almost all of them. "Thousands of pieces of legislation" is the problem... The Federal government, at least, is set up the way it is specifically to prevent the government from making too many laws. The government should stay out of anything that is not an extreme emergency, and even then they should stay out of it unless they have been granted the authority to deal with it.