What you are suggesting is called a Martingale - and you will go broke if you ever play it.
The premise of the Martingale is that if you lose, you double the bet. You keep doing this until you win. Once you finally win, your net is the amount of your initial wager. (If you wager X and win, you get 2X in return. If you lose, you bet 2X. If you win, you get 4X, but your total cost is 3X (X+2X), so your net result is X.
There are two problems with the Martingale. First - casinos have table minimums and maximums. A typical casino on the strip has a min/max structure of $5/$1000 for the cheap tables, then $10/$2000, $25/$5000, etc. Suppose you get on a losing streak - your wagers would be $5, $10, $20, $40, $80, $160, $320, $640 - if you happened to lose eight wagers in a row (trust me - it does happen), you will have wagers a total of $1275 just to earn $5.
Even if the casinos didn't have table minimums, you would need a HUGE bankroll to weather through those times when you lost 10 or 12 or 14 in a row. If you bet table minimum and lose 12 in a row, you are down $60. If you Martigale 12 in a row, you are down $20480.
The other falacy of betting black/red or odd/even, is that if one hasn't hit for a while, then "it is due". The casinos LOVE people who think like this. Each spin of the wheel is a seperate event - and what happened before has no bearing on the current spin - so nothing is ever due. The odds are 18:20 of hitting odd, 18:20 of hitting even, 18:20 of hitting red, 18:20 of hitting black and 2:36 of hitting 0 or 00. And the payoff is always less than the odds, so you are guarenteed to lose the longer you play.
I do have to come clean. I was using W2K on my computer.;-)
Since many/.ers generalize and say things like "Windoz sucks and BSODs every day", I didn't feel the need to be specific to which version of Windows I was running.
On a side note, one of my home machines was running Win98. The only crashes I ever experienced were with Netscape. That application locked up my computer every other day. It was a horrendously(sp) written piece of software.
I work for a company that does development on Windows/Linux/OSX/Solaris. I've done a lot of server work on Unix before I got there, but I now mostly do Windows development. Our Linux guy used to give all of the FUD about BSOD every day, so him and I entered a wager regarding who would have to reboot their machine the first. Considering that my box was a development box and if anyone on my team got sloppy with pointers, it would crash the app, he felt convinced that I would reboot first.
We called the contest a draw after two months - only doing so because the boss was handing out 256MB strips of memory.
Contacting the CEO or VP may not be enough. Did the company have shareholders? If so, they own it. Did the company leave any debt? There may be a line of people trying to collect, any assets, including code, are theirs.
People are used to getting books for free. It's called the library. There just a shift in the ways and means of distributing the books.
Based on your argument that copyright is largely an artificial construct and people don't really buy into the who idea of paying for things that are cheaply copiable, then no one should have a problem with the following.
When O'Reilly publishes a new book, I should buy it, scan in the pages into an electronic format and put it on the internet for the whole world to copy. After all, "copyright doesn't make sense in a world where things are easily and cheaply copiable", and all I did was easily and cheaply copy a book.
O'Reilly is abusing people with the high costs of his books. For example, "Programming Perl" is $49.95. This is far more that the cost of the paper to publish this book, so there is obviously some sort of collusion to artificially keep the costs of books so high. I think a valid form of protest is to boycott buying books.
Maybe if we are lucky, then OReilly will go out of business since his business model is selling copyrighted materials at artificially high prices, and it seems like everyone is against that.
Of course, this screws people like Larry Wahl who make money selling copyrighted materials. One of the common arguments I've seen is that in this world of easy duplication, that musicians should make their money touring and not selling CDs/Records, then Larry should make his money touring giving speaches and not get any money selling his books.
This could be bad since Larry might not get much money and may not be able to continue Perl development. But if Perl dies and Larry goes bankrupt, then it will be sad, but too bad for him since he hopped into bed with the man and proffiteered by selling copyrighted materials.
If all works perfectly, OReilly goes out of business, Larry Wahl goes bankrupt and Perl dies. But such is the consequence of people rejecting copyrights that don't make sense any more.
"I believe the GPL is an important document that is intended to prevent exactly this sort of theft of code. Any company that incorporates GPL software into a commercial product and attempts to skirt the licensing terms is nothing short of a thief, building on the stolen effort of countless contributors. "
Let me make sure that I have this right - it is not OK to "steal" copyrighted software that is "freely" distributed, but it is OK to "steal" other copyrighted materials (mp3s) that were never "freely" distributed?
Binaryhead graduates college, but doesn't know how to decide on a book to read. If he is indicative of his generation, the future looks bleak.
For all you who think that LoTR is too hard, I suspect that you find reading any literature difficult. Tolstoy, Joyce, James - sorry, they are just too tough. You might as well forget Milton or Shakespeare since they don't speak "American" and "they talk kind of funny".
LoTR is to be read slowly. The literary style extends the imagery of the world that Tolkein created. You are meant to read it slow and savor the words - much like sipping a fine cognac. Of course, this is too much to expect from today's attention span deficient generation that wants nothing other than instant gratification.
Ender's Game is a good story, but as one poster mentioned, "Enders Game is the best. I got it [sic] and read it in one weekend". If you don't see the tragedy of this statement, you will probably think that Ender's Game is a great feat of writing. Go find yourself a good air flight read such as Crichton or Grisham - you should be able to finish all of their books in just a few hours.
Forgotten Realms books are written for prepubescent boys seeking escapism from their dull lives. If you are still reading these after the age of 15, there is something wrong with you.
Frank Herbert's books - they might be readable if he didn't try to make the same point over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. Rather annoying, isn't it?
Kudos to the very few of you who suggested Irving, Falkner, Maugham, Twain, Pynchon, Nabakov, Dickens and Dostoevsky. You are in the definite minority.
To all of you who lamented about how boring stories were when you read them in high school, now that you are a few years older, go back and reread them. Hopefully you will realize why you were required to read them in the first place. If not, you are a clod.
=====
My suggestions:
Joseph Campbell and Shakespeare. After you read Campbell, you will realize that every hero and villian found in science fiction and fantasy is just a rehash of the same mythos that humans have been telling for thousands of years. In regards to Shakespeare, there have been few new plot devices introduced since the bard penned his plays. Almost all books, movies and plays are derivative of Shakespeare's work.
If you are familiar with Russian history, Bolshevism, Marxism, Existentialism, Catholicism and Christian Theology, then I suggest "The Brother's Karamozov" by Dostoevsky. It isn't an easy read and you won't finish it in a week, but it is well worth the time.
Interested in expanding your vocabulary - pick up any book by William F. Buckley Jr.
Want to remain a geek and broaden your horizons? Read Ursula Le Guin or Joan Slonczewski who write Sci-fi from a feminist perspective.
To answer a few of your questions, I have reached an age where I grow impatient in arguing semantics. If I can present my position from a point of intent, I don't feel compelled to worry about the semantics. Secondly, in regards to using language to mislead and arguments of emotion over fact, I will ask that you honestly consider how p2p networks are being used. The "fact" is that the primary intent of the users of p2p networks is to illegally get files.
I consider the argument that "making an infringing copy is exactly the same as stealing a CD" to be a fair argument. I think that this is a point where we will probably never see eye-to-eye. My viewpoint is that if you illegally download files because you don't want to pay for them, you are stealing.
First, I understand the difference between physical property laws and copyright laws, but these distinctions are minimal in regards to the mp3 phenomenon. One of the arguments used by proponents of p2p networks for file sharing is the "fair use" argument of copyright law. I support the "fair use" clause of copyright law - I have in my day made cassette duplicates of albums that I own. However, I don't think that file sharing has anything to do with fair use.
Let's be honest about what is actually going on with mp3s. First, someone who has a computer with a CD drive rips the CD with any number of free/commercial applications. Then, using a p2p network, these files are distributed. People who use the p2p network download the files and burn them to a CD. Everyone who I work with under the age of 30 has stacks and stacks of burned CD's, and they all openly brag about how they haven't purchased a CD in years. What is important here is that those people who are burning their own CD's already have the ability to rip their own CD's. Their arguments about fair use are invalid since they have the means to create their own CD's - for home, car and office.
Secondly, I ask about intent. The intent of people who use p2p networks to download mp3s is to get the songs without paying for them. Their position is that "I want these songs and I don't want to pay for them". They may try to justify their downloading files as a protest against the RIAA, or protest against the cost of CD's. Or, they could be exhibiting the base emotion of "why should I pay for something if I can get it for free".
I like your position about the photograph - if you copy the photograph and give it to someone, you still have your copy, but if someone steals your copy, you don't have it to enjoy anymore. However, consider this from the perspective of the artists. Artists get paid for each copy of their work sold, and when people download the mp3's, they are denying the artists recompense that is rightly theirs. Is this stealing?
In regards to property laws and copyright laws, one thing that needs to be considered is that in no time in history could an exact copy of something be made. Going back to the days of copying albums onto cassette, cassettes were low fidelity and the copy process contained signal loss. If one of these cassettes was used to create another copy, there was even greater loss. People did duplicate cassettes, but the quality was poor, the process was time intensive, it was not rampant, and it had minimal impact on album sales. However, in today's digital world, we live in a world where EXACT duplication can be done - and taking advantage of this fact allows mp3's to be created and allows people to bypass purchasing a CD since they can get an EXACT copy for free. And this is why mp3s are different.
Fundamentally, from my own moral viewpoint - your viewpoint may be different, when someone takes the position of "I want this object, which I would normally have to pay for, but because there is an illegal means to obtain what I want without paying for it, I will get it illegally", this amounts to stealing. Even in the Cringly column that you linked to in your response, seems to support this position.
I must admit to having certain shortcomings. I was in the fifth grade as a six year old and I joined MENSA as high school freshman, but I was not a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Although I have always tested above the 3rd stdev on IQ tests, I have always found English to be difficult because it is riddled with inconsistancies in both grammer rules and spelling.
In regards to the previously mentioned Freudian shortcomings, perhaps my four children are a testament to my overcompensation. My wife disagrees with this assertion, has a coy smile on her face, and I think that I shall be ending this response shortly.;-)
As for the misspelled "rediculous", my mistake was that I spelled this phonically within the local dialect, which pronounces the word "re-diculous" and not "ri-diculous". If I had taken but a second to consider the root as "ridicule", I would not have made the error. Such is the peril of writing in haste.
All I know is that the law should follow popular sentiment, and popular sentiment is that music sharing should be legal. Therefore it *is* legal, and anyone who says otherwise is not a legitimate authority
I have to say that I find this argument disturbing. At one time in U.S. history, slavery was legal. Slaves were property and could be treated in whatever manner the slave owner deemed appropriate - including physical beatings and starvation. Popular sentiment is that this was fine. Was popular sentiment correct?
Popular sentiment currently holds in areas that have anti-sodomy laws. Now while I personally don't see the attraction of such activities, does the government have the right to interfere in the conduct of consenting adults?
Convince me that's even possible anymore and maybe I'll consider it. Until then, civil disobedience is the order of the day
I will concede that unless you have a paid lobbyist working for you, it is difficult to get your cause noticed. This does not mean that you should just give up because the effort is hard. In terms of file sharing, this is not a case of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is not agreeing with a law and doing a public protest of the law risking personal jeopardy. Consider Thoreau - he did not agree with a tax, so he refused to pay it. As a result, he spent time in jail. Consider the anti-war protestors who want to create a public disturbance to get TV time to get their position heard. They sit in the streets and block traffic until the police come and take them away.
Trading files anonymously over the net is not civil disobedience. It is breaking the law with little fear of getting caught. If you want to engage in civil disobedience, get about 500 people who are willing to go to Walmart at the same time, and each of you walk out of the store with a CD - holding it in the air as you do to broadcast to the world that you going to steal the CD. Make T-shirts and signs that protest copyrights. Call the local TV station ahead of time and tell them that 500 people are going to go to Walmart to steal CD's. Call a lawyer first to make sure that you can get by with only a slap on the wrist - and then go publicly steal the CD's. Heck, start a web site and try to have a national "Steal a CD to protest song copyrights" Day and try to get 100,000 people to go steal a CD. This would certainly bring attention to your cause.
Neither the article nor the (law)suits state that the amount asked for is for lost sales. The amount of money being sought is the maximum amount allowed by law. This is for punitive and compensatory damages. It seems to me that $150,000 per song is rediculous, but this number came out of Washington, not out of the RIAA. In our increasingly litigatious society, the amount of money for punitive and compensatory damages is rediculuous, but our society has the general idea of "screw the corporations, they have all the money". This is a case of "the man" taking advantage of the same laws used against him daily. Except in this case, they have no hopes of collecting any money. The frivolity of their suit matches the frivolity of most lawsuits these days.
Whether or not you agree with existing copyrights, or you feel that the recording companies are colluding to steal your money, the fact of the matter is, based on current laws, distributing copies of copyrighted materials is agsint the law. Instead of complaining about how "the man is trying to screw me" or setting up p2p networks to distribute mp3's, I would suggest that people who are against the RIAA and music copyrights work to get the laws changed.
Instead of spending money on CD's, use that money to start an advocacy group. Donate some money to the EFF or some other organization who might be willing to fight for your cause. Instead of running a server to host your mp3's (bandwidth costs money and the mp3's have to originate from a CD at some point), discontinue these servers and use the money towards advocacy. Spend your effort changing the laws instead of flying the finger at the establishment.
Regardless of the content of animated movies, the general viewing public views animated movies as cartoons - and the general opintion is that cartoons are for kids.
Look at the popular animated movies done by Disney, Pixar, etc. They are written either for kids, or for the whole family, but the general premise is that these are movies for kids. Animation is seen as content for kids.
So, when an anime movie comes out, it is seen as aimed at kids. And if a cartoon aims for an adult audience, the general public sees this as a movie for geek kids who haven't grown up. Sad, perhaps, but true.
I've been lucky in that I have been able to find companies just starting out. I was employee #8 at my previous job, employee #4 at my current job. Companies that are trying to bootstrap their growth need to hire programmers who know what they are doing, can work incredibly hard, and don't need direction.
The sad truth is that for both of these jobs, I worked with these people before. Sometimes at one company, but for us core employees, I have worked with them at two different companies prior. In fact, I worked at two previous jobs with the guy who started the company I work for. Since the technical programmers in my area tend to keep in a small circle, we see each other a lot socially. I got the lead for my current job while at a Christmas party at a mutual friends house.
Most of the hires that we make are usually someone we have worked with at a previous job, or comes highly recommended by by a former colleague. It turns out that the number of programmers who can cut the mustard is fairly small, and since these type of programmers gravitate to only certain kinds of jobs, you end up seeing the same faces over and over again. I live in a city of 2 million, but the number of places that hire technical programmers is fairly small, and if you mention a single company that does real programming, I can tell you at least five people I know who work there. And if we get a resume from someone who works at one of these companies - with a single phone call, I have the straight scoop on this person.
There is a group of us who last worked together several years ago, and we keep in touch by playing poker several times a year. We all socialize, but it also becomes serves as a chance to keep our pulse on what is going on at everyones company, plus any rumors about other local companies. Drinking beer and playing cards with people you like and liked working with, it doesn't quite feel like the traditional stereotype of networking.
If you decide to give programming one last shot, try giving a call to some other old timers and see what they are up to. They might not have anything, but they may come up with someone else you can talk to.
The other rather ironic thing that has happened to me is that I ended up in a Rotisserie baseball league that was comprised of most of the major head hunters in town, and my former boss is a headhunter for SourceEDP/Romac/KForce. Sometimes you get lucky. If I knew someone who was looking for a job, I could give them a direct line to the major headhunters. Of course, if I was less than impressed with your work, well, I would never tell you that I knew these guys personally.
It really is a scary world when employers are more interested in blind folded monkey who can only do what Uncle Bill told them, versus real programmer who actually know how to think/solve/code.
I have noticed one scary trend down here in the states - all kids coming out of college only know Java. Now, Java may be nice and all - I don't mean to start a flame war, but none of these kids knows jack about thinks like pointers, registers, heap, stack. How do you expect kids to know how to program if they don't understand what the machine is doing? How can they make smart decisions about their code if they never learn the technical details of what their code is actually doing?
One of these upstarts had the gall to tell me that he couldn't even figure out how to program anything useful in C because it didn't have classes - I laughed my ass off. The philosophy of a lot of kids I see these day is that progamming Java is all they need to know - things like pointers and hardware and memory management is for the "smart people" who write the JVM.
I agree with your assessment that what is missing is vision. I posted another message on this thread that makes the same point. And, perhaps, my previous posting did come across as pejorative towards the guy who has an unemployed buddy in the valley, but being a good coder is not what made the valley what it is.
I agree that successful companies, in addition to having vision also need highly skilled people to fulfill their vision. But my general impression is that most people who are considered good coders aren't really all that good. My personal experience over the past 14 years (damn, I'm getting old) is that 75% of people employed as programmers can't program worth crap. Of the remaining 25%, about 15% are good, 9% are really good and about 1% are exceptional.//start tangent Perhaps I am being prejudiced here, but I tend to dismiss people who brag about their certs. Being certified means that they have been taught to view all problems from a fixed paradigm. They have traded their brain to be a code monkey. Once they have done this, they no longer THINK about the problem and what alternatives their are for solutions and the affects and consequences for different approaches - they just spout that this is the way of doing things.
When I interview people, there are three things that I look for:
1). Are they smart? 2). Do they work hard? 3). Are they driven to succeed?
The fundamental premise is that if you are smart and work hard, you can do anything. I can teach you a programming language, but I can't teach you to be smart. You also can't teach someone to work hard - either they do or they don't.
Do you have a high GPA? Unless you have a respectable GPA, you aren't going to get in the door. A lot of programmers I know have low GPA's. Their excuse is that they thought that some of the classes were BS, so they didn't care to do well. Fine - and if you dont care to do what I want you to do when you think that it is BS, then I don't want to hire you and waste my money. The other point about GPA is that it is the college standard for success. If you didn't care enough to succeed by the standard where you were (college), they you don't care enough to succeed by the standard that your company will set.//end tangent
>>Microsoft has kicked innovation in the nards. I haven't really thought too much about this, so I can't give you an honest opinion. BUT, I don't think that innovation was ever their intent. I think that M$ business model was to embrace and extend. Let someone else do the work to create the market - they will just through some bells and whistles on it, and then integrate is so it APPEARS more natural when running on Windows.
I will say that M$ has done one innovative thing - the concept of a known gui framework. If you remember back to the days DOS, every application shipped with several floppies (long before CD's, and even before 3.5"). One floppy was the application, one floppy was if you had a hercules card, one for a EGA card, one for a VGA card. And some of these only worked for certain brands of cards. One downside to IBM's open architecture is that any card manufacturer had great leeway for how to impliment their hardware. Outside of a few common interrupts, all bets were off for how you had to interface with the card. Developers were forced to write very specific code for each piece of possible hardware. Enter M$ - instead of programming for specific hardware cards, you programmed to a known GUI framework. Once each developer didn't have to spend tremendous amounts of time writing hardware specific code, he was given a lot of time to actually work on innovative software.
>>...products are conformist with the Microsoft vision and increasingly drab. Very little that is new and exciting...
I think that you can currently say that about all software. From the work at bell labs (and others, including Berkely) back in the late 60's, there has not been a whole lot of innovation in OS's. Linux and it's myriad flavors is just a rehash of Unix with some bells and whistles. The OS's we all use every day has nothing new in it that hasn't been around for 35 years already. If software is to become innovative again, it begins with a fundamental paradigm shift of hardware architecture and OS thought - and the two must work together.
The last innovation, from my perspective, has been things like Plan 9 and Beowulf. Having an OS that can extend its tendrils out like an amoeba, create a grid/network of machines where CPU can be shared when needed is cool. I think that it needs to be extended such that these networks of computers can be self organizing, perhaps forming a grid/net architecture that can be used for massive parallel neural nets or other such thing, now, that would be cool. (Hmmm, this sounds like Skynet from the Terminator series, and we have already seen where that leads to).
But, we live in a consumer economy, so unless it can be sold such that it works with what the consumer already has, few will spend the money to develop it.
I think that your answer typifies the problems that lead people to believe that the valley is dead.
Having your MCSE and Cisco certs doesn't mean anything other than you can study for a test where you know the questions going into the test. It has nothing to do with quality of coding. And being a good coder doesn't mean that you are able to create revolutionary technology that will transform an industry - it means that you understand the symantecs of a language and can solve problems within that language.
What drives the valley are those who are innovative and visionary, those who can create revolutionary technology. Look back to early Apple - Jobs and Woz. Jobs was the visionary and Woz was the brains, and together they created what was revolutionary. No one looks at these guys and says "gee, they were good coders who had good certifications". That kind of thinking is what caused people to believe the valley was dead and why the valley has far too many unemployed deadbeats. Too many coders with certs moved in and didn't realize that they didn't have the chops for what it really drove the valley to greatness.
One of the quotes mentioned above was "survivors struggling through the toughest stretch in tech industry history" - and frankly, this is the wrong way of looking at it.
When I first became interested in Silicon Valley was back in 1980 - back when the valley was a syntonym for technical innovation, the idea was
1). go to the valley 2). make an innovative product 3). Sell product to VC for millions 4). Start all over again.
But the principle here is that it was driven by technical innovation - and turning this innovation to product. Heck, my idea, which was revolutionary 23 years ago was the idea of creating a color lcd TV (Hey, don't laugh, back then, we only had black on silver lcd's, and they bled if you touched them).
But once the internet took off and became what it is today (which was helped by some the valley innovation), people started to look at the valley differently. First - way too many people saw the valley as only internet and computer technology. Second - they viewed running a web site as technology. Having a bunch of dot com startups all based on running web sites and services is not technologically innovative. Third - people fell into the falacy that because there are millions of computer users/internet users, that if they could create something and sell it to 1% of that market, they would make millions.
At this point, it was not about technical innovation or creating interesting and useful products, but it because how fast can we whip something together. It is easy to see why so many dot coms failed. What is really surprising is that so many VC's fell for the trick.
The 'natives' of the valley are still doing the same thing that they have done for years - innovative research and product development. And the products that are eventually produced from this research will be revolutionary. The biotech and nanotech products that people are working on will be revolutionary.
But all of those pretenders that jumped on the internet bandwagon AFTER the techology was already out and in use were just the pretenders that never belonged their in the first place.
Now that they are gone (well, most of them at least), the valley will continue to do what it has done for decades.
>>I've met a number of people whose computers lock up on a daily basis.
Sorry to say, but this sounds like anti-M$ FUD.
I am a developer at a company that produces sofware for Windows/Linux/OSX/Solaris. I typically spend part of my day on at least two of these platforms, but my primary desktop is Windows 2000. Some of our 'linux only' developers used to talk trash about BSOD's and daily lockups, so I entered into a wager with one of our linux developers regarding whose computer would have the longest uptime. So, we both rebooted our computer at the same time and the contest began. I was using Windows 98 and he was using Debian. After 6 months, we called the contest a draw when the boss came walking around with more memory for our computers (more important to him since he was used VMWare for his Windows stuff).
The only application that I have seen cause a BSOD was Netscape 4.7 on Windows 95, and the only lockups were back in the days of Windows 2.11 when the networking was done with DOS drivers or TSR's and the hardware would get stuck on blocking read/write calls. Since the OS was single tasking, if the hardware didn't perform an interupt, you were stuck. This was back in the days when Ungerman-Bass networking equipment ruled the world.
Have BSOD's occurred - sure they have. But the rate of BSOD's that I have seen over the years have been on par with the number of kernal core and seg faults that I have seen with Linux (going all the way back to Slackware ruled linux - back when Linux was unix and not full of all the bloat crap that it has today).
You notice how no one ever says "Windows locks up on me daily" or "I have to reboot daily", but people say "I know someone who has to reboot daily". Sort of like the fact that no one sees aligators in NYC sewers, but every NYC resident knows someone who claims to have seen these alligators.
After reading the first few sentances of this article, it seemed to me that I remembered reading this some time ago. This article first appeared on/. on Dec 12, 2001.
Riding the Gemeni was always a blast. I remember during the early 80's, that people in one of the trains would yell "Tastes great" and the other train would yell "Less filling" and everyone would be be giving high fives to people on the other train when they were rounding the corner on the second hill.
Another great thrill at Cedar Point was the blue streak. Perhaps just a boring there-n-back coaster, but when the attendants came by to push the lap bar down, you would raise your knees as high as you could. When the ride took off, you had about four inches of play in the bar. When you would crest a hill and go down the other side, you would fly out of your seat and your knees would catch the bar to keep you from flying out of the car. In hindsight, this was pretty stupid, but as a teenager, it was a blast.
Slashdot Mirror
What you are suggesting is called a Martingale - and you will go broke if you ever play it.
The premise of the Martingale is that if you lose, you double the bet. You keep doing this until you win. Once you finally win, your net is the amount of your initial wager. (If you wager X and win, you get 2X in return. If you lose, you bet 2X. If you win, you get 4X, but your total cost is 3X (X+2X), so your net result is X.
There are two problems with the Martingale. First - casinos have table minimums and maximums. A typical casino on the strip has a min/max structure of $5/$1000 for the cheap tables, then $10/$2000, $25/$5000, etc. Suppose you get on a losing streak - your wagers would be $5, $10, $20, $40, $80, $160, $320, $640 - if you happened to lose eight wagers in a row (trust me - it does happen), you will have wagers a total of $1275 just to earn $5.
Even if the casinos didn't have table minimums, you would need a HUGE bankroll to weather through those times when you lost 10 or 12 or 14 in a row. If you bet table minimum and lose 12 in a row, you are down $60. If you Martigale 12 in a row, you are down $20480.
The other falacy of betting black/red or odd/even, is that if one hasn't hit for a while, then "it is due". The casinos LOVE people who think like this. Each spin of the wheel is a seperate event - and what happened before has no bearing on the current spin - so nothing is ever due. The odds are 18:20 of hitting odd, 18:20 of hitting even, 18:20 of hitting red, 18:20 of hitting black and 2:36 of hitting 0 or 00. And the payoff is always less than the odds, so you are guarenteed to lose the longer you play.
I do have to come clean. I was using W2K on my computer. ;-)
/.ers generalize and say things like "Windoz sucks and BSODs every day", I didn't feel the need to be specific to which version of Windows I was running.
Since many
On a side note, one of my home machines was running Win98. The only crashes I ever experienced were with Netscape. That application locked up my computer every other day. It was a horrendously(sp) written piece of software.
I work for a company that does development on Windows/Linux/OSX/Solaris. I've done a lot of server work on Unix before I got there, but I now mostly do Windows development. Our Linux guy used to give all of the FUD about BSOD every day, so him and I entered a wager regarding who would have to reboot their machine the first. Considering that my box was a development box and if anyone on my team got sloppy with pointers, it would crash the app, he felt convinced that I would reboot first.
We called the contest a draw after two months - only doing so because the boss was handing out 256MB strips of memory.
Contacting the CEO or VP may not be enough. Did the company have shareholders? If so, they own it. Did the company leave any debt? There may be a line of people trying to collect, any assets, including code, are theirs.
People are used to getting books for free. It's called the library. There just a shift in the ways and means of distributing the books.
Based on your argument that copyright is largely an artificial construct and people don't really buy into the who idea of paying for things that are cheaply copiable, then no one should have a problem with the following.
When O'Reilly publishes a new book, I should buy it, scan in the pages into an electronic format and put it on the internet for the whole world to copy. After all, "copyright doesn't make sense in a world where things are easily and cheaply copiable", and all I did was easily and cheaply copy a book.
O'Reilly is abusing people with the high costs of his books. For example, "Programming Perl" is $49.95. This is far more that the cost of the paper to publish this book, so there is obviously some sort of collusion to artificially keep the costs of books so high. I think a valid form of protest is to boycott buying books.
Maybe if we are lucky, then OReilly will go out of business since his business model is selling copyrighted materials at artificially high prices, and it seems like everyone is against that.
Of course, this screws people like Larry Wahl who make money selling copyrighted materials. One of the common arguments I've seen is that in this world of easy duplication, that musicians should make their money touring and not selling CDs/Records, then Larry should make his money touring giving speaches and not get any money selling his books.
This could be bad since Larry might not get much money and may not be able to continue Perl development. But if Perl dies and Larry goes bankrupt, then it will be sad, but too bad for him since he hopped into bed with the man and proffiteered by selling copyrighted materials.
If all works perfectly, OReilly goes out of business, Larry Wahl goes bankrupt and Perl dies. But such is the consequence of people rejecting copyrights that don't make sense any more.
Is this really the future that everyone wants?
From the article
"I believe the GPL is an important document that is intended to prevent exactly this sort of theft of code. Any company that incorporates GPL software into a commercial product and attempts to skirt the licensing terms is nothing short of a thief, building on the stolen effort of countless contributors. "
Let me make sure that I have this right - it is not OK to "steal" copyrighted software that is "freely" distributed, but it is OK to "steal" other copyrighted materials (mp3s) that were never "freely" distributed?
I would, but alas, I can't post and moderate in the same article.
as a moderator with points right now, don't tell me what the fuck to do, you stupid asshole.
Microsoft's own support forums show how to install and use smart card readers. How ironic that M$ might be helping 'pirates'.
l t. asp?url=/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/howto /smrtcard.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/defau
Binaryhead graduates college, but doesn't know how to decide on a book to read. If he is indicative of his generation, the future looks bleak.
For all you who think that LoTR is too hard, I suspect that you find reading any literature difficult. Tolstoy, Joyce, James - sorry, they are just too tough. You might as well forget Milton or Shakespeare since they don't speak "American" and "they talk kind of funny".
LoTR is to be read slowly. The literary style extends the imagery of the world that Tolkein created. You are meant to read it slow and savor the words - much like sipping a fine cognac. Of course, this is too much to expect from today's attention span deficient generation that wants nothing other than instant gratification.
Ender's Game is a good story, but as one poster mentioned, "Enders Game is the best. I got it [sic] and read it in one weekend". If you don't see the tragedy of this statement, you will probably think that Ender's Game is a great feat of writing. Go find yourself a good air flight read such as Crichton or Grisham - you should be able to finish all of their books in just a few hours.
Forgotten Realms books are written for prepubescent boys seeking escapism from their dull lives. If you are still reading these after the age of 15, there is something wrong with you.
Frank Herbert's books - they might be readable if he didn't try to make the same point over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. Rather annoying, isn't it?
Kudos to the very few of you who suggested Irving, Falkner, Maugham, Twain, Pynchon, Nabakov, Dickens and Dostoevsky. You are in the definite minority.
To all of you who lamented about how boring stories were when you read them in high school, now that you are a few years older, go back and reread them. Hopefully you will realize why you were required to read them in the first place. If not, you are a clod.
=====
My suggestions:
Joseph Campbell and Shakespeare. After you read Campbell, you will realize that every hero and villian found in science fiction and fantasy is just a rehash of the same mythos that humans have been telling for thousands of years. In regards to Shakespeare, there have been few new plot devices introduced since the bard penned his plays. Almost all books, movies and plays are derivative of Shakespeare's work.
If you are familiar with Russian history, Bolshevism, Marxism, Existentialism, Catholicism and Christian Theology, then I suggest "The Brother's Karamozov" by Dostoevsky. It isn't an easy read and you won't finish it in a week, but it is well worth the time.
Interested in expanding your vocabulary - pick up any book by William F. Buckley Jr.
Want to remain a geek and broaden your horizons? Read Ursula Le Guin or Joan Slonczewski who write Sci-fi from a feminist perspective.
To answer a few of your questions, I have reached an age where I grow impatient in arguing semantics. If I can present my position from a point of intent, I don't feel compelled to worry about the semantics. Secondly, in regards to using language to mislead and arguments of emotion over fact, I will ask that you honestly consider how p2p networks are being used. The "fact" is that the primary intent of the users of p2p networks is to illegally get files.
I consider the argument that "making an infringing copy is exactly the same as stealing a CD" to be a fair argument. I think that this is a point where we will probably never see eye-to-eye. My viewpoint is that if you illegally download files because you don't want to pay for them, you are stealing.
First, I understand the difference between physical property laws and copyright laws, but these distinctions are minimal in regards to the mp3 phenomenon. One of the arguments used by proponents of p2p networks for file sharing is the "fair use" argument of copyright law. I support the "fair use" clause of copyright law - I have in my day made cassette duplicates of albums that I own. However, I don't think that file sharing has anything to do with fair use.
Let's be honest about what is actually going on with mp3s. First, someone who has a computer with a CD drive rips the CD with any number of free/commercial applications. Then, using a p2p network, these files are distributed. People who use the p2p network download the files and burn them to a CD. Everyone who I work with under the age of 30 has stacks and stacks of burned CD's, and they all openly brag about how they haven't purchased a CD in years. What is important here is that those people who are burning their own CD's already have the ability to rip their own CD's. Their arguments about fair use are invalid since they have the means to create their own CD's - for home, car and office.
Secondly, I ask about intent. The intent of people who use p2p networks to download mp3s is to get the songs without paying for them. Their position is that "I want these songs and I don't want to pay for them". They may try to justify their downloading files as a protest against the RIAA, or protest against the cost of CD's. Or, they could be exhibiting the base emotion of "why should I pay for something if I can get it for free".
I like your position about the photograph - if you copy the photograph and give it to someone, you still have your copy, but if someone steals your copy, you don't have it to enjoy anymore. However, consider this from the perspective of the artists. Artists get paid for each copy of their work sold, and when people download the mp3's, they are denying the artists recompense that is rightly theirs. Is this stealing?
In regards to property laws and copyright laws, one thing that needs to be considered is that in no time in history could an exact copy of something be made. Going back to the days of copying albums onto cassette, cassettes were low fidelity and the copy process contained signal loss. If one of these cassettes was used to create another copy, there was even greater loss. People did duplicate cassettes, but the quality was poor, the process was time intensive, it was not rampant, and it had minimal impact on album sales. However, in today's digital world, we live in a world where EXACT duplication can be done - and taking advantage of this fact allows mp3's to be created and allows people to bypass purchasing a CD since they can get an EXACT copy for free. And this is why mp3s are different.
Fundamentally, from my own moral viewpoint - your viewpoint may be different, when someone takes the position of "I want this object, which I would normally have to pay for, but because there is an illegal means to obtain what I want without paying for it, I will get it illegally", this amounts to stealing. Even in the Cringly column that you linked to in your response, seems to support this position.
"Everyone who hates
I must admit to having certain shortcomings. I was in the fifth grade as a six year old and I joined MENSA as high school freshman, but I was not a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Although I have always tested above the 3rd stdev on IQ tests, I have always found English to be difficult because it is riddled with inconsistancies in both grammer rules and spelling.
;-)
In regards to the previously mentioned Freudian shortcomings, perhaps my four children are a testament to my overcompensation. My wife disagrees with this assertion, has a coy smile on her face, and I think that I shall be ending this response shortly.
As for the misspelled "rediculous", my mistake was that I spelled this phonically within the local dialect, which pronounces the word "re-diculous" and not "ri-diculous". If I had taken but a second to consider the root as "ridicule", I would not have made the error. Such is the peril of writing in haste.
All I know is that the law should follow popular sentiment, and popular sentiment is that music sharing should be legal. Therefore it *is* legal, and anyone who says otherwise is not a legitimate authority
I have to say that I find this argument disturbing. At one time in U.S. history, slavery was legal. Slaves were property and could be treated in whatever manner the slave owner deemed appropriate - including physical beatings and starvation. Popular sentiment is that this was fine. Was popular sentiment correct?
Popular sentiment currently holds in areas that have anti-sodomy laws. Now while I personally don't see the attraction of such activities, does the government have the right to interfere in the conduct of consenting adults?
Convince me that's even possible anymore and maybe I'll consider it. Until then, civil disobedience is the order of the day
I will concede that unless you have a paid lobbyist working for you, it is difficult to get your cause noticed. This does not mean that you should just give up because the effort is hard. In terms of file sharing, this is not a case of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is not agreeing with a law and doing a public protest of the law risking personal jeopardy. Consider Thoreau - he did not agree with a tax, so he refused to pay it. As a result, he spent time in jail. Consider the anti-war protestors who want to create a public disturbance to get TV time to get their position heard. They sit in the streets and block traffic until the police come and take them away.
Trading files anonymously over the net is not civil disobedience. It is breaking the law with little fear of getting caught. If you want to engage in civil disobedience, get about 500 people who are willing to go to Walmart at the same time, and each of you walk out of the store with a CD - holding it in the air as you do to broadcast to the world that you going to steal the CD. Make T-shirts and signs that protest copyrights. Call the local TV station ahead of time and tell them that 500 people are going to go to Walmart to steal CD's. Call a lawyer first to make sure that you can get by with only a slap on the wrist - and then go publicly steal the CD's. Heck, start a web site and try to have a national "Steal a CD to protest song copyrights" Day and try to get 100,000 people to go steal a CD. This would certainly bring attention to your cause.
Neither the article nor the (law)suits state that the amount asked for is for lost sales. The amount of money being sought is the maximum amount allowed by law. This is for punitive and compensatory damages. It seems to me that $150,000 per song is rediculous, but this number came out of Washington, not out of the RIAA. In our increasingly litigatious society, the amount of money for punitive and compensatory damages is rediculuous, but our society has the general idea of "screw the corporations, they have all the money". This is a case of "the man" taking advantage of the same laws used against him daily. Except in this case, they have no hopes of collecting any money. The frivolity of their suit matches the frivolity of most lawsuits these days.
Whether or not you agree with existing copyrights, or you feel that the recording companies are colluding to steal your money, the fact of the matter is, based on current laws, distributing copies of copyrighted materials is agsint the law. Instead of complaining about how "the man is trying to screw me" or setting up p2p networks to distribute mp3's, I would suggest that people who are against the RIAA and music copyrights work to get the laws changed.
Instead of spending money on CD's, use that money to start an advocacy group. Donate some money to the EFF or some other organization who might be willing to fight for your cause. Instead of running a server to host your mp3's (bandwidth costs money and the mp3's have to originate from a CD at some point), discontinue these servers and use the money towards advocacy. Spend your effort changing the laws instead of flying the finger at the establishment.
I concur on Waking Ned Devine. Very funny and very subtly done.
Regardless of the content of animated movies, the general viewing public views animated movies as cartoons - and the general opintion is that cartoons are for kids.
Look at the popular animated movies done by Disney, Pixar, etc. They are written either for kids, or for the whole family, but the general premise is that these are movies for kids. Animation is seen as content for kids.
So, when an anime movie comes out, it is seen as aimed at kids. And if a cartoon aims for an adult audience, the general public sees this as a movie for geek kids who haven't grown up. Sad, perhaps, but true.
It seems that us old timers have a lot in common.
I've been lucky in that I have been able to find companies just starting out. I was employee #8 at my previous job, employee #4 at my current job. Companies that are trying to bootstrap their growth need to hire programmers who know what they are doing, can work incredibly hard, and don't need direction.
The sad truth is that for both of these jobs, I worked with these people before. Sometimes at one company, but for us core employees, I have worked with them at two different companies prior. In fact, I worked at two previous jobs with the guy who started the company I work for. Since the technical programmers in my area tend to keep in a small circle, we see each other a lot socially. I got the lead for my current job while at a Christmas party at a mutual friends house.
Most of the hires that we make are usually someone we have worked with at a previous job, or comes highly recommended by by a former colleague. It turns out that the number of programmers who can cut the mustard is fairly small, and since these type of programmers gravitate to only certain kinds of jobs, you end up seeing the same faces over and over again. I live in a city of 2 million, but the number of places that hire technical programmers is fairly small, and if you mention a single company that does real programming, I can tell you at least five people I know who work there. And if we get a resume from someone who works at one of these companies - with a single phone call, I have the straight scoop on this person.
There is a group of us who last worked together several years ago, and we keep in touch by playing poker several times a year. We all socialize, but it also becomes serves as a chance to keep our pulse on what is going on at everyones company, plus any rumors about other local companies. Drinking beer and playing cards with people you like and liked working with, it doesn't quite feel like the traditional stereotype of networking.
If you decide to give programming one last shot, try giving a call to some other old timers and see what they are up to. They might not have anything, but they may come up with someone else you can talk to.
The other rather ironic thing that has happened to me is that I ended up in a Rotisserie baseball league that was comprised of most of the major head hunters in town, and my former boss is a headhunter for SourceEDP/Romac/KForce. Sometimes you get lucky. If I knew someone who was looking for a job, I could give them a direct line to the major headhunters. Of course, if I was less than impressed with your work, well, I would never tell you that I knew these guys personally.
Dude, I feel sorry for you.
It really is a scary world when employers are more interested in blind folded monkey who can only do what Uncle Bill told them, versus real programmer who actually know how to think/solve/code.
I have noticed one scary trend down here in the states - all kids coming out of college only know Java. Now, Java may be nice and all - I don't mean to start a flame war, but none of these kids knows jack about thinks like pointers, registers, heap, stack. How do you expect kids to know how to program if they don't understand what the machine is doing? How can they make smart decisions about their code if they never learn the technical details of what their code is actually doing?
One of these upstarts had the gall to tell me that he couldn't even figure out how to program anything useful in C because it didn't have classes - I laughed my ass off. The philosophy of a lot of kids I see these day is that progamming Java is all they need to know - things like pointers and hardware and memory management is for the "smart people" who write the JVM.
Scares the hell out of me.
I agree with your assessment that what is missing is vision. I posted another message on this thread that makes the same point. And, perhaps, my previous posting did come across as pejorative towards the guy who has an unemployed buddy in the valley, but being a good coder is not what made the valley what it is.
//start tangent
//end tangent
...products are conformist with the Microsoft vision and increasingly drab. Very little that is new and exciting...
I agree that successful companies, in addition to having vision also need highly skilled people to fulfill their vision. But my general impression is that most people who are considered good coders aren't really all that good. My personal experience over the past 14 years (damn, I'm getting old) is that 75% of people employed as programmers can't program worth crap. Of the remaining 25%, about 15% are good, 9% are really good and about 1% are exceptional.
Perhaps I am being prejudiced here, but I tend to dismiss people who brag about their certs. Being certified means that they have been taught to view all problems from a fixed paradigm. They have traded their brain to be a code monkey. Once they have done this, they no longer THINK about the problem and what alternatives their are for solutions and the affects and consequences for different approaches - they just spout that this is the way of doing things.
When I interview people, there are three things that I look for:
1). Are they smart?
2). Do they work hard?
3). Are they driven to succeed?
The fundamental premise is that if you are smart and work hard, you can do anything. I can teach you a programming language, but I can't teach you to be smart. You also can't teach someone to work hard - either they do or they don't.
Do you have a high GPA? Unless you have a respectable GPA, you aren't going to get in the door. A lot of programmers I know have low GPA's. Their excuse is that they thought that some of the classes were BS, so they didn't care to do well. Fine - and if you dont care to do what I want you to do when you think that it is BS, then I don't want to hire you and waste my money. The other point about GPA is that it is the college standard for success. If you didn't care enough to succeed by the standard where you were (college), they you don't care enough to succeed by the standard that your company will set.
>>Microsoft has kicked innovation in the nards.
I haven't really thought too much about this, so I can't give you an honest opinion. BUT, I don't think that innovation was ever their intent. I think that M$ business model was to embrace and extend. Let someone else do the work to create the market - they will just through some bells and whistles on it, and then integrate is so it APPEARS more natural when running on Windows.
I will say that M$ has done one innovative thing - the concept of a known gui framework. If you remember back to the days DOS, every application shipped with several floppies (long before CD's, and even before 3.5"). One floppy was the application, one floppy was if you had a hercules card, one for a EGA card, one for a VGA card. And some of these only worked for certain brands of cards. One downside to IBM's open architecture is that any card manufacturer had great leeway for how to impliment their hardware. Outside of a few common interrupts, all bets were off for how you had to interface with the card. Developers were forced to write very specific code for each piece of possible hardware. Enter M$ - instead of programming for specific hardware cards, you programmed to a known GUI framework. Once each developer didn't have to spend tremendous amounts of time writing hardware specific code, he was given a lot of time to actually work on innovative software.
>>
I think that you can currently say that about all software. From the work at bell labs (and others, including Berkely) back in the late 60's, there has not been a whole lot of innovation in OS's. Linux and it's myriad flavors is just a rehash of Unix with some bells and whistles. The OS's we all use every day has nothing new in it that hasn't been around for 35 years already. If software is to become innovative again, it begins with a fundamental paradigm shift of hardware architecture and OS thought - and the two must work together.
The last innovation, from my perspective, has been things like Plan 9 and Beowulf. Having an OS that can extend its tendrils out like an amoeba, create a grid/network of machines where CPU can be shared when needed is cool. I think that it needs to be extended such that these networks of computers can be self organizing, perhaps forming a grid/net architecture that can be used for massive parallel neural nets or other such thing, now, that would be cool. (Hmmm, this sounds like Skynet from the Terminator series, and we have already seen where that leads to).
But, we live in a consumer economy, so unless it can be sold such that it works with what the consumer already has, few will spend the money to develop it.
I think that your answer typifies the problems that lead people to believe that the valley is dead.
Having your MCSE and Cisco certs doesn't mean anything other than you can study for a test where you know the questions going into the test. It has nothing to do with quality of coding. And being a good coder doesn't mean that you are able to create revolutionary technology that will transform an industry - it means that you understand the symantecs of a language and can solve problems within that language.
What drives the valley are those who are innovative and visionary, those who can create revolutionary technology. Look back to early Apple - Jobs and Woz. Jobs was the visionary and Woz was the brains, and together they created what was revolutionary. No one looks at these guys and says "gee, they were good coders who had good certifications". That kind of thinking is what caused people to believe the valley was dead and why the valley has far too many unemployed deadbeats. Too many coders with certs moved in and didn't realize that they didn't have the chops for what it really drove the valley to greatness.
One of the quotes mentioned above was "survivors struggling through the toughest stretch in tech industry history" - and frankly, this is the wrong way of looking at it.
When I first became interested in Silicon Valley was back in 1980 - back when the valley was a syntonym for technical innovation, the idea was
1). go to the valley
2). make an innovative product
3). Sell product to VC for millions
4). Start all over again.
But the principle here is that it was driven by technical innovation - and turning this innovation to product. Heck, my idea, which was revolutionary 23 years ago was the idea of creating a color lcd TV (Hey, don't laugh, back then, we only had black on silver lcd's, and they bled if you touched them).
But once the internet took off and became what it is today (which was helped by some the valley innovation), people started to look at the valley differently. First - way too many people saw the valley as only internet and computer technology. Second - they viewed running a web site as technology. Having a bunch of dot com startups all based on running web sites and services is not technologically innovative. Third - people fell into the falacy that because there are millions of computer users/internet users, that if they could create something and sell it to 1% of that market, they would make millions.
At this point, it was not about technical innovation or creating interesting and useful products, but it because how fast can we whip something together. It is easy to see why so many dot coms failed. What is really surprising is that so many VC's fell for the trick.
The 'natives' of the valley are still doing the same thing that they have done for years - innovative research and product development. And the products that are eventually produced from this research will be revolutionary. The biotech and nanotech products that people are working on will be revolutionary.
But all of those pretenders that jumped on the internet bandwagon AFTER the techology was already out and in use were just the pretenders that never belonged their in the first place.
Now that they are gone (well, most of them at least), the valley will continue to do what it has done for decades.
>>I've met a number of people whose computers lock up on a daily basis.
Sorry to say, but this sounds like anti-M$ FUD.
I am a developer at a company that produces sofware for Windows/Linux/OSX/Solaris. I typically spend part of my day on at least two of these platforms, but my primary desktop is Windows 2000. Some of our 'linux only' developers used to talk trash about BSOD's and daily lockups, so I entered into a wager with one of our linux developers regarding whose computer would have the longest uptime. So, we both rebooted our computer at the same time and the contest began. I was using Windows 98 and he was using Debian. After 6 months, we called the contest a draw when the boss came walking around with more memory for our computers (more important to him since he was used VMWare for his Windows stuff).
The only application that I have seen cause a BSOD was Netscape 4.7 on Windows 95, and the only lockups were back in the days of Windows 2.11 when the networking was done with DOS drivers or TSR's and the hardware would get stuck on blocking read/write calls. Since the OS was single tasking, if the hardware didn't perform an interupt, you were stuck. This was back in the days when Ungerman-Bass networking equipment ruled the world.
Have BSOD's occurred - sure they have. But the rate of BSOD's that I have seen over the years have been on par with the number of kernal core and seg faults that I have seen with Linux (going all the way back to Slackware ruled linux - back when Linux was unix and not full of all the bloat crap that it has today).
You notice how no one ever says "Windows locks up on me daily" or "I have to reboot daily", but people say "I know someone who has to reboot daily". Sort of like the fact that no one sees aligators in NYC sewers, but every NYC resident knows someone who claims to have seen these alligators.
After reading the first few sentances of this article, it seemed to me that I remembered reading this some time ago. This article first appeared on /. on Dec 12, 2001.
5 22 9&mode=nested
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/10/184
Riding the Gemeni was always a blast. I remember during the early 80's, that people in one of the trains would yell "Tastes great" and the other train would yell "Less filling" and everyone would be be giving high fives to people on the other train when they were rounding the corner on the second hill.
Another great thrill at Cedar Point was the blue streak. Perhaps just a boring there-n-back coaster, but when the attendants came by to push the lap bar down, you would raise your knees as high as you could. When the ride took off, you had about four inches of play in the bar. When you would crest a hill and go down the other side, you would fly out of your seat and your knees would catch the bar to keep you from flying out of the car. In hindsight, this was pretty stupid, but as a teenager, it was a blast.
I think that it is more like
2B. Do an extremely F*cking good job
2C. Get extremely F*cking lucky.
A lot of people do 1 and 2, but they do a poor job of it.