I left home for a four month trip around Europe to get away from my 'tech job'. It's been three years and I haven't been home yet. Being Canadian I can work in the other commonwealth countries, but aside from that I've worked in France helping out at a hostel and ended up running a bar in Turkey on the beach for three months.
If you can get some money saved up before you leave, it's very easy to find jobs working in the tourist sector where you don't make any money, but you get free accomodation, food, and usually enough cash for some beer. There's lots of work in hostels and bars for anyone who speaks english and doesn't need to get paid a lot. Stay there for a while then travel for a bit, dipping into that base of cash and find another place to work.
At the moment I'm in Romania. I've been travelling with two other guys who've come here looking for work. They asked around and ran into a Peace Corp's guy who gave them a lot of information on work here working in orphanages with kids, or even working with the city to help with the stay dog problem (catching, vaccination, and such... )
If you're a little nervous about just comming over and 'hoping for the best' you can always check the internet for volunteer jobs.. They'll often even pay for your travel to the place.. www.care.org is the firts to come to mind, but I'm sure there's other a google search will bring up.
"Copying copyrighted information is not stealing. Stealing would mean that if I took it, you know longer have it. This is blatantly false."
Cool - I'm coming over to your house tonight, taking your car out for awhile, but putting it back in the morning so you still have it....
For me, theft would be using any of my possessions in any way which I don't want you to. Whether you take my car for a drive, take code I've written and use it when I don't want you to, or download and listen to music I've made without my permission.. that's theft
I don't think these '15 year-olds' are really THAT brilliant. I was one of those 'computer wizz-kids' when I was younger, and I wouldn't say I'm of above-average intelligence. It's just that computer science was so easy to pick up. It's all pretty new, compared to other sciences. I could see something cool in computers and learn it pretty quickly. Like watching those cool ASM demos? You can teach yourself to do them in probably a 5-6 weeks. The bleeding-edge information is avaiable via the internet (or BBS's back then), and not horribly complex. The tools you needed were readily available at Radio Shack... The older generation didn't understand it (having their own hobbies - my dad was into Ham Radios and electonics.. ) so they didn't leap into it as easily.
Compare it to, say, physics. 100-200 years ago a lot of young people were doing that bleeding edge work, in their basements. Today you would have to be a brilliant 20-year old in order to learn all of present day knowledge about physics to start discovering something new. You'd also need access to multi-million dollar equipment.
As computer science matures it's going to get out of the grasp of the 'average' person. It will begin to take years to learn enough to specialize in one area of computers, and you'll need access to expensive technologies to try them out.
Oh, come on. The USA has been known to *EXECUTE* foreigners without letting them consult with their consulate, in violation of the Vienna Convention, and you're shocked the media isn't covering someone who's been in jail for two weeks?
"We're not sure but we suspect Celine, eh. I never did trust her. What's our current situation in LA, eh?"
"We've-ammased..... 125,000 Canucks in LA. The 'mericans don't..... suspect-a-thing. You don't mean were going to...... have-to-abort, eh?"
"No.. not yet. I'll check in with the others..."
[Ring... Ring... ]
"Mr. Meyers speaking.."
"Mike! It's Wayne.. Operation hoser is at risk, eh. Have you heard anything?"
"Damnit, eh! After that South Park movie I knew they'd catch on. We've got most of the population's IQ down thanks to Mr. Carey's movies, eh? And now with the legions of hockey players situated in all the major cities -- it'd be a shame to stop now.. "
"Yes, agent Shatner said he was pretty sure the LA army was still undetected, eh. I think we'll scrap plan hoser and go with our backup plan - touque. They'll never figure that one out. Myers, can you call up the others: McLachlan, Martin, Fox, Levy, Shaffer, Trebek. I'm going to call an emergency meeting at 6 o'clock. 6:30 in Newfoundland,eh"
"Okay.. I got it.. I'll talk to you later, eh! Bye.."
The page doesn't show "Most searched for terms.." only the ones that are on the rise or decline. So, maybe 10 million people searched for 'big titties' but if that's the same number of people as last month then they won't appear on the list... At a wild guess I'd say they don't have the top 10 searched for items because that sort of information you can sell... ?
Save up $1500 or so, move to a country that speak the language you want to learn. Find a tourist pub and they'll hire you under the table as long as you speak English. They'll even give you a place to stay and everything... You won't make money, but you won't be spending any either...
As long as you're making an effort to learn, in *6* weeks you'll be able to hold down conversations with people. And, on top of that, you get a great experience living in a different country.
Learning out of books is, imo, usless. I spent 2 years doing French in school and had trouble getting around in France when I first got there. I spent a month working in a hostel on the French Rivera and now I'm - more or less - fluent.
The second best option - Find a girlfriend who's fluent in the language:)
Saw this once somewhere. I'm paraphrasing but...: --- This messages is copyright by me. License to distribute this message in part or in whole is $10,000 US. Permission is hereby given for everyone to distribute this message free of charge, excluding Microsoft.
By reading, sending, copying, forwarding, or distributing this email via mean electronic or physical, by person or automatically by computer system/network you automatically agree to these terms.
Of course code can be an expression or art. This whole situation proves it.
Was 2600 interested in copying DVDs when they posted the links? No. If they were why did they post a bunch of them? Why did other web pages post all those links? Were they trying to copy DVDs? No... Remember, no one can find one case of a DVD being copied via that peice of code.
All those links to the code were an/EXPRESSION/. The code has lost it's meaning as a decryptor.. it's an expression of the injustices of the DMCA.
Art is about expressing new ideas by showing you something you may not of thought of. That's why we have artists bottling up feces or having exhibts that have nothing in them but empty walls. They're trying to questions what 'art' is.. Trying to make you think. 2600 (and everyone else) is using DeCSS to EXPRESS their belief that the DMCA is flawed. Without it their expression wouldn't be nearly as effective. (We wouldn't have this story on Slashdot, for example). Just as a painter could express his opinions on 'what art is' by just talking, but gets the message across much better via his art. Talk about art with art. DeCSS is the technological expression of views towards the DMCA. I don't understand bottled feces.. and maybe the MPAA doesn't understand DeCSS - but that fact remains: It expresses the view of the technological community (aka Geeks).
What I want to know is why it takes 15 nuclear bombs to 'nudge' a small asteroid towards earth, when we all know that it takes only one nuclear bomb to split an asteroid 'the size of Texas' in two and avoid Armageddon???
I'm a Canadian living in London - I found seeing cameras around odd for the first little while, but soon learned to appreciate them. I can't see how this is a privacy issue at all...
The thing that really changed my mind were a few violent crimes that made the newspaper. Shortly afterwards the police could release pictures of the people they thought were involved. This right away struck me as a wonderful thing. In Canada all we would get would be a description along the lines of "White male, 5'9" wearing a red jacket"... Eye witnesses would then report if they saw someone like that in the area...
Basically, I'd much rather have to refer to a picture on an impartial camera than the generally biased/impressionable eyewitness account.
How quickly can a black person be remembered as hispanic when the only person in the area was hispanic? Cameras won't make that kind of a mistake.
If you ask me, generally, activists just want to rebel, riot, break stuff, stand up to authority.... they use their causes of capitalism, opressive goverment, environmentalism, etc etc, as an excuse the be able to do thing that would otherwise be morally unjustifiable.
'Hacktivists' just want to break into computers and activism is a great way to make them feel karmically okay about it...
(I'm not saying that all activists are like this, and I'm not saying the causes are unimportant. I'm just saying that a lot of these people are just sheep following the latest fad. 80 it was the environment, 90s it was goverment, now it's corporations. They seem not to care what the issue is as long as they get to break stuff.. be it computer networks or store windows...)
Pshaw. You like watching flowers grow? I want stuff faster than that. I want to be able to record the flowers growing on my webcam, have it sped up, shown to me on my super-fast laptop in a pop up window so I can see the live stock reports at the same time, all while going 300mph on a high speed train from LA to New York.
Why? It's exciting. It's adrenaline. It's fun. It's what I live for. I'll die 10 years before you do, but I'll get 30% more done. More of what? Well, it's all pretty much irrelivant in the universal picture. But, I love it, so why should I feel guilty for wanting to have the biggest/most powerful/fastest? I didn't like having to wait for my C64's tape drive when I had one, why would I enjoy it now?
Granted that's not your thing. No problem. Have your growing flowers, your 300 baud modem, your four hour productions of Hamlet. But don't be so presumptious to assume that what makes you happy applies to everyone else.
Sure, if the world was full of identicle people then blanket statments like 'Because things are fast people don't appreciate life' would hold merit. But (at least until this whole human cloning thing is figured out) that's not the case.
Don't get me wrong here. I'm sure there are a lot of people who need to mellow out and no one can keep up the high paced life without a rest once in awhile -- BUT I bet you can find a bunch of A-type personality people who would be much happier if they could just get out of the damn trailer park and become professional skydivers or stock brokers or 1600Mhz computer owners.....
I was a trekkie back in the TNG days. Before Deep Space Nine came out there were a bunch of rumours of what the series would be about. Apparently some of the ideas were:
A sitcom based around Troi's Mom (Gosh, I forgot her name!) Star Trek: The Klingon Empire (Based around the Klingons instead of the Federation) Star Trek: DS9 - What they ended up actually using. and Star Trek: The Academy Years. This was supposed to be about Kirk while he was training in the Academy.
If computer games really affected children later in life then all those people who used to play pacman for hours and hours would now be running around munching little pills and listening to repetative music all the time!
Slashdot Mirror
Even in the last couple of months, there have been lots of school shootings.
The only thing that's changed is you're not hearing about them.
In 1970 there were 500 Elvis impersonators in America. Today there are 150,000.
It is expected that in the year 2020 one out of every three people will be an Elvis impersonator.
I left home for a four month trip around Europe to get away from my 'tech job'. It's been three years and I haven't been home yet. Being Canadian I can work in the other commonwealth countries, but aside from that I've worked in France helping out at a hostel and ended up running a bar in Turkey on the beach for three months.
If you can get some money saved up before you leave, it's very easy to find jobs working in the tourist sector where you don't make any money, but you get free accomodation, food, and usually enough cash for some beer. There's lots of work in hostels and bars for anyone who speaks english and doesn't need to get paid a lot. Stay there for a while then travel for a bit, dipping into that base of cash and find another place to work.
At the moment I'm in Romania. I've been travelling with two other guys who've come here looking for work. They asked around and ran into a Peace Corp's guy who gave them a lot of information on work here working in orphanages with kids, or even working with the city to help with the stay dog problem (catching, vaccination, and such... )
If you're a little nervous about just comming over and 'hoping for the best' you can always check the internet for volunteer jobs.. They'll often even pay for your travel to the place.. www.care.org is the firts to come to mind, but I'm sure there's other a google search will bring up.
Urban Lengend
To sumarise, NASA needed a pen that wouldn't:
Burn in 100% oxygen atmosphere
Would work in a vacuum
Work under zero-G
Could work in +150c and -120c
Prior to using the pen, the Americans also used pencils. Pencils had problems with the tips breaking off, which could be a hazard.
In December of 1967 Paul C. Fisher, the inventer of the pen, sold 400 of them to NASA for $2.95 each.
"Copying copyrighted information is not stealing. Stealing would mean
that if I took it, you know longer have it. This is blatantly false."
Cool - I'm coming over to your house tonight, taking your car out for awhile, but putting it back in the morning so you still have it....
For me, theft would be using any of my possessions in any way which I don't want you to. Whether you take my car for a drive, take code I've written and use it when I don't want you to, or download and listen to music I've made without my permission.. that's theft
I don't think these '15 year-olds' are really THAT brilliant. I was one of those 'computer wizz-kids' when I was younger, and I wouldn't say I'm of above-average intelligence. It's just that computer science was so easy to pick up. It's all pretty new, compared to other sciences. I could see something cool in computers and learn it pretty quickly. Like watching those cool ASM demos? You can teach yourself to do them in probably a 5-6 weeks. The bleeding-edge information is avaiable via the internet (or BBS's back then), and not horribly complex. The tools you needed were readily available at Radio Shack... The older generation didn't understand it (having their own hobbies - my dad was into Ham Radios and electonics.. ) so they didn't leap into it as easily.
Compare it to, say, physics. 100-200 years ago a lot of young people were doing that bleeding edge work, in their basements. Today you would have to be a brilliant 20-year old in order to learn all of present day knowledge about physics to start discovering something new. You'd also need access to multi-million dollar equipment.
As computer science matures it's going to get out of the grasp of the 'average' person. It will begin to take years to learn enough to specialize in one area of computers, and you'll need access to expensive technologies to try them out.
Reminds me of my favorite Picasso quote:
"Computers are useless; they can only answer questions."
Oh, come on. The USA has been known to *EXECUTE* foreigners without letting them consult with their consulate, in violation of the Vienna Convention, and you're shocked the media isn't covering someone who's been in jail for two weeks?
[Ring... Ring..]
"Hello. Mr. Gretzky speaking.. ?"
"Your Eminence! This is Candian super secret special forces. They're on to us, eh!"
"What? They're on to us?"
"Yes... They've found out about the suitcase, eh. I'm not sure how, but we have to abort operation Hoser. Right now, eh!"
"Yikes, eh! I'll check in with our agent in Los Angeles!"
[Ring.. Ring..]
"Hi, Bill here"
"Mr. Shatner, this is Gretzky, eh!"
"Your Eminence! What can I do for you, eh!"
"They've found out about the suitcase! We need to abort, eh!"
"OH-MY-GOD....... How-did-they-ever-find-out about..........operation-hoser?
"We're not sure but we suspect Celine, eh. I never did trust her. What's our current situation in LA, eh?"
"We've-ammased..... 125,000 Canucks in LA. The 'mericans don't..... suspect-a-thing. You don't mean were going to...... have-to-abort, eh?"
"No.. not yet. I'll check in with the others..."
[Ring... Ring... ]
"Mr. Meyers speaking.."
"Mike! It's Wayne.. Operation hoser is at risk, eh. Have you heard anything?"
"Damnit, eh! After that South Park movie I knew they'd catch on. We've got most of the population's IQ down thanks to Mr. Carey's movies, eh? And now with the legions of hockey players situated in all the major cities -- it'd be a shame to stop now.. "
"Yes, agent Shatner said he was pretty sure the LA army was still undetected, eh. I think we'll scrap plan hoser and go with our backup plan - touque. They'll never figure that one out. Myers, can you call up the others: McLachlan, Martin, Fox, Levy, Shaffer, Trebek. I'm going to call an emergency meeting at 6 o'clock. 6:30 in Newfoundland,eh"
"Okay.. I got it.. I'll talk to you later, eh! Bye.."
My old DOS prompt was
Yes, oh Master?
Then using all those ASCII codes I had the path on the top left of the screen and the time on the top right.
Hey - I never learned to program, so I had all that extra time to fiddle with ANSI codes and the prompt command!
The page doesn't show "Most searched for terms.." only the ones that are on the rise or decline. So, maybe 10 million people searched for 'big titties' but if that's the same number of people as last month then they won't appear on the list... At a wild guess I'd say they don't have the top 10 searched for items because that sort of information you can sell... ?
Apparently you've never heard of Baywatch, Dynasty, Wheel of Fortune, Tele-tubies, or slashdot.org? :)
Jason.
Don't rule out moving to another country.....
:)
Save up $1500 or so, move to a country that speak the language you want to learn. Find a tourist pub and they'll hire you under the table as long as you speak English. They'll even give you a place to stay and everything... You won't make money, but you won't be spending any either...
As long as you're making an effort to learn, in *6* weeks you'll be able to hold down conversations with people. And, on top of that, you get a great experience living in a different country.
Learning out of books is, imo, usless. I spent 2 years doing French in school and had trouble getting around in France when I first got there. I spent a month working in a hostel on the French Rivera and now I'm - more or less - fluent.
The second best option - Find a girlfriend who's fluent in the language
Saw this once somewhere. I'm paraphrasing but...:
---
This messages is copyright by me. License to distribute this message in part or in whole is $10,000 US. Permission is hereby given for everyone to distribute this message free of charge, excluding Microsoft.
By reading, sending, copying, forwarding, or distributing this email via mean electronic or physical, by person or automatically by computer system/network you automatically agree to these terms.
Of course code can be an expression or art. This whole situation proves it.
/EXPRESSION/. The code has lost it's meaning as a decryptor.. it's an expression of the injustices of the DMCA.
Was 2600 interested in copying DVDs when they posted the links? No. If they were why did they post a bunch of them? Why did other web pages post all those links? Were they trying to copy DVDs? No... Remember, no one can find one case of a DVD being copied via that peice of code.
All those links to the code were an
Art is about expressing new ideas by showing you something you may not of thought of. That's why we have artists bottling up feces or having exhibts that have nothing in them but empty walls. They're trying to questions what 'art' is.. Trying to make you think. 2600 (and everyone else) is using DeCSS to EXPRESS their belief that the DMCA is flawed. Without it their expression wouldn't be nearly as effective. (We wouldn't have this story on Slashdot, for example). Just as a painter could express his opinions on 'what art is' by just talking, but gets the message across much better via his art. Talk about art with art. DeCSS is the technological expression of views towards the DMCA. I don't understand bottled feces.. and maybe the MPAA doesn't understand DeCSS - but that fact remains: It expresses the view of the technological community (aka Geeks).
What I want to know is why it takes 15 nuclear bombs to 'nudge' a small asteroid towards earth, when we all know that it takes only one nuclear bomb to split an asteroid 'the size of Texas' in two and avoid Armageddon???
I'm a Canadian living in London - I found seeing cameras around odd for the first little while, but soon learned to appreciate them. I can't see how this is a privacy issue at all...
The thing that really changed my mind were a few violent crimes that made the newspaper. Shortly afterwards the police could release pictures of the people they thought were involved. This right away struck me as a wonderful thing. In Canada all we would get would be a description along the lines of "White male, 5'9" wearing a red jacket"... Eye witnesses would then report if they saw someone like that in the area...
Basically, I'd much rather have to refer to a picture on an impartial camera than the generally biased/impressionable eyewitness account.
How quickly can a black person be remembered as hispanic when the only person in the area was hispanic? Cameras won't make that kind of a mistake.
'Hacktivists' just want to break into computers and activism is a great way to make them feel karmically okay about it...
(I'm not saying that all activists are like this, and I'm not saying the causes are unimportant. I'm just saying that a lot of these people are just sheep following the latest fad. 80 it was the environment, 90s it was goverment, now it's corporations. They seem not to care what the issue is as long as they get to break stuff.. be it computer networks or store windows...)
Pshaw. You like watching flowers grow? I want stuff faster than that. I want to be able to record the flowers growing on my webcam, have it sped up, shown to me on my super-fast laptop in a pop up window so I can see the live stock reports at the same time, all while going 300mph on a high speed train from LA to New York.
Why? It's exciting. It's adrenaline. It's fun. It's what I live for. I'll die 10 years before you do, but I'll get 30% more done. More of what? Well, it's all pretty much irrelivant in the universal picture. But, I love it, so why should I feel guilty for wanting to have the biggest/most powerful/fastest? I didn't like having to wait for my C64's tape drive when I had one, why would I enjoy it now?
Granted that's not your thing. No problem. Have your growing flowers, your 300 baud modem, your four hour productions of Hamlet. But don't be so presumptious to assume that what makes you happy applies to everyone else.
Sure, if the world was full of identicle people then blanket statments like 'Because things are fast people don't appreciate life' would hold merit. But (at least until this whole human cloning thing is figured out) that's not the case.
Don't get me wrong here. I'm sure there are a lot of people who need to mellow out and no one can keep up the high paced life without a rest once in awhile -- BUT I bet you can find a bunch of A-type personality people who would be much happier if they could just get out of the damn trailer park and become professional skydivers or stock brokers or 1600Mhz computer owners.....
I was a trekkie back in the TNG days. Before Deep Space Nine came out there were a bunch of rumours of what the series would be about. Apparently some of the ideas were:
A sitcom based around Troi's Mom (Gosh, I forgot her name!)
Star Trek: The Klingon Empire (Based around the Klingons instead of the Federation)
Star Trek: DS9 - What they ended up actually using.
and
Star Trek: The Academy Years. This was supposed to be about Kirk while he was training in the Academy.
Perhaps they might of revived the latter idea?
Finally, all those Y2K people who wholed up with food, water and GENERATORS in California finnally really are having the last laugh.....
After 366 days of sitting on a computer and never going outside, his Diablo character got deleted. Frustrated he got up and left...
If computer games really affected children later in life then all those people who used to play pacman for hours and hours would now be running around munching little pills and listening to repetative music all the time!