Maybe we just don't need all the governments we have around the world, we just need people to have honor and uphold justice.
Really? The solution is that easy? If we just have honor and uphold justice our problems will all be solved? Too bad nobody thought of that sooner!
Seriously though, lets give people more credit they deserve and say that 99.9% of people on earth are on board with being honorable. That still leaves 67,000,000 people out there who won't be honorable. Then, you have to deal with the varying opinions on what is honorable and what is upholding justice. Honor and Justice aren't really singular things. There are hundreds, probably thousands of things that make up a system of honor or justice. People don't all think the same. Who has more honor? A Pro-Lifer seeking to save unborn fetuses or a Pro-Choicer seeking to allow woman the freedom to make decisions regarding their own body? Who has more honor, a person who wants to put violent criminals to death to ensure the safety of others or a person who wants to rehabilitate the criminal because everyone's life has value? Who has more honor, the solider that is willing to expend his life freeing people of a different country from the yolk of an oppressive regime or the person who thinks we should stay out of other peoples' business? You might think the answer to all of those questions is simple, but someone else may think that and answer each question the opposite of you.
Note that I am not really a huge fan of Facebook but it does serve its purpose. While I was in college and into my late twenties I saw almost all of my friends very often. Now I am just a tad past 30 and things have changed. One of my best friends since I was 7 is now married, has a wife and a child, and lives 5 hours away. Three of my better friends have one or more children and one of them works a shift completely that makes is hard for us to ever get together. A lot of the friends that used to live less than five minutes away now live 30-60 minutes away. We all have more things that get in the way of hanging out with each other.
That does not mark the end of our friendships. It just makes the more challenging. It is nice to go onto Facebook and post "I'm thinking of having a game of Hold 'Em at my place this Saturday...anybody in?" It is of course preferable to speak with my friends face to face, but when it isn't possible I would rather drop them an EMAIL or Facebook Private Message along the lines of "Did you see Last night's baseball game?" or "Did you and your daughter end up catching any fish this Saturday" or "Looks like the health care bill passed. What do you think of it?" instead of not communicating with them at all.
Trust me. People get older. Responsibilities change. Your time to "Hang out" shrinks significantly. Life just changes. I used to laugh at people over 30 who never seemed to do anything "Fucking awesome" like I did almost every night. Now I understand.
Funny thing is, I was a slight tech hoarder and my wife is a shoe/old clothes hoarder. If the clothes are wearable....even if they are more fit for a teenager....she keeps them. I harassed her to get rid of some of the stuff and she pointed out my collection of garbage. I decided to set a good example and one day started throwing out/selling/giving away/hitting with a bat most of the stuff in my tech pile. It was actually quite liberating. It is not longer difficult to find the actual USEFUL things that I rarely use amidst the piles of stuff I never used.
Never did get the wife to throw away the old clothes though. Oh well. At least it ensures that she keeps the school girl skirt.;)
I agree with you. I would be very wary of using a simple solution for firewall management. Yeah, putting in tons of rules for firewalls can be a time consuming pain in the ass but I really think it is better that way. More than not trusting the interface/firmware/device/software I wouldn't trust MYSELF. I have to put more thought into typing/manually selecting than I do with a drag and drop type setup. That helps me avoid making mistakes.....and at any level of business a mistake on the firewall can turn out to be a big, big disaster.
What you are saying is true, but if you are dealing with beginners I could see the variable names being similar. Perhaps something like "Counter" or "InputNumber" was used by the instructor. Many of the students may adopt similar naming conventions to what they have seen demonstrated in class or in the text book.
This has little bearing on today's languages but back when I was in high school I took two classes on Basic Programming. They had Commadore 64 computers for us to program on (which were very antiquated at the time but our school wasn't much into technology). Variables could only be two characters. Everyone always used x as their first variable, y as their second, and z as their third. That is how the teacher presented it, so everyone sort of adopted that.
While Linux is certainly still better in terms of security/popups/viruses/malware, a properly configured Windows 7 machine is pretty solid these days. If instead of installing Debian you had loaded a fresh install of Windows on her Sony laptop, installed Firefox, and set her up with a good AV solution (Microsoft Security Essentials would be fine) she would have had a lot fewer problems I suspect. One of the bigger issues with new Windows computers....the crapware...is a manufacturer issue. Not a Windows issue.
As far as "Linux doesn't work" anecdotes, I get the feeling that a lot of these "Setting up my wireless card was impossible" are told by people who were messing with Linux a decade or so ago. The first laptop that I owned (Toshiba Tecra 9100) was an absolute headache when it came to Wireless networking in Linux. I can't remember which distro I was using at the time...either Red Had or Mandrake. In the last 5 years I've gone through quite a few laptops and I can't recall a single case where wireless networking didn't work out of the box...and I've owned Toshiba, HP, Acer, and IBM laptops.
My feeling is that right now we have three pretty decent OS options in Windows 7,. OSX, and Linux (Most distros, anyway). It is more matter of personal preference than one or the other sucking too bad to even use.
I've posted this before, but what I do for online purchases is use a Prepaid Debit Card by Netspend. When I want to buy something online I stop at the gas station, load the card with the amount of money I need, go straight home and make the purchase. I'll usually keep $30-$40 on it for small impulse purchases. If my card is compromised and they get my $30....whatever. I'm out $30 and I go get a different prepaid card.
It does cost $3 to load the card so I do end up paying a bit more for purchases but to never have my bank account emptied by hackers, get double charged by a company, or get hit with hundreds of dollars worth of overdraft fees. For me paying the fee is worth it.
Note: Netspend also allows you to create "Virtual" cards for online use.
For what it is worth, I was a Biochemist a lifetime ago. I remember seeing a bottle of Nicotine and being startled at the number of "Warning! Poison!" "May Cause Paralysis!" "If you dump this on your skin, seek medical attention!" labels. It is probably best to avoid putting it in your body. Of course, the same goes for Caffeine. And Alcohol. And THC. And Ibuprofen/Aspirin/Acetominophin (I can never spell that).
I was a really heavy smoker but I started "Vaping" about 6 months ago and have cut down from about 40 cigarettes a day to about 6. I fill my own cartridges and stuff so I do have bottles of nicotine laying around. Almost all of them have the little Skull and Crossbones with a "Warning, contains Nicotine. Harmful or Dangerous if swallowed. Keep our of reach of pets and children" label. I had some early issues overfilling cartridges and ending up with some liquid in my mouth. I got waaay jittery and "Buzzed". That was only from a drop or two. I'd imagine if I took a good 2 ml directly in the mouth I'd get very sick.
That said, E-Cigarettes are fantastic. I never had the desire to quit smoking but I thought it might be neat to try the E-Cigarette. It is a different experience, but it has been awesome for me. I don't wake up with my chest/back/lungs hurting and generally just feel better. I cough a whole lot less. In my experience, the E-Cigs are magnitudes less bad for you than real cigarettes. Maybe in the long run they will still give me lung cancer. Fine. My fault. In the mean time I will be able to climb a flight of stairs when I'm forty without being completely out of breath.. I'm fine with that.
I'm also not a "Programmer" for most of my day but I have written/maintain several complex Excel VBA apps, a few SQL Driven Web Apps, the company web site, and a small embedded solution. The rest of the time I do Network Admin type work.
I started out as a consultant working a few hours a week for the company I am at. The guy who was doing most of the IT stuff has Parkinson's so I was just picking up some of the stuff he didn't have the energy to handle. After a year he really wasn't in a condition where he could continue to come to work so they asked me if I wanted to come on board. I told them I would work an 8x5 schedule if they wanted me to but I really don't do my best work in that fashion. I told them I do better with 4x6 on site and working from home for the rest of the time. By some utter miracle they decided that this was ok with them.
Six hours seems to be my threshold for not dreading going to work for the day and remaining solidly productive the entire time. I come in and I am working within a minute of sitting down. I take 2, maybe 3 very short cigarette breaks but work solid the rest of the time....possibly checking my personal EMAIL once. On days where I don't have anything else to do, I'll jump on and bang out a few hours of work.
I absolutely love this schedule and can't imagine how I ever dealt with working 9 hours 5 days a week. It will suck though when I eventually move on/get fired. I doubt anywhere else will let me do something like that.
I totally understand where you are coming from, but I think restriction might be the better option. Logs will allow you to see if your child is visiting sites you do not approve of, but it won't make the 12 year old unsee that video of "Hot Asian slut taking it in all three holes at once". (I'd assume this is one of the things that he is trying to filter out). Also, it may not be the child's intent to go look at said video. It might be a bait and switch link that takes them there, some malware infestation, the 15 year old jumping on the 12 year old's machine to do his porn surfing, or some other scenario where it really isn't the 12 year old's fault.
Plus, depending on how much surfing the kids are doing, there could be a pretty big list of logs to go through every day.
And of course the biggest issue.....do you think the parent has the time for the hours of talk/psychological help that would be required if one of the kids ran into goatse.cx? One bad click and the kid would be damaged for life. The parent could only hold the child as they rocked back and forth trying to sleep but unable to remove the image that has burned itself into the retinas.
I have to agree with you. I know several teachers and the performance of their students seems to have a direct effect on their general mood. If they have students that are getting the material and pushing themselves to learn more, the teachers are happy outside of work. When they get a batch of kids that don't give a shit about their education, the teachers seem down to the point of depression and talk about going back to school to get their PhD so they can teach college where people might be interested in the material. I never once heard a single one of them say "Gee, I wish my students were mindless automatons."
I'm sure there are plenty of teachers who just don't give a damn. There are plenty of developers like that. And Network Admins. And Drill Press Operators. And Accountants. Every profession is going to have that group that hates their field and does a mediocre to poor job because of it. The school I went to had a mix of both. The core science teachers they had were absolutely ridiculous in their desire to do a good job. My class happened to have a decent number of advanced individuals, so they set up new AP classes for Chemistry, Physics, and Biology. We tore through those as juniors so the teachers sat down and developed a THIRD year of those three subjects for the handful of us that were interested. We were assigned a pretty intensive research paper and they took us on "Field Trips" to college libraries to do research. They got us involved in science/math type competitions which they sacrificed nights and weekends to take us to. The Biology teacher would take us out to a nearby park to show us what we were learning about. It was fantastic. I left high school with knowledge well beyond the first two semesters of college Zoology, college chem, and college physics.
Agreed. I never understood the whole "If you are smart/nerdy, you think sports are stupid" thing. When I was younger, I had a decent sized group of friends who were all pretty much "nerdy" (Excelled in school, liked to play video games/mess with computers, liked Role playing or strategy board games, etc.) but were all almost interested in sports. Even those who were overweight/athletically challenged could be found playing pickup basketball/football/other sports on a regular basis. I keep in touch with a lot of them and they still either play sports pretty often or follow sports.
"Fantasy Football" and the like seems to have been a huge hook for the nerd demographic. A lot of the geeky people I know participate in some type of fantasy sport, which in turn keeps them interested in watching the actual sport. Those really into it make all sorts of charts, come up with ways to try to project stats based on historical data, and all sorts of wacky stuff.
I don't know that "Stealing" even implies "Economic" value. For whatever it is worth, Dictionary.com lists as one definition of Stealing "to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment". Other than that, I agree with you.
What is frightening is that the guy you are responding to doesn't seem to understand the difference between something like Firefox and a proprietary idea. The Mozilla Foundation states on their web site "This means that it is not only available for download free of charge, but you have access to the source code and may modify and redistribute our software subject to certain restrictions as detailed in our license agreements." They are explicitly giving you the right to use and redistribute their software free of charge. I'm pretty sure a quick look at a Record Company, Film Studio, or proprietary software vendor web site would reveal a similar statement informing you that you do NOT have that right.
There are aspects of Copyright law that I do not agree with, and I find the actions of the MPAA/RIAA are pretty insane. What is also insane is that the arguments that a good chunk of people on here boil down to either some rather dubious hair splitting regarding the definition of "Stealing", or the even worse "Well, if the Movie Studios released something good for a change I might purchase it instead of getting it off of The Pirate Bay". Using those premises as the basis for your anti-copyright campaign is a recipe for failure.
My wife recently completed her degree to teach High School Geography/History/. Over 90% of the people in the same degree program as her were male. She is still looking for a permanent job and is subbing for the time being. Between subbing and two semesters of student teaching she has seen about 20 schools in the area. She met a total of 4 female social studies teachers. Three of them acted legitimately surprised to see another woman who wanted to be a History teacher.
Teaching High School History isn't really the first thing that comes to mind when you think of jobs that require intelligence. My wife thought the degree program was laughably easy and I'm sure it wouldn't compare to getting a math or engineering degree. There is clearly something else at play here other than intelligence.
My wife's take on the matter has been that societal issues are the likely cause. She knew only two other girls all through high school who enjoyed History and took higher level Social Studies classes. A good number of her female relatives would repeatedly ask her why she would want to teach High School History....she could teach at a nice elementary school instead. She is a little self conscious and wondered if there was something wrong with her wanting to study History.
Saying some people are higher quality than others is a tough statement to make and depends on your definition of quality. Intelligent? Attractive? Athletically Gifted? Acting/Music/Artistically gifted? Compassionate? Sane? Less prone to diseases? Heterosexual? Excellent work ethic? Not an alcoholic/drug addict?
You are assuming that the traits you hold dear are the absolutes when it comes to judging a person's worth. I know a few Intelligent, Attractive, lazy, drug abusing, insane jerks. They really don't seem to enjoy life. They are a drain on society and nothing I want my children to end up like. I've met some rather unintelligent, homely, sane, drug free, hard working types. Heck, my best friend probably falls into this group. I'm pretty sure he'd fall under an IQ of 100, he isn't gross looking but he isn't really attractive either. He does go work hard at his job (he fuels airplanes), he runs home to spend time with his daughter, he is the first person there when a friend is in need of help, and he is pretty well grounded and happy with life. I consider him to be a very high quality individual. I would have no complaints if my progeny were to end up like him.
I just can't see being willing to pay that much more for a shake of the genetic dice based on a test score that has some pretty shaky links to actual intelligence. Even if the donor is intelligent, it does not guarantee the child will be. For overall quality of the child, you probably have the same chance taking a random egg from the "Not imprisoned/institutionalized, not mentally retarded, not stricken by some horrible disease" general population as you do selecting by something like SAT score.
Public Relations could be a problem...but if you are a larger company and one of your Junior Accountants or Help Desk Technicians are KKK members I have a hard time seeing that it would come crashing down on you. Maybe something like an HR person who may be filtering "Black Sounding" names.....now that may be more of a problem.
NAMBLA. Boy. You are making this tough for me. Obviously I despise racists, but I'd take a staff filled with Racists over a Pedophile. However....and I may sound ignorant here as I don't know that much about NAMBLA....does membership in NAMBLA necessarily guarantee that YOU personally want to have sex with little boys? Or can it be a situation where they don't want to do it, but find it reasonable? There are non-dope smokers who support legalization of Marijuana, non-John's who support legalization, people who have never had and wouldn't have an abortion who are pro-choice.
Basically, I would have a hard time denying someone a job solely based on ideals, even if said ideals are demented. If they aren't out actively beating up blacks or sodomizing little boys, what have they really done wrong?
The bummer part is that the two guys, at some point at least, must have been at least SOMEWHAT nice to the girl if they were dating (article states she was "Dating a popular senior football player") and having sex. They will be the ones that get hit the hardest by this. I'm guessing charges such as "Criminal Harassment" and "Stalking" will end up as no more than slaps on the wrist while the two guys will have the sex offender stamp for the rest of their lives.
I think the School administrators/teachers/parents should intervene, but in a different way. Having an adult step in and tell the bully to leave the bullied kid alone isn't going to be effective. The kids will take that as a sign that the kid can't take care of him/herself and bully them further. Taking the bullied kid aside and trying to instill some self confidence in them, in my opinion, is the better route.
I say this out of experience. I was one of the smallest, smartest, quietest, and most shy boys in school. Obviously that made me an obvious target. First grade in particular was rough for me. I developed a complex where I was afraid to go to the bathroom during school because someone might bully me in the bathroom or on the way. My grades suffered and I was not happy.
My dad (who probably would have bullied me if we were in school together) sat me down on several occasions about being comfortable with who I was, not being afraid to talk, and generally sticking up for myself. I started to put his words into actions and by 3rd grade...I managed to be pretty popular. By 5th grade, I was pretty much untouchable, as any kid who wanted to mess with me would incur the wrath of the other bullies. Even in Middle/HIgh School I was surprisingly popular for one of the "Smart Kids". I can't imagine that things would have went down this way without some good parental guidance.
I think this would only work for someone who is past the "Verbal abuse with occasional wedgie" and is on to "Getting physically beat on every other day". I don't really know what to do at that point, but getting a child to come out of their shell earlier on may have prevented that.
Uhhhhh. Ok, so I'm an idiot. I went plugging through the options one day to try to find a way to not display certain things. I assumed the "Hide" just meant to hide that one post.
But still....My page now looks like "Relative A doesn't like being sick", "Person 1 commented on their own status", "Person 2 likes Person 3's status.", "I just won 1 Swagbuck" (Ok, something new to hide), "Relative B says it is going to be a Marvelous Monday.",."Person 4 commented on PersonIDon'tKnow's album.", followed by 6 more "Commented on Status" posts. I can't hide those unless I hide the person.
I'm sure it works out well for some people. For myself, even after knocking out the Farmville updates, it is just a wild mess of random clutter. When I open my Gmail account I see 23 messages without scrolling down at all. Of those 23, 16 of them are things that I have read/will read. Four of them are "You have a comment on Slashdot" alerts (I am going to shut those off), one is a receipt from an online order I placed, one is a weekly mailer from a discount electronics site (I glance at this about half the time), and one is a newsletter that I used to read but have not been lately. Considering the messages that ARE from real people contain actual useful content that I want/need to know, it is much more of a White Listed inbox for me than my Facebook account is.
Why wouldn't you keep the employee on the payroll if he was a member of the KKK? Not every KKK member is actively lynching minorities and burning crosses. Racism is a really ignorant opinion but as long as the person's feelings towards blacks didn't affect any part of their (excellent) job performance, I can't see canning someone because of it. The root of the problem with KKK members/racist is intolerance towards others that are different. Wouldn't refusing to tolerate someone with a different opinion about tolerating different people be a little hypocritical?
"Joe NotAnActualSpammer has just planted a fucking tree on his farm!"
As of right now, my main Facebook page has exactly 1 item that I might be interested in....my brother in law posted some pictures he took on spring break. The rest is all kinds of nonsense. And that is with being selective about friend requests. I have 21 "Friends" (still probably too many) and 47 "Friend Requests". I can't imagine how much garbage would be on the page with 68 cabbage planting friends.
I think that "taking an IT position" is pretty good advice. I'd like to add that you can even consider working for a smaller company. There won't be the chance of advancement to a developer position that a larger place would have, but there might be more resume building opportunities. (My personal anecdote and reasoning below).
I'm really an IT guy and not really a developer but I have always done some programming as a hobby. I ended up at a small manufacturing company with just me and a half time guy for IT staff. I started looking at how things were done and found MANY opportunities to write programs to help the company. At first it was just VBA scripting and simple SQL/web stuff, but I ended up getting a chance to write an embedded Java application to centrally control the Microprocessors in our products (the line is actually a few months from launch so I can't share more information).
I'm sure real developers will hardly be impressed with the programming resume I have listed, but it is a heck of a lot more development than I would have been doing at a large company. If I had a degree and wanted to find a developer gig, I'd have quite a bit of real world stuff to show.
Correct. I don't know if lalena came out of the womb writing immaculate C++ code or something, but obviously (s)he does not understand the concept of "Education". Everyone has to start somewhere, and that somewhere is usually really basic stuff that years later you cannot believe you ever had a problem with.
If I was hiring for an entry level position and I saw that, I'd think "Hey, this guy knows how to go get answers when he doesn't know what to do." Yeah, sounds lame, but it is unbelievable how many IT guys/programmers that I have run into who don't seem to understand how to use the web (Search, Forums, etc.) to find answers. If they don't know an answer they ask a coworker. If the coworker doesn't know the answer the call a consultant or try some shitty workaround. After seeing this waaaay too often I consider knowing how to use resources to be a pretty decent "Soft Skill".
My anecdote deal with a private company, but I think it is still applicable to people working a government job.
I worked for a 1000+ person manufacturing facility. Everyone on the shop floor was hourly as well as a lot of the office workers. The "Higher Up" office workers were salaried. Salaried was really cool at that company. You didn't clock in and you could just take off when you needed to. Salaried workers would do a 12 hour day and then take off 3 hours early later in the week to take their kids to the doctor. Need a three day weekend? Get your work done earlier and take the day off. Decide you want the day after Christmas off? Ok. Having a salaried position was pretty awesome.
I am pretty sure you can imagine how this turned out. Most of the people were very happy to have this flexibility and worked really hard for the company and were reasonable with their off time. A few people were not. The worst offender was an Engineering manager who took off 77 days during the year. The company responded by saying "Hey, you guys obviously cannot be reasonable about this so salaried employees will now be punching the clock. They will also have vacation days just like hourly. You want 3 hours off? That will cost you a half day."
The moral of the story? Time and attendance isn't "Slavery". It is pretty much necessary. You can try the "Honor System" with employees and many will be pleased but you'll always get those that want to abuse the shit out of it and laugh about making money without working. The idea of every average Joe being a good honest person working for corrupt politicians and CEO's is pretty naive. Put Average Joe in a position where he can screw someone out of money and there is a decent chance he will.
Yeah. I don't think I would have known what he was talking about if the conversation went as presented. And that isn't necessarily meant as a jab at him. Walking someone through computer stuff over the phone is HARD. I've tried to guide some reasonably savvy users through some easy things over the phone and had it end in disaster. I've had normal users get into configuration screens that I never even knew existed just by interpreting my spoken directions slightly wrong.
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Maybe we just don't need all the governments we have around the world, we just need people to have honor and uphold justice.
Really? The solution is that easy? If we just have honor and uphold justice our problems will all be solved? Too bad nobody thought of that sooner!
Seriously though, lets give people more credit they deserve and say that 99.9% of people on earth are on board with being honorable. That still leaves 67,000,000 people out there who won't be honorable. Then, you have to deal with the varying opinions on what is honorable and what is upholding justice. Honor and Justice aren't really singular things. There are hundreds, probably thousands of things that make up a system of honor or justice. People don't all think the same. Who has more honor? A Pro-Lifer seeking to save unborn fetuses or a Pro-Choicer seeking to allow woman the freedom to make decisions regarding their own body? Who has more honor, a person who wants to put violent criminals to death to ensure the safety of others or a person who wants to rehabilitate the criminal because everyone's life has value? Who has more honor, the solider that is willing to expend his life freeing people of a different country from the yolk of an oppressive regime or the person who thinks we should stay out of other peoples' business? You might think the answer to all of those questions is simple, but someone else may think that and answer each question the opposite of you.
Note that I am not really a huge fan of Facebook but it does serve its purpose. While I was in college and into my late twenties I saw almost all of my friends very often. Now I am just a tad past 30 and things have changed. One of my best friends since I was 7 is now married, has a wife and a child, and lives 5 hours away. Three of my better friends have one or more children and one of them works a shift completely that makes is hard for us to ever get together. A lot of the friends that used to live less than five minutes away now live 30-60 minutes away. We all have more things that get in the way of hanging out with each other.
That does not mark the end of our friendships. It just makes the more challenging. It is nice to go onto Facebook and post "I'm thinking of having a game of Hold 'Em at my place this Saturday...anybody in?" It is of course preferable to speak with my friends face to face, but when it isn't possible I would rather drop them an EMAIL or Facebook Private Message along the lines of "Did you see Last night's baseball game?" or "Did you and your daughter end up catching any fish this Saturday" or "Looks like the health care bill passed. What do you think of it?" instead of not communicating with them at all.
Trust me. People get older. Responsibilities change. Your time to "Hang out" shrinks significantly. Life just changes. I used to laugh at people over 30 who never seemed to do anything "Fucking awesome" like I did almost every night. Now I understand.
Funny thing is, I was a slight tech hoarder and my wife is a shoe/old clothes hoarder. If the clothes are wearable....even if they are more fit for a teenager....she keeps them. I harassed her to get rid of some of the stuff and she pointed out my collection of garbage. I decided to set a good example and one day started throwing out/selling/giving away/hitting with a bat most of the stuff in my tech pile. It was actually quite liberating. It is not longer difficult to find the actual USEFUL things that I rarely use amidst the piles of stuff I never used.
Never did get the wife to throw away the old clothes though. Oh well. At least it ensures that she keeps the school girl skirt. ;)
I agree with you. I would be very wary of using a simple solution for firewall management. Yeah, putting in tons of rules for firewalls can be a time consuming pain in the ass but I really think it is better that way. More than not trusting the interface/firmware/device/software I wouldn't trust MYSELF. I have to put more thought into typing/manually selecting than I do with a drag and drop type setup. That helps me avoid making mistakes.....and at any level of business a mistake on the firewall can turn out to be a big, big disaster.
What you are saying is true, but if you are dealing with beginners I could see the variable names being similar. Perhaps something like "Counter" or "InputNumber" was used by the instructor. Many of the students may adopt similar naming conventions to what they have seen demonstrated in class or in the text book.
This has little bearing on today's languages but back when I was in high school I took two classes on Basic Programming. They had Commadore 64 computers for us to program on (which were very antiquated at the time but our school wasn't much into technology). Variables could only be two characters. Everyone always used x as their first variable, y as their second, and z as their third. That is how the teacher presented it, so everyone sort of adopted that.
While Linux is certainly still better in terms of security/popups/viruses/malware, a properly configured Windows 7 machine is pretty solid these days. If instead of installing Debian you had loaded a fresh install of Windows on her Sony laptop, installed Firefox, and set her up with a good AV solution (Microsoft Security Essentials would be fine) she would have had a lot fewer problems I suspect. One of the bigger issues with new Windows computers....the crapware...is a manufacturer issue. Not a Windows issue.
As far as "Linux doesn't work" anecdotes, I get the feeling that a lot of these "Setting up my wireless card was impossible" are told by people who were messing with Linux a decade or so ago. The first laptop that I owned (Toshiba Tecra 9100) was an absolute headache when it came to Wireless networking in Linux. I can't remember which distro I was using at the time...either Red Had or Mandrake. In the last 5 years I've gone through quite a few laptops and I can't recall a single case where wireless networking didn't work out of the box...and I've owned Toshiba, HP, Acer, and IBM laptops.
My feeling is that right now we have three pretty decent OS options in Windows 7,. OSX, and Linux (Most distros, anyway). It is more matter of personal preference than one or the other sucking too bad to even use.
I've posted this before, but what I do for online purchases is use a Prepaid Debit Card by Netspend. When I want to buy something online I stop at the gas station, load the card with the amount of money I need, go straight home and make the purchase. I'll usually keep $30-$40 on it for small impulse purchases. If my card is compromised and they get my $30....whatever. I'm out $30 and I go get a different prepaid card.
It does cost $3 to load the card so I do end up paying a bit more for purchases but to never have my bank account emptied by hackers, get double charged by a company, or get hit with hundreds of dollars worth of overdraft fees. For me paying the fee is worth it.
Note: Netspend also allows you to create "Virtual" cards for online use.
For what it is worth, I was a Biochemist a lifetime ago. I remember seeing a bottle of Nicotine and being startled at the number of "Warning! Poison!" "May Cause Paralysis!" "If you dump this on your skin, seek medical attention!" labels. It is probably best to avoid putting it in your body. Of course, the same goes for Caffeine. And Alcohol. And THC. And Ibuprofen/Aspirin/Acetominophin (I can never spell that).
I was a really heavy smoker but I started "Vaping" about 6 months ago and have cut down from about 40 cigarettes a day to about 6. I fill my own cartridges and stuff so I do have bottles of nicotine laying around. Almost all of them have the little Skull and Crossbones with a "Warning, contains Nicotine. Harmful or Dangerous if swallowed. Keep our of reach of pets and children" label. I had some early issues overfilling cartridges and ending up with some liquid in my mouth. I got waaay jittery and "Buzzed". That was only from a drop or two. I'd imagine if I took a good 2 ml directly in the mouth I'd get very sick.
That said, E-Cigarettes are fantastic. I never had the desire to quit smoking but I thought it might be neat to try the E-Cigarette. It is a different experience, but it has been awesome for me. I don't wake up with my chest/back/lungs hurting and generally just feel better. I cough a whole lot less. In my experience, the E-Cigs are magnitudes less bad for you than real cigarettes. Maybe in the long run they will still give me lung cancer. Fine. My fault. In the mean time I will be able to climb a flight of stairs when I'm forty without being completely out of breath.. I'm fine with that.
I'm also not a "Programmer" for most of my day but I have written/maintain several complex Excel VBA apps, a few SQL Driven Web Apps, the company web site, and a small embedded solution. The rest of the time I do Network Admin type work.
I started out as a consultant working a few hours a week for the company I am at. The guy who was doing most of the IT stuff has Parkinson's so I was just picking up some of the stuff he didn't have the energy to handle. After a year he really wasn't in a condition where he could continue to come to work so they asked me if I wanted to come on board. I told them I would work an 8x5 schedule if they wanted me to but I really don't do my best work in that fashion. I told them I do better with 4x6 on site and working from home for the rest of the time. By some utter miracle they decided that this was ok with them.
Six hours seems to be my threshold for not dreading going to work for the day and remaining solidly productive the entire time. I come in and I am working within a minute of sitting down. I take 2, maybe 3 very short cigarette breaks but work solid the rest of the time....possibly checking my personal EMAIL once. On days where I don't have anything else to do, I'll jump on and bang out a few hours of work.
I absolutely love this schedule and can't imagine how I ever dealt with working 9 hours 5 days a week. It will suck though when I eventually move on/get fired. I doubt anywhere else will let me do something like that.
I totally understand where you are coming from, but I think restriction might be the better option. Logs will allow you to see if your child is visiting sites you do not approve of, but it won't make the 12 year old unsee that video of "Hot Asian slut taking it in all three holes at once". (I'd assume this is one of the things that he is trying to filter out). Also, it may not be the child's intent to go look at said video. It might be a bait and switch link that takes them there, some malware infestation, the 15 year old jumping on the 12 year old's machine to do his porn surfing, or some other scenario where it really isn't the 12 year old's fault.
Plus, depending on how much surfing the kids are doing, there could be a pretty big list of logs to go through every day.
And of course the biggest issue.....do you think the parent has the time for the hours of talk/psychological help that would be required if one of the kids ran into goatse.cx? One bad click and the kid would be damaged for life. The parent could only hold the child as they rocked back and forth trying to sleep but unable to remove the image that has burned itself into the retinas.
I have to agree with you. I know several teachers and the performance of their students seems to have a direct effect on their general mood. If they have students that are getting the material and pushing themselves to learn more, the teachers are happy outside of work. When they get a batch of kids that don't give a shit about their education, the teachers seem down to the point of depression and talk about going back to school to get their PhD so they can teach college where people might be interested in the material. I never once heard a single one of them say "Gee, I wish my students were mindless automatons."
I'm sure there are plenty of teachers who just don't give a damn. There are plenty of developers like that. And Network Admins. And Drill Press Operators. And Accountants. Every profession is going to have that group that hates their field and does a mediocre to poor job because of it. The school I went to had a mix of both. The core science teachers they had were absolutely ridiculous in their desire to do a good job. My class happened to have a decent number of advanced individuals, so they set up new AP classes for Chemistry, Physics, and Biology. We tore through those as juniors so the teachers sat down and developed a THIRD year of those three subjects for the handful of us that were interested. We were assigned a pretty intensive research paper and they took us on "Field Trips" to college libraries to do research. They got us involved in science/math type competitions which they sacrificed nights and weekends to take us to. The Biology teacher would take us out to a nearby park to show us what we were learning about. It was fantastic. I left high school with knowledge well beyond the first two semesters of college Zoology, college chem, and college physics.
Agreed. I never understood the whole "If you are smart/nerdy, you think sports are stupid" thing. When I was younger, I had a decent sized group of friends who were all pretty much "nerdy" (Excelled in school, liked to play video games/mess with computers, liked Role playing or strategy board games, etc.) but were all almost interested in sports. Even those who were overweight/athletically challenged could be found playing pickup basketball/football/other sports on a regular basis. I keep in touch with a lot of them and they still either play sports pretty often or follow sports.
"Fantasy Football" and the like seems to have been a huge hook for the nerd demographic. A lot of the geeky people I know participate in some type of fantasy sport, which in turn keeps them interested in watching the actual sport. Those really into it make all sorts of charts, come up with ways to try to project stats based on historical data, and all sorts of wacky stuff.
I don't know that "Stealing" even implies "Economic" value. For whatever it is worth, Dictionary.com lists as one definition of Stealing "to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment". Other than that, I agree with you.
What is frightening is that the guy you are responding to doesn't seem to understand the difference between something like Firefox and a proprietary idea. The Mozilla Foundation states on their web site "This means that it is not only available for download free of charge, but you have access to the source code and may modify and redistribute our software subject to certain restrictions as detailed in our license agreements." They are explicitly giving you the right to use and redistribute their software free of charge. I'm pretty sure a quick look at a Record Company, Film Studio, or proprietary software vendor web site would reveal a similar statement informing you that you do NOT have that right.
There are aspects of Copyright law that I do not agree with, and I find the actions of the MPAA/RIAA are pretty insane. What is also insane is that the arguments that a good chunk of people on here boil down to either some rather dubious hair splitting regarding the definition of "Stealing", or the even worse "Well, if the Movie Studios released something good for a change I might purchase it instead of getting it off of The Pirate Bay". Using those premises as the basis for your anti-copyright campaign is a recipe for failure.
My wife recently completed her degree to teach High School Geography/History/. Over 90% of the people in the same degree program as her were male. She is still looking for a permanent job and is subbing for the time being. Between subbing and two semesters of student teaching she has seen about 20 schools in the area. She met a total of 4 female social studies teachers. Three of them acted legitimately surprised to see another woman who wanted to be a History teacher.
Teaching High School History isn't really the first thing that comes to mind when you think of jobs that require intelligence. My wife thought the degree program was laughably easy and I'm sure it wouldn't compare to getting a math or engineering degree. There is clearly something else at play here other than intelligence.
My wife's take on the matter has been that societal issues are the likely cause. She knew only two other girls all through high school who enjoyed History and took higher level Social Studies classes. A good number of her female relatives would repeatedly ask her why she would want to teach High School History....she could teach at a nice elementary school instead. She is a little self conscious and wondered if there was something wrong with her wanting to study History.
Saying some people are higher quality than others is a tough statement to make and depends on your definition of quality. Intelligent? Attractive? Athletically Gifted? Acting/Music/Artistically gifted? Compassionate? Sane? Less prone to diseases? Heterosexual? Excellent work ethic? Not an alcoholic/drug addict?
You are assuming that the traits you hold dear are the absolutes when it comes to judging a person's worth. I know a few Intelligent, Attractive, lazy, drug abusing, insane jerks. They really don't seem to enjoy life. They are a drain on society and nothing I want my children to end up like. I've met some rather unintelligent, homely, sane, drug free, hard working types. Heck, my best friend probably falls into this group. I'm pretty sure he'd fall under an IQ of 100, he isn't gross looking but he isn't really attractive either. He does go work hard at his job (he fuels airplanes), he runs home to spend time with his daughter, he is the first person there when a friend is in need of help, and he is pretty well grounded and happy with life. I consider him to be a very high quality individual. I would have no complaints if my progeny were to end up like him.
I just can't see being willing to pay that much more for a shake of the genetic dice based on a test score that has some pretty shaky links to actual intelligence. Even if the donor is intelligent, it does not guarantee the child will be. For overall quality of the child, you probably have the same chance taking a random egg from the "Not imprisoned/institutionalized, not mentally retarded, not stricken by some horrible disease" general population as you do selecting by something like SAT score.
Public Relations could be a problem...but if you are a larger company and one of your Junior Accountants or Help Desk Technicians are KKK members I have a hard time seeing that it would come crashing down on you. Maybe something like an HR person who may be filtering "Black Sounding" names.....now that may be more of a problem.
NAMBLA. Boy. You are making this tough for me. Obviously I despise racists, but I'd take a staff filled with Racists over a Pedophile. However....and I may sound ignorant here as I don't know that much about NAMBLA....does membership in NAMBLA necessarily guarantee that YOU personally want to have sex with little boys? Or can it be a situation where they don't want to do it, but find it reasonable? There are non-dope smokers who support legalization of Marijuana, non-John's who support legalization, people who have never had and wouldn't have an abortion who are pro-choice.
Basically, I would have a hard time denying someone a job solely based on ideals, even if said ideals are demented. If they aren't out actively beating up blacks or sodomizing little boys, what have they really done wrong?
The bummer part is that the two guys, at some point at least, must have been at least SOMEWHAT nice to the girl if they were dating (article states she was "Dating a popular senior football player") and having sex. They will be the ones that get hit the hardest by this. I'm guessing charges such as "Criminal Harassment" and "Stalking" will end up as no more than slaps on the wrist while the two guys will have the sex offender stamp for the rest of their lives.
I think the School administrators/teachers/parents should intervene, but in a different way. Having an adult step in and tell the bully to leave the bullied kid alone isn't going to be effective. The kids will take that as a sign that the kid can't take care of him/herself and bully them further. Taking the bullied kid aside and trying to instill some self confidence in them, in my opinion, is the better route.
I say this out of experience. I was one of the smallest, smartest, quietest, and most shy boys in school. Obviously that made me an obvious target. First grade in particular was rough for me. I developed a complex where I was afraid to go to the bathroom during school because someone might bully me in the bathroom or on the way. My grades suffered and I was not happy.
My dad (who probably would have bullied me if we were in school together) sat me down on several occasions about being comfortable with who I was, not being afraid to talk, and generally sticking up for myself. I started to put his words into actions and by 3rd grade...I managed to be pretty popular. By 5th grade, I was pretty much untouchable, as any kid who wanted to mess with me would incur the wrath of the other bullies. Even in Middle/HIgh School I was surprisingly popular for one of the "Smart Kids". I can't imagine that things would have went down this way without some good parental guidance.
I think this would only work for someone who is past the "Verbal abuse with occasional wedgie" and is on to "Getting physically beat on every other day". I don't really know what to do at that point, but getting a child to come out of their shell earlier on may have prevented that.
Uhhhhh. Ok, so I'm an idiot. I went plugging through the options one day to try to find a way to not display certain things. I assumed the "Hide" just meant to hide that one post.
But still....My page now looks like "Relative A doesn't like being sick", "Person 1 commented on their own status", "Person 2 likes Person 3's status.", "I just won 1 Swagbuck" (Ok, something new to hide), "Relative B says it is going to be a Marvelous Monday.", ."Person 4 commented on PersonIDon'tKnow's album.", followed by 6 more "Commented on Status" posts. I can't hide those unless I hide the person.
I'm sure it works out well for some people. For myself, even after knocking out the Farmville updates, it is just a wild mess of random clutter. When I open my Gmail account I see 23 messages without scrolling down at all. Of those 23, 16 of them are things that I have read/will read. Four of them are "You have a comment on Slashdot" alerts (I am going to shut those off), one is a receipt from an online order I placed, one is a weekly mailer from a discount electronics site (I glance at this about half the time), and one is a newsletter that I used to read but have not been lately. Considering the messages that ARE from real people contain actual useful content that I want/need to know, it is much more of a White Listed inbox for me than my Facebook account is.
Why wouldn't you keep the employee on the payroll if he was a member of the KKK? Not every KKK member is actively lynching minorities and burning crosses. Racism is a really ignorant opinion but as long as the person's feelings towards blacks didn't affect any part of their (excellent) job performance, I can't see canning someone because of it. The root of the problem with KKK members/racist is intolerance towards others that are different. Wouldn't refusing to tolerate someone with a different opinion about tolerating different people be a little hypocritical?
"Joe NotAnActualSpammer has just planted a fucking tree on his farm!"
As of right now, my main Facebook page has exactly 1 item that I might be interested in....my brother in law posted some pictures he took on spring break. The rest is all kinds of nonsense. And that is with being selective about friend requests. I have 21 "Friends" (still probably too many) and 47 "Friend Requests". I can't imagine how much garbage would be on the page with 68 cabbage planting friends.
I think that "taking an IT position" is pretty good advice. I'd like to add that you can even consider working for a smaller company. There won't be the chance of advancement to a developer position that a larger place would have, but there might be more resume building opportunities. (My personal anecdote and reasoning below).
I'm really an IT guy and not really a developer but I have always done some programming as a hobby. I ended up at a small manufacturing company with just me and a half time guy for IT staff. I started looking at how things were done and found MANY opportunities to write programs to help the company. At first it was just VBA scripting and simple SQL/web stuff, but I ended up getting a chance to write an embedded Java application to centrally control the Microprocessors in our products (the line is actually a few months from launch so I can't share more information).
I'm sure real developers will hardly be impressed with the programming resume I have listed, but it is a heck of a lot more development than I would have been doing at a large company. If I had a degree and wanted to find a developer gig, I'd have quite a bit of real world stuff to show.
Correct. I don't know if lalena came out of the womb writing immaculate C++ code or something, but obviously (s)he does not understand the concept of "Education". Everyone has to start somewhere, and that somewhere is usually really basic stuff that years later you cannot believe you ever had a problem with.
If I was hiring for an entry level position and I saw that, I'd think "Hey, this guy knows how to go get answers when he doesn't know what to do." Yeah, sounds lame, but it is unbelievable how many IT guys/programmers that I have run into who don't seem to understand how to use the web (Search, Forums, etc.) to find answers. If they don't know an answer they ask a coworker. If the coworker doesn't know the answer the call a consultant or try some shitty workaround. After seeing this waaaay too often I consider knowing how to use resources to be a pretty decent "Soft Skill".
My anecdote deal with a private company, but I think it is still applicable to people working a government job.
I worked for a 1000+ person manufacturing facility. Everyone on the shop floor was hourly as well as a lot of the office workers. The "Higher Up" office workers were salaried. Salaried was really cool at that company. You didn't clock in and you could just take off when you needed to. Salaried workers would do a 12 hour day and then take off 3 hours early later in the week to take their kids to the doctor. Need a three day weekend? Get your work done earlier and take the day off. Decide you want the day after Christmas off? Ok. Having a salaried position was pretty awesome.
I am pretty sure you can imagine how this turned out. Most of the people were very happy to have this flexibility and worked really hard for the company and were reasonable with their off time. A few people were not. The worst offender was an Engineering manager who took off 77 days during the year. The company responded by saying "Hey, you guys obviously cannot be reasonable about this so salaried employees will now be punching the clock. They will also have vacation days just like hourly. You want 3 hours off? That will cost you a half day."
The moral of the story? Time and attendance isn't "Slavery". It is pretty much necessary. You can try the "Honor System" with employees and many will be pleased but you'll always get those that want to abuse the shit out of it and laugh about making money without working. The idea of every average Joe being a good honest person working for corrupt politicians and CEO's is pretty naive. Put Average Joe in a position where he can screw someone out of money and there is a decent chance he will.
Yeah. I don't think I would have known what he was talking about if the conversation went as presented. And that isn't necessarily meant as a jab at him. Walking someone through computer stuff over the phone is HARD. I've tried to guide some reasonably savvy users through some easy things over the phone and had it end in disaster. I've had normal users get into configuration screens that I never even knew existed just by interpreting my spoken directions slightly wrong.