I've decided to comment instead of mod since I feel sure you'll get to 5 without me. This:
another agency or department has it and the agency that originally procured it lost track of it; it was an ancient laptop and its in the bottom of a closet somewhere; or it was scrubbed and disposed of without the proper paperwork being done.
is the most insightful thing anyone is going to post on this topic. I'm in the middle of assisting with inventory issues in a major TLA. "Missing" laptops (Katrina/flood losses aside) are always explainable in these ways. Last week, a laptop that had been "lost" for over 5 years was found in a cabinet during an office move. Years ago, that laptop went on a public report as "lost." Our inventory tech had to fall on his sword and file paperwork removing it from active inventory because we couldn't find it. It wasn't taken home by anyone, stolen, or improperly passed on to another agency. It was simply misplaced.
Add to this the pallets of used equipment that get diskwiped and then donated to schools, a process often involving running around, looking for every unissued piece of obsolete equipment we can find and quickly doing whatever is necessary to get it onto the pallet, and you have a situation where laptops become "lost" in too-big numbers but without any real threat to anybodys security.
I would only be concerned, really, about two classes of losses. First is the handful (less than 10) that were stolen apparently due to negligence. However, in most of those cases, the data was routinely encrypted and, again, there's no security threat. Second are the 4 laptops that went home with employees when they retired. That's just inexcuseable.
Overall, 150 or so lost laptops in an organization that size is pretty damn good performance.
And I bought a Dreamcast just to play Tetris on a big screen. Somehow, your purchase seems leet and mine seems more than a little tragic.:-)
OT - I notice that you've stuck by the decision to keep the occulus index page as low-key as possible.:-) I never took you up on your kind offer of an account for testing but I would be willing to buy access. I'll drop you an email requesting sign-up particulars.
This one I've never understood. Why is the default and nearly universal choice to work late as opposed to early? When I need to minimize my impact on business services, I come in at 4AM or some such time. Of course, some of my bosses (not the current, but occasionally in the past) are horrified when I walk out the door at 3:30PM, so I guess you can't win no matter how you approach the problem. Still, early works much better for me; I wonder how much of a minority I'm in regarding this.
I agree wholeheartedly with your viewpoint. Understand, though, that I am more concerned with practical methods to stop the pain than I am with the way the world should be.
Ideally, adults protect children. Practically, they're not around when they're needed so it falls to the victim to actively work to protect himself.
As adults, one of our roles is to teach our kids to handle themselves. When he's confronted by peers who would bully him, he needs the gumption and skills to get himself out of the situation. If we've done our job, he will have emotional and physical skills that place him at parity with any of his peers who would bully him. That's how we protect him - by teaching him how to protect himself.
Of course, it's also up to us to always be watchful and to step in if he's attacked by someone who is *not* his peer - someone older, bigger, sufficiently meaner, or anyone he could not reasonably be expected to stand up to. (I hope that answers your concerns in your second-to-last paragraph.)
Overall, though, the practical creation of happy offspring requires (among a million other things) a transition of responsibility for protection from adult to child. A two-year old shouldn't be expected to do much at all in this arena. A 15-year old should be able to handle anything dished out by his high school classmates or be mature enough to ask for help (which is one of those million other things we teach).
Please understand that at no point do I blame the victim. That's not my intent. The bully is ALWAYS to blame for initiating his thuggish behavior. I can, however, blame the victim for letting things drag on. (I realize that, in itself, sounds harsh. It's not meant to be. It's meant to be merely utilitarian.) Yes, as adults it's our duty to protect the innocent. However, it's also true that victims CAN break the cycle and we, as adults, are failing our children if we don't teach them how.
I wish I could moderate. That's pretty insightful. Yes, kids model the behavior of adults and bullying teachers feature prominently in some of the most vibrant and horrifying memories of my youth.
Yes, I may be working under assumptions that don't apply. However, I maintain that the only bullying that really matters is direct. The rest of it can either be turned off or ignored.
I realize I'm betraying my age by saying this, but who said that putting yourself into and maintaining a presence in cyberbullying arenas is mandatory behavior? IMs to MySpace to whatever - it's all optional. Why do a certain minority of kids insist on going places they don't have to go when doing so only brings them pain? I don't get it. Then again, I'm old enough to view a cell phone as a painful technology to be used only when absolutely necessary and otherwise turned off and ignored. I have a feeling that kids these days are a little too connected to accept that notion.
As to the different, female mode of bullying - I can only say that I'm old enough to have finally accepted that I'll never understand women. I don't even want to go there.
To extend your metaphor, there are two ways to stop a pressure cooker from exploding. One is to let off the steam in a positive way. Talking it out with someone you trust is one way. Exercise is another. Martial arts as therapy has been known to have amazing transformative effects on people.
The other way is to cut off the heat coming into the pressure cooker. A victim can insulate himself from the heat by simply not letting it get to him. Admittedly, that requires more maturity, both emotional and spiritual, than most teens have. Religious devotion can accomplish this. Meditation can, too. I accomplish my meditation via pistol shooting, a wonderfully calming activity that I'd recommend for nearly any troubled teen. Other ways to cut the heat are more external. By striking back, the bully can be convinced to stop applying heat. Sometimes, the authorities (school, police, etc.) can turn down the heat by separating the bully and victim or by punishing the bully.
Both the preceeding paragraphs are intended to answer your question about how to stand up for yourself without going overboard. The physical activity helps relieve pressure and builds confidence so that standing up for yourself becomes easier. The spiritual pursuits help relieve pressure and make standing up for yourself a less fearsome thought.
Overall, though, I think the whole "how to stop the pressure cooker" thing is overrated. Go ahead and let the cooker blow, in a relatively small way, early, before the stored energy is dangerously immense. Just make sure that the explosion is focused against the bully and no one else.
I'm going to take the question seriously because I believe it has some merit. No, indiscriminate death-dealing isn't a reasonable answer. However, I wonder if that extreme case tends to support my position in the long term. In the short term, it certainly did. We saw on the news for sometime after how people were willing to talk about bullying issues and how there was some attempt to reach out to those who were different. (Maybe just out of fear, yes, but at least some talking did happen.)
Long term, though, I wonder if there is now more or less bullying at Columbine. Anybody know of any published sources of info on that? My guess is that the culture at Columbine is probably less accepting of bullying than was the case pre-slaughter. I'd love to know if I'm guessing right or wrong.
If a student is harassed for three hours at night on the Web and they come to school and have to sit in the same classroom with the student that's the bully, there is an effect on education
This statement illustrates the problem. Bullying must be tolerated for it to occur. The best person who can deny a bully permission to bully is the bully, himself. That's called self-control and if the bully had it, this issue wouldn't come up. So what's next?
Schools and parents think they can deny a bully permission to be a bully. They can't. They aren't there when the bad guy acts out. They can punish afterward but they can't do a damn thing to stop the bad behavior while it's actually happening. Like training a dog, if the conditioning isn't presented timely, it's useless.
No, there's only one person who can effectively deny a bully permission to bully: the victim. In real life, legal consequences and PC-nonviolent sensibilities be damned, the only effective way to change the behavior of a bully is for his victim-selection process to fail. When he comes across a "victim" who knocks out his teeth instead of cowering in fear, the bully will stop. (For the moment. He may have to be "conditioned" a few times before he truly learns to think before he acts.)
What amazes me about the quote above is that a victim would remain online for hours, getting bullied, while shutting down the bully is a simple matter of turning off IMs (or whatever channel the bully is using to reach the victim) and going on about ones business.
We don't need to protect victims by trying to defend against bullying. We need to teach victims how to short-circuit the whole process. They are the ones with the strongest legitimate interest in seeing the problem solved. They are the *only* ones who are in the right place at the right time to implement solutions. Hit back. Turn off IMs. Whatever, just stop being a victim.
I'm from the U.S., so that colors my perception of what's reasonable for breakfast, but breakfast is a must for me. Most important meal of the day, y'know.:-)
To begin, here are a few randome points from a guy who would happily eat "breakfast" three times a day. One, yes, I like a diet Coke in the morning. Two, I think pancakes and syrup are too sweet and heavy, so a big "pancake breakfast" is not for me. A couple on the side are fine; I just can't imagine an entire breakfast composed of the things. And finally, three, I've seen on a few recent travel shows something referred to as a "traditional English breakfast", a monstrous affair with multiple starches and sausages, eggs, some tomato, and more. Is that real or something they just serve to tourists? Either way, it looks mighty good to me.
But for a *real* breakfast (and to finally answer the headline question), I dearly love a plate with one half covered with eggs (scrambled in a mix of butter and bacon grease) and the other half covered with steamed white rice. Add too much butter and salt to the rice and mix in the middle. Enjoy. A few strips of bacon dropped on top and a glass of milk on the side are worthy additions. Frankly, I might actually order this for my last meal pre-execution; it would be a reasonable choice.
There have been a bunch of comments already and no one has mentioned WebeWeb? I find that strange. I'm at work and filtered, so I can't google for links, but look for "Pierson" (the photographer) and "WebeWeb" (the umbrella site). It seems that the U.S. govt now believes that photographs of clothed children *not* engaged in sexual acts are now child porn. All I can do is shake my head, wonder, and start looking for some sensible place to migrate to when I retire in a few years.
I can empathize. I'll never forget the day my parents were called to the private kindergarten I was attending. I sat in the back of the room and listened as the chief administrator (I don't remember his exact title but I remember that it, oddly, wasn't "principal") told my parents that I was "profoundly retarded" and that they simply didn't have the facilities to handle my needs. He handed them a refund check for my tuition and we left. The walk out, the trip home, and the restaurant stop on the way were all quiet, lonely, weird experiences; I don't think my parents had any good idea how to react.
No, I didn't go on to win a Nobel. But I find it gratifying that when I tell people that story now, more than 40 years later, the first reaction is always disbelief. I guess I was just a late bloomer.
I have problems with this. I'll give the German police some slack and assume they are reasonable enough to only look for people who purchased materials that any reasonable person would look at and say "That's obviously vile child abuse." We cannot, however, trust the police everywhere to be as reasonable.
In the U.S., people are being prosecuted right now for making and selling child porn even though the prosecution agrees that no nudity or sexual activity is depicted. In the U.S., at least one 16 year old girl has been charged with child abuse and child porn production for taking a cell phone picture of herself nude and sending it to a boyfriend. (Yes, the child she was charged with abusing was herself. Think on that a while, but don't blame me if your head explodes.) In the U.S., we have people sitting in jail convicted of possessing child porn for, among other things, having cartoons of young-looking characters having sex. (I'm at work, so filtering prevents me from searching for links; you can google them as easily as I can, though. For the first case, look for "Pierson" who's being prosecuted in Alabama.)
Yes, everyone is probably right that in the instant case this is a reasonable way to proceed. But I'm still not comfortable with it. I don't trust LEOs to not be idiots, to not be grinding political axes. Dangerous stuff, this. If it's backed up with searches that find people in possession, great. But be warned - due to identity theft or whatever reason, there will be some false positives. The people who are the victims of those false positives are just a short distance away from having their lives utterly ruined without adequate justification.
There must be better ways of investigating this sort of thing.
...at the moment. I'm hip-deep in user handholding and re-imaging crashed machines. Here are a few random points, dashed off quickly. If anyone has any questions, feel free to post.
The June 23 White House memo had a 45-day deadline. Everyone has already blown the deadline.
Big props to WinMagic for their marketing. They've been all over the government computer press for the last 1-2 years with press releases and random mentions that make it appear they are the only workable solution. As a result, the agencies that jumped on the bandwagon in time to meet a (seemingly common) end of year deadline have grabbed their SecureDoc software and started installing. My experience with it has been semi-OK. Given that the software is touching every single file on every machine that leaves our physical space, the number of screwups has been acceptable at less than 2%. Our most widespread problems have mostly been a result of insufficient server capacity to deal with all the machines being encrypted at the same time within the last couple of weeks. Whether that was a result of us going cheap on the server side or WinMagic promising that the servers could handle a bigger load than is actually the case, I don't know. I suspect it's a bit of both. Still, things are slowly working out, even if our frontline support staff is going to wind up losing, literally, a month of productivity to the project.
A bunch of the requirements on that DOD checksheet are being ignored by civilian agencies. With no PKI infrastructure in lots of places, plenty of things have to be done "hands on" and the ability to do things like silent installs is out the window.
A bunch of the names on that vendor list are just resellers and of little interest to the slashdot crowd. What's more interesting is the list of products that do the job. THAT list is much, much shorter.
I haven't heard of anyone doing their encryption in hardware, which irritates me. I use hardware-encrypted drives at home and I was looking forward to doing the same thing at work. There is a widespread rumor in my agency that 2 or 3 generations of computer refreshment down the road, we'll transition to encryption in hardware. I hope so.
Deployment instructions are roughed out by the devs and handed to the testing lab. The lab does the trial deployment and if everything goes well, they finalize the instructions. Full deployment then follows. Normally, deployment instructions will continue to be revised based on field feedback throughout our deployments (which are often phased geographically, making it worthwhile and timely to continue upgrading the docs.)
I hardly see how the blind should be allowed to own and operate a firearm. They are 100% incapable of safely using it on their own.... Firearms should only be allowed to those who can distinguish between foes and friends and can hit something that has the ability to move. I'm sorry but blind people just cant do this reliably enough that they should be trusted with using deadly force.
Errors. Many errors. I'll try not to be snarky and just throw out a few things you might not have considered.
A *fully* blind person can tell when he's being robbed, threatened, grabbed, assaulted, beaten. They can easily distinguish a foe at contact distance. At contact distance, 5-in-1 blanks are deadly. Do you see where I'm going with this?
There are a handful of blind people in Texas who have passed the concealed carry test, including the shooting test, and who carry.45 snubbies loaded with blanks. They are no threat to anyone more than a few feet from them, but God help the perp who lays hands on them for some nefarious purpose.
You're saying these people shouldn't be allowed to own guns? That's just silly.
I work for a pretty big place and while I agree with you, we've found that it's nice to have some IT folks who work closely with dev to usher new products to the field. We have a testing lab where dev hands off their work to a mixed IT/dev team (mostly IT) who then upgrade a sample network with the new product. They test against every expected configuration of hardware and software the field is likely to be using. If there are no problems, there's a joint sign-off, the testing team writes deployment instructions (down to the "click here" level) for field techs, and the software is put on a download server and/or pushed. If there are problems, the devs get pulled in for a quick fix and update to the docs. If they can't pull that off, the Lab then sends the software back to the devs and through channels informs the customers of the delay.
It's my impression that this is different from many other large organizations where pre-deployment testing is strictly a dev thing. Technically, that's true of us but the reality is that the testing is done by frontline folks and others who are rotated into the lab and charged with thinking up new and innovative ways to break everything. I hear it's way too much work and a lot of fun at the same time.
One extra feature - every two weeks the IT and dev folks from the testing lab hold a conference call with the front-line techs. They very frankly tell us what's coming, what they're working on, what fixes they've developed recently, etc. The front-line techs are allowed and encouraged (and they take advantage of the opportunity) to vent, complain, suggest, ask for help, etc., directly from the devs, the testers, the customer reps who spec'd the project, the technical analysts, and each other. All this happens in an open, honest forum where there are no reprisals for plainly saying "This stinks and here's why..." even when the executive in charge of said stinky project is on the call.
For a big place (well over 100,000K employees), this system works pretty well.
I then disconnected the network cable from the copier/printer and attached my laptop. As soon as my laptop booted up, DHCP provided a network address and I was on the internal network.
Is everyone that sloppy when they set up networks? Where I work, every jack dedicated to a non-mobile device is exclusively for that device by MAC. Plug in something else and the jack shuts down and an alarm email goes to the telecomm staff every five minutes until the problem is resolved. Jacks used by mobile devices don't shut down that way, but the network still won't allow anything to talk to the network unless the machine name provided by the device is verified. Then logging on requires verification. If the machine name or user account aren't authenticated, there's no communication.
Maybe it's just a copier thing. Some time ago we considered using our copiers as printers and faxes. It sure would be nice to combine those functions. The copier people, however, insisted that the machines be allowed on the network with no real authentification AND insisted that they had to have remote access to those copiers over our network from outside. The copier people really thought that whatever was required (punching firewall holes, dispensing with logon authentification, etc.) we would unhesitatingly do. They were told to go take a hike.
I used to carry BartPE and I still recommend it to budget-constrained folks. However, spending some money for Winternals was one of the best things my employer ever did. It boots faster, comes with more and better tools by default, and gives me the easy network awareness that makes it possible for me to do my job better.
On the free side, when trying to revive the virus-infested home computers of friends, I find Chronomium to be wonderful. You plug in a USB key with a current Clam AV signature file and boot from the disk. It then runs through the drive and deletes all virus-infected files. For a very quick "either fix it or pronounce it fully broken so we can start over" situation, it's without peer.
I remember reading a biography of a chef in which he actually went back to Mexico with members of his kitchen staff to try to find out how they all learned to cook so well... and met their mothers.
I think you're talking about Anthony Bourdain. While he may have also included the info in a book (I would be surprised if he didn't) he definitely went to Mexico and met the mothers of some of his staff in
this epidose of Cook's Tour, his old Food Network TV show.
I know this is off-topic, but when I hear people refer to the NRA as overheated and overpoliticized gun owners, I sigh, and think, "They didn't used to be...."
Relatively speaking, they still aren't.
Every time someone makes a point that the NRA is extreme, I like to point out that to many gun owners the NRA is a bunch of pussies. Compare them to The Second Amendment Foundation or Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. (I'm at work, so filtering prevents me from visiting their sites to gather URLs.) By that measure, the NRA is the voice of reason.
Personally, I take a middle tack. The NRA is the only gun rights organization big enough to make a difference on a national scale, so I support them. However, they have majorly screwed up in more ways than I can count. First, there's PR. Back in the day (until the late 1980s) the NRA was the national governing body for international shooting sports. That meant that the road to the Olympics went through the NRA. The people that worked that program weren't political animals and they failed to defend their turf; the NRA gave up NGB status and let is slide over to U.S. Shooting. That was the single stupidest PR mistake I've ever seen. Almost no one can argue against gun ownership for the purpose of winning Olympic medals, yet the NRA can no longer use that as an example. Way back in the day, it was possible for an NRA rep to hold up a S&W M52 target pistol and say "This is the pistol that Ruby Fox used to win a silver at the L.A. Olympics. We are the organization that provided the infrastructure for that to happen. The assault rifle bill before Congress would ban this gun, thus proving that gun control is a bad thing." (Yes, the original Matzenbaum assault rifle bill, the grandaddy of all that sort of legislation, would have outlawed as "assault rifles" nearly all semiautomatic pistols and shotguns as well as rifles.) The NRA can no longer stand up and say they represent potential Olympians. I'm still shocked that they don't seem to realize what a powerful PR tool they lost when they gave up sanctioning authority.
Another PR error? Here's one, drawn from your own post. You say the NRA has changed. It hasn't. The NRA is still a competition, safety, conservation, and training outfit. All the political stuff belongs to the NRA's Institute for Legislative Action. But does the general public realize that the organization that teaches Boy Scouts and the organization that lobbies Congress are two different things? Not really. The NRA has failed to differentiate, thus contaminating their functions that nearly anyone would agree are wholesome with the stench of their political activities. That's bad PR and I see no way to correct it.
Second, they have wussed out at any number of innopportune times. Check the website of any "NRA watchdog" and you'll find instances when they backed down instead of going for the jugular, usually in the name of preserving future relationships. The earliest I can remember was the so-called "cop killer" bullets, a fiction dreamed up by anti-gun types that the NRA caved on. Now, the notion that there are teflon-coated pistol bullets out there that magically slide through bulletproof vests (and that those objects only exist because the NRA wants them to exist) is ingrained in the minds of most people who don't know any better. It's just crazy. Just this last week, in that Law & Order episode where the escaped con kills all the little schoolgirls, there was an obviously dubbed line thrown in about the bad guy having obtained a.45 with "teflon bullets." Argh! That kind of willful ignorance makes me crazy; if the NRA had done a better job back when they had the chance, such ignorance wouldn't be so common.
Third, they've simply failed far too many times. How in the bloody hell did the machine gun ban get passed? I've seen the video of the voice vote. It wasn't even close to passage, yet the Speaker simply pronounced it p
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From TFA:
Thanks to the author. I'm looking for someplace to retire fairly soon. I'll add those to my list of places to investigate.
Anybody know where I can get the complete list of "pirate-friendly" countries?
I've decided to comment instead of mod since I feel sure you'll get to 5 without me. This:
is the most insightful thing anyone is going to post on this topic. I'm in the middle of assisting with inventory issues in a major TLA. "Missing" laptops (Katrina/flood losses aside) are always explainable in these ways. Last week, a laptop that had been "lost" for over 5 years was found in a cabinet during an office move. Years ago, that laptop went on a public report as "lost." Our inventory tech had to fall on his sword and file paperwork removing it from active inventory because we couldn't find it. It wasn't taken home by anyone, stolen, or improperly passed on to another agency. It was simply misplaced.
Add to this the pallets of used equipment that get diskwiped and then donated to schools, a process often involving running around, looking for every unissued piece of obsolete equipment we can find and quickly doing whatever is necessary to get it onto the pallet, and you have a situation where laptops become "lost" in too-big numbers but without any real threat to anybodys security.
I would only be concerned, really, about two classes of losses. First is the handful (less than 10) that were stolen apparently due to negligence. However, in most of those cases, the data was routinely encrypted and, again, there's no security threat. Second are the 4 laptops that went home with employees when they retired. That's just inexcuseable.
Overall, 150 or so lost laptops in an organization that size is pretty damn good performance.
And I bought a Dreamcast just to play Tetris on a big screen. Somehow, your purchase seems leet and mine seems more than a little tragic. :-)
:-) I never took you up on your kind offer of an account for testing but I would be willing to buy access. I'll drop you an email requesting sign-up particulars.
OT - I notice that you've stuck by the decision to keep the occulus index page as low-key as possible.
This one I've never understood. Why is the default and nearly universal choice to work late as opposed to early? When I need to minimize my impact on business services, I come in at 4AM or some such time. Of course, some of my bosses (not the current, but occasionally in the past) are horrified when I walk out the door at 3:30PM, so I guess you can't win no matter how you approach the problem. Still, early works much better for me; I wonder how much of a minority I'm in regarding this.
I agree wholeheartedly with your viewpoint. Understand, though, that I am more concerned with practical methods to stop the pain than I am with the way the world should be.
Ideally, adults protect children. Practically, they're not around when they're needed so it falls to the victim to actively work to protect himself.
As adults, one of our roles is to teach our kids to handle themselves. When he's confronted by peers who would bully him, he needs the gumption and skills to get himself out of the situation. If we've done our job, he will have emotional and physical skills that place him at parity with any of his peers who would bully him. That's how we protect him - by teaching him how to protect himself.
Of course, it's also up to us to always be watchful and to step in if he's attacked by someone who is *not* his peer - someone older, bigger, sufficiently meaner, or anyone he could not reasonably be expected to stand up to. (I hope that answers your concerns in your second-to-last paragraph.)
Overall, though, the practical creation of happy offspring requires (among a million other things) a transition of responsibility for protection from adult to child. A two-year old shouldn't be expected to do much at all in this arena. A 15-year old should be able to handle anything dished out by his high school classmates or be mature enough to ask for help (which is one of those million other things we teach).
Please understand that at no point do I blame the victim. That's not my intent. The bully is ALWAYS to blame for initiating his thuggish behavior. I can, however, blame the victim for letting things drag on. (I realize that, in itself, sounds harsh. It's not meant to be. It's meant to be merely utilitarian.) Yes, as adults it's our duty to protect the innocent. However, it's also true that victims CAN break the cycle and we, as adults, are failing our children if we don't teach them how.
I wish I could moderate. That's pretty insightful. Yes, kids model the behavior of adults and bullying teachers feature prominently in some of the most vibrant and horrifying memories of my youth.
Yes, I may be working under assumptions that don't apply. However, I maintain that the only bullying that really matters is direct. The rest of it can either be turned off or ignored.
I realize I'm betraying my age by saying this, but who said that putting yourself into and maintaining a presence in cyberbullying arenas is mandatory behavior? IMs to MySpace to whatever - it's all optional. Why do a certain minority of kids insist on going places they don't have to go when doing so only brings them pain? I don't get it. Then again, I'm old enough to view a cell phone as a painful technology to be used only when absolutely necessary and otherwise turned off and ignored. I have a feeling that kids these days are a little too connected to accept that notion.
As to the different, female mode of bullying - I can only say that I'm old enough to have finally accepted that I'll never understand women. I don't even want to go there.
To extend your metaphor, there are two ways to stop a pressure cooker from exploding. One is to let off the steam in a positive way. Talking it out with someone you trust is one way. Exercise is another. Martial arts as therapy has been known to have amazing transformative effects on people.
The other way is to cut off the heat coming into the pressure cooker. A victim can insulate himself from the heat by simply not letting it get to him. Admittedly, that requires more maturity, both emotional and spiritual, than most teens have. Religious devotion can accomplish this. Meditation can, too. I accomplish my meditation via pistol shooting, a wonderfully calming activity that I'd recommend for nearly any troubled teen. Other ways to cut the heat are more external. By striking back, the bully can be convinced to stop applying heat. Sometimes, the authorities (school, police, etc.) can turn down the heat by separating the bully and victim or by punishing the bully.
Both the preceeding paragraphs are intended to answer your question about how to stand up for yourself without going overboard. The physical activity helps relieve pressure and builds confidence so that standing up for yourself becomes easier. The spiritual pursuits help relieve pressure and make standing up for yourself a less fearsome thought.
Overall, though, I think the whole "how to stop the pressure cooker" thing is overrated. Go ahead and let the cooker blow, in a relatively small way, early, before the stored energy is dangerously immense. Just make sure that the explosion is focused against the bully and no one else.
I'm going to take the question seriously because I believe it has some merit. No, indiscriminate death-dealing isn't a reasonable answer. However, I wonder if that extreme case tends to support my position in the long term. In the short term, it certainly did. We saw on the news for sometime after how people were willing to talk about bullying issues and how there was some attempt to reach out to those who were different. (Maybe just out of fear, yes, but at least some talking did happen.)
Long term, though, I wonder if there is now more or less bullying at Columbine. Anybody know of any published sources of info on that? My guess is that the culture at Columbine is probably less accepting of bullying than was the case pre-slaughter. I'd love to know if I'm guessing right or wrong.
...for bullying to occur?
This statement illustrates the problem. Bullying must be tolerated for it to occur. The best person who can deny a bully permission to bully is the bully, himself. That's called self-control and if the bully had it, this issue wouldn't come up. So what's next?
Schools and parents think they can deny a bully permission to be a bully. They can't. They aren't there when the bad guy acts out. They can punish afterward but they can't do a damn thing to stop the bad behavior while it's actually happening. Like training a dog, if the conditioning isn't presented timely, it's useless.
No, there's only one person who can effectively deny a bully permission to bully: the victim. In real life, legal consequences and PC-nonviolent sensibilities be damned, the only effective way to change the behavior of a bully is for his victim-selection process to fail. When he comes across a "victim" who knocks out his teeth instead of cowering in fear, the bully will stop. (For the moment. He may have to be "conditioned" a few times before he truly learns to think before he acts.)
What amazes me about the quote above is that a victim would remain online for hours, getting bullied, while shutting down the bully is a simple matter of turning off IMs (or whatever channel the bully is using to reach the victim) and going on about ones business.
We don't need to protect victims by trying to defend against bullying. We need to teach victims how to short-circuit the whole process. They are the ones with the strongest legitimate interest in seeing the problem solved. They are the *only* ones who are in the right place at the right time to implement solutions. Hit back. Turn off IMs. Whatever, just stop being a victim.
I'm from the U.S., so that colors my perception of what's reasonable for breakfast, but breakfast is a must for me. Most important meal of the day, y'know. :-)
To begin, here are a few randome points from a guy who would happily eat "breakfast" three times a day. One, yes, I like a diet Coke in the morning. Two, I think pancakes and syrup are too sweet and heavy, so a big "pancake breakfast" is not for me. A couple on the side are fine; I just can't imagine an entire breakfast composed of the things. And finally, three, I've seen on a few recent travel shows something referred to as a "traditional English breakfast", a monstrous affair with multiple starches and sausages, eggs, some tomato, and more. Is that real or something they just serve to tourists? Either way, it looks mighty good to me.
But for a *real* breakfast (and to finally answer the headline question), I dearly love a plate with one half covered with eggs (scrambled in a mix of butter and bacon grease) and the other half covered with steamed white rice. Add too much butter and salt to the rice and mix in the middle. Enjoy. A few strips of bacon dropped on top and a glass of milk on the side are worthy additions. Frankly, I might actually order this for my last meal pre-execution; it would be a reasonable choice.
There have been a bunch of comments already and no one has mentioned WebeWeb? I find that strange. I'm at work and filtered, so I can't google for links, but look for "Pierson" (the photographer) and "WebeWeb" (the umbrella site). It seems that the U.S. govt now believes that photographs of clothed children *not* engaged in sexual acts are now child porn. All I can do is shake my head, wonder, and start looking for some sensible place to migrate to when I retire in a few years.
I can empathize. I'll never forget the day my parents were called to the private kindergarten I was attending. I sat in the back of the room and listened as the chief administrator (I don't remember his exact title but I remember that it, oddly, wasn't "principal") told my parents that I was "profoundly retarded" and that they simply didn't have the facilities to handle my needs. He handed them a refund check for my tuition and we left. The walk out, the trip home, and the restaurant stop on the way were all quiet, lonely, weird experiences; I don't think my parents had any good idea how to react.
No, I didn't go on to win a Nobel. But I find it gratifying that when I tell people that story now, more than 40 years later, the first reaction is always disbelief. I guess I was just a late bloomer.
I have problems with this. I'll give the German police some slack and assume they are reasonable enough to only look for people who purchased materials that any reasonable person would look at and say "That's obviously vile child abuse." We cannot, however, trust the police everywhere to be as reasonable.
In the U.S., people are being prosecuted right now for making and selling child porn even though the prosecution agrees that no nudity or sexual activity is depicted. In the U.S., at least one 16 year old girl has been charged with child abuse and child porn production for taking a cell phone picture of herself nude and sending it to a boyfriend. (Yes, the child she was charged with abusing was herself. Think on that a while, but don't blame me if your head explodes.) In the U.S., we have people sitting in jail convicted of possessing child porn for, among other things, having cartoons of young-looking characters having sex. (I'm at work, so filtering prevents me from searching for links; you can google them as easily as I can, though. For the first case, look for "Pierson" who's being prosecuted in Alabama.)
Yes, everyone is probably right that in the instant case this is a reasonable way to proceed. But I'm still not comfortable with it. I don't trust LEOs to not be idiots, to not be grinding political axes. Dangerous stuff, this. If it's backed up with searches that find people in possession, great. But be warned - due to identity theft or whatever reason, there will be some false positives. The people who are the victims of those false positives are just a short distance away from having their lives utterly ruined without adequate justification.
There must be better ways of investigating this sort of thing.
Really? I didn't realize that.
...at the moment. I'm hip-deep in user handholding and re-imaging crashed machines. Here are a few random points, dashed off quickly. If anyone has any questions, feel free to post.
The June 23 White House memo had a 45-day deadline. Everyone has already blown the deadline.
Big props to WinMagic for their marketing. They've been all over the government computer press for the last 1-2 years with press releases and random mentions that make it appear they are the only workable solution. As a result, the agencies that jumped on the bandwagon in time to meet a (seemingly common) end of year deadline have grabbed their SecureDoc software and started installing. My experience with it has been semi-OK. Given that the software is touching every single file on every machine that leaves our physical space, the number of screwups has been acceptable at less than 2%. Our most widespread problems have mostly been a result of insufficient server capacity to deal with all the machines being encrypted at the same time within the last couple of weeks. Whether that was a result of us going cheap on the server side or WinMagic promising that the servers could handle a bigger load than is actually the case, I don't know. I suspect it's a bit of both. Still, things are slowly working out, even if our frontline support staff is going to wind up losing, literally, a month of productivity to the project.
A bunch of the requirements on that DOD checksheet are being ignored by civilian agencies. With no PKI infrastructure in lots of places, plenty of things have to be done "hands on" and the ability to do things like silent installs is out the window.
A bunch of the names on that vendor list are just resellers and of little interest to the slashdot crowd. What's more interesting is the list of products that do the job. THAT list is much, much shorter.
I haven't heard of anyone doing their encryption in hardware, which irritates me. I use hardware-encrypted drives at home and I was looking forward to doing the same thing at work. There is a widespread rumor in my agency that 2 or 3 generations of computer refreshment down the road, we'll transition to encryption in hardware. I hope so.
Deployment instructions are roughed out by the devs and handed to the testing lab. The lab does the trial deployment and if everything goes well, they finalize the instructions. Full deployment then follows. Normally, deployment instructions will continue to be revised based on field feedback throughout our deployments (which are often phased geographically, making it worthwhile and timely to continue upgrading the docs.)
Errors. Many errors. I'll try not to be snarky and just throw out a few things you might not have considered.
A *fully* blind person can tell when he's being robbed, threatened, grabbed, assaulted, beaten. They can easily distinguish a foe at contact distance. At contact distance, 5-in-1 blanks are deadly. Do you see where I'm going with this?
There are a handful of blind people in Texas who have passed the concealed carry test, including the shooting test, and who carry .45 snubbies loaded with blanks. They are no threat to anyone more than a few feet from them, but God help the perp who lays hands on them for some nefarious purpose.
You're saying these people shouldn't be allowed to own guns? That's just silly.
1. Call 911.
2. Seize cop car that arrives.
3. Sell cop car.
4. Repeat.
5. Profit.
I work for a pretty big place and while I agree with you, we've found that it's nice to have some IT folks who work closely with dev to usher new products to the field. We have a testing lab where dev hands off their work to a mixed IT/dev team (mostly IT) who then upgrade a sample network with the new product. They test against every expected configuration of hardware and software the field is likely to be using. If there are no problems, there's a joint sign-off, the testing team writes deployment instructions (down to the "click here" level) for field techs, and the software is put on a download server and/or pushed. If there are problems, the devs get pulled in for a quick fix and update to the docs. If they can't pull that off, the Lab then sends the software back to the devs and through channels informs the customers of the delay.
It's my impression that this is different from many other large organizations where pre-deployment testing is strictly a dev thing. Technically, that's true of us but the reality is that the testing is done by frontline folks and others who are rotated into the lab and charged with thinking up new and innovative ways to break everything. I hear it's way too much work and a lot of fun at the same time.
One extra feature - every two weeks the IT and dev folks from the testing lab hold a conference call with the front-line techs. They very frankly tell us what's coming, what they're working on, what fixes they've developed recently, etc. The front-line techs are allowed and encouraged (and they take advantage of the opportunity) to vent, complain, suggest, ask for help, etc., directly from the devs, the testers, the customer reps who spec'd the project, the technical analysts, and each other. All this happens in an open, honest forum where there are no reprisals for plainly saying "This stinks and here's why..." even when the executive in charge of said stinky project is on the call.
For a big place (well over 100,000K employees), this system works pretty well.
Kudos to daddypants for correcting the link timely.
when I read
Is everyone that sloppy when they set up networks? Where I work, every jack dedicated to a non-mobile device is exclusively for that device by MAC. Plug in something else and the jack shuts down and an alarm email goes to the telecomm staff every five minutes until the problem is resolved. Jacks used by mobile devices don't shut down that way, but the network still won't allow anything to talk to the network unless the machine name provided by the device is verified. Then logging on requires verification. If the machine name or user account aren't authenticated, there's no communication.
Maybe it's just a copier thing. Some time ago we considered using our copiers as printers and faxes. It sure would be nice to combine those functions. The copier people, however, insisted that the machines be allowed on the network with no real authentification AND insisted that they had to have remote access to those copiers over our network from outside. The copier people really thought that whatever was required (punching firewall holes, dispensing with logon authentification, etc.) we would unhesitatingly do. They were told to go take a hike.
I used to carry BartPE and I still recommend it to budget-constrained folks. However, spending some money for Winternals was one of the best things my employer ever did. It boots faster, comes with more and better tools by default, and gives me the easy network awareness that makes it possible for me to do my job better.
On the free side, when trying to revive the virus-infested home computers of friends, I find Chronomium to be wonderful. You plug in a USB key with a current Clam AV signature file and boot from the disk. It then runs through the drive and deletes all virus-infected files. For a very quick "either fix it or pronounce it fully broken so we can start over" situation, it's without peer.
I think you're talking about Anthony Bourdain. While he may have also included the info in a book (I would be surprised if he didn't) he definitely went to Mexico and met the mothers of some of his staff in this epidose of Cook's Tour, his old Food Network TV show.
Relatively speaking, they still aren't.
Every time someone makes a point that the NRA is extreme, I like to point out that to many gun owners the NRA is a bunch of pussies. Compare them to The Second Amendment Foundation or Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. (I'm at work, so filtering prevents me from visiting their sites to gather URLs.) By that measure, the NRA is the voice of reason.
Personally, I take a middle tack. The NRA is the only gun rights organization big enough to make a difference on a national scale, so I support them. However, they have majorly screwed up in more ways than I can count. First, there's PR. Back in the day (until the late 1980s) the NRA was the national governing body for international shooting sports. That meant that the road to the Olympics went through the NRA. The people that worked that program weren't political animals and they failed to defend their turf; the NRA gave up NGB status and let is slide over to U.S. Shooting. That was the single stupidest PR mistake I've ever seen. Almost no one can argue against gun ownership for the purpose of winning Olympic medals, yet the NRA can no longer use that as an example. Way back in the day, it was possible for an NRA rep to hold up a S&W M52 target pistol and say "This is the pistol that Ruby Fox used to win a silver at the L.A. Olympics. We are the organization that provided the infrastructure for that to happen. The assault rifle bill before Congress would ban this gun, thus proving that gun control is a bad thing." (Yes, the original Matzenbaum assault rifle bill, the grandaddy of all that sort of legislation, would have outlawed as "assault rifles" nearly all semiautomatic pistols and shotguns as well as rifles.) The NRA can no longer stand up and say they represent potential Olympians. I'm still shocked that they don't seem to realize what a powerful PR tool they lost when they gave up sanctioning authority.
Another PR error? Here's one, drawn from your own post. You say the NRA has changed. It hasn't. The NRA is still a competition, safety, conservation, and training outfit. All the political stuff belongs to the NRA's Institute for Legislative Action. But does the general public realize that the organization that teaches Boy Scouts and the organization that lobbies Congress are two different things? Not really. The NRA has failed to differentiate, thus contaminating their functions that nearly anyone would agree are wholesome with the stench of their political activities. That's bad PR and I see no way to correct it.
Second, they have wussed out at any number of innopportune times. Check the website of any "NRA watchdog" and you'll find instances when they backed down instead of going for the jugular, usually in the name of preserving future relationships. The earliest I can remember was the so-called "cop killer" bullets, a fiction dreamed up by anti-gun types that the NRA caved on. Now, the notion that there are teflon-coated pistol bullets out there that magically slide through bulletproof vests (and that those objects only exist because the NRA wants them to exist) is ingrained in the minds of most people who don't know any better. It's just crazy. Just this last week, in that Law & Order episode where the escaped con kills all the little schoolgirls, there was an obviously dubbed line thrown in about the bad guy having obtained a .45 with "teflon bullets." Argh! That kind of willful ignorance makes me crazy; if the NRA had done a better job back when they had the chance, such ignorance wouldn't be so common.
Third, they've simply failed far too many times. How in the bloody hell did the machine gun ban get passed? I've seen the video of the voice vote. It wasn't even close to passage, yet the Speaker simply pronounced it p