"However, while you can get basic scientific knowledge taught as - more or less - a byproduct of a research development focused program, you cannot get research development as a byproduct of a "good teacher" focused program. "
And, truth be told, I'm not arguing your point either. You're right.
It's just getting awfully dark out here.
When I first set foot on a college campus way back in the early 80s, professors listed their academic affiliations on their door -- Dr. Someguy, PhD, Caltech, Dr. OtherDude, PhD, Stanford, etc.
The last time I spent any significant time on a college campus in the year 2000, I saw entire departments listed by their corporate sponsor. Professors began listing the companies they consulted with, rather than the institution that granted them their degrees.
Yes, it was at the height of the boom, but several professors I heard of -- at a big famous state school of awesome reputation -- had ditched teaching their classes entirely. They literally did not show up to lecture a single class and dumped all teaching duties on their grad students of dubious communication skills, who in turn slashed schedules to a minimum, too busy consulting on the side themselves.
And then we had eight years of Bush. Public schools in this country aren't even a shell of their former selves any more. They're not even a joke. They're just sad and pathetic, cargo cults going through the motions of running a school who have forgotten the substance and barely remember the form.
Most of the "official" communication my kids bring home looks like the first drafts of a high school freshman comp class. I talk to history teachers who can't tell the difference between the battles of Manassas and Midway, science teachers who can't make an electromagnet, English teachers who dimly remember seeing a couple of Shakespeare's plays on video, math teachers who can't take a derivative...
The two people doing the most to educate the American public about science right now are Jamie and Adam of "Mythbusters," and as much as I adore those guys, it's a little like saying our national defense is secured by the good ol' boys of the Buford Volunteer Fire Department.
It's not just our physical infrastructure that's crumbling, our intanglible assets such as level of education among the populace are falling apart as well.
So when I hear someone who calls themselves a "professor" -- and that title literally means teacher, mind you -- talk about how teaching is too trivial a task for them to attend to, how it's not their main mission, it's a little like hearing a firefighter talk about how he doesn't wanna get his hair messed up. It makes me want to grab them by the collar and pimpslap them across the room until they get back into the fight they're supposed to be leading, the fight that we are losing so badly.
It does no good at all to get a Newton or an Einstein if their discoveries aren't then transmitted down the generations. In fact, I'd argue for a democracy to work, their discoveries need to be not only passed on, but dispersed as widely as possible. It's not until the general population truly understands the implications of "fallout" and "half-life" that we can move past the "Nuke 'em all, let God sort 'em out," nonsense. Think of how our options for Vice-Presidential candidates would improve if the general population truly understood what the biologists mean by "natural selection."
Think of all the misery we go through in this country because the average college graduate can't offer you that much better of an explanation of why the light goes on when you turn the switch other than "Magic fairies made it light up."
It's all well and good if someone over at CalTech discovers "zero point energy" tomorrow, but if the new knowledge isn't then handed down and widely explained enough that the general population can vote intelligently about the matter, then it doesn't do us any good, and may very well put us in greater danger.
And don't even get me started about how we're whoring out our universities so corporations don't have to fund their own product development like Xerox PARC or Bell Labs any more...
Hooray for research. I'm glad I lived long enough to see Fermat's theorem proved, and I'd love to see the Grand Unification Theory before I die, but the purpose of a university is not only to expand the frontiers of knowledge, but to pass it on as well.
Any professor who talks about how he doesn't care about his teaching is only doing half his job.
"Even at MIT, where we pat ourselves on the back for our meritocratic ways until our skin is raw, admissions staffers report that legacies are granted an additional review before their rejection is finalized. At several schools, such students receive much more than an extra review. "
Talking about a school which even considers "legacy" status in admissions not wanting to give a diploma to everyone who pays...
Thank you. That's the best laugh I've had all morning.
Putting a label "WARNING: This game will turn you into a psychotic killing machine" on any game, even "Hello Kitty Knits with her Friends," would instantly make it the highest grossing game of all time.
Seriously, is Representative Baca paying off political donations from the games industry?
"I'm beginning to think that our HR person just does a terrible job at finding resumes for me"
Well, there's your problem...
You sound like a great, amiable guy who'd be a great coworker. HR is screwing that up for you.
Why are you letting HR dictate who you're going to get saddled with? HR doesn't bring you resumes, you should be taking resumes to them. Talk to your friends and acquaintences, guys in the users' group. People that you know can do the job.
"Hey, we need a coder for Project X. Ya want it, or know anybody?"
"Whatcha offering?"
"120K, 30 days vacation, free milk and cookies..."
"See you Monday morning."
. .
"Hey, we need a coder for Project X. Ya want it, or know anybody?"
"Whatcha offering?"
"$4.25 an hour plus all the stress and scapegoating you can handle..."
"Gee, not really looking myself. Let me see if I can find anyone for you...."
Basically, with unemployment penciled in to hit nine percent next month, you WILL find someone competent to hire. You just have to be offering market rates.
I bought three Mercedes. Two of them got repossessed. Now, the dealers won't finance me when I go to buy another. Clearly, there is a shortage of Mercedes.
Look at your story. You had three programmers. Two quit (Yeah, I know, it wasn't because they were unhappy. Look, no one wants to be known as a malcontent or difficult. They lied to you.) Now, you can't get anyone in to interview who knows what they're doing.
You think maybe it's possible that your company's reputation precedes it? I know of half a dozen places in my town that nobody in their right mind would agree to work for.
Show me a man who says he can't find anyone to hire, and I'll show you a man nobody wants to work for.
Take that same man, triple the wages he's offering and wire a pacifier into his mouth and the ghosts of Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing will fight for the interview.
Read a news story the other day about a city manager who wanted to cut the fire department by about half because none of the local fires ever seemed to blow up into anything major anyways.
The quotes from the apoplectic fire chief were hilarious and oddly familiar...
The fact that you can demonstrate such an awesome grasp of this fundamental concept makes me want to vote you IT Czar.
Seriously. I want you to go all around the world and talk to absolutely everyone and repeat that little speech. I wanna see you show up as a guest on The Daily Show. I want to see them make "Backup Plane: The Movie" I want you to wander the Earth like Johnny Appleseed and Samuel Jackson in "Pulp Fiction," getting into adventures and imparting this wisdom to all you meet.
And then maybe, just maybe, on some faraway golden day, in a better world than the one we have now, I'll pick up my phone to hear some poor netadmin chump cry out for help and when I ask that vile bastard "Do you have any backups?" maybe, just maybe, he'll say "Yes, I took them yesterday."
And when that glorious day comes, ToasterMonkey, I swear I will find the tallest twin peaks in the world, and dynamite the first into the shape of a toaster, and the other into the shape of a monkey, in your eternal glorious honor.
OK, Ray, we all love you here, but does that mean if the RIAA showed up at your door with a truck full of money tomorrow, you'd start suing widows and orphans for them?
There are two horrendous memes going around right now that scare me to death:
1. The Government is allowed to do it unless the Constitution says it can't.
As you rightfully point out, this is exactly backward. The Government can't do it until the Constitution says it can. You would think a bunch of geeks would appreciate the power of a "default" setting...
2. The Constitution says the Government can't do that. The Constitution doesn't restrict Corporations from doing that. Therefore, if the Government works through Corporations to do it, it's OK.
I worry about these two wrong-headed ideas, because I've seen one other one rise to power in my life. When Carl Icahn and T. Boone Pickens started chanting in the late '70s, "A Corporation's only obligation is to maximize shareholder value," they were laughed out of the room. I even remember an interview with a Wharton business prof deriding the idea. Of course Corporations have obligations to the community and societies they operate in -- it was the explicit deal spelled out in their corporate charters. The Citizens of the State grant the Corporation limited liability, legal personhood and tax breaks. In return for these favors, Corporations promise to contribute to the General Welfare.
That was the theory, at any rate. At least everyone understood how the game was SUPPOSED to be played, even if the real world never did quite measure up...
Unfortunately, after 30 years of the Big Lie, I talk to kids in college these days who honestly believe, "A Corporation should maximize shareholder value without consideration of morality or the impact on the society at large."
I always ask these kids, "OK, why exactly do we offer Corporations limited liability, the legal fiction of personhood, and lesser tax burdens?"
Mostly they answer, "Just because we do." Some of the more clever ones come up with "To encourage investment in Corporations." When I ask why we should care, they fumble for a bit and mention something about jobs. I point out that proportinately, most jobs in America are now created by the sole proprietorships and partnerships of small businesses. If we're trading no liability and tax breaks in return for jobs, we're getting screwed on the deal.
Ultimately, they shrug their shoulders and say, "I don't know, that's just what I was always told."
It's bad enough my children have to live in a world where everyone thinks businesses have no obligations but to make money. I shudder to think that my grandkids might live in a world where everyone thinks the government can rightfully do whatever it wants.
There is no place in this country where you are forced to work any longer than you choose, or in hazardous conditions.
I used to believe that too. Then they took "Underdog" off the air and I was forced to venture outside.
My goodness, what a precious and sheltered little life you must have led up to now. OK, 'scuse us, but the grownups are talking here. Go back to your tinker toys until you've seen enough of the world to understand there are unspeakable horrors out here that would make Sinclair Lewis faint.
Better yet, find a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter to volunteer at, and for goodness sake, keep your mouth closed and your eyes and ears open. You'll find life isn't quite what the Young Republicans Club told you it was.
Reading through this thread, the number of comments made by morally retarded idiots is depressing. I just wanted to say once again, as far as most of us here are concerned, you are a superhero complete with a big flappy cape. We luv ya. Keep fighting the good fight.
Relax, he was on mute and never named. I'm only recounting the story here -- polished and dramatized a bit -- as a caution to the poster. Not only was there no public humiliation involved for the freshly minted MCSE, I also helped save his job, as well as giving him the Cliff Notes version of a CCNA course. I made sure his boss got a recap that emphasized the error of looking for bouncy little graphs, not the ineptness of forcing a box to respond to a few hundred SNMP queries a second.
As far as the speakerphone, that's SOP. Whenever a network of that magnitude is brought down for a reason that silly, rest assured the whole room is always made aware at the start of the situation. You'd be amazed how unscrupulous people can get when they think they're about to be fired for cause, and having witnesses to conversations like that is policy.
It was too funny. Some other chief sales drone insisted they wanted pretty dancing graphs like a stereo equalizer, so the cheap-salary french fry maker/network engineer in charge of it turned on every SNMP query possible at the core, dug up the command to give SNMP queries the highest possible priority, and then set their SNMP monitoring tool to query everything about a dozen times a second.
CPU Utilization, which was already at a heavy 70%, pegged. The whole network shuddered to a screaming halt. Trouble tickets flooded in, customers and everyone else screaming bloody murder...
Naturally, Fate saw to it this issue hit my desk. "Why," I asked, rubbing my temples and already fearing the answer, "did you do this?"
"They wanted it to look cool."
I raised me voice loud enough for the room to hear. "I'm sorry, we had some static, I didn't catch that. Could you repeat that?" Everyone fell silent as I hit the "speaker" and then "mute" buttons on my phone.
"I wanted it to look cool, you know, like 'the Matrix?'"
Everyone got a merrily constipated look on their face. One of my buddies across the room asked "We on mute?"
"Of course."
The room full of CCIEs laughed for a good three minutes. For weeks afterward, "I wanted it to look cool, like the Matrix" was a catch phrase.
Actually, I'm from a military family with generations of service and a couple at the bottom of the Pacific. Yes, I've actually been shot at. It's no fun at all.
It would make planes the holy grail of bombability - walk on with a couple of lbs of explosives and be guaranteed a 200+ kill on the plane and maybe 100s more on the ground if you time it right. Are you seriously suggesting that is acceptable because you believe you mustn't be searched even when getting on someone else's private property as a privilege?"
Absolutely, free men are never to be searched without great cause. I stand in awesome company when I say this. You think Washington, Franklin or Jefferson would have put up with the TSA for even a second?
First off, travel is not a privilige. It's a guaranteed right as the courts have affirmed on numerous ocassions. If you're not free to move around, you're not free to do anything. Secondly, the minute you open a public business, you give up your "private property" rights. I can bar someone from my home just because I don't like they way they look. I can't do the same from my business.
But forget the details, here's your real problem. You're afraid. Someone could do something bad that could hurt a lot of people, and because of that fear, you think we should toss our liberty out the window and hope the big strong men in suits and uniforms protect us.
Patrick Henry disagrees with you.
Here's your problem. You're posting on a board filled with engineers. I'll bet at least half of the people on this board could wreak some real havoc. It takes brilliance to create something new, but any jackass can rip something apart. Destruction is easy. "But, but, you could take a bomb and kill a couple hundred people..." Sure, but that's true of any large gathering of people.
Freedom and Liberty are not safe. They're never going to be safe. There's no way to make them safe. You could spend a year coming up with the most air-tight security you can imagine, and the denizens of Slashdot would pop it almost immediately. Go back and read Feynman again. The military would come up with the best schemes they could. Feynman would have them ripping their hair out by lunch.
Consider the history. A mental patient with a fixation on a Hollywood starlet managed to get a bullet past the best bodyguard service ever. The whole Union Army couldn't keep a flaky actor from killing one of our greatest presidents. Consider Iraq. We've put Draconian security measures in place, complete with "If in doubt, shoot" orders. We're still losing men to half-assed mouthbreathers who lack the balls to let their women speak their mind.
You can be Free, or you can be Fearful, but you can't be both at the same time. Yes, the man next to you could be a suicide bomber. No, you don't get to cancel his Liberty to check. Yes, your waiter might be carrying SARS. No, you don't get to force him to pass medical quarantine every morning.
We're Americans. People should speak their minds without fear as befits free men. Pray to whatever god you believe in, or deny whatever deity you choose. We don't search people until we can convince a judge that they've already done something wrong.
And the fact that some of my fellow countrymen haven't soaked this lesson down to their very bones just terrifies me...
A search IS harrassment. It's a gross violation of your person. It's a massive exercise of power, sending the message that you don't even control your own body, that we can do anything to you at any time. That's why there's an entire amendment in the Bill of Rights prohibiting it until we're pretty sure we're gonna find a dead body somewhere.
I don't mean to offend, but the level of subservience in your post is frightening. We're Americans. We're supposed to be easy to govern, but impossible to rule.
Here's the issue -- We want to trust our law enforcement officers. We take their word above anyone else's in a court of law. We don't want to think of them as liars.
I'm uncomfortable when I see stings like this because when I see it, it forces me to acknowledge that the police are liars -- and that gets worrisome fast. If they're willing to lie here, if they say the ends justify the means here, then where else are they willing to bend the truth?
That's why juries originally rejected the use of undercover officers until TV made it seem ordinary.
I went through the training for Volunteer Firefighters. You learn all about setting fires. I know guys who went to various academies. You learn all about forcibly taking things away from people. Firefighters study arson. Cops study crime. You absolutely want them to. There was never a saint who didn't perfectly understand sin.
Slashdot Mirror
"However, while you can get basic scientific knowledge taught as - more or less - a byproduct of a research development focused program, you cannot get research development as a byproduct of a "good teacher" focused program. "
And, truth be told, I'm not arguing your point either. You're right.
It's just getting awfully dark out here.
When I first set foot on a college campus way back in the early 80s, professors listed their academic affiliations on their door -- Dr. Someguy, PhD, Caltech, Dr. OtherDude, PhD, Stanford, etc.
The last time I spent any significant time on a college campus in the year 2000, I saw entire departments listed by their corporate sponsor. Professors began listing the companies they consulted with, rather than the institution that granted them their degrees.
Yes, it was at the height of the boom, but several professors I heard of -- at a big famous state school of awesome reputation -- had ditched teaching their classes entirely. They literally did not show up to lecture a single class and dumped all teaching duties on their grad students of dubious communication skills, who in turn slashed schedules to a minimum, too busy consulting on the side themselves.
And then we had eight years of Bush. Public schools in this country aren't even a shell of their former selves any more. They're not even a joke. They're just sad and pathetic, cargo cults going through the motions of running a school who have forgotten the substance and barely remember the form.
Most of the "official" communication my kids bring home looks like the first drafts of a high school freshman comp class. I talk to history teachers who can't tell the difference between the battles of Manassas and Midway, science teachers who can't make an electromagnet, English teachers who dimly remember seeing a couple of Shakespeare's plays on video, math teachers who can't take a derivative...
The two people doing the most to educate the American public about science right now are Jamie and Adam of "Mythbusters," and as much as I adore those guys, it's a little like saying our national defense is secured by the good ol' boys of the Buford Volunteer Fire Department.
It's not just our physical infrastructure that's crumbling, our intanglible assets such as level of education among the populace are falling apart as well.
So when I hear someone who calls themselves a "professor" -- and that title literally means teacher, mind you -- talk about how teaching is too trivial a task for them to attend to, how it's not their main mission, it's a little like hearing a firefighter talk about how he doesn't wanna get his hair messed up. It makes me want to grab them by the collar and pimpslap them across the room until they get back into the fight they're supposed to be leading, the fight that we are losing so badly.
Passing that knowledge on is the other half.
It does no good at all to get a Newton or an Einstein if their discoveries aren't then transmitted down the generations. In fact, I'd argue for a democracy to work, their discoveries need to be not only passed on, but dispersed as widely as possible. It's not until the general population truly understands the implications of "fallout" and "half-life" that we can move past the "Nuke 'em all, let God sort 'em out," nonsense. Think of how our options for Vice-Presidential candidates would improve if the general population truly understood what the biologists mean by "natural selection."
Think of all the misery we go through in this country because the average college graduate can't offer you that much better of an explanation of why the light goes on when you turn the switch other than "Magic fairies made it light up."
It's all well and good if someone over at CalTech discovers "zero point energy" tomorrow, but if the new knowledge isn't then handed down and widely explained enough that the general population can vote intelligently about the matter, then it doesn't do us any good, and may very well put us in greater danger.
And don't even get me started about how we're whoring out our universities so corporations don't have to fund their own product development like Xerox PARC or Bell Labs any more...
Hooray for research. I'm glad I lived long enough to see Fermat's theorem proved, and I'd love to see the Grand Unification Theory before I die, but the purpose of a university is not only to expand the frontiers of knowledge, but to pass it on as well.
Any professor who talks about how he doesn't care about his teaching is only doing half his job.
Have you ever considered that you might be happier at a pure research institution where you wouldn't be burdened with teaching?
It certainly sounds like your students might prefer you there...
"...because giving a diploma to everyone who pays waters down the value of the diploma."
http://tech.mit.edu/V121/N14/col14nesmi.14c.html
"Even at MIT, where we pat ourselves on the back for our meritocratic ways until our skin is raw, admissions staffers report that legacies are granted an additional review before their rejection is finalized. At several schools, such students receive much more than an extra review. "
Talking about a school which even considers "legacy" status in admissions not wanting to give a diploma to everyone who pays...
Thank you. That's the best laugh I've had all morning.
Is this testing whether I'm an applicant, or a lesbian?
Putting a label "WARNING: This game will turn you into a psychotic killing machine" on any game, even "Hello Kitty Knits with her Friends," would instantly make it the highest grossing game of all time.
Seriously, is Representative Baca paying off political donations from the games industry?
"I'm beginning to think that our HR person just does a terrible job at finding resumes for me"
Well, there's your problem...
You sound like a great, amiable guy who'd be a great coworker. HR is screwing that up for you.
Why are you letting HR dictate who you're going to get saddled with? HR doesn't bring you resumes, you should be taking resumes to them. Talk to your friends and acquaintences, guys in the users' group. People that you know can do the job.
"Hey, we need a coder for Project X. Ya want it, or know anybody?"
"Whatcha offering?"
"120K, 30 days vacation, free milk and cookies..."
"See you Monday morning."
.
.
"Hey, we need a coder for Project X. Ya want it, or know anybody?"
"Whatcha offering?"
"$4.25 an hour plus all the stress and scapegoating you can handle..."
"Gee, not really looking myself. Let me see if I can find anyone for you...."
Basically, with unemployment penciled in to hit nine percent next month, you WILL find someone competent to hire. You just have to be offering market rates.
I bought three Mercedes. Two of them got repossessed. Now, the dealers won't finance me when I go to buy another. Clearly, there is a shortage of Mercedes.
Look at your story. You had three programmers. Two quit (Yeah, I know, it wasn't because they were unhappy. Look, no one wants to be known as a malcontent or difficult. They lied to you.) Now, you can't get anyone in to interview who knows what they're doing.
You think maybe it's possible that your company's reputation precedes it? I know of half a dozen places in my town that nobody in their right mind would agree to work for.
Show me a man who says he can't find anyone to hire, and I'll show you a man nobody wants to work for.
Take that same man, triple the wages he's offering and wire a pacifier into his mouth and the ghosts of Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing will fight for the interview.
Read a news story the other day about a city manager who wanted to cut the fire department by about half because none of the local fires ever seemed to blow up into anything major anyways.
The quotes from the apoplectic fire chief were hilarious and oddly familiar...
That was just beautiful, man. Just perfect.
The fact that you can demonstrate such an awesome grasp of this fundamental concept makes me want to vote you IT Czar.
Seriously. I want you to go all around the world and talk to absolutely everyone and repeat that little speech. I wanna see you show up as a guest on The Daily Show. I want to see them make "Backup Plane: The Movie" I want you to wander the Earth like Johnny Appleseed and Samuel Jackson in "Pulp Fiction," getting into adventures and imparting this wisdom to all you meet.
And then maybe, just maybe, on some faraway golden day, in a better world than the one we have now, I'll pick up my phone to hear some poor netadmin chump cry out for help and when I ask that vile bastard "Do you have any backups?" maybe, just maybe, he'll say "Yes, I took them yesterday."
And when that glorious day comes, ToasterMonkey, I swear I will find the tallest twin peaks in the world, and dynamite the first into the shape of a toaster, and the other into the shape of a monkey, in your eternal glorious honor.
Gah. I need to clean my glasses and maybe learn how to read... Where did I put that "Hooked on Phonics" CD again....
OK, Ray, we all love you here, but does that mean if the RIAA showed up at your door with a truck full of money tomorrow, you'd start suing widows and orphans for them?
Amen. Amen. Amen.
There are two horrendous memes going around right now that scare me to death:
1. The Government is allowed to do it unless the Constitution says it can't.
As you rightfully point out, this is exactly backward. The Government can't do it until the Constitution says it can. You would think a bunch of geeks would appreciate the power of a "default" setting...
2. The Constitution says the Government can't do that. The Constitution doesn't restrict Corporations from doing that. Therefore, if the Government works through Corporations to do it, it's OK.
I worry about these two wrong-headed ideas, because I've seen one other one rise to power in my life. When Carl Icahn and T. Boone Pickens started chanting in the late '70s, "A Corporation's only obligation is to maximize shareholder value," they were laughed out of the room. I even remember an interview with a Wharton business prof deriding the idea. Of course Corporations have obligations to the community and societies they operate in -- it was the explicit deal spelled out in their corporate charters. The Citizens of the State grant the Corporation limited liability, legal personhood and tax breaks. In return for these favors, Corporations promise to contribute to the General Welfare.
That was the theory, at any rate. At least everyone understood how the game was SUPPOSED to be played, even if the real world never did quite measure up...
Unfortunately, after 30 years of the Big Lie, I talk to kids in college these days who honestly believe, "A Corporation should maximize shareholder value without consideration of morality or the impact on the society at large."
I always ask these kids, "OK, why exactly do we offer Corporations limited liability, the legal fiction of personhood, and lesser tax burdens?"
Mostly they answer, "Just because we do." Some of the more clever ones come up with "To encourage investment in Corporations." When I ask why we should care, they fumble for a bit and mention something about jobs. I point out that proportinately, most jobs in America are now created by the sole proprietorships and partnerships of small businesses. If we're trading no liability and tax breaks in return for jobs, we're getting screwed on the deal.
Ultimately, they shrug their shoulders and say, "I don't know, that's just what I was always told."
It's bad enough my children have to live in a world where everyone thinks businesses have no obligations but to make money. I shudder to think that my grandkids might live in a world where everyone thinks the government can rightfully do whatever it wants.
Nobody likes an etymology geek, Scully.
Agghhhhh! A Juniper Huguenot! BURN HIM!
There is no place in this country where you are forced to work any longer than you choose, or in hazardous conditions.
I used to believe that too. Then they took "Underdog" off the air and I was forced to venture outside.
My goodness, what a precious and sheltered little life you must have led up to now. OK, 'scuse us, but the grownups are talking here. Go back to your tinker toys until you've seen enough of the world to understand there are unspeakable horrors out here that would make Sinclair Lewis faint.
Better yet, find a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter to volunteer at, and for goodness sake, keep your mouth closed and your eyes and ears open. You'll find life isn't quite what the Young Republicans Club told you it was.
I know I did.
Hi Ray,
Reading through this thread, the number of comments made by morally retarded idiots is depressing. I just wanted to say once again, as far as most of us here are concerned, you are a superhero complete with a big flappy cape. We luv ya. Keep fighting the good fight.
Relax, he was on mute and never named. I'm only recounting the story here -- polished and dramatized a bit -- as a caution to the poster. Not only was there no public humiliation involved for the freshly minted MCSE, I also helped save his job, as well as giving him the Cliff Notes version of a CCNA course. I made sure his boss got a recap that emphasized the error of looking for bouncy little graphs, not the ineptness of forcing a box to respond to a few hundred SNMP queries a second.
As far as the speakerphone, that's SOP. Whenever a network of that magnitude is brought down for a reason that silly, rest assured the whole room is always made aware at the start of the situation. You'd be amazed how unscrupulous people can get when they think they're about to be fired for cause, and having witnesses to conversations like that is policy.
It was too funny. Some other chief sales drone insisted they wanted pretty dancing graphs like a stereo equalizer, so the cheap-salary french fry maker/network engineer in charge of it turned on every SNMP query possible at the core, dug up the command to give SNMP queries the highest possible priority, and then set their SNMP monitoring tool to query everything about a dozen times a second.
CPU Utilization, which was already at a heavy 70%, pegged. The whole network shuddered to a screaming halt. Trouble tickets flooded in, customers and everyone else screaming bloody murder...
Naturally, Fate saw to it this issue hit my desk. "Why," I asked, rubbing my temples and already fearing the answer, "did you do this?"
"They wanted it to look cool."
I raised me voice loud enough for the room to hear. "I'm sorry, we had some static, I didn't catch that. Could you repeat that?" Everyone fell silent as I hit the "speaker" and then "mute" buttons on my phone.
"I wanted it to look cool, you know, like 'the Matrix?'"
Everyone got a merrily constipated look on their face. One of my buddies across the room asked "We on mute?"
"Of course."
The room full of CCIEs laughed for a good three minutes. For weeks afterward, "I wanted it to look cool, like the Matrix" was a catch phrase.
I sure hope so.
Actually, I'm from a military family with generations of service and a couple at the bottom of the Pacific. Yes, I've actually been shot at. It's no fun at all.
Not that I'm posting AC, of course. :-)
It would make planes the holy grail of bombability - walk on with a couple of lbs of explosives and be guaranteed a 200+ kill on the plane and maybe 100s more on the ground if you time it right. Are you seriously suggesting that is acceptable because you believe you mustn't be searched even when getting on someone else's private property as a privilege?"
Absolutely, free men are never to be searched without great cause. I stand in awesome company when I say this. You think Washington, Franklin or Jefferson would have put up with the TSA for even a second?
First off, travel is not a privilige. It's a guaranteed right as the courts have affirmed on numerous ocassions. If you're not free to move around, you're not free to do anything. Secondly, the minute you open a public business, you give up your "private property" rights. I can bar someone from my home just because I don't like they way they look. I can't do the same from my business.
But forget the details, here's your real problem. You're afraid. Someone could do something bad that could hurt a lot of people, and because of that fear, you think we should toss our liberty out the window and hope the big strong men in suits and uniforms protect us.
Patrick Henry disagrees with you.
Here's your problem. You're posting on a board filled with engineers. I'll bet at least half of the people on this board could wreak some real havoc. It takes brilliance to create something new, but any jackass can rip something apart. Destruction is easy. "But, but, you could take a bomb and kill a couple hundred people..." Sure, but that's true of any large gathering of people.
Freedom and Liberty are not safe. They're never going to be safe. There's no way to make them safe. You could spend a year coming up with the most air-tight security you can imagine, and the denizens of Slashdot would pop it almost immediately. Go back and read Feynman again. The military would come up with the best schemes they could. Feynman would have them ripping their hair out by lunch.
Consider the history. A mental patient with a fixation on a Hollywood starlet managed to get a bullet past the best bodyguard service ever. The whole Union Army couldn't keep a flaky actor from killing one of our greatest presidents. Consider Iraq. We've put Draconian security measures in place, complete with "If in doubt, shoot" orders. We're still losing men to half-assed mouthbreathers who lack the balls to let their women speak their mind.
You can be Free, or you can be Fearful, but you can't be both at the same time. Yes, the man next to you could be a suicide bomber. No, you don't get to cancel his Liberty to check. Yes, your waiter might be carrying SARS. No, you don't get to force him to pass medical quarantine every morning.
We're Americans. People should speak their minds without fear as befits free men. Pray to whatever god you believe in, or deny whatever deity you choose. We don't search people until we can convince a judge that they've already done something wrong.
And the fact that some of my fellow countrymen haven't soaked this lesson down to their very bones just terrifies me...
"Harassed how exactly? They were searched."
A search IS harrassment. It's a gross violation of your person. It's a massive exercise of power, sending the message that you don't even control your own body, that we can do anything to you at any time. That's why there's an entire amendment in the Bill of Rights prohibiting it until we're pretty sure we're gonna find a dead body somewhere.
I don't mean to offend, but the level of subservience in your post is frightening. We're Americans. We're supposed to be easy to govern, but impossible to rule.
Here's the issue -- We want to trust our law enforcement officers. We take their word above anyone else's in a court of law. We don't want to think of them as liars. I'm uncomfortable when I see stings like this because when I see it, it forces me to acknowledge that the police are liars -- and that gets worrisome fast. If they're willing to lie here, if they say the ends justify the means here, then where else are they willing to bend the truth? That's why juries originally rejected the use of undercover officers until TV made it seem ordinary.
I went through the training for Volunteer Firefighters. You learn all about setting fires. I know guys who went to various academies. You learn all about forcibly taking things away from people. Firefighters study arson. Cops study crime. You absolutely want them to. There was never a saint who didn't perfectly understand sin.