Don't second-guess yourself. You did the right thing. It was the only (reasonable) choice that could have freed you. Your bully learned a valuable lesson, and perhaps some humility. Trust me, you didn't scar him for life. But you did teach him not to fsck with you, and by extension, maybe he learned not to fsck with as many other people. Huzzah! Believe it or not, you did a great thing for yourself and society at large.
I'm not a violent person either. I haven't had to raise a hand to anyone since my last scuffle in high school, over a decade ago. But like they say... if someone has to start a fight with me, I'll make sure I finish it. To do otherwise is to cheat myself. We should all stand up for ourselves and refuse to live in fear.
It's a shame you were taught not to fight back. I had to resolve a couple of schoolyard problems with fisticuffs, and it turned out the be the best possible solution. The problem went away, and I got a much-needed dose of self confidence.
Sucking up abuse in your young years doesn't make you a better person. It makes you an angry, vengeful person, perhaps a timid person... parents who train their kids to be victims are doing them a terrible disservice.
I'm going to try and keep this from turning into a gun-nut rant, because I'm not a gun nut. However, I do believe in the 2nd amendment.
Let's see... a well-reasoned, non-hostile response from someone who believes in the 2nd Amendment. Sorry buddy... you ARE a "gun nut" to anyone who disagrees with you. Welcome aboard. Glad to have you.:)
Wow! That rules. Not that I like hunting personally, but that story speaks of a time when people were more personally responsible and conducted themselves better. Amazing how far we have fallen in some ways.
I SINCERELY hope you delivered a savage beating to your bully. It's the only thing they understand, and once you fight back, they leave you alone. Same thing happened to me, more or less.
Here's today's lesson in modern civilization:
1. Sometimes, violence IS a solution.
Human culture will never reach a place where that is not true.
If I carry a pistol, hey, better get an UZI in case someone comes up to me with a desert eagle or some such thing.
That's crazy, and not even us gun-nuts argue it that way. Even in states where you can legally carry a concealed weapon with ease, no one's carrying around rifles and other forms of extreme firepower.
If someone takes after you with a BIG gun, even a SMALL gun is enough to defend yourself. Carrying a big gun doesn't make you tougher.
If you are really getting at "why do we need to have the right to own black, scary-looking rifles?" then that is another topic for another post.
But what is it that you and other anachronistic people tend to believe that they have to defend themselves from?
When I was a kid, the folks that were my babysitters opened a convenience store in Los Angeles. They worked the night/early AM shift, and then took care of me during the day.
One day, my mom was driving me in to their place, and we heard a report on the radio news about how there was a holdup and shooting in the part of the city where their store was. And when we arrived at their home, we found that the husband had been injured and his wife had been killed. They cooperated with the robbers, too -- the guys were just animals and decided to shoot them up on the way out. The family had 2 daughters and a son, and they all lost their mom at an early age.
Could the police have done anything in this situation? Of course not. It happened too quickly. The fact is, when something like this happens all you have to rely on is yourself. And, as horrible as it may be to some people, sometimes your best option is to use force to defend yourself.
YOU may feel safe, but the world can be a dangerous place. If someone tries to rob a store, or a home, the victim has every right to defend themselves -- because even if you cooperate, you can get iced.
If my shopkeeper friends had been armed, maybe one of them wouldn't have been killed. I still think about that to this day, and I'm sure this was a formitive event in my young life.
I am sincerely glad that you feel safe. I hope you are, and I hope you never even come close to violent crime. But don't try to take away someone else's right to defend themselves. No matter what your view of the world is, I hope that you can at least agree that self-defense is a pretty fundamental human right. There's nothing anachronistic about that.
It's no myth. Here's one link. You can easily find others if you look.
The fact is, guns aside, America just has a more violent culture than most other industrialized nations. Guns don't make people into killers, and it is possible to have a society where there are lots of guns and little crime. America just isn't that place for some reason -- we should try to find out why.
The TRG is cool, but I am more interested in being able to preview/delete the giant color jpegs that my digicam produces. A color PDA would be good for this; the camera's LCD is too small to evaluate borderline images. And when you are away from a computer for a while, you need to prune the dud images from your camera's memory card to save space.
I used to work in enterprise CRM software. Any solution that you pay $1M for is a custom solution.
Some platforms, like Vignette, are merely engines upon which you can create a dynamic Web app. Any Vignette implementation is custom by its very nature... and Vignette as a company makes 80% of its revenue off Professional Services (ie customization) fees.
(Another topic is what the heck does Vignette offer that you can't get with less money, your own programmers, and free software? But I digress.)
Wow, the eBookman DOES look nice. And cheap. But it syncs to Windows only, according to the spec sheet. And even worse, it looks like it syncs to Outlook. I can't stand Outlook OR Outlook Express, and I don't want to use them as my contact manager.
Currently I am a PalmOS user, and I like the way that Palm has a lightweight Windows client for searching/adding organizer events & contacts. On the Mac side it is even better, since they use a rebranded version of Claris Organizer. But Outlook... . Invasive bloatware. Ack. And even though I use Windows most of the time, I have Macs too and generally refuse to buy stuff like PDAs unless it works with both platforms.
I have tried and tried to justify an upgrade, but my Palm III is still truckin' along with no end in sight.
My wife got a III shortly after I did, a couple of years ago. We both became Palm junkies. Her III bit the dust and she's carrying a Visor now. My III is still fine. Maybe all my idle talk about upgrades scared it into behaving.:)
When the time comes to upgrade I will seriously look at the Microsquish powered PDAs though... It would be nice to have a full color PDA that can read the CF memory cards from my digital camera.
An "English rule" system would probably be great. Man, anything will help at this point.
I have a great respect for the law, and I think people should be able to protect their rights or use the system to get at people who are in the wrong -- but somewhere along the way "the system" went berzerk!
I think that it would result in LESS lawsuits though. The "attacker" would be more likely to think this way: "Well, since my victim is entitled to free legal representation, he is less likely to cave in and settle out of court with me -- we both know my lawsuit is bogus. I better wait until I have a GOOD reason to sue someone, to make my costly attack lawyers pay for themselves."
And yes, it would take tax money. It would work exactly like a criminal defense -- if you get hauled into court, the state will provide you a lawyer. Normally I am not in favor of more government programs, but I'm down with this idea.
TechSearch is totally reprehensible for doing this... even if it's legal.
As an aside, we need some major alterations to the way lawsuits are handled in this country. When a company can choose to attack an innocent individual and ruin them financially, something is clearly wrong with the system.
I've said it before, I'll say it again -- we need the equivalent of a "public defender's office" for civil suits. If someone files a frivolous lawsuit against you you should be able to defend yourself without going bankrupt. A public defender would see to it that you had legal representation, and hopefully they could get the frivolous suits thrown out of court for you, without you paying a gazillion dollars. If you are hit with a NON-frivolous lawsuit, take your chances with the PD or pay for a high-powered team of lawyers.
Even if it was too hard to make this a removable media system at first, it would still be valuable. Imagine a box that you plug into your gigabit ethernet that stores some *ungodly* amount of data and costs about $1000. Or some other figure, which would still be a lot less than a huge array of hard drives.
This would be maximally useful if new computer standards allowed you to boot off it, so all your boxen could tap the data source. And if all your home entertainment gear could talk to it too...
Of course that kind of interconnectivity is not looking good right now, so it's kind of a moot point. But I'd still like a ziggabyte of storage.:)
Of course, with the way fair use and copyright laws are evolving, there won't be that much legal data accessible to anyone. Library of Congress? We'll be lucky if we can legally store a couple gigs of files in this thing without breaking some kind of law!
Why turn on the surround sound? Pro Logic will highlight the loss of channel separation in MP3, sure, but that's hardly a normal listening situation. Unless you listen to music with the surround on normally. Which just screws it up, IMHO.
There is still a LOT of "souping up" you can do without messing with your car's computer. It varies from car to car, of course, but you can't fairly say that the whole car modification scene has been reduced to chipping.
The point is that the DMCA is blatantly unconstitutional (as interpreted by the courts [so far]).
And that gives us hope that it will someday be overturned. But in the meantime great damage can be done.
Before I moved to WA, I lived in CA. It is the stated position of the CA attorney general's office that they support and prosecute all CA laws, even if a law is widely known to be unconstitutional and is expected to be overturned in court. In other words, it isn't the police's job to interpret laws. They enforce them, blindly, and let the courts sort out the mess later.
I would be surprised if other states acted otherwise, actually. And I would be surprised if a Federal law was treated any differently. The DCMA will do a hell of a lot of damage before it is fixed, and traces of it will probably linger on forever.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't second-guess yourself. You did the right thing. It was the only (reasonable) choice that could have freed you. Your bully learned a valuable lesson, and perhaps some humility. Trust me, you didn't scar him for life. But you did teach him not to fsck with you, and by extension, maybe he learned not to fsck with as many other people. Huzzah! Believe it or not, you did a great thing for yourself and society at large.
I'm not a violent person either. I haven't had to raise a hand to anyone since my last scuffle in high school, over a decade ago. But like they say... if someone has to start a fight with me, I'll make sure I finish it. To do otherwise is to cheat myself. We should all stand up for ourselves and refuse to live in fear.
It's a shame you were taught not to fight back. I had to resolve a couple of schoolyard problems with fisticuffs, and it turned out the be the best possible solution. The problem went away, and I got a much-needed dose of self confidence.
Sucking up abuse in your young years doesn't make you a better person. It makes you an angry, vengeful person, perhaps a timid person... parents who train their kids to be victims are doing them a terrible disservice.
I'm going to try and keep this from turning into a gun-nut rant, because I'm not a gun nut. However, I do believe in the 2nd amendment.
:)
Let's see... a well-reasoned, non-hostile response from someone who believes in the 2nd Amendment. Sorry buddy... you ARE a "gun nut" to anyone who disagrees with you. Welcome aboard. Glad to have you.
I wouldn't have necessarily compared the "gun culture" to the "psychedelic culture," but well said nonetheless.
Wow! That rules. Not that I like hunting personally, but that story speaks of a time when people were more personally responsible and conducted themselves better. Amazing how far we have fallen in some ways.
I SINCERELY hope you delivered a savage beating to your bully. It's the only thing they understand, and once you fight back, they leave you alone. Same thing happened to me, more or less.
Here's today's lesson in modern civilization:
1. Sometimes, violence IS a solution.
Human culture will never reach a place where that is not true.
If I carry a pistol, hey, better get an UZI in case someone comes up to me with a desert eagle or some such thing.
That's crazy, and not even us gun-nuts argue it that way. Even in states where you can legally carry a concealed weapon with ease, no one's carrying around rifles and other forms of extreme firepower.
If someone takes after you with a BIG gun, even a SMALL gun is enough to defend yourself. Carrying a big gun doesn't make you tougher.
If you are really getting at "why do we need to have the right to own black, scary-looking rifles?" then that is another topic for another post.
But what is it that you and other anachronistic people tend to believe that they have to defend themselves from?
When I was a kid, the folks that were my babysitters opened a convenience store in Los Angeles. They worked the night/early AM shift, and then took care of me during the day.
One day, my mom was driving me in to their place, and we heard a report on the radio news about how there was a holdup and shooting in the part of the city where their store was. And when we arrived at their home, we found that the husband had been injured and his wife had been killed. They cooperated with the robbers, too -- the guys were just animals and decided to shoot them up on the way out. The family had 2 daughters and a son, and they all lost their mom at an early age.
Could the police have done anything in this situation? Of course not. It happened too quickly. The fact is, when something like this happens all you have to rely on is yourself. And, as horrible as it may be to some people, sometimes your best option is to use force to defend yourself.
YOU may feel safe, but the world can be a dangerous place. If someone tries to rob a store, or a home, the victim has every right to defend themselves -- because even if you cooperate, you can get iced.
If my shopkeeper friends had been armed, maybe one of them wouldn't have been killed. I still think about that to this day, and I'm sure this was a formitive event in my young life.
I am sincerely glad that you feel safe. I hope you are, and I hope you never even come close to violent crime. But don't try to take away someone else's right to defend themselves. No matter what your view of the world is, I hope that you can at least agree that self-defense is a pretty fundamental human right. There's nothing anachronistic about that.
It's no myth. Here's one link. You can easily find others if you look.
The fact is, guns aside, America just has a more violent culture than most other industrialized nations. Guns don't make people into killers, and it is possible to have a society where there are lots of guns and little crime. America just isn't that place for some reason -- we should try to find out why.
A stell heart might be great, but they'll never make a steel liver. Natural replacement parts will be better most of the time.
The TRG is cool, but I am more interested in being able to preview/delete the giant color jpegs that my digicam produces. A color PDA would be good for this; the camera's LCD is too small to evaluate borderline images. And when you are away from a computer for a while, you need to prune the dud images from your camera's memory card to save space.
I used to work in enterprise CRM software. Any solution that you pay $1M for is a custom solution.
Some platforms, like Vignette, are merely engines upon which you can create a dynamic Web app. Any Vignette implementation is custom by its very nature... and Vignette as a company makes 80% of its revenue off Professional Services (ie customization) fees.
(Another topic is what the heck does Vignette offer that you can't get with less money, your own programmers, and free software? But I digress.)
Wow, the eBookman DOES look nice. And cheap. But it syncs to Windows only, according to the spec sheet. And even worse, it looks like it syncs to Outlook. I can't stand Outlook OR Outlook Express, and I don't want to use them as my contact manager.
Currently I am a PalmOS user, and I like the way that Palm has a lightweight Windows client for searching/adding organizer events & contacts. On the Mac side it is even better, since they use a rebranded version of Claris Organizer. But Outlook... . Invasive bloatware. Ack. And even though I use Windows most of the time, I have Macs too and generally refuse to buy stuff like PDAs unless it works with both platforms.
I have tried and tried to justify an upgrade, but my Palm III is still truckin' along with no end in sight.
My wife got a III shortly after I did, a couple of years ago. We both became Palm junkies. Her III bit the dust and she's carrying a Visor now. My III is still fine. Maybe all my idle talk about upgrades scared it into behaving.
When the time comes to upgrade I will seriously look at the Microsquish powered PDAs though... It would be nice to have a full color PDA that can read the CF memory cards from my digital camera.
An "English rule" system would probably be great. Man, anything will help at this point.
I have a great respect for the law, and I think people should be able to protect their rights or use the system to get at people who are in the wrong -- but somewhere along the way "the system" went berzerk!
I think that it would result in LESS lawsuits though. The "attacker" would be more likely to think this way: "Well, since my victim is entitled to free legal representation, he is less likely to cave in and settle out of court with me -- we both know my lawsuit is bogus. I better wait until I have a GOOD reason to sue someone, to make my costly attack lawyers pay for themselves."
And yes, it would take tax money. It would work exactly like a criminal defense -- if you get hauled into court, the state will provide you a lawyer. Normally I am not in favor of more government programs, but I'm down with this idea.
TechSearch is totally reprehensible for doing this... even if it's legal.
As an aside, we need some major alterations to the way lawsuits are handled in this country. When a company can choose to attack an innocent individual and ruin them financially, something is clearly wrong with the system.
I've said it before, I'll say it again -- we need the equivalent of a "public defender's office" for civil suits. If someone files a frivolous lawsuit against you you should be able to defend yourself without going bankrupt. A public defender would see to it that you had legal representation, and hopefully they could get the frivolous suits thrown out of court for you, without you paying a gazillion dollars. If you are hit with a NON-frivolous lawsuit, take your chances with the PD or pay for a high-powered team of lawyers.
Even if it was too hard to make this a removable media system at first, it would still be valuable. Imagine a box that you plug into your gigabit ethernet that stores some *ungodly* amount of data and costs about $1000. Or some other figure, which would still be a lot less than a huge array of hard drives.
This would be maximally useful if new computer standards allowed you to boot off it, so all your boxen could tap the data source. And if all your home entertainment gear could talk to it too...
Of course that kind of interconnectivity is not looking good right now, so it's kind of a moot point. But I'd still like a ziggabyte of storage.
If the increasing opaqueness of the material is a hangup, I imagine that they will work with layers of the stuff, not thick pieces.
A "small cube" worth of material in a different form (smart card sized?) would still be pretty nifty.
Of course if you spread out the material, you introduce other problems, but they may be easier to solve.
Cynic Mode:
Of course, with the way fair use and copyright laws are evolving, there won't be that much legal data accessible to anyone. Library of Congress? We'll be lucky if we can legally store a couple gigs of files in this thing without breaking some kind of law!
Why turn on the surround sound? Pro Logic will highlight the loss of channel separation in MP3, sure, but that's hardly a normal listening situation. Unless you listen to music with the surround on normally. Which just screws it up, IMHO.
Names, please.
There is still a LOT of "souping up" you can do without messing with your car's computer. It varies from car to car, of course, but you can't fairly say that the whole car modification scene has been reduced to chipping.
The point is that the DMCA is blatantly unconstitutional (as interpreted by the courts [so far]).
And that gives us hope that it will someday be overturned. But in the meantime great damage can be done.
Before I moved to WA, I lived in CA. It is the stated position of the CA attorney general's office that they support and prosecute all CA laws, even if a law is widely known to be unconstitutional and is expected to be overturned in court. In other words, it isn't the police's job to interpret laws. They enforce them, blindly, and let the courts sort out the mess later.
I would be surprised if other states acted otherwise, actually. And I would be surprised if a Federal law was treated any differently. The DCMA will do a hell of a lot of damage before it is fixed, and traces of it will probably linger on forever.
I forget which old Mac is was, but you could boot from a system image in ROM with the right kind of Vulcan nerve pinch.