A lot of it is just getting past your fears and putting yourself out there. The more you do it the more your fear lessens or at least your ability to deal with it improves.
That's exactly why a class like this could be valuable. For a lot of people (myself included), social engagements can be extremely uncomfortable because we don't know what to say, and are afraid of being in a situation where conversation is called for, and our minds just go blank. We don't believe we're capable of being socially engaging enough to carry on our part of the conversation, and so we have a great disincentive to get involved in social interaction in the first place.
If the class does what it says it will do, it may be able to give its students more confidence that they can hold up their end of a social interaction, and therefore make them more comfortable trying to get involved in social engagements.
I think the standard protocol for these sorts of things is to sell everything you own, stockpile as many guns as possible, and move into a cabin somewhere deep in the mountains. Disconnect from all power sources, and discontinue use of any electronic devices. Grow or hunt all your own food, and try to avoid contact with the outside world as much as possible. Also, if you could learn to enjoy drinking your own urine, that would be a big help.
So what are you waiting for? Start an Open Source project and see if you can get contributors.
Unfortunately, while I do encourage you to try, it could be an uphill battle. Medical records software is boring as hell to work on, and the people that need it are willing to pay lots of money to get it. These two things in combination make it much more attractive to build as a closed source commercial piece of software rather than open source.
If you want to stop the botnet, you need to remove its incentive. The botnet operates not for someones jollies, but because it is profitable to have a botnet. If you remove the profit motive the botnet will self-disassemble over time.
And how do you propose we do that? Spam is profitable even when only one in 10,000 people respond to them, so how do you stop something like that? People have been building better and better spam filters for years, and more and more effort has been spent on educating people about the various scams, and yet spam is STILL profitable enough to illegally hack thousands of computers in order to send it out.
Saying all we have to do to stop botnets forever is remove the profit motive is like saying all we have to do to stop drug smuggling or illegal immigration or home burglaries is to stop the profit motive. Sounds simple, but virtually impossible in practice.
I, for one, am dismayed that they were so quick to shoot down my idea of commercial aircraft being launched to their destinations with enormous slingshots. It requires no fuel, and would look wicked cool. Where's my grant, huh? Why do these jokers who want to fly planes using used grease from a McDonald's fryer get all the money, and I don't get squat?
All I need is a big tree and a really big elastic band at every airport, and I could solve this problem tomorrow!
My theory is that the success of HDTV and BluRay is entirely due to the ridiculously easy access to credit over the past few years. People get credit cards with huge limits and can suddenly "afford" thousand dollar TVs, so they go out and buy them.
HDTV and BluRay adoption rates will slow dramatically now that the credit market has collapsed, especially since HDTVs are still far too expensive for the average person to buy without credit.
The only cost I've ever heard of is if you want to donate it to some far away medical school, you have to pay to transport it there. Other than that, it should be free.
Of course, I don't want to donate my body to medical science because I am uncomfortable with the idea of all those medical students laughing^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hstaring in awe at my junk.
They claim it won't be used to bombard customers with ads...yah right. If the capability exists, it will eventually be used for advertising.
So now, I get to spend a huge premium so I can have a car with the Lexus name, thereby making all the other suburbanites jealous, and on top of it I get "targeted" advertisements. I'll think about getting a car that spews ads at me if and only if you give me the car for free.
On the other hand, if you subscribe to the prevailing theory as to why people buy a Lexus in the first place, all of the "targeted" ads will be for Viagra.
However, we (people) are incredibly bad a doing global solutions to big problems quickly, so we need to start to migrate things early.
Unfortunately, we're also bad at doing global solutions to big problems ahead of time, especially when there's still disagreement as to whether or not the problem even exists or is as serious as some say it is. Nobody wants to spend all the money to redo their network infrastructure when no one can give them a good answer as to when or if the changes will actually be necessary.
IPv6 will only move forward in a big way when we actually run out of IPv4 space and no one can get the addresses they need, and no one can come up with a good workaround. Until then, it will only be in use in widely scattered installations, just like it is now.
It was also announced at the International Conference of Asshats (Those with heads in ass) that today's terrorists may also link using 2 tin cans and a piece of string!
See, it's exactly that sort of heavy-handed crap that really gets people angry. Why did we need to ban string just because some kids could strangle themselves? All we needed to do was start putting string behind the counter and requiring ID for it to be sold, and we could have solved the problem easily!
I, for one, applaud your grandparents for having the fortitude to be able to live without the Internet during the Great Depression. Truly, their sacrifices knew no bounds.
What we really need is an alien race to show up, blow up a major city or two, leave us exact directions on how to get to their home planet and specs on what sort of weaponry they have, and then leave us alone for about 200 years. That's about the only way I can see the military getting into manned space travel in a big way.
I think their business plan was fundamentally flawed, and deciding to go with Windows (meaning extra cost) when they were having trouble getting down to the price point they wanted even without it was just the final nail in the coffin.
They, like many other companies these days, are using the poor economy as a convenient excuse for dumping salary, but they were likely doomed anyway.
I think the better (and cheaper!) solution is to give me $20 billion. I promise that I'll create at least 2 or 3 jobs that wouldn't exist otherwise (maybe more, depending on the size of my harem). In this way, I will personally be responsible for a net increase of 2 or 3 jobs to the economy. This is a much better rate of return than the $750 billion already spent, which has resulted in a net decrease of several thousand jobs so far, with no end in sight.
Clearly, the wisest move is to invest in me. I promise I won't give any of the money to investment bankers or CEOs, and I will not hoard it (okay, maybe just a tiny bit of it). In fact, I will embark on a spending spree of truly epic proportions.
How did Tuesdays Keynote illustrate 'how difficult it will be for any of those guys to replace Jobs.'? Just a bloggers opinion, nothing to see here, please move along
None of them look good in a black turtleneck. It's a little-known fact that Steve Jobs has not run Apple for some time now. Rather, the turtleneck is firmly in charge. If it can't find a suitable host when Jobs kicks the bucket, the company is doomed.
You and your wife's $60k incomes togather may make a thousand bucks "chicken feed" but my forty grand and no wife can't afford to replace an otherwise perfectly good television.
Dude, your conversion factor is way off. To match your $40k with no wife income, he would have to be earning at least $120k with a wife.
Slashdot Mirror
If you believe the "Channel Insider" predictions, this is more a list of the companies that are highly unlikely to go out of business in 2009.
Summary of article:
"Our readers predicted these companies will fail. Our readers are idiots, all of these companies will be fine."
A lot of it is just getting past your fears and putting yourself out there. The more you do it the more your fear lessens or at least your ability to deal with it improves.
That's exactly why a class like this could be valuable. For a lot of people (myself included), social engagements can be extremely uncomfortable because we don't know what to say, and are afraid of being in a situation where conversation is called for, and our minds just go blank. We don't believe we're capable of being socially engaging enough to carry on our part of the conversation, and so we have a great disincentive to get involved in social interaction in the first place.
If the class does what it says it will do, it may be able to give its students more confidence that they can hold up their end of a social interaction, and therefore make them more comfortable trying to get involved in social engagements.
I think the standard protocol for these sorts of things is to sell everything you own, stockpile as many guns as possible, and move into a cabin somewhere deep in the mountains. Disconnect from all power sources, and discontinue use of any electronic devices. Grow or hunt all your own food, and try to avoid contact with the outside world as much as possible. Also, if you could learn to enjoy drinking your own urine, that would be a big help.
So what are you waiting for? Start an Open Source project and see if you can get contributors.
Unfortunately, while I do encourage you to try, it could be an uphill battle. Medical records software is boring as hell to work on, and the people that need it are willing to pay lots of money to get it. These two things in combination make it much more attractive to build as a closed source commercial piece of software rather than open source.
What comes to mind for me is just how obsessed many people are with the Google favicon.
You mean like the Slashdot editors who think it's important enough to put on the front page?
If you want to stop the botnet, you need to remove its incentive. The botnet operates not for someones jollies, but because it is profitable to have a botnet. If you remove the profit motive the botnet will self-disassemble over time.
And how do you propose we do that? Spam is profitable even when only one in 10,000 people respond to them, so how do you stop something like that? People have been building better and better spam filters for years, and more and more effort has been spent on educating people about the various scams, and yet spam is STILL profitable enough to illegally hack thousands of computers in order to send it out.
Saying all we have to do to stop botnets forever is remove the profit motive is like saying all we have to do to stop drug smuggling or illegal immigration or home burglaries is to stop the profit motive. Sounds simple, but virtually impossible in practice.
USB 3.0 is known as "ludicrous speed".
Illegal immigrants, obviously.
I, for one, am dismayed that they were so quick to shoot down my idea of commercial aircraft being launched to their destinations with enormous slingshots. It requires no fuel, and would look wicked cool. Where's my grant, huh? Why do these jokers who want to fly planes using used grease from a McDonald's fryer get all the money, and I don't get squat?
All I need is a big tree and a really big elastic band at every airport, and I could solve this problem tomorrow!
See, and here I thought the CEOs of the major cable companies would be too busy to post on Slashdot...looks like I was wrong.
My theory is that the success of HDTV and BluRay is entirely due to the ridiculously easy access to credit over the past few years. People get credit cards with huge limits and can suddenly "afford" thousand dollar TVs, so they go out and buy them.
HDTV and BluRay adoption rates will slow dramatically now that the credit market has collapsed, especially since HDTVs are still far too expensive for the average person to buy without credit.
The only cost I've ever heard of is if you want to donate it to some far away medical school, you have to pay to transport it there. Other than that, it should be free.
Of course, I don't want to donate my body to medical science because I am uncomfortable with the idea of all those medical students laughing^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hstaring in awe at my junk.
Okay, okay, I'll write you a check later, when the banks open.
They claim it won't be used to bombard customers with ads...yah right. If the capability exists, it will eventually be used for advertising.
So now, I get to spend a huge premium so I can have a car with the Lexus name, thereby making all the other suburbanites jealous, and on top of it I get "targeted" advertisements. I'll think about getting a car that spews ads at me if and only if you give me the car for free.
On the other hand, if you subscribe to the prevailing theory as to why people buy a Lexus in the first place, all of the "targeted" ads will be for Viagra.
However, we (people) are incredibly bad a doing global solutions to big problems quickly, so we need to start to migrate things early.
Unfortunately, we're also bad at doing global solutions to big problems ahead of time, especially when there's still disagreement as to whether or not the problem even exists or is as serious as some say it is. Nobody wants to spend all the money to redo their network infrastructure when no one can give them a good answer as to when or if the changes will actually be necessary.
IPv6 will only move forward in a big way when we actually run out of IPv4 space and no one can get the addresses they need, and no one can come up with a good workaround. Until then, it will only be in use in widely scattered installations, just like it is now.
Um...that was supposed to be in reply to the post below about banning string, not the one it was actually in reply to.
I shouldn't post this early in the morning.
It was also announced at the International Conference of Asshats (Those with heads in ass) that today's terrorists may also link using 2 tin cans and a piece of string!
See, it's exactly that sort of heavy-handed crap that really gets people angry. Why did we need to ban string just because some kids could strangle themselves? All we needed to do was start putting string behind the counter and requiring ID for it to be sold, and we could have solved the problem easily!
I, for one, applaud your grandparents for having the fortitude to be able to live without the Internet during the Great Depression. Truly, their sacrifices knew no bounds.
What we really need is an alien race to show up, blow up a major city or two, leave us exact directions on how to get to their home planet and specs on what sort of weaponry they have, and then leave us alone for about 200 years. That's about the only way I can see the military getting into manned space travel in a big way.
Its just a bad time overall.
I think their business plan was fundamentally flawed, and deciding to go with Windows (meaning extra cost) when they were having trouble getting down to the price point they wanted even without it was just the final nail in the coffin.
They, like many other companies these days, are using the poor economy as a convenient excuse for dumping salary, but they were likely doomed anyway.
Sure, but they changed their name twice for each time they changed their goals, so it all worked out.
What OLPC really needs is a name change, preferably to some sort of nonsensical word. That always seems to turn companies around.
I think the better (and cheaper!) solution is to give me $20 billion. I promise that I'll create at least 2 or 3 jobs that wouldn't exist otherwise (maybe more, depending on the size of my harem). In this way, I will personally be responsible for a net increase of 2 or 3 jobs to the economy. This is a much better rate of return than the $750 billion already spent, which has resulted in a net decrease of several thousand jobs so far, with no end in sight.
Clearly, the wisest move is to invest in me. I promise I won't give any of the money to investment bankers or CEOs, and I will not hoard it (okay, maybe just a tiny bit of it). In fact, I will embark on a spending spree of truly epic proportions.
How did Tuesdays Keynote illustrate 'how difficult it will be for any of those guys to replace Jobs.'? Just a bloggers opinion, nothing to see here, please move along
None of them look good in a black turtleneck. It's a little-known fact that Steve Jobs has not run Apple for some time now. Rather, the turtleneck is firmly in charge. If it can't find a suitable host when Jobs kicks the bucket, the company is doomed.
Of course. Everyone knows that the primary difference between almost all intelligent life throughout the universe is forehead appearance.
You and your wife's $60k incomes togather may make a thousand bucks "chicken feed" but my forty grand and no wife can't afford to replace an otherwise perfectly good television.
Dude, your conversion factor is way off. To match your $40k with no wife income, he would have to be earning at least $120k with a wife.