Sometimes the most important thing in playing a prank is knowing who NOT to play them on. This particular boss had a sense of humor. He noticed, but his response wasn't particularly memorable, and I don't remember the details of it.
My boss used to ask for a daily email summary of everything I'd done over the course of the day. I, like you, was convinced that they weren't being read, so I threw in a couple lines that read:
Updated my resume. Sent applications to 15 companies.
My daughter is 4 and showing mild signs of autism (PDD they're calling it, I forget exactly what that stands for).
I worry that she may someday need to rely on her little sister (10 months old and presently napping) to take care of her when I'm gone.
I still have hope that she'll be a fully-functioning adult (I'm told chances are pretty good for her case, she's not severe), but I'm still terrified of what the future may hold for her.
This also sounds a bit like what a friend used to do in chat rooms on AOL. People would go there looking for some hot chat, and he would deliberately weird them out for fun. He would weird them out with conversation so bizarre, they were incredulous they had found such a nutcase. I found this hilarious to read as a third-party, and it probably did the target some good, as they will be forewarned about anonymous fiends on the other side of their chat.
That was part of what was so frustrating for me. I've been fascinated with terraforming for a while now (predating when I read that book, it was one of the things that drew me to it) and found his treatment of the topic so utterly uninspiring.
Different people, different tastes I suppose, but I'm one of those people who prefers a book where the science of it is highly relevant, but I just couldn't see the attraction of this one.
I read the first of the series in its entirety, constantly waiting for it to get good. I'm still waiting. That had to be one of the most overrated books I've ever come across.
The obstacle I often run into is not one of difficulty so much as one of budget. I *could* write robust, rock-solid code, but if I want to pick up my paycheck, I've got to have it done by the end of the week and running through all my test cases would push delivery past what we've promised to our clients. So I test as many things as I can and then call it done. No one's life is depending on my code working properly, so as long as my bugs are relatively infrequent or at least not blindingly obvious things that I should have caught when I tested them, nobody bothers me too much.
You argued for allowing knives to be sold, but against guns. What did you expect me to think? If weapon is irrelevent, why did you try to point out other uses for the knife?
I think you're confusing me with a different correspondant. That argument was certainly made, but not by me.
So now its on the whim of a sales clerk that determines if someone is fit to purchase something or not? What if his gut is wrong? You're saying he should be liable, even though his 'feelings' didn't give him any reason to worry.
I'm not saying the seller has to be superhuman. If the seller thought a weapon used in a murder was being going to be used to hunt deer, then that's an honest mistake. And the seller may have even been correct, as maybe the weapon wasn't even intended for illegal use when it was bought. I'm not talking about tenuous cases, I'm talking about ones where a clerk thinks to himself that he'd better set this paperwork to the side so it's easier to find when the police come checking. I could also accept if a clerk sold out of fear of what might happen if he refused to sell, or any set of reasonable circumstances. Law is not absolute. Motive and mindset play a large part in guilt/innocence
What if he's wrong and refuses to sell? Will that stop the buyer from going somewhere else (possibly underground, where your chances of tracing the gun are much lower)? Either way, if someone really wants something, they'll get it. Look at the failed war on drugs if you don't believe me.
Saying "If I don't steal it, someone else will." doesn't make you any less guilty of theft should you take something.
There are good reasons to hold the funder responsible. My problem is where that reasoning leads. You hold the shop owner liable. OK sure. Why not hold the gun companies themselves liable? They made it. Why not hold the steel / mining companies liable? If they didn't sell to the gun makers they couldn't make guns to begin with.
Holding someone funding a murder responsible is a world apart from holding a clerk who knowingly sells a murder weapon to a killer. Assuming you have no problem with punishing people who directly fund crimes (correct me if that's a wrong assumption), I'll move onto the rest of your argument.
Culpability rides alongside knowledge and expectations, for EACH SPECIFIC case. In the improbable case where an assembly line worker held the belief that a SPECIFIC gun was going to be used to kill someone, then he would be liable for assembling it.
That's a deliberately absurd scenario. My point with it is that you very quickly and very obviously remove responsibility as you move back up the chain.
Interesting that you assume I'm anti-gun. This whole discussion to me was simply using guns as an example. Substitute knife and have me asking which one is best to stab my wife with. The weapon is irrelevant. It's only when the seller is providing something that he EXPECTS to be used in a criminal manner that I feel they should be liable. Note that I'm not saying "could be", or "suspects that it could be", but that the seller actually holds the sincere belief that what they just sold will be used to commit a crime.
I find it disturbing that you feel that only the direct perpetrator of the crime should be responsible. It allows people to be killed for $ not because someone can't or won't do it, but because they just don't want to go to jail for it, or maybe they think a professional has less of a chance of getting caught. There are so many obvious reasons for holding the funder responsible that I have to wonder if I've been trolled.
There's a difference between selling a tool whose purpose is to kill someone and selling a tool that you know will be used to commit a crime.
So how do you know what the buyers intent is? Do store owners now have to be physic? Guns are not only used to commit crimes. Self defense and hunting are two other ligitimate uses.
It's not that you are expected to necessarily know. It's if you do happen to know, as in I walk in ask you which gun you think would be my best choice for my upcoming bank robbery.
Well, you can be arrested for urging people to commit crimes.
Which i believe is wrong. If i tell someone to commit a crime, they are still have the power not to. Its not mind control or anything.
If person A tells person B to kill someone, BOTH people are legally liable for it. You're suggesting that I could openly pay to have someone killed, but only the actual shooter is repsonsible.
There's also an appendix listing well known ports. I noticed Port 22 is listed as "unassigned", which I believe has been used for SSH for quite a while.
I used to do the same, except with people's faces. I always wanted to drop and L-shaped piece between someone's eyebrows to cover the flesh colored gap slightly below and in the center. I probably gave some people really strange looks doing that.
I expect I'll become one around the same age you did (my oldest will be 23 when I reach 45), and I don't think I'll have gone senile just yet at that point.
On the other hand, my Grandmother is 87 and has trouble with ANYTHING remotely technological, including her digital alarm clock that only has 4 buttons.
I've often thought that as the Bayshore/Brightwaters/West Islip area gets more populated, the fact that Robert Moses Pkwy (or is it a causeway?) doesn't connect directly to Sagtikos will be a major source of traffic.
That was helpfully informative. Thank you.
I have to wonder though why we haven't extended Meadowbrook and/or Wantagh up to LIE now that Robert Moses is a goner. I guess there's too much property in between now.
When I made that my sig, they were doing construction on it, which pretty much doubled my commute. Hence the frustration. It's actually not so bad most mornings right now, I just haven't come up with anything wittier to make my new sig.
FYI, people tend to call them "Cross Island", "Southern State", and "Belt". The part that people call Belt is actually labelled such on the signs. I have no idea why Southern gets called Southern State (same thing happens to Northern) when other state parkways (like Wantagh or Meadowbrook) in the area don't get "state" added to the end.
Nobody really calls Laurelton anything special. It either gets lumped in with Cross Island or Belt.
I often joke that when people around the country want to build new roads, they look at NYC & LI, and then they know what NOT to do.
But whose punishment applies? If it happens in Canada, then the worst the offender can get is life in prison. If it happenes in the US, then it depends on the state whether or not the offender is executed. The US can't dictate punishment for what happens outside its borders (diplomacy and bullying aside), similar to how Maryland can't dictate punishment for things outside its borders.
A Maryland law stating that all murders ANYWHERE are punishable by flogging would be just as unconstitutional. Only within its own borders can a state govern.
There are these people called "Jews" that celebrate it. I guess you don't have many wherever you are. And yes, its name gets changed too. Holiday season refers to just about the whole month of December, and covers Xmas, New Year's, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa, so ALL of them are renamed. People still refer to any one specifically if they need to. Holiday season is synonymous with Christmas time, but it is NOT a reference to Christmas itself.
It's also a nice catch-all if any other faith pops up and says they have a December holiday too. We don't even have to make new signs this way.
For the users who fit into the "I'll use the admin as my manual" type, quit being nice. Explain something once and, when they ask the same question again, hand them a note pad and remind them that they asked you that same question sometime previously.
This in particular works for non-admin positions too. Every time I get repeat questions, I send them back to their own desk to get a pen and paper, and I go through the steps one at a time, never moving onto the next step until I've actually seen them write down what I just showed them.
The problem I would see with that is who writes the descriptions? Let's say you have two candidates for Comptroller, and they've both submitted descriptions of themselves.
Candidate A submits: "Joe Smith, a choice for honesty and ensuring your children's safety."
Candidate B submits: "Ed Foo, the comptroller candidate AGAINST child pornography."
The first one is pure BS, and the second one implies that his opponent feels the opposite when in all likelihood he doesn't.
It'd be great to have these descriptions, but you need a trusted objective source to provide them and those are very hard to come by.
(Incidentally, I was wondering who this WhiplashII guy was who had responded to me twice so far, so I looked up your recent comments and landed on this one. Felt I had to respond.)
Oddly enough, the only reason I had the stats handy was because a co-worker of mine seemed to think that the 3.5 Mil that Bush won by this year was some huge margin, and I looked at the last 80 years of elections (I used encyclopedia britannica's site for the numbers, they have it laid out fairly nicely) and pointed out to him that only 5 races since 1920 (or 1924, not sure anymore) were decided by fewer votes, and most had nowhere near 110 million people voting. So your comment came up at just the right time for me to know the numbers on it.
But anyway, I actually think that the numbers of Republicans and Democrats are roughly equal, but that Republicans are more likely to vote.
(spouting from memory here, so if these stats are wrong my apologies, but I think they're close):
The 18-24 demographic polled at better than 60-40 in favor of Kerry, and yet that group is known to have the lowest voter turnout percentages.
The census bureau has a report from the 2000 elections that's kind of interesting: election report
Slashdot Mirror
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb."
Forgot where that is from (Spaceballs?)
Yes, Spaceballs. Specifically, it's near the end where Dark Helment and Lone Star are dueling.
Sometimes the most important thing in playing a prank is knowing who NOT to play them on. This particular boss had a sense of humor. He noticed, but his response wasn't particularly memorable, and I don't remember the details of it.
My boss used to ask for a daily email summary of everything I'd done over the course of the day. I, like you, was convinced that they weren't being read, so I threw in a couple lines that read:
Updated my resume.
Sent applications to 15 companies.
My daughter is 4 and showing mild signs of autism (PDD they're calling it, I forget exactly what that stands for).
I worry that she may someday need to rely on her little sister (10 months old and presently napping) to take care of her when I'm gone.
I still have hope that she'll be a fully-functioning adult (I'm told chances are pretty good for her case, she's not severe), but I'm still terrified of what the future may hold for her.
This also sounds a bit like what a friend used to do in chat rooms on AOL. People would go there looking for some hot chat, and he would deliberately weird them out for fun. He would weird them out with conversation so bizarre, they were incredulous they had found such a nutcase. I found this hilarious to read as a third-party, and it probably did the target some good, as they will be forewarned about anonymous fiends on the other side of their chat.
Was he as good as the bloodninja?
That was part of what was so frustrating for me. I've been fascinated with terraforming for a while now (predating when I read that book, it was one of the things that drew me to it) and found his treatment of the topic so utterly uninspiring.
Different people, different tastes I suppose, but I'm one of those people who prefers a book where the science of it is highly relevant, but I just couldn't see the attraction of this one.
I read the first of the series in its entirety, constantly waiting for it to get good. I'm still waiting. That had to be one of the most overrated books I've ever come across.
The obstacle I often run into is not one of difficulty so much as one of budget. I *could* write robust, rock-solid code, but if I want to pick up my paycheck, I've got to have it done by the end of the week and running through all my test cases would push delivery past what we've promised to our clients. So I test as many things as I can and then call it done. No one's life is depending on my code working properly, so as long as my bugs are relatively infrequent or at least not blindingly obvious things that I should have caught when I tested them, nobody bothers me too much.
You argued for allowing knives to be sold, but against guns. What did you expect me to think? If weapon is irrelevent, why did you try to point out other uses for the knife?
I think you're confusing me with a different correspondant. That argument was certainly made, but not by me.
So now its on the whim of a sales clerk that determines if someone is fit to purchase something or not? What if his gut is wrong? You're saying he should be liable, even though his 'feelings' didn't give him any reason to worry.
I'm not saying the seller has to be superhuman. If the seller thought a weapon used in a murder was being going to be used to hunt deer, then that's an honest mistake. And the seller may have even been correct, as maybe the weapon wasn't even intended for illegal use when it was bought. I'm not talking about tenuous cases, I'm talking about ones where a clerk thinks to himself that he'd better set this paperwork to the side so it's easier to find when the police come checking. I could also accept if a clerk sold out of fear of what might happen if he refused to sell, or any set of reasonable circumstances. Law is not absolute. Motive and mindset play a large part in guilt/innocence
What if he's wrong and refuses to sell? Will that stop the buyer from going somewhere else (possibly underground, where your chances of tracing the gun are much lower)? Either way, if someone really wants something, they'll get it. Look at the failed war on drugs if you don't believe me.
Saying "If I don't steal it, someone else will." doesn't make you any less guilty of theft should you take something.
There are good reasons to hold the funder responsible. My problem is where that reasoning leads. You hold the shop owner liable. OK sure. Why not hold the gun companies themselves liable? They made it. Why not hold the steel / mining companies liable? If they didn't sell to the gun makers they couldn't make guns to begin with.
Holding someone funding a murder responsible is a world apart from holding a clerk who knowingly sells a murder weapon to a killer. Assuming you have no problem with punishing people who directly fund crimes (correct me if that's a wrong assumption), I'll move onto the rest of your argument.
Culpability rides alongside knowledge and expectations, for EACH SPECIFIC case. In the improbable case where an assembly line worker held the belief that a SPECIFIC gun was going to be used to kill someone, then he would be liable for assembling it.
That's a deliberately absurd scenario. My point with it is that you very quickly and very obviously remove responsibility as you move back up the chain.
Interesting that you assume I'm anti-gun. This whole discussion to me was simply using guns as an example. Substitute knife and have me asking which one is best to stab my wife with. The weapon is irrelevant. It's only when the seller is providing something that he EXPECTS to be used in a criminal manner that I feel they should be liable. Note that I'm not saying "could be", or "suspects that it could be", but that the seller actually holds the sincere belief that what they just sold will be used to commit a crime.
I find it disturbing that you feel that only the direct perpetrator of the crime should be responsible. It allows people to be killed for $ not because someone can't or won't do it, but because they just don't want to go to jail for it, or maybe they think a professional has less of a chance of getting caught. There are so many obvious reasons for holding the funder responsible that I have to wonder if I've been trolled.
There's a difference between selling a tool whose purpose is to kill someone and selling a tool that you know will be used to commit a crime.
So how do you know what the buyers intent is? Do store owners now have to be physic? Guns are not only used to commit crimes. Self defense and hunting are two other ligitimate uses.
It's not that you are expected to necessarily know. It's if you do happen to know, as in I walk in ask you which gun you think would be my best choice for my upcoming bank robbery.
Well, you can be arrested for urging people to commit crimes.
Which i believe is wrong. If i tell someone to commit a crime, they are still have the power not to. Its not mind control or anything.
If person A tells person B to kill someone, BOTH people are legally liable for it. You're suggesting that I could openly pay to have someone killed, but only the actual shooter is repsonsible.
There's also an appendix listing well known ports. I noticed Port 22 is listed as "unassigned", which I believe has been used for SSH for quite a while.
I used to do the same, except with people's faces. I always wanted to drop and L-shaped piece between someone's eyebrows to cover the flesh colored gap slightly below and in the center. I probably gave some people really strange looks doing that.
As you say, depends on the grandparent.
I expect I'll become one around the same age you did (my oldest will be 23 when I reach 45), and I don't think I'll have gone senile just yet at that point.
On the other hand, my Grandmother is 87 and has trouble with ANYTHING remotely technological, including her digital alarm clock that only has 4 buttons.
It translates to pretty much the same thing either way.
I thought those sorts of lies mostly worked the other way around.
I'm pretty sure Ender's Game did too, but I'm too lazy to research it.
I have respect for Le Guin's work, but I've never really enjoyed it much. I've only read the Earthsea books though.
My brother told me that when his school won the Fencing Championships, the team got shirts that read "National F***ing champions".
I've often thought that as the Bayshore/Brightwaters/West Islip area gets more populated, the fact that Robert Moses Pkwy (or is it a causeway?) doesn't connect directly to Sagtikos will be a major source of traffic.
That was helpfully informative. Thank you.
I have to wonder though why we haven't extended Meadowbrook and/or Wantagh up to LIE now that Robert Moses is a goner. I guess there's too much property in between now.
When I made that my sig, they were doing construction on it, which pretty much doubled my commute. Hence the frustration. It's actually not so bad most mornings right now, I just haven't come up with anything wittier to make my new sig.
FYI, people tend to call them "Cross Island", "Southern State", and "Belt". The part that people call Belt is actually labelled such on the signs. I have no idea why Southern gets called Southern State (same thing happens to Northern) when other state parkways (like Wantagh or Meadowbrook) in the area don't get "state" added to the end.
Nobody really calls Laurelton anything special. It either gets lumped in with Cross Island or Belt.
I often joke that when people around the country want to build new roads, they look at NYC & LI, and then they know what NOT to do.
But whose punishment applies? If it happens in Canada, then the worst the offender can get is life in prison. If it happenes in the US, then it depends on the state whether or not the offender is executed. The US can't dictate punishment for what happens outside its borders (diplomacy and bullying aside), similar to how Maryland can't dictate punishment for things outside its borders.
A Maryland law stating that all murders ANYWHERE are punishable by flogging would be just as unconstitutional. Only within its own borders can a state govern.
There are these people called "Jews" that celebrate it. I guess you don't have many wherever you are. And yes, its name gets changed too. Holiday season refers to just about the whole month of December, and covers Xmas, New Year's, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa, so ALL of them are renamed. People still refer to any one specifically if they need to. Holiday season is synonymous with Christmas time, but it is NOT a reference to Christmas itself.
It's also a nice catch-all if any other faith pops up and says they have a December holiday too. We don't even have to make new signs this way.
For the users who fit into the "I'll use the admin as my manual" type, quit being nice. Explain something once and, when they ask the same question again, hand them a note pad and remind them that they asked you that same question sometime previously.
This in particular works for non-admin positions too. Every time I get repeat questions, I send them back to their own desk to get a pen and paper, and I go through the steps one at a time, never moving onto the next step until I've actually seen them write down what I just showed them.
The problem I would see with that is who writes the descriptions? Let's say you have two candidates for Comptroller, and they've both submitted descriptions of themselves.
Candidate A submits:
"Joe Smith, a choice for honesty and ensuring your children's safety."
Candidate B submits:
"Ed Foo, the comptroller candidate AGAINST child pornography."
The first one is pure BS, and the second one implies that his opponent feels the opposite when in all likelihood he doesn't.
It'd be great to have these descriptions, but you need a trusted objective source to provide them and those are very hard to come by.
(Incidentally, I was wondering who this WhiplashII guy was who had responded to me twice so far, so I looked up your recent comments and landed on this one. Felt I had to respond.)
Oddly enough, the only reason I had the stats handy was because a co-worker of mine seemed to think that the 3.5 Mil that Bush won by this year was some huge margin, and I looked at the last 80 years of elections (I used encyclopedia britannica's site for the numbers, they have it laid out fairly nicely) and pointed out to him that only 5 races since 1920 (or 1924, not sure anymore) were decided by fewer votes, and most had nowhere near 110 million people voting. So your comment came up at just the right time for me to know the numbers on it.
But anyway, I actually think that the numbers of Republicans and Democrats are roughly equal, but that Republicans are more likely to vote.
(spouting from memory here, so if these stats are wrong my apologies, but I think they're close):
The 18-24 demographic polled at better than 60-40 in favor of Kerry, and yet that group is known to have the lowest voter turnout percentages.
The census bureau has a report from the 2000 elections that's kind of interesting:
election report