What is it with the computer industry and impossible deadlines anyway?
Impossible people, usually. People who think N+1 trivial tasks take as long as N trivial tasks. People who think because it takes 15 seconds to fix a typo in HTML, it should also take 15 seconds to fix a subtle design error in the middle of a 23,000 line mound of code. People who simply refuse to understand the technology and what actually goes into the process. People who can't get over their control issues and thus feel they HAVE to set impossible deadlines or they aren't doing their jobs - in big companies this becomes an exercise in penis enlargement, I can schedule tighter deadlines than you. And so on.
Not abolishing slavery immediately was a concession to the wisdom of choosing one's battles. You don't have to like that they did it that way. I know I don't.
But take the closest modern equivalent - abortion - and consider what would happen if they passed a Constitutional amendment about it. Roe v Wade had people taking to the streets. Now imagine something similar happening in 1787 - when the 13 states were not a single nation, but basically a bunch of small nations that shared currency and didn't stop people crossing their borders.
What good does it do, then, to pick a side on the subject, alienate some states so horribly that they don't sign the new Constitution and thus don't become part of the new Republic, so you will NEVER be able to influence them down the road? (And though it's a conceptual stretch, the Civil War was basically the North "influencing" the South. Would have been MUCH harder to justify if the southern states had been another country to begin with.)
You don't have to like it, but they did it that way for a reason.
Ending winner-take-all wouldn't require an amendment, would it? Electors can "vote their conscience" in some states, which hints to me (it's been awhile since I researched this stuff) that it's up to the states to regulate how the EC works, and it's VERY possible for electoral votes to split within a state (it's happened before).
So at the STATE level you can say if a candidate gets 75% of the popular vote, they get a close approximation of 75% of the electoral votes.
To make this work nationwide, the federal government can use the same trick they did to raise the drinking age: threaten to cut off highway funds.
The electoral college exists to protect small states from being bullied by larger more populous states, and it does it very well.
You know what would do the job even better? Doing away with winner-take all. You don't "carry" a state - each candidate gets a proportion of the electors.
Scratch that - divide each vote by the population of the state you voted in, THEN add them up.
Or use existing county, district, and precinct lines to chop it up and still vote proportionally by population. The more itty bitty pieces, the harder it gets to use a few of them to dominate the masses.
The point is there's a million and one math games you can play to come up with a system better than what we have. Think Perl here: there's more than one way to do it.
Remember. Hitler was democratically *elected* to his office and the majority loved him.
And how would an Electoral College type system have fixed this?
Hitler reflects not the ills of democracy, but the ills of humankind. Until we find a way to change what's in people's hearts, another Hitler is ALWAYS a danger.
Who has an answer? Figure out how to solve all these problems, make a system of government that DOESN'T screw up, and you could change the world.
Don't underestimate the power of vote fraud. What good's a traded, carefully finagled vote for Nader if the senile old poll workers throw it away thinking you wrote "Darth Vader" instead of "Ralph Nader"?
Truth told, if the Greens were reasonable, rational people, they wouldn't have bought the "a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush" propaganda line and changed their minds at the last minute. The 5% would have meant a much easier time getting candidates in local offices - that was the IDEA, not for Nader to win, but for him a) to bring new issues into the election, and b) to bring home enough bacon for the party to start building itself nationwide at the local level. It's not like the Green Party is gonna be funded by corporate contributions, y'know.
As to your last remark: the environment was sold to the oil companies years ago. What was Gore gonna do to fix that, pray tell, that he couldn't have done in the last eight years as vice president?
As for me, I have no guilt for voting for Nader. If Nader wasn't running, I would not have voted. My vote for Nader was not stolen from ANYBODY.
You are yelling at Nader and his supporters. Why? They're not the ones who explicitly pushed the Bush button in the booths because they actually WANTED Dubya to be in charge - that's HALF THE COUNTRY! Doesn't that scare you? No, you'd rather point fingers at the 2% of us (well, those of us whose votes didn't get "lost" at the polls) who decided NOT to be swayed by "a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush" FUD. We cost Gore the election. Not Bush appealing to the scary conservative half of America. Not Gore, losing ground in the last weeks because he couldn't even give people reasons NOT to vote the other way. Nope, it's us, the Nader supporters, who are to blame for everything that happens in the next four years. Whatever.
The structured if and while blocks are assembler macros.
And under most modern OSes on modern CPUs, even in native assembly you still don't know very much about what's going on anyway. You could be put to sleep for thousands or millions of cycles while other tasks execute. Your next memory read could come from L1 or L2 cache, RAM, or even from disk. Your next conditional branch may be in the pipeline already or it may cost you dearly - even between different CPUs of the same family, even between successive runthroughs of the same code. We're not talking the 6502 here - do YOU know how many pipeline stages a given instruction breaks down into on the Pentium III? Athlon? Duron?
In the face of all that, I'd think this VP system would be a relief - at least you're no longer expected to worry about what happens at the pipeline level.:-) Besides, the theory is, the VP-to-native translator will (and should!) know more about the cycle-by-cycle behavior of your CPU than the programmer who wrote your software.
I was encouraged NOT to solve my problems - I WAS the problem, to hear the administration talk.
What were my options when people are throwing me into walls or busting into my locker and stealing my shit? Go to the administration - nope, they don't care, "ignore them and they'll go away". Ignore them - nope, that just makes it worse, then they see it as a challenge to do things I can't ignore, like throwing chairs at me. Try to make friends with them - I tried that, oh believe me I tried. Try to make myself less of a target - tried that too, everything short of changing my hair color. Try to talk sense into them when they're fucking me over? Um... YEAH, right, excellent idea, good way to get laughed at even louder. Walk away? Sure, especially when they're doing this shit in the locker room where there's noplace to go. Fight back? Sure, I lose every time, often sustaining heavy injuries, and if I'm lucky we BOTH get suspended for 3 days - after which the adversary just wants revenge, since it's my fault he was beating up on me. Change schools? In Seymour, Indiana we had ONE high school and my parents were in no hurry to change towns. Home schooling? Not even an option. Quit school? Great, who needs college anyway - assuming I survive until I'm 18 and assuming I don't want to go to college.
Great, after 12 years of school I'm still screwed because I've still never successfully dealt with adversity.
Ooh, I wish you'd been there to give this inspirational speech the day they threw me in the locker room laundry basket.
I am simply saying that most young kids need to learn how to deal with unfairness from an early age, or they'll constantly be frustrated by their inability to understand why they're being treated unfairly.
You mean, so we won't mind so much when our rights get taken away by big governments and big corporations, or our religious beliefs or ethnic backgrounds are used as excuses to turn us into second class citizens. So long as we know WHY we're being treated unfairly, I guess it's okay.
It's been said better elsewhere, this is one of those situations where actions speak louder (and clearer) than words. If he gave a speech, people would have tuned out. By simply putting it on the ground and walking away, he made them THINK. And unlike, say, the weird shit Sinead O'Connor does, this one's rather unambigious.
We're also not talking about the popularity contests that play out in the halls - this was a school-sanctioned, extracurricular, non-educational event.
The kid registered his protest in the best way imaginable. Without having been there, it looks like he was suspended not for his conduct (he put an object on the ground and walked away silently), but for the fact that he dared to make a mockery of the ceremony.
It's like some people around here think you aren't allowed to complain about the world until you're 40.
"Ignore them and they'll go away" - oh yes, I do remember that one. If I wasn't so weak and the vice principal wasn't so fat, I'd have been tempted to throw him in a trash can, as the locker room fuckwits often did to me, and said "can you ignore this?"
So ignoring them doesn't work, and they don't go away - or else they specialize in activities that are harder to ignore, like vandalizing my property or bodily throwing me around. Unable to get help from the school, I ended up getting in fights trying to defend myself (and losing badly) - and once in the office, they'd ask "why didn't you come to us when this was going on?"
Here and here is what I did to stay sane. (shameless plug for my site...)
As to the girl getting suspended for "casting a spell" - what does it say about the teacher that they're superstitious enough to think a flu bug must have been caused by someone practicing witchcraft? Does he think this way about other things in life too, like if there's dog poo on his porch and he's the only one in the neighborhood with a dog, does he think his neighbor psychically commanded the dog to do it?
Theatrics is right. What exactly does the homecoming royalty election have to do with the learning environment? What are we supposed to "learn" by watching this - what's the awarding of the crown supposed to prepare us for in life, the Grammy Awards? Does "Homecoming King" impart any REAL meaning - aside from obviously having won a vote and getting a page in the yearbook? What's THAT experience prepare you for? What do other people learn from you winning a vote? (I'd go so far as to say refusing the crown was FAR more educational for all involved.)
High schools treat this stuff with more reverence than CHURCH. Theater, hell, this is pure ritual, and just as much about worshipping gods - the god of popularity, the god of happy little sheep, etc.
What does a ritual mean, anyway? If it's for a religious observance, the theory is that the ritual has meaning for whatever supreme being is supposed to be watching. A ritual like crowning a homecoming king, who's that for? What deity is supposed to be appeased by this? It has no meaning except for those who watch and participate - which means if they all manage to realize it's bullshit, the ritual becomes nothing but bad theater, like watching them parade the blood of saints past you in a little vial when you already know that's just wax and food coloring in the vial.
It's about understanding the system of control the Iron Prison has created and how to overcome it.
That's what we're DOING. It's just that we shouldn't have to wait until we're 40 to do it.
The whole point is that school (and society at large) tries to break you, therefore it's our duty to forbid ourselves to be broken. What's the alternative? Sit back and take it? Let them peel away our freedoms while we're in school - which has the effect of getting us used to losing freedoms once we leave? Maybe that's what's wrong with America - all the people who trade away our freedoms for some comfortable illusion of "safety", do so because school got them accustomed to it.
We all know school is about indoctrination, not education. Well, maybe that's what we need to change. That's what people TRY to change in a small way when you see them in the halls in a weird outfit or carrying a D&D rulebook hidden in the stack of books - that's their way of carving out a little piece of freedom for themselves, an island in the storm. Maybe D&D or Quake isn't worth much in the long run, but in the short run, it may be all a kid has to keep them from losing their grip.
And what I think the Hellmouth discussions do, at the most basic level, is raise awareness that there ISN'T a reason to tolerate abuse from other students, from school officials, or whoever's trying to take away your soul this week.
So school sucks because it has always sucked. Does that mean we have to like it?
Keep something in mind: Harris & Klebold created this situation. They had this planned a year in advance, stockpiling weapons and whatnot - maybe it was their tortured lives that led to this, but shit, after a year of building an arsenal and treating everyone in the halls as potential frag targets, it pretty much self-fulfilled and they KNEW it. This wasn't about taking out their torment on those who tormented them, this was about playing Quake in the halls on real targets. I mean, where's the logic in taking machineguns to the school library at lunch hour? Who were they expecting to find there? Athletes?
Don't worry about assigning blame. Finding a scapegoat was the job of the American public in the first 2 weeks, and find scapegoats they did - usually in the form of everything and everyone they didn't like anyway.
And keep something else in mind: this kind of thing has happened a LOT over the years. You just didn't hear people crying about it until it was rich suburbanite white kids getting shot.
Puberty is, always has been, and always will be a time of trial. For everyone. Just because you're a geek doesn't make you special, so quit with the martyr complex. As soon as you mature past that - assuming you do mature past it - you'll see that.
This is true. This does NOT mean, however, that we're all collectively supposed to sit back and tolerate it when people who have a choice about whether or not to hurt us, choose to hurt us.
Economic "growth" - you can't find two economists who agree on whether or not this is even possible. You'd think by now someone would have done the mathematics.
If there IS actual economic growth taking place, we'd never know it - corporations probably drink it all.
Good idea, and for good reasons, but I think it'd be WAY too easy to abuse it. The obvious problem is that there'd be a LOT of people wanting to defer, and a lot fewer people being deferred TO. Which means you get, let's say, every one "official voter" is pulling five other people's levers.
Something better, which could be done NOW, is to have "vote consultants" - instead of giving your vote to them, you ask their advice instead. Sorta like taking your taxes to an accountant, you take your list of political wants/needs to them, and they produce a list of candidates which you can do whatever you want with. Such "consultants" might be in the form of paid professionals we might call a "vote firm", or it might be volunteer-run Web sites.
This is partly what political parties are supposed to do. The party selects candidates, and you vote for the party. But in this case, the vote firm is under no obligation to return a list of candidates that support a particular agenda - and it'd be pretty easy to spot if you ask for candidates who support marijuana legalization or gay marriages and they come back with Pat Buchanan. Instead you'd be getting a political party tailored to YOU, and your unique mix of beliefs.
The problem, though, is that as now, people won't be taking an active part in the election process. Parties exist to relieve people of the burden of having to think about how they're gonna vote. While this idea allows a greater diversity of candidates and more "veto control" for you the voter, it also stands to replace the voting process, people will just take their candidate lists and blindly enter them into the machine. Which in turn gives the "vote firms" and Web sites an unusual amount of sway over American politics. (But then, that's what the corporations have now anyway.)
Agree mostly on the rest. The electoral college for one thing NEEDS TO GO AWAY. As it stands, a candidate could get a majority of the popular vote against two other candidates, but say the bulk of those votes are in smaller states with fewer electoral votes - the big states went another way (but only by a narrow margin!) and have more electoral votes, another candidate ends up with a slight majority of ELECTORAL votes and so THEY win instead!
Not to suggest that there aren't problems which need to be fixed, but might this stability be better than a government built up by Nader, dismantled by Browne, and then build up by Nader again in successive terms?
As opposed to what we have now - an overgrown, corporate-run government that takes turns removing our freedoms?
Maybe I missed something during my lifetime, but from here it looks like stability is the one thing we've HAD too much of.
Heaven forbid anyone might want to affect the outcome of the election.
Re:Tom Baker's in this?
on
D&D Trailer
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· Score: 2
Yeah, now the famous Who fan luck takes over - he'll appear onscreen for about 60 seconds and deliver two lines.
I don't need any such device. I know exactly who's calling, 90% of the time - telemarketers to whom Ameritech sold my name.
And I know they did because when I got my phone service reactivated awhile back, Ameritech wrote my name down wrong, substituting an O for a P in a critical spot, so that the name was basically unpronounceable - and telemarketers sometimes ask for you by name.
For the rest I bought a toy phone with a voice-changer. I could just say "put me on your don't call list" and hang up, but this is much more fun: let them finish their sales pitch, so as to make them do the most work, then flip on the voice changer and begin speaking, either in Elmo-speak or in the deep booming voice of Satan. After that it doesn't matter what I say. They either go silent for many seconds and then hang up, or they bust up laughing and hang up.
Just once I had a telemarketer on the line, I chose the Elmo voice, and they didn't go away, so I had to switch to Satan voice: "NO, I said I'm not INTERESTED!"
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, if it weren't for bubble memory, Doctor Who wouldn't have been able to prevent the entropy death of the universe in Logopolis...
What is it with the computer industry and impossible deadlines anyway?
Impossible people, usually. People who think N+1 trivial tasks take as long as N trivial tasks. People who think because it takes 15 seconds to fix a typo in HTML, it should also take 15 seconds to fix a subtle design error in the middle of a 23,000 line mound of code. People who simply refuse to understand the technology and what actually goes into the process. People who can't get over their control issues and thus feel they HAVE to set impossible deadlines or they aren't doing their jobs - in big companies this becomes an exercise in penis enlargement, I can schedule tighter deadlines than you. And so on.
I LIKE lesbian witches.
Not abolishing slavery immediately was a concession to the wisdom of choosing one's battles. You don't have to like that they did it that way. I know I don't.
But take the closest modern equivalent - abortion - and consider what would happen if they passed a Constitutional amendment about it. Roe v Wade had people taking to the streets. Now imagine something similar happening in 1787 - when the 13 states were not a single nation, but basically a bunch of small nations that shared currency and didn't stop people crossing their borders.
What good does it do, then, to pick a side on the subject, alienate some states so horribly that they don't sign the new Constitution and thus don't become part of the new Republic, so you will NEVER be able to influence them down the road? (And though it's a conceptual stretch, the Civil War was basically the North "influencing" the South. Would have been MUCH harder to justify if the southern states had been another country to begin with.)
You don't have to like it, but they did it that way for a reason.
Ending winner-take-all wouldn't require an amendment, would it? Electors can "vote their conscience" in some states, which hints to me (it's been awhile since I researched this stuff) that it's up to the states to regulate how the EC works, and it's VERY possible for electoral votes to split within a state (it's happened before).
So at the STATE level you can say if a candidate gets 75% of the popular vote, they get a close approximation of 75% of the electoral votes.
To make this work nationwide, the federal government can use the same trick they did to raise the drinking age: threaten to cut off highway funds.
The electoral college exists to protect small states from being bullied by larger more populous states, and it does it very well.
You know what would do the job even better? Doing away with winner-take all. You don't "carry" a state - each candidate gets a proportion of the electors.
Scratch that - divide each vote by the population of the state you voted in, THEN add them up.
Or use existing county, district, and precinct lines to chop it up and still vote proportionally by population. The more itty bitty pieces, the harder it gets to use a few of them to dominate the masses.
The point is there's a million and one math games you can play to come up with a system better than what we have. Think Perl here: there's more than one way to do it.
Remember. Hitler was democratically *elected* to his office and the majority loved him.
And how would an Electoral College type system have fixed this?
Hitler reflects not the ills of democracy, but the ills of humankind. Until we find a way to change what's in people's hearts, another Hitler is ALWAYS a danger.
Who has an answer? Figure out how to solve all these problems, make a system of government that DOESN'T screw up, and you could change the world.
Don't underestimate the power of vote fraud. What good's a traded, carefully finagled vote for Nader if the senile old poll workers throw it away thinking you wrote "Darth Vader" instead of "Ralph Nader"?
Truth told, if the Greens were reasonable, rational people, they wouldn't have bought the "a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush" propaganda line and changed their minds at the last minute. The 5% would have meant a much easier time getting candidates in local offices - that was the IDEA, not for Nader to win, but for him a) to bring new issues into the election, and b) to bring home enough bacon for the party to start building itself nationwide at the local level. It's not like the Green Party is gonna be funded by corporate contributions, y'know.
As to your last remark: the environment was sold to the oil companies years ago. What was Gore gonna do to fix that, pray tell, that he couldn't have done in the last eight years as vice president?
As for me, I have no guilt for voting for Nader. If Nader wasn't running, I would not have voted. My vote for Nader was not stolen from ANYBODY.
You are yelling at Nader and his supporters. Why? They're not the ones who explicitly pushed the Bush button in the booths because they actually WANTED Dubya to be in charge - that's HALF THE COUNTRY! Doesn't that scare you? No, you'd rather point fingers at the 2% of us (well, those of us whose votes didn't get "lost" at the polls) who decided NOT to be swayed by "a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush" FUD. We cost Gore the election. Not Bush appealing to the scary conservative half of America. Not Gore, losing ground in the last weeks because he couldn't even give people reasons NOT to vote the other way. Nope, it's us, the Nader supporters, who are to blame for everything that happens in the next four years. Whatever.
The structured if and while blocks are assembler macros.
:-) Besides, the theory is, the VP-to-native translator will (and should!) know more about the cycle-by-cycle behavior of your CPU than the programmer who wrote your software.
:-)
And under most modern OSes on modern CPUs, even in native assembly you still don't know very much about what's going on anyway. You could be put to sleep for thousands or millions of cycles while other tasks execute. Your next memory read could come from L1 or L2 cache, RAM, or even from disk. Your next conditional branch may be in the pipeline already or it may cost you dearly - even between different CPUs of the same family, even between successive runthroughs of the same code. We're not talking the 6502 here - do YOU know how many pipeline stages a given instruction breaks down into on the Pentium III? Athlon? Duron?
In the face of all that, I'd think this VP system would be a relief - at least you're no longer expected to worry about what happens at the pipeline level.
Or I could be talking out my ass again.
I was encouraged NOT to solve my problems - I WAS the problem, to hear the administration talk.
What were my options when people are throwing me into walls or busting into my locker and stealing my shit? Go to the administration - nope, they don't care, "ignore them and they'll go away". Ignore them - nope, that just makes it worse, then they see it as a challenge to do things I can't ignore, like throwing chairs at me. Try to make friends with them - I tried that, oh believe me I tried. Try to make myself less of a target - tried that too, everything short of changing my hair color. Try to talk sense into them when they're fucking me over? Um... YEAH, right, excellent idea, good way to get laughed at even louder. Walk away? Sure, especially when they're doing this shit in the locker room where there's noplace to go. Fight back? Sure, I lose every time, often sustaining heavy injuries, and if I'm lucky we BOTH get suspended for 3 days - after which the adversary just wants revenge, since it's my fault he was beating up on me. Change schools? In Seymour, Indiana we had ONE high school and my parents were in no hurry to change towns. Home schooling? Not even an option. Quit school? Great, who needs college anyway - assuming I survive until I'm 18 and assuming I don't want to go to college.
Great, after 12 years of school I'm still screwed because I've still never successfully dealt with adversity.
One word: Perot.
Ooh, I wish you'd been there to give this inspirational speech the day they threw me in the locker room laundry basket.
I am simply saying that most young kids need to learn how to deal with unfairness from an early age, or they'll constantly be frustrated by their inability to understand why they're being treated unfairly.
You mean, so we won't mind so much when our rights get taken away by big governments and big corporations, or our religious beliefs or ethnic backgrounds are used as excuses to turn us into second class citizens. So long as we know WHY we're being treated unfairly, I guess it's okay.
It's been said better elsewhere, this is one of those situations where actions speak louder (and clearer) than words. If he gave a speech, people would have tuned out. By simply putting it on the ground and walking away, he made them THINK. And unlike, say, the weird shit Sinead O'Connor does, this one's rather unambigious.
We're also not talking about the popularity contests that play out in the halls - this was a school-sanctioned, extracurricular, non-educational event.
The kid registered his protest in the best way imaginable. Without having been there, it looks like he was suspended not for his conduct (he put an object on the ground and walked away silently), but for the fact that he dared to make a mockery of the ceremony.
It's like some people around here think you aren't allowed to complain about the world until you're 40.
"Ignore them and they'll go away" - oh yes, I do remember that one. If I wasn't so weak and the vice principal wasn't so fat, I'd have been tempted to throw him in a trash can, as the locker room fuckwits often did to me, and said "can you ignore this?"
So ignoring them doesn't work, and they don't go away - or else they specialize in activities that are harder to ignore, like vandalizing my property or bodily throwing me around. Unable to get help from the school, I ended up getting in fights trying to defend myself (and losing badly) - and once in the office, they'd ask "why didn't you come to us when this was going on?"
Here and here is what I did to stay sane. (shameless plug for my site...)
As to the girl getting suspended for "casting a spell" - what does it say about the teacher that they're superstitious enough to think a flu bug must have been caused by someone practicing witchcraft? Does he think this way about other things in life too, like if there's dog poo on his porch and he's the only one in the neighborhood with a dog, does he think his neighbor psychically commanded the dog to do it?
Theatrics is right. What exactly does the homecoming royalty election have to do with the learning environment? What are we supposed to "learn" by watching this - what's the awarding of the crown supposed to prepare us for in life, the Grammy Awards? Does "Homecoming King" impart any REAL meaning - aside from obviously having won a vote and getting a page in the yearbook? What's THAT experience prepare you for? What do other people learn from you winning a vote? (I'd go so far as to say refusing the crown was FAR more educational for all involved.)
High schools treat this stuff with more reverence than CHURCH. Theater, hell, this is pure ritual, and just as much about worshipping gods - the god of popularity, the god of happy little sheep, etc.
What does a ritual mean, anyway? If it's for a religious observance, the theory is that the ritual has meaning for whatever supreme being is supposed to be watching. A ritual like crowning a homecoming king, who's that for? What deity is supposed to be appeased by this? It has no meaning except for those who watch and participate - which means if they all manage to realize it's bullshit, the ritual becomes nothing but bad theater, like watching them parade the blood of saints past you in a little vial when you already know that's just wax and food coloring in the vial.
It's about understanding the system of control the Iron Prison has created and how to overcome it.
That's what we're DOING. It's just that we shouldn't have to wait until we're 40 to do it.
The whole point is that school (and society at large) tries to break you, therefore it's our duty to forbid ourselves to be broken. What's the alternative? Sit back and take it? Let them peel away our freedoms while we're in school - which has the effect of getting us used to losing freedoms once we leave? Maybe that's what's wrong with America - all the people who trade away our freedoms for some comfortable illusion of "safety", do so because school got them accustomed to it.
We all know school is about indoctrination, not education. Well, maybe that's what we need to change. That's what people TRY to change in a small way when you see them in the halls in a weird outfit or carrying a D&D rulebook hidden in the stack of books - that's their way of carving out a little piece of freedom for themselves, an island in the storm. Maybe D&D or Quake isn't worth much in the long run, but in the short run, it may be all a kid has to keep them from losing their grip.
And what I think the Hellmouth discussions do, at the most basic level, is raise awareness that there ISN'T a reason to tolerate abuse from other students, from school officials, or whoever's trying to take away your soul this week.
So school sucks because it has always sucked. Does that mean we have to like it?
Challenge the assumptions.
Keep something in mind: Harris & Klebold created this situation. They had this planned a year in advance, stockpiling weapons and whatnot - maybe it was their tortured lives that led to this, but shit, after a year of building an arsenal and treating everyone in the halls as potential frag targets, it pretty much self-fulfilled and they KNEW it. This wasn't about taking out their torment on those who tormented them, this was about playing Quake in the halls on real targets. I mean, where's the logic in taking machineguns to the school library at lunch hour? Who were they expecting to find there? Athletes?
Don't worry about assigning blame. Finding a scapegoat was the job of the American public in the first 2 weeks, and find scapegoats they did - usually in the form of everything and everyone they didn't like anyway.
And keep something else in mind: this kind of thing has happened a LOT over the years. You just didn't hear people crying about it until it was rich suburbanite white kids getting shot.
Puberty is, always has been, and always will be a time of trial. For everyone. Just because you're a geek doesn't make you special, so quit with the martyr complex. As soon as you mature past that - assuming you do mature past it - you'll see that.
This is true. This does NOT mean, however, that we're all collectively supposed to sit back and tolerate it when people who have a choice about whether or not to hurt us, choose to hurt us.
Economic "growth" - you can't find two economists who agree on whether or not this is even possible. You'd think by now someone would have done the mathematics.
If there IS actual economic growth taking place, we'd never know it - corporations probably drink it all.
I think that's where we're headed anyway: class warfare, people versus corporations to see who ends up with our freedoms.
option to delegate one's vote to someone else.
Good idea, and for good reasons, but I think it'd be WAY too easy to abuse it. The obvious problem is that there'd be a LOT of people wanting to defer, and a lot fewer people being deferred TO. Which means you get, let's say, every one "official voter" is pulling five other people's levers.
Something better, which could be done NOW, is to have "vote consultants" - instead of giving your vote to them, you ask their advice instead. Sorta like taking your taxes to an accountant, you take your list of political wants/needs to them, and they produce a list of candidates which you can do whatever you want with. Such "consultants" might be in the form of paid professionals we might call a "vote firm", or it might be volunteer-run Web sites.
This is partly what political parties are supposed to do. The party selects candidates, and you vote for the party. But in this case, the vote firm is under no obligation to return a list of candidates that support a particular agenda - and it'd be pretty easy to spot if you ask for candidates who support marijuana legalization or gay marriages and they come back with Pat Buchanan. Instead you'd be getting a political party tailored to YOU, and your unique mix of beliefs.
The problem, though, is that as now, people won't be taking an active part in the election process. Parties exist to relieve people of the burden of having to think about how they're gonna vote. While this idea allows a greater diversity of candidates and more "veto control" for you the voter, it also stands to replace the voting process, people will just take their candidate lists and blindly enter them into the machine. Which in turn gives the "vote firms" and Web sites an unusual amount of sway over American politics. (But then, that's what the corporations have now anyway.)
Agree mostly on the rest. The electoral college for one thing NEEDS TO GO AWAY. As it stands, a candidate could get a majority of the popular vote against two other candidates, but say the bulk of those votes are in smaller states with fewer electoral votes - the big states went another way (but only by a narrow margin!) and have more electoral votes, another candidate ends up with a slight majority of ELECTORAL votes and so THEY win instead!
Not to suggest that there aren't problems which need to be fixed, but might this stability be better than a government built up by Nader, dismantled by Browne, and then build up by Nader again in successive terms?
As opposed to what we have now - an overgrown, corporate-run government that takes turns removing our freedoms?
Maybe I missed something during my lifetime, but from here it looks like stability is the one thing we've HAD too much of.
Heaven forbid anyone might want to affect the outcome of the election.
Yeah, now the famous Who fan luck takes over - he'll appear onscreen for about 60 seconds and deliver two lines.
I don't need any such device. I know exactly who's calling, 90% of the time - telemarketers to whom Ameritech sold my name.
And I know they did because when I got my phone service reactivated awhile back, Ameritech wrote my name down wrong, substituting an O for a P in a critical spot, so that the name was basically unpronounceable - and telemarketers sometimes ask for you by name.
For the rest I bought a toy phone with a voice-changer. I could just say "put me on your don't call list" and hang up, but this is much more fun: let them finish their sales pitch, so as to make them do the most work, then flip on the voice changer and begin speaking, either in Elmo-speak or in the deep booming voice of Satan. After that it doesn't matter what I say. They either go silent for many seconds and then hang up, or they bust up laughing and hang up.
Just once I had a telemarketer on the line, I chose the Elmo voice, and they didn't go away, so I had to switch to Satan voice: "NO, I said I'm not INTERESTED!"
YAM does. It appears to parse on a line-by-line basis to avoid the "whole message in italics" thing you describe. And the feature can be turned off.
Just one problem: the mailer in question is for the Amiga.
What happens if you hold a magnifying lens above ants on the sidewalk?
Your eyes have lenses in the front.