...but I wouldn't care to have a chip implanted at birth. If for instance something were to happen to you, rescue-teams would find you more easily.
No offense, but people like you really frighten me. It really shouldn't take much to see that there is a great potential for abuse with a system like this. Imagine a system like this carried out forcefully on an entire population such as Communist China.
Even if you were a "good citizen", you could suddenly come under suspicion if the computers tracking you determined you came into contact with a dissident. Or perhaps you were loitering too long in the wrong place at the wrong time.
You can be assured that if the Chinese government had something like this after the Tiananmen Square massacre that every citizen determined to have spent too much time in the area would be suspected of harboring anti-government thought.
It is not a far stretch to see that this could be misused in other countries as well. In the United States, even with a pretty paranoid Constitution there have been massive abuses by the government. I certainly don't feel the entire government is out to "get" anybody, but it only takes a few corrupt individuals placed in the right position to abuse their power.
Do you feel it was right for the FBI to investigate and infiltrate the organization of Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader? It happened. Ever read the Puzzle Palace? Check out Project SHAMROCK.
"In 1945, Project SHAMROCK was initiated to obtain copies of all telegraphic information exiting or entering the United States. With the full cooperation of RCA, ITT and Western Union (representing almost all of the telegraphic traffic in the US at the time), the NSA's predecessor and later the NSA itself were provided with daily microfilm copies of all incoming, outgoing and transiting telegraphs."
How about OPERATION CHAOS?
"When Johnson ordered CIA Director John McCone to use the DOD to analyse the growing college student protests against the Administration's policy towards Vietnam, two new units were set up to target anti-war protesters and organisations: Project RESISTANCE, which worked with college administrators, campus security and local police to identify anti-war activists and political dissidents; and Project MERRIMAC, which monitored any demonstrations being conducted in the Washington, DC, area. The CIA then began monitoring student activists and infiltrating anti-war organisations by working with local police departments to pull-off burglaries, illegal entries (black bag jobs), interrogations and electronic surveillance. After President Nixon came to office in 1969, all of these domestic surveillance activities were consolidated into Operation CHAOS."
I'd recommend you give one of the newer Linux distros a shot. Frankly it is just as easy to install as any of the Microsoft offerings. Your grandmother probably couldn't install Windows without your help. The same with Linux.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the problem I had getting the NIC to work on my 10BaseT network.
I was hoping someone would be able to explain why I needed to set it to 10baseT in the installation and 10Base2 after installation. Is this something I should report as a bug or am I just clueless here?:)
I've only seen problems in anti-aliasing of text when I use a poor font. Give one of the true type servers a shot. True type fonts seem to work a lot better than some of the crud that got included on certain Linux distributions.
I now use TT fonts for most of my X apps. Netscape looks much better now. Especially since I have fonts like MS Comic Sans that novice web designers love to throw in.
There's a link in there to a page that contains info on the applicable patents. in fact, the interviewer asks pretty much the question that youre asking.
When I responded to the story the second link was not listed, and I was not aware of the linux.com interview.
Note to CmdrTaco... Please when you update a story, mark it as an update. It makes things less confusing for all of us.
I've heard that GIMP can not implement professional Color Matching (used in pre-press work, etc) because of Patent/License issues.
Is it possible for someone like Corel or Red Hat to step forward with the license fees or a patent-free implementation? I've heard rumblings that this is the only major feature preventing a lot of professional graphics people switching to GIMP from Photoshop.
I'd appreciate any information/URLs as I'm not that familiar with who holds the patents and/or licenses.
I'm not sure I would like the moderator controls to be always visible. I would like to know when I have moderator status. Whenever the moderator controls pop up, I switch my threshold to -1 and begin to look for abuses. I also tend to read the comments a bit more carefully so I can promote the good stuff.
I think it would be frustrating to go through moderating stuff up and down and not even know if all the work you just did will have any effect. Or am I misunderstanding what CmdrTaco has proposed?
On a related note, does anyone know where I can find an OpenBSD.iso? I have looked everywhere and was basically told to either do an ftp-install or better yet to buy the cd-rom....
As much as I'd like to purchase the cd-rom, I am a student and would much prefer to burn my own. Any help?
I can have my Microsoft Windows, my Microsoft Phone, Microsoft Barney, my Web TV, my MSNBC, my Microsoft Joystick, my Microsoft Mouse, my Microsoft Keyboard, playing Microsoft Games, integrated together with embedded NT, WinCE, and ActiveX!!!! Will this work with my MS Hotmail and MS Passport and MS Carpoint and MS Sidewalk?! I LOVE YOU BILL! I even spell check this with my new hard cover Microsoft Dictionary!!! </SARCASM>
A little bit too much integration for my personal tastes. Microsoft knows damn well that they aren't going to be making the same kind of money off their old cash cows. Ironically the strategy that they killed Netscape with (giving away a competing product for free) is now being used to kill their OS and their Office Suite. How delicious is that?
I guess they have to sell something to satisfy their stock holders.
I'd feel a lot more secure with Linux if a distribution would apply this level of scrutiny to any program given a setuid bit and the C library as well (And I'd want to be able to access the test plans and results online.)
Hrrm. You have experience in performing this task, and you have an itch to scratch. Sounds to me like you just volunteered your services:)
Has Slashdot really degenerated to the point that we are forced to read press releases? I thought/. was all about the technical aspects and being geeky/nerdy.
Show me the code dammit! Or at least some screenshots to drool over. I don't want to read a bunch of marketdroidspeak, I get that enough everywhere else. Please bring back the technical content guys!
They may have written their own tcp/ip stack, but they aren't adverse to knicking BSD code when it suits them:
[root@localhost windows]# pwd /dosc/windows [root@localhost windows]# strings ftp.exe | grep Cali @(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
Least they coulda done was knick the telnet client code too. Someone please tell me that win2000 has a better default telnet built in.
I'm super pleased to hear that they are now supporting Linux... I ended up buying a Voodoo 2 card because at the time 3DFX was the only company with any linux support.
I have to say I feel sorry for whoever decides to take this position. They aren't kidding when they say "High Profile" within and out of MS.
You thought Jesse Berst got a lot of hate mail... You ain't seen nothin yet! Maybe i'll email the new employee a copy of procmail so they can filter out their flames;)
Second, what we have in Serbia is not "just some poor people getting bombed by evil forces", but some Big-Brother-type dictator Milosevic whose politics are strikingly similar to those of a certain Adolf Hitler in 1938.
I don't entirely believe this. The European compaign by the allies in WW2 was fought to reclaim the land that Hitler had taken from sovereign nations and not to stop the "cleansing" of the Jews/Handicapped/Dissidents/etc. going on in the concentration camps.
If however, Milosevic is actually cleansing the Albanians in a manner that can be compared to Hitler, then why haven't we gone to the UN with the evidence? I'm sure if the world was presented with satellite photographs, sigint intercepts, escapee interviews and such we would declare war on Serbia and go in with the blessing of the world.
If there are really Albanians being slaughtered by the thousands as is implied by the term "Ethnic Cleansing" then why aren't we down on the ground protecting them? Does anyone honestly believe that we can stop the slaughter using air power alone? Did the massive bombing of Germany affect the concentration camps a single whit? If I recall correctly, the camps weren't liberated until ground troops were sent in.
If we have a moral obligation to prevent this from happening, we should be doing it with everything we have. Are you prepared to go into Albania and Serbia and be possibly be killed/maimed? Are you prepared to have your fathers/sons/brothers/friends go in and possibly be killed/maimed?
If not why not? If this is really an evil comparable to Hitler we should have gone in with ground troops to put an end to this long ago.
As an American I'm not very pleased with any of this. I certainly don't want to see anyone get killed in a war. That includes Albanians, Serbians, Croatians, Chinese, Russian, or member of an African Tribe. Frankly, from what I've seen so far this seems more like a civil war than anything else.
In the later stages of the American Civil War we had Sherman running around burning a swath through the southern United States. Americans should ask ourselves how we would have felt if a bunch of foreigners stepped in to prevent the wanton destruction of non-combatant property?
The other thing that really bothers me about this is that America has not declared war. Does anyone really think that the founding fathers intended for the executive branch to have the power to bomb a nation without approval of Congress? I think we need to get our Checks back so we have a balanced system of government again.
The other thing I wanted to get off my chest which I'm sure will be controversial is this: If Albanians had the right to keep and bear arms, would any of this be necessary? As seen in Afghanistan and Vietnam, an enemy that is determined and fighting for their family and homeland can use guerilla warfare against a superior force to great effect. I'm not talking about the KLA here, but an entire armed population .
I consider myself a Patriot and love my country. Therefore, I think its my responsibility to question what is going on here. I feel completely disconnected from my government on this issue and that disturbs me. It's still We The People, right?
Actually, I've found that the GNOME included in Red Hat 6.0 is quite stable and very usable.
For the first time, I've actually been able to use the control-panel effectively and I can install GTK themes without bringing the whole thing to a crashing halt.
Now, I'm actually spending all my time within GNOME instead of a bare bones Window Maker session.
Check out my basic screenshot that I was able to whip up within minutes of getting RH6 installed.
I still use a couple of the KDE apps which RH thoughtfully included by default in the GNOME start menu. My one wish would be for GNOME and KDE to share the same theme format so that I could have a integrated look and feel for both sets of programs.
I've made it through the hell we call Middle and High School. I had some unique experiences because my father was in the Army and I got to go to another new school every other year.
I learned early on that you had to respond with violence in order to gain any respect. Not only was I the "new kid", but I was also a geek and I was in fist fights constantly starting in elementary school. I'm really quite a non-violent person, but if someone pushes me too far then I will fight back, and I suspect thats what happened with these latest school shootings.
I can well remember sitting in Middle School science class quite peacefully while a little bully gave me a "red neck" which is a term describing how the giver slaps the back of the givee's neck multiple times causing it to become quite red. He did this once and I sat there and did nothing. The sound of the skin being slapped went through the whole class room and the teacher sat there and didn't say a word. The bully did it again. My friend next to me says that I mumbled one more time and I'm gonna kill him or something to that effect, but I don't remember saying anything. The next time he did it I stood up threw him against the wall and proceeded to beat the tar out of him. Of course, THEN the teacher noticed and we were broken up and sent to the office. Now due to the zero tolerence rules we were both suspended even though I had never been in the office for any kind of trouble and my attacker was well known there. So, for standing up for myself in self defense, I received the same punishment as my attacker. In fact, we sat near each other during our 3 days in In School Suspension.
However, I could never think of doing anything like the TCM did because I had been raised with firearms. I was given a.22 rifle for my 13th birthday, I had hunter safety training and I joined the High School Rifle team (Varsity Letter no less). There's no way I could point an unloaded weapon at another human being much less a loaded one.
I think what saved me more than anything in my High Schools (I went to 4 different ones) was that I was a member of the JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps). It seems weird for me to say so, because it seems like such a non geek thing to be a part of. But I was a part of a large group of people that were jocks, geeks, freaks, and every other subgroup, and for the most part we all got along and had a bit of esprit d'corps to boot.
I suspect that if I were in High School right now I would be dragged into counseling. I've always had a fascination with Military History, Military tactics, equipment and everything else. When I was in the 5th grade I had a bizzare fascination with the European theatre of WW2 (well I WAS in Germany at the time). I read every book on WW2 in the library including LOTS on Nazis and Hitler. I spent much of my free time in front of a computer often connected to BBS' (where I first downloaded Wolf-3D long distance from Apogee BBS several minutes after it came out:). And last and certainly not least I would go down several times a week and shoot a firearm downrange and receive training on how to become a better marksman.
I'm sure it would be quite obvious to all these supposed "experts" that I was some raving psycho ready to let loose another school shooting. The worst part is, that every one of the activities I listed are what kept me sane through High School. Something about competitive shooting focused and calmed me more than almost anything could.
Well I guess this turned into a personal story which I didn't intend when I started.. What I really meant to say was that I suspect that many Geeks if given the chance to be in the Majority would discriminate against the Jocks and everyone else. Many of the posts I've read have stereotyped negatively ALL jocks. This is no better than stereotyping geeks and we need to realize this!
Who here would deny the fact that if Geeks ran the schools that everyone else would be taunted for running Windows and not Linux or *BSD? Or programming in Visual Basic and not C or Perl? There may not be as much physical abuse, but the mental abuse would be there...
I don't know what the answer is.. Humans have been forming into little groups and fighting with the other groups from the very beginning... The only good thing to come from this shooting is that at least we are finally talking about this.
M$ will continue to dominate the desktop client market for quite some time, due to momentum and the difficulty and expense of retraining users to use a new client platform.
I partially agree with you, but I'd like to share an experience we had in our office converting a machine over from Win95 to Linux.
We have a group of employees that don't work in the office and just come and go at different times in the day. We had one win95 machine for about 10 of these employees to come in on break and check their email and surf the web.
With win95 the machine was always crashing, and we had many problems with win95 not being multi-user.
Eventually we moved the machine into Linux and set up each person with their own username, password and Windowmaker desktop. Yes, we didn't even bother with KDE or GNOME (well we did have GNOME installed for one of the power users, but he actually requested that we remove it and just leave Windowmaker). We setup a button for Netscape, a button for an xterm and a button for an office app we occasionally use. We'll probably add one more button to let them use WordPerfect.
The largely computer illiterate users couldn't be happier! We set them up with a Windowmaker theme of their choice and showed them how to log into the school server and check their email with pine. We haven't had a single problem with this setup. Most of them probably really don't understand that they are even using a Unix varient. They just click on one or two buttons and get the things done that they need to do, and they know they won't crash the machine or break anything accidently.
This may not be a typical office experience, but it shows how easy it was to migrate users that weren't familiar with computers at all. I suspect if they had been like many Win95 users they would have complained bitterly because the system doesn't work exactly like Windows does.
I think many people forget that Windows was hard to train people on as well. In fact, I have a hard time sitting in front of a Mac machine. It is definately not intuitive to me. It took me quite some time to figure out how to eject the floppy disk! What common sense was I supposed to use to determine that to eject the disk I drag the icon into the trash can?
Linux wasn't intuitive for me to learn, but now that I have learned it, it's no harder than anything else I've done with computers.
Microsoft definately had a clue when they were still competing with Word Perfect. It let you map the Word Perfect keybindings to the new Word ones as well as giving the user help throughout to help them migrate. It's just as easy to do the same thing in reverse, and I hope it will be done!
Slashdot Mirror
No offense, but people like you really frighten me. It really shouldn't take much to see that there is a great potential for abuse with a system like this. Imagine a system like this carried out forcefully on an entire population such as Communist China.
Even if you were a "good citizen", you could suddenly come under suspicion if the computers tracking you determined you came into contact with a dissident. Or perhaps you were loitering too long in the wrong place at the wrong time.
You can be assured that if the Chinese government had something like this after the Tiananmen Square massacre that every citizen determined to have spent too much time in the area would be suspected of harboring anti-government thought.
It is not a far stretch to see that this could be misused in other countries as well. In the United States, even with a pretty paranoid Constitution there have been massive abuses by the government. I certainly don't feel the entire government is out to "get" anybody, but it only takes a few corrupt individuals placed in the right position to abuse their power.
Do you feel it was right for the FBI to investigate and infiltrate the organization of Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader? It happened. Ever read the Puzzle Palace? Check out Project SHAMROCK.
"In 1945, Project SHAMROCK was initiated to obtain copies of all telegraphic information exiting or entering the United States. With the full cooperation of RCA, ITT and Western Union (representing almost all of the telegraphic traffic in the US at the time), the NSA's predecessor and later the NSA itself were provided with daily microfilm copies of all incoming, outgoing and transiting telegraphs."
How about OPERATION CHAOS?
"When Johnson ordered CIA Director John McCone to use the DOD to analyse the growing college student protests against the Administration's policy towards Vietnam, two new units were set up to target anti-war protesters and organisations: Project RESISTANCE, which worked with college administrators, campus security and local police to identify anti-war activists and political dissidents; and Project MERRIMAC, which monitored any demonstrations being conducted in the Washington, DC, area. The CIA then began monitoring student activists and infiltrating anti-war organisations by working with local police departments to pull-off burglaries, illegal entries (black bag jobs), interrogations and electronic surveillance. After President Nixon came to office in 1969, all of these domestic surveillance activities were consolidated into Operation CHAOS."
http://www.i sleofavalon.co.uk/local/h-pages/pro-freedom/echelThese are just a few documented abuses of power that have occured in the recent past. Do you truly believe that abuses won't take place again?
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."- The Papers of Ben Franklin
I'd recommend you give one of the newer Linux distros a shot. Frankly it is just as easy to install as any of the Microsoft offerings. Your grandmother probably couldn't install Windows without your help. The same with Linux.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the problem I had getting the NIC to work on my 10BaseT network.
:)
I was hoping someone would be able to explain why I needed to set it to 10baseT in the installation and 10Base2 after installation. Is this something I should report as a bug or am I just clueless here?
I now use TT fonts for most of my X apps. Netscape looks much better now. Especially since I have fonts like MS Comic Sans that novice web designers love to throw in.
When I responded to the story the second link was not listed, and I was not aware of the linux.com interview.
Note to CmdrTaco... Please when you update a story, mark it as an update. It makes things less confusing for all of us.
I've heard that GIMP can not implement professional Color Matching (used in pre-press work, etc) because of Patent/License issues.
Is it possible for someone like Corel or Red Hat to step forward with the license fees or a patent-free implementation? I've heard rumblings that this is the only major feature preventing a lot of professional graphics people switching to GIMP from Photoshop.
I'd appreciate any information/URLs as I'm not that familiar with who holds the patents and/or licenses.
I'm not sure I would like the moderator controls to be always visible. I would like to know when I have moderator status. Whenever the moderator controls pop up, I switch my threshold to -1 and begin to look for abuses. I also tend to read the comments a bit more carefully so I can promote the good stuff.
I think it would be frustrating to go through moderating stuff up and down and not even know if all the work you just did will have any effect. Or am I misunderstanding what CmdrTaco has proposed?
On a related note, does anyone know where I can find an OpenBSD .iso? I have looked everywhere and was basically told to either do an ftp-install or better yet to buy the cd-rom....
As much as I'd like to purchase the cd-rom, I am a student and would much prefer to burn my own. Any help?
My questions are:
And somewhat unrelated: Do you read every book you publish?
I can have my Microsoft Windows, my Microsoft Phone, Microsoft Barney, my Web TV, my MSNBC, my Microsoft Joystick, my Microsoft Mouse, my Microsoft Keyboard, playing Microsoft Games, integrated together with embedded NT, WinCE, and ActiveX!!!! Will this work with my MS Hotmail and MS Passport and MS Carpoint and MS Sidewalk?! I LOVE YOU BILL! I even spell check this with my new hard cover Microsoft Dictionary!!!
</SARCASM>
A little bit too much integration for my personal tastes. Microsoft knows damn well that they aren't going to be making the same kind of money off their old cash cows. Ironically the strategy that they killed Netscape with (giving away a competing product for free) is now being used to kill their OS and their Office Suite. How delicious is that?
I guess they have to sell something to satisfy their stock holders.
VB 6.0 Enterprise?! Ugh. Says alot about the website that ripped you off right there.
You may want to check out the Open Content License to see if it meets your needs.
Hrrm. You have experience in performing this task, and you have an itch to scratch. Sounds to me like you just volunteered your services :)
The source is out there. Use it friend, use it.
Show me the code dammit! Or at least some screenshots to drool over. I don't want to read a bunch of marketdroidspeak, I get that enough everywhere else. Please bring back the technical content guys!
Where's BoredAtWork and his cluestick?!
They may have written their own tcp/ip stack, but they aren't adverse to knicking BSD code when it suits them:
[root@localhost windows]# pwd
/dosc/windows
[root@localhost windows]# strings ftp.exe | grep Cali
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
Least they coulda done was knick the telnet client code too. Someone please tell me that win2000 has a better default telnet built in.
I tried submitting this to slashdot, but no joy so far, anyone want to slashdot /. with some submissions?
I'm super pleased to hear that they are now supporting Linux... I ended up buying a Voodoo 2 card because at the time 3DFX was the only company with any linux support.
:)
Now, my next card may very well be a TNT2
Good job!
I have to say I feel sorry for whoever decides to take this position. They aren't kidding when they say "High Profile" within and out of MS.
;)
You thought Jesse Berst got a lot of hate mail... You ain't seen nothin yet! Maybe i'll email the new employee a copy of procmail so they can filter out their flames
Second, what we have in Serbia is not "just some
poor people getting bombed by evil forces", but
some Big-Brother-type dictator Milosevic
whose politics are strikingly similar to those of
a certain Adolf Hitler in 1938.
I don't entirely believe this. The European compaign by the allies in WW2 was fought to reclaim the land that Hitler had taken from sovereign nations and not to stop the "cleansing" of the Jews/Handicapped/Dissidents/etc. going on in the concentration camps.
If however, Milosevic is actually cleansing the Albanians in a manner that can be compared to Hitler, then why haven't we gone to the UN with the evidence? I'm sure if the world was presented with satellite photographs, sigint intercepts, escapee interviews and such we would declare war on Serbia and go in with the blessing of the world.
If there are really Albanians being slaughtered by the thousands as is implied by the term "Ethnic Cleansing" then why aren't we down on the ground protecting them? Does anyone honestly believe that we can stop the slaughter using air power alone? Did the massive bombing of Germany affect the concentration camps a single whit? If I recall correctly, the camps weren't liberated until ground troops were sent in.
If we have a moral obligation to prevent this from happening, we should be doing it with everything we have. Are you prepared to go into Albania and Serbia and be possibly be killed/maimed? Are you prepared to have your fathers/sons/brothers/friends go in and possibly be killed/maimed?
If not why not? If this is really an evil comparable to Hitler we should have gone in with ground troops to put an end to this long ago.
As an American I'm not very pleased with any of this. I certainly don't want to see anyone get killed in a war. That includes Albanians, Serbians, Croatians, Chinese, Russian, or member of an African Tribe. Frankly, from what I've seen so far this seems more like a civil war than anything else.
In the later stages of the American Civil War we had Sherman running around burning a swath through the southern United States. Americans should ask ourselves how we would have felt if a bunch of foreigners stepped in to prevent the wanton destruction of non-combatant property?
The other thing that really bothers me about this is that America has not declared war. Does anyone really think that the founding fathers intended for the executive branch to have the power to bomb a nation without approval of Congress? I think we need to get our Checks back so we have a balanced system of government again.
The other thing I wanted to get off my chest which I'm sure will be controversial is this: If Albanians had the right to keep and bear arms, would any of this be necessary? As seen in Afghanistan and Vietnam, an enemy that is determined and fighting for their family and homeland can use guerilla warfare against a superior force to great effect. I'm not talking about the KLA here, but an entire armed population .
I consider myself a Patriot and love my country. Therefore, I think its my responsibility to question what is going on here. I feel completely disconnected from my government on this issue and that disturbs me. It's still We The People, right?
Here's what came with my RH6
[mmichie@localhost mmichie]$ rpm -qa | grep gnome
gnome-audio-1.0.0-6
gnome-audio-extra-1.0.0-6
gnome-core-1.0.4-34
gnome-core-devel-1.0.4-34
gnome-games-1.0.2-10
gnome-games-devel-1.0.2-10
gnome-libs-1.0.8-8
gnome-libs-devel-1.0.8-8
gnome-linuxconf-0.22-1
gnome-media-1.0.1-3
gnome-objc-1.0.2-4
gnome-objc-devel-1.0.2-4
gnome-pim-1.0.7-2
gnome-pim-devel-1.0.7-2
gnome-users-guide-1.0.5-4rh
gnome-utils-1.0.1-6
switchdesk-gnome-1.7.0-1
Actually, I've found that the GNOME included in Red Hat 6.0 is quite stable and very usable.
For the first time, I've actually been able to use the control-panel effectively and I can install GTK themes without bringing the whole thing to a crashing halt.
Now, I'm actually spending all my time within GNOME instead of a bare bones Window Maker session.
Check out my basic screenshot that I was able to whip up within minutes of getting RH6 installed.
I still use a couple of the KDE apps which RH thoughtfully included by default in the GNOME start menu. My one wish would be for GNOME and KDE to share the same theme format so that I could have a integrated look and feel for both sets of programs.
I've made it through the hell we call Middle and High School. I had some unique experiences because my father was in the Army and I got to go to another new school every other year.
.22 rifle for my 13th birthday, I had hunter safety training and I joined the High School Rifle team (Varsity Letter no less). There's no way I could point an unloaded weapon at another human being much less a loaded one.
:). And last and certainly not least I would go down several times a week and shoot a firearm downrange and receive training on how to become a better marksman.
I learned early on that you had to respond with violence in order to gain any respect. Not only was I the "new kid", but I was also a geek and I was in fist fights constantly starting in elementary school. I'm really quite a non-violent person, but if someone pushes me too far then I will fight back, and I suspect thats what happened with these latest school shootings.
I can well remember sitting in Middle School science class quite peacefully while a little bully gave me a "red neck" which is a term describing how the giver slaps the back of the givee's neck multiple times causing it to become quite red. He did this once and I sat there and did nothing. The sound of the skin being slapped went through the whole class room and the teacher sat there and didn't say a word. The bully did it again. My friend next to me says that I mumbled one more time and I'm gonna kill him or something to that effect, but I don't remember saying anything. The next time he did it I stood up threw him against the wall and proceeded to beat the tar out of him. Of course, THEN the teacher noticed and we were broken up and sent to the office. Now due to the zero tolerence rules we were both suspended even though I had never been in the office for any kind of trouble and my attacker was well known there. So, for standing up for myself in self defense, I received the same punishment as my attacker. In fact, we sat near each other during our 3 days in In School Suspension.
However, I could never think of doing anything like the TCM did because I had been raised with firearms. I was given a
I think what saved me more than anything in my High Schools (I went to 4 different ones) was that I was a member of the JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps). It seems weird for me to say so, because it seems like such a non geek thing to be a part of. But I was a part of a large group of people that were jocks, geeks, freaks, and every other subgroup, and for the most part we all got along and had a bit of esprit d'corps to boot.
I suspect that if I were in High School right now I would be dragged into counseling. I've always had a fascination with Military History, Military tactics, equipment and everything else. When I was in the 5th grade I had a bizzare fascination with the European theatre of WW2 (well I WAS in Germany at the time). I read every book on WW2 in the library including LOTS on Nazis and Hitler. I spent much of my free time in front of a computer often connected to BBS' (where I first downloaded Wolf-3D long distance from Apogee BBS several minutes after it came out
I'm sure it would be quite obvious to all these supposed "experts" that I was some raving psycho ready to let loose another school shooting. The worst part is, that every one of the activities I listed are what kept me sane through High School. Something about competitive shooting focused and calmed me more than almost anything could.
Well I guess this turned into a personal story which I didn't intend when I started.. What I really meant to say was that I suspect that many Geeks if given the chance to be in the Majority would discriminate against the Jocks and everyone else. Many of the posts I've read have stereotyped negatively ALL jocks. This is no better than stereotyping geeks and we need to realize this!
Who here would deny the fact that if Geeks ran the schools that everyone else would be taunted for running Windows and not Linux or *BSD? Or programming in Visual Basic and not C or Perl? There may not be as much physical abuse, but the mental abuse would be there...
I don't know what the answer is.. Humans have been forming into little groups and fighting with the other groups from the very beginning... The only good thing to come from this shooting is that at least we are finally talking about this.
If/when it does happen I'll bet we'll see the ultimate slashdot effect!
Seeing how insane IPOs like Netscape, Amazon.com, Yahoo, etc. were, I almost cringe to think about Redhat's!
I know if I had some money I'd throw some their way... and I suspect I'm not the only slashdotter who feels that way (grin).
If you thought Rasterman was eccentric and bizzare before wait until he's a paper millionaire! (wink).
Hmmm I suppose that also applies to Alan Cox. Should be interesting to see what nifty toys he gets to further his hacking "career".
"I expect to have publicly testable code for journaling over ext2fs in about 4 weeks or so."
Should be interesting eh?
If this is truly an April Fool's joke it is about as funny as the story last year about JWZ passing away in a car wreck.
I fail to see the humour.
I partially agree with you, but I'd like to share an experience we had in our office converting a machine over from Win95 to Linux.
We have a group of employees that don't work in the office and just come and go at different times in the day. We had one win95 machine for about 10 of these employees to come in on break and check their email and surf the web.
With win95 the machine was always crashing, and we had many problems with win95 not being multi-user.
Eventually we moved the machine into Linux and set up each person with their own username, password and Windowmaker desktop. Yes, we didn't even bother with KDE or GNOME (well we did have GNOME installed for one of the power users, but he actually requested that we remove it and just leave Windowmaker). We setup a button for Netscape, a button for an xterm and a button for an office app we occasionally use. We'll probably add one more button to let them use WordPerfect.
The largely computer illiterate users couldn't be happier! We set them up with a Windowmaker theme of their choice and showed them how to log into the school server and check their email with pine. We haven't had a single problem with this setup. Most of them probably really don't understand that they are even using a Unix varient. They just click on one or two buttons and get the things done that they need to do, and they know they won't crash the machine or break anything accidently.
This may not be a typical office experience, but it shows how easy it was to migrate users that weren't familiar with computers at all. I suspect if they had been like many Win95 users they would have complained bitterly because the system doesn't work exactly like Windows does.
I think many people forget that Windows was hard to train people on as well. In fact, I have a hard time sitting in front of a Mac machine. It is definately not intuitive to me. It took me quite some time to figure out how to eject the floppy disk! What common sense was I supposed to use to determine that to eject the disk I drag the icon into the trash can?
Linux wasn't intuitive for me to learn, but now that I have learned it, it's no harder than anything else I've done with computers.
Microsoft definately had a clue when they were still competing with Word Perfect. It let you map the Word Perfect keybindings to the new Word ones as well as giving the user help throughout to help them migrate. It's just as easy to do the same thing in reverse, and I hope it will be done!