Hear, hear. My mother and my mother-in-law are both teachers, and in the twenty-five years they have been in the business, they have both seen a steep and alarming rise in the number of parents who refuse to come to parent-teacher conferences, refuse to participate in extracurricular activities, and generally refuse to get involved in their children's lives in any way. My wife is now an educator, and has witnessed gymnasiums full of cots--that's where they put the kids who get dropped off at 6am because their parents don't want to deal with them while they get ready for work in the morning.
You need a license to drive and a license to shoot--why don't you need a license to raise a child? Hell, I need a license to raise a DOG in some states.
The wave website has a whole section devoted to sports. "Write in and tell us how great your school's team sports are!". Gimme a break.
This question has probably already been asked a dozen or more times, but what is Pinkerton's going to do about the school-supported culture of violence that is called team sports? I was bullied in school, and so were my geeky friends, but we never fought back. Who was doing the bullying? The football team, go figure.
We couldn't get money for band instruments or new chairs in the auditorium or for (god forbid!) art classes, but the football team got a new stadium and a new scoreboard. Do you know how many paintbrushes you can buy with what a new scoreboard costs? Instead, we take a group of hyperaggressive, testosterone-fueled young men, teach them to hurt other people, and then try to keep them in check when they're not off the field.
I invite all slashdot readers who are still in high school to hit the following URL:
http://www.waveamerica.com/news/wavenews.htm
Go ahead, write in, tell them how much your school sports program BITES and how much it detracts from actual education. Tell them how they're deluding young men and women, suggesting that more than one in a million has a chance of becoming a national sports figure. Ridiculous.
I manage a tech support team. I get to work at 8am, along with most of my staff. I leave work at 7pm, along with most of mys taff. This is the easiest and least time-intensive job I've ever had, and everyone here, regardless of the industry they came from.
I am a geek. I also have a degree in medieval history and literature, and have had absolutely no formal training whatsoever in computer science or any related field. That doesn't stop me from getting a high-paying geek job in today's economy, however.
Technology is a great equalizer. In today's economy, it doesn't matter what your major was. It doesn't matter how many years of experience you have. All that matters is how well you code, how good a sysadmin you are, how fast you learn, and how much passion you have for the machines and the software that runs them.
Another thing: these days, with the high cost of living in the technology centers of the world, having two breadwinners in the family is not a bad thing. In short, money shouldn't be a concern in choosing a mate, unless you are in need of a provider yourself.
Y'know, just about every post I've seen has been some variant of "Well, properly administered Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris/*nix can have ten-year uptimes, but our plain-vanilla NT system crashed six times out of the box."
Doofus. How many of you would take a preconfigured Linux system and try to run it right out of the box? Would you call that "properly administered"? NT needs to be tuned, just like anything else. Many of these horror stories end with "and then I had to reinstall the OS!!" which should have been step #1, before anything else happened. Get machine, reinstall OS, tune OS, install software, tune OS and software, then let it all run. I've seen NT boxes with one-year uptimes. I've worked on NT boxes with six-month uptimes. I'm only able to say that because I know that NT is NOT the simple point-and-click operating system that the average *nix user seems to think it is.
And I can't get Linux working to save my life. Crashes on me all the time. I keep trying, because I know that it's an inherently stable OS and that my major problem is lack of knowledge and experience, but you don't see me on here screeching about how all *nixes suck and that I wanna go punch Linus, do you?
Sheesh. Bunch of savages in this town.
Arms buildup is a pretty big factor
on
Why Kids Kill
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· Score: 1
I'd say the parental ignorance of the arms buildup is the biggest factor in my case for parental negligence. If the father was working from home, then the parents are even more to blame (not entirely, as you say, but they bear most of it). The kids built over 30 explosive devices of various sizes and stockpiled semiautomatic weapons.....was dad completely oblivious?
Placing blame--from the Druge Report
on
Why Kids Kill
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· Score: 1
XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX 04/21/99 22:51:05 UTC XXXXX
PAPERS: TRENCHCOAT BOYS WOULD HOLD HANDS IN HALLS; JOCKS FOUGHT, TEASED, CALLED THEM 'GAY' AND 'HOMOS'
Jocks at Columbine High would pick on the school's Trenchcoat Mafia, calling members "gay", "freaks" and "homos", the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER and Grand Junction's DAILY SENTINEL are reporting in Thursday editions.
"They were ones you'd make fun of," Mike Smith, 18, a senior and a point guard on the school's state championship basketball team, tells the INQUIRER.
Smith says that "he and the other jocks would pick on the mafia members, egging them on with gibes of 'gay,' or 'inbreed.'"
The tensions between the jocks and the trenchcoats came to a head at the end of the last school year.
For several weeks, Smith tells the paper, the two groups fought almost daily after school.
"It was like, 'OK, we'll meet you here and we'll meet you there and get it all over with.'"
He said school officials knew about the fights but did little to stop them.
At the time in the past, he had shrugged off the disputes.
But Wednesday, he felt guilty, reports the paper's Richard Jones and Gwen Florio in Littleton.
"Sometimes," he added, gesturing at the school over his shoulder, "I think it's because of me."
Jon Vandermark, a 16-year-old sophomore, tells Thursday's DAILY SENTINEL [in Grand Junction, Colo.] that members of the Trenchcoat Mafia said they were bi-sexual.
"Boys would hold hands in the halls sometimes," Vandermark tells the paper.
"They were called freaks, homos and everything in-between."
Junior Nicole Shieve watched as the two, and others in the group, kept getting picked on during school.
"It's not my fault!"--RIGHT ON.
on
Why Kids Kill
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· Score: 1
Very, very good point. I still think parenting has a lot to do with how you grow up, but Americans have got to be the worst culture in the world when it comes to taking responsiblity for their own actions....
Sure, but take it to the other extreme; what if the other kids had been armed, and the two killers had to walk into school knowing that they were facing an honest-to-goodness firefight? Would they still have done it, or would they just have been better prepared?
Just playing Devil's advocate here, but it's an interesting thought.
Where were their mothers, huh?
on
Why Kids Kill
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· Score: 5
Misifts are not inherently violent, but misfits with bad parents can be. Where have the parents been during this whole mess? I have heard all about how Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold played violent games and watched violent movies, how they were outcasts, how they wore black clothes and trenchcoats--thank goodness they didn't play Dungeons and Dragons, or we'd have to sit through that old song and dance again--but I haven't heard a single thing about their home lives or their families.
Sure, John Katz can say that these kids were "generally well-parented" but I think the empirical evidence shows otherwise. Unfortunately, I don't think Eric and Dylan are going to be volunteering information about their upbringing anytime soon.
So, the news never said: are their parents divorced, or still together? Did their mothers and fathers love them? If so, how did they show it? Surely any concerned parent would notice their child storming around in black boots and a trenchcoat, talking about Hitler and playing violent video games all the time, and regardless of what anyone says, it's kind of hard to overlook a bomb-building operation in a kid's bedroom. Did their parents take any action, or just call it a phase that they were going through and ignore them?
When I was growing up, I wore a lot of black, I studied explosives and bomb-making, I learned how to shoot, and I memorized complete copies of _Jane's Infantry Weapons_ and various army and special forces survival manuals. It was a funky hobby that never really went anywhere. I've worn a black trenchcoat almost every day for ten years, I've played DOOM-like games since they first appeared, and I'm a big fan of John Woo films. To the best of my knowledge, I never went nuts and killed anyone.
I also graduated at the top of my high school class and graduated with honors from an ivy-league college, and I'm now happily married and managing the support team for a successful tech startup. I give credit for all of my success to my parents, who took an active interest in what I was doing and why, without trying to control my life.
So what if you play QUAKE a lot and you know how to turn Mr. Clean and Clorox into mustard gas? You shouldn't be asking where these kids found out how to do all of this stuff, or what violent acts sparked their imaginations. You should be asking what motivated them to use their knowledge, and where their parents were when they were planning and preparing.
Banning trenchcoats and restricting access to "dangerous" knowledge isn't going to solve the problem. Forcing parents to wake up, smell the gunsmoke, and start RAISING THEIR CHILDREN is going to solve the problem.
The biggest problem with spam is bandwidth loss. There are a million programs out there that let you take care of clearing your mailbox, and there are plenty of ways to keep yourself off of spam lists, but there's no way to regain lost bandwidth.
Here's a tip for keeping your email account spam-free: get a hotmail account, and use it for all internet registration and anything else that can be seen by a webcrawler or grabbed for a mailing list. Then all of the spam goes to Hotmail, and M$ ends up paying for it.:)
Comparing Saddam Hussein to the VietCong and the Afghan resistance movement is rather insulting, at least to the Afghans and the VC. Katz has lumped a third-rate military leader who happens to have nine lives, a brilliant political mind, and one hell of a PR machine together with the masters of modern guerilla warfare. The only basis for comparison between either of these guerilla fighters and Saddam is that all of them go into hiding when the missles start flying. It's just that the VC and the Afghans tend to come out shooting...
We defeated (I don't know if that's quite the right word to use, since "defeated" nations don't tend to come back posing and posturing about how they're going to kick your ass if you come back) Iraq in ground combat without any trouble, and with very few casualties. We did not have the same luck with the Germans, and I don't think anyone wants to get involved with Vietnam again. Heck, ask the Russians how they like dealing with Afghanistan, and see how it stacks up to anyone's experience in Iraq.
The article is an interesting read, but as soon as JK starts trying to make historical or cultural analogies, he starts sounding like an idiot. My advice: stick to what you know!
Linux is good because it "requires some learning", eh?
Lovely. With an attitude like that, open-source software will be pushing Microsoft off the desktop in no time. I'm sure most corporate MIS managers are just dying to sit down a teach themselves a new OS, especially something as cool as Linux.
Sorry, but IMHO, the great thing about Linux (and other free OSes, don't want to leave the BSD folks or anyone else out in the cold) is that they've kinda got a scalable geek factor. You can set up a linux box as a point-and-click machine for an average-joe desktop user, or you can have a full-blown geek box with your very own custom kernel. Still, the install is a bitch (relatively speaking, of course) and if joe user has a choice, he's still going to take Windows, because it's easier for him to play with and tweak (note: not more tweakable, just easier). You want to beat M$, you've gotta sell the idea to the non-geeks, and that means building a distribution that's made for them.
Has anyone actually got something like that in the works, or is the open source movement still too hung up on its status as a fringe element to try beating M$ at their own game?
Slashdot Mirror
Hear, hear. My mother and my mother-in-law are both teachers, and in the twenty-five years they have been in the business, they have both seen a steep and alarming rise in the number of parents who refuse to come to parent-teacher conferences, refuse to participate in extracurricular activities, and generally refuse to get involved in their children's lives in any way. My wife is now an educator, and has witnessed gymnasiums full of cots--that's where they put the kids who get dropped off at 6am because their parents don't want to deal with them while they get ready for work in the morning.
You need a license to drive and a license to shoot--why don't you need a license to raise a child? Hell, I need a license to raise a DOG in some states.
The wave website has a whole section devoted to sports. "Write in and tell us how great your school's team sports are!". Gimme a break.
This question has probably already been asked a dozen or more times, but what is Pinkerton's going to do about the school-supported culture of violence that is called team sports? I was bullied in school, and so were my geeky friends, but we never fought back. Who was doing the bullying? The football team, go figure.
We couldn't get money for band instruments or new chairs in the auditorium or for (god forbid!) art classes, but the football team got a new stadium and a new scoreboard. Do you know how many paintbrushes you can buy with what a new scoreboard costs? Instead, we take a group of hyperaggressive, testosterone-fueled young men, teach them to hurt other people, and then try to keep them in check when they're not off the field.
I invite all slashdot readers who are still in high school to hit the following URL:
http://www.waveamerica.com/news/wavenews.htm
Go ahead, write in, tell them how much your school sports program BITES and how much it detracts from actual education. Tell them how they're deluding young men and women, suggesting that more than one in a million has a chance of becoming a national sports figure. Ridiculous.
Woo! Let's hear it for the Birch John society. Bringing conservative values and outdoor plumbing to a town near you! Everyone needs a birch john!
I manage a tech support team. I get to work at 8am, along with most of my staff. I leave work at 7pm, along with most of mys taff. This is the easiest and least time-intensive job I've ever had, and everyone here, regardless of the industry they came from.
I am a geek. I also have a degree in medieval history and literature, and have had absolutely no formal training whatsoever in computer science or any related field. That doesn't stop me from getting a high-paying geek job in today's economy, however.
Technology is a great equalizer. In today's economy, it doesn't matter what your major was. It doesn't matter how many years of experience you have. All that matters is how well you code, how good a sysadmin you are, how fast you learn, and how much passion you have for the machines and the software that runs them.
Another thing: these days, with the high cost of living in the technology centers of the world, having two breadwinners in the family is not a bad thing. In short, money shouldn't be a concern in choosing a mate, unless you are in need of a provider yourself.
Y'know, just about every post I've seen has been some variant of "Well, properly administered Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris/*nix can have ten-year uptimes, but our plain-vanilla NT system crashed six times out of the box."
Doofus. How many of you would take a preconfigured Linux system and try to run it right out of the box? Would you call that "properly administered"? NT needs to be tuned, just like anything else. Many of these horror stories end with "and then I had to reinstall the OS!!" which should have been step #1, before anything else happened. Get machine, reinstall OS, tune OS, install software, tune OS and software, then let it all run. I've seen NT boxes with one-year uptimes. I've worked on NT boxes with six-month uptimes. I'm only able to say that because I know that NT is NOT the simple point-and-click operating system that the average *nix user seems to think it is.
And I can't get Linux working to save my life. Crashes on me all the time. I keep trying, because I know that it's an inherently stable OS and that my major problem is lack of knowledge and experience, but you don't see me on here screeching about how all *nixes suck and that I wanna go punch Linus, do you?
Sheesh. Bunch of savages in this town.
I'd say the parental ignorance of the arms buildup is the biggest factor in my case for parental negligence. If the father was working from home, then the parents are even more to blame (not entirely, as you say, but they bear most of it). The kids built over 30 explosive devices of various sizes and stockpiled semiautomatic weapons.....was dad completely oblivious?
XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX 04/21/99 22:51:05 UTC XXXXX
PAPERS: TRENCHCOAT BOYS WOULD HOLD HANDS IN HALLS; JOCKS FOUGHT, TEASED, CALLED THEM 'GAY' AND 'HOMOS'
Jocks at Columbine High would pick on the school's Trenchcoat Mafia, calling members "gay", "freaks" and "homos", the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER and Grand Junction's DAILY SENTINEL are reporting in Thursday editions.
"They were ones you'd make fun of," Mike Smith, 18, a senior and a point guard on the school's state championship basketball team, tells the INQUIRER.
Smith says that "he and the other jocks would pick on the mafia members, egging them on with gibes of 'gay,' or 'inbreed.'"
The tensions between the jocks and the trenchcoats came to a head at the end of the last school year.
For several weeks, Smith tells the paper, the two groups fought almost daily after school.
"It was like, 'OK, we'll meet you here and we'll meet you there and get it all over with.'"
He said school officials knew about the fights but did little to stop them.
At the time in the past, he had shrugged off the disputes.
But Wednesday, he felt guilty, reports the paper's Richard Jones and Gwen Florio in Littleton.
"Sometimes," he added, gesturing at the school over his shoulder, "I think it's because of me."
Jon Vandermark, a 16-year-old sophomore, tells Thursday's DAILY SENTINEL [in Grand Junction, Colo.] that members of the Trenchcoat Mafia said they were bi-sexual.
"Boys would hold hands in the halls sometimes," Vandermark tells the paper.
"They were called freaks, homos and everything in-between."
Junior Nicole Shieve watched as the two, and others in the group, kept getting picked on during school.
Very, very good point. I still think parenting has a lot to do with how you grow up, but Americans have got to be the worst culture in the world when it comes to taking responsiblity for their own actions....
Sure, but take it to the other extreme; what if the other kids had been armed, and the two killers had to walk into school knowing that they were facing an honest-to-goodness firefight? Would they still have done it, or would they just have been better prepared?
Just playing Devil's advocate here, but it's an interesting thought.
Misifts are not inherently violent, but misfits with bad parents can be. Where have the parents been during this whole mess? I have heard
all about how Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold played violent games and watched violent movies, how they were outcasts, how they wore black clothes and trenchcoats--thank goodness they didn't play Dungeons and Dragons, or we'd have to sit through that old song and dance again--but I haven't heard a single thing about their home lives or their families.
Sure, John Katz can say that these kids were "generally well-parented" but I think the empirical evidence shows otherwise. Unfortunately, I don't think Eric and Dylan are going to be volunteering information about their upbringing anytime soon.
So, the news never said: are their parents divorced, or still together? Did their mothers and fathers love them? If so, how did they show it? Surely any concerned parent would notice their child storming around in black boots and a trenchcoat, talking about Hitler and playing violent video games all the time, and regardless of what anyone says, it's kind of hard to overlook a bomb-building operation in a kid's bedroom. Did their parents take any action, or just call it a phase that they were going through and ignore them?
When I was growing up, I wore a lot of black, I studied explosives and bomb-making, I learned how to shoot, and I memorized complete copies of _Jane's Infantry Weapons_ and various army and special forces survival manuals. It was a funky hobby that never really went anywhere. I've worn a black trenchcoat almost every day for ten years, I've played DOOM-like games since they first appeared, and I'm a big fan of John Woo films. To the best of my knowledge, I never went nuts and killed anyone.
I also graduated at the top of my high school class and graduated with honors from an ivy-league college, and I'm now happily married and managing the support team for a successful tech startup. I give credit for all of my success to my parents, who took an active interest in what I was doing and why, without trying to control my life.
So what if you play QUAKE a lot and you know how to turn Mr. Clean and Clorox into mustard gas? You shouldn't be asking where these kids found out how to do all of this stuff, or what violent acts sparked their imaginations. You should be asking what motivated them to use their knowledge, and where their parents were when they were planning and preparing.
Banning trenchcoats and restricting access to "dangerous" knowledge isn't going to solve the problem. Forcing parents to wake up, smell the gunsmoke, and start RAISING THEIR CHILDREN is going to solve the problem.
The biggest problem with spam is bandwidth loss. There are a million programs out there that let you take care of clearing your mailbox, and there are plenty of ways to keep yourself off of spam lists, but there's no way to regain lost bandwidth.
:)
Here's a tip for keeping your email account spam-free: get a hotmail account, and use it for all internet registration and anything else that can be seen by a webcrawler or grabbed for a mailing list. Then all of the spam goes to Hotmail, and M$ ends up paying for it.
If satellite was completely bidirectional, then DirectPC wouldn't need an outgoing analog line for upload requests. It's a one-way feed.
Comparing Saddam Hussein to the VietCong and the Afghan resistance movement is rather insulting, at least to the Afghans and the VC. Katz has lumped a third-rate military leader who happens to have nine lives, a brilliant political mind, and one hell of a PR machine together with the masters of modern guerilla warfare. The only basis for comparison between either of these guerilla fighters and Saddam is that all of them go into hiding when the missles start flying. It's just that the VC and the Afghans tend to come out shooting...
We defeated (I don't know if that's quite the right word to use, since "defeated" nations don't tend to come back posing and posturing about how they're going to kick your ass if you come back) Iraq in ground combat without any trouble, and with very few casualties. We did not have the same luck with the Germans, and I don't think anyone wants to get involved with Vietnam again. Heck, ask the Russians how they like dealing with Afghanistan, and see how it stacks up to anyone's experience in Iraq.
The article is an interesting read, but as soon as JK starts trying to make historical or cultural analogies, he starts sounding like an idiot. My advice: stick to what you know!
Linux is good because it "requires some learning", eh?
Lovely. With an attitude like that, open-source software will be pushing Microsoft off the desktop in no time. I'm sure most corporate MIS managers are just dying to sit down a teach themselves a new OS, especially something as cool as Linux.
Sorry, but IMHO, the great thing about Linux (and other free OSes, don't want to leave the BSD folks or anyone else out in the cold) is that they've kinda got a scalable geek factor. You can set up a linux box as a point-and-click machine for an average-joe desktop user, or you can have a full-blown geek box with your very own custom kernel. Still, the install is a bitch (relatively speaking, of course) and if joe user has a choice, he's still going to take Windows, because it's easier for him to play with and tweak (note: not more tweakable, just easier). You want to beat M$, you've gotta sell the idea to the non-geeks, and that means building a distribution that's made for them.
Has anyone actually got something like that in the works, or is the open source movement still too hung up on its status as a fringe element to try beating M$ at their own game?
Just a thought...