Before anybody goes off the deep end, I'm not a theology major and speak from a largely Judeo-Christian perspective, because that's one I know. I also don't really care what two people want to do in their own homes as long as they don't force somebody into it or try to jam their views down my throat. Discussion is good and healthy, but screaming "You're a frigging bigot" just because I don't happen to be gay, or black, or a one-legged hobo with ears the size of an elephant is not discussion; it's plain old intolerance for somebody who's opinions don't match with your own.
Now that that's outta 'da way...
i just don't get why 85% of americans are against gay marriage
Put quite simply, Marriage is a religious covenant and should not be the realm of any government save a theocracy.
Most offensive, to me at least, is the fact that a religious idea requires a license from the government.
Don't make the mistakes with this child that were made with quite a few gifted children in the 70's, 80's and 90's. I'm a product of the late-70's myself and have two children (7 and 8 years) who are both scaring the hell out of me with their brain power
Don't continually tell him he's smarter than everybody else, can achieve more, is different, etcetera. He is, most likely, painfully aware of this and will have to face that fact for the rest of his life. Recognize the intelligence, nurture it but don't use it to set him apart.
Peer groups are bogus; this child probably has no peer group that's recognizable. Imagine having your current raw intellect and reasoning ability but having to deal with disappointment, frustration and day-to-day life with the emotional level of a 9 year old or younger.
That being said, it's very important to encourage friendships with children his own age; not just for the bonding fact, but to help grow the ability to talk to people. I didn't (and still don't) have friends and it shows; I can talk to anybody who's "on the same level" that I am, but have a horrible time explaining what I'm thinking to anybody else. I can't talk to people, I can't reason with people and I get disgusted with everybody because "they just don't get it."
Encourage discipline. Unfortunately, from the way the post sounded, he's already out of grade-school and doing college level stuff. My biggest problem has been in dealing with the every-day booring stuff. Having to sit through classes and go to a school with kids his own age will teach discipline to handle life in the "real-world" when stuff just isn't all that new and exciting all the time.
In short, I guess' I'm just asking that this child not be taken to be a subject of some book you order from an add in a Psychology magazine or some freakish adult-in-a-kid's-body to be poked and prodded. He's a human being and is caught between the emotions of a 9 year-old and the intelligence of God knows who.
What scares me is the "I'd like to move him to..." tone of some of the messages. Allow him to search out what he likes, don't force anything down his throat, and make sure he has the discipline to deal with what has to be done before going on to what he wants to do.
Let me address the flames I already see coming: hate what I say, disagree with everything above, call me totally wrong; it doesn't matter. I've been through it, I'm guiding my two children through it. My view of what's going on is totally different that what you'll see, as it should be.
I'm a bitter, disappointed bastard of a man at 29. Most of this (not all, I'll admit) because of the way "gifted" children were handled where I grew up; I know because I see bits and pieces of my past every day.
Yeah, I know... Get over it, it was a long time ago, blah-blah-blah. I'm not looking for sympathy or trying to start a flame war.
I'd just like to give a kid a chance not to become me.
Just ban France from going to any.yahoo.com site. I'm sure Yahoo! is doing some sort of ident-type lookups for their logging, so it would be a simple matter to just bounce anything from a.fr domain out.
Even better, place a "500" error message: "Access to Yahoo! denied by the French government."
Most software development and consulting companies have such language included in their NDA's. I've found that a 6 month to 1 year limit is about standard in the industry. The thought behind this, as I've been told by Corporate Suit-types, is to limit the company's vulnerability to competitors coming in and offering a huge salary increase, bonus or other such compensation to get a developer to leave a similar project and take their work with them.
Standard IANAL disclaimers apply, but here's the way I understand it:
Reading the code wouldn't necessarily land you in legal trouble; nor would contributing to a Free software project IF you could prove that you did not use the knowledge gained by reading the source code in that project. There lies the problem. It's much easier to document that people have had no access to such knowledge and, therefore couldn't use it than it is to document that people had the knowledge but selectively "forgot" the knowledge when working on a similar project.
A good legal example of such a case was the Compaq black-box reverse-engineering of, if I remember correctly, an IBM PC BIOS for their "portable" (read: a thirty five pound plastic, hernia-inducing box).
I might have one or more of the companies confused, but I do remember the loss of the lawsuit because of the levels of documentation kept on the project.
Well, I'm not exactly in the Phoenix Metro area, but I'm close. I'm in Scottsdale. I recently moved from the East Valley and an @Home connection to where I'm at now. My experience with DSL has been mixed.
I'm was a little bit spoiled with @Home because they had at least a T-1 at the head end of my apartment complex, yet there were only 3 of us using it. When I moved, they were'nt available so I had to go the DSL route.
Rather than dinking around with shared bandwidth, unreliable service and talking with U.S. Worst (now Qworst) support, sales and customer service people, I decided to go with a Rhythyms business connection.
I'm 19,485 feet from the CO, so the phone company wouldn't even touch me; however Rhythyms was more than happy to tell me about how their superior equipment would allow me to get an ISDL connection with a 128k bandwith limit each way.
After Qworst screwed up the installation, forgot they were supposed to fix the screw up, fixed it for a few hours and promptly puked all over it again... You get the picture. The connection hasn't had a bit of downtime since (about 2 weeks now) and, while the speed is nothing compared to a cable modem, I at least have a reliable connection that I don't share with anybody.
As a bonus, I worked a deal to get 5 IP's so I can host my services. As a business account, it's perfectly agreeable to the TOS contract. All this for about $110 a month. A bit pricey, but it was well within my budget for my daily 'Net fix.
Just another knee-jerk reaction by our wonderful governmental entities. It's about time we (at least in the U.S.) started screaming at our representitives instead of taking a "well, what can I do anyway?" attitude. Depending upon the wording of these laws, it could very well screw up security auditing tools and make companies that sell these types of utilities international outlaws overnight.
As anybody who's had to hack a box at work can attest, the most important things you can use is the trusty telnet client, perhaps Perl to run through a million passwords in a brute force attack and the good old brain.
So, do we outlaw ICQ, IRC, ICMP, source-routed packet data, backticks in the *nix shells, poor CGI programs that don't escape their parameters well enough, the Bugtraq mailing list, the sprintf function and just about anything else because it's a tool that could be used for hacking? Remember that Kevin Mitnik (sp?) used social engineering and trash digging more often than any hacking tool...
It's time for the public to take a stand and stop listening to the overreacting, sensationalizing, hype-strewn media blowing things out of proportion
and react with common sense for a change. If we'd just spend some time telling the government what rational people want for a change, we'd be much better off.
So, if you feel like writing to your representitives, put pen to paper and fire off a letter; almost without exception, the people dictating our "can's" and "cannot's" on-line don't even understand simple e-mail, let alone the complex ways in which a tool can be used for good or bad.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to have to find it and send it into the site now...
Before anybody goes off the deep end, I'm not a theology major and speak from a largely Judeo-Christian perspective, because that's one I know. I also don't really care what two people want to do in their own homes as long as they don't force somebody into it or try to jam their views down my throat. Discussion is good and healthy, but screaming "You're a frigging bigot" just because I don't happen to be gay, or black, or a one-legged hobo with ears the size of an elephant is not discussion; it's plain old intolerance for somebody who's opinions don't match with your own.
Now that that's outta 'da way...
Put quite simply, Marriage is a religious covenant and should not be the realm of any government save a theocracy.
Most offensive, to me at least, is the fact that a religious idea requires a license from the government.
Oh, and since they're the ones with the "keys", I think it only fair that they supply the hardware for me at no cost.
I'll take... Oh... 30 or 40 terabytes, please...
Don't continually tell him he's smarter than everybody else, can achieve more, is different, etcetera. He is, most likely, painfully aware of this and will have to face that fact for the rest of his life. Recognize the intelligence, nurture it but don't use it to set him apart.
Peer groups are bogus; this child probably has no peer group that's recognizable. Imagine having your current raw intellect and reasoning ability but having to deal with disappointment, frustration and day-to-day life with the emotional level of a 9 year old or younger.
That being said, it's very important to encourage friendships with children his own age; not just for the bonding fact, but to help grow the ability to talk to people. I didn't (and still don't) have friends and it shows; I can talk to anybody who's "on the same level" that I am, but have a horrible time explaining what I'm thinking to anybody else. I can't talk to people, I can't reason with people and I get disgusted with everybody because "they just don't get it."
Encourage discipline. Unfortunately, from the way the post sounded, he's already out of grade-school and doing college level stuff. My biggest problem has been in dealing with the every-day booring stuff. Having to sit through classes and go to a school with kids his own age will teach discipline to handle life in the "real-world" when stuff just isn't all that new and exciting all the time.
In short, I guess' I'm just asking that this child not be taken to be a subject of some book you order from an add in a Psychology magazine or some freakish adult-in-a-kid's-body to be poked and prodded. He's a human being and is caught between the emotions of a 9 year-old and the intelligence of God knows who.
What scares me is the "I'd like to move him to..." tone of some of the messages. Allow him to search out what he likes, don't force anything down his throat, and make sure he has the discipline to deal with what has to be done before going on to what he wants to do.
Let me address the flames I already see coming: hate what I say, disagree with everything above, call me totally wrong; it doesn't matter. I've been through it, I'm guiding my two children through it. My view of what's going on is totally different that what you'll see, as it should be.
I'm a bitter, disappointed bastard of a man at 29. Most of this (not all, I'll admit) because of the way "gifted" children were handled where I grew up; I know because I see bits and pieces of my past every day.
Yeah, I know... Get over it, it was a long time ago, blah-blah-blah. I'm not looking for sympathy or trying to start a flame war.
I'd just like to give a kid a chance not to become me.
/me gets off the soapbox.
Even better, place a "500" error message: "Access to Yahoo! denied by the French government."
Rediculous problems require rediculous solutions.
Reading the code wouldn't necessarily land you in legal trouble; nor would contributing to a Free software project IF you could prove that you did not use the knowledge gained by reading the source code in that project. There lies the problem. It's much easier to document that people have had no access to such knowledge and, therefore couldn't use it than it is to document that people had the knowledge but selectively "forgot" the knowledge when working on a similar project.
A good legal example of such a case was the Compaq black-box reverse-engineering of, if I remember correctly, an IBM PC BIOS for their "portable" (read: a thirty five pound plastic, hernia-inducing box).
I might have one or more of the companies confused, but I do remember the loss of the lawsuit because of the levels of documentation kept on the project.
I'm was a little bit spoiled with @Home because they had at least a T-1 at the head end of my apartment complex, yet there were only 3 of us using it. When I moved, they were'nt available so I had to go the DSL route.
Rather than dinking around with shared bandwidth, unreliable service and talking with U.S. Worst (now Qworst) support, sales and customer service people, I decided to go with a Rhythyms business connection.
I'm 19,485 feet from the CO, so the phone company wouldn't even touch me; however Rhythyms was more than happy to tell me about how their superior equipment would allow me to get an ISDL connection with a 128k bandwith limit each way.
After Qworst screwed up the installation, forgot they were supposed to fix the screw up, fixed it for a few hours and promptly puked all over it again... You get the picture. The connection hasn't had a bit of downtime since (about 2 weeks now) and, while the speed is nothing compared to a cable modem, I at least have a reliable connection that I don't share with anybody.
As a bonus, I worked a deal to get 5 IP's so I can host my services. As a business account, it's perfectly agreeable to the TOS contract. All this for about $110 a month. A bit pricey, but it was well within my budget for my daily 'Net fix.
Hope that helps!
As anybody who's had to hack a box at work can attest, the most important things you can use is the trusty telnet client, perhaps Perl to run through a million passwords in a brute force attack and the good old brain.
So, do we outlaw ICQ, IRC, ICMP, source-routed packet data, backticks in the *nix shells, poor CGI programs that don't escape their parameters well enough, the Bugtraq mailing list, the sprintf function and just about anything else because it's a tool that could be used for hacking? Remember that Kevin Mitnik (sp?) used social engineering and trash digging more often than any hacking tool...
It's time for the public to take a stand and stop listening to the overreacting, sensationalizing, hype-strewn media blowing things out of proportion and react with common sense for a change. If we'd just spend some time telling the government what rational people want for a change, we'd be much better off.
So, if you feel like writing to your representitives, put pen to paper and fire off a letter; almost without exception, the people dictating our "can's" and "cannot's" on-line don't even understand simple e-mail, let alone the complex ways in which a tool can be used for good or bad.