How often does shit hit the fan in that sort of environment ?
As a hybrid techie who does a lot of hardware work, I would much rather go in once a month, fix a batch of issues in one visit, collect my fat cheque and go back to the pub, than spend 40+ hours a week playing Bejeweled, waiting for stuff to break.
I would expect AOL's strategy to greatly reduce costs, because that $15/hr rack monkey costs a lot more than $15/hr in the end. They have benefits, you have to "manage" them, they need human comforts like bathrooms, cleaning, seating, heating/air, lunch room. From an efficiency standpoint, the contractor route is more efficient in both money and time.
If version control is used as a single-user backup system, sure, good idea. But I already have a robust backup that runs several times daily. If I wanted to compile my project as it was on June 3rd, 2009, I just go to that folder and type "make". Done. If I have a brain fart and accidentally delete something, I open up the backup folder and fish it back out from the morning's snapshot.
If you're in a scenario where there are frequent collisions and a need for developer accountability, sure, source control wins by a big margin. For single coders, or mostly independent workflows like web development, you can get by just fine with very little.
Yep, that has been my experience. We didn't use anything like SVN, CVS or even the proprietary ones, but every single project was backed up several times a day. If I screwed something up, I could roll back to the morning's version in about 30 seconds. We didn't need anyone to know how to work the source control system, because it all happened server-side.
For my personal stuff, that's still how I do it. Heck, I could roll my entire cluster back to how it was 4 years ago if I so wanted, with nothing more than a few 'rsync' invocations. For large teams, that probably doesn't work out so well, but in scenarios where there are only 1-2 developers per project, it's all you need. It's not like we had a bunch of people committing large swaths of code that required delicate merging. It's usually just me and the graphic artist... no biggie!
Sure it is, and that's the route I usually take, but it's ten times more effort than you first anticipate. Even if you don't need to buy any new hardware, you still meet tons of resistance from people who refuse to change their habits.
Just a few years ago, I went through that hell convincing my employer to start using virtual machines instead of 10-year old PCs in the server room. He suffered from extreme sticker shock, would rather buy used stuff on eBay than spend a couple thousand on a white-box 2U server. Those things would fail every other week, they were awfully slow, and I wasn't too fond of driving out to the datacenter all the time to reboot a box or replace an (IDE) hard drive. It was like playing whack-a-mole with hardware failures. It took about a year to convince the boss to toss all that junk out and replace it with a big SAN and a few VM hosts. Just the time saved by not having to support crappy old hardware has more than covered the cost of upgrading to proper enterprise gear.
He finally saw the light, but it took a lot of nagging and teasing to open his eyes. Changing a company's dangerous or stupid ways is 10% technical know-how, and 90% psychology. You need to convince people their work will be faster/easier/better after the change, which often requires something to blow up in their faces before they'll even hear you out. Swoop in, save the day, and suddenly everyone's opening up their ears and budgets for your great ideas.
Funny, most of the places where I've worked have had worse practices than I, even for my personal "toy" projects.
I'm currently helping a 200-seat company set up proper backups and disaster planning. They have the money, but no one there ever had a clue as to what to implement, or how.
Even my day job has sporadic source control. We're in the process of fixing that, but in our case we were far too busy to slow down for such things. That's true of any business: when it's crunch time, the first things to fly out the window are all those "best practices" because billable hours trump infrastructure.
And kernel users have a finite number of useful choices for hardware. The binary driver bullshit isn't about developer time, its about GPL political agenda and that was VERY CLEAR when it went into place, if you can't see that there is no point in continuing the discussion. Yes, its harder to debug problems with binaries only, but I do it every fucking day. Its far from impossible but yes it does take effort. But thats not what I'm talking about, what I'm talking about is that they completely blowing off any bug reports from people who happen to use a binary driver, regardless of what the culprit actually is.
The binary driver "bullshit", as you say, is not bullshit at all. How many times have I gotten stuck because a binary driver was not available for my particular choice of kernel, or didn't jibe with my compile-time settings ? Enough times that I now avoid binary blobs like the plague. If I have a choice to make between binary-supported hardware, and source-supported hardware, the latter wins about 99% of the time. I make exactly two exceptions: WiFi, and GPU. That's it. Same goes for things like Xen where I'm locked into a specific kernel version - you'll find no Xen on my servers as a direct result of that hell.
Besides, why should volunteers support VirtualBox ? Oracle made it, and they have more resources than all volunteer driver developers combined. They should be fixing it. Just because we're into free software doesn't mean we're into free tech support for commercial software.
I'll posit that were it anyone other than Oracle, there might be a chance of someone benevolently fixing the bugs.
You know all that MS hate that used to go around this place ? Well in 2011, Oracle is the new boogeyman. They love to embrace, extend and extinguish open source projects - far more so than Microsoft. Good luck finding a kernel developer willing to throw their personal time down that black hole.
The Paypal fees are based on the fees charged to them by the credit card companies. There is simply no getting away from that, since Visa/MC insist on getting their points. The big plus with Paypal is they cater to small transactions, and they even offer an alternate fee structure that benefits those who primarily deal in microtransactions under $5. Good luck convincing the bank to open up a micro merchant account! The last time I accepted credit cards directly, I had to place a $10k security balance (to cover chargebacks!?), and while my per-transaction fee was slightly lower (2.2%), there were monthly fees for the account itself ($50), plus annual fees for the swipe readers and a separate fee for access to the e-terminal ($1800/yr). So I was paying about $2400 / year in bank fees just for the privilege of accepting Visa/MC, and I still had to pay 2.1% + 25 cents on each transaction.
With Paypal, they require no security deposit at all, no monthly/annual fees, and almost anyone can sign up (excluding some countries). As a consultant, I offer Paypal as an option to my clients now. Unless you're selling $250k a year, Paypal actually ends up being cheaper than having your own merchant account!
What most people consider evil is Paypal's policies when things go wrong. Some of this is due to poor communication. In one instance, I had received a large payment that presumably bumped my account past some threshold, so Paypal froze my account - not just the payment itself, but my existing balance as well - until I emailed in some photo ID and proof of address. It was the fact that they sprung it on me at the last minute that really set me off. The funds were quickly released once they had the info, but it shouldn't have happened in the first place. Had they asked for this up-front when I upgraded to a business account, it would have saved everyone a bit of grief. Their phone support reps were also rather clueless, just by the tone of voice, I could tell I was talking to some disaffected students at the other end, they knew even less about the company than I did. So Paypal needs a lot of work on that front... I wouldn't call them evil though. Ten years ago, sure, they were a trainwreck, but today they are far more well-behaved. If they're good enough for Steam, they're good enough for me.
Just because it's possible doesn't mean the zealots actually care about even trying. It's so much cooler to play the blame game, rather than focus on what's actually important: making things work!
The net result is that someone else has to implement the hackish-yet-perfectly-acceptable fix. Kernel devs could tackle it, but they won't, so someone else will. That someone else is often Redhat or Ubuntu, which means the fixes don't travel back upstream.
Even though it's the BIOS makers' fault, as an end user, I don't care. If the driver devs have an easy way to fix it, they should, because it will take months if not years to convince the OEMs to fix the problem at the source - if at all, because nobody gives a fuck about the 1% of us who use Linux on desktop and laptop machines.
Do you even have two functioning brain cells to rub together ?
Northern Canada is the sparsely-populated area that's too friggin cold for most Canadians. There are only a handful of small towns up there, primarily native americans and the occasional labour town. Not only is the population very very small, but I'd wager that very few of them are technically minded. The mere fact that all of their telecomms are handled by a lone satellite should be a pretty big hint about how minimal their needs are. It's the kind of place where the local ISP is a guy with a day job, who shares his internet feed with the whole neighbourhood via Wi-Max. There is no sprawling network of underground fibre up there, it's all very frontier-town and I doubt they're all that worried about a temporary outage.
There a few things I dread more than having to go to the Rideau Apple Store. In addition to the horde of seemingly non-paying customers, they get a colourful complement of the usual downtown Ottawa riff-raff: crackheads, brain-damaged, hobos, drunken Ottawa U students, and on one notable occasion, a fine fellow who begged for changed, then tried to steal my wallet and received a tender iBeating.
But, since I live within walking distance, it's quicker than mail-order. FML.
As much as I dislike the Apple Stores for being way too full of loitering fools, I gotta give them kudos for staying on-topic. The few 3rd-party items they do carry are directly related to their core products. Contrast with my local PC shop and erstwhile employer, whose computer inventory is perversely complemented by kitchenware, pottery, and Chinese Ikea-knockoff furniture. You know, because I totally needed an 8-dollar toaster to go with my new Radeon.
Dude... as a guy who regularly writes code while sitting in a quiet pub, I can tell you first-hand: the last thing you want to see is a drunken Apple fanboi.
I have the unfortunate distinction of owning a 17" MBP. Wasn't my idea, but part of my job is mobile app dev, and I needed a new laptop anyway, so I let my boss buy me the dumb thing. Every goddamned turtleneck-wearing cockmongler has to bless me with a rant about how they love their Mac. When I tell them I hate the thing and that it hinders my workflow, the answer is always "you'll learn to love it" - never "you will get used to it" or "yeah I guess that feature kind of sucks". They simply cannot parse the reality that someone might not be head-over-heels for a piece of Apple hardware.
And that's when they're fresh off the street, still sober. After one and a half pints of wheat beer, they step it up a notch by shouting in your ear about how awesome GarageBand is, you're a "fucking dinosaur" for using Cubase. After pint #3, they start telling you how iCloud is going to change your life and end world hunger. Somewhere during pint #4, the bartender calls 9-1-1 because Mr Fanboi has accidentally fallen under your boot and crushed their windpipe.
So no, let's not sell booze at the Apple store. Those cultists are annoying enough as it is, and frankly I'm already quite tired of having to cleave through hordes of people just to buy a stupid charger. You want to improve the Apple store experience ? Kick them out after 5 minutes if they haven't bought anything. It's a fucking Apple store, they sell all of 4 products. You don't need to browse, you need to get in, remortgage your kidneys, and get the fuck out.
Which is perfectly fine. They're not a real customer anyway... they don't want the stuff you're selling, they want the $10 they'll get when they send in their report.
Secret shoppers are overrated. If you come across as a giant prick, don't be surprised when your employees ignore your wishes and clumsily sabotage your business. I've always been one to lead by example, working WITH my employees, not AGAINST them. If they're doing it wrong, train them. If you want to curb undesirable behaviours, sit down with them and explain why you think it's unacceptable. Treat your staff as humans, not chattel, and you just might find they actually start caring about their job enough to do it right.
You clearly have never worked in a retail environment, especially a shithole of a convenience store / gas station like the one where this "firing contest" took place. Go work half a shift for this guy, and tell me you don't want to run him through a wood chipper.
Minimum wage gets you minimum dedication from your employees. If the guy wants his gas station to look like the Ritz, where everyone dresses nicely and treats every customer like a golden nugget, he can start paying them proportionately to those expectations. Otherwise, he's going to keep getting stuck with slummy, disrespectful teenagers and other human failures.
If he can't afford to run his business properly, he shouldn't run it at all.
Well, Tom, mr UID 822, I for one am quite pleased that you're not one of those P.C. apologists. Yes, people aren't always people, sometimes they're just savages, and should be treated as such.
As someone who has spent far too much time in bars, as both a patron and employee, I whole-heartedly agree with you. The latest generation has been so coddled that they believe themselves impervious to criticism and reprimand. Waking up to a good sore knuckle imprint serves to fill in for the lessons their parents failed to teach.
I don't find the prof's response disproportionate. Once you allow this sort of censorship, it opens the door to increasingly greater abuses of power. To yet again quote the overquoted Niemöller statement:
First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
If we don't defend out right to free speech TODAY, no matter how seemingly small the affront, we are setting a precedent for the future. Today it's just a poster, but tomorrow they may well label all Firefly fans as dangerous terrorists. Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Nah. The prof is already doing the right thing: using a lawyer to skull-fuck the school, and hopefully replacing his place of work with something less idiocratic.
Is she a public servant ? Did she graduate from a police college ? Does she roll around in a modified Crown Vic ? Does she hide behind an overpass with a radar gun ?
Anyone can wear a shiny badge, act like a self-righteous prick and boss people around - still doesn't automagically make them a real cop.
No, really. This equality bullshit fad needs to end NOW! Reminds me of the Kurt Vonnegut story "Harrison Bergeron", recently made into a movie, where
The strong wear weights, the beautiful wear masks and the intelligent wear earpieces that fire off loud noises to keep them from taking unfair advantage of their brains
That nicely sums up my opinion of political correctness. If the only way to achieve a stable society is to stoop down to the lowest common denominator, I say ship all the weak, ugly imbeciles off to a damn Mars colony so we can have our nice little utopia, and they can have their real-life Idiocracy. Everyone's happy then, right ?
The problem is finding the source of that mistake. Either you accept the possibility that a series of individually inane omissions added up to a giant clusterfuck, or you choose to believe the theory that a handful of people acted strategically to trigger the "right mistakes", which sent the remaining players along a predictable path toward the desired outcome. Like a big meat-powered Rube Goldberg machine of doom...
Given the level of stupidity inherent in any large enough organisation, I'm not quite ready to dismiss theory #2.
Slashdot Mirror
How often does shit hit the fan in that sort of environment ?
As a hybrid techie who does a lot of hardware work, I would much rather go in once a month, fix a batch of issues in one visit, collect my fat cheque and go back to the pub, than spend 40+ hours a week playing Bejeweled, waiting for stuff to break.
I would expect AOL's strategy to greatly reduce costs, because that $15/hr rack monkey costs a lot more than $15/hr in the end. They have benefits, you have to "manage" them, they need human comforts like bathrooms, cleaning, seating, heating/air, lunch room. From an efficiency standpoint, the contractor route is more efficient in both money and time.
If version control is used as a single-user backup system, sure, good idea. But I already have a robust backup that runs several times daily. If I wanted to compile my project as it was on June 3rd, 2009, I just go to that folder and type "make". Done. If I have a brain fart and accidentally delete something, I open up the backup folder and fish it back out from the morning's snapshot.
If you're in a scenario where there are frequent collisions and a need for developer accountability, sure, source control wins by a big margin. For single coders, or mostly independent workflows like web development, you can get by just fine with very little.
Yep, that has been my experience. We didn't use anything like SVN, CVS or even the proprietary ones, but every single project was backed up several times a day. If I screwed something up, I could roll back to the morning's version in about 30 seconds. We didn't need anyone to know how to work the source control system, because it all happened server-side.
For my personal stuff, that's still how I do it. Heck, I could roll my entire cluster back to how it was 4 years ago if I so wanted, with nothing more than a few 'rsync' invocations. For large teams, that probably doesn't work out so well, but in scenarios where there are only 1-2 developers per project, it's all you need. It's not like we had a bunch of people committing large swaths of code that required delicate merging. It's usually just me and the graphic artist... no biggie!
Sure it is, and that's the route I usually take, but it's ten times more effort than you first anticipate. Even if you don't need to buy any new hardware, you still meet tons of resistance from people who refuse to change their habits.
Just a few years ago, I went through that hell convincing my employer to start using virtual machines instead of 10-year old PCs in the server room. He suffered from extreme sticker shock, would rather buy used stuff on eBay than spend a couple thousand on a white-box 2U server. Those things would fail every other week, they were awfully slow, and I wasn't too fond of driving out to the datacenter all the time to reboot a box or replace an (IDE) hard drive. It was like playing whack-a-mole with hardware failures. It took about a year to convince the boss to toss all that junk out and replace it with a big SAN and a few VM hosts. Just the time saved by not having to support crappy old hardware has more than covered the cost of upgrading to proper enterprise gear.
He finally saw the light, but it took a lot of nagging and teasing to open his eyes. Changing a company's dangerous or stupid ways is 10% technical know-how, and 90% psychology. You need to convince people their work will be faster/easier/better after the change, which often requires something to blow up in their faces before they'll even hear you out. Swoop in, save the day, and suddenly everyone's opening up their ears and budgets for your great ideas.
Funny, most of the places where I've worked have had worse practices than I, even for my personal "toy" projects.
I'm currently helping a 200-seat company set up proper backups and disaster planning. They have the money, but no one there ever had a clue as to what to implement, or how.
Even my day job has sporadic source control. We're in the process of fixing that, but in our case we were far too busy to slow down for such things. That's true of any business: when it's crunch time, the first things to fly out the window are all those "best practices" because billable hours trump infrastructure.
And kernel users have a finite number of useful choices for hardware. The binary driver bullshit isn't about developer time, its about GPL political agenda and that was VERY CLEAR when it went into place, if you can't see that there is no point in continuing the discussion. Yes, its harder to debug problems with binaries only, but I do it every fucking day. Its far from impossible but yes it does take effort. But thats not what I'm talking about, what I'm talking about is that they completely blowing off any bug reports from people who happen to use a binary driver, regardless of what the culprit actually is.
The binary driver "bullshit", as you say, is not bullshit at all. How many times have I gotten stuck because a binary driver was not available for my particular choice of kernel, or didn't jibe with my compile-time settings ? Enough times that I now avoid binary blobs like the plague. If I have a choice to make between binary-supported hardware, and source-supported hardware, the latter wins about 99% of the time. I make exactly two exceptions: WiFi, and GPU. That's it. Same goes for things like Xen where I'm locked into a specific kernel version - you'll find no Xen on my servers as a direct result of that hell.
Besides, why should volunteers support VirtualBox ? Oracle made it, and they have more resources than all volunteer driver developers combined. They should be fixing it. Just because we're into free software doesn't mean we're into free tech support for commercial software.
I'll posit that were it anyone other than Oracle, there might be a chance of someone benevolently fixing the bugs.
You know all that MS hate that used to go around this place ? Well in 2011, Oracle is the new boogeyman. They love to embrace, extend and extinguish open source projects - far more so than Microsoft. Good luck finding a kernel developer willing to throw their personal time down that black hole.
The Paypal fees are based on the fees charged to them by the credit card companies. There is simply no getting away from that, since Visa/MC insist on getting their points. The big plus with Paypal is they cater to small transactions, and they even offer an alternate fee structure that benefits those who primarily deal in microtransactions under $5. Good luck convincing the bank to open up a micro merchant account! The last time I accepted credit cards directly, I had to place a $10k security balance (to cover chargebacks!?), and while my per-transaction fee was slightly lower (2.2%), there were monthly fees for the account itself ($50), plus annual fees for the swipe readers and a separate fee for access to the e-terminal ($1800/yr). So I was paying about $2400 / year in bank fees just for the privilege of accepting Visa/MC, and I still had to pay 2.1% + 25 cents on each transaction.
With Paypal, they require no security deposit at all, no monthly/annual fees, and almost anyone can sign up (excluding some countries). As a consultant, I offer Paypal as an option to my clients now. Unless you're selling $250k a year, Paypal actually ends up being cheaper than having your own merchant account!
What most people consider evil is Paypal's policies when things go wrong. Some of this is due to poor communication. In one instance, I had received a large payment that presumably bumped my account past some threshold, so Paypal froze my account - not just the payment itself, but my existing balance as well - until I emailed in some photo ID and proof of address. It was the fact that they sprung it on me at the last minute that really set me off. The funds were quickly released once they had the info, but it shouldn't have happened in the first place. Had they asked for this up-front when I upgraded to a business account, it would have saved everyone a bit of grief. Their phone support reps were also rather clueless, just by the tone of voice, I could tell I was talking to some disaffected students at the other end, they knew even less about the company than I did. So Paypal needs a lot of work on that front... I wouldn't call them evil though. Ten years ago, sure, they were a trainwreck, but today they are far more well-behaved. If they're good enough for Steam, they're good enough for me.
Just because it's possible doesn't mean the zealots actually care about even trying. It's so much cooler to play the blame game, rather than focus on what's actually important: making things work!
The net result is that someone else has to implement the hackish-yet-perfectly-acceptable fix. Kernel devs could tackle it, but they won't, so someone else will. That someone else is often Redhat or Ubuntu, which means the fixes don't travel back upstream.
Even though it's the BIOS makers' fault, as an end user, I don't care. If the driver devs have an easy way to fix it, they should, because it will take months if not years to convince the OEMs to fix the problem at the source - if at all, because nobody gives a fuck about the 1% of us who use Linux on desktop and laptop machines.
Do you even have two functioning brain cells to rub together ?
Northern Canada is the sparsely-populated area that's too friggin cold for most Canadians. There are only a handful of small towns up there, primarily native americans and the occasional labour town. Not only is the population very very small, but I'd wager that very few of them are technically minded. The mere fact that all of their telecomms are handled by a lone satellite should be a pretty big hint about how minimal their needs are. It's the kind of place where the local ISP is a guy with a day job, who shares his internet feed with the whole neighbourhood via Wi-Max. There is no sprawling network of underground fibre up there, it's all very frontier-town and I doubt they're all that worried about a temporary outage.
the tapes were stolen from an SAIC employee's car during a burglary the night before.
What kind of idiot leaves tapes containing confidential data in a car, OVERNIGHT ? I wouldn't even leave a half-eaten sandwich in there overnight...
Gotta love government, contracting out to the biggest crooks and morons they can find.
^^ This.
There a few things I dread more than having to go to the Rideau Apple Store. In addition to the horde of seemingly non-paying customers, they get a colourful complement of the usual downtown Ottawa riff-raff: crackheads, brain-damaged, hobos, drunken Ottawa U students, and on one notable occasion, a fine fellow who begged for changed, then tried to steal my wallet and received a tender iBeating.
But, since I live within walking distance, it's quicker than mail-order. FML.
As much as I dislike the Apple Stores for being way too full of loitering fools, I gotta give them kudos for staying on-topic. The few 3rd-party items they do carry are directly related to their core products. Contrast with my local PC shop and erstwhile employer, whose computer inventory is perversely complemented by kitchenware, pottery, and Chinese Ikea-knockoff furniture. You know, because I totally needed an 8-dollar toaster to go with my new Radeon.
Dude... as a guy who regularly writes code while sitting in a quiet pub, I can tell you first-hand: the last thing you want to see is a drunken Apple fanboi.
I have the unfortunate distinction of owning a 17" MBP. Wasn't my idea, but part of my job is mobile app dev, and I needed a new laptop anyway, so I let my boss buy me the dumb thing. Every goddamned turtleneck-wearing cockmongler has to bless me with a rant about how they love their Mac. When I tell them I hate the thing and that it hinders my workflow, the answer is always "you'll learn to love it" - never "you will get used to it" or "yeah I guess that feature kind of sucks". They simply cannot parse the reality that someone might not be head-over-heels for a piece of Apple hardware.
And that's when they're fresh off the street, still sober. After one and a half pints of wheat beer, they step it up a notch by shouting in your ear about how awesome GarageBand is, you're a "fucking dinosaur" for using Cubase. After pint #3, they start telling you how iCloud is going to change your life and end world hunger. Somewhere during pint #4, the bartender calls 9-1-1 because Mr Fanboi has accidentally fallen under your boot and crushed their windpipe.
So no, let's not sell booze at the Apple store. Those cultists are annoying enough as it is, and frankly I'm already quite tired of having to cleave through hordes of people just to buy a stupid charger. You want to improve the Apple store experience ? Kick them out after 5 minutes if they haven't bought anything. It's a fucking Apple store, they sell all of 4 products. You don't need to browse, you need to get in, remortgage your kidneys, and get the fuck out.
Which is perfectly fine. They're not a real customer anyway... they don't want the stuff you're selling, they want the $10 they'll get when they send in their report.
Secret shoppers are overrated. If you come across as a giant prick, don't be surprised when your employees ignore your wishes and clumsily sabotage your business. I've always been one to lead by example, working WITH my employees, not AGAINST them. If they're doing it wrong, train them. If you want to curb undesirable behaviours, sit down with them and explain why you think it's unacceptable. Treat your staff as humans, not chattel, and you just might find they actually start caring about their job enough to do it right.
You clearly have never worked in a retail environment, especially a shithole of a convenience store / gas station like the one where this "firing contest" took place. Go work half a shift for this guy, and tell me you don't want to run him through a wood chipper.
Minimum wage gets you minimum dedication from your employees. If the guy wants his gas station to look like the Ritz, where everyone dresses nicely and treats every customer like a golden nugget, he can start paying them proportionately to those expectations. Otherwise, he's going to keep getting stuck with slummy, disrespectful teenagers and other human failures.
If he can't afford to run his business properly, he shouldn't run it at all.
And that is the kind of thinking that leads to unmanned fighter drones assassinating U.S. citizens.
Hey, if you want to lie in the bed you're made, by all means... I'm perfectly happy to watch the self-destruction of society from a safe distance.
Well, Tom, mr UID 822, I for one am quite pleased that you're not one of those P.C. apologists. Yes, people aren't always people, sometimes they're just savages, and should be treated as such.
As someone who has spent far too much time in bars, as both a patron and employee, I whole-heartedly agree with you. The latest generation has been so coddled that they believe themselves impervious to criticism and reprimand. Waking up to a good sore knuckle imprint serves to fill in for the lessons their parents failed to teach.
I don't find the prof's response disproportionate. Once you allow this sort of censorship, it opens the door to increasingly greater abuses of power. To yet again quote the overquoted Niemöller statement:
First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
If we don't defend out right to free speech TODAY, no matter how seemingly small the affront, we are setting a precedent for the future. Today it's just a poster, but tomorrow they may well label all Firefly fans as dangerous terrorists. Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Nah. The prof is already doing the right thing: using a lawyer to skull-fuck the school, and hopefully replacing his place of work with something less idiocratic.
Friday: Starving because there's no Braaaains in this building.
And how is that different from a rent-a-cop ?
Is she a public servant ? Did she graduate from a police college ? Does she roll around in a modified Crown Vic ? Does she hide behind an overpass with a radar gun ?
Anyone can wear a shiny badge, act like a self-righteous prick and boss people around - still doesn't automagically make them a real cop.
I reject your reality, and substitute my own.
No, really. This equality bullshit fad needs to end NOW! Reminds me of the Kurt Vonnegut story "Harrison Bergeron", recently made into a movie, where
The strong wear weights, the beautiful wear masks and the intelligent wear earpieces that fire off loud noises to keep them from taking unfair advantage of their brains
That nicely sums up my opinion of political correctness. If the only way to achieve a stable society is to stoop down to the lowest common denominator, I say ship all the weak, ugly imbeciles off to a damn Mars colony so we can have our nice little utopia, and they can have their real-life Idiocracy. Everyone's happy then, right ?
I believe the administration was threatened by that quote, because they clearly aren't in the business of giving people a chance at a fair defense.
If this prof is any good at what he does, he should jump ship, immediately, and find work in an institution that actually fosters learning.
That, or have his students prank the dumb rent-a-cop daily until she checks herself into the nearest psychiatric hospital.
The problem is finding the source of that mistake. Either you accept the possibility that a series of individually inane omissions added up to a giant clusterfuck, or you choose to believe the theory that a handful of people acted strategically to trigger the "right mistakes", which sent the remaining players along a predictable path toward the desired outcome. Like a big meat-powered Rube Goldberg machine of doom...
Given the level of stupidity inherent in any large enough organisation, I'm not quite ready to dismiss theory #2.