Never thought I'd be quoting from "A Course In Miracles" on Slashdot, of all places. But a few of the more open minded readers may find the below interesting:
“The world of time is the world of illusion. What happened long ago seems to be happening now. Choices made long since appear to be open; yet to be made. What has been learned and understood and long ago passed by is looked upon as a new thought, a fresh idea, a different approach. Because your will is free you can accept what has already happened at any time you choose, and only then will you realize that it was always there.” (ACIM, M-2.3)
"What God did not create does not exist. And everything that does exist exists as He created it. The world you see has nothing to do with reality. It is of your own making, and it does not exist." (ACIM Workbook-pI.14.1:2-5)
The above quote is useful to understand this one: “In order to understand the teaching-learning plan of salvation, it is necessary to grasp the concept of time that the course sets forth. Atonement corrects illusions, not truth. Therefore, it corrects what never was. Further, the plan for this correction was established and completed simultaneously, for the Will of God is entirely apart from time. So is all reality, being of Him. The instant the idea of separation entered the mind of God's Son, in that same instant was God's Answer given. In time this happened very long ago. In reality it never happened at all.” (ACIM, M-2.2)
Not trying to "spiritualize" quantum physics, simply to point out some potential similarities. Spiritual masters such as the historical Buddha and Jesus had an interesting insight into the same kind of questions that modern physics is only starting to explore.
I on a Qatar Airlines flight to Doha last month. Linux was in use there for their in-flight services (again, the penguin at the boot screen gave it away). Immediately after I had a flight from Doha to Kuala Lumpur (Malaysian Airlines). Malaysian Airlines seems to use it as well as they seemed to be using the same system (at least with the plane I was in).
I heard the robot also includes a built in vocoder. At this time however, its vocabulary is limited to "Welcome to QuikEMart" and "Thank you, come again."
Hate to be a pedant, but the _focus_ was 4.7 miles below the surface, as the focus is the absolute place of origin of an earthquake. The epicenter is the point at the surface directly above the focus.
Sorry if someone else brought this up, I'm too lazy to wade through 400 messages:P
hey, I'm already using a patched version of a 2.4 kernel with encrfs support. I have a loopback filesystem all encrypted with AES (rijndael). Does anyone have any info/experience on how this might translate over if I upgrade to 8.2?
I'd like to wager that the amazing amount of sugar present in that much mountain dew played a big role too.
I gave up basically everything to drink besides water (mostly for health reasons), at first I missed the soda, milk, juice. Now I could care less, I love water. Call me crazy...:)
with actually reading the article fully, the signal distribution method of it sounds more like CDMA than OFDM, if anything. Oh well, if it's not OFDM, then OFDM is another thing on the horizion. I told you I didn't work with this stuff.:)
This UWB term I've never heard of, but I worked at a company that was developing 802.11a goods. This sounds like the same, as the article touts ~40-55mb/ps (I don't know what this 1000MB/ps shit is).
I wasn't one of the engineers working on it (I was actually a high school co-op who worked on higher-level code in the same dept), so some of my facts may be off. 802.11a (or at least the variant we were working on) used a modulation scheme called OFDM. OFDM was "invented" in the 1960s if I remember, but the technology is finally catching up with the math to allow for mass production and the data precision required in the algorithm.
OFDM would fit with the articles blurb about it being in the "noise" area. Basically, a baseband signal is multiplexed into multiple low-power subcarriers, which are aligned in such a way that the intersymbol/intercarrier interference (ISI/ICI) is minimized. Basically, this means orthangonally (at 90 deg angles), so that the peak distabution of one carrier occurs at the zero points of the carriers on either side of it. So it's a particulary advanced form of FDM. All that low power shit comes from this fact, and that the nature of noise is amplitude-related, not frequency related. Plus, data interleaving and error detection coding (described below) goes on during baseband processing I think. I forget the symbol length and all that in detail crap, but there is QAM coding and FFTs/IFFTs going on in the process. (I remember 64-QAM being a popular initial choice.) Error correction/detection might be left open in the specs (i.e. it could be this or that), but the one I was familiar using was reed-soloman (a convolutional encoding method used with CDroms) and/or turbocoding (a very advanced convolutional encoding method which gets pretty close to the limit imposed by the Shannon theorem).
OFDM has been defined as packing the data as close as physics will allow, and it whoops 802.11b in both range and bandwidth. I think it will be both in the 2GHz and the 5.4GHz bands.
Sounds exciting. The race is on.
I have seen a good intro paper on OFDM before, but I lost the URL, here is a more indepth one on it: http://www.eng.jcu.edu.au/eric/thesis/Thesis.htm
Sorry about the spelling, I'm not using a spell checker.:)
I didn't see it explicitly mentioned, but it would be good if these new "antibiotics" could target specific types of bacteria. The author even goes so far as to call bacteria "bugs", however one must realize that not all bacteria are harmful (i.e. there are "good" bacteria such as Lactobacillus acidophilus and Lactobacillus bifidius). Traditional antibiotics when ingested orally, will attempt to destroy ALL bacteria in the gut, possibly leading to a condition called Candidiasis, characterized by the overgrowth of fungi in the intestines, which are known to emit some 70 or so types of toxins. Restoration of wellness is not possible when chronic candidiasis is present. Many people are diagnosed with CFS or some other bullshit condition because the popular notion in the medical community is that conditions like candidiasis don't exist (that's at least the experience I've had with it).
Generally, antibiotics have led to the conquering of many types of once deadly diseases have saved many lives, but not without a cost. They are prescribed much too often, which has ultimately led to these resistant strains of bacteria we hear about in the news today. Use of antibiotics reach further than just the medical field. First-world consumers demand that their cleaning products that "destroy 99.9% of germs", and chemical companies produce such projects, but neither hardly ever realizes the consequences of such a request. Antibiotics and growth hormones are given to farm animals, and passed along to humans in the food they eat. I have never had a doctor recommend that I supplement antibiotic use with bifidus and/or acidophilus, and with the amount of training in clinical nutrition/alternative treatments that most doctors get in medschool, I don't expect to have this happen for a long while. For these reasons I avoid antibiotics unless absolutely necessary, as they have caused me more harm than good in the past in situations where their use wasn't entirely justified.
I'm a high schooler (12th grade) with no formal computer education (besides half a semester of a Cisco class) that works at a RTP, NC company's communications algorithms department as a programmer. Before I worked on large scale UNIX projects on their IS/IT team, but I enjoy programming and wanted to get some professional programming experience. I've been coding in C/C++ since 12 or so, but before I was too unsure of my programming abilities, and stuck to IT. (My real passion is games programming, which I do at home, I admit that I'm a geek:)
Anyhow, my experience seems to differ from yours. I work with a team of engineers, the vast majority of whom who are very nice, and don't try to shelter me from what's going on but at the same time don't hesitate to help me if I need an explanation of something. Some may say that I'm just lucky, but much of the time, this respect has to be earned.
When I joined up I got very little respect from a few (only about two) people, but as I proved to them that I could handle what I was given without any hand-holding, this changed. People were truly impressed. Maybe your situation is from people that are intimidated by what you are doing at your age, and in their jealously seem to suppress/normalize you, to make themselves feel not as normal. Remember that it's average not to think you're average, and most people like to think of themselves as somehow special. However, I tend to keep my mouth shut with things I don't fully understand, and am rather humble (I don't ever remember bragging to these people I work with). If you are not like this and are not getting respect, perhaps your problem lies there. No-one likes a big-mouth or a braggart, and that's exactly what many of these "child-geniuses" are.
One qualm I have is seniority-based payment. I've turned out products that seem to be rather valuable to the company, however I get payed very little, judging from what others with more age and/or formal education get paid in this field. Merit-based pay seems to be more appropiate to the fast-moving/dynamic computing market. My boss, while nice, isn't exactly realistic at times, and as such I've been held to a few deadlines, which IMHO, no intern should have to do. However, on the good side, they've put me on all-expenses-paid trips to Finland and Silicon Valley, which were absolutely *great* experiences.
It sounds like you could be treated better, but remember that formal education does go a long way, and companies view an older/more experienced person with a degree or degrees to be a *much* safer investment than throwing their money and resources at a student/child prodigy. I myself only got an interview because I knew someone, and as I've found, "knowing someone" is the key to getting a good job in most cases, for better or worse. As far as the lack of respect, some people are like that (especially academics, from my experience), as it sounds like you've proven yourself in many situations. If you're sure it's not your attitude, or something about you, then it's probably due to others feeling insecure around you, like I mentioned earlier. However, if this disrespect was with everyone in the company, then I'd say you were a jerk.:) You may want to read up on ways you could gently confront certain people about it, as straight-up confrontation seems to anger insecure people.
In any case, I wish you the best of luck, and most importantly, don't forget to have fun at your age, because you will be working for the rest of your life and youth only comes once. Too many people our age jump head-first into this stuff, and get burnt out in no-time. I've come really close to burn-out at times. It's one thing if you really enjoy this stuff, but it's another if you're just doing it for the money. It sounds like you know what you're doing and like doing it, but too many people these days live hour-to-hour in jobs they hate, just so they can go home in their BMW, don't become one of them.
The original sufferers were largely homosexual males, many (most?) of whom engaged in recreational drug use and unhealthy lifestyles.
AZT itself has a history of being a particulary harmful drug. Referencing the site for Dr. Duesberg, noted in a previous responce, seems to have a good piece on it:
http://www.duesberg.com/jltrial.html
That said, if you think like an executive, it becomes appearent that releasing a "cure" in not only AIDS treatment, but other diseases, would choke their stream of income. Getting people hooked on drugs is a great thing for the producer because they can then expect a perodic, constant source of money coming at them. Obviously, cures are not profitable, but "breakthroughs" have to be put out every few years, so the public doesn't get disenchanted. If you want to be really cynical, educating the public about such things as safe-sex, or healthy living is also a large kick to the pocketbook. Morality goes down the tubes when money is involved, and that is expectable with any human-run institution.
Then again, I believe if people really care enough, they will get off their asses and educate themselves, but educating oneself I would think would be rather hard to do in a poverty-striken area such as most of Africa.
This is no surprise, anyone who thought that drug companies ever held themselves to some kind of higher ethical standard over making money was severely misguided. I'm of the belief that their drugs kill people off just as quickly as the actual disease does.
I see this again and again, companies would rather push harmful ideas and products that generate profit, then educate the public. Examples of this are the milk industry, with the notion that milk is good for you and makes strong bones, companies that advertise their foods as healthy (yet they contain hydrogenated fats and oils) and many companies that cholesterol is always bad, or that fat is always bad.
While people in Africa are getting ravaged from what the media terms the AIDS epidemic (and what I term the drug companies), people in more well-off areas of the world are suffering from diseases of plenty (i.e. diabetes, Crohn's, cancer, etc.) All the while the drug companies keep getting richer. The conventional medical establishment refuses to accept that disease is not the start of the problem, but actually the end point in a degenerative process that began long ago. The body naturally tends towards wellness, but one has to give it the components to sustain this state, which is something we, for the most part, totally overlook in society. Health isn't through drugs, and the only place that trying to out-think nature will get you is dead.
There is a fringe theory that HIV is actually one of the 1,300 or so harmless retroviruses, and what doctors call AIDS is actually caused by all the drugs one is given to kill this virus (which aren't living in the first place, they're just pieces of genetic material) and the harmful lifestyle one engages in (drug use, etc.) This does not seem as far off if one considers that there are a good number of people that never progressed to AIDS after many years of testing HIV positive, and even some in which there is no trace of the virus in their system. Both of the above, from what I've heard, are usually done without the use of HIV drugs, such as AZT or protease inhibitors. Actually, I believe they've never isolated the virus, and the tests only look for the presence of antibodies in the blood. Take it for what you will...
I personally have come to strongly dislike Windows and disagree with some of the stuff in here, but this message is obviously informative and deserves more than a rating of 0.
I can't say that I have as much life experience as you, but I can definitely understand your situation.
I've been involved in computers from the age of 6, when I got my first real PC, a 286/16 (currently I'm almost 17 and a sophomore at high school.) Ever since then I've been hooked, in that little gray box there is a world of possibilities and adventures, and the only thing holding you back (if you aren't using some shitty OS like 'doze:) is your will, knowledge and imagination. In the past I've done a lot like running a BBS, programming since I was like 10 or so, administering computers and networks, etc. Currently I'm working on my own CRPG (online, static-world, high-capacity roleplaying game...www.avalonent.org) and I love it, I feel like a god whenever I work at the code, creating my own world. But there's another side to life, and it certainly isn't all that great for me at this time...
Where I live is known for being a very liberal town, hell, even the mayor is gay. But I still take plenty of crap for being different. I've become really good at hiding what makes me what I am rather than risking being ostracized for it, the state of the public school system in America is rather sad. I don't really pretend I'm someone else, I just don't openly share who I am with others, if I do it's usually on a very superficial level. Some would say to "be yourself and don't care what others think about you", but I've been there and done that, and in high school it only makes your life hell, or at least it did mine.
Right now I fit in alright, I'm not popular or anything, but at the same time I'm well-liked by most others. But I feel that I'm not *living* my life...my potential is constantly oppressed and I can't really talk to anyone about who I really am because they just can't understand me, so I've all but given up with trying. This is a good indication as to the fact that I've never gone to see school counselors, etc.
I'm really a good guy at the root. I hate being mean to people (I'm sure it bothers me more than them when I do it) and I just love having fun, fun that doesn't involve putting others down to make yourself feel better (that's certainly hard to find in my environment.) For me understanding comes from children, I love kids. Just spending time with them makes me feel somehow fulfilled as a human being...all you have to do is give them attention and love and they'll love you back for who you are. I don't have to pretend in front of them, and that's what I love about it. Of course they most likely can't understand what I do, nor do I expect them to try, just the fact that they're there and smiling at you is enough. It's sad to see them grow up and be filled with stereotypes and misconceptions, but it's inevitable these days, I don't know how it was back when you were growing up.
People fill that void in different ways, for me it's children, for you hopefully it's your fiancee...hopefully I can find an understanding woman in my future, one who is fine with me being myself. I'm sorry that I really can't offer any advice but I can only share my short story and hope that you find that you're not alone, there are plenty of others like you and I who have been "shown the door" concerning inclusion in society, some more than others. The world is a scary place, and those who brave it while staying true to themselves are the real winners.
Slashdot Mirror
Never thought I'd be quoting from "A Course In Miracles" on Slashdot, of all places. But a few of the more open minded readers may find the below interesting:
“The world of time is the world of illusion. What happened long ago seems to be happening now. Choices made long since appear to be open; yet to be made. What has been learned and understood and long ago passed by is looked upon as a new thought, a fresh idea, a different approach. Because your will is free you can accept what has already happened at any time you choose, and only then will you realize that it was always there.” (ACIM, M-2.3)
"What God did not create does not exist. And everything that does exist exists as He created it. The world you see has nothing to do with reality. It is of your own making, and it does not exist." (ACIM Workbook-pI.14.1:2-5)
The above quote is useful to understand this one: “In order to understand the teaching-learning plan of salvation, it is necessary to grasp the concept of time that the course sets forth. Atonement corrects illusions, not truth. Therefore, it corrects what never was. Further, the plan for this correction was established and completed simultaneously, for the Will of God is entirely apart from time. So is all reality, being of Him. The instant the idea of separation entered the mind of God's Son, in that same instant was God's Answer given. In time this happened very long ago. In reality it never happened at all.” (ACIM, M-2.2)
Not trying to "spiritualize" quantum physics, simply to point out some potential similarities. Spiritual masters such as the historical Buddha and Jesus had an interesting insight into the same kind of questions that modern physics is only starting to explore.
How about a free tshirt for the folks that have been with the site since day 1 (e.g. userID 1000) and are still daily readers? :p
I on a Qatar Airlines flight to Doha last month. Linux was in use there for their in-flight services (again, the penguin at the boot screen gave it away).
Immediately after I had a flight from Doha to Kuala Lumpur (Malaysian Airlines). Malaysian Airlines seems to use it as well as they seemed to be using the same system (at least with the plane I was in).
I heard the robot also includes a built in vocoder. At this time however, its vocabulary is limited to "Welcome to QuikEMart" and "Thank you, come again."
"The epicenter was 4.7 miles below surface."
:P
Hate to be a pedant, but the _focus_ was 4.7 miles below the surface, as the focus is the absolute place of origin of an earthquake. The epicenter is the point at the surface directly above the focus.
Sorry if someone else brought this up, I'm too lazy to wade through 400 messages
Robby
Hey, does this mean we could take those X10 folks to court for their ads?!?!
bwhahahaha I said that as a joke.
Then I actually reread the article. Oh man...people have to resort to torturing these things to get their satisfaction these days? Sadistic...
I think the website is being run off of that C64 too
hey, I'm already using a patched version of a 2.4 kernel with encrfs support. I have a loopback filesystem all encrypted with AES (rijndael). Does anyone have any info/experience on how this might translate over if I upgrade to 8.2?
Thanks!
I'd like to wager that the amazing amount of sugar present in that much mountain dew played a big role too.
:)
I gave up basically everything to drink besides water (mostly for health reasons), at first I missed the soda, milk, juice. Now I could care less, I love water. Call me crazy...
with actually reading the article fully, the signal distribution method of it sounds more like CDMA than OFDM, if anything. Oh well, if it's not OFDM, then OFDM is another thing on the horizion. I told you I didn't work with this stuff. :)
Robby
This UWB term I've never heard of, but I worked at a company that was developing 802.11a goods. This sounds like the same, as the article touts ~40-55mb/ps (I don't know what this 1000MB/ps shit is).
:)
I wasn't one of the engineers working on it (I was actually a high school co-op who worked on higher-level code in the same dept), so some of my facts may be off. 802.11a (or at least the variant we were working on) used a modulation scheme called OFDM. OFDM was "invented" in the 1960s if I remember, but the technology is finally catching up with the math to allow for mass production and the data precision required in the algorithm.
OFDM would fit with the articles blurb about it being in the "noise" area. Basically, a baseband signal is multiplexed into multiple low-power subcarriers, which are aligned in such a way that the intersymbol/intercarrier interference (ISI/ICI) is minimized. Basically, this means orthangonally (at 90 deg angles), so that the peak distabution of one carrier occurs at the zero points of the carriers on either side of it. So it's a particulary advanced form of FDM. All that low power shit comes from this fact, and that the nature of noise is amplitude-related, not frequency related. Plus, data interleaving and error detection coding (described below) goes on during baseband processing I think. I forget the symbol length and all that in detail crap, but there is QAM coding and FFTs/IFFTs going on in the process. (I remember 64-QAM being a popular initial choice.) Error correction/detection might be left open in the specs (i.e. it could be this or that), but the one I was familiar using was reed-soloman (a convolutional encoding method used with CDroms) and/or turbocoding (a very advanced convolutional encoding method which gets pretty close to the limit imposed by the Shannon theorem).
OFDM has been defined as packing the data as close as physics will allow, and it whoops 802.11b in both range and bandwidth. I think it will be both in the 2GHz and the 5.4GHz bands.
Sounds exciting. The race is on.
I have seen a good intro paper on OFDM before, but I lost the URL, here is a more indepth one on it: http://www.eng.jcu.edu.au/eric/thesis/Thesis.htm
Sorry about the spelling, I'm not using a spell checker.
I didn't see it explicitly mentioned, but it would be good if these new "antibiotics" could target specific types of bacteria. The author even goes so far as to call bacteria "bugs", however one must realize that not all bacteria are harmful (i.e. there are "good" bacteria such as Lactobacillus acidophilus and Lactobacillus bifidius). Traditional antibiotics when ingested orally, will attempt to destroy ALL bacteria in the gut, possibly leading to a condition called Candidiasis, characterized by the overgrowth of fungi in the intestines, which are known to emit some 70 or so types of toxins. Restoration of wellness is not possible when chronic candidiasis is present. Many people are diagnosed with CFS or some other bullshit condition because the popular notion in the medical community is that conditions like candidiasis don't exist (that's at least the experience I've had with it).
Generally, antibiotics have led to the conquering of many types of once deadly diseases have saved many lives, but not without a cost. They are prescribed much too often, which has ultimately led to these resistant strains of bacteria we hear about in the news today. Use of antibiotics reach further than just the medical field. First-world consumers demand that their cleaning products that "destroy 99.9% of germs", and chemical companies produce such projects, but neither hardly ever realizes the consequences of such a request. Antibiotics and growth hormones are given to farm animals, and passed along to humans in the food they eat. I have never had a doctor recommend that I supplement antibiotic use with bifidus and/or acidophilus, and with the amount of training in clinical nutrition/alternative treatments that most doctors get in medschool, I don't expect to have this happen for a long while. For these reasons I avoid antibiotics unless absolutely necessary, as they have caused me more harm than good in the past in situations where their use wasn't entirely justified.
they squeezed that one in at the last second...going by EST :)
If you wen't by UTC/GMT, thats another story.
What's up with that URL, btw
I'm a high schooler (12th grade) with no formal computer education (besides half a semester of a Cisco class) that works at a RTP, NC company's communications algorithms department as a programmer. Before I worked on large scale UNIX projects on their IS/IT team, but I enjoy programming and wanted to get some professional programming experience. I've been coding in C/C++ since 12 or so, but before I was too unsure of my programming abilities, and stuck to IT. (My real passion is games programming, which I do at home, I admit that I'm a geek :)
:) You may want to read up on ways you could gently confront certain people about it, as straight-up confrontation seems to anger insecure people.
Anyhow, my experience seems to differ from yours. I work with a team of engineers, the vast majority of whom who are very nice, and don't try to shelter me from what's going on but at the same time don't hesitate to help me if I need an explanation of something. Some may say that I'm just lucky, but much of the time, this respect has to be earned.
When I joined up I got very little respect from a few (only about two) people, but as I proved to them that I could handle what I was given without any hand-holding, this changed. People were truly impressed. Maybe your situation is from people that are intimidated by what you are doing at your age, and in their jealously seem to suppress/normalize you, to make themselves feel not as normal. Remember that it's average not to think you're average, and most people like to think of themselves as somehow special. However, I tend to keep my mouth shut with things I don't fully understand, and am rather humble (I don't ever remember bragging to these people I work with). If you are not like this and are not getting respect, perhaps your problem lies there. No-one likes a big-mouth or a braggart, and that's exactly what many of these "child-geniuses" are.
One qualm I have is seniority-based payment. I've turned out products that seem to be rather valuable to the company, however I get payed very little, judging from what others with more age and/or formal education get paid in this field. Merit-based pay seems to be more appropiate to the fast-moving/dynamic computing market. My boss, while nice, isn't exactly realistic at times, and as such I've been held to a few deadlines, which IMHO, no intern should have to do. However, on the good side, they've put me on all-expenses-paid trips to Finland and Silicon Valley, which were absolutely *great* experiences.
It sounds like you could be treated better, but remember that formal education does go a long way, and companies view an older/more experienced person with a degree or degrees to be a *much* safer investment than throwing their money and resources at a student/child prodigy. I myself only got an interview because I knew someone, and as I've found, "knowing someone" is the key to getting a good job in most cases, for better or worse. As far as the lack of respect, some people are like that (especially academics, from my experience), as it sounds like you've proven yourself in many situations. If you're sure it's not your attitude, or something about you, then it's probably due to others feeling insecure around you, like I mentioned earlier. However, if this disrespect was with everyone in the company, then I'd say you were a jerk.
In any case, I wish you the best of luck, and most importantly, don't forget to have fun at your age, because you will be working for the rest of your life and youth only comes once. Too many people our age jump head-first into this stuff, and get burnt out in no-time. I've come really close to burn-out at times. It's one thing if you really enjoy this stuff, but it's another if you're just doing it for the money. It sounds like you know what you're doing and like doing it, but too many people these days live hour-to-hour in jobs they hate, just so they can go home in their BMW, don't become one of them.
The original sufferers were largely homosexual males, many (most?) of whom engaged in recreational drug use and unhealthy lifestyles.
AZT itself has a history of being a particulary harmful drug. Referencing the site for Dr. Duesberg, noted in a previous responce, seems to have a good piece on it:
http://www.duesberg.com/jltrial.html
That said, if you think like an executive, it becomes appearent that releasing a "cure" in not only AIDS treatment, but other diseases, would choke their stream of income. Getting people hooked on drugs is a great thing for the producer because they can then expect a perodic, constant source of money coming at them. Obviously, cures are not profitable, but "breakthroughs" have to be put out every few years, so the public doesn't get disenchanted. If you want to be really cynical, educating the public about such things as safe-sex, or healthy living is also a large kick to the pocketbook. Morality goes down the tubes when money is involved, and that is expectable with any human-run institution.
Then again, I believe if people really care enough, they will get off their asses and educate themselves, but educating oneself I would think would be rather hard to do in a poverty-striken area such as most of Africa.
This is no surprise, anyone who thought that drug companies ever held themselves to some kind of higher ethical standard over making money was severely misguided. I'm of the belief that their drugs kill people off just as quickly as the actual disease does.
I see this again and again, companies would rather push harmful ideas and products that generate profit, then educate the public. Examples of this are the milk industry, with the notion that milk is good for you and makes strong bones, companies that advertise their foods as healthy (yet they contain hydrogenated fats and oils) and many companies that cholesterol is always bad, or that fat is always bad.
While people in Africa are getting ravaged from what the media terms the AIDS epidemic (and what I term the drug companies), people in more well-off areas of the world are suffering from diseases of plenty (i.e. diabetes, Crohn's, cancer, etc.) All the while the drug companies keep getting richer. The conventional medical establishment refuses to accept that disease is not the start of the problem, but actually the end point in a degenerative process that began long ago. The body naturally tends towards wellness, but one has to give it the components to sustain this state, which is something we, for the most part, totally overlook in society. Health isn't through drugs, and the only place that trying to out-think nature will get you is dead.
There is a fringe theory that HIV is actually one of the 1,300 or so harmless retroviruses, and what doctors call AIDS is actually caused by all the drugs one is given to kill this virus (which aren't living in the first place, they're just pieces of genetic material) and the harmful lifestyle one engages in (drug use, etc.) This does not seem as far off if one considers that there are a good number of people that never progressed to AIDS after many years of testing HIV positive, and even some in which there is no trace of the virus in their system. Both of the above, from what I've heard, are usually done without the use of HIV drugs, such as AZT or protease inhibitors. Actually, I believe they've never isolated the virus, and the tests only look for the presence of antibodies in the blood. Take it for what you will...
I personally have come to strongly dislike Windows and disagree with some of the stuff in here, but this message is obviously informative and deserves more than a rating of 0.
Smells like bigotry on the moderator's part.
I've always liked "code monkey" as an alternate term to programmer, of course I only use it when talking to other programmers though.
I can't say that I have as much life experience as you, but I can definitely understand your situation.
:) is your will, knowledge and imagination. In the past I've done a lot like running a BBS, programming since I was like 10 or so, administering computers and networks, etc. Currently I'm working on my own CRPG (online, static-world, high-capacity roleplaying game...www.avalonent.org) and I love it, I feel like a god whenever I work at the code, creating my own world. But there's another side to life, and it certainly isn't all that great for me at this time...
...hopefully I can find an understanding woman in my future, one who is fine with me being myself. I'm sorry that I really can't offer any advice but I can only share my short story and hope that you find that you're not alone, there are plenty of others like you and I who have been "shown the door" concerning inclusion in society, some more than others. The world is a scary place, and those who brave it while staying true to themselves are the real winners.
I've been involved in computers from the age of 6, when I got my first real PC, a 286/16 (currently I'm almost 17 and a sophomore at high school.) Ever since then I've been hooked, in that little gray box there is a world of possibilities and adventures, and the only thing holding you back (if you aren't using some shitty OS like 'doze
Where I live is known for being a very liberal town, hell, even the mayor is gay. But I still take plenty of crap for being different. I've become really good at hiding what makes me what I am rather than risking being ostracized for it, the state of the public school system in America is rather sad. I don't really pretend I'm someone else, I just don't openly share who I am with others, if I do it's usually on a very superficial level. Some would say to "be yourself and don't care what others think about you", but I've been there and done that, and in high school it only makes your life hell, or at least it did mine.
Right now I fit in alright, I'm not popular or anything, but at the same time I'm well-liked by most others. But I feel that I'm not *living* my life...my potential is constantly oppressed and I can't really talk to anyone about who I really am because they just can't understand me, so I've all but given up with trying. This is a good indication as to the fact that I've never gone to see school counselors, etc.
I'm really a good guy at the root. I hate being mean to people (I'm sure it bothers me more than them when I do it) and I just love having fun, fun that doesn't involve putting others down to make yourself feel better (that's certainly hard to find in my environment.) For me understanding comes from children, I love kids. Just spending time with them makes me feel somehow fulfilled as a human being...all you have to do is give them attention and love and they'll love you back for who you are. I don't have to pretend in front of them, and that's what I love about it. Of course they most likely can't understand what I do, nor do I expect them to try, just the fact that they're there and smiling at you is enough. It's sad to see them grow up and be filled with stereotypes and misconceptions, but it's inevitable these days, I don't know how it was back when you were growing up.
People fill that void in different ways, for me it's children, for you hopefully it's your fiancee
Robby Dermody (Nova)
nova@avalonent.org