Anonymous Coward wrote: Here is an IDEA: The local area networks of governments (city, county, state, national) should be publicly readable networks. NO reason not to and every reason to make it open to the public.
Oh yeah, that's just what I want - all government records, including:
Social security numbers
Driver's license numbers
Tax returns
Health records (especially in Canada)
Criminal records
In theory, it's a nice idea - the data that the government has on me should be my property, and I should be able to see what they know about me. However, the problem lies in making sure that I'm the only one who can access that information...
...and I'm not even going to mention the risk to data integrity... oops, guess I just did. ________________________
Just adding my 2 cents (Canadian) on Scotia Online: The security is great, but it's done via a small proxy program from Entrust (more details) which is only available for Win32 - if you're a Linux or Mac monogamist, you're out of luck with Scotia Online.
Having said that, I'm very pleased with their online banking - especially free bill payments. About the only thing I would add to the system is the ability to schedule recurring transactions (you can schedule one-time transactions, such as bill payments or account transfers, a month or so in advance). Haven't tried their online discount brokerage - all I have for stocks is what I got when my insurance company demutualized. ________________________
If memory serves me correctly, was once supported by Slashdot... and abused horribly by AC's who would use them to force horizontal scrolling (imagine a loooooooong string between )... damn annoying.
But yeah, it would be nice for code posting. Oh well, just another example of a few sh*t-heads screwing things up for everyone else... ________________________
When I spotted this story on Wired this morning, I decided to look this guy up (John McLanahan) - I've had my own experiences with NSI (not quite to the same extreme as he has), and wanted to find out some more details about his situation and see if I could help somehow.
So, I went to the NSI WHOIS server, searched for "McLanahan, John", and found a John McLanahan with a Boston address (actually, three or four handles with the same name and mailing address) who currently owns a number of domains related to racing (roadraces.com, sailingraces.com, runningclubs.com, raceplanning.com, raceinformation.com, coolraces.com) - sounds like the right guy...
...and then I notice the other domains this guy has registered. It looks like he owns a number of domains that are stock-ticker symbols for.com and hi-tech companies (TalkCity, Voyager.Net, ChemDex), some life-insurance related domains (weblifeinsurance.com, lifeinsuranceinfo.com), and some more generic business-related domains (bankinginformation.com, companyinterview.com). Unless his business plan covers more than just racing, I'd say he's been in the domain-speculation game for a while himself... especially when just about every domain I tried going to said "domain for sale".
Not to excuse NSI's more-than-usual imcompetence, but suddenly I don't feel quite so sorry for this guy... ________________________
That was one of the better site defacements I've seen in a while - what better thing to do to a Linux site than replace their page with the default MS IIS page? Pity that it's too late to make CNet's list of "Top 10 Hacks"...
And no, I'm not condoning cracking (are you kidding? I'm a sysadmin, for crying out loud), and I'm in no way saying that IIS is a better web server (it's a piece of crap). All I'm saying is that this one made me laugh a lot more than the usual "\/\/3 0\/\/n U! \/\/3 R 3773t3!" bull... ________________________
Huh? Suing a company that's gone under doesn't strike me as a particularly effective course of action - if they've gone bankrupt, chances are you'll never get a penny out of them in a lawsuit.
And you don't have to rely on the "legions of loyal hackers" - with OSS, you can fix the problems yourself (or you can hire someone with a clue to do it for you). Quit expecting everyone else to fix your problems for you - if the product is that critical to your company's success, you should be willing to invest your time and/or money to ensure it's continued viability.
<RANT>Is it just me, or does it seem that modern society has moved away from the concept of personal responsibility? You don't have to look much further than the commercials for lawyers on TV, or the whole "everyone's a victim" mentality ("I was beaten as a child, so I'm not responsible for holding up that liquor store - it's my step-father's fault!"). When something goes wrong, everyone seems to be screaming for someone to blame, rather than going out and trying to fix it (I'm guilty of this, but I'm trying to change). The whole OpenSource concept goes counter to that idea, which I find refreshingly revolutionary, but how long will it take before we see a reversal in this attitude?</RANT&;gt ________________________
"What if Redmond got hit by a Meteor tomorrow, and every MS programmer got killed... What happens to all the bug-fixes and tech support?"
The much more likely scenario is this: "What if Microsoft decides that the product your business depends on isn't profitable enough and discontinues it?" Although I won't shed too many tears if the meteor scenario comes to pass...:=] ________________________
What's to prevent a small group of contestants banding together to "fix" the contest? A group of 6 contestants could easily control the votes in the "Tribal Council" (gosh, this show sounds stupid), set up one of their own group as the eventual winner, and split the winnings 6 ways.
Of course, I suspect it will all come down to the old "Prisoner's Dillema" (if I rat on my cellmate, I go free - we both keep quiet, we both go free), and greed will win out in the end...
Give me a rerun of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" any day over this crap... ________________________
Re:This is great news that should be spread
on
911 Calls Linux
·
· Score: 1
Just wait - according to the piece on Wired the other day, most of those outlets monitor/., so I would expect Officer Sherman's phone to start ringing soon... ________________________
Guess I should be working for the Post Office or else the Berkely math department... but what I really want to be is a BOFH! (Anyone know of a BOFH personality test?) ________________________
180 GB in a wristwatch sounds great, but what about the physical shock factor? IANANTS (I Am Not A NanoTech Specialist), but what are the chances of a "head crash" on a device this size? ________________________
I also had an electric MAC-10 water gun - spare clip, matte black finish, almost a precise replica (except for an annoying water leak). I really wanted the UZI, though...
My high-school room-mate (boarding school) and I went out driving around our small town one night in my Firebird (what, me, spoiled rich kid? yep!) with my MAC-10. My room-mate ("Dynomite" Dave) was a somewhat scary looking fellow - long-ish hair, wild eyes, and almost always wearing a Metallica T-Shirt. I drove, he had the water gun, and we instituted a reign (rain? sorry for the pun) of wet terror on the town that night. I remember two incidents in particular:
Two people on bikes. Hit them once, circled the block, hit them again. Circled the block - they must have turned off somewhere.
10-year-old kid at a phone booth. Room-mate leaned out the window, pointed water gun at kid, shouted "I'm gonna get you!". Kid looked like he wet himself right there and then.
The really scary part of this? We were both stone-cold sober...:=]
Nowadays, a couple guys pulling a stunt like this would have been sent for psychological evaluation and court-mandated therapy - provided that the police don't shoot them dead on the spot. Those were the days, all right... ________________________
I think you've nailed it - this explains infomercials and shopping channels especially. Network TV depends on people who don't care enough to use the remote control - I mean, really, who tunes in specifically to watch infomercials?
The only infomercial I actually watched on purpose was one that was on WUHF every single night for months - essentially 30 minutes of bad cover tunes, over-endowed women in bikinis, and a 1-900 "chat line" number flashing at the bottom of the screen... how exactly would you program that preference into ReplayTV or TiVo?:=] ________________________
It's Monday, obviously - I stand corrected. (Memo to self - research first, then open mouth - insertion of foot is optional).
I think my basic point still stands, however - we are implicitly agreeing to the networks' licensing agreements when we turn on our TVs, and we don't have any rights to the content except those that the networks and/or content producers decide to give us. If, in the future, they decide to outlaw private recording of broadcasts, that's their right - no matter how many millions of people it pisses off.
In a final, grasping-at-straws effort to vindicate myself against you somehow, I have found a nit to pick with your post - the 42% that you refer to are North Americans. I enjoyed a wonderful Canada Day (July 1) last week, eh! ________________________
The ads that are there get watched again - but there's no way for the networks to track this, so they can't charge the advertiser more for it. And if they can't charge the advertiser more, then it's not doing the network any direct benefit.
Recording PPV movies... shouldn't be an issue either... you already payed for it - I have to disagree with you here, this is just wrong. You pay to rent videos, but you don't have the right to make a copy of them, even for personal use - why should PPV be any different? It's just like software - the distribution medium doesn't mean a thing, it's the intellectual property that you are licensing.
When it comes down to it, we are implicitly agreeing to the license agreement of the broadcasters whenever we turn on the TV - and you thought Micro$oft was bad about not letting you see the license until it's too late?. I want my GNU-TV!:-) ________________________
ActiveState sent out a message about this on their announcment list this morning. They said that there are four main areas of development with M$:
improving the impementation of fork() to reduce overhead
improving the Windows installer (especially for Win2K compatibility)
improved Unicode support
performance boosting of PerlScript (embedded Perl within Active Server Pages)
I don't rightly see how any of this could be seen as a bad thing - it'll be easier to install and use Perl on Windows, which will result in more developers writing Perl code, which means it'll be easier to port their existing code to other operating systems when they decide to ditch NT/Win2K.
As for people's fears of embracing/extending, there are already a number of Perl modules specific to the Win32 platform for system services, registry, ODBC, etc. so it's already happened - and it's users who did it, not M$. As other people here have noted, most Perl scripts run in a controlled environment (i.e. your server) rather than an uncontrolled environment (i.e. someone else's web browser), so the comparison to Java is mostly irrelevant. ________________________
Is Net and Web property infinite? That is, is the Net so expansible that it could never be overcrowded and congested?
Two words - dot com. You talk about overcrowded and congested, this is the prime example. New top-level-domains will help, but.com will still be the desirable property for quite some time.
Another example - the IP address space. Yes, I know IPv6 is on it's way, with enough IP addresses for everything on the planet to have at least 2, but it's not here yet, and for the time being, IP address space is getting pretty congested.
In theory, virtual property is infinite. In practice, it's limited. It keeps growing and growing, but there will always be limits, and we are quite good at pushing limits. And don't forget the infamous quote attributed to Bill Gates - "640K ought to be enough for anyone." ________________________
Anyone else remember the Coleco Adam? It was an add-on to the ColecoVision game system that made it roughly the equivalent of an Apple ][+ (keyboard, floppy drive, daisy-wheel printer). I never actually saw one of these units in person, and if I recall correctly, it was a pretty big flop. Haven't heard much from Coleco since then.
Sony makes excellent products, and I worry that these plans for the PlayStation 2 may tank, and drag the company down with it. That would be a shame... ________________________
How many guns and explosives have actually been found by airport scanners?
You're totally overlooking the deterrent value of airport scanners. For anyone with half a brain, they know that they can't bring guns/bombs/whatever through the scanner, so they don't even try.
Of course, it has the negative effect of making the "bad guys" think smarter - nothing worse than smart bad guys... ________________________
With my 10 year high school reunion coming up, I'd been thinking a lot about my teenage years a lot. Now with the shooting, I can't think of anything else.
I was always the weird kid. I completely sucked at any sort of sports - I was on the school softball team for a while in Grade 4, but quit after it conflicted with piano lessons. I am pretty near-sighted, so I've had glasses since I was 7 or 8. The school that I attended from kindergarten to grade 8 was living hell for me, especially in the later years (actually, the school shut down one year after I left due to the number of parents pulling their kids out). By that time, I had a shattered self-image and no self esteem. I got into some fights with other students, and began bullying other kids who happened to be just a little geekier than me.
Grade 9 saw a new school for me, with the number of students at least a full order of magnitude greater than the previous school. Here again, I was ostracized and bullied. Gym class was a special sort of nightmare - eventually, I just skipped class. I took the grade 10 computer class along with a number of other grade 9 geeks, but wound up crossing paths with one of the grade 10 jerks in the class. None of the teachers knew me, or seemed to care.
Grades 10 through 12 were at a private residential school in a small town about an hour away from my home city. The total enrollment in that school was about 115 students - the teachers knew each student by name. I believe that the three years at this school is what kept me from becoming a complete sociopath. It wasn't perfect - grade 10 was a bit of a rough transition, my roommate in the dorm that year was a complete psycho, and I threatened suicide twice - but I don't even want to think what would have happened to me back at my old school. The social structure among the students wasn't very rigid - you had your jocks and geeks, but they managed to get along fairly well (I sang in the school concert choir, along with most of the members of the basketball and volleyball teams). I made a number of lasting friendships from those years (and a couple of people that I hope don't show up at the reunion).
I'd say I turned out pretty good, but I wonder what would have happened to me today? In grade 12, I grew a beard and dressed in camouflage. I read "International Combat Arms" magazine. I played computer games (Autoduel and Beyond Wolfenstein were favorites). I loved violent movies (Aliens, Predator, and Platoon were among my personal collection). I listened to heavy metal. I had an UZI water pistol. A kid like that today would be in serious counseling and/or surveillance.
Life after high school has been pretty good. Got into BBS-ing in the early 90's (under the alias "Suburban Commando"), went to university, got into the Internet and earned my B. Sc. majoring in Computer Science, married a girl that I had met in high school, and I'm now the father of a 1-year-old girl. I've got a good job as network admin for a small company (even if it is an NT network), and I'm happy with my life. I don't wear camouflage any more, but I still listen to loud music, play games like Quake and Jedi Knight, and I drive my car a little too fast sometimes. But I survived high school, and I'm happy now.
This shooting has hit me pretty hard. I can understand what the two shooters were feeling - I'm not condoning their actions, but I think I understand their motives. Revenge is a powerful drive, pain and hate are powerful emotions, and it's pretty easy to let them override common sense. To everyone who is currently in high school, I just want to say "hang in there". It'll soon be over, and then you can get on with the rest of your life. ________________________
Along with switching engines on the fly, it also says it will do a "side-by-side" layout with both engines (i.e. same web page, displayed in both Gecko and IE5). I don't know about you, but that will sure save me some wear-and-tear on the old Alt-Tab key.
Of course, that wouldn't be necessary if browsers actually supported the standards correctly. Gecko is very promising in this direction, especially regarding CSS and the DOM, but IE is an absolute disaster. According to the stats on one of the web sites I administer, about 36% of our visitors are using IE 3 or 4, 31% are using Netscape 3 or 4, and 25% are using AOL 3 or 4 - what a nightmare to have to keep all these in mind when designing the site!
Of course, the day that MS actually adheres to standards, rather than "embracing and extending", is the day I go into floral design. ________________________
Slashdot Mirror
<DrEvil>One... billion pages</DrEvil>
Sorry - couldn't resist. :=]
________________________
Anonymous Coward wrote: Here is an IDEA: The local area networks of governments (city, county, state, national) should be publicly readable networks. NO reason not to and every reason to make it open to the public.
Oh yeah, that's just what I want - all government records, including:
- Social security numbers
- Driver's license numbers
- Tax returns
- Health records (especially in Canada)
- Criminal records
In theory, it's a nice idea - the data that the government has on me should be my property, and I should be able to see what they know about me. However, the problem lies in making sure that I'm the only one who can access that information......and I'm not even going to mention the risk to data integrity... oops, guess I just did.
________________________
Just adding my 2 cents (Canadian) on Scotia Online: The security is great, but it's done via a small proxy program from Entrust (more details) which is only available for Win32 - if you're a Linux or Mac monogamist, you're out of luck with Scotia Online.
Having said that, I'm very pleased with their online banking - especially free bill payments. About the only thing I would add to the system is the ability to schedule recurring transactions (you can schedule one-time transactions, such as bill payments or account transfers, a month or so in advance). Haven't tried their online discount brokerage - all I have for stocks is what I got when my insurance company demutualized.
________________________
But yeah, it would be nice for code posting. Oh well, just another example of a few sh*t-heads screwing things up for everyone else...
________________________
When I spotted this story on Wired this morning, I decided to look this guy up (John McLanahan) - I've had my own experiences with NSI (not quite to the same extreme as he has), and wanted to find out some more details about his situation and see if I could help somehow.
Tried searching the web for him - found a 29-year-old John McLanahan from Boston who came in 134th in a half-marathon, another who is a corporate lawyer in Georgia, and one who lived sometime in the late 1700s (from a few geneology sites). From the Wired article, it sounded like the Boston McLanahan might be the one (right age range, into racing) but there was no e-mail address listed on the marathon results.
So, I went to the NSI WHOIS server, searched for "McLanahan, John", and found a John McLanahan with a Boston address (actually, three or four handles with the same name and mailing address) who currently owns a number of domains related to racing (roadraces.com, sailingraces.com, runningclubs.com, raceplanning.com, raceinformation.com, coolraces.com) - sounds like the right guy...
...and then I notice the other domains this guy has registered. It looks like he owns a number of domains that are stock-ticker symbols for .com and hi-tech companies (TalkCity, Voyager.Net, ChemDex), some life-insurance related domains (weblifeinsurance.com, lifeinsuranceinfo.com), and some more generic business-related domains (bankinginformation.com, companyinterview.com). Unless his business plan covers more than just racing, I'd say he's been in the domain-speculation game for a while himself... especially when just about every domain I tried going to said "domain for sale".
Not to excuse NSI's more-than-usual imcompetence, but suddenly I don't feel quite so sorry for this guy...
________________________
I can't help but wonder why even ZDNet would lower their quality control to this level.
ZDNet has quality control? Oh, maybe that's Jesse Berst's job...
________________________
*chuckle*
That was one of the better site defacements I've seen in a while - what better thing to do to a Linux site than replace their page with the default MS IIS page? Pity that it's too late to make CNet's list of "Top 10 Hacks"...
And no, I'm not condoning cracking (are you kidding? I'm a sysadmin, for crying out loud), and I'm in no way saying that IIS is a better web server (it's a piece of crap). All I'm saying is that this one made me laugh a lot more than the usual "\/\/3 0\/\/n U! \/\/3 R 3773t3!" bull...
________________________
Huh? Suing a company that's gone under doesn't strike me as a particularly effective course of action - if they've gone bankrupt, chances are you'll never get a penny out of them in a lawsuit.
And you don't have to rely on the "legions of loyal hackers" - with OSS, you can fix the problems yourself (or you can hire someone with a clue to do it for you). Quit expecting everyone else to fix your problems for you - if the product is that critical to your company's success, you should be willing to invest your time and/or money to ensure it's continued viability.
<RANT>Is it just me, or does it seem that modern society has moved away from the concept of personal responsibility? You don't have to look much further than the commercials for lawyers on TV, or the whole "everyone's a victim" mentality ("I was beaten as a child, so I'm not responsible for holding up that liquor store - it's my step-father's fault!"). When something goes wrong, everyone seems to be screaming for someone to blame, rather than going out and trying to fix it (I'm guilty of this, but I'm trying to change). The whole OpenSource concept goes counter to that idea, which I find refreshingly revolutionary, but how long will it take before we see a reversal in this attitude?</RANT&;gt
________________________
"What if Redmond got hit by a Meteor tomorrow, and every MS programmer got killed... What happens to all the bug-fixes and tech support?"
The much more likely scenario is this: "What if Microsoft decides that the product your business depends on isn't profitable enough and discontinues it?" Although I won't shed too many tears if the meteor scenario comes to pass... :=]
________________________
What's to prevent a small group of contestants banding together to "fix" the contest? A group of 6 contestants could easily control the votes in the "Tribal Council" (gosh, this show sounds stupid), set up one of their own group as the eventual winner, and split the winnings 6 ways.
Of course, I suspect it will all come down to the old "Prisoner's Dillema" (if I rat on my cellmate, I go free - we both keep quiet, we both go free), and greed will win out in the end...
Give me a rerun of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" any day over this crap...
________________________
Just wait - according to the piece on Wired the other day, most of those outlets monitor /., so I would expect Officer Sherman's phone to start ringing soon...
________________________
- Openness: Yoda (80%)
- Conscientious: Han Solo (13%)
- Extraversion: Wampa (4%)
- Agreeableness: Boba Fett (27%)
- Neuroticism: Tusken Raider (94%)
Guess I should be working for the Post Office or else the Berkely math department... but what I really want to be is a BOFH! (Anyone know of a BOFH personality test?)________________________
180 GB in a wristwatch sounds great, but what about the physical shock factor? IANANTS (I Am Not A NanoTech Specialist), but what are the chances of a "head crash" on a device this size?
________________________
I also had an electric MAC-10 water gun - spare clip, matte black finish, almost a precise replica (except for an annoying water leak). I really wanted the UZI, though...
My high-school room-mate (boarding school) and I went out driving around our small town one night in my Firebird (what, me, spoiled rich kid? yep!) with my MAC-10. My room-mate ("Dynomite" Dave) was a somewhat scary looking fellow - long-ish hair, wild eyes, and almost always wearing a Metallica T-Shirt. I drove, he had the water gun, and we instituted a reign (rain? sorry for the pun) of wet terror on the town that night. I remember two incidents in particular:
- Two people on bikes. Hit them once, circled the block, hit them again. Circled the block - they must have turned off somewhere.
- 10-year-old kid at a phone booth. Room-mate leaned out the window, pointed water gun at kid, shouted "I'm gonna get you!". Kid looked like he wet himself right there and then.
The really scary part of this? We were both stone-cold sober...Nowadays, a couple guys pulling a stunt like this would have been sent for psychological evaluation and court-mandated therapy - provided that the police don't shoot them dead on the spot. Those were the days, all right...
________________________
I think you've nailed it - this explains infomercials and shopping channels especially. Network TV depends on people who don't care enough to use the remote control - I mean, really, who tunes in specifically to watch infomercials?
The only infomercial I actually watched on purpose was one that was on WUHF every single night for months - essentially 30 minutes of bad cover tunes, over-endowed women in bikinis, and a 1-900 "chat line" number flashing at the bottom of the screen... how exactly would you program that preference into ReplayTV or TiVo? :=]
________________________
It's Monday, obviously - I stand corrected. (Memo to self - research first, then open mouth - insertion of foot is optional).
I think my basic point still stands, however - we are implicitly agreeing to the networks' licensing agreements when we turn on our TVs, and we don't have any rights to the content except those that the networks and/or content producers decide to give us. If, in the future, they decide to outlaw private recording of broadcasts, that's their right - no matter how many millions of people it pisses off.
In a final, grasping-at-straws effort to vindicate myself against you somehow, I have found a nit to pick with your post - the 42% that you refer to are North Americans. I enjoyed a wonderful Canada Day (July 1) last week, eh!
________________________
Just to nit-pick a couple points:
- The ads that are there get watched again - but there's no way for the networks to track this, so they can't charge the advertiser more for it. And if they can't charge the advertiser more, then it's not doing the network any direct benefit.
- Recording PPV movies
... shouldn't be an issue either ... you already payed for it - I have to disagree with you here, this is just wrong. You pay to rent videos, but you don't have the right to make a copy of them, even for personal use - why should PPV be any different? It's just like software - the distribution medium doesn't mean a thing, it's the intellectual property that you are licensing.
When it comes down to it, we are implicitly agreeing to the license agreement of the broadcasters whenever we turn on the TV - and you thought Micro$oft was bad about not letting you see the license until it's too late?. I want my GNU-TV!________________________
ActiveState sent out a message about this on their announcment list this morning. They said that there are four main areas of development with M$:
- improving the impementation of fork() to reduce overhead
- improving the Windows installer (especially for Win2K compatibility)
- improved Unicode support
- performance boosting of PerlScript (embedded Perl within Active Server Pages)
I don't rightly see how any of this could be seen as a bad thing - it'll be easier to install and use Perl on Windows, which will result in more developers writing Perl code, which means it'll be easier to port their existing code to other operating systems when they decide to ditch NT/Win2K.As for people's fears of embracing/extending, there are already a number of Perl modules specific to the Win32 platform for system services, registry, ODBC, etc. so it's already happened - and it's users who did it, not M$. As other people here have noted, most Perl scripts run in a controlled environment (i.e. your server) rather than an uncontrolled environment (i.e. someone else's web browser), so the comparison to Java is mostly irrelevant.
________________________
If you replace "Elite" with "3L33T", the test makes perfect sense.
________________________
Is Net and Web property infinite? That is, is the Net so expansible that it could never be overcrowded and congested?
Two words - dot com. You talk about overcrowded and congested, this is the prime example. New top-level-domains will help, but .com will still be the desirable property for quite some time.
Another example - the IP address space. Yes, I know IPv6 is on it's way, with enough IP addresses for everything on the planet to have at least 2, but it's not here yet, and for the time being, IP address space is getting pretty congested.
In theory, virtual property is infinite. In practice, it's limited. It keeps growing and growing, but there will always be limits, and we are quite good at pushing limits. And don't forget the infamous quote attributed to Bill Gates - "640K ought to be enough for anyone."
________________________
Anyone else remember the Coleco Adam? It was an add-on to the ColecoVision game system that made it roughly the equivalent of an Apple ][+ (keyboard, floppy drive, daisy-wheel printer). I never actually saw one of these units in person, and if I recall correctly, it was a pretty big flop. Haven't heard much from Coleco since then.
Sony makes excellent products, and I worry that these plans for the PlayStation 2 may tank, and drag the company down with it. That would be a shame...
________________________
How many guns and explosives have actually been found by airport scanners?
You're totally overlooking the deterrent value of airport scanners. For anyone with half a brain, they know that they can't bring guns/bombs/whatever through the scanner, so they don't even try.
Of course, it has the negative effect of making the "bad guys" think smarter - nothing worse than smart bad guys...
________________________
With my 10 year high school reunion coming up, I'd been thinking a lot about my teenage years a lot. Now with the shooting, I can't think of anything else.
I was always the weird kid. I completely sucked at any sort of sports - I was on the school softball team for a while in Grade 4, but quit after it conflicted with piano lessons. I am pretty near-sighted, so I've had glasses since I was 7 or 8. The school that I attended from kindergarten to grade 8 was living hell for me, especially in the later years (actually, the school shut down one year after I left due to the number of parents pulling their kids out). By that time, I had a shattered self-image and no self esteem. I got into some fights with other students, and began bullying other kids who happened to be just a little geekier than me.
Grade 9 saw a new school for me, with the number of students at least a full order of magnitude greater than the previous school. Here again, I was ostracized and bullied. Gym class was a special sort of nightmare - eventually, I just skipped class. I took the grade 10 computer class along with a number of other grade 9 geeks, but wound up crossing paths with one of the grade 10 jerks in the class. None of the teachers knew me, or seemed to care.
Grades 10 through 12 were at a private residential school in a small town about an hour away from my home city. The total enrollment in that school was about 115 students - the teachers knew each student by name. I believe that the three years at this school is what kept me from becoming a complete sociopath. It wasn't perfect - grade 10 was a bit of a rough transition, my roommate in the dorm that year was a complete psycho, and I threatened suicide twice - but I don't even want to think what would have happened to me back at my old school. The social structure among the students wasn't very rigid - you had your jocks and geeks, but they managed to get along fairly well (I sang in the school concert choir, along with most of the members of the basketball and volleyball teams). I made a number of lasting friendships from those years (and a couple of people that I hope don't show up at the reunion).
I'd say I turned out pretty good, but I wonder what would have happened to me today? In grade 12, I grew a beard and dressed in camouflage. I read "International Combat Arms" magazine. I played computer games (Autoduel and Beyond Wolfenstein were favorites). I loved violent movies (Aliens, Predator, and Platoon were among my personal collection). I listened to heavy metal. I had an UZI water pistol. A kid like that today would be in serious counseling and/or surveillance.
Life after high school has been pretty good. Got into BBS-ing in the early 90's (under the alias "Suburban Commando"), went to university, got into the Internet and earned my B. Sc. majoring in Computer Science, married a girl that I had met in high school, and I'm now the father of a 1-year-old girl. I've got a good job as network admin for a small company (even if it is an NT network), and I'm happy with my life. I don't wear camouflage any more, but I still listen to loud music, play games like Quake and Jedi Knight, and I drive my car a little too fast sometimes. But I survived high school, and I'm happy now.
This shooting has hit me pretty hard. I can understand what the two shooters were feeling - I'm not condoning their actions, but I think I understand their motives. Revenge is a powerful drive, pain and hate are powerful emotions, and it's pretty easy to let them override common sense. To everyone who is currently in high school, I just want to say "hang in there". It'll soon be over, and then you can get on with the rest of your life.
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Along with switching engines on the fly, it also says it will do a "side-by-side" layout with both engines (i.e. same web page, displayed in both Gecko and IE5). I don't know about you, but that will sure save me some wear-and-tear on the old Alt-Tab key.
Of course, that wouldn't be necessary if browsers actually supported the standards correctly. Gecko is very promising in this direction, especially regarding CSS and the DOM, but IE is an absolute disaster. According to the stats on one of the web sites I administer, about 36% of our visitors are using IE 3 or 4, 31% are using Netscape 3 or 4, and 25% are using AOL 3 or 4 - what a nightmare to have to keep all these in mind when designing the site!
Of course, the day that MS actually adheres to standards, rather than "embracing and extending", is the day I go into floral design.
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Isn't that the definition of government?
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