Forget the mental illness comments: Posters here have raised mental illness only as a possible explanation for his irrational behaviour in court, and usually in the context of trying to be helpful, as in "maybe he's not stupid, he just needs treatment."
How about addressing some of the pragmatic issues I've raised? Like, it's a bad idea to piss off the judge, no matter how corrupt you think the system is; like, he should get a lawyer; like, he should try to cut his losses and take a plea. Seriously, if you know what's going on with him, I'd like to know, because I can't make sense of it.
I don't doubt that he is a good, decent person. However, he's a good, decent person who's talking himself straight into a long prison term because he's apparently refusing to deal with the situation. The "Caps Lock" defence and asking to subpoena the United States of America are the strategies of lunatic tax protestors who are routinely slapped down for trying them. What's going on? What do you know that we don't?
Personally, I don't think he's mentally ill. I think that he's too smart for his own good--meaning that he's so certain of his analysis and his rightness in this case that he's not correctly perceiving the consequences of his strategy. I suspect he also has a too-strong streak of romantic fatalism common to twenty-year-olds.
The observation that it's a bad idea to piss off the judge with frivolous, juvenile behavior isn't psycho-analysis, it's common sense. The observation that Jerome should quit fucking around and get a good lawyer isn't psycho-analysis, it's common sense. The observation that self-righteous martyrdom is a good recipe for a long prison term isn't psycho-analysis, it's common sense.
Psychoanalysis is being raised because Jerome's behaviour is so irrationally self-destructive for someone who's apparently brilliant, that mental illness is the only plausible cause.
Pleading guilty to a felony may hurt his chances in a future job interview, but what does gaining notoriety for shenanigans like this do for his chances? If he goes to jail for 85 years, he can feel very self-righteous about the fact that he'll never have a job interview again.
Jerome is again in jail. His "crime" is asking questions in the courtroom. No other reason can be given. Yes, God Bless America; what is our country coming to?
Jerome's not the only one disconnected from reality here. Your beliefs in the morality of his actions are irrelevant; Jerome's beliefs are irrelevant. What's relevant is that he's facing felony charges, and it's a judge who will decide what happens. This is exactly what lawyers are for. A lawyer could probably have argued this down to a misdemeanor plea; Jerome (and those around him telling him that he's fighting the good fight) is the one turning this into the trial of the century.
If your opinions are representative of those around him, then you're all enabling him to talk his way into a long, brutal prison sentence that's totally unnecessary.
If his crime amounts to little more than spraying grafitti on a wall, then a lawyer would get up and say that. A lawyer would say "my client is an extremely intelligent and overenthusiastic kid who did no real harm. He realizes it's wrong, he's very sorry, and he promises not to do it again. Please don't destroy a promising career."
The judge would slap him on the wrist and tell him to use his powers for good, not evil. Christ, the ADA offered to drop 25 of the 26 charges for a plea that was rejected.
This is a case of someone with a serious disconnect from reality. I wonder how many of his coworkers and friends at Los Alamos are telling him to get help, instead of feeding his feelings of persecution.
How can a libertarian cry "censorship!" when it's a private corporation making rules about its own terms of service? If he doesn't like it, he can find another ISP.
When was the last time a home user bought a PowerEdge Server or a Precision Workstation? When was the last time someone not in a technical job requiring massive computing power bought either?
If I had the Coke recipe, I still wouldn't be able to compete with Coke.
It's not the recipe that makes Coke what it is. It's the massive corporation with production and distribution facilities all over the world, and a business system that makes it all run well enough to get cheap cans of the stuff into the hands of thirsty people everywhere.
They could print the recipe on the side of each of those cans and it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference to any competitor.
The "secret recipe" is a (no longer) terribly useful marketing tactic.
Sure, script kiddies will pass it around; a few of the more talented ones might actually use it to write a new worm.
From a business perspective, it's useless, though. Any MS competitor who uses the code, or even looks at it, will be liable for all kinds of legal trouble. Most businesses won't even touch the CD it's burned on.
From a marketplace perspective, it's irrelevant if it gets out.
Alan made the accurate observation that Linux is nowhere on the desktop because it isn't getting OEM pre-installs (i.e., it's in the same situation that BeOS was). The reason it's not getting OEM pre-installs is that Microsoft's monopolistic practices have locked up the channel (I don't necessarily agree with that, but the appeal court does).
Deadlines aren't the problem: unreasonable, inflexible deadlines are the problem. All the vices associated with coding under deadline pressure come from bad time management, not the simple fact that some thing needs doing by some specific time.
Joel Spolsky goes on at great length about proper scheduling of software development, and seems to get it right.
Perhaps the reason you never get a good answer is because your scepticism about an answer positive to Java is apparent.
This is anecdotal, but programming useful vertex, edge, and graph classes for an AI test took me three hours in Java. It took me three weekends in C++.
The difference lay largely in having no memory management to worry about, and having good container classes and enumerators. It took a long time to get the kinks out the C++ classes (and that was using STL vectors and iterators).
The less complex java syntax made it all straightforward. The more complex C++ syntax had me tripping all over the place, and I've written more C++.
An experienced C++ programmer wouldn't have had the problems I did, but then I'm not an experienced Java programmer, either.
My test was small, so there were no noticeable performance differences on which I can comment.
I read his comment about creativity being less than 1% of the battle along the lines of Edison's line about how invention is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. In other words, a great idea needs a hell of a lot of work to get onto your computer in a form that's fun and useful. You can brainstorm all you want, but if you won't put the sweat into a professional game development program, then your product will suck.
"Yeah, we were as badly run as all our critics said, and it really was a huge waste of money, time and energy, but Goddamn, it was fun. I miss it. Won't someone give me a job doing the same thing?"
Re:Get an IBM Home Director Panel
on
Wiring A New House?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I built a house a year ago in Oak Creek, Wisconsin (just south of Milwaukee), and had it done by IBM Home Director. Four drops to each bedroom (1 RG6, 3 CAT5), two to the living room (RG6 and CAT5) and two to the kitchen (2 CAT5), all terminated in a box in the basement, with no POTS lines, and I'm totally happy.
The Home Director panel houses my Time/Warner cable connection, which is both digital cable and RoadRunner, so my cable modem is in there, hooked up to a Linksys 8 port cable/dsl router (which provides DHCP to my network). The phone lines and cable lines terminate at simple splitters in the box; the network lines in the router.
It's clean and nearly effortless. Plug a phone in, and it's set; plug a computer into a network port, and it's on the network with a proxyless broadband connection. When I built a room in the basement, I added six drops to it (RG6 and 5 CAT5) just as easily.
It seems like one of the cheapest ploys in sci-fi to make differences obvious is to give a character or community some silly hat. Reverend Mother Anteac looked like the fairy queen; the Sardaukar looked like a bunch of 10,000th century frenchmen ("Wanna buy some used imperial lasguns? Never fired and only dropped once!").
I think that the broad rewriting of plot and dialogue done by Harrison works well for the purpose of translating a terribly cerebral book to the screen. My only real irritation is that it seems like the casting was done in an Irish pub - Gurney, Duncan, Liet-Kynes and Stilgar look like they consume a gallon or two of Guinness every day. They don't project the sort of cultured-killer auras they have in the book (then again, with the imperial Sardaukar looking like a bunch of frogs from across the channel...).
I wish they'd pulled a few of the cast from the Lynch's version: Max von Sidow as Liet-Kynes; Jurgen Prochnow, but cast him as Gurney.
The point isn't that Deep Blue was programmed to beat Kasparov; it's that Kasparov had no opportunity to study Deep Blue's game beforehand. He was learning on the job, which obviously hurt his game, as it would if he were playing an unknown human opponent.
It's standard practice above the master level to study your opponent's last 50 games as preparation. Kasparov ascribed part of his loss to Kramnik to the fact that Kramnik changed styles, rendering 90% of Kasparov's preparation useless.
Six months ago, I became the manager of a small IT department (5 members plus myself) of a manufacturer. Doing so pretty directly cut down on what time I had to do development work, and added a lot of dealing with people to my day.
What has saved me from becoming a paper-shuffling, phone-call-returning drone is a couple things:
The president, to whom I report directly, is of the opinion that the best managers are the ones who can afford to walk around, harassing the employees with trivia questions and requests for snacks. If you have the time to do so, then you've properly delegated the work for your department, and are free to do the primary function of your job, which is management and supervision - making decisions and seeing that they're carried out.
As manager, you get to design projects, set deadlines, and assign tasks, and generally make people do for you those things you used to do yourself. While this sounds like death for a programmer, it means that you can assign tasks to yourself, thus taking part in a project; it also means that the larger tasks, like designing specs and choosing strategies for the development of the system are yours, and they can be just as challenging as coding.
As a manager, you get to tell other people 'no'. "No, the IT department will not add another report to that system for you - there's four like it already"; "no, the network isn't slow - it's that desktop-background-changing program you have on all the time, and the set of special muppets cursors"; "no, inventory is off because your staff refuses to use the scanners correctly - here's the records".
There's a different kind of reward as a manager. That reward comes when you've designed and delegated a four person project, and on the deadline, are looking at a finished product that's ready to deploy according to your standards. That's rewarding.
The mickey-mouse, personal politics bullshit isn't really any worse at the management level than it is at the bottom; it just takes a slightly different form, and it's still up to you how much or little you play.
It's nice to get others working productively, and be able to treat them as well as you think you should have been treated when you were among them. In my case, this includes signing authority for a certain amount that allows me to buy things like manuals, RAM, spare components, and all the mickey-mouse shit that the old manager used to spend a week evaluating. It also means going to the manager of accounting and getting her to sign off on a new server when we need it. It also means taking the department out for lunch or beers after work sometimes.
Your work habits will have to change, but that doesn't mean you'll spend all day in meetings or on the phone. For myself, I found that taking care of paperwork as it came up, handling phone calls immediately, and being cagey about requests for meetings means that I generally have at least a couple hours a day to code. You can't shut yourself off from the company for any length of time, but if you're well-organized about all the details that come your way, it's not too hard to find time for coding, and I go home between five and six every day.
The Office de le Langue Français, like the academy in France, does issue language advisories on what words should be used to refer to what, and which should be discarded. When I was a web developer in Montreal, all content was run by a translator who kept a whole library of such advisories. Whenever one of the "pur laine" complained about the french on a site, our translator quoted them chapter and verse on why those exact words were chosen.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm seeing mail from my server bounced as well, even though my mail server isn't visible to the Internet. The message reads:
550 5.0.0 Mail from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx refused by blackhole site inputs.orbz.org The message that caused this notification was:
Forget the mental illness comments: Posters here have raised mental illness only as a possible explanation for his irrational behaviour in court, and usually in the context of trying to be helpful, as in "maybe he's not stupid, he just needs treatment."
How about addressing some of the pragmatic issues I've raised? Like, it's a bad idea to piss off the judge, no matter how corrupt you think the system is; like, he should get a lawyer; like, he should try to cut his losses and take a plea. Seriously, if you know what's going on with him, I'd like to know, because I can't make sense of it.
I don't doubt that he is a good, decent person. However, he's a good, decent person who's talking himself straight into a long prison term because he's apparently refusing to deal with the situation. The "Caps Lock" defence and asking to subpoena the United States of America are the strategies of lunatic tax protestors who are routinely slapped down for trying them. What's going on? What do you know that we don't?
Personally, I don't think he's mentally ill. I think that he's too smart for his own good--meaning that he's so certain of his analysis and his rightness in this case that he's not correctly perceiving the consequences of his strategy. I suspect he also has a too-strong streak of romantic fatalism common to twenty-year-olds.
The observation that it's a bad idea to piss off the judge with frivolous, juvenile behavior isn't psycho-analysis, it's common sense. The observation that Jerome should quit fucking around and get a good lawyer isn't psycho-analysis, it's common sense. The observation that self-righteous martyrdom is a good recipe for a long prison term isn't psycho-analysis, it's common sense.
Psychoanalysis is being raised because Jerome's behaviour is so irrationally self-destructive for someone who's apparently brilliant, that mental illness is the only plausible cause.
He didn't have to tweak the judge for that. Return the bail and volunteer for remand. His little "act" only hurt his credibility with the judge.
I'd suggest all the amateur psychoanalysis can stop now.
Why? Because we're not agreeing with you that Jerome's a digital martyr?
Pleading guilty to a felony may hurt his chances in a future job interview, but what does gaining notoriety for shenanigans like this do for his chances? If he goes to jail for 85 years, he can feel very self-righteous about the fact that he'll never have a job interview again.
Here's what freesk8 had to say about this story:
Jerome is again in jail. His "crime" is asking questions in the courtroom. No other reason can be given. Yes, God Bless America; what is our country coming to?
Jerome's not the only one disconnected from reality here. Your beliefs in the morality of his actions are irrelevant; Jerome's beliefs are irrelevant. What's relevant is that he's facing felony charges, and it's a judge who will decide what happens. This is exactly what lawyers are for. A lawyer could probably have argued this down to a misdemeanor plea; Jerome (and those around him telling him that he's fighting the good fight) is the one turning this into the trial of the century.
If your opinions are representative of those around him, then you're all enabling him to talk his way into a long, brutal prison sentence that's totally unnecessary.
If his crime amounts to little more than spraying grafitti on a wall, then a lawyer would get up and say that. A lawyer would say "my client is an extremely intelligent and overenthusiastic kid who did no real harm. He realizes it's wrong, he's very sorry, and he promises not to do it again. Please don't destroy a promising career."
The judge would slap him on the wrist and tell him to use his powers for good, not evil. Christ, the ADA offered to drop 25 of the 26 charges for a plea that was rejected.
This is a case of someone with a serious disconnect from reality. I wonder how many of his coworkers and friends at Los Alamos are telling him to get help, instead of feeding his feelings of persecution.
Dude, pull the cork out. It was a joke.
Nothing to explain. Before Phantom Menace came out, everyone was excited. After they saw it, everyone thought it sucked.
How can a libertarian cry "censorship!" when it's a private corporation making rules about its own terms of service? If he doesn't like it, he can find another ISP.
When was the last time a home user bought a PowerEdge Server or a Precision Workstation? When was the last time someone not in a technical job requiring massive computing power bought either?
If I had the Coke recipe, I still wouldn't be able to compete with Coke.
It's not the recipe that makes Coke what it is. It's the massive corporation with production and distribution facilities all over the world, and a business system that makes it all run well enough to get cheap cans of the stuff into the hands of thirsty people everywhere.
They could print the recipe on the side of each of those cans and it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference to any competitor.
The "secret recipe" is a (no longer) terribly useful marketing tactic.
So what if one good copy gets out?
Sure, script kiddies will pass it around; a few of the more talented ones might actually use it to write a new worm.
From a business perspective, it's useless, though. Any MS competitor who uses the code, or even looks at it, will be liable for all kinds of legal trouble. Most businesses won't even touch the CD it's burned on.
From a marketplace perspective, it's irrelevant if it gets out.
Does VA Linux still sell hardware?
No, it doesn't.
Is Fry's a major distributor of home computers?
No, it isn't.
Do Dell, Compaq, HP, IBM, or any other significant retailer of home systems pre-install Linux?
No, they don't.
Simple as that.
Alan made the accurate observation that Linux is nowhere on the desktop because it isn't getting OEM pre-installs (i.e., it's in the same situation that BeOS was). The reason it's not getting OEM pre-installs is that Microsoft's monopolistic practices have locked up the channel (I don't necessarily agree with that, but the appeal court does).
Deadlines aren't the problem: unreasonable, inflexible deadlines are the problem. All the vices associated with coding under deadline pressure come from bad time management, not the simple fact that some thing needs doing by some specific time.
Joel Spolsky goes on at great length about proper scheduling of software development, and seems to get it right.
Perhaps the reason you never get a good answer is because your scepticism about an answer positive to Java is apparent.
This is anecdotal, but programming useful vertex, edge, and graph classes for an AI test took me three hours in Java. It took me three weekends in C++.
The difference lay largely in having no memory management to worry about, and having good container classes and enumerators. It took a long time to get the kinks out the C++ classes (and that was using STL vectors and iterators).
The less complex java syntax made it all straightforward. The more complex C++ syntax had me tripping all over the place, and I've written more C++.
An experienced C++ programmer wouldn't have had the problems I did, but then I'm not an experienced Java programmer, either.
My test was small, so there were no noticeable performance differences on which I can comment.
I read his comment about creativity being less than 1% of the battle along the lines of Edison's line about how invention is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. In other words, a great idea needs a hell of a lot of work to get onto your computer in a form that's fun and useful. You can brainstorm all you want, but if you won't put the sweat into a professional game development program, then your product will suck.
"Yeah, we were as badly run as all our critics said, and it really was a huge waste of money, time and energy, but Goddamn, it was fun. I miss it. Won't someone give me a job doing the same thing?"
I built a house a year ago in Oak Creek, Wisconsin (just south of Milwaukee), and had it done by IBM Home Director. Four drops to each bedroom (1 RG6, 3 CAT5), two to the living room (RG6 and CAT5) and two to the kitchen (2 CAT5), all terminated in a box in the basement, with no POTS lines, and I'm totally happy.
The Home Director panel houses my Time/Warner cable connection, which is both digital cable and RoadRunner, so my cable modem is in there, hooked up to a Linksys 8 port cable/dsl router (which provides DHCP to my network). The phone lines and cable lines terminate at simple splitters in the box; the network lines in the router.
It's clean and nearly effortless. Plug a phone in, and it's set; plug a computer into a network port, and it's on the network with a proxyless broadband connection. When I built a room in the basement, I added six drops to it (RG6 and 5 CAT5) just as easily.
It seems like one of the cheapest ploys in sci-fi to make differences obvious is to give a character or community some silly hat. Reverend Mother Anteac looked like the fairy queen; the Sardaukar looked like a bunch of 10,000th century frenchmen ("Wanna buy some used imperial lasguns? Never fired and only dropped once!").
I think that the broad rewriting of plot and dialogue done by Harrison works well for the purpose of translating a terribly cerebral book to the screen. My only real irritation is that it seems like the casting was done in an Irish pub - Gurney, Duncan, Liet-Kynes and Stilgar look like they consume a gallon or two of Guinness every day. They don't project the sort of cultured-killer auras they have in the book (then again, with the imperial Sardaukar looking like a bunch of frogs from across the channel...).
I wish they'd pulled a few of the cast from the Lynch's version: Max von Sidow as Liet-Kynes; Jurgen Prochnow, but cast him as Gurney.
The point isn't that Deep Blue was programmed to beat Kasparov; it's that Kasparov had no opportunity to study Deep Blue's game beforehand. He was learning on the job, which obviously hurt his game, as it would if he were playing an unknown human opponent.
It's standard practice above the master level to study your opponent's last 50 games as preparation. Kasparov ascribed part of his loss to Kramnik to the fact that Kramnik changed styles, rendering 90% of Kasparov's preparation useless.
Several years ago, Kasparov said publicly that it would it most likely be Kramnik who eventually dethroned him.
Fischer never played Kasparov. Spassky was Fischer's nemesis.
Six months ago, I became the manager of a small IT department (5 members plus myself) of a manufacturer. Doing so pretty directly cut down on what time I had to do development work, and added a lot of dealing with people to my day.
What has saved me from becoming a paper-shuffling, phone-call-returning drone is a couple things:
Your work habits will have to change, but that doesn't mean you'll spend all day in meetings or on the phone. For myself, I found that taking care of paperwork as it came up, handling phone calls immediately, and being cagey about requests for meetings means that I generally have at least a couple hours a day to code. You can't shut yourself off from the company for any length of time, but if you're well-organized about all the details that come your way, it's not too hard to find time for coding, and I go home between five and six every day.
The Office de le Langue Français, like the academy in France, does issue language advisories on what words should be used to refer to what, and which should be discarded. When I was a web developer in Montreal, all content was run by a translator who kept a whole library of such advisories. Whenever one of the "pur laine" complained about the french on a site, our translator quoted them chapter and verse on why those exact words were chosen.