Re-read my post minus the stick up your ass, if at all possible.
Guess I have to spell it out: "Shock and horror" was located within parentheses to convey the comically effeminate "well I never!" attitude of both the RIAA and government toward the fact that people would decide against being pushed around.
Why would you assume I'm _not_ on your side? You just got gored by Occam's Razor.
Fond of kicking goals for the other team, are you?
Am I the only one who thinks she looks like a Praying Mantis? It's as though that character has mantis wide-screen eyes to afford greater ability to find things to bitch about.
This reminds me of the episode of "The Office" where Michael Scott becomes butthurt about something and dresses up as Jesus, interrupting people and telling them they're going to hell. The only non-moron in the group tells him he can't push religion and he responds that he either has to push religion or push drugs.
The RIAA is "The world according to Michael Scott" in a nutshell and taken to an extreme.
No, the RIAA is a classic case of where government SHOULD have stepped in and squished and illegal Mafia cartel long ago.
The government is a babbling retard playing with its own feces. Instead, the unwashed masses are (shock and horror) voting with their wallets, taking matters securely in-hand..
your interpret the sound waves of information as noise because you're unable to comprehend any deeper meaning than the existence of waves crashing nearby.
I hear that, loud and clear (no pun intended, ever). I remember when I tried to make the most quiet computer possible and found that, while the computer was dead-quiet, I couldn't concentrate worth a damn. Years later, I discovered that while my teen years had me throwing way too many fans in a computer because it was the hip thing to do at the time (loud meant fast in 1997), I got a whole lot more done because the noise drowned out the other sounds around me.
I now have a ten node renderfarm I like to work right next to. It was built to be quiet by server standards, but with almost a hundred fans, it's still loud enough to drown out most of the airplanes that fly over in the process of landing at the airport three miles away.
You're getting deeper than I thought you would. I respect your clarification.
While I can understand why your post would be downmodded Troll, I see merit in your arguments.
The road we're on isn't sustainable in the long term and the general situation just looked scary as hell during the post 9-11 Bush years when things got mixed and turned around horribly. Having a new commander in chief in office changed the tone, but it's still up in the air whether anything will ultimately change for the better out of it.
Ultimately, I believe all delusion has limits and it doesn't take much to punch the reset button. We haven't really had any major shake-ups during my time (I'm only thirty) that offered a long-lasting social landmark for the country. Like it or not, the effect 9-11 had on us was nothing in comparison to Pearl Harbor despite the difference in number of lives lost. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, a war was already going on and had been for some time. We threw down and the whole country ran like one big machine for a respectable amount of time. We became WWII at the national level, in a sense, despite arriving late to the party.
9-11 sucked, but that was a group of sneaky wackos acting against the USA while representing nobody other than their fellow wackos. Japan nailing Pearl was Japan, a "real" country, acting against the USA.
Even the Cold War and the Space Race had the country on edge for an entire generation. We've lost that kind of zeal. We need another neighborhood scuffle to get us back on our game. To get really twisty with this for kicks, if it's China or the entire Middle East getting in the ring, I welcome that. China offers a challenge in terms of sheer numbers and the fact they make most of our stuff. The Middle East is where we get most of our energy.
If either case were true, I have a feeling we'd go war machine again if we had to because we haven't lost that talent and Rosie the Riveter is far from dead. We'd learn how to be craftsmen again instead of expecting to sell each other life insurance and sue each other for a living.
I'm going to play around with this a bit so I hope the readers will bear with me. I pick on the following groups because pretty much everyone knows who they are.
Hippies are only worried about wind turbines killing birds because there's been no real constant threat to American everyday human life in a generation or more. PETA is only worried about animal rights because they have the time to protest in fake-bloodied FunFur instead of helping to protect human lives. Those Save The African Kids *sob* groups who spend most of their donations on TV spots are only worried about starving children over there because we're not starving around these parts, obesity being pretty good proof of that. Religious groups... I'm just not going to go there.
I doubt we're going to have a conflict that heavy in my lifetime, but I don't think anyone would take it lying down. The American Spirit still lives on. We're bold, we're brash, we're not to be messed with. That's us at our very heart and we still have that reputation with a different, though negative, slant.
Hell, if my family was under direct attack, I wouldn't worry about how my left contact lens is bugging me right now, I'd be looking for the sharpest/heaviest improvised weapon available and worrying about guiding it to the most vulnerable part of the attacker's body with intent to remove the threat permanently. I think I've made my point and I hope nobody would, I dunno, try to reason with the attacker instead, let alone allow them to continue with lives at stake. I have no respect for anyone who wouldn't defend their loved-ones.
Sadly, peace breeds confidence. Confidence breeds distraction and that is when one is most vulnerable. I don't think we stay on our game for the sake of the game anymore. I think we do it when we have something to prove. All it's going to take is for the right fuse to blow at the right time, just like Pearl.
So, OTOH, you think what such "few douchbags" do eveyrwhere is not, more or less, a reflection of given society?
From where do you think they come? Do you think that "ordinary people" despise and distant themselves from such ways, even when given the opportunity?
"Ignore it and it will go away" is often the only feasible approach in these situations.
I don't know where you hail from, but it's illegal to choke a douchebag here. If it weren't illegal, I guarantee it would happen more often, starting with basically every politician and banker.
I am a citizen of the USA and distance myself from the ways of which you speak. Either I'm an ordinary guy and there are a whole helluvalot more like me, or I really am a unique and beautiful snowflake. Which one is more likely? Win-win either way.
Elsewhere I mention my time as a retention rep for AOL. Relevant to both that experience and your post, here's a story:
When I started working for AOL, I already had Internet service through Comcast. While training, I asked if they seriously expected me to get a landline just so I could dial up via 56k modem when I had a 3mbps line already. Nope.
They had the option where you could (oh wow...) run AOL over your existing connection for the same $23.90 (at the time) price. That's right. Run my free AOL employee account over my $50 a month broadband line. While they had AOL Boardband available at the time, it wasn't available in my area for some reason, meaning I couldn't get in on the free bundle as an employee.
Dogfooding is nice, in theory, but I couldn't bring myself to use AOL even just for practice. The service felt condescending, really.
Brings back memories. People would call up, wait on hold for half an hour or more and end up on a call with me or any other SAVES rep:
*ping* (female phone voice) AOL. Saves. [connect] Me: Thank you for calling America Online, this is Pezbian. How can I help you have an even better online experience today? Luser: Cancel my account. (yeah. So original.) What I'd say while playing Solitaire on the computer: I'm sorry to hear things aren't going well for you. Let's get started. What I'd be thinking: Okay so what are you? Computer-stupid, no longer in need of training wheels, sick of overpaying or just trying to make a stand?
From there, it was a matter of talking them into staying. I probably gave away a lifetime worth of free service months in two month blocks during the few months I was there. Did it matter? No, and I'll explain why later. If you were a jerk, you got transferred or hung up on. We were taught never to hang up on lusers, but disconnecting the cord from the back of the phone didn't count as a hangup. I did it a couple dozen times when I'd get cursed at. There were often logs from previous support reps in the Merlin system regarding customer behavior so I pretty well knew who was going to be trouble and who was going to get free stuff.
At the end of the call, there were sometimes these "Special Member Benefits" where lusers would hear a speil for something else. I got $1.25 if they would just listen to it. Some people were wise. "Do you get a bonus if I just listen to it?" "Yes I do." "Well since you've helped me so much, you're going to get that bonus." Schweet. While I was there, the SMB was a Sprint long distance deal. Yeah, for a landline. Remember those? I probably got $200 a month just off of those transfers.
Pay: $8 an hour plus bonuses. Bonuses... boy howdy... 80+% of your income. I didn't believe it until I got my first 90-day long-term retention check. That's correct. Your long-term retention bonus was on a 90 day scale. Not a year. Why? Ultimately, it was because the revenue generated by each user for AOL was $125 a month. That's on top of the $23.90 a month they were charging for you to be their lab rat.
I wasn't delusional enough to expect the crazy bonus checks to last forever since the dollars for banner ads (no matter how attention-whoring/seizure-inducing) boom was already crashing hard and popups/pop-unders were starting to become the norm.
The funniest thing about working there was the special event days they'd have where Warner Bros movies that were still in theaters were screened in the call center during work hours. The techs and everyone but SAVES would be watching while SAVES saw it as a distraction from the big money. Some reps were making six figures a year. I kid you not. You were on a tiered scale where you were paid for saves per month and the more you got, the more each one paid you. Those who were making that kind of money had little time for anything else, however. 12-16 hour days non-stop. One lady hadn't had a day off in three months and slept at work sometimes, but she did make $125,000 a year this way.
In the middle of my time there, an "All Hands" meeting was called where everyone in the callcenter went to a big reception center and got put through a big dog and pony show. It was mostly about a new SAVES pay scale change that was more focused on quantity than quality. This wasn't beneficial to my style. I was all about long term. I didn't care about the average $1.50 24-hour or pissant $.50 30-day retention bonuses. I was all about the 90-day kind that paid like $9 each if I remember correctly. I was going to take a big hit on my paychecks to the extent that it just wasn't worth keeping that job.
It's worth mentioning that, during the Q&A portion, a butthurt tech dared ask when the tech support people were going to be paid like Saves reps. The suit on stage snickered slightly while the question was met with groans and laughter from Saves goons like myself. The
It's almost as if you can't afford not to become a patent troll now. When everyone's done suing each other, only the lawyers will have money and it's like a group of starving opossums stuck at the bottom of a pit at that point.
If it were possible to pin the blame on one person, or enough to hit with a full clip, I'm sure there would be more mob rule justice or fewer cases of people being fleeced and fucked due to the creeps being scared into morality. Diffusion of blame is a bitch. It's why things like this happen in a lot of industries. It's probably why, among other examples, Monsanto hasn't become a bloodbath/crater.
Scary shit. Maybe those who would find out who deserves to be dragged into the street and shot and actually do it aren't for the sole reason of not wanting to "go to hell"? I mean, that's what all the leaders who preach that shit are saying... in their grand buildings, private jets, priceless furs and jewelry--while doing so with such faith as to feel it necessary to stay behind bulletproof glass that was a product of the science they hate. Same side of the same coin. Just a different edge.
So many ways to handle my comment and you go for the one that would require I be a complete retard? Have we as a society truly developed that much bias?
You've assumed far too much. I'm not going to force her to do anything. If she tells me she wants to learn, I'm willing to teach her. She will be instructed in proper safety and will be supervised directly until she feels confident to take it solo. Even then I'll still be within earshot if something should go wrong. The idea is not to be a helicopter parent, but a satellite parent, if you will, ready to help if called upon.
I burnt myself many times. Everyone does it, but there are ways to minimize the damage while still getting the point across. Even now when I touch a scorching hot component or entire board that has soaked a lot of heat from fighting a large ground plane, I get burned, but it's reduced to a scald with cotton gloves and nitrile gloves covering my hands. Painful second-degree burn with a blister that lasts a few days is reduced to a more painful scald that is gone within hours, getting the point across.
I started out with a Radio Shack iron until I was 17 and bought a Tenma unit from MCM Electronics. Just last year I recovered and repaired a broken Hakko unit from the trash at work. If I had had access to such a unit when I was eight, I would have saved myself an overwhelming majority of the burns I received.
As for the seven year old, you may just not have the right seven year old. I found my Zen with electronics even before I could solder. I would spend hours looking at random circuit boards, trying to figure out what they were doing based on the components and traces. It was easier in the days of discrete components, however.
I have saved one of those Spring and wire experimenter kits for my daughter. I learned a lot from mine without having to deal with hot metal.
Occam's Razor says you're either trying to be funny and failing miserably, or you're just trolling. In that case, go back to 4chan. Grown-ups are talking, son, and I think Naruto's on.
On the off-chance neither case applies to you (stranger shit has happened. This is the Internet, after all), read on:
Stereotypes represent dedication to one aspect of life at the expense of the others. Pale, skinny (now more commonly obese) nerd and dumbass "Mungo" jock stereotypes exist for a reason.
The goal should be to achieve balance (Oh the horror!) and have the best of both worlds. I'd dare use myself as an example, but my remaining gut precludes this.
Sometimes you have to lift that 200lb server. Sometimes you have to... I dunno... know which end of the soldering iron you ought to hold.
Elsewise you end up like Uwe "Call me a genius or I'll beat your ass!" Boll.
It's not going to be a world of idiots. Think about this: In the movie, they never went into who made the TVs that were everywhere, the cameras that put "Ow My Balls" on the screen for the idiots to watch in the first place, the projectors and cameras involved in production and display of "Ass", the machines that made Brawndo, the scanners used for ID and the batteries in their electric cars.
Maybe there was a ruling class located elsewhere? Could be a combination of the intelligent and reclusive Morlocks in Time Machine and the "Screw you guys. We'll come back when you've died of Stupid." attitude in Atlas Shrugged.
I can teach a "special person" (I hate that term) to cook fries, but I can't teach them to design a video camera.
My daughter will be a geek. But she will be a geek with social skills. That's a powerful combination. She already has a strong motherly instinct that's easy to see in her interaction with her baby dolls. We live where families are large. This could turn out to be a very good thing.
Having said that, my daughter is an only child and will have many, many friends out of necessity. If I can ignite the minds of two of those friends, I've done my part. Every single one of them is a mere "How does it work?" away from that. And what kid can look at a Tesla Coil in action and not be amazed?
Taking that one a step further, I'd like to build a system like ArcAttack uses and perform at schools in the area. Almost every assembly I went to as a kid had zero educational value (the hypnotist ones were stupid, the Bose Motivational Media shows were mere marketing wrapped in eyecandy, the "Scared Straight" one was just damned insulting since these prisoners were chewing out kids who weren't juvenile offenders). A performance with musical Tesla Coils and robotic drums would ignite at least one mind in every audience.
It's foolish, arrogant and shortsighted to require a child to be my own flesh and blood for me to be willing to share my knowledge with them.
Let's face it. The only touching of lives teachers have been doing recently is the kind that will trigger an Amber Alert. The vast majority are too worried about test scores and other mental masturbation to actually care about the effectiveness of their "work".
At only thirty years of age, I've already realized it's down to Mr. Wizard-style hobbyists like myself to give later generations fuel for thought--and my hat was thrown in that ring long ago.
For some, maybe. For me, it just got me to calm the hell down so I could be creative instead of worrying about stupid shit when I had my bases covered already.
I only smoked half a dozen times. Didn't need to after that.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear Troll,
Re-read my post minus the stick up your ass, if at all possible.
Guess I have to spell it out: "Shock and horror" was located within parentheses to convey the comically effeminate "well I never!" attitude of both the RIAA and government toward the fact that people would decide against being pushed around.
Why would you assume I'm _not_ on your side? You just got gored by Occam's Razor.
Fond of kicking goals for the other team, are you?
Mutually-Assured Destruction. Or "If I can't have it, neither can you."
If they catch you in the backseat, trying to pick her locks, they're going to send you home to mother in a cardboard box. You better RUN! RUN! RUN!
Am I the only one who thinks she looks like a Praying Mantis? It's as though that character has mantis wide-screen eyes to afford greater ability to find things to bitch about.
*blows 4chan whistle* Anonymous! Get 'em!
I really can't believe that even government officials wouldn't notice how shallow this attempt is.
That's their job. A roach can fit through even the smallest of gaps.
The difference is the roach's only agendae are spreading feces and breeding... oh wait...
This reminds me of the episode of "The Office" where Michael Scott becomes butthurt about something and dresses up as Jesus, interrupting people and telling them they're going to hell. The only non-moron in the group tells him he can't push religion and he responds that he either has to push religion or push drugs.
The RIAA is "The world according to Michael Scott" in a nutshell and taken to an extreme.
No, the RIAA is a classic case of where government SHOULD have stepped in and squished and illegal Mafia cartel long ago.
The government is a babbling retard playing with its own feces. Instead, the unwashed masses are (shock and horror) voting with their wallets, taking matters securely in-hand..
your interpret the sound waves of information as noise because you're unable to comprehend any deeper meaning than the existence of waves crashing nearby.
I hear that, loud and clear (no pun intended, ever). I remember when I tried to make the most quiet computer possible and found that, while the computer was dead-quiet, I couldn't concentrate worth a damn. Years later, I discovered that while my teen years had me throwing way too many fans in a computer because it was the hip thing to do at the time (loud meant fast in 1997), I got a whole lot more done because the noise drowned out the other sounds around me.
I now have a ten node renderfarm I like to work right next to. It was built to be quiet by server standards, but with almost a hundred fans, it's still loud enough to drown out most of the airplanes that fly over in the process of landing at the airport three miles away.
You're getting deeper than I thought you would. I respect your clarification.
While I can understand why your post would be downmodded Troll, I see merit in your arguments.
The road we're on isn't sustainable in the long term and the general situation just looked scary as hell during the post 9-11 Bush years when things got mixed and turned around horribly. Having a new commander in chief in office changed the tone, but it's still up in the air whether anything will ultimately change for the better out of it.
Ultimately, I believe all delusion has limits and it doesn't take much to punch the reset button. We haven't really had any major shake-ups during my time (I'm only thirty) that offered a long-lasting social landmark for the country. Like it or not, the effect 9-11 had on us was nothing in comparison to Pearl Harbor despite the difference in number of lives lost. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, a war was already going on and had been for some time. We threw down and the whole country ran like one big machine for a respectable amount of time. We became WWII at the national level, in a sense, despite arriving late to the party.
9-11 sucked, but that was a group of sneaky wackos acting against the USA while representing nobody other than their fellow wackos. Japan nailing Pearl was Japan, a "real" country, acting against the USA.
Even the Cold War and the Space Race had the country on edge for an entire generation. We've lost that kind of zeal. We need another neighborhood scuffle to get us back on our game. To get really twisty with this for kicks, if it's China or the entire Middle East getting in the ring, I welcome that. China offers a challenge in terms of sheer numbers and the fact they make most of our stuff. The Middle East is where we get most of our energy.
If either case were true, I have a feeling we'd go war machine again if we had to because we haven't lost that talent and Rosie the Riveter is far from dead. We'd learn how to be craftsmen again instead of expecting to sell each other life insurance and sue each other for a living.
I'm going to play around with this a bit so I hope the readers will bear with me. I pick on the following groups because pretty much everyone knows who they are.
Hippies are only worried about wind turbines killing birds because there's been no real constant threat to American everyday human life in a generation or more.
PETA is only worried about animal rights because they have the time to protest in fake-bloodied FunFur instead of helping to protect human lives.
Those Save The African Kids *sob* groups who spend most of their donations on TV spots are only worried about starving children over there because we're not starving around these parts, obesity being pretty good proof of that.
Religious groups... I'm just not going to go there.
I doubt we're going to have a conflict that heavy in my lifetime, but I don't think anyone would take it lying down. The American Spirit still lives on. We're bold, we're brash, we're not to be messed with. That's us at our very heart and we still have that reputation with a different, though negative, slant.
Hell, if my family was under direct attack, I wouldn't worry about how my left contact lens is bugging me right now, I'd be looking for the sharpest/heaviest improvised weapon available and worrying about guiding it to the most vulnerable part of the attacker's body with intent to remove the threat permanently. I think I've made my point and I hope nobody would, I dunno, try to reason with the attacker instead, let alone allow them to continue with lives at stake. I have no respect for anyone who wouldn't defend their loved-ones.
Sadly, peace breeds confidence. Confidence breeds distraction and that is when one is most vulnerable. I don't think we stay on our game for the sake of the game anymore. I think we do it when we have something to prove. All it's going to take is for the right fuse to blow at the right time, just like Pearl.
While we're beating dead horses, this is the type of post that would have made an excellent story on Kuro5hin!
Kuro5hin? Never even been there. If it's like 4chan I'll pass, thanks.
So, OTOH, you think what such "few douchbags" do eveyrwhere is not, more or less, a reflection of given society?
From where do you think they come? Do you think that "ordinary people" despise and distant themselves from such ways, even when given the opportunity?
"Ignore it and it will go away" is often the only feasible approach in these situations.
I don't know where you hail from, but it's illegal to choke a douchebag here. If it weren't illegal, I guarantee it would happen more often, starting with basically every politician and banker.
I am a citizen of the USA and distance myself from the ways of which you speak. Either I'm an ordinary guy and there are a whole helluvalot more like me, or I really am a unique and beautiful snowflake. Which one is more likely? Win-win either way.
Your move... try not to hurt yourself.
Elsewhere I mention my time as a retention rep for AOL. Relevant to both that experience and your post, here's a story:
When I started working for AOL, I already had Internet service through Comcast. While training, I asked if they seriously expected me to get a landline just so I could dial up via 56k modem when I had a 3mbps line already. Nope.
They had the option where you could (oh wow...) run AOL over your existing connection for the same $23.90 (at the time) price. That's right. Run my free AOL employee account over my $50 a month broadband line. While they had AOL Boardband available at the time, it wasn't available in my area for some reason, meaning I couldn't get in on the free bundle as an employee.
Dogfooding is nice, in theory, but I couldn't bring myself to use AOL even just for practice. The service felt condescending, really.
You imply all Americans deserve to lose everything because a few douchbags got greedy?
I'm sure your homeland is a paragon of civility, honor and integrity. You're such a shining example, after all.
Smells like Eurotrash, long as we're making sweeping generalizations here.
Everything is a rickroll
Brings back memories. People would call up, wait on hold for half an hour or more and end up on a call with me or any other SAVES rep:
*ping* (female phone voice) AOL. Saves. [connect]
Me: Thank you for calling America Online, this is Pezbian. How can I help you have an even better online experience today?
Luser: Cancel my account. (yeah. So original.)
What I'd say while playing Solitaire on the computer: I'm sorry to hear things aren't going well for you. Let's get started.
What I'd be thinking: Okay so what are you? Computer-stupid, no longer in need of training wheels, sick of overpaying or just trying to make a stand?
From there, it was a matter of talking them into staying. I probably gave away a lifetime worth of free service months in two month blocks during the few months I was there. Did it matter? No, and I'll explain why later. If you were a jerk, you got transferred or hung up on. We were taught never to hang up on lusers, but disconnecting the cord from the back of the phone didn't count as a hangup. I did it a couple dozen times when I'd get cursed at. There were often logs from previous support reps in the Merlin system regarding customer behavior so I pretty well knew who was going to be trouble and who was going to get free stuff.
At the end of the call, there were sometimes these "Special Member Benefits" where lusers would hear a speil for something else. I got $1.25 if they would just listen to it. Some people were wise. "Do you get a bonus if I just listen to it?" "Yes I do." "Well since you've helped me so much, you're going to get that bonus." Schweet. While I was there, the SMB was a Sprint long distance deal. Yeah, for a landline. Remember those? I probably got $200 a month just off of those transfers.
Pay: $8 an hour plus bonuses. Bonuses... boy howdy... 80+% of your income. I didn't believe it until I got my first 90-day long-term retention check. That's correct. Your long-term retention bonus was on a 90 day scale. Not a year. Why? Ultimately, it was because the revenue generated by each user for AOL was $125 a month. That's on top of the $23.90 a month they were charging for you to be their lab rat.
I wasn't delusional enough to expect the crazy bonus checks to last forever since the dollars for banner ads (no matter how attention-whoring/seizure-inducing) boom was already crashing hard and popups/pop-unders were starting to become the norm.
The funniest thing about working there was the special event days they'd have where Warner Bros movies that were still in theaters were screened in the call center during work hours. The techs and everyone but SAVES would be watching while SAVES saw it as a distraction from the big money. Some reps were making six figures a year. I kid you not. You were on a tiered scale where you were paid for saves per month and the more you got, the more each one paid you. Those who were making that kind of money had little time for anything else, however. 12-16 hour days non-stop. One lady hadn't had a day off in three months and slept at work sometimes, but she did make $125,000 a year this way.
In the middle of my time there, an "All Hands" meeting was called where everyone in the callcenter went to a big reception center and got put through a big dog and pony show. It was mostly about a new SAVES pay scale change that was more focused on quantity than quality. This wasn't beneficial to my style. I was all about long term. I didn't care about the average $1.50 24-hour or pissant $.50 30-day retention bonuses. I was all about the 90-day kind that paid like $9 each if I remember correctly. I was going to take a big hit on my paychecks to the extent that it just wasn't worth keeping that job.
It's worth mentioning that, during the Q&A portion, a butthurt tech dared ask when the tech support people were going to be paid like Saves reps. The suit on stage snickered slightly while the question was met with groans and laughter from Saves goons like myself. The
It's almost as if you can't afford not to become a patent troll now. When everyone's done suing each other, only the lawyers will have money and it's like a group of starving opossums stuck at the bottom of a pit at that point.
Galt's Gulch, anyone? *cringe*
... and made my wife laugh in a crowded theater.
Or do they summon Captain Planet? ...or Wilford Brimley?
If it were possible to pin the blame on one person, or enough to hit with a full clip, I'm sure there would be more mob rule justice or fewer cases of people being fleeced and fucked due to the creeps being scared into morality. Diffusion of blame is a bitch. It's why things like this happen in a lot of industries. It's probably why, among other examples, Monsanto hasn't become a bloodbath/crater.
Scary shit. Maybe those who would find out who deserves to be dragged into the street and shot and actually do it aren't for the sole reason of not wanting to "go to hell"? I mean, that's what all the leaders who preach that shit are saying... in their grand buildings, private jets, priceless furs and jewelry--while doing so with such faith as to feel it necessary to stay behind bulletproof glass that was a product of the science they hate. Same side of the same coin. Just a different edge.
When the bully picks on you, you're supposed to punch him in the nose to teach him a lesson. That's domestic terrorism now.
So many ways to handle my comment and you go for the one that would require I be a complete retard? Have we as a society truly developed that much bias?
You've assumed far too much. I'm not going to force her to do anything. If she tells me she wants to learn, I'm willing to teach her. She will be instructed in proper safety and will be supervised directly until she feels confident to take it solo. Even then I'll still be within earshot if something should go wrong. The idea is not to be a helicopter parent, but a satellite parent, if you will, ready to help if called upon.
I burnt myself many times. Everyone does it, but there are ways to minimize the damage while still getting the point across. Even now when I touch a scorching hot component or entire board that has soaked a lot of heat from fighting a large ground plane, I get burned, but it's reduced to a scald with cotton gloves and nitrile gloves covering my hands. Painful second-degree burn with a blister that lasts a few days is reduced to a more painful scald that is gone within hours, getting the point across.
I started out with a Radio Shack iron until I was 17 and bought a Tenma unit from MCM Electronics. Just last year I recovered and repaired a broken Hakko unit from the trash at work. If I had had access to such a unit when I was eight, I would have saved myself an overwhelming majority of the burns I received.
As for the seven year old, you may just not have the right seven year old. I found my Zen with electronics even before I could solder. I would spend hours looking at random circuit boards, trying to figure out what they were doing based on the components and traces. It was easier in the days of discrete components, however.
I have saved one of those Spring and wire experimenter kits for my daughter. I learned a lot from mine without having to deal with hot metal.
Occam's Razor says you're either trying to be funny and failing miserably, or you're just trolling. In that case, go back to 4chan. Grown-ups are talking, son, and I think Naruto's on.
On the off-chance neither case applies to you (stranger shit has happened. This is the Internet, after all), read on:
Stereotypes represent dedication to one aspect of life at the expense of the others. Pale, skinny (now more commonly obese) nerd and dumbass "Mungo" jock stereotypes exist for a reason.
The goal should be to achieve balance (Oh the horror!) and have the best of both worlds. I'd dare use myself as an example, but my remaining gut precludes this.
Sometimes you have to lift that 200lb server. Sometimes you have to... I dunno... know which end of the soldering iron you ought to hold.
Elsewise you end up like Uwe "Call me a genius or I'll beat your ass!" Boll.
Too late. Got a vasectomy last year.
It's not going to be a world of idiots. Think about this: In the movie, they never went into who made the TVs that were everywhere, the cameras that put "Ow My Balls" on the screen for the idiots to watch in the first place, the projectors and cameras involved in production and display of "Ass", the machines that made Brawndo, the scanners used for ID and the batteries in their electric cars.
Maybe there was a ruling class located elsewhere? Could be a combination of the intelligent and reclusive Morlocks in Time Machine and the "Screw you guys. We'll come back when you've died of Stupid." attitude in Atlas Shrugged.
I can teach a "special person" (I hate that term) to cook fries, but I can't teach them to design a video camera.
My daughter will be a geek. But she will be a geek with social skills. That's a powerful combination. She already has a strong motherly instinct that's easy to see in her interaction with her baby dolls. We live where families are large. This could turn out to be a very good thing.
Having said that, my daughter is an only child and will have many, many friends out of necessity. If I can ignite the minds of two of those friends, I've done my part. Every single one of them is a mere "How does it work?" away from that. And what kid can look at a Tesla Coil in action and not be amazed?
Taking that one a step further, I'd like to build a system like ArcAttack uses and perform at schools in the area. Almost every assembly I went to as a kid had zero educational value (the hypnotist ones were stupid, the Bose Motivational Media shows were mere marketing wrapped in eyecandy, the "Scared Straight" one was just damned insulting since these prisoners were chewing out kids who weren't juvenile offenders). A performance with musical Tesla Coils and robotic drums would ignite at least one mind in every audience.
It's foolish, arrogant and shortsighted to require a child to be my own flesh and blood for me to be willing to share my knowledge with them.
Let's face it. The only touching of lives teachers have been doing recently is the kind that will trigger an Amber Alert. The vast majority are too worried about test scores and other mental masturbation to actually care about the effectiveness of their "work".
At only thirty years of age, I've already realized it's down to Mr. Wizard-style hobbyists like myself to give later generations fuel for thought--and my hat was thrown in that ring long ago.
For some, maybe. For me, it just got me to calm the hell down so I could be creative instead of worrying about stupid shit when I had my bases covered already.
I only smoked half a dozen times. Didn't need to after that.