I really want to know, though, where can I get just such a "viral"
RFID tag to stick to the inside cover of my passport?
I just need to wrap the real passport in a modified tinfoil beanie,
put the fake one on the outside of the beanie, and laugh heartily as
people scan me and then go white in horror at the realization of
what they just did to themselves. Bwa-hahahah!
/ only half kidding - I'd do this in a heartbeat if I had the hardware
to program my own tags.
It means a lot more than someone who has never used
the service and complains about a bug that has been fixed.
I hadn't planned to respond to this thread further, but, congrats,
you've drawn me back in.
I did not say I've never used it. I also did not
say it had "a bug" you describe as fixed. I said that,
HAVING USED IT, albeit unwillingly, I have invariably
turned it off for the sake of the performance hit it
causes UNRELATED to any particular bug it may
once have contained.
I also mentioned that I do not need to search for my own files
all that often. If I used it daily, perhaps my opinion might
differ. I have to suspect, however, that most people use the
Windows search functionality even less often than I do, and
would therefore have an even smaller payback for the resource
drain it causes.
What do other programmers do to motivate themselves?
You don't need to "do" anything to stay focused on programming... If
you love doing it, your friends and relatives will complain that
you spend too much time trancing out while staring at a computer.
They'll worry about your mental health that you would rather pass
the time reading what they perceive as meaningless blobs of punctuation
with the occasional English-like word thrown in, rather than something
"healthy" like watching TV. They'll irritatedly point out that your
mere three "just a minute"s have taken over half an hour, and you
really felt like only three minutes went by.
Or to put it another way - Given your described work-week, A good
coder wouldn't ask how they can force themselves to work longer to make
more - They'd just spend the surplus of free time "working" on their
own code, a nice open source project or the like.
Perhaps you do a decent enough job at coding, I don't mean to disparage
your skills. But merely asking your question means you don't
love programming. You do it for pay; not for the pure joy of losing
yourself in an elegant algorithm, or even just the simple satisfaction
of killing bugs in a section of code written too hastily for a deadline.
Are there types of breaks that you find really increase productivity?
Sorta... You don't code as well when you really need to pee; and
if you use that as a sort of built-in alarm clock to go for a 15 minute
walk (around the block, around the building, or in a big enough building,
just down to get coffee and back), you'll find your neck, back, and
eyes don't hurt at the end of the day.
I'm making more money than I need, and more than I'm used to even
working 20 or 25 hours a week. I'd like to work more, and rake in even
more money
I say unapologetically - Get a frickin' clue.
You don't work for the sake of making money - You work to afford
to enjoy your time off; You negotiate to maximize your time off,
trading as much pay as you can bear to lose for as much vacation time
(or the shortest work-week) you can get. Even if you spend every second
of your time off doing almost exactly the same thing you would do at work,
it still counts as your time, not the company's. Enjoy it!
If you already make more than you need, and in a work-week that most of
us only dream about - CELEBRATE! Don't ask slashdot "How can
I lower my quality of living in exchange for flipping bits in a bank's
computer". As they say, no one ever died wishing they had worked more.
Well, only in that I said something painfully obvious...
Indexing Service had a bug which once caused it to use excess CPU time.
Whereas now it only uses excessive disk I/O and memory? MUCH better!
Have you used Indexing Service before or set it up?
Why yes, yes, I have. Every major release and service pack (up to XP SP2,
as I mentioned) had it on by default. Invariably, a week later, I would
wonder why my machine had started crawling, notice indexing turned
on, swear like a sailor at Bill Gates, and turn off indexing. Poof!
Suddenly my machine's performance shot back up to a tolerable level.
But the worst part about the indexing service - Seriously, how often do
you need to search for a local file? Personally, I use quite a
few machines on a regular basis, and only do a search perhaps once a week.
And even then, 99% of the time I do a filename-only search, which I could
get from locate/updatedb in exchange for five minutes of scanning (and
no constant background task!) every 2am, rather than a continual
background suckage.
it could be used to provide a Google-like indexing service, similar
to Google's Desktop Search or their enterprise products, with
configuration [...] With the right plugins, I could add in metadata
for different file types (like filenames in archives, mp3 tags, etc).
...Or, you could just run Google's desktop search, and get all that,
with better performance, without any configuration needed, right out
of the box.
Hmm, tough choice... I could fight with MS's crap to not take
me where they want me to go today - Or I could use something that
already works as it should. What to do, what to do?
(As a side-note, I don't use Google's desktop search either, though
more out of privacy concerns than the still-significant-but-better-than-MS
performance hit)
I would imagine that any such system would be built upon
the Indexing Service, which is a very useful tool.
Did you mean to refer to the absolutely horrible, performance-crippling
service that EVERY Windows user should disable as the first thing
they do on a new install (actually on SP2 boxen they have it turned
off by default, thank Zeus)?
If so - Performance aside, that doesn't really count as "enterprise"
level search. Desktop search amounts to nothing more than an index
of local files; Enterprise search means coordinating that info across
numerous machines and, frequently, several different physical sites
connected by pipes of unknown (a priori) speed and reliability.
Although you may well use your thumbs to squeeze your mouse, you don't
really need to, we only do so out of habit.
I personally use a tiny wireless optical mouse (they usually refer
to them as targetted at laptop users on the road, but it has all the standard,
fully-functional 3btn+scroll mouse features. And I use it with my hand flat
(when not hitting the scroll wheel, I even just hold it with just my two
fingers in a sort of relaxed peace-sign pose), no thumbs involved whatsoever.
It takes some getting used to when you've grown accustomed to a mouse
you could use as a shot-put in a pinch, since it feels so light and fragile,
but the smaller ones can actually take more abuse (designed for
chucking in a bag and travelling around with you, after all).
Someone else already mentioned this, but I also recommend switching mouse-hands. Within a day you'll stop feeling painfully frustrated, and within a week you'll get back to your normal speed with it. And, that leaves your dominant hand
free to write with, meaning you don't need to keep switching tools in one hand
while your nondominant hand sits limp and useless at your side.
And, finally, as yet another person mentioned - The keyboard and mouse
doesn't cause RSI. Your posture and workspace layout does. Correct
that, and (if you haven't already caused permanant damage) the
symptoms will slowly fade and vanish. If you only deal with a workaround
while keeping the same terrible workspace, your next Ask Slashdot
will talk about elbow, shoulder, and neck pain rather than just wrist pain.
that could very well also be a "politically correct" way of saying,[...]
Or it could mean that in six months, we'll hear about how Intel accidentally
stalled their production pipeline for the next five years by laying off a few
of their "underperforming" R&D groups.
"But they had zero income and a huge budget, and I didn't understand their
explanation what with all those big words like terahertz and sixteen core
and quarter-watt TDP! It looked like a no-brainer to sack the lot of 'em!"
Little explanation of ADS or the special ADS
keyword "$DATA" was revealed
That exploit just worked by tricking IIS's extension
parser - It would normally treat an ASP specially rather
than as a plain file. Because the file would obviously
have read permission set, specifying that name just
returns the file itself the same way IIS would return
any other not-special file.
The DATA stream just specifies the basic unnamed default
stream containing what we would normally think of as the
file itself. All NTFS files will also have an unnamed
"security" stream, and many will contain an unnamed
"object identifiers" stream.
So those don't really count as magic words that Microsoft
has hidden from us (you can access them programmatically
without any more trouble than opening any "normal" file),
any more than an entry in the FAT "hid" data from us under
DOS.
Antigravity
Which differs from hoverboards and rooms-flipping-upside-down how?
teleporter doors
...Work just like real doors except they make it a total pain to
make an accurate map.
psychic projections (that can kill people).
Just another type of ranged weapon.
I agree with your point to some extent - Games with a high
degree of physical realism can always find ways to allow the
player to violate the laws of physics. But I more strongly
agree with the GP, that much of the problem here comes from
trying to stuff a form of real-world-escapist-entertainment
back into something as close to the real world as possible.
So how exactly am I meant to use a thumb drive on NT 4?
You tell the BIOS to provide legacy support for USB drives, then
NT sees it as just another HDD.
Of course, you can't hot-plug it if you do that, but assuming you
shut your machines down at night, you can attach it in in the morning
and take it home at night with you.
Note that, unlike the original case, there are no copyright issues in my analogy;
Shakespeare is long dead, so there are no copyright concerns
True, but you've described unwanted censorship, not solicited editing.
Censorship (of this sort) does indeed fall under the category of "editing", but
it occurs because some prudish "father knows best" 3rd-party doesn't want you to
see what they disapprove of - Not the removal of material, at your request,
of material you personally find detracts from your enjoyment of the content.
I can stand Jar-Jar. I can grit my teeth and make it through the god-awful
dialogue (and delivery thereof) between Anakin and Padme. But, owning (screw
"licensing", I own physical discs and will do as I wish with them) my
own copies of those movies, I see no reason why I personally shouldn't have
the right to make my own edit (including asking someone else to do it for me,
if I didn't have the skills to do so personally).
So, no offense intended, but it sounds like you did fall into exactly
the sort of trap that lead me to make my previous post in the first place.
This doesn't involve censorship - The FCC and the PTA can still take out as
many "cock"s and "bastard"s as they want; We, however, cannot.
So by all means, continue opposing censorship - Hell, I stopped renting from
BlockBuster, even though I almost never actually paid for their movies (you
can get free movie coupons about a million different ways - I used to get
two a month just for paying my phone bill) because I found their habit of
censoring their movies infuriating (and not even sensible - They leave in
sex, drugs, violence and language, but snip seemingly arbitrary scenes). Don't,
however, conflate censorship with the right to personally choose what subset of
a released work you want to watch.
Most people strongly supporting this decision seem to have the
delusion that it applies only to (as per the FP title) "Naughty
bits".
NO!
Instead, imagine Star Wars I through III with every scene
containing Jar-Jar, or both Anakin and Padme, completely
cut out! Poof, it goes from utter crap to a decent (if
not as good as the original trilogy) watch.
Or for another angle on it - Mix CDs. This decision
basically reduces to outlawing mix CDs. Now, I don't
think I've ever made a RedBook mix CD, but imagine the
implications for your "20 hour drive" MP3 CD, if you
have to keep original albums as a whole. Bam, your
choices just went from (literally?) millions of tracks,
down to Pink Floyd or the soundtracks to musicals. Imagine
20 hours of musicals, people!!! Hey, I like the occasional
JCS or Spamalot, but 20 straight hours? Think of the children!
I like Floyd as much as the next guy, but I'd have to join Sid
at Chalfont (well, The Great Beyond, now) after 20 hours of it.
Every few years another anti-intellectual feel-good women's lib line
of BS like that comes up, whether it involves Einstein's wife as some
hidden genius behind her man, or Bach's wife Maria as the true composer,
or that Mary Sidney ghost-wrote most of Shakespeare's works, or just a
large to-do about a relatively talentless woman "chauvinistically
ignored" by her peers such as Hildegarde von Bingen.
If someone finds proof, not pointless conjecture based
on (in this case) nothing more solid than that Mileva Maric
considered herself something of a mathematician - I'll gladly
reconsider my stance. But until that magic diary entry saying
"Today Mileva showed me how to get around that pesky bit in
Maxwell's equations" appears, don't go mucking around with
history just because some people consider it too male-heavy.
Okay, folks - Since I have yet to see any non-humor comments on this
topic, I'll break the ice. From TFA:
Thanks to automatically
assigned "cookies", the scientists were able to reconstruct the browsing
history of about 250,000 visitors to the site over the course of a
month. [... and...] Although the average
half-life varies for different types of sites, the decay laws identified
are likely to be generic because they do not depend on content, but are
manly determined by a user's visiting and browsing patterns.
So, what do we see here?
This trend depends on user browsing patterns rather than content,
but also depends on users allowing cookies to live for not only
longer than one browsing session, but for a full month.
Thus, much like that classic problem of proving the external
validity of any research done by a college psych department
on their own undergrads (which usually results in 80-90% female
and at least half freshman participants), this study has a
pretty glaring flaw - It only really says anything about MSIE
users (and even then, only MSIE users dumb enough not to use
some form of cookie management) rather than users in general.
While that almost certainly includes the majority of visitors
to many sites, it doesn't safely extend to the larger
population of all web surfers.
Additionally, I would point out one more glaring source of error...
It fails to normalize each unit of time against the remaining base
of users - So, for example, if 90% of the regular visitors to a site
see an article within an hour of posting, that leaves only 10% (plus
the negligibly-small number that re-read the same article over and
over, except on Slashdot where you can use FP refreshes as a solid
measure of workday boredom). That, IMO, says far more about how
long the typical (MSIE-qualified as above) user can go without a
news fix, rather than how long an article remains interesting.
File names aside, is there a good way to "tag" files (generic metadata)
on Windows or Linux?
On NTFS, you can use ADS (Alternate Data Streams)
to store metadata about a file, though I don't know of any
software that can read such data in a consistant manner - Not to mention,
just about every malware scanner out there will flag such files as
suspicious.
On Linux, it very much depends on the FS you choose, though again,
support for file metadata remains about as standardized as snowflakes.
So long as it's only scientists and the 'elite' going into space and performing
experiments progress will be very slow. That can't be good.
Nevermind that, how about we start actually sending mostly scientists to space!
Currently, the vast majority of people visiting space come from regular militaries,
and almost every mission has some military goal as its primary purpose, with the
"science" aspect coming in only as an "oh yeah we can fit one of those things in
there too".
Instead of critisising it how about coming up with something else that works better.
The FP does suggest two approaches, one of which I agree with - Do nothing.
Terrorism has, as its goal, the forcing of certain concessions on an otherwise unwilling
government (or really any sufficiently large opponent) by inspiring fear in the plebes
who make up that government or organization.
When the DHS has done more to inspire terror in the world than Osama could
ever dream of, only an idiot would call that even remotely effective. Quite
literally, "doing nothing" would have better effect than sacrificing our
civil liberties and personal freedom in the name of an expensive an ineffective
witch-hunt.
what is your definition of capitalism? It looks as if it were very far appart from Adam Smith's market economics.
Adam Smith also didn't address the problem of modern backroom deals (though, apparently he
did strongly favor anti-monopoly legislation in private). He believed that markets
would always correct themselves over time - Which I grant holds true, but "over time"
could well refer to centuries without a little manual intervention.
So, my definition of "pure" capitalism? No-holds-barred, rape the public as much as they
will bear. Work conditions should approach outright slavery, and of course child labor
comes pretty cheap. Prices should absolutely reflect demand, meaning people should have
to all but sell their souls to afford just about any necessary drugs or medical proceedures.
Competition, while good for the consumer, drives down the price. Therefore, from the point
of view of the producers, it counts as an enemy to minimize or even eliminate if possible.
From the point of view of the consumers - Well, let's face it, consumers have almost
no power. They have the illusion of choice (sixteen colors of the same crap with different
names), but basically buy what the television tells them to. Most companies fail for two
reasons - Changes in the market (ie, new technology makes them irrelevant), or less arrogant
competition. Microsoft grew very arrogant, and eventually would have fallen for that
reason. The antitrust action against them, ironically enough, may have saved them from
that fate, at least for now. But I won't pretend that even the "good guys" really care
about me - Even the likes of SouthWest, CostCo or Google, only do what they do because it gives
them an edge in the market.
and do you promote it?
Absolutely not. But most Americans strongly claim to believe in the
idea of a free market, without realizing that such an abstraction amounts to
the horror I describe above.
On a more realistic level - Yes, Microsoft abused its power, and I would have
liked to see it split into an OS group and an app group (though even then,
drawing the line beyond Windows/Office gets very blurry - Does a
browser and media player realistically count as part of a modern OS? Most
non-geeks would say "yes", I think, and even most geeks would call any non-server
machine all-but-useless without both). But now? I don't claim Microsoft has
turned into a great big fuzzy teddy-bear of a company, but they do
appear to have started behaving quite a lot better.
I think people forget that RedHat, SuSe, Novell, and the rest count as
Microsoft's enemies, in a very real and measurable way. Faulting
Microsoft for doing everything they can to fend off the barbarians at the
gate strikes me as similar to faulting a black-belt for soundly thrashing
the gun-toting mugger - Yeah, you can call it an unfair fight, but the
mugger really does present a deadly threat, and anyone, black-belt or not,
should treat it as such.
On both side of the Atlantic has MSFT been declared by judges 1) a monopoly
and 2) abusing from its position of power. This means guilty, bad.
I agree, that describes a clear fact. But both of those occurred after the
actual offenses in question... The rules for a monopoly differ quite a lot from
the rules for a regular company, and before those rulings, Microsoft didn't count
as a monopoly. Therefore, what they did, didn't actually break the law. I suppose
you can call this a philosophical argument, and I'll accept that some may disagree
with me on it; but I consider it "unfair" to punish someone (even a company) for
rules that don't apply at the time they commit their offense.
Thanks for the English exercise!
You probably would have had an easier time of it if I hadn't stupidly
broken a few HTML tags and ended up chopping out almost two complete
paragraphs.;-)
A decade ago I paid 800/semester for two years and $3500/semester
for the remainder (great things, in-state reciprocity agreements
between community colleges and state unis). And that gave me one
fluffy degree and a pair of "real" degrees, from a fairly well-respected
(in Engineering, anyway) state university.
This year, those numbers have gone up to $1200 and $5500, so $800 still
represents a significant chunk of that compared with a used notebook
or a cheap Dell.
Kids - Serious advice here... Save the ivy league for grad school - No
one cares where your BA/BS comes from as long as you have the framed
slip of paper to prove you put in your time. And "Your Permanant Record"
(cue spooky reverb with thunder in the background) all but vanishes
into irrelevance six months after your first post-college job.
not to mention living expenses are probably another 10-20k.
Could you please pull the silver spoon out of your... mouth... while we talk?
I find it very distracting.
Thank you.
A cheap apartment in a college town costs $400-$600 a month. Sharing
that with 3-4 people makes it up to $200/mo, or $800/semester. Add
in a third of heat and electric for another $100/mo on average (you used
to need to include phone in that, but everyone has their own
cellphone now). Food comes last for most college students, which
means a bit less than a dollar a day for Ramen Noodles by the case,
with a pizza once a week to make up for the massive protein deficiency.
So, living expenses add only another roughly $1500-$2000/semester.
Again, paying half that for an overpriced but aesthetically pleasing
computer doesn't seem all that great of a use of money.
Not to mention - Writing reports, surfing the web, and responding
to email doesn't take an even remotely "modern" machine. Except for a
very few specific purposes, most people have only one reason to own a
fast rig - Gaming. Hmm, now remind me what sort of reputation Macs
have for availability of the latest-n'-greatest games? Though,
for students who can afford to get a few of the latest-n'-greatest
games each month, most of this doesn't apply anyway.
Try not to make yourself so obvious. I don't know who I pissed off, nor do I
care - Just keep in mind that, on average, I earn karma back far faster than
you can burn it with five points here and there. So, for your own benefit,
you would do better to use your points meaningfully rather than to irk me.
But, as long as you insist on acting like a petulant two year old in response to whatever
imagined sleight I've committed against you, I suppose it benefits us all that you
vent your anger on li'l old me.
Kudos on your use of the un-metamoddable "overrated", though.
Please explain to me... when I download every episode of Futurama for free,
how does this stop a hard-core fan from buying the DVD?
Better yet, please explain to me how it costs the show anything
when I watch it at first-run, then download it for free, then still
buy the DVD sets when they come out?
Since you have the best reply to me, I'll respond.
You can partially run that, but not at full scope. [...] This should change with Samba 4.
Exactly. Microsoft implemented something new with Windows 2003, and the Samba team has almost
caught up.
The problem I see here involves the assumption that the Samba team should have
the ability to catch up. Why? because we want it? Because the EU said so?
Because we have some BS concept of fairness that absolutely does not apply to a truly
capitalistic economy?
et al. But I don't see any non-authoritarian
reason for Microsoft to make their work easier. And despite that, amidst claims
that the most powerful software company on Earth has actively tried to thwart such
efforts - The Samba team has still largely succeeded! Call me crazy, but when 2+2=5,
I look for some weak link leading up to that conclusion.
Right: competitors are fed up to guess and decrypt, wether be it C code or packets.
Oh, boo-frickin-hoo! MS's competitors might actually have to work to write their
own little Word and Excel clones?
Ahem. Forgive my sarcasm, I realize it doesn't help present a rational argument,
but really - How should I respond when the primary argument against
considering MS compliant involves "it would take too much work"? Microsoft needs
to make it possible for others to interoperate and compete. That doesn't
mean they need to do their competitors' jobs.
Wonderfull things, all those Windows Mobile things: they can only work well
on Windows (you guess it: undocumented protocols) and with Exchange.
And iPods only work well with iTunes and Apple's DRM - Except there, reverse engineering
not only risks civil penalties, it would violate the DMCA.
Corrupt, the EU?
Yes, corrupt. I could point you to a million and one links, but
this
one says it best right in the first sentence - "Bad accounting, along with
bad management, nepotism and the fraud that resulted from it, brought down the
entire European Union Commission, then headed by Jacques Santer, just four years
ago" - And then goes on to discuss how little things have changes since then.
As a modern allegedly "democratic" organization, it has an appointed membership, no
direct public accountability, and at least from the POv from this side of
the pond, has done nothing at all beyond piss the majority of its member states'
citizens off by a steady stream of bought-and-paid-for regional protectionisms.
You mean, more than [...]
I specifically said "pseudo-government organization". Yes, plenty of "real" governments
have (and still do) levels of corruption that make the Mafia look on-the-level. And
plenty of private criminal organizations exist to milk the sheep. But it takes a
special breed to act as though they have legitimate public-granted governmental powers
and then dictate who can sell what to whom and under what terms, and of course bleed
a little off the top whenever possible.
And the whole Microsoft situation - Extend "regional protectionism" to "Us vs US",
and you'll have a pretty good idea of my take on the whole situation. The US DOJ
backed down because Microsoft really hadn't done anything that bad. The
EU has stuck like a leech because they see a weak point to attack, and damn the facts
of the matter.
And you call a monopolistic and repeatedly condemned corporation the
"great American capitalist successes".
winning - 100%
market share and the bankruptcy of all competitors. Even with the far-weakened
form of capitalism practiced in the US, Microsoft still managed to do just that.
And I would point out that, UNTIL declared a monopoly, their actions
broke no laws, plain as that. So yes, I consider Microsoft, AT&T, Standard Oil - and
don't act surprised to h
No, the non-compliance wasn't about Windows Media Player so much as it
was interoperability with other networking software.
I can run a mixed Windows and Linux system in either a flat TCP/IP network
or a Microsoft style Active Directory. I can even use a Linux box as the
DC. How exactly does that not mean "interoperability"?
As for Media player, let's not forget the oh-so-popular "XP E" version - No
bundled crap, and no one wanted it. Most people buy software because they
just want it to work, which MS gave them. They don't want to buy some dirty
hippy's philosophy along with the box, and have to find an additional 27
programs merely to do the day-to-day tasks they consider fundamental to
using a computer.
And as for "Open" formats...
MS's attempts at compliance were deemed inadequate even though they
protested that it was "too hard" to comply to the degree that the EU wanted.
Yeah, because offering a peek at the goddamned source code didn't
go far enough, right? And the recent shift toward open XML-based formats
doesn't amount to nothing short of rolling over on their back and exposing
their bellies to the pack?
I hate this topic, because every time it comes up I, a die-hard Linux fan
who uses Windows only when required (ie, my desktop machine at work), get
accused of either trolling or fanboyism. But it digusts me to see people
falling for this "enemy of my enemy" crap.
Microsoft abused their position 5-10 years ago (though, until deemed a monopoly,
they hadn't done anything any other comapny wouldn't also do if given half a
chance). Not only does it appear they stopped when caught, but MS has since
started moving to open formats (though I'd call the issue irrelevant once the
government says "okay boys, you can reverse engineer it without fear of legal
action" - In the absence of strong encryption, any coder worth their salt can
reverse engineer a binary file format).
But now? We have the third most corrupt pseudo-government organization
in history, the EU, making backroom deals with one another to slowly
bleed Microsoft, which represents the most recent of the great American
capitalist successes. For those not paying attention in 2nd grade, that
doesn't count as "fair". It counts as - Whaddya know, pretty much the
exact same behavior that got Microsoft in trouble in the first place,
abusing their position of questionably-attained authority to squash a
competitor.
We'll have to agree to disagree on some of your ideas, but I don't think we
diverge all that far.
I'd like to clarify my stance on one point, however... When I say people have the
right to act like a miserable bastard, I agree completely that such right does
not include the right to dip into your tax dollars.
But as far as teaching kids not to behave that way, I'd call the behavior
either defensive or self-punishing - In the former, punishment will just
reinforce it ("the world sucks and everyone hates me - see? They even want
to punish me just for trying to express myself!"), and in the latter, it
doesn't take punishment to demonstrate that you get more flies with honey
than with vinegar.
Children need to learn what it means to be a productive, positive influence on the world around them
Why?
As part of my right to pursue happyness comes the "right" to act as negative as I
want (up to breaking the law), and to drain society and those around me of as much
productivity as possible (again, short of breaking the law).
In short, I have the right to act like a Miserable Bastard.
Now, death threats in general go to far, but y'know - An icon does not
equal a death threat. Ill-wishing does not mean committing verbal assault.
Every morning I wake up and optimisticially scan the headlines to see if a
certain leader of the "free" world has suffered a massive stroke the previous
night; that doesn't mean I would unwisely risk my current uncaged status to
promote such a headline.
I have absolutely no idea, and cannot comment on where to draw the line between
childrens' rights to be children and society's right to ensure healthy upbringing.
Let me darken that line for you, then - Society has no such right, whereas, as
elaborated above, children (and the rest of us) do have the right to
Miserable Bastardy.
That means your professional school principles who handle 10,000 children a year
but hever married and had children of their own are not up to the task.
Yeah, riiiiiight - Because some 4th-gen welfare mom with three kids and another on
the way certainly has, simply by virtue of having spread her legs, the
wisdom and compassion to properly raise "productive, positive influence[s] on the
world around them".
When I was a kid, pulling stunts like that got me a belting from my folks.
Thats what this world needs more of.
Lest you think I sound too antagonistic above, here I agree with you completely.
As the core problem here, the kid did something stupid and arguably "bad". But not
bad in a "call the police, everyone panic, suspend for a semester" way - Just "good
spanking and grounded for a week" bad.
I suppose that goes back to your main point, which (taking the happy fluffy angle
out of it) I read as nothing more drastic than that parents need to act as parents,
not delegate the task to teachers, to ISPs, to MySpace, to Nickelodeon or PBS, to NetNanny,
or to the government. Likewise, those groups need to not take airs and try to assume
the role of parents, deferring instead to the dreaded "I'll call your mother, young man!"
Slashdot Mirror
Sweet!
I really want to know, though, where can I get just such a "viral" RFID tag to stick to the inside cover of my passport?
I just need to wrap the real passport in a modified tinfoil beanie, put the fake one on the outside of the beanie, and laugh heartily as people scan me and then go white in horror at the realization of what they just did to themselves. Bwa-hahahah!
/ only half kidding - I'd do this in a heartbeat if I had the hardware to program my own tags.
It means a lot more than someone who has never used the service and complains about a bug that has been fixed.
I hadn't planned to respond to this thread further, but, congrats, you've drawn me back in.
I did not say I've never used it. I also did not say it had "a bug" you describe as fixed. I said that, HAVING USED IT, albeit unwillingly, I have invariably turned it off for the sake of the performance hit it causes UNRELATED to any particular bug it may once have contained.
I also mentioned that I do not need to search for my own files all that often. If I used it daily, perhaps my opinion might differ. I have to suspect, however, that most people use the Windows search functionality even less often than I do, and would therefore have an even smaller payback for the resource drain it causes.
What do other programmers do to motivate themselves?
You don't need to "do" anything to stay focused on programming... If you love doing it, your friends and relatives will complain that you spend too much time trancing out while staring at a computer. They'll worry about your mental health that you would rather pass the time reading what they perceive as meaningless blobs of punctuation with the occasional English-like word thrown in, rather than something "healthy" like watching TV. They'll irritatedly point out that your mere three "just a minute"s have taken over half an hour, and you really felt like only three minutes went by.
Or to put it another way - Given your described work-week, A good coder wouldn't ask how they can force themselves to work longer to make more - They'd just spend the surplus of free time "working" on their own code, a nice open source project or the like.
Perhaps you do a decent enough job at coding, I don't mean to disparage your skills. But merely asking your question means you don't love programming. You do it for pay; not for the pure joy of losing yourself in an elegant algorithm, or even just the simple satisfaction of killing bugs in a section of code written too hastily for a deadline.
Are there types of breaks that you find really increase productivity?
Sorta... You don't code as well when you really need to pee; and if you use that as a sort of built-in alarm clock to go for a 15 minute walk (around the block, around the building, or in a big enough building, just down to get coffee and back), you'll find your neck, back, and eyes don't hurt at the end of the day.
I'm making more money than I need, and more than I'm used to even working 20 or 25 hours a week. I'd like to work more, and rake in even more money
I say unapologetically - Get a frickin' clue.
You don't work for the sake of making money - You work to afford to enjoy your time off; You negotiate to maximize your time off, trading as much pay as you can bear to lose for as much vacation time (or the shortest work-week) you can get. Even if you spend every second of your time off doing almost exactly the same thing you would do at work, it still counts as your time, not the company's. Enjoy it!
If you already make more than you need, and in a work-week that most of us only dream about - CELEBRATE! Don't ask slashdot "How can I lower my quality of living in exchange for flipping bits in a bank's computer". As they say, no one ever died wishing they had worked more.
It's sad that the parent got insightful.
...Or, you could just run Google's desktop search, and get all that,
with better performance, without any configuration needed, right out
of the box.
Well, only in that I said something painfully obvious...
Indexing Service had a bug which once caused it to use excess CPU time.
Whereas now it only uses excessive disk I/O and memory? MUCH better!
Have you used Indexing Service before or set it up?
Why yes, yes, I have. Every major release and service pack (up to XP SP2, as I mentioned) had it on by default. Invariably, a week later, I would wonder why my machine had started crawling, notice indexing turned on, swear like a sailor at Bill Gates, and turn off indexing. Poof! Suddenly my machine's performance shot back up to a tolerable level.
But the worst part about the indexing service - Seriously, how often do you need to search for a local file? Personally, I use quite a few machines on a regular basis, and only do a search perhaps once a week. And even then, 99% of the time I do a filename-only search, which I could get from locate/updatedb in exchange for five minutes of scanning (and no constant background task!) every 2am, rather than a continual background suckage.
it could be used to provide a Google-like indexing service, similar to Google's Desktop Search or their enterprise products, with configuration
[...]
With the right plugins, I could add in metadata for different file types (like filenames in archives, mp3 tags, etc).
Hmm, tough choice... I could fight with MS's crap to not take me where they want me to go today - Or I could use something that already works as it should. What to do, what to do?
(As a side-note, I don't use Google's desktop search either, though more out of privacy concerns than the still-significant-but-better-than-MS performance hit)
I would imagine that any such system would be built upon the Indexing Service, which is a very useful tool.
Did you mean to refer to the absolutely horrible, performance-crippling service that EVERY Windows user should disable as the first thing they do on a new install (actually on SP2 boxen they have it turned off by default, thank Zeus)?
If so - Performance aside, that doesn't really count as "enterprise" level search. Desktop search amounts to nothing more than an index of local files; Enterprise search means coordinating that info across numerous machines and, frequently, several different physical sites connected by pipes of unknown (a priori) speed and reliability.
Although you may well use your thumbs to squeeze your mouse, you don't really need to, we only do so out of habit.
I personally use a tiny wireless optical mouse (they usually refer to them as targetted at laptop users on the road, but it has all the standard, fully-functional 3btn+scroll mouse features. And I use it with my hand flat (when not hitting the scroll wheel, I even just hold it with just my two fingers in a sort of relaxed peace-sign pose), no thumbs involved whatsoever. It takes some getting used to when you've grown accustomed to a mouse you could use as a shot-put in a pinch, since it feels so light and fragile, but the smaller ones can actually take more abuse (designed for chucking in a bag and travelling around with you, after all).
Someone else already mentioned this, but I also recommend switching mouse-hands. Within a day you'll stop feeling painfully frustrated, and within a week you'll get back to your normal speed with it. And, that leaves your dominant hand free to write with, meaning you don't need to keep switching tools in one hand while your nondominant hand sits limp and useless at your side.
And, finally, as yet another person mentioned - The keyboard and mouse doesn't cause RSI. Your posture and workspace layout does. Correct that, and (if you haven't already caused permanant damage) the symptoms will slowly fade and vanish. If you only deal with a workaround while keeping the same terrible workspace, your next Ask Slashdot will talk about elbow, shoulder, and neck pain rather than just wrist pain.
that could very well also be a "politically correct" way of saying,[...]
Or it could mean that in six months, we'll hear about how Intel accidentally stalled their production pipeline for the next five years by laying off a few of their "underperforming" R&D groups.
"But they had zero income and a huge budget, and I didn't understand their explanation what with all those big words like terahertz and sixteen core and quarter-watt TDP! It looked like a no-brainer to sack the lot of 'em!"
Little explanation of ADS or the special ADS keyword "$DATA" was revealed
That exploit just worked by tricking IIS's extension parser - It would normally treat an ASP specially rather than as a plain file. Because the file would obviously have read permission set, specifying that name just returns the file itself the same way IIS would return any other not-special file.
The DATA stream just specifies the basic unnamed default stream containing what we would normally think of as the file itself. All NTFS files will also have an unnamed "security" stream, and many will contain an unnamed "object identifiers" stream.
So those don't really count as magic words that Microsoft has hidden from us (you can access them programmatically without any more trouble than opening any "normal" file), any more than an entry in the FAT "hid" data from us under DOS.
Antigravity
...Work just like real doors except they make it a total pain to
make an accurate map.
Which differs from hoverboards and rooms-flipping-upside-down how?
teleporter doors
psychic projections (that can kill people).
Just another type of ranged weapon.
I agree with your point to some extent - Games with a high degree of physical realism can always find ways to allow the player to violate the laws of physics. But I more strongly agree with the GP, that much of the problem here comes from trying to stuff a form of real-world-escapist-entertainment back into something as close to the real world as possible.
It just seems to miss the point, somehow.
So how exactly am I meant to use a thumb drive on NT 4?
You tell the BIOS to provide legacy support for USB drives, then NT sees it as just another HDD.
Of course, you can't hot-plug it if you do that, but assuming you shut your machines down at night, you can attach it in in the morning and take it home at night with you.
Note that, unlike the original case, there are no copyright issues in my analogy; Shakespeare is long dead, so there are no copyright concerns
True, but you've described unwanted censorship, not solicited editing.
Censorship (of this sort) does indeed fall under the category of "editing", but it occurs because some prudish "father knows best" 3rd-party doesn't want you to see what they disapprove of - Not the removal of material, at your request, of material you personally find detracts from your enjoyment of the content.
I can stand Jar-Jar. I can grit my teeth and make it through the god-awful dialogue (and delivery thereof) between Anakin and Padme. But, owning (screw "licensing", I own physical discs and will do as I wish with them) my own copies of those movies, I see no reason why I personally shouldn't have the right to make my own edit (including asking someone else to do it for me, if I didn't have the skills to do so personally).
So, no offense intended, but it sounds like you did fall into exactly the sort of trap that lead me to make my previous post in the first place. This doesn't involve censorship - The FCC and the PTA can still take out as many "cock"s and "bastard"s as they want; We, however, cannot.
So by all means, continue opposing censorship - Hell, I stopped renting from BlockBuster, even though I almost never actually paid for their movies (you can get free movie coupons about a million different ways - I used to get two a month just for paying my phone bill) because I found their habit of censoring their movies infuriating (and not even sensible - They leave in sex, drugs, violence and language, but snip seemingly arbitrary scenes). Don't, however, conflate censorship with the right to personally choose what subset of a released work you want to watch.
Most people strongly supporting this decision seem to have the delusion that it applies only to (as per the FP title) "Naughty bits".
NO!
Instead, imagine Star Wars I through III with every scene containing Jar-Jar, or both Anakin and Padme, completely cut out! Poof, it goes from utter crap to a decent (if not as good as the original trilogy) watch.
Or for another angle on it - Mix CDs. This decision basically reduces to outlawing mix CDs. Now, I don't think I've ever made a RedBook mix CD, but imagine the implications for your "20 hour drive" MP3 CD, if you have to keep original albums as a whole. Bam, your choices just went from (literally?) millions of tracks, down to Pink Floyd or the soundtracks to musicals. Imagine 20 hours of musicals, people!!! Hey, I like the occasional JCS or Spamalot, but 20 straight hours? Think of the children! I like Floyd as much as the next guy, but I'd have to join Sid at Chalfont (well, The Great Beyond, now) after 20 hours of it.
No idea how good the underlying sources are,
Not very good.
Every few years another anti-intellectual feel-good women's lib line of BS like that comes up, whether it involves Einstein's wife as some hidden genius behind her man, or Bach's wife Maria as the true composer, or that Mary Sidney ghost-wrote most of Shakespeare's works, or just a large to-do about a relatively talentless woman "chauvinistically ignored" by her peers such as Hildegarde von Bingen.
If someone finds proof, not pointless conjecture based on (in this case) nothing more solid than that Mileva Maric considered herself something of a mathematician - I'll gladly reconsider my stance. But until that magic diary entry saying "Today Mileva showed me how to get around that pesky bit in Maxwell's equations" appears, don't go mucking around with history just because some people consider it too male-heavy.
This trend depends on user browsing patterns rather than content, but also depends on users allowing cookies to live for not only longer than one browsing session, but for a full month.
Thus, much like that classic problem of proving the external validity of any research done by a college psych department on their own undergrads (which usually results in 80-90% female and at least half freshman participants), this study has a pretty glaring flaw - It only really says anything about MSIE users (and even then, only MSIE users dumb enough not to use some form of cookie management) rather than users in general. While that almost certainly includes the majority of visitors to many sites, it doesn't safely extend to the larger population of all web surfers.
Additionally, I would point out one more glaring source of error... It fails to normalize each unit of time against the remaining base of users - So, for example, if 90% of the regular visitors to a site see an article within an hour of posting, that leaves only 10% (plus the negligibly-small number that re-read the same article over and over, except on Slashdot where you can use FP refreshes as a solid measure of workday boredom). That, IMO, says far more about how long the typical (MSIE-qualified as above) user can go without a news fix, rather than how long an article remains interesting.
File names aside, is there a good way to "tag" files (generic metadata) on Windows or Linux?
On NTFS, you can use ADS (Alternate Data Streams) to store metadata about a file, though I don't know of any software that can read such data in a consistant manner - Not to mention, just about every malware scanner out there will flag such files as suspicious.
On Linux, it very much depends on the FS you choose, though again, support for file metadata remains about as standardized as snowflakes.
So long as it's only scientists and the 'elite' going into space and performing experiments progress will be very slow. That can't be good.
Nevermind that, how about we start actually sending mostly scientists to space!
Currently, the vast majority of people visiting space come from regular militaries, and almost every mission has some military goal as its primary purpose, with the "science" aspect coming in only as an "oh yeah we can fit one of those things in there too".
Instead of critisising it how about coming up with something else that works better.
The FP does suggest two approaches, one of which I agree with - Do nothing.
Terrorism has, as its goal, the forcing of certain concessions on an otherwise unwilling government (or really any sufficiently large opponent) by inspiring fear in the plebes who make up that government or organization.
When the DHS has done more to inspire terror in the world than Osama could ever dream of, only an idiot would call that even remotely effective. Quite literally, "doing nothing" would have better effect than sacrificing our civil liberties and personal freedom in the name of an expensive an ineffective witch-hunt.
what is your definition of capitalism? It looks as if it were very far appart from Adam Smith's market economics.
;-)
Adam Smith also didn't address the problem of modern backroom deals (though, apparently he did strongly favor anti-monopoly legislation in private). He believed that markets would always correct themselves over time - Which I grant holds true, but "over time" could well refer to centuries without a little manual intervention.
So, my definition of "pure" capitalism? No-holds-barred, rape the public as much as they will bear. Work conditions should approach outright slavery, and of course child labor comes pretty cheap. Prices should absolutely reflect demand, meaning people should have to all but sell their souls to afford just about any necessary drugs or medical proceedures. Competition, while good for the consumer, drives down the price. Therefore, from the point of view of the producers, it counts as an enemy to minimize or even eliminate if possible.
From the point of view of the consumers - Well, let's face it, consumers have almost no power. They have the illusion of choice (sixteen colors of the same crap with different names), but basically buy what the television tells them to. Most companies fail for two reasons - Changes in the market (ie, new technology makes them irrelevant), or less arrogant competition. Microsoft grew very arrogant, and eventually would have fallen for that reason. The antitrust action against them, ironically enough, may have saved them from that fate, at least for now. But I won't pretend that even the "good guys" really care about me - Even the likes of SouthWest, CostCo or Google, only do what they do because it gives them an edge in the market.
and do you promote it?
Absolutely not. But most Americans strongly claim to believe in the idea of a free market, without realizing that such an abstraction amounts to the horror I describe above.
On a more realistic level - Yes, Microsoft abused its power, and I would have liked to see it split into an OS group and an app group (though even then, drawing the line beyond Windows/Office gets very blurry - Does a browser and media player realistically count as part of a modern OS? Most non-geeks would say "yes", I think, and even most geeks would call any non-server machine all-but-useless without both). But now? I don't claim Microsoft has turned into a great big fuzzy teddy-bear of a company, but they do appear to have started behaving quite a lot better.
I think people forget that RedHat, SuSe, Novell, and the rest count as Microsoft's enemies, in a very real and measurable way. Faulting Microsoft for doing everything they can to fend off the barbarians at the gate strikes me as similar to faulting a black-belt for soundly thrashing the gun-toting mugger - Yeah, you can call it an unfair fight, but the mugger really does present a deadly threat, and anyone, black-belt or not, should treat it as such.
On both side of the Atlantic has MSFT been declared by judges 1) a monopoly and 2) abusing from its position of power. This means guilty, bad.
I agree, that describes a clear fact. But both of those occurred after the actual offenses in question... The rules for a monopoly differ quite a lot from the rules for a regular company, and before those rulings, Microsoft didn't count as a monopoly. Therefore, what they did, didn't actually break the law. I suppose you can call this a philosophical argument, and I'll accept that some may disagree with me on it; but I consider it "unfair" to punish someone (even a company) for rules that don't apply at the time they commit their offense.
Thanks for the English exercise!
You probably would have had an easier time of it if I hadn't stupidly broken a few HTML tags and ended up chopping out almost two complete paragraphs.
How much is tuition these days? 20K-35K?
A decade ago I paid 800/semester for two years and $3500/semester for the remainder (great things, in-state reciprocity agreements between community colleges and state unis). And that gave me one fluffy degree and a pair of "real" degrees, from a fairly well-respected (in Engineering, anyway) state university.
This year, those numbers have gone up to $1200 and $5500, so $800 still represents a significant chunk of that compared with a used notebook or a cheap Dell.
Kids - Serious advice here... Save the ivy league for grad school - No one cares where your BA/BS comes from as long as you have the framed slip of paper to prove you put in your time. And "Your Permanant Record" (cue spooky reverb with thunder in the background) all but vanishes into irrelevance six months after your first post-college job.
not to mention living expenses are probably another 10-20k.
Could you please pull the silver spoon out of your... mouth... while we talk? I find it very distracting.
Thank you.
A cheap apartment in a college town costs $400-$600 a month. Sharing that with 3-4 people makes it up to $200/mo, or $800/semester. Add in a third of heat and electric for another $100/mo on average (you used to need to include phone in that, but everyone has their own cellphone now). Food comes last for most college students, which means a bit less than a dollar a day for Ramen Noodles by the case, with a pizza once a week to make up for the massive protein deficiency. So, living expenses add only another roughly $1500-$2000/semester.
Again, paying half that for an overpriced but aesthetically pleasing computer doesn't seem all that great of a use of money.
Not to mention - Writing reports, surfing the web, and responding to email doesn't take an even remotely "modern" machine. Except for a very few specific purposes, most people have only one reason to own a fast rig - Gaming. Hmm, now remind me what sort of reputation Macs have for availability of the latest-n'-greatest games? Though, for students who can afford to get a few of the latest-n'-greatest games each month, most of this doesn't apply anyway.
Try not to make yourself so obvious. I don't know who I pissed off, nor do I care - Just keep in mind that, on average, I earn karma back far faster than you can burn it with five points here and there. So, for your own benefit, you would do better to use your points meaningfully rather than to irk me.
But, as long as you insist on acting like a petulant two year old in response to whatever imagined sleight I've committed against you, I suppose it benefits us all that you vent your anger on li'l old me.
Kudos on your use of the un-metamoddable "overrated", though.
Please explain to me ... when I download every episode of Futurama for free,
how does this stop a hard-core fan from buying the DVD?
Better yet, please explain to me how it costs the show anything when I watch it at first-run, then download it for free, then still buy the DVD sets when they come out?
Since you have the best reply to me, I'll respond.
You can partially run that, but not at full scope. [...] This should change with Samba 4.
Exactly. Microsoft implemented something new with Windows 2003, and the Samba team has almost caught up.
The problem I see here involves the assumption that the Samba team should have the ability to catch up. Why? because we want it? Because the EU said so? Because we have some BS concept of fairness that absolutely does not apply to a truly capitalistic economy?
et al. But I don't see any non-authoritarian reason for Microsoft to make their work easier. And despite that, amidst claims that the most powerful software company on Earth has actively tried to thwart such efforts - The Samba team has still largely succeeded! Call me crazy, but when 2+2=5, I look for some weak link leading up to that conclusion.
Right: competitors are fed up to guess and decrypt, wether be it C code or packets.
Oh, boo-frickin-hoo! MS's competitors might actually have to work to write their own little Word and Excel clones?
Ahem. Forgive my sarcasm, I realize it doesn't help present a rational argument, but really - How should I respond when the primary argument against considering MS compliant involves "it would take too much work"? Microsoft needs to make it possible for others to interoperate and compete. That doesn't mean they need to do their competitors' jobs.
Wonderfull things, all those Windows Mobile things: they can only work well on Windows (you guess it: undocumented protocols) and with Exchange.
And iPods only work well with iTunes and Apple's DRM - Except there, reverse engineering not only risks civil penalties, it would violate the DMCA.
Corrupt, the EU?
Yes, corrupt. I could point you to a million and one links, but this one says it best right in the first sentence - "Bad accounting, along with bad management, nepotism and the fraud that resulted from it, brought down the entire European Union Commission, then headed by Jacques Santer, just four years ago" - And then goes on to discuss how little things have changes since then.
As a modern allegedly "democratic" organization, it has an appointed membership, no direct public accountability, and at least from the POv from this side of the pond, has done nothing at all beyond piss the majority of its member states' citizens off by a steady stream of bought-and-paid-for regional protectionisms.
You mean, more than [...]
I specifically said "pseudo-government organization". Yes, plenty of "real" governments have (and still do) levels of corruption that make the Mafia look on-the-level. And plenty of private criminal organizations exist to milk the sheep. But it takes a special breed to act as though they have legitimate public-granted governmental powers and then dictate who can sell what to whom and under what terms, and of course bleed a little off the top whenever possible.
And the whole Microsoft situation - Extend "regional protectionism" to "Us vs US", and you'll have a pretty good idea of my take on the whole situation. The US DOJ backed down because Microsoft really hadn't done anything that bad. The EU has stuck like a leech because they see a weak point to attack, and damn the facts of the matter.
And you call a monopolistic and repeatedly condemned corporation the "great American capitalist successes".
winning - 100% market share and the bankruptcy of all competitors. Even with the far-weakened form of capitalism practiced in the US, Microsoft still managed to do just that. And I would point out that, UNTIL declared a monopoly, their actions broke no laws, plain as that. So yes, I consider Microsoft, AT&T, Standard Oil - and don't act surprised to h
No, the non-compliance wasn't about Windows Media Player so much as it was interoperability with other networking software.
I can run a mixed Windows and Linux system in either a flat TCP/IP network or a Microsoft style Active Directory. I can even use a Linux box as the DC. How exactly does that not mean "interoperability"?
As for Media player, let's not forget the oh-so-popular "XP E" version - No bundled crap, and no one wanted it. Most people buy software because they just want it to work, which MS gave them. They don't want to buy some dirty hippy's philosophy along with the box, and have to find an additional 27 programs merely to do the day-to-day tasks they consider fundamental to using a computer.
And as for "Open" formats...
MS's attempts at compliance were deemed inadequate even though they protested that it was "too hard" to comply to the degree that the EU wanted.
Yeah, because offering a peek at the goddamned source code didn't go far enough, right? And the recent shift toward open XML-based formats doesn't amount to nothing short of rolling over on their back and exposing their bellies to the pack?
I hate this topic, because every time it comes up I, a die-hard Linux fan who uses Windows only when required (ie, my desktop machine at work), get accused of either trolling or fanboyism. But it digusts me to see people falling for this "enemy of my enemy" crap.
Microsoft abused their position 5-10 years ago (though, until deemed a monopoly, they hadn't done anything any other comapny wouldn't also do if given half a chance). Not only does it appear they stopped when caught, but MS has since started moving to open formats (though I'd call the issue irrelevant once the government says "okay boys, you can reverse engineer it without fear of legal action" - In the absence of strong encryption, any coder worth their salt can reverse engineer a binary file format).
But now? We have the third most corrupt pseudo-government organization in history, the EU, making backroom deals with one another to slowly bleed Microsoft, which represents the most recent of the great American capitalist successes. For those not paying attention in 2nd grade, that doesn't count as "fair". It counts as - Whaddya know, pretty much the exact same behavior that got Microsoft in trouble in the first place, abusing their position of questionably-attained authority to squash a competitor.
Good response!
We'll have to agree to disagree on some of your ideas, but I don't think we diverge all that far.
I'd like to clarify my stance on one point, however... When I say people have the right to act like a miserable bastard, I agree completely that such right does not include the right to dip into your tax dollars.
But as far as teaching kids not to behave that way, I'd call the behavior either defensive or self-punishing - In the former, punishment will just reinforce it ("the world sucks and everyone hates me - see? They even want to punish me just for trying to express myself!"), and in the latter, it doesn't take punishment to demonstrate that you get more flies with honey than with vinegar.
Children need to learn what it means to be a productive, positive influence on the world around them
Why?
As part of my right to pursue happyness comes the "right" to act as negative as I want (up to breaking the law), and to drain society and those around me of as much productivity as possible (again, short of breaking the law).
In short, I have the right to act like a Miserable Bastard.
Now, death threats in general go to far, but y'know - An icon does not equal a death threat. Ill-wishing does not mean committing verbal assault. Every morning I wake up and optimisticially scan the headlines to see if a certain leader of the "free" world has suffered a massive stroke the previous night; that doesn't mean I would unwisely risk my current uncaged status to promote such a headline.
I have absolutely no idea, and cannot comment on where to draw the line between childrens' rights to be children and society's right to ensure healthy upbringing.
Let me darken that line for you, then - Society has no such right, whereas, as elaborated above, children (and the rest of us) do have the right to Miserable Bastardy.
That means your professional school principles who handle 10,000 children a year but hever married and had children of their own are not up to the task.
Yeah, riiiiiight - Because some 4th-gen welfare mom with three kids and another on the way certainly has, simply by virtue of having spread her legs, the wisdom and compassion to properly raise "productive, positive influence[s] on the world around them".
When I was a kid, pulling stunts like that got me a belting from my folks. Thats what this world needs more of.
Lest you think I sound too antagonistic above, here I agree with you completely.
As the core problem here, the kid did something stupid and arguably "bad". But not bad in a "call the police, everyone panic, suspend for a semester" way - Just "good spanking and grounded for a week" bad.
I suppose that goes back to your main point, which (taking the happy fluffy angle out of it) I read as nothing more drastic than that parents need to act as parents, not delegate the task to teachers, to ISPs, to MySpace, to Nickelodeon or PBS, to NetNanny, or to the government. Likewise, those groups need to not take airs and try to assume the role of parents, deferring instead to the dreaded "I'll call your mother, young man!"