Why not include a nice little "Hello, world" example program with your IDE? Then the user would need the JRE to run your program. Of course, it would also be installed when they went to run their programs, too, but that's coincidental, right?;^>
...and, like in every other class, the teachers got a sample handout in 1990 from their curriculum suppliers and then photocopied it for each student every year since then.
...New Englanders get a $5 discount per bulb making them practically free.
Yeah...because (a) those flourescent bulbs suck for light quality, which is a problem in the wintertime when we have very little natural light to begin with (Seasonal Affective Disorder, anyone?) and (b) when it's 40 degrees below zero, I don't really mind my lights generating a little extra heat.
For those who aren't familiar with the bulbs, we had them in the hotel I lived in last year (college overbooked)--after spending a few months with the lampshades off so that we'd have enough light to do homework, I struck upon the realization that 60-watt bulbs from StopNShop would make the place a lot better to hang out in.
Umm, I'm only "proficient" in Spanish according to my college (and not according to anyone else), but wouldn't the Spanish equivilant be "Qué passaaaaaaaa?"
Shouldn't an update be appended to the complete original text of the story and clearly marked as such, rather than appear to be an attempt to cover up something you came to regret having said?
Not when it really is an attempt to cover up something you came to regret having said...
...or to cover up something your lawyers say you will regret having said...
Can a company legally say "don't use this product for illegal purposes. If you do, we're going to charge you more."? That really seems like it makes them an accomplice of the criminal rather than an innocent business associate (eg the difference between "I can sell you this AR15 for $1500" and "I can sell you this AR15 for $1500 unless you're using it to defend your pot field, in which case I need $3000."
Perhaps the speed limiter isn't using the speedometer and is actually more accurately calibrated? (or vice-versa) Or perhaps the speedometer is deliberately left reading a higher speed than the actual travel speed (as are most cars sold in the US; I don't know if this practice extends overseas, as well).
Well, I think the elderly will learn computers just like everybody else does. By screwing around on them and doing random stuff.
Nah, like everyone else, if they do random stuff, they'll forget about it. People remember how to do things that mean something; people also tend (in my experience) to forget things that don't mean something. Another poster made a point about not bothering with technical details that don't affect the task at hand; that is a very valid point.
The "Oh, cool, I can do that???!!!" factor is important, too. If you show someone how to do something that helps him or her but that he or she didn't think he or she could do, then have him or her do it, he or she will probably remember it. Which brings in my favorite task when teaching seniors about their computers: let them know that they can customize the way the interface looks, especially colors and font size. This introduces them to the Control Panel (on Windoze machines), which is a bit of a Pandora's box, but when you show them how to change to "High-resolution colors, large fonts" with two clicks (by using the schemes), they will often be amazed. Many seniors have poor vision (eyes, like most body parts, tend to deteriorate over time); a lot of the seniors I met didn't even realize that I could make things that much easier for them.
Don't forget college radio...lots of colleges have small, student-run FM stations. Most of them are little, if at all, influenced by the RIAA; student DJs will often decide their own playlists, and though this does give an uneven quality to stations (8-10pm might be a really cool show, with DJs playing material you really like but haven't heard elsewhere and 10-12 might be a pair of teenybopper freshmen who like boy bands, Britney Spears, etc), it does provide a forum for new music.
The reason I trust that my neighbor will not murder me in my sleep is that I trust society at large to enact retribution (prison time) on my behalf. The state has absolutely no obligation to protect me (despite what the "we must think of the children!" crowd thinks), but it does have an obligation to enforce its laws. One of those laws requires a reasonable effort to find my killer, and that is what keeps me safe.
Okay, first: the state does have an obligation to protect your rights to life, liberty, and property from infringement by other people or the state itself. That is the sole purpose of the state, according to the natural rights theory upon which the US was founded. It does not have an obligation to protect you from yourself (e.g. motorcycle lid laws, "vice" taxes, etc).
Second, I actually feel safe not because I trust the government but because I trust those who live around me. If I didn't, I'd probably lock my house at night and have a loaded shotgun around (better than a pistol for in-home defense, IMO, because you're more likely to knock down an assailant wearing armor with a 12-gauge than with a small pistol, and you're less likely to have a ruond richochet and go through a wall...but I digress).
In genernal, though, I think you made some pretty good points about being forced to trust Bill G & co.
In the past few hundred years, we have seen the emergence of the neo-liberal theory of political and economic action. In that same time period, many nations recognized--often in formative documents, such as the United States' Declaration of Independence and later the Bill of Rights--the rights which philosophers had recognized as "natural rights," belonging to every person. These rights are, quite simply, life, liberty, and property. The Bill of Rights in the U.S. also recognized additional rights stemming from these rights, rights that the Framers felt were critical to preventing a tyrannical government. These rights included the freedom of speech, the freedom of written speech (i.e. freedom of the press), the right to peaceably assemble, the right to express one's religion, the right to keep and bear arms, the right to petition, the right to due process, and the right not to incriminate oneself in a court of law. The Framers recognized these rights as the rights necessary to sustain a representative democracy and protect the citizenry from a tyrannical government.
The Framers specifically forbade the government to infringe upon these rights. This attempt to protect the citizens from their government was somewhat successful. Citizens are sometimes denied their rights by various forms of government. The right to speak freely was denied by statues prohibiting sedition. For many years, blacks were denied the right to keep and bear arms--the last thing a lynch mob wants to find is a well-armed victim. The right to peaceably assemble has been trampled upon time after time when anti-establishment groups attempted to demonstrate. Most of the citizenry now faces extreme hurdles in attempting to exercise its right to keep and bear arms, but the police and the criminals seem to have little trouble in exercising this right.
By and large, though, the Framers were successful in protecting our rights from government infringement. Even some recent challenges to the freedom of speech, such as the Communications Decency Act, have been struck down in whole or in part by court as contrary to the First Amendment guarantees of freedom. The Framers were generally successful in recognizing the danger inherent in a government entrusted with the power necessary to maintain order and protect its citizens' rights.
The Framers did not, however, protect against the greatest danger to freedom in the world today. Some corporations are now more powerful than many nation-states and exert dangerous levels of influence in the rest. Some of that influence is direct, such as action against nation-states by corporations in trade tribunals. Some is indirect, such as the threat to move an industrial installation if the minimum wage is raised or if environmental laws are strengthened. Occasionally the influence is beneficial--corporate pressure was one of the reasons the U.S. recently changed export laws regarding encryption technology that can itself be a tremendous aid to free speech in areas where such speech is not inherently protected.
The majority of corporate influence, though, serves only one interest--corporate profit. When a community benefit (such as the relaxation of encryption export laws) comes from corporate influence, it is generally an unintended side effect. It should be clear that corporations don't seek to destroy the environment or to cause cancer by introducing new compounds into foods. They seek only to make profits; if they perceive that profits will be greater if they do not harm the environment, then they will not harm the environment. If they perceive that their profits will be greater if they do harm the environment, they will do so. Corporations, being run by humans, are inherently fallible; they make mistakes, sometimes in calculating the cost of a particular business decision. Cases where a corporation caused long-term harm due to a lack of foresight or simple ineptitude are no less numerous than cases where governments, in seeking to somehow improve life, caused tremendous amounts of harm. Nor are corporations any less likely than individuals to misinterpret data and mispredict the outcome of an action or set of actions. Quite simply, corporations are neither inherently good nor inherently bad. More importantly, though, they are not inherently moral.
Corporations also use governments directly, even attacking freedoms that have traditionally belonged to the people. Take, for example, the various abuses of copyright law in the U.S. The most egregious is the Sonny Bono Copyright Act, which was another giant leap to sidestep the original intent of copyright law (i.e. to benefit the people through the creation of new intellectual property). The Sonny Bono Copyright Act extended copyright protection on works published after 1978 to the length of the artist's life plus seventy years or to 95 years if the work was authored by a corporation. Quite simply, the repeated extensions of the copyright term thwart one of the original benefits of copyright--namely, the idea that every work produced, copyrighted, and distributed for profit would become a part of the public domain at a later date. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, another corporate-sponsored bill, seeks to attack copyright from another angle and attack fair use. Its most onerous provision outlaws the circumvention of any device meant to control copying or displaying of information, regardless of the reason for which such circumvention is sought. Seeking to record a digital streaming audio broadcast and watch it at a later time, an activity held as legal under the fair use doctrine (in the Betamax case), is illegal if that audio broadcast has some bit of information that says it is not to be copied. Further, under subsections (a)(2) and (b)(1), the DMCA prohibits making any utility or device available to the public that can thwart such access controls. Quite simply, the DMCA does not technically remove one's rights under the fair use doctrine. However, it does remove one's ability to legally exercise those rights, if access controls are present that prevent the exercising of those rights.
It is the corporations, then, that we must protect ourselves against. Like the radicals who sought to form a new, largely libertarian nation in a world of monarchies and empires, we must struggle to protect our rights against another challenge. Like those radicals, we should seek not to eliminate the force that threatens our liberties but instead to eliminate the threat. Through legislation, political activism, and economic activism, we must seek to protect our rights against the tyranny of the corporations.
Treat children as if they are intelligent, responsible and capable, and they will respond as such.
But at the same time, the capability to make major decisions comes in large part from experience. It also comes with non-experiential learning; I've never felt household AC current run through my body, but I'm still pretty damn cautious when working around the stuff (of course, I usually just unplug whatever I happen to be afraid of shocking myself with). Both of these things take time, and both of these are reasons that we [as a society] try to slowly increase rights and responsibilities.
Unfortunately, as the Salon article points out, the legal world seems to view anyone under 18 as "without these rights and responsibilities" and anyone over 18 "with these rights and responsibilities". As the article recognizes, and as the real world usually recognizes, it's not a binary situation. Most states even recognize this in driving laws, whether just by allowing minors of a certain age to drive, or even by graduated restrictions on driving.
Bottom line: even if children aren't stupid, they don't have the innate ability to make good decisions. Hopefully, they develop that ability over time and grow to be productive, good-decision-making adults. Sometimes they don't; sometimes they get teh opportunity to make a bad decision before they understand that decision and that's it; sometimes they make a bad decision even though they know the consequences; sometimes shit just happens. And, then, sometimes, things just don't work out that way and they end up serving in the US Congress.
My point was that, despite being an evil corporation, they do sell some useful products. McDonald's and NSync, however, have no redeeming value whatsoever (at least as far as I can tell)
I really don't think Walmart belongs on that list, and Microsoft is somewhat questionable. NSync is just crap. McDonalds is cheap crap. Walmart actually sells some reasonably useful stuff at relatively low prices, and for convenience it's hard to beat. Granted, it is a big, evil corporation that tends to push out local mom-and-pop shops, but at least it doesn't directly cause gastrointestinal distress (a la McDonald's). A few of Microsoft's products are (were?) useful and decent applications...Word comes to mind.
heh. My school has recently instituted an "email-for-life" policy, but it's not just forwarding. It's "keep the same address we gave you when you got here, not a special alumni domain address, and we'll keep maintaining the mail server". Incidentally, the IT staff was recently forced to institute a "any message older than a year in your inbox will be deleted" policy. Could just be coincidence, though.
I would *love* to be using tin (substitute your newsreader of choice) to read usenet instead of a heavily lagged web interface (ie it takes a couple of days for messages to show up). However, I don't have access to a Real NNTP Server(TM). My school isn't enlightened enough to provide one (which shocked me when I got here...I had always had NNTP access with my Internet access until that point), and I can't afford to pay for one of the commercial services. So I'm stuck with web-based interfaces.
. Someone makes it and puts de ad routine in the code, e.g. show_ad_banner();
Nothing can stop me from nuking that code away and remove the banner in the client.
Very true. Of course, one doesn't need an open-source progrm to nuke the banners:
#include <disclaim>
Shut down AIM.EXE (don't just log off--completely exit the program)
Open C:\PROGRA~1\AIM95\AIM.ODL (change path as necessary) in your text editor of choice (or Notepad, if all else fails). Comment out the lines referring to advert (under on_group(5) and on_group(11); a semicolon (';') at the beginning of the line will make it a comment. Save the file.
Rename ADVERT.OCM to something like advert.oc_ (or delete it).
Start AIM. No banner ad. (of coures, you still loose the screen real estate to a blank gray square, but at least it's not an annoying, non-static, brightly-colored square).
(Now if someone could tell me how to write OCM modules, I'd be really interested...AIM itself seems to be rather modular, and it would be Really Cool(TM) to write one's own modules for it.)
Yeah, but you can't get a "trusted" Verisign cert for a.us domain--only for.com,.net, and.org (last I looked; I suppose they're prolly allowing some other domains now). For that reason, my high school went from.pvt.k12.me.us to.org. The CIO there is pretty big into standards, which is prolly why we didn't get the.com (which was open at the time of the.org purchase) or the.edu (which, at least according to some RFCs I've seen but am too lazy to look up, is supposed to be only for four-year, accredited, post-secondary institutions).
Yeah, it probably would, if my server hadn't picked today to die (segfaults on everything, trying to run "w" gives "Non-standard uts for running kernel: release 2.0.38=0.0.0 gives version code 0" and hangs). I guess it just shows that even with a nice, solid OS, if the eight-year-old hardware dies, you still loose uptime.
Now, if I just had a way to redirect that original resume link to my backup copy of that page (on my school's personalweb server), I'd be all set.
I am trying to kill both birds with one stone. I'd like to be in a "professional" environment to get that experience--that's something I can't get working from home. The money aspect is kinda important, too...I can't afford to not work for the summer, but my first priority is not lots of cash.
Grrr....remind me to apply a cluestick to FrontPage at the earliest convenience. The problem, quite simply, is that our "wonderful" personalweb server is no longer accessible to post via any method other than FrontPage (so far as I can determine...it certainly isn't SMB-accessible anymore). So I'm limited to posting with FrontPage, which leaves me somewhat at its mercy for links...grrr....this is why I like Emacs much, much better for HTML tasks.
granted, I am a blooming idiot for not checking that first, but I threw the page up in.5 seconds while I was in a lab (no FP on my personal PC, thank God) and forgot that FrontPage likes to do things like that.
Why no HTML? It's not a layout language, and all the people I've talked to have preferred either Word or PDF format.
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Why not include a nice little "Hello, world" example program with your IDE? Then the user would need the JRE to run your program. Of course, it would also be installed when they went to run their programs, too, but that's coincidental, right? ;^>
Mozilla allows this--see the docs. You can either globally disable window.open() or disable it on a per-site basis.
...at pissing off users and causing more people to switch off Javascript or switch to Mozilla with its per-site popup blocking ability.
...and, like in every other class, the teachers got a sample handout in 1990 from their curriculum suppliers and then photocopied it for each student every year since then.
Yeah...because (a) those flourescent bulbs suck for light quality, which is a problem in the wintertime when we have very little natural light to begin with (Seasonal Affective Disorder, anyone?) and (b) when it's 40 degrees below zero, I don't really mind my lights generating a little extra heat.
For those who aren't familiar with the bulbs, we had them in the hotel I lived in last year (college overbooked)--after spending a few months with the lampshades off so that we'd have enough light to do homework, I struck upon the realization that 60-watt bulbs from StopNShop would make the place a lot better to hang out in.
Umm, I'm only "proficient" in Spanish according to my college (and not according to anyone else), but wouldn't the Spanish equivilant be "Qué passaaaaaaaa?"
...or to cover up something your lawyers say you will regret having said...
Can a company legally say "don't use this product for illegal purposes. If you do, we're going to charge you more."? That really seems like it makes them an accomplice of the criminal rather than an innocent business associate (eg the difference between "I can sell you this AR15 for $1500" and "I can sell you this AR15 for $1500 unless you're using it to defend your pot field, in which case I need $3000."
Perhaps the speed limiter isn't using the speedometer and is actually more accurately calibrated? (or vice-versa) Or perhaps the speedometer is deliberately left reading a higher speed than the actual travel speed (as are most cars sold in the US; I don't know if this practice extends overseas, as well).
Nah, like everyone else, if they do random stuff, they'll forget about it. People remember how to do things that mean something; people also tend (in my experience) to forget things that don't mean something. Another poster made a point about not bothering with technical details that don't affect the task at hand; that is a very valid point.
The "Oh, cool, I can do that???!!!" factor is important, too. If you show someone how to do something that helps him or her but that he or she didn't think he or she could do, then have him or her do it, he or she will probably remember it. Which brings in my favorite task when teaching seniors about their computers: let them know that they can customize the way the interface looks, especially colors and font size. This introduces them to the Control Panel (on Windoze machines), which is a bit of a Pandora's box, but when you show them how to change to "High-resolution colors, large fonts" with two clicks (by using the schemes), they will often be amazed. Many seniors have poor vision (eyes, like most body parts, tend to deteriorate over time); a lot of the seniors I met didn't even realize that I could make things that much easier for them.
Don't forget college radio...lots of colleges have small, student-run FM stations. Most of them are little, if at all, influenced by the RIAA; student DJs will often decide their own playlists, and though this does give an uneven quality to stations (8-10pm might be a really cool show, with DJs playing material you really like but haven't heard elsewhere and 10-12 might be a pair of teenybopper freshmen who like boy bands, Britney Spears, etc), it does provide a forum for new music.
Okay, first: the state does have an obligation to protect your rights to life, liberty, and property from infringement by other people or the state itself. That is the sole purpose of the state, according to the natural rights theory upon which the US was founded. It does not have an obligation to protect you from yourself (e.g. motorcycle lid laws, "vice" taxes, etc).
Second, I actually feel safe not because I trust the government but because I trust those who live around me. If I didn't, I'd probably lock my house at night and have a loaded shotgun around (better than a pistol for in-home defense, IMO, because you're more likely to knock down an assailant wearing armor with a 12-gauge than with a small pistol, and you're less likely to have a ruond richochet and go through a wall...but I digress).
In genernal, though, I think you made some pretty good points about being forced to trust Bill G & co.
In the past few hundred years, we have seen the emergence of the neo-liberal theory of political and economic action. In that same time period, many nations recognized--often in formative documents, such as the United States' Declaration of Independence and later the Bill of Rights--the rights which philosophers had recognized as "natural rights," belonging to every person. These rights are, quite simply, life, liberty, and property. The Bill of Rights in the U.S. also recognized additional rights stemming from these rights, rights that the Framers felt were critical to preventing a tyrannical government. These rights included the freedom of speech, the freedom of written speech (i.e. freedom of the press), the right to peaceably assemble, the right to express one's religion, the right to keep and bear arms, the right to petition, the right to due process, and the right not to incriminate oneself in a court of law. The Framers recognized these rights as the rights necessary to sustain a representative democracy and protect the citizenry from a tyrannical government.
The Framers specifically forbade the government to infringe upon these rights. This attempt to protect the citizens from their government was somewhat successful. Citizens are sometimes denied their rights by various forms of government. The right to speak freely was denied by statues prohibiting sedition. For many years, blacks were denied the right to keep and bear arms--the last thing a lynch mob wants to find is a well-armed victim. The right to peaceably assemble has been trampled upon time after time when anti-establishment groups attempted to demonstrate. Most of the citizenry now faces extreme hurdles in attempting to exercise its right to keep and bear arms, but the police and the criminals seem to have little trouble in exercising this right.
By and large, though, the Framers were successful in protecting our rights from government infringement. Even some recent challenges to the freedom of speech, such as the Communications Decency Act, have been struck down in whole or in part by court as contrary to the First Amendment guarantees of freedom. The Framers were generally successful in recognizing the danger inherent in a government entrusted with the power necessary to maintain order and protect its citizens' rights.
The Framers did not, however, protect against the greatest danger to freedom in the world today. Some corporations are now more powerful than many nation-states and exert dangerous levels of influence in the rest. Some of that influence is direct, such as action against nation-states by corporations in trade tribunals. Some is indirect, such as the threat to move an industrial installation if the minimum wage is raised or if environmental laws are strengthened. Occasionally the influence is beneficial--corporate pressure was one of the reasons the U.S. recently changed export laws regarding encryption technology that can itself be a tremendous aid to free speech in areas where such speech is not inherently protected.
The majority of corporate influence, though, serves only one interest--corporate profit. When a community benefit (such as the relaxation of encryption export laws) comes from corporate influence, it is generally an unintended side effect. It should be clear that corporations don't seek to destroy the environment or to cause cancer by introducing new compounds into foods. They seek only to make profits; if they perceive that profits will be greater if they do not harm the environment, then they will not harm the environment. If they perceive that their profits will be greater if they do harm the environment, they will do so. Corporations, being run by humans, are inherently fallible; they make mistakes, sometimes in calculating the cost of a particular business decision. Cases where a corporation caused long-term harm due to a lack of foresight or simple ineptitude are no less numerous than cases where governments, in seeking to somehow improve life, caused tremendous amounts of harm. Nor are corporations any less likely than individuals to misinterpret data and mispredict the outcome of an action or set of actions. Quite simply, corporations are neither inherently good nor inherently bad. More importantly, though, they are not inherently moral.
Corporations also use governments directly, even attacking freedoms that have traditionally belonged to the people. Take, for example, the various abuses of copyright law in the U.S. The most egregious is the Sonny Bono Copyright Act, which was another giant leap to sidestep the original intent of copyright law (i.e. to benefit the people through the creation of new intellectual property). The Sonny Bono Copyright Act extended copyright protection on works published after 1978 to the length of the artist's life plus seventy years or to 95 years if the work was authored by a corporation. Quite simply, the repeated extensions of the copyright term thwart one of the original benefits of copyright--namely, the idea that every work produced, copyrighted, and distributed for profit would become a part of the public domain at a later date. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, another corporate-sponsored bill, seeks to attack copyright from another angle and attack fair use. Its most onerous provision outlaws the circumvention of any device meant to control copying or displaying of information, regardless of the reason for which such circumvention is sought. Seeking to record a digital streaming audio broadcast and watch it at a later time, an activity held as legal under the fair use doctrine (in the Betamax case), is illegal if that audio broadcast has some bit of information that says it is not to be copied. Further, under subsections (a)(2) and (b)(1), the DMCA prohibits making any utility or device available to the public that can thwart such access controls. Quite simply, the DMCA does not technically remove one's rights under the fair use doctrine. However, it does remove one's ability to legally exercise those rights, if access controls are present that prevent the exercising of those rights.
It is the corporations, then, that we must protect ourselves against. Like the radicals who sought to form a new, largely libertarian nation in a world of monarchies and empires, we must struggle to protect our rights against another challenge. Like those radicals, we should seek not to eliminate the force that threatens our liberties but instead to eliminate the threat. Through legislation, political activism, and economic activism, we must seek to protect our rights against the tyranny of the corporations.
But at the same time, the capability to make major decisions comes in large part from experience. It also comes with non-experiential learning; I've never felt household AC current run through my body, but I'm still pretty damn cautious when working around the stuff (of course, I usually just unplug whatever I happen to be afraid of shocking myself with). Both of these things take time, and both of these are reasons that we [as a society] try to slowly increase rights and responsibilities.
Unfortunately, as the Salon article points out, the legal world seems to view anyone under 18 as "without these rights and responsibilities" and anyone over 18 "with these rights and responsibilities". As the article recognizes, and as the real world usually recognizes, it's not a binary situation. Most states even recognize this in driving laws, whether just by allowing minors of a certain age to drive, or even by graduated restrictions on driving.
Bottom line: even if children aren't stupid, they don't have the innate ability to make good decisions. Hopefully, they develop that ability over time and grow to be productive, good-decision-making adults. Sometimes they don't; sometimes they get teh opportunity to make a bad decision before they understand that decision and that's it; sometimes they make a bad decision even though they know the consequences; sometimes shit just happens. And, then, sometimes, things just don't work out that way and they end up serving in the US Congress.
Or, also likely, that one man with a large hunk of mass (such as a rocket) can make a huge impact into the Earth.
My point was that, despite being an evil corporation, they do sell some useful products. McDonald's and NSync, however, have no redeeming value whatsoever (at least as far as I can tell)
I really don't think Walmart belongs on that list, and Microsoft is somewhat questionable. NSync is just crap. McDonalds is cheap crap. Walmart actually sells some reasonably useful stuff at relatively low prices, and for convenience it's hard to beat. Granted, it is a big, evil corporation that tends to push out local mom-and-pop shops, but at least it doesn't directly cause gastrointestinal distress (a la McDonald's). A few of Microsoft's products are (were?) useful and decent applications...Word comes to mind.
heh. My school has recently instituted an "email-for-life" policy, but it's not just forwarding. It's "keep the same address we gave you when you got here, not a special alumni domain address, and we'll keep maintaining the mail server". Incidentally, the IT staff was recently forced to institute a "any message older than a year in your inbox will be deleted" policy. Could just be coincidence, though.
I would *love* to be using tin (substitute your newsreader of choice) to read usenet instead of a heavily lagged web interface (ie it takes a couple of days for messages to show up). However, I don't have access to a Real NNTP Server(TM). My school isn't enlightened enough to provide one (which shocked me when I got here...I had always had NNTP access with my Internet access until that point), and I can't afford to pay for one of the commercial services. So I'm stuck with web-based interfaces.
Very true. Of course, one doesn't need an open-source progrm to nuke the banners:
#include <disclaim>
(Now if someone could tell me how to write OCM modules, I'd be really interested...AIM itself seems to be rather modular, and it would be Really Cool(TM) to write one's own modules for it.)
Yeah, but you can't get a "trusted" Verisign cert for a .us domain--only for .com, .net, and .org (last I looked; I suppose they're prolly allowing some other domains now). For that reason, my high school went from .pvt.k12.me.us to .org. The CIO there is pretty big into standards, which is prolly why we didn't get the .com (which was open at the time of the .org purchase) or the .edu (which, at least according to some RFCs I've seen but am too lazy to look up, is supposed to be only for four-year, accredited, post-secondary institutions).
Yeah, it probably would, if my server hadn't picked today to die (segfaults on everything, trying to run "w" gives "Non-standard uts for running kernel: release 2.0.38=0.0.0 gives version code 0" and hangs). I guess it just shows that even with a nice, solid OS, if the eight-year-old hardware dies, you still loose uptime.
Now, if I just had a way to redirect that original resume link to my backup copy of that page (on my school's personalweb server), I'd be all set.
I am trying to kill both birds with one stone. I'd like to be in a "professional" environment to get that experience--that's something I can't get working from home. The money aspect is kinda important, too...I can't afford to not work for the summer, but my first priority is not lots of cash.
Okay, I now have my resume up on my box, rather than the local "personal page" server. That should work (no FrontPage involved this time).
Grrr....remind me to apply a cluestick to FrontPage at the earliest convenience. The problem, quite simply, is that our "wonderful" personalweb server is no longer accessible to post via any method other than FrontPage (so far as I can determine...it certainly isn't SMB-accessible anymore). So I'm limited to posting with FrontPage, which leaves me somewhat at its mercy for links...grrr....this is why I like Emacs much, much better for HTML tasks.
granted, I am a blooming idiot for not checking that first, but I threw the page up in .5 seconds while I was in a lab (no FP on my personal PC, thank God) and forgot that FrontPage likes to do things like that.
Why no HTML? It's not a layout language, and all the people I've talked to have preferred either Word or PDF format.