and yet another friend got tackled to the ground by campus security for looking like he was "on-drugs".
I'd be fucked at that school. I look like I'm on drugs most of the time. Especially if i haven't slept well (dark bags under my eyes), my allergies are acting up (red bloodshot eyes, runny red nose), or have gone too long without food and my blood sugar level has crashed (incoherent, occasionally tripping over stuff). Then they'd look at my art (shameless plug) and realize I MUST be on drugs.
But I'll bet that school turns a blind eye to teachers who come in smelling like Budweiser.
Sounds frighteningly familiar. We had a retarded principal who, I guess, believed the first kid who walked through his door. So one of the major troublemakers at school picked a fight with me on lunch hour, I lost as usual, and they bring us down to the office. And for whatever reason we ended up seeing the principal instead of the vice principal (who was only slightly less dumb) - and the kid who started the fight got to tell his story first.
When I got in there, the principal - who knew nothing about me but could probably have pulled my file to see what kind of kid I was - was warning me that if I didn't change my ways, I'd spend my life in and out of jail.
Total number of minutes I've spent in jail in the twelve years since: 0. I'm afraid I can't speak for the other kid.
"You shut up and dealt with it" isn't a viable adaptive behavior to this, or very many (if any) issues.
Agreed. And maybe that's the idea - schools are, maybe intentionally, desensitizing kids to the idea that they should attempt to change what's wrong with the world. We see it here, all the people saying "but school is SUPPOSED to suck" - so it's obvious that it's working. Result, if allowed to continue: generations of kids who shrug off almost anything that bugs them and say "well, fuck it, can't change City Hall..."
No, really. Piracy isn't theft. Piracy doesn't show up on a company's balance sheet: "piracy losses: $307,236,129.42" Piracy doesn't COST the company a cent.
What piracy does is cause a company not to MAKE as much money as they think they should. And I say "think they should" because there's no way for a company to figure out how much money they should make, other than "all of it".
Piracy doesn't show up on a company's balance sheet. Companies can't install cameras in their products' packaging, to watch consumers in the store walking past it, so they have NO WAY to divine the intention of the consumer - no way to identify when a sale is "lost" in the first place. Which means they certainly have no way to tell whether a sale is "lost" to competition, disinterest, or Napster. Nor can they tell the difference between a pirate who would or would not have bought the product had a pirated version not been available.
Piracy is thus solely a MARKETING issue - because it creates a situation where a company is competing with free versions of its own products. And even then, a company continues to sell product and make some amount of money off it - until the marketplace is saturated by some mixture of pirated and legit versions of both the company's product and any competing products. And even then, it's not easy to saturate say, the DVD market - movies don't compete directly with each other.
If you're looking for concrete examples of companies going bust due to piracy, the early Amiga market might have some examples. Lots of companies claimed piracy rates of 80% or more - that is, for every four pirate copies in use, one copy was actually bought. But again, these are estimates - and of any company that claimed to fail due to piracy, you'd have a hard time proving they didn't fail due to poor marketing or pointy-haired business practices, unless you found a way to get the EXACT number of pirate copies in the field - and could prove how many of those copies would have been sales anyway.
Clue, people: if I shoplift a CD, that's theft: the CD has to be manufactured, people have to be paid to deliver it, etc. and the CD is no longer there for the next person to buy. If I download that same CD off Napster, that didn't cost you a cent and you aren't out the cost of a CD. Still not the same as me giving you $18.95 of my money, but YOU DIDN'T LOSE ANY MONEY! You just failed to make it, which is no different than if I wasn't interested in the product at all.
And more importantly, can you prove they went away because of piracy and NOT because of pointy-haired business practices or spending double their annual sales on lawyers?
[Bad Business Move]...to base your product on a limited supply of resources, no?
That hasn't stopped the oil companies.
Besides, I know people with whole boxfuls of broken C64s in closets. Commodore made about 20 million C64s. And realistically, if this company is in danger of selling a million of these synthesizers, they'll be able to afford to build a new NMOS fab and start making SIDs themselves from the original masks.
I've heard there's a part on the C64 motherboard that has a limited lifespan - a programmable logic chip or something like that - and so some of the older C64s are dying anyway.
Besides, didn't Commodore make something like 22 MILLION C64s from 1982 to 1992? (I've heard they were STILL manufacturing them for the Eastern Europe and developing countries markets up until the day they went out of business.)
And above all, if we're gonna anthropomorphize the C64, why wouldn't a C64 rusting in a closet WANT to live on in a useful fashion, by donating an organ to a synthesizer some musician is gonna love and cherish for years?
The idea is to PUNISH Microsoft for what they did. $5,000 or even $5,000,000 is pocket change to them. Lawsuits tend to be for amounts in proportion to the company you're suing, not the amount of damage actually caused to you, for precisely this reason: if you don't sue them for enough money that it shows up on the books, they won't get the hint.
GNU + Linux isn't the be all and end all of operating system design. None of the systems we have today are. We need people to continually try new ideas and come up with unfamiliar things.
And marketing and engineering not working from the same dates doesn't qualify as a problem?
Maybe it's just me, but I don't like the idea of deceiving people with release dates. Yeah, people who base their lives around marketing release dates deserve what they get - but why does this happen? Why are there two dates in the first place, a true one (which we're not told but are expected to divine) and a false one (which we're told)? There's an industry-wide lie, a naked emperor, where everyone "knows" you never trust release dates - so why make them? The answer is, admittedly exaggerated release dates are made to lie to people, either to placate stockholders or to build advance excitement or in extreme cases, to sucker in potential customers to lure them away from competing products that may be ready a year or two sooner ("Real Soon Now" for years on end). If you have to lie to people to make money off them, isn't something wrong?
OK, so why not use the engineering dates instead of marketing dates in the first place? Marketing won't stand for it - that's not what they're about, at least not in today's industry where marketing and engineering are two opposing armies. Not like engineers never lie, but engineers have a better idea of what's possible (build a new OS in six minutes? sure!) than marketers.
You can use the discrepancy between dates to determine how much of a shooting war there is between a company's engineering and marketing wings. Look at Microsoft - they miss deadlines by YEARS and usually lose half the announced feature set (and gain thousands of bugs) along the way - why? It's not like they WANT to make shit products - rather it's that marketing designs their products without asking the engineers what it'll take to incorporate into a codebase that is already bloated and grub-infested from two decades of this.
I'm not saying that marketing should NEVER influence the design of a product, but that marketing should at least attempt to work with engineering on such matters, determine how feasible things are, refine the feature lists, and perhaps even start building for a few months before deciding on a feasible release date.
As for Linus wearing both hats - he's fallen into the same industry trap, where it's expected that the first date out of your mouth is pulled out of your ass. Maybe that's thinking we should try to get out of.
Granted maybe I'm not the one to talk, I've got programs that've been in a state of beta for two years. But maybe it's better to simply never HAVE a release date, than to make one up that's gonna be wrong - especially if you know you're a) depending on other people that have pulled their release dates out of their asses, or b) charting unexplored territory where you really don't know HOW long it'll take to do the impossible. Of course that won't fly in the mainstream software industry, but that's because the people who control the money live in what amounts to another world.
The dynamic range of 24-bit graphics isn't nearly as wide as what we can see. For example: what color, in 24-bit RGB, is a fluorescent highlighter pen? Or the difference in 24-bit RGB color between treetops and sky at 11:20PM on a night where you can just barely see the treetops? (Less than 1 level difference?) And this kind of subtle color may sound silly, but could be put to excellent use in a 3D shooter on a wall-sized screen: menacing shapes moving in the sky, etc.
Stereoscopic imagery. Film resolutions (4096x3072 and such). Multihead cards. 64 bpp, maybe even 128bpp - 16 bits per gun, the rest for highly elaborate alpha and reflectivity tricks. Raytracing in realtime. There's plenty of room for expansion here.
And never, ever ignore the possibility of the Next Cool Thing coming along.
What if you were poor when you were a child...and never had access to a computer until coming to school. So do you think you would be a young sysadmin then?
That's why it's a million times more important for teachers to ENCOURAGE students to learn about computers, rather than punish them for it. Those school lab computers may well be the only computers some of those kids get to touch - and the philosophy is exactly like, stay in the lines, use only these eight crayons, and if I catch you drawing on the back of the paper, you go home for 3 days.
This is ridiculous. Usually, a generation tends to want its kids to have it better than they did. So why are we stuck dealing with a couple of generations that are SCARED TO DEATH whenever we demonstrate that we know more than they do - and thus have a chance to have it better than they did? When did schools decide it was their job to keep kids dumb instead of make them smart?
there probably would be penalties fo
r not keeping your front door locked.
Actually I'm sure there are plenty of real-world examples, of gun-toting psychos breaking into people's houses (through unlocked doors, while the owners are away) and standing off against the police. One needs only imagine the psychos snipering the neighbors' houses and the analogy is complete.
You can never garauntee that a 15 year old is mature enough to pock up the nuances of adult humor, or sarcasm
Some 15yolds are surprisingly good at picking up on this sort of thing.
My opinion: the teacher was making it up on the spot, on the assumption that there was NO WAY to defeat the security - or that no one would take up the offer.
Even so, this is a dangerous spot for a teacher to stand. It's the equivalent of: There's a tennis racket stuck in the rafters of the gym or some other exceptionally cavernous room, the teacher knows there's absolutely no way anyone can get up there and get it. A cocky student brags that he can in fact go get it. So the teacher - with poker face - dares him to do so. And that night, the student attempts this, without anyone's knowledge, and either a) succeeds, or b) fails and is injured, take your pick, the point is made either way. Can the teacher get out of hot water (for encouraging this dangerous stunt) instantly by saying "I was just kidding"?
School's just like the military. Drill sergeants and teachers alike can bust your ass for stuff THEY did, just because they don't feel like admitting they're not perfect.
The moral of the story: schools are the most oppresive organizations out there. I mean, hell, you can't even carry a gun or drugs into them! 8^)
Actually I thought the problem was, people DO carry guns and drugs in and don't get caught, but if you do something antisocial like wear black or question authority, you're in eleven kinds of trouble.
Re:This is the problem not the solution
on
Nazis on Napster
·
· Score: 2
I get the sense it's more they don't think they can AFFORD to tolerate certain kinds of dissenting voices.
I think they figure they're protecting the rest of the world. Consider what must be going through their heads: They caused two world wars, they tried to cause the extinction of a race of people, they almost 0wn3d the planet and committed unspeakable atrocities along the way. They're aware of their capacity to wreak havoc on the global stage, and are TERRIFIED that if they allow any kind of Nazi group to take root, it could all happen again. Or maybe they're trying to assure the rest of the world, by publicly going after this kind of material, that they're taking steps to make sure it doesn't happen again.
I'm not saying they're right. In my head it plays a bit too much like "protect the children." But I'm just saying there's a reason for this.
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and yet another friend got tackled to the ground by campus security for looking like he was "on-drugs".
I'd be fucked at that school. I look like I'm on drugs most of the time. Especially if i haven't slept well (dark bags under my eyes), my allergies are acting up (red bloodshot eyes, runny red nose), or have gone too long without food and my blood sugar level has crashed (incoherent, occasionally tripping over stuff). Then they'd look at my art (shameless plug) and realize I MUST be on drugs.
But I'll bet that school turns a blind eye to teachers who come in smelling like Budweiser.
Sounds frighteningly familiar. We had a retarded principal who, I guess, believed the first kid who walked through his door. So one of the major troublemakers at school picked a fight with me on lunch hour, I lost as usual, and they bring us down to the office. And for whatever reason we ended up seeing the principal instead of the vice principal (who was only slightly less dumb) - and the kid who started the fight got to tell his story first.
When I got in there, the principal - who knew nothing about me but could probably have pulled my file to see what kind of kid I was - was warning me that if I didn't change my ways, I'd spend my life in and out of jail.
Total number of minutes I've spent in jail in the twelve years since: 0. I'm afraid I can't speak for the other kid.
They'll probably expand it: "and get EXTRA reward money if you turn in atheists, homosexuals, and liberals!"
"You shut up and dealt with it" isn't a viable adaptive behavior to this, or very many (if any) issues.
Agreed. And maybe that's the idea - schools are, maybe intentionally, desensitizing kids to the idea that they should attempt to change what's wrong with the world. We see it here, all the people saying "but school is SUPPOSED to suck" - so it's obvious that it's working. Result, if allowed to continue: generations of kids who shrug off almost anything that bugs them and say "well, fuck it, can't change City Hall..."
You're supposed to feel like shit in high-school.
No. You're supposed to feel like shit in prison.
But no sex scandals.
Unless they find Dubya's collection of sheep porn.
Wait for the idiot to be sworn in and then start prattling on about how shite Bush-baby is going to be for tech and free speech et al.
Maybe everyone was hoping there'd be an "accident" on the way to the inauguration.
Piracy isn't theft.
No, really. Piracy isn't theft. Piracy doesn't show up on a company's balance sheet: "piracy losses: $307,236,129.42" Piracy doesn't COST the company a cent.
What piracy does is cause a company not to MAKE as much money as they think they should. And I say "think they should" because there's no way for a company to figure out how much money they should make, other than "all of it".
Piracy doesn't show up on a company's balance sheet. Companies can't install cameras in their products' packaging, to watch consumers in the store walking past it, so they have NO WAY to divine the intention of the consumer - no way to identify when a sale is "lost" in the first place. Which means they certainly have no way to tell whether a sale is "lost" to competition, disinterest, or Napster. Nor can they tell the difference between a pirate who would or would not have bought the product had a pirated version not been available.
Piracy is thus solely a MARKETING issue - because it creates a situation where a company is competing with free versions of its own products. And even then, a company continues to sell product and make some amount of money off it - until the marketplace is saturated by some mixture of pirated and legit versions of both the company's product and any competing products. And even then, it's not easy to saturate say, the DVD market - movies don't compete directly with each other.
If you're looking for concrete examples of companies going bust due to piracy, the early Amiga market might have some examples. Lots of companies claimed piracy rates of 80% or more - that is, for every four pirate copies in use, one copy was actually bought. But again, these are estimates - and of any company that claimed to fail due to piracy, you'd have a hard time proving they didn't fail due to poor marketing or pointy-haired business practices, unless you found a way to get the EXACT number of pirate copies in the field - and could prove how many of those copies would have been sales anyway.
Clue, people: if I shoplift a CD, that's theft: the CD has to be manufactured, people have to be paid to deliver it, etc. and the CD is no longer there for the next person to buy. If I download that same CD off Napster, that didn't cost you a cent and you aren't out the cost of a CD. Still not the same as me giving you $18.95 of my money, but YOU DIDN'T LOSE ANY MONEY! You just failed to make it, which is no different than if I wasn't interested in the product at all.
And more importantly, can you prove they went away because of piracy and NOT because of pointy-haired business practices or spending double their annual sales on lawyers?
[Bad Business Move] ...to base your product on a limited supply of resources, no?
That hasn't stopped the oil companies.
Besides, I know people with whole boxfuls of broken C64s in closets. Commodore made about 20 million C64s. And realistically, if this company is in danger of selling a million of these synthesizers, they'll be able to afford to build a new NMOS fab and start making SIDs themselves from the original masks.
I've heard there's a part on the C64 motherboard that has a limited lifespan - a programmable logic chip or something like that - and so some of the older C64s are dying anyway.
Besides, didn't Commodore make something like 22 MILLION C64s from 1982 to 1992? (I've heard they were STILL manufacturing them for the Eastern Europe and developing countries markets up until the day they went out of business.)
And above all, if we're gonna anthropomorphize the C64, why wouldn't a C64 rusting in a closet WANT to live on in a useful fashion, by donating an organ to a synthesizer some musician is gonna love and cherish for years?
The idea is to PUNISH Microsoft for what they did. $5,000 or even $5,000,000 is pocket change to them. Lawsuits tend to be for amounts in proportion to the company you're suing, not the amount of damage actually caused to you, for precisely this reason: if you don't sue them for enough money that it shows up on the books, they won't get the hint.
GNU + Linux isn't the be all and end all of operating system design. None of the systems we have today are. We need people to continually try new ideas and come up with unfamiliar things.
Heresy! Burn him at the stake!
And marketing and engineering not working from the same dates doesn't qualify as a problem?
Maybe it's just me, but I don't like the idea of deceiving people with release dates. Yeah, people who base their lives around marketing release dates deserve what they get - but why does this happen? Why are there two dates in the first place, a true one (which we're not told but are expected to divine) and a false one (which we're told)? There's an industry-wide lie, a naked emperor, where everyone "knows" you never trust release dates - so why make them? The answer is, admittedly exaggerated release dates are made to lie to people, either to placate stockholders or to build advance excitement or in extreme cases, to sucker in potential customers to lure them away from competing products that may be ready a year or two sooner ("Real Soon Now" for years on end). If you have to lie to people to make money off them, isn't something wrong?
OK, so why not use the engineering dates instead of marketing dates in the first place? Marketing won't stand for it - that's not what they're about, at least not in today's industry where marketing and engineering are two opposing armies. Not like engineers never lie, but engineers have a better idea of what's possible (build a new OS in six minutes? sure!) than marketers.
You can use the discrepancy between dates to determine how much of a shooting war there is between a company's engineering and marketing wings. Look at Microsoft - they miss deadlines by YEARS and usually lose half the announced feature set (and gain thousands of bugs) along the way - why? It's not like they WANT to make shit products - rather it's that marketing designs their products without asking the engineers what it'll take to incorporate into a codebase that is already bloated and grub-infested from two decades of this.
I'm not saying that marketing should NEVER influence the design of a product, but that marketing should at least attempt to work with engineering on such matters, determine how feasible things are, refine the feature lists, and perhaps even start building for a few months before deciding on a feasible release date.
As for Linus wearing both hats - he's fallen into the same industry trap, where it's expected that the first date out of your mouth is pulled out of your ass. Maybe that's thinking we should try to get out of.
Granted maybe I'm not the one to talk, I've got programs that've been in a state of beta for two years. But maybe it's better to simply never HAVE a release date, than to make one up that's gonna be wrong - especially if you know you're a) depending on other people that have pulled their release dates out of their asses, or b) charting unexplored territory where you really don't know HOW long it'll take to do the impossible. Of course that won't fly in the mainstream software industry, but that's because the people who control the money live in what amounts to another world.
The dynamic range of 24-bit graphics isn't nearly as wide as what we can see. For example: what color, in 24-bit RGB, is a fluorescent highlighter pen? Or the difference in 24-bit RGB color between treetops and sky at 11:20PM on a night where you can just barely see the treetops? (Less than 1 level difference?) And this kind of subtle color may sound silly, but could be put to excellent use in a 3D shooter on a wall-sized screen: menacing shapes moving in the sky, etc.
Stereoscopic imagery. Film resolutions (4096x3072 and such). Multihead cards. 64 bpp, maybe even 128bpp - 16 bits per gun, the rest for highly elaborate alpha and reflectivity tricks. Raytracing in realtime. There's plenty of room for expansion here.
And never, ever ignore the possibility of the Next Cool Thing coming along.
It got him fucked, not the same thing.
Congrats, at the age of 45 you will be doing the exact same thing and making the same salary. If that's what you want, more power to ya.
How is that different from any other career that DOES require formal "I played their game for 16 years" completion certificates?
What if you were poor when you were a child...and never had access to a computer until coming to school. So do you think you would be a young sysadmin then?
That's why it's a million times more important for teachers to ENCOURAGE students to learn about computers, rather than punish them for it. Those school lab computers may well be the only computers some of those kids get to touch - and the philosophy is exactly like, stay in the lines, use only these eight crayons, and if I catch you drawing on the back of the paper, you go home for 3 days.
This is ridiculous. Usually, a generation tends to want its kids to have it better than they did. So why are we stuck dealing with a couple of generations that are SCARED TO DEATH whenever we demonstrate that we know more than they do - and thus have a chance to have it better than they did? When did schools decide it was their job to keep kids dumb instead of make them smart?
Because I had figured out some simple ways to bypass the security, the computer lab teacher was deathly afraid of me.
They should have been deathly afraid of their wimpy security instead.
there probably would be penalties fo
r not keeping your front door locked.
Actually I'm sure there are plenty of real-world examples, of gun-toting psychos breaking into people's houses (through unlocked doors, while the owners are away) and standing off against the police. One needs only imagine the psychos snipering the neighbors' houses and the analogy is complete.
Articles like this make me very afraid of an upcomming witch-hunt, in which hackers - even this kid - could be targets for persecution.
There's no shortage of witch hunts in our future, that much seems certain.
You can never garauntee that a 15 year old is mature enough to pock up the nuances of adult humor, or sarcasm
Some 15yolds are surprisingly good at picking up on this sort of thing.
My opinion: the teacher was making it up on the spot, on the assumption that there was NO WAY to defeat the security - or that no one would take up the offer.
Even so, this is a dangerous spot for a teacher to stand. It's the equivalent of: There's a tennis racket stuck in the rafters of the gym or some other exceptionally cavernous room, the teacher knows there's absolutely no way anyone can get up there and get it. A cocky student brags that he can in fact go get it. So the teacher - with poker face - dares him to do so. And that night, the student attempts this, without anyone's knowledge, and either a) succeeds, or b) fails and is injured, take your pick, the point is made either way. Can the teacher get out of hot water (for encouraging this dangerous stunt) instantly by saying "I was just kidding"?
School's just like the military. Drill sergeants and teachers alike can bust your ass for stuff THEY did, just because they don't feel like admitting they're not perfect.
The moral of the story: schools are the most oppresive organizations out there. I mean, hell, you can't even carry a gun or drugs into them! 8^)
Actually I thought the problem was, people DO carry guns and drugs in and don't get caught, but if you do something antisocial like wear black or question authority, you're in eleven kinds of trouble.
I get the sense it's more they don't think they can AFFORD to tolerate certain kinds of dissenting voices.
I think they figure they're protecting the rest of the world. Consider what must be going through their heads: They caused two world wars, they tried to cause the extinction of a race of people, they almost 0wn3d the planet and committed unspeakable atrocities along the way. They're aware of their capacity to wreak havoc on the global stage, and are TERRIFIED that if they allow any kind of Nazi group to take root, it could all happen again. Or maybe they're trying to assure the rest of the world, by publicly going after this kind of material, that they're taking steps to make sure it doesn't happen again.
I'm not saying they're right. In my head it plays a bit too much like "protect the children." But I'm just saying there's a reason for this.