Wow. Just wow. I opted in with enthusiasm for the following reasons:
1. I like statistics. I work with statistics, reports, business analytics, data mining so it's well within my area of interest. 2. The report (as far as I have seen) tells me what I've done and allows me to make things more efficient. 3. It provides me with insight of how much does Google know about me. It knows a lot. Do I care? No, not really. I'm not yelling for privacy for the sake of privacy.
(that last point can lead to a really--REALLY long discussion though, so I'd better stop now before it's too late)
Doh. It obviously had, since he got kicked out, but what I'm saying is that it shouldn't have had such code of conduct, especially if the deeds did NOT happen during classes or within the school premises.
I have read his tweets as shown in your link. I've seen worse on the Interwebz, way worse.
All I can say is that he became a scapegoat in a purist wannabe environment, where people must not say what they think but rather what's appropriate. I honestly pity him; this looks like a classic case of an intoxicated teen trying to troll away. His guilt is being in the wrong place at the wrong time (plus being surrounded by a society which regards political correctness too highly).
Here's the thing. I live in a country where colored people are a rarity; there's probably less than 0.1% black people around. I've seen and heard lots of (white) people around here greeting each other with "'sup, dog" and "'sup, nigga" because they've heard that in some movie and they think it's cool. Those expressions are completely free of racism, they're used to signify that someone belongs to a specific group (e.g. "co-workers"). I bet that if an african-american would come here he would feel very offended. It's a cultural thing he doesn't understand.
Now I shiver when I think what would happen if I were to go to the US and inadvertently greet someone with "wazzup, nigga" (which for me is devoid of any racist meaning). I would end up arrested, beaten up or both.
That guy's arrest and imprisonment is a case of "do before thinking".
What if Muamba were white? What if the offender were black too? I wonder...
I don't care what it means to him. I focus on society here. The society is better off without him in its midst, but that can be achieved without kicking him from school or imprisoning him.
He shouldn't be kicked out of school at all. When someone's an asshole, leave the society to deal with him by staying away from him. If nobody socializes with the guy, he's as good as imprisoned. It's people's choice to still interact with him or ignore him completely. What if I go to school, behave properly, don't cause no trouble, learn well, act well and so on, then go home and spit poison all over the Internet regarding this and that? Why would the school throw me out? I like the concept of Freedom of Speech and I still think society can self-regulate and keep disorderly citizens out, especially in this situation, when they troll online. The Internet is full of trolls and low-lifes who don't actually cause any real-life trouble, but just vent off on the interwebz. I honestly believe that if they are barred from venting off online, they will find other, more dangerous ways to vent off, e.g. go out at night and beat some colored man to death (if they're racist and whatnot).
There are times when I get annoyed/angry and swear a lot. I vent off, then mind my own business. Barring me from swearing would build up internal pressure unnecessarily and after a while anyone would snap and do stupid things.
What happened is dumb and shows how short-sighted people can be. They conform to a general point of view and positively discriminate other people by trying to be "more catholic than the Pope", because society wants this to happen.
This situation reminds me of a book written by Serge Brussolo (http://sergebrussolo.1fr1.net/t89-operation-serrures-carnivores) where punishments for misdemeanors and crimes are being handed by robots by putting the criminal in a heat chamber. The severity of the punishment is proportional to public vehemence towards the crime, and so if some poor bastard stole an apple and there were 100 merchants yelling "Death!", the guy would have been charred to death in the heat chamber.
Pretty much what happened to this dude. He got kicked out of school, serves jail time and will be ripe for a long life of crime. If a couple years down the road, God forbid, he's going to kill someone, would anyone blame the system? I'd say not.
AFAIK, they were supposed to send out "LOG" and receive "IN". The "IN" never arrived. My Internet History is rusty and I can't be arsed to research right now, though, so take this with a hill of salt.
The idea is that their "own" staff is so large that you fall unnoticed. Everyone seems to think you're in the other team (like main team, backup team, roadie, groupie, whatever).
You can easily sneak into large concerts, gigs, expos, whatever if you have a cap with a TV station logo, dress shabby and carry a large video camera. If you don't have a camera, a set of cables or a tripod would do just fine. Badges? No need.
I used to work for a local branch of a known TV station, I had access to an old training video camera at all times. Every time there was a gig I wanted to attend to, I went to my workplace, grabbed that camera, went to the gig, got in, left the camera in one of the the tech rooms, achievement unlocked. Sometimes I brought my girlfriend in by letting her carry a microphone. We even interviewed a security dude just for the kicks.
You have certainly been forced through too many meetings; with being an antisocial and stuff, no wonder you're so aggressive. That and you haven't even considered virtual teams or global teams; you know, like teams which consist of 5+ people spread around the globe.
I have team mates in IN, US, IE, RO and IT. In order for us to actually be in sync, meetings are required. Of course, I would love to never participate to meetings and rot in my own cubicle while slacking, but I've seen where that takes. We used to have a colleague in Singapore whose timezone difference made him not participate to our weekly Team Meeting for months. We still kept him informed through e-mails and whatnot but there was pretty much no-one even remotely near his time zone (our IN colleagues weren't part of the team then), so nobody had control over him.
Our manager encouraged self-management and allowed us to take care of our own work and spread it as we saw fit, as long as it brought results. All was working smoothly until one day my US colleagues started inquiring about the SG co-worker. Turns out he hadn't been in the office in two weeks and hadn't produced any work in more than a month.
Of course, after he got fired, things turned to become a lot worse; like mandatory weekly meetings, obligation to submit a daily task list, being told to provide VPN/IM log in/log out times and to say hello/goodbye to all currently working team members through phone every time we started or ended work. And wait for them to respond.
In time, some of those measures have been dropped, but all it takes is for a bad apple to fuck a whole team for months.
You know... I expected comments on an education-related article to be more literate, but hey... maybe it's just me.
* OP had "Capitalism at it's finest". ** Its child has "sentance", "the older on". *** Its child also has "class Ive taken", "its at your own risk", "youre" and another occurrence of "its hardly".
If this isn't the Trifecta of Fail, I don't know what is.
If YOU are not interested, it doesn't mean NOBODY is.
I'd consider the combustion start method(s) interesting from a technical perspective. I honestly wasn't aware that wind friction can set a tree on fire. OR that a week old lighting strike can do that as well.
Don't worry, I am realistic. I was just pointing out that comparing coffee tables with computer games is not really working out. You can't really compare a product that can't be multiplied for almost no cost with one that can be multiplied by 1 billion for almost nothing.
I like arguments going back and forth, pro- and against piracy, pro- and against questionable game companies methods, but let's compare what we can compare.
As for my personal opinion, companies which resort to customer-screwing methods to inflate their income deserve to be screwed back. Tenfold.
You can't multiply coffee tables without investing 90+% of the production price of the original one. You can multiply a software product almost for free.
Your post pretty much sums it up. Oh and I love how company staff come and say "Y U NO UNDERSTAND!!!" "WE TRY HELP U!". Bullshit. When zounds of angry customers tell you you're WRONG, it's chutzpah (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chutzpah) to come out ant tell them they're all wrong and you're right. It's disgusting.
To put some more salt on the wound, I live in what many consider a "third world country". Our advantage here was that we had virtually no data infrastructure (Internet-wise) prior to 1990, so what was created used top technology (CAT5 cabling, optical fiber and such) rather than rely on the unsatisfactory wired telephony infrastructure.
Slashdot Mirror
Unrelated: I had a genetics-related question for you but your Journal entries are archived. :)
Please create a new entry
Wow. Just wow.
I opted in with enthusiasm for the following reasons:
1. I like statistics. I work with statistics, reports, business analytics, data mining so it's well within my area of interest.
2. The report (as far as I have seen) tells me what I've done and allows me to make things more efficient.
3. It provides me with insight of how much does Google know about me. It knows a lot. Do I care? No, not really. I'm not yelling for privacy for the sake of privacy.
(that last point can lead to a really--REALLY long discussion though, so I'd better stop now before it's too late)
That would teach him to check his own pockets more often, not just daddy's :)
Doh.
It obviously had, since he got kicked out, but what I'm saying is that it shouldn't have had such code of conduct, especially if the deeds did NOT happen during classes or within the school premises.
I have read his tweets as shown in your link. I've seen worse on the Interwebz, way worse.
All I can say is that he became a scapegoat in a purist wannabe environment, where people must not say what they think but rather what's appropriate. I honestly pity him; this looks like a classic case of an intoxicated teen trying to troll away. His guilt is being in the wrong place at the wrong time (plus being surrounded by a society which regards political correctness too highly).
Here's the thing. I live in a country where colored people are a rarity; there's probably less than 0.1% black people around. I've seen and heard lots of (white) people around here greeting each other with "'sup, dog" and "'sup, nigga" because they've heard that in some movie and they think it's cool. Those expressions are completely free of racism, they're used to signify that someone belongs to a specific group (e.g. "co-workers"). I bet that if an african-american would come here he would feel very offended. It's a cultural thing he doesn't understand.
Now I shiver when I think what would happen if I were to go to the US and inadvertently greet someone with "wazzup, nigga" (which for me is devoid of any racist meaning). I would end up arrested, beaten up or both.
That guy's arrest and imprisonment is a case of "do before thinking".
What if Muamba were white? What if the offender were black too? I wonder...
I don't care what it means to him. I focus on society here. The society is better off without him in its midst, but that can be achieved without kicking him from school or imprisoning him.
Um, when a school dictates what am I allowed to do and say outside its doors and classes, it becomes something entirely different.
Was trying to be hood-ish. Evidently, that didn't really work out.
*goes back to drawing board*
He shouldn't be kicked out of school at all.
When someone's an asshole, leave the society to deal with him by staying away from him. If nobody socializes with the guy, he's as good as imprisoned. It's people's choice to still interact with him or ignore him completely.
What if I go to school, behave properly, don't cause no trouble, learn well, act well and so on, then go home and spit poison all over the Internet regarding this and that? Why would the school throw me out?
I like the concept of Freedom of Speech and I still think society can self-regulate and keep disorderly citizens out, especially in this situation, when they troll online. The Internet is full of trolls and low-lifes who don't actually cause any real-life trouble, but just vent off on the interwebz. I honestly believe that if they are barred from venting off online, they will find other, more dangerous ways to vent off, e.g. go out at night and beat some colored man to death (if they're racist and whatnot).
There are times when I get annoyed/angry and swear a lot. I vent off, then mind my own business. Barring me from swearing would build up internal pressure unnecessarily and after a while anyone would snap and do stupid things.
What happened is dumb and shows how short-sighted people can be. They conform to a general point of view and positively discriminate other people by trying to be "more catholic than the Pope", because society wants this to happen.
This situation reminds me of a book written by Serge Brussolo (http://sergebrussolo.1fr1.net/t89-operation-serrures-carnivores) where punishments for misdemeanors and crimes are being handed by robots by putting the criminal in a heat chamber. The severity of the punishment is proportional to public vehemence towards the crime, and so if some poor bastard stole an apple and there were 100 merchants yelling "Death!", the guy would have been charred to death in the heat chamber.
Pretty much what happened to this dude. He got kicked out of school, serves jail time and will be ripe for a long life of crime. If a couple years down the road, God forbid, he's going to kill someone, would anyone blame the system? I'd say not.
You're marrying your GIRL?
What the hell happened with the world?
I want off this planet. NOW!
AFAIK, they were supposed to send out "LOG" and receive "IN". The "IN" never arrived.
My Internet History is rusty and I can't be arsed to research right now, though, so take this with a hill of salt.
Well, unlike the first internet-powered message ever, this one actually DID complete.
The idea is that their "own" staff is so large that you fall unnoticed. Everyone seems to think you're in the other team (like main team, backup team, roadie, groupie, whatever).
Um, you buy ONE camera for 300 USD and can go to say 50 concerts with it. That's a shitload of saved money on tickets, my friend.
You can easily sneak into large concerts, gigs, expos, whatever if you have a cap with a TV station logo, dress shabby and carry a large video camera. If you don't have a camera, a set of cables or a tripod would do just fine. Badges? No need.
I used to work for a local branch of a known TV station, I had access to an old training video camera at all times. Every time there was a gig I wanted to attend to, I went to my workplace, grabbed that camera, went to the gig, got in, left the camera in one of the the tech rooms, achievement unlocked. Sometimes I brought my girlfriend in by letting her carry a microphone. We even interviewed a security dude just for the kicks.
So yeah, it's easier than expected.
You have certainly been forced through too many meetings; with being an antisocial and stuff, no wonder you're so aggressive.
That and you haven't even considered virtual teams or global teams; you know, like teams which consist of 5+ people spread around the globe.
I have team mates in IN, US, IE, RO and IT. In order for us to actually be in sync, meetings are required. Of course, I would love to never participate to meetings and rot in my own cubicle while slacking, but I've seen where that takes.
We used to have a colleague in Singapore whose timezone difference made him not participate to our weekly Team Meeting for months. We still kept him informed through e-mails and whatnot but there was pretty much no-one even remotely near his time zone (our IN colleagues weren't part of the team then), so nobody had control over him.
Our manager encouraged self-management and allowed us to take care of our own work and spread it as we saw fit, as long as it brought results. All was working smoothly until one day my US colleagues started inquiring about the SG co-worker. Turns out he hadn't been in the office in two weeks and hadn't produced any work in more than a month.
Of course, after he got fired, things turned to become a lot worse; like mandatory weekly meetings, obligation to submit a daily task list, being told to provide VPN/IM log in/log out times and to say hello/goodbye to all currently working team members through phone every time we started or ended work. And wait for them to respond.
In time, some of those measures have been dropped, but all it takes is for a bad apple to fuck a whole team for months.
Well, screw this, I'm going anyway. Who's with me?
(awkward silence)
OK, let's go watch some crappy movies!
(crowd cheering)
You know... I expected comments on an education-related article to be more literate, but hey... maybe it's just me.
* OP had "Capitalism at it's finest".
** Its child has "sentance", "the older on".
*** Its child also has "class Ive taken", "its at your own risk", "youre" and another occurrence of "its hardly".
If this isn't the Trifecta of Fail, I don't know what is.
149 comments proving you wrong.
Just sayin'.
If YOU are not interested, it doesn't mean NOBODY is.
I'd consider the combustion start method(s) interesting from a technical perspective. I honestly wasn't aware that wind friction can set a tree on fire. OR that a week old lighting strike can do that as well.
Um, dude... we're on the same page here. :)
Care to re-read my post?
Don't worry, I am realistic.
I was just pointing out that comparing coffee tables with computer games is not really working out. You can't really compare a product that can't be multiplied for almost no cost with one that can be multiplied by 1 billion for almost nothing.
I like arguments going back and forth, pro- and against piracy, pro- and against questionable game companies methods, but let's compare what we can compare.
As for my personal opinion, companies which resort to customer-screwing methods to inflate their income deserve to be screwed back. Tenfold.
You can't multiply coffee tables without investing 90+% of the production price of the original one.
You can multiply a software product almost for free.
Your argument is moot.
Well said.
Your post pretty much sums it up.
Oh and I love how company staff come and say "Y U NO UNDERSTAND!!!" "WE TRY HELP U!".
Bullshit.
When zounds of angry customers tell you you're WRONG, it's chutzpah (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chutzpah) to come out ant tell them they're all wrong and you're right. It's disgusting.
Yeah, sorry, my wording was bad.
To put some more salt on the wound, I live in what many consider a "third world country".
Our advantage here was that we had virtually no data infrastructure (Internet-wise) prior to 1990, so what was created used top technology (CAT5 cabling, optical fiber and such) rather than rely on the unsatisfactory wired telephony infrastructure.
My 15-bucks-a-month Internet subscription comes with a bonus from my ISP: a country-wide*, unlimited traffic, 3.6 Mbit/s 3G USB stick.
For free.
I used it more than once as back-up for my main connection and it rocks.
So yeah, you're not so far-fetched.
*Country-wide means wherever they provide coverage, for now limited to medium-sized and major cities but good enough for what I need.