American here - we don't prefer to work hard, some of us just aren't up to the task of working smart. Ok, a LOT of us aren't. Of the rest who like to 'work smart', working for a 'hard worker' makes their intelligence moot - if the boss is on the job, you better be.:)
I wish I ran a company, and needed someone like you. I'd hire you in a second, and pay you very well - if you can steadily increase the amount of stuff that gets done consistently and correctly (scripts don't f*ck off on the job) and you can keep figuring out how to save time and money via automation, I guarantee you would have a job as long as you could keep maintaining the code to 'get stuff done'. That kind of working is, IMHO, what quality IT service is about. You are not lazy, you're smart.
Careful generalizing on consultants - I am one, and we frequently see jobs bid along unrealistic time and budget constraints to just get the work, with no involvement by the people selling the work. This may not be the case at a smaller place, but at medium to large firms where Partners or Directors negotiate the Statement of Work, and whose tech skills are often woefully out of date, it is in my experience pretty common. Result: incredible pressure on engagement managers and seniors to get the job done on time and within budget - with failure to do so directly impacting your promotions and salary. The result - 'eating' hours and burnout. Yes, your every hour is billable, but you cannot always bill all your hours and get the job done without getting yourself fired for blowing the budget. Refuse to eat hours and work stupid overtime on a consistent basis? That's okay, they'll let you go and replace you with a 23-year-old straight from college who is willing to work 18 hour days for 3-4 months. No exaggeration on that - I saw it happen. Fortunately, it is usually not THAT bad.
Forget the computers, focus on tutoring. The problem isn't that kids can't use computers, although that is certainly an issue, the problem is that kids are not being taught in a way that encourages them to learn. A good tutor can make the 'hardest' subjects (usually math and science) much more accessible. One-on-one time with a kid, walking them through material they feel helpless to face on their own, will do a lot more good than whiz-bang technology. A kid who is helped to learn to love math and science and buys into the learning process will be far better prepared to self-motivate to learn than a kid who has a Leapster at home and can click-through tutorials all day in school.
This assumes you are looking for direct effect stuff - if you want to generally help the school cope with a tech deficit, then there are many other good posts in this thread I defer to. Good luck!
To your point about stereotyping - one of the difficulties with fighting the stereotyping of religions is that the 'major' faiths (christianity, judaism, islam - lower case intentional) are dogma-based. It is very easy to stereotype a population that insists on jamming the basis for such stereotypes down everyone elses throats. I share a neighborhood with a bunch of jehovas' witnesses who insist that god wants them to keep knocking on my door and littering my mailbox, front walkway and car windshield with leaflets. Were I to stereotype them as being a bunch of people who spend their weekends littering other peoples homes and cars with leaflets, how far off the mark would I be? Would it be unfair of me? Most religious expression, in my experience, involves someone telling everyone around them, with great force and repetition, that things for which they have no actual proof are indeed true. If I generalize this behavior to religions in general, is that a stereotype, or in some way inappropriate?
Your pastor example wasn't terribly well-aimed, by the way - he was promoting sex among married christian couples. When your pastor starts encouraging sex between people who love each other, regardless of race, marital status or gender, I'll be impressed. The stereotype of christians isn't that sex is dirty, it's that sex with someone the church doesn't approve of is dirty - which appears to be the case here, no? Am I stereotyping when I suggest your pastor would be horrified at the thought of two men having sex every day for a week, or is that simply the truth?
I'd love an example of what we might find if we 'stopped stereotyping religions'. The problem is, if you look past the stereotypes and the denial of reason - and I'd be willing to look past those to some degree, because as you point out, we don't have all the answers on the 'science' side of the house either - you end up with intolerance and vitriol. Think I'm overgeneralizing? Try being gay in a christian, jewish or muslim community and see how you fare. The Anglican church tried to open up and tolerate gays and lesbians (I give them capitals for that) and what happened? The church is disintegrating.
Stereotypes can be helpful too - I was raised catholic. By associating priests with pedophilia (truly a stereotype, as pedophile priests are a tiny minority of the priesthood) I desensitized myself to the catholic symbols and mechanisms of oppression. Now, instead of seeing a 'father' I see a 'creepy pervert'. Such stereotyping helped flush the 'papal poison' from my memetic scheme.
Now, why again should we stop stereotyping religions and embrace them? I'll consider it when they stop stereotyping and start embracing everyone who does not believe as they do. When they stop mudslinging and worse, trying to deny the full, legitimate humanity of others based on *their* dogma, I'll grant them some respect. Until that time, given the chance, I will sling mud and take every shot, cheap or fair, that I can - I am still playing more fairly than they do.
I'm curious - I read the article, and I could not see how she is 'clearly mentally ill'. I am not an expert in mental health though - what makes her mentally ill and not just an idiot who got fixated on a scam? I see hordes of similar people every week heading for the casinos near the city I live in so they can pump their social security and savings into one-armed bandits. They are clearly stupid and obsessed, but hardly mentally ill, unless we are going down the 'addictive behavior is a disease' road. Not trying to be sarcastic, BTW, I'm serious about wondering how you reached your conclusion.
Only problem with your solution - those who need it most will understand it least, and be most likely to deny being stupid, and therefore won't realize they are the target audience. Good idea though.
How critical is social interaction to you in gaming? If not terribly important, then SimCity or something similar. If so, then The Sims or similar. Both had extremely long, successful 'careers' and are still played. I would love to see some of the clever simulation logic in SimCity into an FPS engine or similar. Building worlds, creating some basic rules and letting those rules develop a complex system... or crash/stop... would be interesting, especially if one had the ability to step into that world and walk around it and experiencing it as the automata that inhabited it did. The original game of Life is kind of interesting that way, but not terribly much fun (in the 'gamer' sense) unless you understand what is happening - the UI on most implementations is a simple grid with colored dots.
Apple don't discount because they don't have to. Seriously - check out eBay. People are selling G4 laptops for close on $1,000. With new line out now, that will drop I hope, but to answer your question - there's no reason to discount. Macs live for a long time and just keep working. I service my sister in laws Mac G4 and except for a memory upgrade, I've done nothing to it - and it runs OSX 10.4 like a champ. Say what you like, Apple have an excellent value proposition.
At the risk of repeating the obvious and previously cited, hardware comparisons are only half the story. Consider the OS, the hardware longevity (I'm still running my 'Tangerine Toilet Seat' iBook) and the fact that you get a complete set of developer tools free with the operating system - the very ones used to build it - the value proposition favors Macs. Add the cost of a seat license for MS Visual Studio to the price of a laptop, you are starting to hit price parity between the two. We haven't even gotten into the whole 'running open source software' on OSX - sure you can install CYGWIN and recompile, but even leaving this out, on a what-did-the-original-manufacturer-give-me comparison (iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes, XTools, a real shell environment, quality hardware) you get a lot more and a lot better with a Mac, even if you hate the design.
Agreed. Interesting, though, how the artists who complain about 'the album experience' going away aren't really making album-style works. I think of 'Dark Side of the Moon' by Pink Floyd - that is an album experience. There aren't too many totally 'integrated' albums coming out that I've seen. Even Radioheads' stuff is more 'song oriented', though not as much as other bands. I'm curious how much of the trend away from albums is format changes and how much is artist-driven. Then again, Pink Floyd put out DSOTM and Wish You Were Here when Billy Joel was writing about record companies cutting songs for time, so maybe it is just a cycle. Maybe portable, high-capacity, high-fidelity players will usher in an era of long-playing formats. Not an 'album' necessarily, but I'm looking at my playlists that once were cassette tapes and limited to 45 minutes, which now span hours and are trivial to create and update, and wondering, 'what's next?' Maybe the Rock Opera will finally catch on! (ducks)
Well, yeah, but the trick is, do bands truly know the filler/crap on their albums from the good stuff? Some do - but they are the ones most likely to toss garbage instead of publish it. A struggling band that happens on a hit might not be so good at editing. Think about it - Band X puts out a single. It sucks. Repeat (cause distribution costs are so low on the net). Second song sucks. Repeat. If the 'hit' follows a bunch of garbage, who is paying attention any more? One of the few things record companies (SOMETIMES) did right when managing artists was help them edit and find 'the single'. I do agree with your point that it would be nice to have the choice of just cherry picking the good stuff, though.
Bear in mind, you are not the target audience - most of the people I run into in the Apple store (I am an Apple user) couldn't tell you what BSD or Darwin are and never even installed Xcode or the other dev. tools. They just want a smooth, seamless, elegant user experience. And they get it. They don't notice the velvet handcuffs, not at all...
I would only add this - be reasonable and pleasant when declining unreasonable requests. At my employer, project managers ding the performance evals of those who didn't put in the unpaid overtime indirectly. Rather than 'Wouldn't eat hours because of my poor planning, -5", they'd hammer the person for attitude ("Guy pulled my punk card in front of a room full of staff about how he found my time management skills lacking, -5"). Be professional and nice, work hard while on the clock (i.e., lay off the fantasy football...) and leave when you have put in the time budgeted.
Caeful on that, though - I'm a vet, and while there are lots of 'non bullet catcher' jobs, there are some caveats:
The needs of the service come before EVERYTHING. Oh, you have a contract? Sue them. Good luck. If you are in the Air Force you might be able to get them to kick you out, but in the Marines (yeah, I know, if you wanted to join for the benefits, you wouldn't go there, I know...) they will put you literally anywhere, doing anything. Smart? Great - you get to go intelligence or public affairs. Not brilliant? Postal clerk, admin or cook - god knows where. Navy? Nice bet, nice culture (in my experience, I was Marines who spent a lot of time on ship) but I hope you really like travel.
Finally, consider what you give up - you will be 'on duty' working EVERY DAY for your entire tour. You will be deployed. You will probably be in either the ass end of nowhere, or in a combat zone. Best you can hope for - a podunk base in the US with nothing but strip clubs, pawnshops, tattoo parlors and hookers, watching your fellow human beings act like asshats. No college? Guess what - you will be enlisted. That means you will be the closest thing to a serf you can be in the western world. You might get lucky and have good leadership, or you might have a bunch of ROTC and service academy grads with Napoleon complexes. God save you if you don't have good Staff NCOs - and you might not, especially if these SNCOs find out you just joined 'for the benefits'.
I joined because I actually wanted to serve. After my tour was up, I got the f*ck out as fast as I could, and when my honorable discharge papers came in, I had my uniforms at the goodwill that day.
Oh, and BTW - EVERY enlistment is 8+ years. Read the fine print on your contract - your 'active' time is the 2, 4 or 6 years, but that is just the ACTIVE duty time. The difference up to 8 years is 'inactive reserve'. They can call you up if there's a need and guess what there is right now - big need. And no, they don't just 'need' combat MOS. I knew public affairs people who were stop-lossed, and that was in 1992. Gotta have those 'reporters' and PR folk, y'know. Its critical to the war effort. Seriously, they have a Table of Organization, and if there's a slot, you will be on it, period. They don't care that you were going to college, getting married, or have just had enough. We used to say USMC stands for 'U Signed the Motherf*cking Contract' and it is true. Don't sign it unless you really want it - do yourself and your fellow potential servicemenbers a favor. No one likes serving with someone who isn't really motivated to be there.
I was aware of the limited publishers for texts. I knew there were adoption committees, but I assumed their effects were local. If you are correct, then I must thank you for providing a good reason to toss some whisky in my Sunday morning coffee.:)
Sadly, while I wouldn't say Americans 'cant think their way out of a paper bag or election booth', the only real support for my position would be that those who can think rarely make the news. Weak argument, unfortunately, when placed against widely available news stories or issues you referenced. 'It's a perception problem' just doesn't seem to cover the problem.
You raise a creepy, not entirely new but nevertheless interesting point - self-censorship. Which is worse - big brother / the nanny state filtering material that it finds fault with, or people (even corporate 'persons', whether you agree with the concept or not) being so utterly terrified of releasing works that might be construed as 'harmful' (note the quotes, please) that they simply stop producing them?
Frankly, I was never a fan of 'Piss Christ' (for example) until it occurred to me what would happen if it were actually censored, whether by government fiat or paranoid self-policing. Tacky, yes - harmful, no. Who knows what else the Guardians of Decency would find nasty?
I always wonder when I read arguments for 'protection' - has anyone ever done any actual, peer-reviewed, statistically valid research showing that sex, violence or some combination of the two actually cause harm or the threat of harm to such an extent as merits government action? (BTW - GIMF, but I didn't find anything that stood out as particularly credulous)
General principles are still valid and if you or your students get stuck, they can look online for updated material - a guided search, rather than a from-scratch. Plus, it will teach them one of the most important lessons in IT/IS - 'RTFM'. Good luck!
Many thanks - I appreciate the insight, esp. regarding.NET. I am not terribly concerned with.NET though, as I will be using this for a personal project where I have the luxury of not having a bunch of.NET dependencies to worry about.
Which leads to another question -.NET is simply a MS framework, yet it gets a ton of play in discussion groups, etc. I'm relatively new to web dev work, so maybe I'm just ignorant, but why should I care about.NET integration, unless I have to do dev. work in someone else's code that uses it?
Thanks for the insightful reply - yours was the most useful. I appreciate you taking the time to think and respond. I am downloading Postgresql and PGAdmin3 now to try out.
I am a US citizen, and we do get the leaders we deserve. I am getting tired of dealing with people who absolutely refuse to learn from our errors - especially when the consequences for poor learning are much higher for the US. We tend to spread the damage beyond our borders more than most, unfortunately.
'Convicted' where? I agree the charges have been leveled, and I do not debate the veracity of the claims - there is quite enough evidence in the public domain to justify a trial, but so far, I have not heard of one actually taking place. Plus, how does one convict a country? Maybe indict the head of state for a trial in the Hague... wait a minute...
Ahh, but if he was truly innocent, he should take it to trial, because we all know that people are *never* convicted for crimes they did not commit, especially when the crime is related to 'terrorism' and deals in government secrets to boot!
(rubs hands, adjusts monocle, picks spot of lint from suit).
Right!?!
All sarcasm aside, you should capitalize US Criminal Justice System - it is a name, not a statement of fact. Our 'justice' system is pretty crappy - but it is better than most of the rest of the worlds. (SWAG) We're at least on par with our Western European brethren, unless you count death penalty issues.(\SWAG)
In the interest of proposing a solution, would it not be better to try such individuals in the UK if the US and UK could agree on common definitions (legal defs that is) for crimes and some kind of sentencing guidelines? I'm not suggesting that our UK friends bring back the death penalty (although for some of those Enron execs, you know...) but there is a disparity between sentences meted out in both countries (say I after a cursory reading of the 'crime' sections of the the BBC and CNN). I think that such an arrangement would let both countries feel that justice was being done, and that neither government was a sock-puppet for the other. I know, I know, the US gov't hasn't been accused of being an English sock puppet since the 18th century, but the principle applies...
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American here - we don't prefer to work hard, some of us just aren't up to the task of working smart. Ok, a LOT of us aren't. Of the rest who like to 'work smart', working for a 'hard worker' makes their intelligence moot - if the boss is on the job, you better be. :)
I wish I ran a company, and needed someone like you. I'd hire you in a second, and pay you very well - if you can steadily increase the amount of stuff that gets done consistently and correctly (scripts don't f*ck off on the job) and you can keep figuring out how to save time and money via automation, I guarantee you would have a job as long as you could keep maintaining the code to 'get stuff done'. That kind of working is, IMHO, what quality IT service is about. You are not lazy, you're smart.
Careful generalizing on consultants - I am one, and we frequently see jobs bid along unrealistic time and budget constraints to just get the work, with no involvement by the people selling the work. This may not be the case at a smaller place, but at medium to large firms where Partners or Directors negotiate the Statement of Work, and whose tech skills are often woefully out of date, it is in my experience pretty common. Result: incredible pressure on engagement managers and seniors to get the job done on time and within budget - with failure to do so directly impacting your promotions and salary. The result - 'eating' hours and burnout. Yes, your every hour is billable, but you cannot always bill all your hours and get the job done without getting yourself fired for blowing the budget. Refuse to eat hours and work stupid overtime on a consistent basis? That's okay, they'll let you go and replace you with a 23-year-old straight from college who is willing to work 18 hour days for 3-4 months. No exaggeration on that - I saw it happen. Fortunately, it is usually not THAT bad.
Forget the computers, focus on tutoring. The problem isn't that kids can't use computers, although that is certainly an issue, the problem is that kids are not being taught in a way that encourages them to learn. A good tutor can make the 'hardest' subjects (usually math and science) much more accessible. One-on-one time with a kid, walking them through material they feel helpless to face on their own, will do a lot more good than whiz-bang technology. A kid who is helped to learn to love math and science and buys into the learning process will be far better prepared to self-motivate to learn than a kid who has a Leapster at home and can click-through tutorials all day in school.
This assumes you are looking for direct effect stuff - if you want to generally help the school cope with a tech deficit, then there are many other good posts in this thread I defer to. Good luck!
To your point about stereotyping - one of the difficulties with fighting the stereotyping of religions is that the 'major' faiths (christianity, judaism, islam - lower case intentional) are dogma-based. It is very easy to stereotype a population that insists on jamming the basis for such stereotypes down everyone elses throats. I share a neighborhood with a bunch of jehovas' witnesses who insist that god wants them to keep knocking on my door and littering my mailbox, front walkway and car windshield with leaflets. Were I to stereotype them as being a bunch of people who spend their weekends littering other peoples homes and cars with leaflets, how far off the mark would I be? Would it be unfair of me? Most religious expression, in my experience, involves someone telling everyone around them, with great force and repetition, that things for which they have no actual proof are indeed true. If I generalize this behavior to religions in general, is that a stereotype, or in some way inappropriate?
Your pastor example wasn't terribly well-aimed, by the way - he was promoting sex among married christian couples. When your pastor starts encouraging sex between people who love each other, regardless of race, marital status or gender, I'll be impressed. The stereotype of christians isn't that sex is dirty, it's that sex with someone the church doesn't approve of is dirty - which appears to be the case here, no? Am I stereotyping when I suggest your pastor would be horrified at the thought of two men having sex every day for a week, or is that simply the truth?
I'd love an example of what we might find if we 'stopped stereotyping religions'. The problem is, if you look past the stereotypes and the denial of reason - and I'd be willing to look past those to some degree, because as you point out, we don't have all the answers on the 'science' side of the house either - you end up with intolerance and vitriol. Think I'm overgeneralizing? Try being gay in a christian, jewish or muslim community and see how you fare. The Anglican church tried to open up and tolerate gays and lesbians (I give them capitals for that) and what happened? The church is disintegrating.
Stereotypes can be helpful too - I was raised catholic. By associating priests with pedophilia (truly a stereotype, as pedophile priests are a tiny minority of the priesthood) I desensitized myself to the catholic symbols and mechanisms of oppression. Now, instead of seeing a 'father' I see a 'creepy pervert'. Such stereotyping helped flush the 'papal poison' from my memetic scheme.
Now, why again should we stop stereotyping religions and embrace them? I'll consider it when they stop stereotyping and start embracing everyone who does not believe as they do. When they stop mudslinging and worse, trying to deny the full, legitimate humanity of others based on *their* dogma, I'll grant them some respect. Until that time, given the chance, I will sling mud and take every shot, cheap or fair, that I can - I am still playing more fairly than they do.
I'm curious - I read the article, and I could not see how she is 'clearly mentally ill'. I am not an expert in mental health though - what makes her mentally ill and not just an idiot who got fixated on a scam? I see hordes of similar people every week heading for the casinos near the city I live in so they can pump their social security and savings into one-armed bandits. They are clearly stupid and obsessed, but hardly mentally ill, unless we are going down the 'addictive behavior is a disease' road. Not trying to be sarcastic, BTW, I'm serious about wondering how you reached your conclusion.
Only problem with your solution - those who need it most will understand it least, and be most likely to deny being stupid, and therefore won't realize they are the target audience.
Good idea though.
How critical is social interaction to you in gaming? If not terribly important, then SimCity or something similar. If so, then The Sims or similar. Both had extremely long, successful 'careers' and are still played. I would love to see some of the clever simulation logic in SimCity into an FPS engine or similar. Building worlds, creating some basic rules and letting those rules develop a complex system... or crash/stop... would be interesting, especially if one had the ability to step into that world and walk around it and experiencing it as the automata that inhabited it did. The original game of Life is kind of interesting that way, but not terribly much fun (in the 'gamer' sense) unless you understand what is happening - the UI on most implementations is a simple grid with colored dots.
Apple don't discount because they don't have to. Seriously - check out eBay. People are selling G4 laptops for close on $1,000. With new line out now, that will drop I hope, but to answer your question - there's no reason to discount. Macs live for a long time and just keep working. I service my sister in laws Mac G4 and except for a memory upgrade, I've done nothing to it - and it runs OSX 10.4 like a champ. Say what you like, Apple have an excellent value proposition.
At the risk of repeating the obvious and previously cited, hardware comparisons are only half the story. Consider the OS, the hardware longevity (I'm still running my 'Tangerine Toilet Seat' iBook) and the fact that you get a complete set of developer tools free with the operating system - the very ones used to build it - the value proposition favors Macs. Add the cost of a seat license for MS Visual Studio to the price of a laptop, you are starting to hit price parity between the two. We haven't even gotten into the whole 'running open source software' on OSX - sure you can install CYGWIN and recompile, but even leaving this out, on a what-did-the-original-manufacturer-give-me comparison (iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes, XTools, a real shell environment, quality hardware) you get a lot more and a lot better with a Mac, even if you hate the design.
Agreed. Interesting, though, how the artists who complain about 'the album experience' going away aren't really making album-style works. I think of 'Dark Side of the Moon' by Pink Floyd - that is an album experience. There aren't too many totally 'integrated' albums coming out that I've seen. Even Radioheads' stuff is more 'song oriented', though not as much as other bands. I'm curious how much of the trend away from albums is format changes and how much is artist-driven. Then again, Pink Floyd put out DSOTM and Wish You Were Here when Billy Joel was writing about record companies cutting songs for time, so maybe it is just a cycle.
Maybe portable, high-capacity, high-fidelity players will usher in an era of long-playing formats. Not an 'album' necessarily, but I'm looking at my playlists that once were cassette tapes and limited to 45 minutes, which now span hours and are trivial to create and update, and wondering, 'what's next?'
Maybe the Rock Opera will finally catch on! (ducks)
Well, yeah, but the trick is, do bands truly know the filler/crap on their albums from the good stuff? Some do - but they are the ones most likely to toss garbage instead of publish it. A struggling band that happens on a hit might not be so good at editing. Think about it - Band X puts out a single. It sucks. Repeat (cause distribution costs are so low on the net). Second song sucks. Repeat. If the 'hit' follows a bunch of garbage, who is paying attention any more? One of the few things record companies (SOMETIMES) did right when managing artists was help them edit and find 'the single'.
I do agree with your point that it would be nice to have the choice of just cherry picking the good stuff, though.
Bear in mind, you are not the target audience - most of the people I run into in the Apple store (I am an Apple user) couldn't tell you what BSD or Darwin are and never even installed Xcode or the other dev. tools. They just want a smooth, seamless, elegant user experience. And they get it. They don't notice the velvet handcuffs, not at all...
I would only add this - be reasonable and pleasant when declining unreasonable requests. At my employer, project managers ding the performance evals of those who didn't put in the unpaid overtime indirectly. Rather than 'Wouldn't eat hours because of my poor planning, -5", they'd hammer the person for attitude ("Guy pulled my punk card in front of a room full of staff about how he found my time management skills lacking, -5").
Be professional and nice, work hard while on the clock (i.e., lay off the fantasy football...) and leave when you have put in the time budgeted.
Caeful on that, though - I'm a vet, and while there are lots of 'non bullet catcher' jobs, there are some caveats:
The needs of the service come before EVERYTHING. Oh, you have a contract? Sue them. Good luck. If you are in the Air Force you might be able to get them to kick you out, but in the Marines (yeah, I know, if you wanted to join for the benefits, you wouldn't go there, I know...) they will put you literally anywhere, doing anything. Smart? Great - you get to go intelligence or public affairs. Not brilliant? Postal clerk, admin or cook - god knows where. Navy? Nice bet, nice culture (in my experience, I was Marines who spent a lot of time on ship) but I hope you really like travel.
Finally, consider what you give up - you will be 'on duty' working EVERY DAY for your entire tour. You will be deployed. You will probably be in either the ass end of nowhere, or in a combat zone. Best you can hope for - a podunk base in the US with nothing but strip clubs, pawnshops, tattoo parlors and hookers, watching your fellow human beings act like asshats. No college? Guess what - you will be enlisted. That means you will be the closest thing to a serf you can be in the western world. You might get lucky and have good leadership, or you might have a bunch of ROTC and service academy grads with Napoleon complexes. God save you if you don't have good Staff NCOs - and you might not, especially if these SNCOs find out you just joined 'for the benefits'.
I joined because I actually wanted to serve. After my tour was up, I got the f*ck out as fast as I could, and when my honorable discharge papers came in, I had my uniforms at the goodwill that day.
Oh, and BTW - EVERY enlistment is 8+ years. Read the fine print on your contract - your 'active' time is the 2, 4 or 6 years, but that is just the ACTIVE duty time. The difference up to 8 years is 'inactive reserve'. They can call you up if there's a need and guess what there is right now - big need. And no, they don't just 'need' combat MOS. I knew public affairs people who were stop-lossed, and that was in 1992. Gotta have those 'reporters' and PR folk, y'know. Its critical to the war effort. Seriously, they have a Table of Organization, and if there's a slot, you will be on it, period. They don't care that you were going to college, getting married, or have just had enough. We used to say USMC stands for 'U Signed the Motherf*cking Contract' and it is true. Don't sign it unless you really want it - do yourself and your fellow potential servicemenbers a favor. No one likes serving with someone who isn't really motivated to be there.
Sorry. Rant over. Good luck.
I was aware of the limited publishers for texts. I knew there were adoption committees, but I assumed their effects were local. If you are correct, then I must thank you for providing a good reason to toss some whisky in my Sunday morning coffee. :)
Sadly, while I wouldn't say Americans 'cant think their way out of a paper bag or election booth', the only real support for my position would be that those who can think rarely make the news. Weak argument, unfortunately, when placed against widely available news stories or issues you referenced. 'It's a perception problem' just doesn't seem to cover the problem.
You raise a creepy, not entirely new but nevertheless interesting point - self-censorship. Which is worse - big brother / the nanny state filtering material that it finds fault with, or people (even corporate 'persons', whether you agree with the concept or not) being so utterly terrified of releasing works that might be construed as 'harmful' (note the quotes, please) that they simply stop producing them?
Frankly, I was never a fan of 'Piss Christ' (for example) until it occurred to me what would happen if it were actually censored, whether by government fiat or paranoid self-policing. Tacky, yes - harmful, no. Who knows what else the Guardians of Decency would find nasty?
I always wonder when I read arguments for 'protection' - has anyone ever done any actual, peer-reviewed, statistically valid research showing that sex, violence or some combination of the two actually cause harm or the threat of harm to such an extent as merits government action? (BTW - GIMF, but I didn't find anything that stood out as particularly credulous)
If you can't spare the $39 per copy to buy the Linux Network Admin Guide, there is a free but slightly dated version available:
http://tldp.org/LDP/nag2/index.html
General principles are still valid and if you or your students get stuck, they can look online for updated material - a guided search, rather than a from-scratch. Plus, it will teach them one of the most important lessons in IT/IS - 'RTFM'. Good luck!
Many thanks - I appreciate the insight, esp. regarding .NET. I am not terribly concerned with .NET though, as I will be using this for a personal project where I have the luxury of not having a bunch of .NET dependencies to worry about.
Which leads to another question - .NET is simply a MS framework, yet it gets a ton of play in discussion groups, etc. I'm relatively new to web dev work, so maybe I'm just ignorant, but why should I care about .NET integration, unless I have to do dev. work in someone else's code that uses it?
Thanks for the insightful reply - yours was the most useful. I appreciate you taking the time to think and respond. I am downloading Postgresql and PGAdmin3 now to try out.
Much respect to you.
I am a US citizen, and we do get the leaders we deserve. I am getting tired of dealing with people who absolutely refuse to learn from our errors - especially when the consequences for poor learning are much higher for the US. We tend to spread the damage beyond our borders more than most, unfortunately.
Hold out until the end of this election, and the definition of torture could change, regardless of who takes the White House.
Yes, mindlessly hopeful, but better than despondent.
'Convicted' where? I agree the charges have been leveled, and I do not debate the veracity of the claims - there is quite enough evidence in the public domain to justify a trial, but so far, I have not heard of one actually taking place. Plus, how does one convict a country? Maybe indict the head of state for a trial in the Hague... wait a minute...
Ahh, but if he was truly innocent, he should take it to trial, because we all know that people are *never* convicted for crimes they did not commit, especially when the crime is related to 'terrorism' and deals in government secrets to boot!
(rubs hands, adjusts monocle, picks spot of lint from suit).
Right!?!
All sarcasm aside, you should capitalize US Criminal Justice System - it is a name, not a statement of fact. Our 'justice' system is pretty crappy - but it is better than most of the rest of the worlds. (SWAG) We're at least on par with our Western European brethren, unless you count death penalty issues.(\SWAG)
In the interest of proposing a solution, would it not be better to try such individuals in the UK if the US and UK could agree on common definitions (legal defs that is) for crimes and some kind of sentencing guidelines? I'm not suggesting that our UK friends bring back the death penalty (although for some of those Enron execs, you know...) but there is a disparity between sentences meted out in both countries (say I after a cursory reading of the 'crime' sections of the the BBC and CNN). I think that such an arrangement would let both countries feel that justice was being done, and that neither government was a sock-puppet for the other. I know, I know, the US gov't hasn't been accused of being an English sock puppet since the 18th century, but the principle applies...