Believe me, I went through this in a major way, since I grew up in a sports-loving-intellectual-hating public school. Here's what helped me break out of it:
1) The kid should make no apologies for his brains. Unfortunately, many such kids are bright enough to realize that people like you if you're stupid, and thus try to act like an idiot to try to make friends.
2) Show the kid that social issues can be solved just like mathematical and scientific problems. Individual people, especially children aged 8-12, are pretty easy to predict, so encourage the kid to try experimenting with various approaches, changes in appearance, etc, and noticing how each classmate reacts. You might try having the nerd take notes and create a report findings to the teacher, and if their not inflammatory, to the rest of the class.
3) Provide opportunities for the kid's intelligence to be used to the benefit of classmates in a context which matters to them. For instance, give them a mathematical puzzle to solve as a group with a reward based on how quickly they can do it. Suddenly a nerdy kid becomes useful, and everybody's friend.
4) Make sure the kid knows that eventually the nerds win. Big time. They control almost everything, from sciences to many businesses to sports teams to governments. Also make it clear that bullying is a sign of weakness, not strength.
5) Let him find some nerdy friends. They often exist.
------------- Here are some ideas which you should never ever ever try: 1) Don't blame the nerd for bullies. Teaching a nerd not to be a victim is fine, but to blame the nerd is to tell him that you support the bullies. Dumber kids might not see that connection, but a nerd definitely will.
2) Don't give the nerd self-help books. That just encourages more reading and less social behavior, which makes matters worse.
3) Don't force the nerd to spend time with a particular classmate. The nerd doesn't enjoy it, because the classmate is clearly pretending to be a friend, while the classmate immediately resents the nerds presence because it was imposed by an adult. No one wins.
I hope the guy who invented this glider doesn't use performance-enhancers, go insane, and start blowing up New York while wearing a Green Goblin costume.
Re:The C++ Programming Language
on
Practical C++
·
· Score: 1
Stroustrup, as you might know, was one of those who invented C++, so like K&R it's the standard work on the subject. I learned C++ just fine in the course of a week, starting with a solid C and Java background.
As Murphy and others have pointed out, it's the flaw you don't test for that gets you every time. There are an infinite number of things that can go wrong, and a finite number of things you can test. The idea that you could somehow plan for every contingency is what stops many a promising project.
I don't think people like Richard Stallman, Ken Thompson, and Eric Raymond want to be put in the same category as Kevin Mitnick and Cap'n Crunch. Lumping them together seems to me like an opportunity for Darl McBride to go "Look! All the Linux people are really crooked hackers!"
Another lawyers perspective: An appropriate legal response from IBM's lawyers is the following:
Honerable ______:
Plaintiff has got to be kidding.
Respectfully Submitted,...
This has been used in actual legal practice, and in the case in question the resulting ruling was: "Plaintiff's motion denied for reasons best stated in the defendent's response."
The NYTimes article mentioned in passing the work started Bev Harris, as described in her book,and said that "Diebold stated that the code used by the researchers, which had been taken from a company Internet site and circulated online...". What actually happened is that supposedly private code, which no one should have been able to get to, was left in a wide open FTP server. And these are the guys we're supposed to trust with our elections. At this point I can't figure out whether Diebold's lack of security is due to malice or incompetance.
Before jumping on the repeal property rights bandwagon, we should note that the Swathmore students could have easily gotten around the copyright issue by paraphrasing and writing their own original work drawn from the emails.
If the Swarthmore students had paraphrased Diebold's memos or written their own interpretation, would they have had the slightest chance of anyone believing them? For example, if I wrote in a blog that I had produced evidence that John Ashcroft was hellbent on world domination, chances are I'd be ignored (by all except the US DOJ) or laughed at.
Perhaps The SCO Group's legal department would have put better use to their time producing evidence of the so-called contract infringement by Monday. Any recipient of the notice should at least wait until Monday to see whether the judge dismisses the case (translation out of legalspeak: Boies and Co get laughed out of court) due to lack of such evidence, which I've seen nothing to indicate they have.
I expect that the following announcement was heard in SCO offices: "Thank you for pressing the self-destruct button. The company will implode in 6 days."
The article was targeting those people who actually believe The SCum Group when they say that the GPL is illegal. My impression was that the point was to settle the PHB's fear that Linux would get them into legal trouble. In that, I think the article succeeds admirably.
But is this really "News for Nerds"? Most of us know about the GPL and BSD Liscenses at least. More like "News for Suits".
So a lot of folks have talked about how to reduce intake, deal with the withdrawal, etc. But for those who are not as of yet addicted to caffeine, here's what I use to keep the amount I drink sane:
1. I found quickly that the less caffeine I drank, the more 1 dose would do for me. I went from 1 soda being worth 1 hour of alertness to around 4 hours. So if you start feeling the urge at 8 AM, remember that it will cost you at 8 PM when the project is due the next day.
2. Decaf, Decaf, Decaf, Decaf. (Geez, I'm starting to sound like Steve Balmer.) Separate out the habit of drinking coffee, tea, soda, whatever with the caffeine rush.
3. Don't give yourself a reason to need to stay alert for more time continuously than you can reasonably handle. That means avoiding all-nighters, long days, and procrastination. If you aren't able to get the work done without caffeine, that means you have too much to do. Remember Scotty's method of reporting how long a task takes (The time it should take * 3).
4. Remember that when on caffeine or other mind-altering substances you lose a bit of your judgement. Yes, you will feel more awake, but that segmentation fault error will be more obscure drugged late at night than it will the next morning.
Hope this helps someone avoid becoming a coffee freak.
Slashdot should change it's slogan to "News for Everyone. Stuff that matters." Then my non-nerd friends won't be confused when I talk about CowboyNeal.
I think you have it somewhat wrong on the Homeland Security Dept. Here's my analysis: If the Homeland Security Dept is supposed to be protecting the citizens of the United States from outside attackers, then what is the Defense Dept defending?
The most major change for me was that I could not get through an airport without being searched relatively thoroughly around 4 times apiece. I invariably, over 8 different airports, was singled out. The only reason for this so-called random selection (odds around 1:40000) that I could see was my longish hair and choice of wearing a beard. In other words, I somehow meet the profile of a terrorist.
However, the good news is that I happen to live near a free country (Canada), and have considered many times to see whether I can part Lake Erie to lead as many of my people as will come to safety.
In all honesty, I expected the Patriot Act sort of thing to happen soon after Bush's coup. 9/11 was for me, as soon as I had determined the extent of what had happened, the excuse to create a police state. For all I know, the president might know the exact location of bin Laden, or even be cooperating with him a la Attack of the Clones.
And don't worry, I expect to be arrested for saying... Oh S@$!T!!!!!!!
As one of the 'Precious Few'
on
The Stallman Factor
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
As someone who counts himself among those who have little opinion of Stallman, I can say this much:
No one will deny RMS' dedication to the cause of Free software, nor his contribution to the *nix world. When we have defeated the evil demons of closed formats and binary-only distrobutions, the FSF will be rightly honored as a group that started the revolution. Furthermore, GNU software has a well-earned reputation for being the most stable in existance.
That said, putting GNU/ before everything smacks to me as the sort of brand-naming that goes on in the commercial software world. It's the equivalent of saying, "It's not Acrobat, it's Adobe Acrobat." Surely we are able to give credit where credit is due without putting the name of an organization on it.
You could say that RMS is stubborn and unwilling to change, but that is precisely what made it possible for him to do what he did.
If this law is past, I think we can watch the video game business collapse. Every study I've seen, and personal experience confirms, that the majority of gamers get into gaming in early adolescence and continue playing into their adulthood. The vast majority of games out there feature violence as the whole point of the game, as anyone who has tried out Quake, Unreal Tournament, Rune, etc. would know.
To counter the argument that game makers just need to make different sorts of games for minors, we just need to realize that the target audience is boys between the ages of 13 and 20, who as a general rule want more sex and violence.
Finally, violence really isn't a good gauge on the harmfulness of a game. EverQuest is far worse than Quake, having some of the same effects as drugs.
It seems, given the current political situation, that the 2% tax would pass, the money go directly to RIAA members, and the "free download" sites would mysteriously never appear. Remember, this comes from an industry that's perfectly willing to rip off artists and consumers (and I say this as a musician, not as a disgruntled customer), and I'm sure they're not above forcing everyone in the country to line the pockets of record company executives.
Copyright law was intended to protect writers, musicians, actors, etc from being exploited by groups of people who want to profit off of mass reproduction of creative work. Record labels fit that definition exactly. As long as the people who put actual artistic effort into a work are payed, then it is a valid copyright system.
First of all the public television and radio in the US is mostly supported by donations rather than the government.
PBS, in my experience watching it, broadcasts mostly children's and educational programs during the day (e.g. Sesame Street, Mr Rodgers Neighborhood) and concentrates on news and political discussions in the evenings.
In response to your other question, the few really good shows I've seen come out of the American commercial television world are, in no particular order: South Park, The Daily Show (Although most of their jokes are American-oriented), Stargate, The Simpsons (when it ran), Family Guy, and according to some Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You'll note that many of these have some pointed social commentary, which is part of a good show IMHO. My impression is that there are a few people (Matt Groening among them) in American television who are interested in saying something important, rather than producing drivel.
This is not to disparage the fine institution of the BBC, which has produced many of the finest films and programmes in the world. I consider the BBC to be a better source for international news than American news organizations. All I'm saying is that not everything produced here is hyped crap.
RMS argued that the bit about "all your modifications are belong to us" was really denying you the rights he finds important. I beg to differ.
By the looks of things, there's no restriction on you modifying the gode, with the exception that you must make your modifications available to the company. This would be sort of like forcing everyone who hacks the linux kernel to send in patches, which could be a useful thing to do. But there's no restriction on people messing with the code in the first place.
I'm not saying this software is free by Stallman's definition, but perhaps this is not quite as bad as he makes it out to be.
OS competition, if nothing else, motivates everyone to write better software (unless you're a monopolist, but we won't get into that). As a linux partisan, I say "Bring it on"
I weas just going to point out, in relation the signal to noise ratio, that your post right here could easily be considered part of the noise. Slashdot is full of people like myself who like to talk, and so we all do, with only the modding system to keep some of us sane or doing work.
Of course there's a problem of shifting through the garbage that bombards your senses. I deal with that problem every time I go to a library, or step outside in a city, or turn on the television set. In some ways, I find that the 'net is better at allowing me to filter out the crap than paper-based information sources. And I'm not just talking about google's ability to thwart pages' attempts to up their ratings, but also that if you truly want you can only visit a few websites and not deal with anything else.
Although as Mr. Carlin noted nearly 10 years ago, the two men running the Gulf War were named Dick Cheney and Colin Powell. This is still true. And we all know what happens when you combine a dick with a colon.
I've been considering the move since GWB got elected. All it would take for me is about 35 miles, assuming I can part Lake Erie. So maybe we can call upon some higher power to aid the chosen people of the Geeks and give them freedom from Phar^H^H^H^HBill Gates.
Slashdot Mirror
Believe me, I went through this in a major way, since I grew up in a sports-loving-intellectual-hating public school. Here's what helped me break out of it:
1) The kid should make no apologies for his brains. Unfortunately, many such kids are bright enough to realize that people like you if you're stupid, and thus try to act like an idiot to try to make friends.
2) Show the kid that social issues can be solved just like mathematical and scientific problems. Individual people, especially children aged 8-12, are pretty easy to predict, so encourage the kid to try experimenting with various approaches, changes in appearance, etc, and noticing how each classmate reacts. You might try having the nerd take notes and create a report findings to the teacher, and if their not inflammatory, to the rest of the class.
3) Provide opportunities for the kid's intelligence to be used to the benefit of classmates in a context which matters to them. For instance, give them a mathematical puzzle to solve as a group with a reward based on how quickly they can do it. Suddenly a nerdy kid becomes useful, and everybody's friend.
4) Make sure the kid knows that eventually the nerds win. Big time. They control almost everything, from sciences to many businesses to sports teams to governments. Also make it clear that bullying is a sign of weakness, not strength.
5) Let him find some nerdy friends. They often exist.
-------------
Here are some ideas which you should never ever ever try:
1) Don't blame the nerd for bullies. Teaching a nerd not to be a victim is fine, but to blame the nerd is to tell him that you support the bullies. Dumber kids might not see that connection, but a nerd definitely will.
2) Don't give the nerd self-help books. That just encourages more reading and less social behavior, which makes matters worse.
3) Don't force the nerd to spend time with a particular classmate. The nerd doesn't enjoy it, because the classmate is clearly pretending to be a friend, while the classmate immediately resents the nerds presence because it was imposed by an adult. No one wins.
I hope the guy who invented this glider doesn't use performance-enhancers, go insane, and start blowing up New York while wearing a Green Goblin costume.
Stroustrup, as you might know, was one of those who invented C++, so like K&R it's the standard work on the subject. I learned C++ just fine in the course of a week, starting with a solid C and Java background.
As Murphy and others have pointed out, it's the flaw you don't test for that gets you every time. There are an infinite number of things that can go wrong, and a finite number of things you can test. The idea that you could somehow plan for every contingency is what stops many a promising project.
I don't think people like Richard Stallman, Ken Thompson, and Eric Raymond want to be put in the same category as Kevin Mitnick and Cap'n Crunch. Lumping them together seems to me like an opportunity for Darl McBride to go "Look! All the Linux people are really crooked hackers!"
Another lawyers perspective:
...
An appropriate legal response from IBM's lawyers is the following:
Honerable ______:
Plaintiff has got to be kidding.
Respectfully Submitted,
This has been used in actual legal practice, and in the case in question the resulting ruling was:
"Plaintiff's motion denied for reasons best stated in the defendent's response."
The NYTimes article mentioned in passing the work started Bev Harris, as described in her book ,and said that "Diebold stated that the code used by the researchers, which had been taken from a company Internet site and circulated online...". What actually happened is that supposedly private code, which no one should have been able to get to, was left in a wide open FTP server. And these are the guys we're supposed to trust with our elections. At this point I can't figure out whether Diebold's lack of security is due to malice or incompetance.
If you really wanted to DoS SCO, why not just use the Slashdot Effect, like this: litigous bastards
April Fools! Nice joke, Id.
Today some full-size color images are available.
/. gets to them.
Available, that is, until
Perhaps The SCO Group's legal department would have put better use to their time producing evidence of the so-called contract infringement by Monday. Any recipient of the notice should at least wait until Monday to see whether the judge dismisses the case (translation out of legalspeak: Boies and Co get laughed out of court) due to lack of such evidence, which I've seen nothing to indicate they have.
I expect that the following announcement was heard in SCO offices: "Thank you for pressing the self-destruct button. The company will implode in 6 days."
The article was targeting those people who actually believe The SCum Group when they say that the GPL is illegal. My impression was that the point was to settle the PHB's fear that Linux would get them into legal trouble. In that, I think the article succeeds admirably.
But is this really "News for Nerds"? Most of us know about the GPL and BSD Liscenses at least. More like "News for Suits".
So a lot of folks have talked about how to reduce intake, deal with the withdrawal, etc. But for those who are not as of yet addicted to caffeine, here's what I use to keep the amount I drink sane:
1. I found quickly that the less caffeine I drank, the more 1 dose would do for me. I went from 1 soda being worth 1 hour of alertness to around 4 hours. So if you start feeling the urge at 8 AM, remember that it will cost you at 8 PM when the project is due the next day.
2. Decaf, Decaf, Decaf, Decaf. (Geez, I'm starting to sound like Steve Balmer.) Separate out the habit of drinking coffee, tea, soda, whatever with the caffeine rush.
3. Don't give yourself a reason to need to stay alert for more time continuously than you can reasonably handle. That means avoiding all-nighters, long days, and procrastination. If you aren't able to get the work done without caffeine, that means you have too much to do. Remember Scotty's method of reporting how long a task takes (The time it should take * 3).
4. Remember that when on caffeine or other mind-altering substances you lose a bit of your judgement. Yes, you will feel more awake, but that segmentation fault error will be more obscure drugged late at night than it will the next morning.
Hope this helps someone avoid becoming a coffee freak.
Slashdot should change it's slogan to "News for Everyone. Stuff that matters." Then my non-nerd friends won't be confused when I talk about CowboyNeal.
I think you have it somewhat wrong on the Homeland Security Dept. Here's my analysis: If the Homeland Security Dept is supposed to be protecting the citizens of the United States from outside attackers, then what is the Defense Dept defending?
The most major change for me was that I could not get through an airport without being searched relatively thoroughly around 4 times apiece. I invariably, over 8 different airports, was singled out. The only reason for this so-called random selection (odds around 1:40000) that I could see was my longish hair and choice of wearing a beard. In other words, I somehow meet the profile of a terrorist.
... Oh S@$!T!!!!!!!
However, the good news is that I happen to live near a free country (Canada), and have considered many times to see whether I can part Lake Erie to lead as many of my people as will come to safety.
In all honesty, I expected the Patriot Act sort of thing to happen soon after Bush's coup. 9/11 was for me, as soon as I had determined the extent of what had happened, the excuse to create a police state. For all I know, the president might know the exact location of bin Laden, or even be cooperating with him a la Attack of the Clones.
And don't worry, I expect to be arrested for saying
As someone who counts himself among those who have little opinion of Stallman, I can say this much:
No one will deny RMS' dedication to the cause of Free software, nor his contribution to the *nix world. When we have defeated the evil demons of closed formats and binary-only distrobutions, the FSF will be rightly honored as a group that started the revolution. Furthermore, GNU software has a well-earned reputation for being the most stable in existance.
That said, putting GNU/ before everything smacks to me as the sort of brand-naming that goes on in the commercial software world. It's the equivalent of saying, "It's not Acrobat, it's Adobe Acrobat." Surely we are able to give credit where credit is due without putting the name of an organization on it.
You could say that RMS is stubborn and unwilling to change, but that is precisely what made it possible for him to do what he did.
If this law is past, I think we can watch the video game business collapse. Every study I've seen, and personal experience confirms, that the majority of gamers get into gaming in early adolescence and continue playing into their adulthood. The vast majority of games out there feature violence as the whole point of the game, as anyone who has tried out Quake, Unreal Tournament, Rune, etc. would know.
To counter the argument that game makers just need to make different sorts of games for minors, we just need to realize that the target audience is boys between the ages of 13 and 20, who as a general rule want more sex and violence.
Finally, violence really isn't a good gauge on the harmfulness of a game. EverQuest is far worse than Quake, having some of the same effects as drugs.
It seems, given the current political situation, that the 2% tax would pass, the money go directly to RIAA members, and the "free download" sites would mysteriously never appear. Remember, this comes from an industry that's perfectly willing to rip off artists and consumers (and I say this as a musician, not as a disgruntled customer), and I'm sure they're not above forcing everyone in the country to line the pockets of record company executives.
Copyright law was intended to protect writers, musicians, actors, etc from being exploited by groups of people who want to profit off of mass reproduction of creative work. Record labels fit that definition exactly. As long as the people who put actual artistic effort into a work are payed, then it is a valid copyright system.
First of all the public television and radio in the US is mostly supported by donations rather than the government.
PBS, in my experience watching it, broadcasts mostly children's and educational programs during the day (e.g. Sesame Street, Mr Rodgers Neighborhood) and concentrates on news and political discussions in the evenings.
In response to your other question, the few really good shows I've seen come out of the American commercial television world are, in no particular order: South Park, The Daily Show (Although most of their jokes are American-oriented), Stargate, The Simpsons (when it ran), Family Guy, and according to some Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You'll note that many of these have some pointed social commentary, which is part of a good show IMHO. My impression is that there are a few people (Matt Groening among them) in American television who are interested in saying something important, rather than producing drivel.
This is not to disparage the fine institution of the BBC, which has produced many of the finest films and programmes in the world. I consider the BBC to be a better source for international news than American news organizations. All I'm saying is that not everything produced here is hyped crap.
RMS argued that the bit about "all your modifications are belong to us" was really denying you the rights he finds important. I beg to differ.
By the looks of things, there's no restriction on you modifying the gode, with the exception that you must make your modifications available to the company. This would be sort of like forcing everyone who hacks the linux kernel to send in patches, which could be a useful thing to do. But there's no restriction on people messing with the code in the first place.
I'm not saying this software is free by Stallman's definition, but perhaps this is not quite as bad as he makes it out to be.
OS competition, if nothing else, motivates everyone to write better software (unless you're a monopolist, but we won't get into that). As a linux partisan, I say "Bring it on"
I weas just going to point out, in relation the signal to noise ratio, that your post right here could easily be considered part of the noise. Slashdot is full of people like myself who like to talk, and so we all do, with only the modding system to keep some of us sane or doing work.
Of course there's a problem of shifting through the garbage that bombards your senses. I deal with that problem every time I go to a library, or step outside in a city, or turn on the television set. In some ways, I find that the 'net is better at allowing me to filter out the crap than paper-based information sources. And I'm not just talking about google's ability to thwart pages' attempts to up their ratings, but also that if you truly want you can only visit a few websites and not deal with anything else.
Although as Mr. Carlin noted nearly 10 years ago, the two men running the Gulf War were named Dick Cheney and Colin Powell. This is still true. And we all know what happens when you combine a dick with a colon.
I've been considering the move since GWB got elected. All it would take for me is about 35 miles, assuming I can part Lake Erie. So maybe we can call upon some higher power to aid the chosen people of the Geeks and give them freedom from Phar^H^H^H^HBill Gates.