The vast majority of multiple murderers are middle class white males, not poor folk. And in places like I grew up in Alaska, where lterraly every 10-year old has a rifle and several knives, we had zero problems with violence, because we were taught to have respect for damage that weapons can do. Anyway, your applying the same "Post hoc, ergo proctor hoc" fallacy to all three "causes".
I have a couple of cousins who were given semi-automatic rifles for their 16th birthdays by their parents. The only thing they've ever killed with said rifles is wild boars and other sundry Florida game animals. Oh, and they also played video games growing up, at least some of which were violent, but somehow, they managed not to go shooting up their highschool.
The problem in cases like the one we're discussing is that we have kids who don't fit in at school, endured merciless teasing, and who likely don't have the greatest contact with reality. Given the right combination of factors, the kid probably snapped. There is something wrong with a society where the kind of teasing and harrasment that the boy and his brother endured is allowed to continue. Someone at his school should have stepped in and punished the kids who were tormenting him. Unfortunately, it is still socially acceptable for people to make fun of nerds, which is something that we need to work to change.
Other things have been done to make the sports more accessable for the viewer. HDTV is probably the most pronounced, but other things (many of which have been mentioned) - constant scoreboards on the screen, 1st and 10 lines in football, glowing pucks, and even instant replay have done a lot to improve what the viewer knows about what they are watching.
There are several sports that I suspect would gain a bigger fan base if everyone had HDTV widescreen. I would like watching hockey on TV a lot better if I could see the whole playing surface and see how the plays develop, but on TV you lose a lot. Same thing with football (and yes, I will call soccer what the rest of the world calls it--football). On TV, it's hard to see things develop because you get to see such a small part of the field (it's not so bad watching on Univision, but American stations are terrible). In person, it's a great sport, but Americans are never going to figure that out if they only see it the way it is on TV now.
Considering what I've heard about African phone service from a professor I had who lived in Africa for a number of years, I would venture to say that VoIP would be an improvement on what they have now. In many parts of Africa, the phone lines are in such bad condition (poorly spliced together, full of dirt and the like), that you're lucky if you can have a conversation through all the static. If they were able to implement Wi-Fi so that it was available to a broad enough segment of the country that people in remote villages could have internet access, VoIP could revolutionize the lives of the average African villager.
Remember, we aren't talking just about business, we are talking about empowering the little guy to have access to the outside world. The more access to means of communication, the less they can be controlled and oppressed by others.
After that my signature diminished to my first and last initials with little squiggly lines after each. You know, like celebrities sign autographs...
That's the way I sign my name too, and whenever I pay for anything, the salesperson almost always makes a comment about me being a doctor or something, which has gotten so tiresome that I've almost decided to go and write all the letters in my name, though that's a major pain.
My dad only has about two letters left in his signature (out of 15 in his name), and when he signed the FAFSA for my college financial aid, they sent it back and said that he had to write his whole name out, even though his legal signature is the illegible squiggle. It's hard to fake my dad's real signature, but seems that the government would rather have a full name that anybody could write out and no way to prove that it's really my dad because he never signs anything that way.
I don't know about other countries, but I do know that in Bangledesh, some years back an economist started the Grameen Bank, a micro-finance bank geared toward the poorest of the poor (landless women, primarily), which has become the model for micro-finance institutions started all over the world. Anyway, several years ago, the Grameen Bank branched out and started offering cell phone service with the model that a person in the village would get a micro-loan to purchase the phone which the person would then use as a small business--everyone in the village would go through that person if they needed to use a phone, paying a fee to use it. The result is that Bangledesh has a pretty decent cell phone infrastructure. My brother was there a couple of months back and said that there are advertisements all over the place for Grameen Phone.
I have a Honeywell HEPA airfilter that I have in my dorm room. It works great in filtering out the dust and mold (I've gotten a lot fewer sinus infections since I got it). The great thing about HEPA filters is that the longer you wait to change the filter, the better it is at filtering the air. They aren't that expensive (under $100 for my small one), and they work wonders. I've never had any problems, and the only thing you need to do is to replace the charcoal pre-filter every 3 months, which isn't much trouble.
But how many of todays popular culture addicts would sit down with a copy of Plato's works and read through it? Yes, it may very well enlighten them, and yes they'd learn a lot from it... But hell, these are the same people that watch WWE wrestling religously.:P
I, for one, have read Plato, and not only Plato, also Decartes, Hume, and Kant, and part of the reason that I like The Matrix is because I see influences from all those philosophers in the movie. Sure, bring up Plato, that one's easy, but unless you can also find the influence of Decartes, Hume, and Kant, then don't go around making fun of everyone else.
Hmm, good point. I suspect that eventually cable will get a larger percentage than it has now, but the late adopters sometimes take years to finally adopt the technology. My parents finally gave in and got cable last year. The reason we never had cable was because they didn't see any real "killer app" so to speak, that necessitated adopting the technology and adding the extra bill every month. What finally caused them to cave in and get it was wanting to watch sports programming that we couldn't get with regular broadcast stations. Or, in other words, they wanted to watch hockey, and the only way they could do that was with cable. Since they've had cable, they've discovered other reasons why they want it (24 hour news channels, especially), but if it wasn't for ESPN and the local sports channel that shows all the hockey games, they wouldn't have gotten it to begin with.
I think that it's pretty much the same for the internet--for the late adopters of technology, the one single killer app that would cause them to get internet access hasn't come along yet. For different people, that app will be different, but I think that gradually, more people will be getting online, it will just be at a very slow pace. I have relatives who are in their 70s who have been online for several years. For them, e-mail was the big reason for getting online--my family is spread across the country, and communication is much easier with e-mail. On the other hand, I had a coworker at a department store who saw absolutely no reason to get a computer, or to use her son's computer, even though he lived right next door. Her reasoning was that one son lived next door, the other one lived with her, and she didn't have anyone else whou she would want to communicate with, so why shell out the money for yet another thing to learn how to use (plus, if she became computer literate, her bosses would come up with more things for her to do, on top of all the things she didn't have time to do already).
Is a tiny phone--small enough to fit on my keychain would be nice. I don't want video, I don't want a camera, I don't want a PDA, I just want a phone that does what a phone is supposed to do--call people.
How did they get the first film so right and the second one so wrong? *pounds head against wall*
I would argue that the plot deviations that were introduced in TTT were the logical result of the "minor" plot changes that were made in Fellowship. For example, all that absurdity with the Aragorn/Arwen story that was introduced in TTT is the direct result of expanding the role of Arwen in Fellowship--the changes made it a plot necessity to expand the Arwen story in TTT. If Jackson had stuck with the plot in Fellowship, that whole mess wouldn't have happened.
I would also argue that the Faramir debacle is a direct result of the change in focus that Jackson introduced in Fellowship. He sees the central story of the books as the way that no one in Middle Earth can resist the ring, and added the scene of Aragorn being tempted to take the ring. It would not have fit with the story as he started to tell it to have Faramir to be able to withstand the power of the ring when even Aragorn was almost overcome. If Jackson had stuck with the plot, we wouldn't have had the Faramir mess.
By about halfway through the movie, the only way that my sister and I retained our sanity was by making peanut gallery comments and making fun of the Arwen/Aragorn subplot (if that whole thing was supposed to draw in the female audience, it certainly didn't work on us).
The thing that especially bugs me is that if only Jackson had bothered to read any of Tolkien's writings outside of LOTR, I doubt that he would ever have butchered the story like he did--TTT, especially, isn't even in the spirit of Tolkien. How hard would it have been for him to read Tolkien's Of Fairy Stories which sets out what he believes are the important elements of a fairy story--elements that Jackson totally left out. Further, Jackson should have read some of Tolkien's writings on Anglo-Saxon literature, and should have read some Anglo-Saxon literature himself, so that he could have had an understanding of the type of literature that influenced Tolkien--if he had done that, he wouldn't have totally screwed up the people of Rohan, for one.
...and I'm tired of reading articles that assume that all programmers are men. It's not the case, and as long as people keep writing articles that make that assumption, people will keep thinking that there aren't female programmers. Besides, I would argue that part of the reason that there aren't that many female programmers is because of people like you who act like it's some major attack on your psyche to have someone talk about programmers and not use masculine language.
Also, on the question of whether programming is more like art or more like engineering, remember that Donald Knuth titled his book "The Art of Computer Programming" and Fred Brooks also talks of programming as an art in "The Mythical Man Month."
Is this the "LookWhatOtherNoNamePlaceUsesLinux.com" website, or Slashdot? I mean really. Im glad people are using Linux, and OS/2, and OSX, and anything else, but uh... so one place no ones ever heard of adopts Linux as their OS of choice today and Slashdot posts about it? I wonder how many people setup a new environment based on Windows today? Or OSX? or IRIX, or Solaris? Post some of the places on that.
All your post does is prove that you haven't bothered to look at a map or study geography. Andalucia is not some little place that no one has ever heard of, it's a huge region of Spain, that contains millions of people. The 5th largest city in Spain (Malaga) is located in Andalucia, such famous cities as Grenada are located there, and tourists from all over Europe vacation there. Furthermore, technology is at least as ubiquitious, if not more so, than in the US. Dial-up internet access is free from the telephone company, (for those people who happen to use landline phones, a lot of people just carry cell phones and have broadband internet access). This isn't just some podunk area switching to free software, this is a thriving, very modern, very technologically advanced part of the world deciding that they don't need Windows in their educational system is huge, especially since this is the second major region in Spain to do so.
The FBI has been known to majorly screw over innocent people, and I don't trust them at all. It is a little known fact that the FBI has successfully been sued under RICO (the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations act). It happened in the early 1980s, so there is no internet source, but it was apparently quite a precedent setting case--I personally know the people involved, and their story sounds like something out of a movie script, only it's true.
The people involved owned a used car lot in Illinois, and one day had the FBI show up at their door to arrest the car dealer for dealing in stolen cars. It turned out that the cars in question were originally stolen and had been recovered by the FBI, and since insurance had already paid the theft victims, the insurance company took possession of the cars and sold them at auction. The dealer had bought the cars at auction, having no idea of the history of the cars (not that it mattered, because they had been recovered by the FBI and had been cleared to be auctioned off). When that information came out, he was cleared of the charges, and decided to sue the FBI for false arrest, among other things. In the course of their research for the lawsuit, they discovered information that led them to sue under RICO for triple damages. No one had ever sued the government for racketeering, and they had to go to court argue that they could indeed sue the feds under RICO, and it was ruled that the government is not immune to racketeering charges. It took them something like 8 years, but they were able to get the evidence to prove that the FBI was not only engaging in racketeer type activity, but also that they had a profit motive to do so, and they won the lawsuit, forcing the FBI to pay them triple damages under RICO.
So, with the FBI having been considered a Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization in a court of law, I don't really trust them with anything, certainly not with the ability to store information about me that they haven't proven to be true (because, like the car dealer friend, it's probably false).
I'm glad this was leaked. Am I the only one who finds it disturbing that the worlds "ruling classes" can get together, have a chinwag and for it not to be mentioned in the mainstream press?
Your problem is that you aren't reading the right mainstream press. Information about the World Economic Forum was there to be found if you wanted to read about it. Just a guess, but I suspect that a lot of slashdotters did in fact see articles about the WEF, but didn't bother to read them. It's much more enticing when you read about it in the form of a leaked e-mail, than to go and bother to read the business section on CNN.com or to bother to pick up an issue of the Economist. I know it was in the mainstream press because I read about it in the mainstream press.
The World Economic Forum is not secret--hundreds of journalists are there covering it every year. It's not a secret society, it's just a bunch of the world's movers and shakers getting together to discuss the economy and global politics. They even have a website that, among other things, details the discussions in every meeting www.weforum.org.
One other thing. That journalist was obviously trying to make herself sound more important, as though she was one of a select few to get the kind of access she got. In reality, according to the WEF website, all journalists who are selected to attend get the same participation rights as everyone else.
"Journalists do not pay participation fees and the Annual Meeting is one of the only international meetings to integrate media participants as full stakeholders in its debates. The media represent twenty percent of all participants and participate in all the activities of the Annual Meeting."
Bet that the Bucs would win a game where the temp was under 40 degrees.
Also, bet that the Bucs will finally win the Superbowl by eating the stinkin Raiders for lunch.
No wait, maybe I shouldn't tell my former self either of those things, because watching my team cream the Raiders after being made fun of for being a Bucs fan for all those years was just sweet. It wouldn't have been as great an experience if I knew it was going to happen.
That is so true. I find myself wishing that I had not taken the completely useless consumer math class that I took in 9th grade (I tool algebra 1 and 2 in 7th and 8th), and had gone directly to geometry, so that I could have had the time after finishing my advanced math course to spend my last two years in school to dual enrolled at the community college to take all 3 semesters of calculus and differential equations.
I would have told myself that even though I think I hate algebra now, and think that I will never use math again in my life, that I will be glad for all the math I took and wish I took more. Oh wait, my parents did tell me that, and I didn't listen. What makes me think I would have listened to my 22 year old self any more?
We had a rather eccentric neighbor who was ex-military (WWII, Korea, and Vietnam), and who worked on one of the US missile systems (patriot, I think). Anyway, one day he was telling my mom about how easy it would be to put a bomb on a remote controlled airplane, fly it in to someone's house, and then detonate it, with no one knowing what happened. Thing is, he probably could have done it himself with stuff in his garage or something.
Let's just say that he was the sort of neighbor you wouldn't want to get mad at you. He wouldn't blow anything up (at least I don't think he would), but he's the sort of guy that, when he got into a dispute with the county about hooking up to county water, ended up deeding a one foot perimeter around his property to the government of Iran because that would make it too hard for the county to pull emminent domain. Yep, you got that right, I lived across the street from property owned by a member of the Axis of Evil!
I don't think the parent should have been modded funny. To me it's kind of depressing...
I grew up launching model rockets. Thanks to rocketry, in elementary school, I knew way more physics than a 1st or 2nd grader normally knows (heck, it was more than most American adults know about physics). Where else can a 6 or 7 year old kid play with explosives legally? I don't know, but I suspect that model rocketry was what sent me down the path of becoming a geek--it started me thinking about the sciences.
Even better than launching crickets was the time when one of my brother's rockets went higher than expected, and ended up hitting a bird--when it came down, a fin was nicked up.
However, I can see why the feds might be concerned with people launching rockets. When we'd launch them, we'd pack the parachutes full of baby powder because it looks really cool when the chute deploys. Baby powder really spreads when it's released at a height--imagine what would happen if someone were to launch a rocket with weapons grade anthrax in packed into the chute instead of baby powder. If it was launched over a croweded area (say, launching it in to Disney World), it could make a lot of people very sick.
I know some (how's that for an indicator) women who are fairly smart, but the last few times I've been around them, I've noticed them acting dumb, like they were trying to pull off the "dumb blonde" routine. It just doesn't fit, and it wasn't attractive at all. It was even annoying.
As a woman, I have to say that I think that there is nothing worse than an intelligent woman who thinks that she needs to act dumb to snag a guy (and that is why they do it). I would have to say that if a guy was scared off because I am intelligent, then that guy isn't worth it. I'm not going to act like I'm dumb or pretend to be something I'm not just to snag some guy.
I remember back when my parents took my older brother to college, my mom met the mother of a girl who, like my brother, was in the honors program. The girl's mother started telling my mom about how her daughter was really smart, but didn't want to act too smart because she was afraid that she wouldn't be able to find a husband if she acted smart. Yeah, that's just what you want to tell the mother of a male student. You can imagine what my mom told my brother after her conversation with that girl's mother.
Ryn, the female computer science major who refuses to act like a ditz (well, I don't make any promises when I'm short on sleep and have OD'd on caffeine and sugar)
"Personally, I've found the most effective strategy is to waffle until the baby's been born. Then, once your wife is back in the recovery room, all doped up and groggy from pain that men can't even imagine (thank goodness for epidurals and pain-induced memory blocks), pop your suggestion to her"
Actually, choosing a baby name will still drugged up after giving birth isn't really that great an idea. My cousin's boyfriend goes by "Nick" but his name is actually "Nickalouse." Yep, you got that right, it isn't a typo, that's how his name is actually spelled! When he was born, his mother was so drugged up that when they asked her how she wanted to spell his name on the birth certificate, that's what she told them.
As for unique names, my younger brother's name is Jedidiah. Some guy on my sister's hockey team thought that my family was Amish because of my brother's name--he was confusing it with Weird Al's "Amish Paradise."
Personally, I've found the most effective strategy is to waffle until the baby's been born. Then, once your wife is back in the recovery room, all doped up and groggy from pain that men can't even imagine (thank goodness for epidurals and pain-induced memory blocks), pop your suggestion to her:
You:So, what do you think of the name Roscoe [utk.edu]? Her : (groggy): Hrm? Bosco? [boscoworld.com] Yes, I'm thirsty...
For my college workstudy, I've spent the last three years working as a computer lab assistant, and it has been invaluable. I've discovered that most of my fellow CS majors tend to majorly overestimate what the average user is capable of doing. I'm in software engineering this semester, and we're supposed to be developing the software for getting student's computers set up to get on the network (we're going wireless next year). The average Windows user is not going to know how to check and see if their computer is set to use DHCP, heck, the average user at this school needs help attaching a file to an e-mail!
The difference between you and the average computer user is that you are a techie, and you understand, in general, how computers work and where to go to find what you need to know. Most people simply do not comprehend how computers work. It's not because they are stupid and all us techies are so much smarter than them, it's because their orientation toward computers is entirely different and they aren't used to thinking the way we do.
It's like if one of us tried to read Derrida--most of us are not used to reading heavy philosophy or literary theory, and if we tried to pick up Derrida without any training, we would be just as lost as the average computer user is when they try to use a program they haven't used before. If I were to try to read Derrida, I would probably have to get one of my philosophy major friends to explain it to me, and I wouldn't be surprised if they couldn't get it why I can't understand Derrida. Philosophers can understand Derrida because their studies and they way they think is oriented toward philosophy, and techies can understand computers because the way we think is oriented toward computers. We don't expect non-philosophers to understand philosophy, but we expect non-techies to understand technology. (and if you've never heard of Derrida, well, that proves my point).
Slashdot Mirror
First post?
Interesting article, though not terribly informative.
The vast majority of multiple murderers are middle class white males, not poor folk. And in places like I grew up in Alaska, where lterraly every 10-year old has a rifle and several knives, we had zero problems with violence, because we were taught to have respect for damage that weapons can do. Anyway, your applying the same "Post hoc, ergo proctor hoc" fallacy to all three "causes".
I have a couple of cousins who were given semi-automatic rifles for their 16th birthdays by their parents. The only thing they've ever killed with said rifles is wild boars and other sundry Florida game animals. Oh, and they also played video games growing up, at least some of which were violent, but somehow, they managed not to go shooting up their highschool.
The problem in cases like the one we're discussing is that we have kids who don't fit in at school, endured merciless teasing, and who likely don't have the greatest contact with reality. Given the right combination of factors, the kid probably snapped. There is something wrong with a society where the kind of teasing and harrasment that the boy and his brother endured is allowed to continue. Someone at his school should have stepped in and punished the kids who were tormenting him. Unfortunately, it is still socially acceptable for people to make fun of nerds, which is something that we need to work to change.
Other things have been done to make the sports more accessable for the viewer. HDTV is probably the most pronounced, but other things (many of which have been mentioned) - constant scoreboards on the screen, 1st and 10 lines in football, glowing pucks, and even instant replay have done a lot to improve what the viewer knows about what they are watching.
There are several sports that I suspect would gain a bigger fan base if everyone had HDTV widescreen. I would like watching hockey on TV a lot better if I could see the whole playing surface and see how the plays develop, but on TV you lose a lot. Same thing with football (and yes, I will call soccer what the rest of the world calls it--football). On TV, it's hard to see things develop because you get to see such a small part of the field (it's not so bad watching on Univision, but American stations are terrible). In person, it's a great sport, but Americans are never going to figure that out if they only see it the way it is on TV now.
Considering what I've heard about African phone service from a professor I had who lived in Africa for a number of years, I would venture to say that VoIP would be an improvement on what they have now. In many parts of Africa, the phone lines are in such bad condition (poorly spliced together, full of dirt and the like), that you're lucky if you can have a conversation through all the static. If they were able to implement Wi-Fi so that it was available to a broad enough segment of the country that people in remote villages could have internet access, VoIP could revolutionize the lives of the average African villager.
Remember, we aren't talking just about business, we are talking about empowering the little guy to have access to the outside world. The more access to means of communication, the less they can be controlled and oppressed by others.
(Note: FBI guys, could you please inform me if you are or are not corrupt, and whether you will take this case or not? Thanks)
Well, since the FBI has been sucessfully sued under RICO for racketeering, I'd put the FBI down as corrupt.
After that my signature diminished to my first and last initials with little squiggly lines after each. You know, like celebrities sign autographs...
That's the way I sign my name too, and whenever I pay for anything, the salesperson almost always makes a comment about me being a doctor or something, which has gotten so tiresome that I've almost decided to go and write all the letters in my name, though that's a major pain.
My dad only has about two letters left in his signature (out of 15 in his name), and when he signed the FAFSA for my college financial aid, they sent it back and said that he had to write his whole name out, even though his legal signature is the illegible squiggle. It's hard to fake my dad's real signature, but seems that the government would rather have a full name that anybody could write out and no way to prove that it's really my dad because he never signs anything that way.
I don't know about other countries, but I do know that in Bangledesh, some years back an economist started the Grameen Bank, a micro-finance bank geared toward the poorest of the poor (landless women, primarily), which has become the model for micro-finance institutions started all over the world. Anyway, several years ago, the Grameen Bank branched out and started offering cell phone service with the model that a person in the village would get a micro-loan to purchase the phone which the person would then use as a small business--everyone in the village would go through that person if they needed to use a phone, paying a fee to use it. The result is that Bangledesh has a pretty decent cell phone infrastructure. My brother was there a couple of months back and said that there are advertisements all over the place for Grameen Phone.
I have a Honeywell HEPA airfilter that I have in my dorm room. It works great in filtering out the dust and mold (I've gotten a lot fewer sinus infections since I got it). The great thing about HEPA filters is that the longer you wait to change the filter, the better it is at filtering the air. They aren't that expensive (under $100 for my small one), and they work wonders. I've never had any problems, and the only thing you need to do is to replace the charcoal pre-filter every 3 months, which isn't much trouble.
But how many of todays popular culture addicts would sit down with a copy of Plato's works and read through it? Yes, it may very well enlighten them, and yes they'd learn a lot from it... But hell, these are the same people that watch WWE wrestling religously. :P
I, for one, have read Plato, and not only Plato, also Decartes, Hume, and Kant, and part of the reason that I like The Matrix is because I see influences from all those philosophers in the movie. Sure, bring up Plato, that one's easy, but unless you can also find the influence of Decartes, Hume, and Kant, then don't go around making fun of everyone else.
Hmm, good point. I suspect that eventually cable will get a larger percentage than it has now, but the late adopters sometimes take years to finally adopt the technology. My parents finally gave in and got cable last year. The reason we never had cable was because they didn't see any real "killer app" so to speak, that necessitated adopting the technology and adding the extra bill every month. What finally caused them to cave in and get it was wanting to watch sports programming that we couldn't get with regular broadcast stations. Or, in other words, they wanted to watch hockey, and the only way they could do that was with cable. Since they've had cable, they've discovered other reasons why they want it (24 hour news channels, especially), but if it wasn't for ESPN and the local sports channel that shows all the hockey games, they wouldn't have gotten it to begin with.
I think that it's pretty much the same for the internet--for the late adopters of technology, the one single killer app that would cause them to get internet access hasn't come along yet. For different people, that app will be different, but I think that gradually, more people will be getting online, it will just be at a very slow pace. I have relatives who are in their 70s who have been online for several years. For them, e-mail was the big reason for getting online--my family is spread across the country, and communication is much easier with e-mail. On the other hand, I had a coworker at a department store who saw absolutely no reason to get a computer, or to use her son's computer, even though he lived right next door. Her reasoning was that one son lived next door, the other one lived with her, and she didn't have anyone else whou she would want to communicate with, so why shell out the money for yet another thing to learn how to use (plus, if she became computer literate, her bosses would come up with more things for her to do, on top of all the things she didn't have time to do already).
Is a tiny phone--small enough to fit on my keychain would be nice. I don't want video, I don't want a camera, I don't want a PDA, I just want a phone that does what a phone is supposed to do--call people.
How did they get the first film so right and the second one so wrong? *pounds head against wall*
I would argue that the plot deviations that were introduced in TTT were the logical result of the "minor" plot changes that were made in Fellowship. For example, all that absurdity with the Aragorn/Arwen story that was introduced in TTT is the direct result of expanding the role of Arwen in Fellowship--the changes made it a plot necessity to expand the Arwen story in TTT. If Jackson had stuck with the plot in Fellowship, that whole mess wouldn't have happened.
I would also argue that the Faramir debacle is a direct result of the change in focus that Jackson introduced in Fellowship. He sees the central story of the books as the way that no one in Middle Earth can resist the ring, and added the scene of Aragorn being tempted to take the ring. It would not have fit with the story as he started to tell it to have Faramir to be able to withstand the power of the ring when even Aragorn was almost overcome. If Jackson had stuck with the plot, we wouldn't have had the Faramir mess.
By about halfway through the movie, the only way that my sister and I retained our sanity was by making peanut gallery comments and making fun of the Arwen/Aragorn subplot (if that whole thing was supposed to draw in the female audience, it certainly didn't work on us).
The thing that especially bugs me is that if only Jackson had bothered to read any of Tolkien's writings outside of LOTR, I doubt that he would ever have butchered the story like he did--TTT, especially, isn't even in the spirit of Tolkien. How hard would it have been for him to read Tolkien's Of Fairy Stories which sets out what he believes are the important elements of a fairy story--elements that Jackson totally left out. Further, Jackson should have read some of Tolkien's writings on Anglo-Saxon literature, and should have read some Anglo-Saxon literature himself, so that he could have had an understanding of the type of literature that influenced Tolkien--if he had done that, he wouldn't have totally screwed up the people of Rohan, for one.
...and I'm tired of reading articles that assume that all programmers are men. It's not the case, and as long as people keep writing articles that make that assumption, people will keep thinking that there aren't female programmers. Besides, I would argue that part of the reason that there aren't that many female programmers is because of people like you who act like it's some major attack on your psyche to have someone talk about programmers and not use masculine language.
Also, on the question of whether programming is more like art or more like engineering, remember that Donald Knuth titled his book "The Art of Computer Programming" and Fred Brooks also talks of programming as an art in "The Mythical Man Month."
All your post does is prove that you haven't bothered to look at a map or study geography. Andalucia is not some little place that no one has ever heard of, it's a huge region of Spain, that contains millions of people. The 5th largest city in Spain (Malaga) is located in Andalucia, such famous cities as Grenada are located there, and tourists from all over Europe vacation there. Furthermore, technology is at least as ubiquitious, if not more so, than in the US. Dial-up internet access is free from the telephone company, (for those people who happen to use landline phones, a lot of people just carry cell phones and have broadband internet access). This isn't just some podunk area switching to free software, this is a thriving, very modern, very technologically advanced part of the world deciding that they don't need Windows in their educational system is huge, especially since this is the second major region in Spain to do so.
The FBI has been known to majorly screw over innocent people, and I don't trust them at all. It is a little known fact that the FBI has successfully been sued under RICO (the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations act). It happened in the early 1980s, so there is no internet source, but it was apparently quite a precedent setting case--I personally know the people involved, and their story sounds like something out of a movie script, only it's true.
The people involved owned a used car lot in Illinois, and one day had the FBI show up at their door to arrest the car dealer for dealing in stolen cars. It turned out that the cars in question were originally stolen and had been recovered by the FBI, and since insurance had already paid the theft victims, the insurance company took possession of the cars and sold them at auction. The dealer had bought the cars at auction, having no idea of the history of the cars (not that it mattered, because they had been recovered by the FBI and had been cleared to be auctioned off). When that information came out, he was cleared of the charges, and decided to sue the FBI for false arrest, among other things. In the course of their research for the lawsuit, they discovered information that led them to sue under RICO for triple damages. No one had ever sued the government for racketeering, and they had to go to court argue that they could indeed sue the feds under RICO, and it was ruled that the government is not immune to racketeering charges. It took them something like 8 years, but they were able to get the evidence to prove that the FBI was not only engaging in racketeer type activity, but also that they had a profit motive to do so, and they won the lawsuit, forcing the FBI to pay them triple damages under RICO.
So, with the FBI having been considered a Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization in a court of law, I don't really trust them with anything, certainly not with the ability to store information about me that they haven't proven to be true (because, like the car dealer friend, it's probably false).
Your problem is that you aren't reading the right mainstream press. Information about the World Economic Forum was there to be found if you wanted to read about it. Just a guess, but I suspect that a lot of slashdotters did in fact see articles about the WEF, but didn't bother to read them. It's much more enticing when you read about it in the form of a leaked e-mail, than to go and bother to read the business section on CNN.com or to bother to pick up an issue of the Economist. I know it was in the mainstream press because I read about it in the mainstream press.
The World Economic Forum is not secret--hundreds of journalists are there covering it every year. It's not a secret society, it's just a bunch of the world's movers and shakers getting together to discuss the economy and global politics. They even have a website that, among other things, details the discussions in every meeting www.weforum.org.
One other thing. That journalist was obviously trying to make herself sound more important, as though she was one of a select few to get the kind of access she got. In reality, according to the WEF website, all journalists who are selected to attend get the same participation rights as everyone else.
Bet that the Bucs would win a game where the temp was under 40 degrees. Also, bet that the Bucs will finally win the Superbowl by eating the stinkin Raiders for lunch. No wait, maybe I shouldn't tell my former self either of those things, because watching my team cream the Raiders after being made fun of for being a Bucs fan for all those years was just sweet. It wouldn't have been as great an experience if I knew it was going to happen.
5. Take more math classes
That is so true. I find myself wishing that I had not taken the completely useless consumer math class that I took in 9th grade (I tool algebra 1 and 2 in 7th and 8th), and had gone directly to geometry, so that I could have had the time after finishing my advanced math course to spend my last two years in school to dual enrolled at the community college to take all 3 semesters of calculus and differential equations.
I would have told myself that even though I think I hate algebra now, and think that I will never use math again in my life, that I will be glad for all the math I took and wish I took more. Oh wait, my parents did tell me that, and I didn't listen. What makes me think I would have listened to my 22 year old self any more?
We had a rather eccentric neighbor who was ex-military (WWII, Korea, and Vietnam), and who worked on one of the US missile systems (patriot, I think). Anyway, one day he was telling my mom about how easy it would be to put a bomb on a remote controlled airplane, fly it in to someone's house, and then detonate it, with no one knowing what happened. Thing is, he probably could have done it himself with stuff in his garage or something.
Let's just say that he was the sort of neighbor you wouldn't want to get mad at you. He wouldn't blow anything up (at least I don't think he would), but he's the sort of guy that, when he got into a dispute with the county about hooking up to county water, ended up deeding a one foot perimeter around his property to the government of Iran because that would make it too hard for the county to pull emminent domain. Yep, you got that right, I lived across the street from property owned by a member of the Axis of Evil!
I don't think the parent should have been modded funny. To me it's kind of depressing...
I grew up launching model rockets. Thanks to rocketry, in elementary school, I knew way more physics than a 1st or 2nd grader normally knows (heck, it was more than most American adults know about physics). Where else can a 6 or 7 year old kid play with explosives legally? I don't know, but I suspect that model rocketry was what sent me down the path of becoming a geek--it started me thinking about the sciences.
Even better than launching crickets was the time when one of my brother's rockets went higher than expected, and ended up hitting a bird--when it came down, a fin was nicked up.
However, I can see why the feds might be concerned with people launching rockets. When we'd launch them, we'd pack the parachutes full of baby powder because it looks really cool when the chute deploys. Baby powder really spreads when it's released at a height--imagine what would happen if someone were to launch a rocket with weapons grade anthrax in packed into the chute instead of baby powder. If it was launched over a croweded area (say, launching it in to Disney World), it could make a lot of people very sick.
As a woman, I have to say that I think that there is nothing worse than an intelligent woman who thinks that she needs to act dumb to snag a guy (and that is why they do it). I would have to say that if a guy was scared off because I am intelligent, then that guy isn't worth it. I'm not going to act like I'm dumb or pretend to be something I'm not just to snag some guy.
I remember back when my parents took my older brother to college, my mom met the mother of a girl who, like my brother, was in the honors program. The girl's mother started telling my mom about how her daughter was really smart, but didn't want to act too smart because she was afraid that she wouldn't be able to find a husband if she acted smart. Yeah, that's just what you want to tell the mother of a male student. You can imagine what my mom told my brother after her conversation with that girl's mother.
Ryn, the female computer science major who refuses to act like a ditz (well, I don't make any promises when I'm short on sleep and have OD'd on caffeine and sugar)
Actually, choosing a baby name will still drugged up after giving birth isn't really that great an idea. My cousin's boyfriend goes by "Nick" but his name is actually "Nickalouse." Yep, you got that right, it isn't a typo, that's how his name is actually spelled! When he was born, his mother was so drugged up that when they asked her how she wanted to spell his name on the birth certificate, that's what she told them.
As for unique names, my younger brother's name is Jedidiah. Some guy on my sister's hockey team thought that my family was Amish because of my brother's name--he was confusing it with Weird Al's "Amish Paradise."
Personally, I've found the most effective strategy is to waffle until the baby's been born. Then, once your wife is back in the recovery room, all doped up and groggy from pain that men can't even imagine (thank goodness for epidurals and pain-induced memory blocks), pop your suggestion to her:
:So, what do you think of the name Roscoe [utk.edu]?
You
Her : (groggy): Hrm? Bosco? [boscoworld.com] Yes, I'm thirsty...
You : Excellent! Roscoe it is! Wasn't that easy?
For my college workstudy, I've spent the last three years working as a computer lab assistant, and it has been invaluable. I've discovered that most of my fellow CS majors tend to majorly overestimate what the average user is capable of doing. I'm in software engineering this semester, and we're supposed to be developing the software for getting student's computers set up to get on the network (we're going wireless next year). The average Windows user is not going to know how to check and see if their computer is set to use DHCP, heck, the average user at this school needs help attaching a file to an e-mail!
The difference between you and the average computer user is that you are a techie, and you understand, in general, how computers work and where to go to find what you need to know. Most people simply do not comprehend how computers work. It's not because they are stupid and all us techies are so much smarter than them, it's because their orientation toward computers is entirely different and they aren't used to thinking the way we do.
It's like if one of us tried to read Derrida--most of us are not used to reading heavy philosophy or literary theory, and if we tried to pick up Derrida without any training, we would be just as lost as the average computer user is when they try to use a program they haven't used before. If I were to try to read Derrida, I would probably have to get one of my philosophy major friends to explain it to me, and I wouldn't be surprised if they couldn't get it why I can't understand Derrida. Philosophers can understand Derrida because their studies and they way they think is oriented toward philosophy, and techies can understand computers because the way we think is oriented toward computers. We don't expect non-philosophers to understand philosophy, but we expect non-techies to understand technology. (and if you've never heard of Derrida, well, that proves my point).