Methinks that we've been confusing the media definition of "geek" with the hackerly definition of "geek". We already understand that when the media says "hacker", they are talking about "crackers".
The general definition of "geek" is what many of us would call a "dork". It has nothing to do with technical expertise and everything to do with unpopularity and annoyance. While your average Slashdotter will point to Linus Torvalds as the canonical geek, the average American would probably point to "Urkel" or Marty McFly's father (remember Back to the Future?)
I found this out a while back, having dinner with family. I noted that my wife and I are geeks (we are both software types, and meet a lot of the Jargon File profile for hackers). My cousin pipes up and says, "You're not geeks! You're cool!". She thought that we were insulting ourselves.
Nothing I have seen in the media make me think that the killers were "geeks" in the Slashdot sense. I do believe that they were outcasts, and were thus treated much like the average Slashdottian geek.
Frankly, I think that it is even harder to be a "dork" geek than a "hacker" geek in high school. Hacker geeks have structures like Slashdot.
One attribute of the Internet is that you rarely see its denizens, and thus lose some preconcieved notions of them. The evil side of this is that molesters can pose as children, fool other children, and molest them in the real world. The wonderful side of this is that if a minor talks like an adult (IMHO the best test of adulthood out there, and a mutation of the Turing Test), they will be treated like an adult. And being treated like an adult human being is a great preventative from going over the Edge.
In the last three days, I have been nothing short of astounded at the teenage population of Slashdot! I admit to assuming that the population here was almost exclusively 18+; I will never do so again. But unless someone specifically posts about it (as did some netizens discussing their current high school nightmares), I honestly cannot tell who is in their teens, twenties, or thirties here. Maybe I could tell the older ones--few twentysomethings will wax poetic over the PDP or ITS, but I can't tell a teenager from a young adult on this board. Nor do I have to.
I know of two companies that are resisting Linux: Microsoft and SCO. The rest of the big guns are financially backing Linux.
SCO likely lacks the competence (read: money) to hire the kind of lawyers it would take to crack the copyleft. Microsoft does, but Linux is currently the only thing keeping them out of even deeper kimshi than they're already in. With Linux, they can tell the judge that they are not a monopoly, and keep a straight face. They can even FUD them as a form of competition. If they cracked the copyleft (or even tried) now, they would stand a real chance of getting "Baby Billed".
From what I know about the man (no, I haven't seen the films), this is exactly his kind of subject matter.
Geeks are a type of outcast. Blacks are a type of outcast. The whole point about this discussion is about being outcast in the American public school system. Whether this means geeky, Black, or whatever, is irrelevant.
I don't know how to reach Lee or his company ("40 Acres and a Mule", I believe). I am going to send email to (of all places) publicenemy.com. They have been doing political rap for God knows how long, from the outcast perspective. They "get" online (wasn't there a forum on this board about their MP3 album release?). Chuck D. either was or still is a political analyst for a TV network. And being in the biz, they may be able to get through to Spike Lee if they buy into this topic.
I don't expect much chance of a reaction from doing this, but I can expect a zero chance of a reaction from not doing this. People have been screaming that all this talk on Slashdot doesn't help until it makes it outside. I'll make my attempt tonight from my home email.
The answer has been in our hands for almost two millenia. It's just so hard to take that we've been looking for shortcuts all this time, and there aren't any.
The more you demean others, the more you try to alienate them, the more hatred you create, the worse the world becomes. The fact that others are demeaning you, alienating you, and hating you, is no excuse. Hatred is the problem, and basic human respect is the solution. Other peoples' hatred makes you hurt. Your own hatred will eat you alive and spit out the bones. That's what happened to two people in Colorado; they hated with a passion and it destroyed them and over a dozen other people.
The solution is basic human respect, and genuinely caring about people. I don't mean being smooshy and nice to everybody. Sometimes, respect means using some very harsh words (or worse) to help someone steer away from self-destruction. To care for another human being, to respect them, is to figure out what they need and to provide that.
People cannot be operated like mere machines; even the simplest of us are far more complex than the most complex machine. People are different, and different people respond differently to different things.
Certain groups of people will respond predictably to certain stimuli. If they didn't, the advertising industry would instantly fail. But groups of people are different from the people who make them. Groups of people are very deterministic. Individual people are very non-deterministic, and make the most complex system designed by humans seem as deterministic as stones.
If you're on the Slashdot board, you are likely smarter than 85-90% of the people around you. This makes you no more righteous, no more deserving to live. You are still a person; nothing more, nothing less (apologies to all AI lurkers out there;^>). You live in a society full of people, many of which don't have the sheer brainpower that you do. That doesn't make them robots. They may be trapped in the fog that you can see over; to me, this implies a responsibility to help clear the fog for some of them, not to get them to march around like toy soldiers. Personally, I suspect that this is exactly what Microsoft's marketing department does and it disgusts most of us here; do the same people who advocate Linux over NT think of most people as zombie robots?
But you live with these people, who you can perhaps see better than. Fair or not, you must learn to live with them, or find a way to get away from them. But treating them like robots will not do that. Treating people like robots will, sooner or later, backfire on you.
Egad. I think that zero tolerance laws would be--literally--the death of some misfits.
First off, I am opposed to ZT laws under all circumstances, because they remove any relationship between the infraction and the punishment. In this case, however, I think it would be worse than other ZT laws.
If these laws were enforced every time, this might work. However, I have no faith that they would because I know that the rules already in place aren't enforced every time.
Let me go back to my own childhood; gym class, junior high. It's a free-form class, with two teachers and (likely) eighty kids. A bully finds me, and another misfit (who was no friend of mine, BTW). The bully effectively chases us around the gym for forty-five minutes trying to start a fight. He takes the other misfit (I was the larger one) and shoves him into me, trying to start a fight between the two of us. I didn't like him, but I had no reason to fight.
During this time, I tried to draw the attention of the teachers. No dice.
The bully gets sick of not being able to get the two of us to fight, and starts beating on the smaller misfit. This still elicits zero response from the faculty. Perhaps the laws against fighting don't cover beatings?
At this point, I have had enough, and have (more importantly) a valid reason to fight. IMHO, there are very few reasons for using violence, and one of them is to prevent greater violence. I reach over and drag the bully down. This is what brings the teacher over, to break the fight up and dress me down for picking a fight.
A zero tolerance law would have sent me up the river. That law would not get the teachers to stop a bully beating on a geek. It would be applied once the beating became a fight, because they then have little choice but to take action. To this day, I feel no remorse, because I feel that I reacted appropriately to the situation.
When the bully attacks, the faculty considers this normal and acceptable. When the geek counterattacks, the faculty considers it unacceptable. That's the problem
Zero tolerance laws would not address that problem, and would be consistently and systematically applied to the geeks and not the bullies.
You don't need optimal performance on the Linux end. Normal performance, non-pessimal performance, can outpace NT. And this is a good thing, because you couldn't get optimal Linux performance out of Mindcraft if they got tech support from Linus himself (which is why he's not buying in).
Sure, you can get optimal performance by compiling from source. You can also shoot yourself in the foot quite badly. I think Mindcraft was aiming for the right big toe.
This is not about solace. This is not about blame. This is about preventing this sort of tragedy in the future. This is about understanding what took place, where the dominoes started to tumble, and the exact placement of every brick in the wall. If you understand why these kids chose to do this, you are on the path to stopping the next tragedy.
Blaming the killers will not do that. Banning black trenchcoats will not do that. Even making kids responsible for their own actions will not prevent this sort of tragedy, because you cannot call a suicide into detention.
Recognizing the warning signs--the real warning signs--will help. Knowing how to help a teen deal with stress will help. Caring about a teenager will help. This can be done by faculty. This can be done by other students. This must be done by parents.
God Himself can lay blame; I have no right to. But there are key people who can prevent these tragedies. As a society, we must make sure that these people are both able to do the Right Thing and responsible for doing the Right Thing.
As far as high school being a Nazi Death Camp: it isn't. The closest environment is prison, complete with the inmate pecking order and the eerie cooperation between the guards and the largest group of inmates to "keep the peace". For most of us, it is tolerable because we led productive lives outside those six hours. Most of us had caring parents, and we had nurturing homes to go to.
If you went through school without having that environment, without anyone who cared, you would have broken down. Of those who have been broken, some will get their hands on guns and go postal.
Microsoft's EULA prevents you from publishing benchmark results on NT without their consent. This is not pure MS evil, either; I've noted that my Netscape license has the same clause. The intent is likely to keep incompetents from testing bogus benchmarks. Linux has no such license.
However, if one simply did the Linux side, then pointed to the already published NT numbers for comparison, this may be doable.
Better yet, don't use the Mindcraft guys at all. Get a machine with the same hardware setup as Mindcraft published, throw Linux on it, tune it, and watch it scream. You or I can't afford the hardware, but dedicated Linux vendors can (several of who advertise here). Better yet, they have motive to refute the results. And they can invite anyone to the tests to examine the setup, in case people complain about impartiality...
From an engineering perspective, these kids were operating way the hell out of design specifications.
Every device ever engineered has a set of design specifications. The red line on your tachometer shows one. When you exceed the redline, your engine is going too fast for its own good and you can no longer guarantee that it won't tear itself to shreds and take you with it.
In short, when something exceeds design specs, it can fail. By "fail", I mean to stop doing the job it was designed to do. Engines explode; bridges collapse; processors release blue smoke; software crashes.
People have design specs as well. They're more flexible specs, because a person is a wonderfully complex system. Some design specs are physical, some are mental, some are emotional.
People can only handle so much stress before they exceed their design specs and fail. When a person emotionally fails, they become irrational. In common parlance, they "lose it".
Who here has not exceeded design specs and lost it? I've certainly lost it, and done some incredibly stupid things as a result. But for most of us, it is but a momentary lapse of reason. We lose it, we get out of (or distanced from) the source of acute stress, and we start operating like somewhat rational human beings again.
And then there are people who have exceeded design specs so far, or so constantly, that they lose it and never get it back. In engineering terms, they have "failed" and not recovered. In common parlance, we call these people "sickos" or "psychos".
If this were not bad enough, the fact that we're so complex (compared to machines, anyhow) means that we fail unpredictably. It's like a girder buckling under the pressure; you don't know when it will fail, nor in which direction. Psychology texts are full of ways that people fail to deal with stress. The psych texts are incomplete, and people come up with new failure modes. One of these failure modes is suicidal and homicidal mania.
With all the profiling, the talk about games and bands and coats, people are trying to predict the failure mode. We worry about this kid because he's likely to crack by going postal; we don't worry about that kid because she's likely to crack by popping barbituates and dropping out.
Trying to predict which people will fail by gunning people down is a fool's errand, because we can't tell which way a person will fail. If we can, psychology is incredibly advanced, and I'd love to see some of these psychologists working in engineering firms.
We can tell if a person is likely to fail in any sense. We can't tell when somebody will fail, because we can't accurately gauge their tolerance for stress. We can look at a person, see what causes stress for them, see what relieves stress for them, and look for a mismatch. If the stress is far above the relief, then the stress will eventually surpass any person's capacity. That person is going to break, period.
I can't tell you whether it is possible for a school to do this for students. If it is, it is very hard. It is possible for parents to do so, if they know how and if they care. As a nation (not necessarily as a government), we must give the parents that care the knowledge to look for this. As a nation and a government, we also must require that parents do care about the well-being of their kids, including their emotional well-being. Failure to do so is criminal neglect.
The schools are trying to make themselves safe, due to the media-hyped school shootings. First and foremost, this is a laudable goal. I believe that our schools are acting in good faith, but with bad information and the wrong tools. I'd rather have this than have intentionally malicious people attacking this problem with good information and the right tools. People with good intentions can be trained; people with poor intentions can often only be restrained.
To all the parents and school faculty reading this and actively dealing with the issues of this tragedy, thank you. You have the right intentions. Read this thread, not just this post. Arm yourself with the knowledge and tools you need to do the job effectively.
Everyone gets treated cruel... so I THINK I"VE HEARD ENOUGH ABOUT WAAA WAAAA EVERYONE HATES ME I HAVE NO FRIENDS.
Awww...let's have a pity party for you.
You will hear about this over and over again. When you're lucky, it sounds like people talking, or keyboard clacking on Slashdot. When you're not lucky, it sounds like a 7.62 slug leaving the barrel...followed by the sound of a 7.62 slug hitting flesh.
that this whole media thing over littleton has caused all these geeks to be discriminated against in the past week, well you know what... thats their own problem.
It's everybody's problem. It's not just the discrimination, it's not just the rights violations. More importantly, it's an ineffective solution to a major problem. An ineffective solution is worse than no solution at all, because it makes you think that you are solving the problem.
As for the email sent in about the girl who showed up at school in a trenchcoat and whined over her rights being violated because they told her she couldn't wear it.... ARE YOU STUPID OR SOMETHING? HELLO PEOPLE.... 13 STUDENTS WERE KILLED LAST WEEK while they were in the "safest" place possible. Don't be stupid and wear your trenchcoat to school the next day just to be dramatic and prove some kind of point... have some %$#^ing respect.
Thank you; I'm embarrased to have missed that one. Wearing a black trenchcoat is not a problem. Wearing a black trenchcoat right after this shooting looks too much like a deliberate troll in meatspace.
I can't belive some of the crap I'm reading. You "understand" the killer's feelings? Give me a break... the are murderers... case CLOSED.
We're all trying to "understand" the killers. That has nothing to do with condoning their actions. I agree that anyone who condones their actions needs to be pulled aside and corrected themselves.
Police departments have profilers; experts in understanding criminals. In their case, it's to find the perpetrator. In this case, it's to find possible perpetrators and intervene before the violence starts.
Some people think that they understand these killers. "Doom and Marilyn Manson will do that to a person". It is the right thing to do to try to understand them, because you can't stop what you don't understand. I just believe that what we are hearing on mass media is not a proper understanding; they're not going deep enough. Their incorrect understanding will not find the next killers.
Are they murderers? Yes. Personally, I don't think that they have the motives of murderers. To my eyes, these kids were suicidal. They knew that they wouldn't live through it. Their endgame involved crashing a jet into a building. I think that it's a bigger leap from teen to teen ready to suicide than from teen ready to suicide to teen ready to suicide and take people with you.
Basically, if you can keep these kids from wanting to commit suicide, you are already keeping them from shooting up the school.
NO ONE... NOTHING is to blame except for those parents that didn't notice the 30 some bombs and guns in the house or the fact that their child was depressed. IF YOU ARE A PARENT.. FOR GODS SAKE, TALK TO YOUR KIDS.
I agree. I only have two extensions to this. The first is that, if a faculty member noticed what was going on, they should have intervened--starting with the parents. A school cannot be a parent, but it can and must assist in that role.
The other extension is about talking to your kids. Talk and listen. Importantly, understand the vast difference between talking to your kids and talking at your kids. Talking at your kids only fans the flames.
The sad truth is that the price of freedom is often, if not always, paid in blood. However, that's not what is going on here. This is not the price of freedom. This is purely unneccesary bloodshed.
I have said it before, and I will say it again: look for signs of mental illness and treat it. You don't need bathroom cameras, video game bans, or similar Big Brother treatments. The signs are there, have got to be there, visible without invading privacy. These kids were planning this, plus an airline hijacking, for a year.
We have to recognize the signs and make sure that the people who watch over our children (first and foremost parents, then school faculty and others) recognize the signs. Distant early warning, without loss of privacy.
You want to see the crap beaten out of them? Then you are part of the problem.
I can relate in that I can see where they are coming from. I can see where a lot of people are coming from, because I have learned to put myself in other peoples' shoes. It's a survival skill.
I can't agree. These kids chose to do something incredibly wrong. In retrospect, I can see why they made that choice. That doesn't make it any less right.
I was one of the lucky ones. My parents knew me. I was the D&D player. I was the metalhead (okay, well, fan of the hair bands. This was the eighties). I didn't have dates. I kept to myself a lot.
My parents knew that I was "weird" since before grade school. They could handle it. They talked to me, not at me. And they listened to what I had to say.
I had my problems, something other than violence. My parents were concerned, and gave me a chance to solve the problem myself. I failed to, and they confronted me with the problem. They applied a lot of pressure to force me to see the problem, and then we worked through it.
To anybody out there who is a parent or is helping a parent, I cannot stress enough the importance of understanding. Though it doesn't feel like it, bona fide attempts to understand teenagers are not just a way see how they're doing. In and of itself, listening is a way to improve how they're doing. If you feel persecuted at school and then persecuted again at home, something is likely to crack. If you are persecuted at school and free to discuss it and deal with it at home, home helps you keep your sanity.
Don't immediately judge. As a parent, it is important to know when (and how) to put your foot down. But a knee-jerk response is simply going to reinforce the teen mantra of "parents just don't get it". Understand, then evaluate, then act.
Warning: metaphors are being stretched to the breaking point. Don't take this entirely seriously.
So he wants to bring up dragons. He wants us to make nice with the dragon.
This isn't St. George versus the dragon. There are two dragons. By painting Linux as St. George, one implies that it's the little guy. But Linux really isn't the little guy. Linux is two things. Linux is effectively the next generation of Unix, literally More Unix Than Unix (though the vendors aren't allowed to say that). And Unix is a fairly formidable dragon itself.
One dragon, "Windows", lairs on the desktop. The other one, "Unix", lairs on the server. The desktop dragon is fat and lazy, munching on a steady diet of managers and Apples. He rules his realm by sheer size. The dragon of the server has cut his claws and sharpened his fangs by fighting the Big Iron and VAXen. Currently, he rules his realm, but he keeps vigilant.
The desktop dragon has never dealt with any competition bigger than a lion. Windows (in the form of NT) is shambling over to serverville for supposedly easy pickings. Unix has home-field advantage, decades of competency, and practice slaying other dragons. In the lair of the server, the desktop dragon is going to have his head handed to him.
Meanwhile, Unix (in the form of Linux), is looking at the desktop. He's not sure if he wants to unseat the dragon of Windows, but at least wants a time-share in a nice neighborhood. It's more powerful, but Windows' home-field advantage is daunting. Unix isn't used to the close-quarters combat of the desktop, but Linux has some experience. The outcome here is much more in doubt.
Are Linux users anti-establishment? As much as anybody else. That is, some are, and some aren't. If we were anti-establishment, we'd be using Mac rather than Intel. Or we'd have come up with another hardware platform (perhaps old BeBoxen, who knows?)
Anti-establishment means bucking the system for the sake of bucking the system. People buck the system all the time, in order to try to improve it. When a politician raves about movie violence, he isn't being anti-establishment (and would likely be insulted if you said that he was). He's being anti-violent-movie.
We aren't anti-establishment. We're anti-crash. Anti-BSOD. Anti-broken-software-that-we-can't-fix. Anti-square-wheel. Anti-bloat.
We spend all this energy inflicting all this pro-* stuff onto Linux because we can. Since Windows doesn't let us make it work, we don't waste our time on it. Sooner or later, the horses pulling square-wheeled carts will get jealous of the horses pulling round-wheeled carts and passing them.
A gun is just a tool, nothing more.
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However, don't you think that progress should be made on the issue for the sake of our society and our childrens safety? At the very least, don't you think that people who own guns should be made to own them RESPONSIBLY i.e. by keeping them locked up at all times? Legislation making gun owners responsible (at least in part) for tragedies enacted with their weapons may well reduce the number of legally owned weapons available to these types of disturbed individuals.
I agree. I believe in the right to bear arms. Nothing more. There is no constitutional right to fire arms. Gun control, to me, means controling how one uses a gun.
Make it legal for everybody and their pet billygoat to own and carry a firearm. Make it illegal to fire one outside of a controlled firing range (there is no constitutional right to hunt, but the right to bear arms means little if there is no legal way to become skilled at using it). Make it illegal to conceal a firearm; if you're going to have a.22, holster it visibly, don't hide it under your jacket or in your purse. Make it illegal to store a weapon irresponsibly (and get specific here--safeties, locked cases, ammo stored seperate, trigger locks).
As far as being responsible for crimes committed with your weapon, I have seen similar laws for cars. In Massachusetts (at least, maybe many or all states), you are responsible for damage caused by your car by a thief if you leave the keys in it. If you leave a weapon like a Chevy around carelessly, you are responsible for the damage.
In the same way, make gun owners responsible for crimes committed with their weapons if the owner failed to responsibly secure it. If you took reasonable precautions and somebody got your weapon anyhow (picked the lock on the gun safe, for example), the owner should be exonerated. If the gun was easy pickings, you are charged with felonious firearm negligence.
Society is not the cause
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I couldn't have said it any better. everyone is out trying to blame the internet, kids,parents.. no one is even thinking of the question of how these kids got these guns. Why ? because if they do. the finger points right back at themselves. Because so many of them voted to allow guns, so many of them still support the right to bear arms. and these same people want the violence turned down ? why ? it's typical american attitude. they want everyone else to change, except themselves.
I strongly believe in the right to bear arms because I strongly want the violence turned down.
The genie has been out of the bottle since before the US was the US. There will be guns in this country, no matter what laws are passed. If we could remove all guns from this country, I'd love to. But we can't.
No matter what the law says, people who really want guns and are willing to commit murder will get them. They will get smuggled in like drugs. They will still be carried by police officers and soldiers. Given how many cops and soldiers exist, there will be enough of them on the take to provide a black market (they're just as human as we are).
Where do kids get guns for the massacres of late? In most cases, illegally. What will they do if guns are illegal? They'll get them illegally. Or they'll start leaks in the gas pipes and wait for a teacher to light a cigarette. Or they'll mix the contents of the chemistry lab with the day's lunch.
As long as criminals are going to have guns, it's very important for the honest citizens to have them as well. It's a lot harder for a criminal to pull a gun out on an unarmed victim when many potential victims are armed. Sane violent criminals (hitmen, muggers, etc.) thrive in an environment where a.44 makes them the most powerful person around. They don't do so well when every twentieth mugging victim has their own.44.
judging by american politics, the argument of americas politicians being stable and focused is crap. they are focused on only one thing and thats more power. they could care less about anything else.
I agree. Again, when you ban guns, there will be three types of people who carry them. They are criminals, soldiers, and police. In other words, the majority of the guns will be controlled by the politicians.
Do you want to live someplace where the only people with weapons are those you don't trust?
I am probably in the minority here, but I don't believe that it really matters how well an OS scales to a piece of hardware. It really matters how well an OS scales to a job.
The interesting question to me isn't "How much power can you get out of hardware X with OS Y", but rather "How much hardware do you need to throw OS Y on to do job Z".
From what I've been reading, NT does better SMP than Linux does. Frankly, Linux doesn't need SMP nearly as badly as NT. If uniprocessor Linux can do the same job as SMP NT, who cares how good or bad SMP Linux is?
Microsoft has credibility by the plainest definition: they can get people to believe what they say. Specifically, they have credibility with many of the management types that determine what they're spending their software budget on this year.
As long as they're credible with the deep-pocket types, they don't have to be credible with the techie/geek types. Of course, if the techie/geeks start gaining credibility with the deep pockets at the expense of Microsoft...
Full disclosure: I own no firearms. I only own a canister of "human repellant". And I have to carry a permit to do that. I am not a member of the NRA or any similar group. I have the right to carry firearms, and defend that right. However, I personally feel no need to own a firearm.
I don't consider firearms to be a "fundamental human right". I do believe that it is smart to extend the right to bear arms to people because it keeps society honest.
If you could remove all firearms from this country, I would be the first to vote to do so. However, we can't. We have tried to do that with drugs. All that gives us is an underground drug trade. Criminals will always get their firearms. Restricting them simply means that fewer will. Eventually, you end up with only police, military, and criminals holding weapons.
OTOH, imagine a world where honest citizens carry weapons. When one is surrounded by a dozen people with holstered handguns in plain view, one is much less likely to actually pull a weapon out and try to use it. That is, unless you're a psychopath who is ready to die.
And if you are? You point (at least indirectly) to the recent Colorado shooting. These people were clearly psychopathic. What would have happened if they didn't have guns (and as an aside...exactly how would you do that...I doubt that they were carrying legally)? They had bombs. You can't take away the bombs, because they're so easy to make (after the Oklahoma City bombing, people were considering restricting _manure_...yeah, right). If they did that, these kids would have found some way to create their carnage. Think about it, they had access to a high school; this includes a chemistry lab.
The point is, psychopaths with weapons are going to kill people. Psychopaths without weapons are going to kill people. The trick isn't to ban guns, but to ban psychopaths. Find them, pull them out, and either render them non-psychopathic or lock them up in rubber rooms.
Sick of sending your kids to a school where they can be used as target practice? Get involved in the school! Look for the disturbed individuals. These people don't normally come out of nowhere--one student (don't remember names...interviewed on Today Show) mentioned that they were known Satanists. If this doesn't raise warning flags, you have problem.
If Colorado scared you, consider this sobering thought. I don't have the numbers on me, but compare the number of children murdered by gunfire in schools over the past year to the number of children murdered by their own parents' bare hands at home over the past year.
You don't need a firearm to kill. Often, you need nothing more than an emotional disturbance. You can lower the body count a lot more by dealing with the emotional disturbances than by banning the weapons.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure that if you look up in the manual, you will find that NT error number 2 is "URL is hotlinked by www.slashdot.org".
The general definition of "geek" is what many of us would call a "dork". It has nothing to do with technical expertise and everything to do with unpopularity and annoyance. While your average Slashdotter will point to Linus Torvalds as the canonical geek, the average American would probably point to "Urkel" or Marty McFly's father (remember Back to the Future?)
I found this out a while back, having dinner with family. I noted that my wife and I are geeks (we are both software types, and meet a lot of the Jargon File profile for hackers). My cousin pipes up and says, "You're not geeks! You're cool!". She thought that we were insulting ourselves.
Nothing I have seen in the media make me think that the killers were "geeks" in the Slashdot sense. I do believe that they were outcasts, and were thus treated much like the average Slashdottian geek.
Frankly, I think that it is even harder to be a "dork" geek than a "hacker" geek in high school. Hacker geeks have structures like Slashdot.
One attribute of the Internet is that you rarely see its denizens, and thus lose some preconcieved notions of them. The evil side of this is that molesters can pose as children, fool other children, and molest them in the real world. The wonderful side of this is that if a minor talks like an adult (IMHO the best test of adulthood out there, and a mutation of the Turing Test), they will be treated like an adult. And being treated like an adult human being is a great preventative from going over the Edge.
In the last three days, I have been nothing short of astounded at the teenage population of Slashdot! I admit to assuming that the population here was almost exclusively 18+; I will never do so again. But unless someone specifically posts about it (as did some netizens discussing their current high school nightmares), I honestly cannot tell who is in their teens, twenties, or thirties here. Maybe I could tell the older ones--few twentysomethings will wax poetic over the PDP or ITS, but I can't tell a teenager from a young adult on this board. Nor do I have to.
SCO likely lacks the competence (read: money) to hire the kind of lawyers it would take to crack the copyleft. Microsoft does, but Linux is currently the only thing keeping them out of even deeper kimshi than they're already in. With Linux, they can tell the judge that they are not a monopoly, and keep a straight face. They can even FUD them as a form of competition. If they cracked the copyleft (or even tried) now, they would stand a real chance of getting "Baby Billed".
From what I know about the man (no, I haven't seen the films), this is exactly his kind of subject matter.
Geeks are a type of outcast. Blacks are a type of outcast. The whole point about this discussion is about being outcast in the American public school system. Whether this means geeky, Black, or whatever, is irrelevant.
I don't know how to reach Lee or his company ("40 Acres and a Mule", I believe). I am going to send email to (of all places) publicenemy.com. They have been doing political rap for God knows how long, from the outcast perspective. They "get" online (wasn't there a forum on this board about their MP3 album release?). Chuck D. either was or still is a political analyst for a TV network. And being in the biz, they may be able to get through to Spike Lee if they buy into this topic.
I don't expect much chance of a reaction from doing this, but I can expect a zero chance of a reaction from not doing this. People have been screaming that all this talk on Slashdot doesn't help until it makes it outside. I'll make my attempt tonight from my home email.
The answer has been in our hands for almost two millenia. It's just so hard to take that we've been looking for shortcuts all this time, and there aren't any.
In 1996, we found that killer app that you could get on Linux but not Unix.
C++.
SCO Open Server V came with a bogus, buggy implementation of C++. So we did what every red-blooded American hacker would do: grab the G++ port.
Cygnus hadn't bothered to port C++ to SCO. We had to root around and find a private user who had ported it.
When Cygnus drops your Unix platform, you know you're marginalized.
The solution is basic human respect, and genuinely caring about people. I don't mean being smooshy and nice to everybody. Sometimes, respect means using some very harsh words (or worse) to help someone steer away from self-destruction. To care for another human being, to respect them, is to figure out what they need and to provide that.
People cannot be operated like mere machines; even the simplest of us are far more complex than the most complex machine. People are different, and different people respond differently to different things.
Certain groups of people will respond predictably to certain stimuli. If they didn't, the advertising industry would instantly fail. But groups of people are different from the people who make them. Groups of people are very deterministic. Individual people are very non-deterministic, and make the most complex system designed by humans seem as deterministic as stones.
If you're on the Slashdot board, you are likely smarter than 85-90% of the people around you. This makes you no more righteous, no more deserving to live. You are still a person; nothing more, nothing less (apologies to all AI lurkers out there ;^>). You live in a society full of people, many of which don't have the sheer brainpower that you do. That doesn't make them robots. They may be trapped in the fog that you can see over; to me, this implies a responsibility to help clear the fog for some of them, not to get them to march around like toy soldiers. Personally, I suspect that this is exactly what Microsoft's marketing department does and it disgusts most of us here; do the same people who advocate Linux over NT think of most people as zombie robots?
But you live with these people, who you can perhaps see better than. Fair or not, you must learn to live with them, or find a way to get away from them. But treating them like robots will not do that. Treating people like robots will, sooner or later, backfire on you.
First off, I am opposed to ZT laws under all circumstances, because they remove any relationship between the infraction and the punishment. In this case, however, I think it would be worse than other ZT laws.
If these laws were enforced every time, this might work. However, I have no faith that they would because I know that the rules already in place aren't enforced every time.
Let me go back to my own childhood; gym class, junior high. It's a free-form class, with two teachers and (likely) eighty kids. A bully finds me, and another misfit (who was no friend of mine, BTW). The bully effectively chases us around the gym for forty-five minutes trying to start a fight. He takes the other misfit (I was the larger one) and shoves him into me, trying to start a fight between the two of us. I didn't like him, but I had no reason to fight.
During this time, I tried to draw the attention of the teachers. No dice.
The bully gets sick of not being able to get the two of us to fight, and starts beating on the smaller misfit. This still elicits zero response from the faculty. Perhaps the laws against fighting don't cover beatings?
At this point, I have had enough, and have (more importantly) a valid reason to fight. IMHO, there are very few reasons for using violence, and one of them is to prevent greater violence. I reach over and drag the bully down. This is what brings the teacher over, to break the fight up and dress me down for picking a fight.
A zero tolerance law would have sent me up the river. That law would not get the teachers to stop a bully beating on a geek. It would be applied once the beating became a fight, because they then have little choice but to take action. To this day, I feel no remorse, because I feel that I reacted appropriately to the situation.
When the bully attacks, the faculty considers this normal and acceptable. When the geek counterattacks, the faculty considers it unacceptable. That's the problem
Zero tolerance laws would not address that problem, and would be consistently and systematically applied to the geeks and not the bullies.
Sure, you can get optimal performance by compiling from source. You can also shoot yourself in the foot quite badly. I think Mindcraft was aiming for the right big toe.
Blaming the killers will not do that. Banning black trenchcoats will not do that. Even making kids responsible for their own actions will not prevent this sort of tragedy, because you cannot call a suicide into detention.
Recognizing the warning signs--the real warning signs--will help. Knowing how to help a teen deal with stress will help. Caring about a teenager will help. This can be done by faculty. This can be done by other students. This must be done by parents.
God Himself can lay blame; I have no right to. But there are key people who can prevent these tragedies. As a society, we must make sure that these people are both able to do the Right Thing and responsible for doing the Right Thing.
As far as high school being a Nazi Death Camp: it isn't. The closest environment is prison, complete with the inmate pecking order and the eerie cooperation between the guards and the largest group of inmates to "keep the peace". For most of us, it is tolerable because we led productive lives outside those six hours. Most of us had caring parents, and we had nurturing homes to go to.
If you went through school without having that environment, without anyone who cared, you would have broken down. Of those who have been broken, some will get their hands on guns and go postal.
However, if one simply did the Linux side, then pointed to the already published NT numbers for comparison, this may be doable.
Better yet, don't use the Mindcraft guys at all. Get a machine with the same hardware setup as Mindcraft published, throw Linux on it, tune it, and watch it scream. You or I can't afford the hardware, but dedicated Linux vendors can (several of who advertise here). Better yet, they have motive to refute the results. And they can invite anyone to the tests to examine the setup, in case people complain about impartiality...
Every device ever engineered has a set of design specifications. The red line on your tachometer shows one. When you exceed the redline, your engine is going too fast for its own good and you can no longer guarantee that it won't tear itself to shreds and take you with it.
In short, when something exceeds design specs, it can fail. By "fail", I mean to stop doing the job it was designed to do. Engines explode; bridges collapse; processors release blue smoke; software crashes.
People have design specs as well. They're more flexible specs, because a person is a wonderfully complex system. Some design specs are physical, some are mental, some are emotional.
People can only handle so much stress before they exceed their design specs and fail. When a person emotionally fails, they become irrational. In common parlance, they "lose it".
Who here has not exceeded design specs and lost it? I've certainly lost it, and done some incredibly stupid things as a result. But for most of us, it is but a momentary lapse of reason. We lose it, we get out of (or distanced from) the source of acute stress, and we start operating like somewhat rational human beings again.
And then there are people who have exceeded design specs so far, or so constantly, that they lose it and never get it back. In engineering terms, they have "failed" and not recovered. In common parlance, we call these people "sickos" or "psychos".
If this were not bad enough, the fact that we're so complex (compared to machines, anyhow) means that we fail unpredictably. It's like a girder buckling under the pressure; you don't know when it will fail, nor in which direction. Psychology texts are full of ways that people fail to deal with stress. The psych texts are incomplete, and people come up with new failure modes. One of these failure modes is suicidal and homicidal mania.
With all the profiling, the talk about games and bands and coats, people are trying to predict the failure mode. We worry about this kid because he's likely to crack by going postal; we don't worry about that kid because she's likely to crack by popping barbituates and dropping out.
Trying to predict which people will fail by gunning people down is a fool's errand, because we can't tell which way a person will fail. If we can, psychology is incredibly advanced, and I'd love to see some of these psychologists working in engineering firms.
We can tell if a person is likely to fail in any sense. We can't tell when somebody will fail, because we can't accurately gauge their tolerance for stress. We can look at a person, see what causes stress for them, see what relieves stress for them, and look for a mismatch. If the stress is far above the relief, then the stress will eventually surpass any person's capacity. That person is going to break, period.
I can't tell you whether it is possible for a school to do this for students. If it is, it is very hard. It is possible for parents to do so, if they know how and if they care. As a nation (not necessarily as a government), we must give the parents that care the knowledge to look for this. As a nation and a government, we also must require that parents do care about the well-being of their kids, including their emotional well-being. Failure to do so is criminal neglect.
The schools are trying to make themselves safe, due to the media-hyped school shootings. First and foremost, this is a laudable goal. I believe that our schools are acting in good faith, but with bad information and the wrong tools. I'd rather have this than have intentionally malicious people attacking this problem with good information and the right tools. People with good intentions can be trained; people with poor intentions can often only be restrained.
To all the parents and school faculty reading this and actively dealing with the issues of this tragedy, thank you. You have the right intentions. Read this thread, not just this post. Arm yourself with the knowledge and tools you need to do the job effectively.
Awww...let's have a pity party for you.
You will hear about this over and over again. When you're lucky, it sounds like people talking, or keyboard clacking on Slashdot. When you're not lucky, it sounds like a 7.62 slug leaving the barrel...followed by the sound of a 7.62 slug hitting flesh.
that this whole media thing over littleton has caused all these geeks to be discriminated against in the past week, well you know what... thats their own problem.
It's everybody's problem. It's not just the discrimination, it's not just the rights violations. More importantly, it's an ineffective solution to a major problem. An ineffective solution is worse than no solution at all, because it makes you think that you are solving the problem.
As for the email sent in about the girl who showed up at school in a trenchcoat and whined over her rights being violated because they told her she couldn't wear it.... ARE YOU STUPID OR SOMETHING? HELLO PEOPLE.... 13 STUDENTS WERE KILLED LAST WEEK while they were in the "safest" place possible. Don't be stupid and wear your trenchcoat to school the next day just to be dramatic and prove some kind of point... have some %$#^ing respect.
Thank you; I'm embarrased to have missed that one. Wearing a black trenchcoat is not a problem. Wearing a black trenchcoat right after this shooting looks too much like a deliberate troll in meatspace.
I can't belive some of the crap I'm reading. You "understand" the killer's feelings? Give me a break... the are murderers... case CLOSED.
We're all trying to "understand" the killers. That has nothing to do with condoning their actions. I agree that anyone who condones their actions needs to be pulled aside and corrected themselves.
Police departments have profilers; experts in understanding criminals. In their case, it's to find the perpetrator. In this case, it's to find possible perpetrators and intervene before the violence starts.
Some people think that they understand these killers. "Doom and Marilyn Manson will do that to a person". It is the right thing to do to try to understand them, because you can't stop what you don't understand. I just believe that what we are hearing on mass media is not a proper understanding; they're not going deep enough. Their incorrect understanding will not find the next killers.
Are they murderers? Yes. Personally, I don't think that they have the motives of murderers. To my eyes, these kids were suicidal. They knew that they wouldn't live through it. Their endgame involved crashing a jet into a building. I think that it's a bigger leap from teen to teen ready to suicide than from teen ready to suicide to teen ready to suicide and take people with you.
Basically, if you can keep these kids from wanting to commit suicide, you are already keeping them from shooting up the school.
NO ONE... NOTHING is to blame except for those parents that didn't notice the 30 some bombs and guns in the house or the fact that their child was depressed. IF YOU ARE A PARENT.. FOR GODS SAKE, TALK TO YOUR KIDS.
I agree. I only have two extensions to this. The first is that, if a faculty member noticed what was going on, they should have intervened--starting with the parents. A school cannot be a parent, but it can and must assist in that role.
The other extension is about talking to your kids. Talk and listen. Importantly, understand the vast difference between talking to your kids and talking at your kids. Talking at your kids only fans the flames.
Absolutely.
I am part of an organization that has been teaching exactly that message for two millenia (three guesses, and the first two don't count).
Maybe some more people will "get it".
I have said it before, and I will say it again: look for signs of mental illness and treat it. You don't need bathroom cameras, video game bans, or similar Big Brother treatments. The signs are there, have got to be there, visible without invading privacy. These kids were planning this, plus an airline hijacking, for a year.
We have to recognize the signs and make sure that the people who watch over our children (first and foremost parents, then school faculty and others) recognize the signs. Distant early warning, without loss of privacy.
I can relate in that I can see where they are coming from. I can see where a lot of people are coming from, because I have learned to put myself in other peoples' shoes. It's a survival skill.
I can't agree. These kids chose to do something incredibly wrong. In retrospect, I can see why they made that choice. That doesn't make it any less right.
I was one of the lucky ones. My parents knew me. I was the D&D player. I was the metalhead (okay, well, fan of the hair bands. This was the eighties). I didn't have dates. I kept to myself a lot.
My parents knew that I was "weird" since before grade school. They could handle it. They talked to me, not at me. And they listened to what I had to say.
I had my problems, something other than violence. My parents were concerned, and gave me a chance to solve the problem myself. I failed to, and they confronted me with the problem. They applied a lot of pressure to force me to see the problem, and then we worked through it.
To anybody out there who is a parent or is helping a parent, I cannot stress enough the importance of understanding. Though it doesn't feel like it, bona fide attempts to understand teenagers are not just a way see how they're doing. In and of itself, listening is a way to improve how they're doing. If you feel persecuted at school and then persecuted again at home, something is likely to crack. If you are persecuted at school and free to discuss it and deal with it at home, home helps you keep your sanity.
Don't immediately judge. As a parent, it is important to know when (and how) to put your foot down. But a knee-jerk response is simply going to reinforce the teen mantra of "parents just don't get it". Understand, then evaluate, then act.
Note that the post above yours noted zero sympathy for the TCM. Smiley-caption Derek's first sentence for extra flavor.
You are in violent agreement with Derek and you proceeded to call him a moron. This is just OTT.
So he wants to bring up dragons. He wants us to make nice with the dragon.
This isn't St. George versus the dragon. There are two dragons. By painting Linux as St. George, one implies that it's the little guy. But Linux really isn't the little guy. Linux is two things. Linux is effectively the next generation of Unix, literally More Unix Than Unix (though the vendors aren't allowed to say that). And Unix is a fairly formidable dragon itself.
One dragon, "Windows", lairs on the desktop. The other one, "Unix", lairs on the server. The desktop dragon is fat and lazy, munching on a steady diet of managers and Apples. He rules his realm by sheer size. The dragon of the server has cut his claws and sharpened his fangs by fighting the Big Iron and VAXen. Currently, he rules his realm, but he keeps vigilant.
The desktop dragon has never dealt with any competition bigger than a lion. Windows (in the form of NT) is shambling over to serverville for supposedly easy pickings. Unix has home-field advantage, decades of competency, and practice slaying other dragons. In the lair of the server, the desktop dragon is going to have his head handed to him.
Meanwhile, Unix (in the form of Linux), is looking at the desktop. He's not sure if he wants to unseat the dragon of Windows, but at least wants a time-share in a nice neighborhood. It's more powerful, but Windows' home-field advantage is daunting. Unix isn't used to the close-quarters combat of the desktop, but Linux has some experience. The outcome here is much more in doubt.
Anti-establishment means bucking the system for the sake of bucking the system. People buck the system all the time, in order to try to improve it. When a politician raves about movie violence, he isn't being anti-establishment (and would likely be insulted if you said that he was). He's being anti-violent-movie.
We aren't anti-establishment. We're anti-crash. Anti-BSOD. Anti-broken-software-that-we-can't-fix. Anti-square-wheel. Anti-bloat.
We're pro-uptime. Pro-tech-support. Pro-stuff-that-works. Pro-set-and-forget. Pro-efficient-use-of-hardware. Pro-competent.
We spend all this energy inflicting all this pro-* stuff onto Linux because we can. Since Windows doesn't let us make it work, we don't waste our time on it. Sooner or later, the horses pulling square-wheeled carts will get jealous of the horses pulling round-wheeled carts and passing them.
I agree. I believe in the right to bear arms. Nothing more. There is no constitutional right to fire arms. Gun control, to me, means controling how one uses a gun.
Make it legal for everybody and their pet billygoat to own and carry a firearm. Make it illegal to fire one outside of a controlled firing range (there is no constitutional right to hunt, but the right to bear arms means little if there is no legal way to become skilled at using it). Make it illegal to conceal a firearm; if you're going to have a .22, holster it visibly, don't hide it under your jacket or in your purse. Make it illegal to store a weapon irresponsibly (and get specific here--safeties, locked cases, ammo stored seperate, trigger locks).
As far as being responsible for crimes committed with your weapon, I have seen similar laws for cars. In Massachusetts (at least, maybe many or all states), you are responsible for damage caused by your car by a thief if you leave the keys in it. If you leave a weapon like a Chevy around carelessly, you are responsible for the damage.
In the same way, make gun owners responsible for crimes committed with their weapons if the owner failed to responsibly secure it. If you took reasonable precautions and somebody got your weapon anyhow (picked the lock on the gun safe, for example), the owner should be exonerated. If the gun was easy pickings, you are charged with felonious firearm negligence.
I strongly believe in the right to bear arms because I strongly want the violence turned down.
The genie has been out of the bottle since before the US was the US. There will be guns in this country, no matter what laws are passed. If we could remove all guns from this country, I'd love to. But we can't.
No matter what the law says, people who really want guns and are willing to commit murder will get them. They will get smuggled in like drugs. They will still be carried by police officers and soldiers. Given how many cops and soldiers exist, there will be enough of them on the take to provide a black market (they're just as human as we are).
Where do kids get guns for the massacres of late? In most cases, illegally. What will they do if guns are illegal? They'll get them illegally. Or they'll start leaks in the gas pipes and wait for a teacher to light a cigarette. Or they'll mix the contents of the chemistry lab with the day's lunch.
As long as criminals are going to have guns, it's very important for the honest citizens to have them as well. It's a lot harder for a criminal to pull a gun out on an unarmed victim when many potential victims are armed. Sane violent criminals (hitmen, muggers, etc.) thrive in an environment where a .44 makes them the most powerful person around. They don't do so well when every twentieth mugging victim has their own .44.
judging by american politics, the argument of americas politicians being stable and focused is crap. they are focused on only one thing and thats more power. they could care less about anything else.
I agree. Again, when you ban guns, there will be three types of people who carry them. They are criminals, soldiers, and police. In other words, the majority of the guns will be controlled by the politicians.
Do you want to live someplace where the only people with weapons are those you don't trust?
The interesting question to me isn't "How much power can you get out of hardware X with OS Y", but rather "How much hardware do you need to throw OS Y on to do job Z".
From what I've been reading, NT does better SMP than Linux does. Frankly, Linux doesn't need SMP nearly as badly as NT. If uniprocessor Linux can do the same job as SMP NT, who cares how good or bad SMP Linux is?
As long as they're credible with the deep-pocket types, they don't have to be credible with the techie/geek types. Of course, if the techie/geeks start gaining credibility with the deep pockets at the expense of Microsoft...
I don't consider firearms to be a "fundamental human right". I do believe that it is smart to extend the right to bear arms to people because it keeps society honest.
If you could remove all firearms from this country, I would be the first to vote to do so. However, we can't. We have tried to do that with drugs. All that gives us is an underground drug trade. Criminals will always get their firearms. Restricting them simply means that fewer will. Eventually, you end up with only police, military, and criminals holding weapons.
OTOH, imagine a world where honest citizens carry weapons. When one is surrounded by a dozen people with holstered handguns in plain view, one is much less likely to actually pull a weapon out and try to use it. That is, unless you're a psychopath who is ready to die.
And if you are? You point (at least indirectly) to the recent Colorado shooting. These people were clearly psychopathic. What would have happened if they didn't have guns (and as an aside...exactly how would you do that...I doubt that they were carrying legally)? They had bombs. You can't take away the bombs, because they're so easy to make (after the Oklahoma City bombing, people were considering restricting _manure_...yeah, right). If they did that, these kids would have found some way to create their carnage. Think about it, they had access to a high school; this includes a chemistry lab.
The point is, psychopaths with weapons are going to kill people. Psychopaths without weapons are going to kill people. The trick isn't to ban guns, but to ban psychopaths. Find them, pull them out, and either render them non-psychopathic or lock them up in rubber rooms.
Sick of sending your kids to a school where they can be used as target practice? Get involved in the school! Look for the disturbed individuals. These people don't normally come out of nowhere--one student (don't remember names...interviewed on Today Show) mentioned that they were known Satanists. If this doesn't raise warning flags, you have problem.
If Colorado scared you, consider this sobering thought. I don't have the numbers on me, but compare the number of children murdered by gunfire in schools over the past year to the number of children murdered by their own parents' bare hands at home over the past year.
You don't need a firearm to kill. Often, you need nothing more than an emotional disturbance. You can lower the body count a lot more by dealing with the emotional disturbances than by banning the weapons.