Sometimes I'm happy to live in neither the US nor the UK... both of those places freak me out WAY too much with draconian laws and ideas. Not that anywhere in the world is perfect, but those two countries do fall near the bottom of my list (somewhere just above OPENLY authoritarian states, but below everywhere else)
I regularly use my phone on the subway and it'd annoy me greatly if it were blocked by the speed... (not that the subway here ever goes that fast though - too many stops in my city to get up to a decent speed before it has to slow down again - still pretty convenient though)
And just to throw my bit in with the thousand others who've already said it (not in relation to the post I'm answering): Exercising a modicum of self-control to simply "not answer my phone while driving" is far preferable to this rather silly idea.
Out of interest (this isn't just directed to the post I'm replying to), what's the deal with the amazing amount of web related posts I always see in any threads about programming?
I've been coding for most of my life, and doing so professionally for nearly all of my adult life, and I've never once written a web app. I do realise there's a lot of web development stuff going on out there these days, but it seems the posts on Slashdot are extremely skewed towards that end of the spectrum.
I'd be really quite keen to hear how many people here are developers that DON'T do web stuff...
We're currently hiring (if you trawl through much older posts of mine, you'll probably find details, but I won't repeat them since we already had enough applicants from Slashdot! (and may well take one...)), and I really don't expect the potential hire to know everything they need to for the job. One of the reasons for this is that the main thing they need to know is our own proprietary API, so what we're looking for is a person that is going to be able to pick it up quickly, and can demonstrate this from their background. One guy who applied (from Slashdot) sent me some sample code he wrote for example (in the language we're looking for), and explained the various concepts involved in his program. That's much more valuable from our side.
Now, if someone were to come along who magically already knew our API, of course we'd have to pretty seriously consider them, but really, an API is just an API - anyone can learn it if they're even half decent coders. Knowing how to write good (as in, working, bug-free, fast, flexible and extensible) code in general is still the most important thing.
I actually agree with you, but want to play devil's advocate to your examples here... Hopefully to improve whatever your well known media player is (I use VLC exclusively these days, but I'm always open to alternatives if something better comes along)
* YUV->RGB color conversion (there isn't even a single right answer to this, it's subjective)
Which is why it should be a user option... give the user advanced controls over this and they'll love you forever. Just find one nice default and leave it at that for the less savvy users - this is simple enough for the developer to do without needing someone in QA to do it.
* A/V Sync
I'll grant this one.
* Audio language selection (how do you write code to tell if the guy is speaking in french as opposed to spanish?)
Again, simple enough for the developer to do without needing someone in QA
* GUI Widget alignment
Make your app skinnable. You'll never please everyone otherwise. For the "default" skin, just keep it DEAD simple and follow standard practices on your OS for layout (I'm thinking, as an example, Visual Studio's "snap to place" placement stuff)
* Subtitle Placement
Again, should be a user option. What I would like to see in this realm though is something clever enough to recognise text on the movie I'm watching and avoid placing the subtitle over it. This, I'm sure, would be extremely tricky, but VERY cool.
My comments referring to "simple enough for the developer to do" also relates to the kind of project you're talking about here. When the dev goes home from a hard day at work and wants to put a movie on, he'll probably fire up the media player that he's been working on. Nothing makes for a real world test like an actual real world test!
Sorry to hear that life sucks, but if I were you, I wouldn't attribute it entirely to "not going to college". As a result of the way my life went after the activities that I described in this thread, I also never went to any kind of "higher education" (actually, a started a Polytechnic course, but got expelled for fixing a bug in a tutor's program that was in a folder I shouldn't have had access to), and my life has turned out pretty well.
My advice, if you're finding it hard to get work based on your lack of education is to work for yourself for awhile. Listing my own security company on my CV did much more for me when I decided to work for someone else than educational background ever could have. I'm now reasonably well paid and working as a programmer in a relatively senior position for a company that treats me pretty well. And I'm not quite yet 30 - so I doubt I'd be much further had I spent 4 or so years of my life getting a bit of paper.
Hah... I was wondering if you'd read all that;) Ah the perils of the people I'm talking about having Slashdot accounts!
But hey, to be completely honest, maybe I was RIGHT when I was a "cynical little bastard" and I've just become wrong in my old age... one can never really KNOW, can one?
To distill down your stated motivations, you were seeking power and a form of acceptance.
Primarily the former rather than the latter... you can't really have "power" (over people) without at least some kind of acceptance, but the acceptance was definitely a secondary thing to the power. It's a pretty natural human desire to have power over others, and the school bullies would assert theirs physically, while the "general geeks" would sit back and know that they'd be asserting theirs later in life. For me, it wasn't really enough. It's not that I wanted/needed/deserved more power than anyone else, it's just that one day I found a means that gave me a more ultimate kind of power - power over the "almighty" adults. At that age, I had the typical rebellious streak of the younger teenage years, and I had found an outlet for it.
Sure, you might not have been interested in joining a youth soccer league, but what about a chess club? Or a gaming group? Basically, anywhere where you can make friends (in real life) and get positive feedback and acceptance. If you had had those, would you still have felt the need to break into banks?
I was in the chess club, maths competition team, and on the school newspaper (I became editor of it eventually)... none really did anything to stop me wanting to break in to banks. If you compare them, "broke in to bank" is a hell of a lot "cooler" at that age than "first prize in maths competition", "wrote well appreciated article" or "considered by peers to be really good at chess".
The school staff (teachers, guidance counsellor, principal etc) worshipped the ground I walked on - I could do no wrong in their eyes. My peers (geeks) respected me and looked up to me (head of that 'clique' basically), but that wasn't enough. I viewed the school staff as incompetent and unaware (how could they write reports saying "studies hard", when I didn't study a day in my life?) and my peers as slimy and greasing ("they just want to be me" (I almost certainly misconstrued their intentions - I was a cynical little bastard really)). I didn't just want to be respected - I wanted to be ADMIRED, FEARED and LOVED. (again, PLEASE remember this is how I thought at that age - I've grown up now, and I do realise how petty and crappy those attitudes are... but I also think they're pretty common amongst people at that age)
Honestly, another factor in how I viewed the activity (rather than the reasons for it) may have been my upbringing. I was raised to question authority when that authority was not backed up with reason. So, the idea of "breaking a law" didn't have a huge negative stigma attached to it for me. I knew it was wrong in the eyes of the law, but I considered (and still consider to be quite honest) those who uphold the law with no regard for the reasons behind it to be very foolish indeed - nothing more than sheep to the system. Whenever my parents told me to do something, they'd ALWAYS give me a reason why. Teachers at school were happy to do the same as long as I was polite about it, which I always was ("Go take this to Mr Smith", "Why?", "Because he needs it, and you can miss a few minutes of class without falling behind", "Okay"). Breaking in to a bank just didn't feel wrong to me. I didn't steal money, I didn't harm anyone, I just looked around. Remember, from the eyes of a young teen, this is a pretty straightforward kind of argument - you don't really appreciate the many facets of things like that until you're much older. It's a matter of maturity, and while I certainly may have been a very smart kid, I was definitely NOT mature enough to really handle my knowledge.
Just as a side note - it eventually led me to a rather difficult point in my life in my late teenage years, where I was arrested, hired an extremely good lawyer, got off with only a fine, paid that, found out the lawyer was charging me more than three times what the fine was, cracked in to her system to ma
There are many, many bright people who have the ability to do what you did - far more than you realize.
Hmmm... as I mentioned, I lived in small town New Zealand, and it was the early 90s. I really don't think there were too many other people around with the same skills that I had. Now, you then said:
But the truth is that almost anyone can become a burglar, provided they choose to do so (emphasis mine)
I never said others couldn't BECOME able to do what I did, simply that very few others actually possessed the required skills. In the early 90s, computer crime wasn't the "cool" thing that it had become after the web explosion in the mid to late 90s. It wasn't unheard of, and was gaining popularity (see movies such as War Games from nearly 10 years earlier), however it was still pretty quiet in general. Compounded with my location, I can be pretty certain I knew everyone locally who could do such things - and that wasn't exactly a lot of people.
The difference was that they had something that you lacked - the moral judgment not to go breaking into other people's systems, and instead to do something productive with their abilities.
That is perhaps true - there may well have been others who COULD do it, but didn't, but I think that's pretty unlikely (especially if we're limiting the sample set to people my age at the time), as the only real way to gain those skills was to either actually do it, or study it specifically. Why anyone would study it without doing it, as a young teenager, I couldn't imagine.
Note that I never said "noone", I said "very few", and as a percentage of the population of Earth, I'm pretty positive that stands as true. As a percentage of people my age, or people in my town, I'm completely certain.
I started going bald quite young (mid 20s) and now (late 20s) I have little left up top (but still pretty full back and sides). I ALSO don't seem to grow much facial or body hair (if I wanted to grow a beard, it'd take me MONTHS - literally) - even the moustache I have (which took about 5 weeks to grow properly and I've had for about a year) is a lot thinner and scragglier than most people's after about a week (yeh, I'm going to shave it off soon since it looks sort of silly). Based on a sample set of one, I'd say there is at least some relation there.
Well, assuming you posed the question to me (I was convicted of telephone fraud (phreaking) once, and discharged without conviction on charges of breaches of the telecommunications act (unlawful entry to a computer system that wasn't my own (a bank))), I would have to answer as follows:
There is almost nothing you could have done to deter me from those actions. I felt as if I was a part of a "wild frontier", and had control and abilities that very few others possessed (and, I was probably right). The feeling was that of real power - something that most people in their very early teens (when I was arrested for the crimes mentioned) don't often get a lot of... especially as the "geeky kid" at school who got picked on all the time (this was the early 90s in small town New Zealand - not the best place for a geek). Trying to convince anyone to willingly give up that sense of "worth" without getting something equal in return is pretty much impossible. It's also worth noting that I was caught twice, for what was hundreds, if not thousands, of criminal activities. I still felt pretty bulletproof (especially after the "discharge without conviction" for the bank crack)
I made my mistakes, but honestly, I don't regret it even to this day - my current work has nothing to do with security, although I still keep up in those circles and like to hone my skills against my own systems. But, I've also never had any negative consequences other than the court imposed penalty for the phreaking (which was surprisingly minor - especially in relation to the police recommendation). If a kid were to come to me today and ask if he/she should do it, my answer would be that they should do what they feel is right and accept the consequences if they do something illegal and get caught at it. I'm not 100% sure that even means I would try to discourage them...
Of course, I was a cracker and a phreaker... not a script kiddie. "Mafiaboy" may be a little different.
I bought this book, but it intentionally contained too many pages and overflowed my bookcase. It fell off the end, and gave my cat a fatal error. While I was in the back garden burying Muffins, he sneaked into my house and stole all my stuff!
It took me three readings of that to parse that "Muffins" was the name of your cat. My first impression of your post was a lot more surreal.
160mph... that's around 260km/h - not something you see even on the Autobahn very often. I tend to cruise at around 180km/h and still pass most people, who seem to prefer around 160 or so. From time to time, I need to get out of the way of a larger car doing between 200 and 220 behind me, but it's not all that often. VERY occasionally, some incredibly fancy sports car will whizz past as if I'm standing still, but I can count the number of times that's happened in the last year on one hand.
I'm not so sure about that. I'd think there'd be a fair number that would, certainly... but especially those with family would more likely side with their family allegiances than their superiors. Blood is thicker than water and all that. I don't think either of us could prove it one way or the other, so it really is just my opinion.
Don't forget that the US Military are still a part of the US Population. If there were a civil war, it wouldn't be "population vs armed forces", it'd be "some people in the armed forces plus civilians vs other people in the armed forces possibly plus other civilians".
I don't live in the US, never have, and never intend to; but from what I've seen, I do now think it's at least a possibility, which is both scary and sad. There's a lot of great people in that country - it's just a shame there's also so many that aren't. Extreme corruption in your political system, the core values of the country being eroded, and so many people that are either too stupid or too ignorant (or both) to care. People need to learn from history, and meanwhile the rest of the world needs to pay close attention there to learn from the present - the US isn't the only country going down this slippery slope, it's just one of the most noticeable.
Currently, I live in a country that has gone down slippery slopes before, and almost lost everything for it. Mostly, the people remember, and are informed and cautious. Those who aren't are forcibly reminded when needs be. I'm hoping that this should be a good place to be should the worst happen through the coming years.
Rather than getting rid of "overrated" and "underrated", they should simply only apply to pre-existing mods. So, if a post has +2 Insightful (for example), it couldn't be modded "overrated" more than twice. That keeps the original purpose of these mods and limits their abuse somewhat. All mods can be abused of course, but I really do think it's less of a problem than a lot of people seem to make out.
The box I get my email on is different to the box I code with (and it makes no sound when email comes in)... this is self-enforced. I NEVER check my email on my coding system. I've pretty much become used to doing it this way now, and sort of "broke the chains" of being tied to my email, so I no longer miss it if I take even a few days without checking it. I do readily admit that 5 years ago, it was a different story though - I couldn't go more than 5 minutes without checking email, or if I heard an email come in (audio notification), I just HAD to check it there and then.
I've heard that the internet is changing the way that people think. They think in short quick bursts now instead of long thoughtful periods.
I find it depends on what people are doing - as a coder, I have no problem sitting down and coding non-stop (literally) for several hours. I enjoy reading also, and can do this for several hours without losing any concentration. Put me in front of something I don't want to do and I'll likely wander off and get distracted by randomly browsing Slashdot or something else (like right now at work, I'm brushing up on SharePoint to show to a managementy type just because I once wrote an integration in to SharePoint from our products and now they think I'm a SharePoint expert).
Also, it's probably worth noting that TV tends to have a worse effect because of the enforced breaks from advertisements...
Completely simple, non-scientific way of putting it. You can't have less than zero apples, but there's no upper limit to the number of apples you can have. (yes, bad analogy, but run with it)
I've lived without privacy, and if you're not one of the mainstream majority, it's hell on earth.
Only in places where the "mainstream majority" consider anyone else to be "bad"/"wrong"/"evil"/etc. I'm pretty much an open book - I have no problem with most complete strangers knowing almost everything about me (note: I did say almost - I draw the line well before things like, "hey, here's my debit card and PIN!") and it really doesn't cause problems for me. I just make sure that the circles I put myself in are those of tolerant people. They don't care whether I'm "like them" or not, and while I see no problem with telling people things if they ask, they also generally don't ask.
The one real concern I've seen is if someone posts a picture of you drinking and a prospective employer sees it
Woah, what?!
Of course, it's an extremely stupid employer who is concerned about that type of thing in the first place, and I maintain that you're better off not working there, but I also realize it's unfortunately not always that simple.
Slightly better, but I'm still a bit dumbstruck by this. Every job I've ever had since I stopped doing "crappy little jobs", the first evening has been being taken out to dinner with my new boss and drinking a relatively large amount of beer. If they're going to do this, what's the problem with having pictures of yourself online drinking?!
It's actually also worth noting that on my Facebook profile, anyone who is my "friend" can see a picture of me sitting in front of a table, covered in empty beer bottles, some magic mushrooms and a hash pipe (it was my friend's pipe - I don't smoke that stuff (the mushrooms were mine though)). I also have detailed descriptions of many experiences with LSD and a rather large amount of LSD advocacy available online for pretty much anyone to find if they know where to look. I would have no problem with a potential future employer seeing any of this. If they don't give me the job because of it, then I don't want to work there - plain and simple.
It's also worth noting that I'm gainfully employed in a position of a reasonable amount of responsibility, make good money and am well respected both within the company and also the industry that it is a part of. I am who I am, and while I know that some people I work with disagree with my lifestyle (and others are strongly in favour of it), they also know that I am a reliable person who will get stuff done.
In a time when you can be excluded from consideration for a job because of what you wrote about on the web, it's probably best to say less.
I'm currently in the process of helping my boss look for a new employee (working side-by-side with myself). I don't hide that I've Googled every applicant, and found some pretty interesting stuff on some of them. But to me, "drunken party pics" are more of a positive than a negative - I have no intention of working with someone boring!
The problem with travelling to the US is that they don't even let you past the gates without a valid address. I discovered this on my first visit there several years ago. I was staying in a hotel in Connecticut, but didn't know the address (my colleagues would pick me up from the airport and take me there), but I flew in to Los Angeles and was to transfer to a domestic flight to get to CT. I was tied up at the checkpoint for about 4 hours while they tried (and tried and tried and tried) to call the CT office to make sure I was "legit" and to get the address of the hotel. It didn't occur to them that due to the timezone difference, everyone had already gone home for the day and the cleaning staff generally don't answer people's office phones. All this time, they just left me waiting around, not allowed through. Eventually, they came to me and asked for an number back in my home country (Australia at the time) and after waiting another hour for someone to get in to the office there (don't forget the joy of timezones), they finally got through to someone, got the cell number of a guy in CT, woke him up (it was pretty late by that point), got the address and then let me through. NEVER again will I travel to the US without having an address written down somewhere!
Actually, thinking about it, never again will I travel to the US unless COMPLETELY necessary. If I need to have a meeting with my colleagues from the US again, they can bloody well fly over here to Germany (where I now live/work).
Absolutely. Just as the US decided to "make the world a better place" by invading various countries that were not directly threatening it, the rest of the world should have the chance to do the same thing. Only, we'd prefer the more peaceful method of simply choosing US leadership, because we're not a bunch of gun-nut psychopaths mixed with retarded monkeys that need warnings on everything just to avoid suing each other 20 times a day.
To the MANY US citizens that are not gun-nut psychopaths or retarded monkeys, I apologise and offer my sympathies, but don't retract my statement - I have several friends from the US, and I'll know you're not all bad. You just happen to live in a country with a disproportionate number of utter morons, and we in the rest of the world hope that you'll assist us should we be given the opportunity to do something about it.
(note: Believing in the right to bear arms, and the necessity of weapon ownership does not make one a "gun-nut psychopath" (I disagree with your viewpoints if you do think weapon ownership is necessary, but I disagree with a lot of my friends, so that's fine). Driving around shooting mailboxes while you're drunk, owning a small arsenal of automatic weaponry that you use regularly or spending more than an hour a week watching military weapons demonstration videos does however make you a gun-nut psychopath).
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes I'm happy to live in neither the US nor the UK... both of those places freak me out WAY too much with draconian laws and ideas. Not that anywhere in the world is perfect, but those two countries do fall near the bottom of my list (somewhere just above OPENLY authoritarian states, but below everywhere else)
sort of a moot point for subways though...
Why is the subway a moot point? I'm confused...
I regularly use my phone on the subway and it'd annoy me greatly if it were blocked by the speed... (not that the subway here ever goes that fast though - too many stops in my city to get up to a decent speed before it has to slow down again - still pretty convenient though)
And just to throw my bit in with the thousand others who've already said it (not in relation to the post I'm answering): Exercising a modicum of self-control to simply "not answer my phone while driving" is far preferable to this rather silly idea.
Out of interest (this isn't just directed to the post I'm replying to), what's the deal with the amazing amount of web related posts I always see in any threads about programming?
I've been coding for most of my life, and doing so professionally for nearly all of my adult life, and I've never once written a web app. I do realise there's a lot of web development stuff going on out there these days, but it seems the posts on Slashdot are extremely skewed towards that end of the spectrum.
I'd be really quite keen to hear how many people here are developers that DON'T do web stuff...
Depends on the job.
We're currently hiring (if you trawl through much older posts of mine, you'll probably find details, but I won't repeat them since we already had enough applicants from Slashdot! (and may well take one...)), and I really don't expect the potential hire to know everything they need to for the job. One of the reasons for this is that the main thing they need to know is our own proprietary API, so what we're looking for is a person that is going to be able to pick it up quickly, and can demonstrate this from their background. One guy who applied (from Slashdot) sent me some sample code he wrote for example (in the language we're looking for), and explained the various concepts involved in his program. That's much more valuable from our side.
Now, if someone were to come along who magically already knew our API, of course we'd have to pretty seriously consider them, but really, an API is just an API - anyone can learn it if they're even half decent coders. Knowing how to write good (as in, working, bug-free, fast, flexible and extensible) code in general is still the most important thing.
I actually agree with you, but want to play devil's advocate to your examples here... Hopefully to improve whatever your well known media player is (I use VLC exclusively these days, but I'm always open to alternatives if something better comes along)
* YUV->RGB color conversion (there isn't even a single right answer to this, it's subjective)
Which is why it should be a user option... give the user advanced controls over this and they'll love you forever. Just find one nice default and leave it at that for the less savvy users - this is simple enough for the developer to do without needing someone in QA to do it.
* A/V Sync
I'll grant this one.
* Audio language selection (how do you write code to tell if the guy is speaking in french as opposed to spanish?)
Again, simple enough for the developer to do without needing someone in QA
* GUI Widget alignment
Make your app skinnable. You'll never please everyone otherwise. For the "default" skin, just keep it DEAD simple and follow standard practices on your OS for layout (I'm thinking, as an example, Visual Studio's "snap to place" placement stuff)
* Subtitle Placement
Again, should be a user option. What I would like to see in this realm though is something clever enough to recognise text on the movie I'm watching and avoid placing the subtitle over it. This, I'm sure, would be extremely tricky, but VERY cool.
My comments referring to "simple enough for the developer to do" also relates to the kind of project you're talking about here. When the dev goes home from a hard day at work and wants to put a movie on, he'll probably fire up the media player that he's been working on. Nothing makes for a real world test like an actual real world test!
Sorry to hear that life sucks, but if I were you, I wouldn't attribute it entirely to "not going to college". As a result of the way my life went after the activities that I described in this thread, I also never went to any kind of "higher education" (actually, a started a Polytechnic course, but got expelled for fixing a bug in a tutor's program that was in a folder I shouldn't have had access to), and my life has turned out pretty well.
My advice, if you're finding it hard to get work based on your lack of education is to work for yourself for awhile. Listing my own security company on my CV did much more for me when I decided to work for someone else than educational background ever could have. I'm now reasonably well paid and working as a programmer in a relatively senior position for a company that treats me pretty well. And I'm not quite yet 30 - so I doubt I'd be much further had I spent 4 or so years of my life getting a bit of paper.
Hah... I was wondering if you'd read all that ;) Ah the perils of the people I'm talking about having Slashdot accounts!
But hey, to be completely honest, maybe I was RIGHT when I was a "cynical little bastard" and I've just become wrong in my old age... one can never really KNOW, can one?
To distill down your stated motivations, you were seeking power and a form of acceptance.
Primarily the former rather than the latter... you can't really have "power" (over people) without at least some kind of acceptance, but the acceptance was definitely a secondary thing to the power. It's a pretty natural human desire to have power over others, and the school bullies would assert theirs physically, while the "general geeks" would sit back and know that they'd be asserting theirs later in life. For me, it wasn't really enough. It's not that I wanted/needed/deserved more power than anyone else, it's just that one day I found a means that gave me a more ultimate kind of power - power over the "almighty" adults. At that age, I had the typical rebellious streak of the younger teenage years, and I had found an outlet for it.
Sure, you might not have been interested in joining a youth soccer league, but what about a chess club? Or a gaming group? Basically, anywhere where you can make friends (in real life) and get positive feedback and acceptance. If you had had those, would you still have felt the need to break into banks?
I was in the chess club, maths competition team, and on the school newspaper (I became editor of it eventually)... none really did anything to stop me wanting to break in to banks. If you compare them, "broke in to bank" is a hell of a lot "cooler" at that age than "first prize in maths competition", "wrote well appreciated article" or "considered by peers to be really good at chess".
The school staff (teachers, guidance counsellor, principal etc) worshipped the ground I walked on - I could do no wrong in their eyes. My peers (geeks) respected me and looked up to me (head of that 'clique' basically), but that wasn't enough. I viewed the school staff as incompetent and unaware (how could they write reports saying "studies hard", when I didn't study a day in my life?) and my peers as slimy and greasing ("they just want to be me" (I almost certainly misconstrued their intentions - I was a cynical little bastard really)). I didn't just want to be respected - I wanted to be ADMIRED, FEARED and LOVED.
(again, PLEASE remember this is how I thought at that age - I've grown up now, and I do realise how petty and crappy those attitudes are... but I also think they're pretty common amongst people at that age)
Honestly, another factor in how I viewed the activity (rather than the reasons for it) may have been my upbringing. I was raised to question authority when that authority was not backed up with reason. So, the idea of "breaking a law" didn't have a huge negative stigma attached to it for me. I knew it was wrong in the eyes of the law, but I considered (and still consider to be quite honest) those who uphold the law with no regard for the reasons behind it to be very foolish indeed - nothing more than sheep to the system. Whenever my parents told me to do something, they'd ALWAYS give me a reason why. Teachers at school were happy to do the same as long as I was polite about it, which I always was ("Go take this to Mr Smith", "Why?", "Because he needs it, and you can miss a few minutes of class without falling behind", "Okay").
Breaking in to a bank just didn't feel wrong to me. I didn't steal money, I didn't harm anyone, I just looked around. Remember, from the eyes of a young teen, this is a pretty straightforward kind of argument - you don't really appreciate the many facets of things like that until you're much older. It's a matter of maturity, and while I certainly may have been a very smart kid, I was definitely NOT mature enough to really handle my knowledge.
Just as a side note - it eventually led me to a rather difficult point in my life in my late teenage years, where I was arrested, hired an extremely good lawyer, got off with only a fine, paid that, found out the lawyer was charging me more than three times what the fine was, cracked in to her system to ma
There are many, many bright people who have the ability to do what you did - far more than you realize.
Hmmm... as I mentioned, I lived in small town New Zealand, and it was the early 90s. I really don't think there were too many other people around with the same skills that I had. Now, you then said:
But the truth is that almost anyone can become a burglar, provided they choose to do so (emphasis mine)
I never said others couldn't BECOME able to do what I did, simply that very few others actually possessed the required skills. In the early 90s, computer crime wasn't the "cool" thing that it had become after the web explosion in the mid to late 90s. It wasn't unheard of, and was gaining popularity (see movies such as War Games from nearly 10 years earlier), however it was still pretty quiet in general. Compounded with my location, I can be pretty certain I knew everyone locally who could do such things - and that wasn't exactly a lot of people.
The difference was that they had something that you lacked - the moral judgment not to go breaking into other people's systems, and instead to do something productive with their abilities.
That is perhaps true - there may well have been others who COULD do it, but didn't, but I think that's pretty unlikely (especially if we're limiting the sample set to people my age at the time), as the only real way to gain those skills was to either actually do it, or study it specifically. Why anyone would study it without doing it, as a young teenager, I couldn't imagine.
Note that I never said "noone", I said "very few", and as a percentage of the population of Earth, I'm pretty positive that stands as true. As a percentage of people my age, or people in my town, I'm completely certain.
I started going bald quite young (mid 20s) and now (late 20s) I have little left up top (but still pretty full back and sides). I ALSO don't seem to grow much facial or body hair (if I wanted to grow a beard, it'd take me MONTHS - literally) - even the moustache I have (which took about 5 weeks to grow properly and I've had for about a year) is a lot thinner and scragglier than most people's after about a week (yeh, I'm going to shave it off soon since it looks sort of silly).
Based on a sample set of one, I'd say there is at least some relation there.
Well no, but I did say "almost nothing"...
Besides - YouTube didn't exist in the early 90s when I was doing that sort of thing.
Well, assuming you posed the question to me (I was convicted of telephone fraud (phreaking) once, and discharged without conviction on charges of breaches of the telecommunications act (unlawful entry to a computer system that wasn't my own (a bank))), I would have to answer as follows:
There is almost nothing you could have done to deter me from those actions. I felt as if I was a part of a "wild frontier", and had control and abilities that very few others possessed (and, I was probably right). The feeling was that of real power - something that most people in their very early teens (when I was arrested for the crimes mentioned) don't often get a lot of... especially as the "geeky kid" at school who got picked on all the time (this was the early 90s in small town New Zealand - not the best place for a geek). Trying to convince anyone to willingly give up that sense of "worth" without getting something equal in return is pretty much impossible.
It's also worth noting that I was caught twice, for what was hundreds, if not thousands, of criminal activities. I still felt pretty bulletproof (especially after the "discharge without conviction" for the bank crack)
I made my mistakes, but honestly, I don't regret it even to this day - my current work has nothing to do with security, although I still keep up in those circles and like to hone my skills against my own systems. But, I've also never had any negative consequences other than the court imposed penalty for the phreaking (which was surprisingly minor - especially in relation to the police recommendation). If a kid were to come to me today and ask if he/she should do it, my answer would be that they should do what they feel is right and accept the consequences if they do something illegal and get caught at it. I'm not 100% sure that even means I would try to discourage them...
Of course, I was a cracker and a phreaker... not a script kiddie. "Mafiaboy" may be a little different.
I bought this book, but it intentionally contained too many pages and overflowed my bookcase. It fell off the end, and gave my cat a fatal error. While I was in the back garden burying Muffins, he sneaked into my house and stole all my stuff!
It took me three readings of that to parse that "Muffins" was the name of your cat. My first impression of your post was a lot more surreal.
160mph... that's around 260km/h - not something you see even on the Autobahn very often. I tend to cruise at around 180km/h and still pass most people, who seem to prefer around 160 or so. From time to time, I need to get out of the way of a larger car doing between 200 and 220 behind me, but it's not all that often. VERY occasionally, some incredibly fancy sports car will whizz past as if I'm standing still, but I can count the number of times that's happened in the last year on one hand.
I'm not so sure about that. I'd think there'd be a fair number that would, certainly... but especially those with family would more likely side with their family allegiances than their superiors. Blood is thicker than water and all that. I don't think either of us could prove it one way or the other, so it really is just my opinion.
Don't forget that the US Military are still a part of the US Population. If there were a civil war, it wouldn't be "population vs armed forces", it'd be "some people in the armed forces plus civilians vs other people in the armed forces possibly plus other civilians".
I don't live in the US, never have, and never intend to; but from what I've seen, I do now think it's at least a possibility, which is both scary and sad. There's a lot of great people in that country - it's just a shame there's also so many that aren't. Extreme corruption in your political system, the core values of the country being eroded, and so many people that are either too stupid or too ignorant (or both) to care. People need to learn from history, and meanwhile the rest of the world needs to pay close attention there to learn from the present - the US isn't the only country going down this slippery slope, it's just one of the most noticeable.
Currently, I live in a country that has gone down slippery slopes before, and almost lost everything for it. Mostly, the people remember, and are informed and cautious. Those who aren't are forcibly reminded when needs be. I'm hoping that this should be a good place to be should the worst happen through the coming years.
Rather than getting rid of "overrated" and "underrated", they should simply only apply to pre-existing mods. So, if a post has +2 Insightful (for example), it couldn't be modded "overrated" more than twice. That keeps the original purpose of these mods and limits their abuse somewhat. All mods can be abused of course, but I really do think it's less of a problem than a lot of people seem to make out.
The box I get my email on is different to the box I code with (and it makes no sound when email comes in)... this is self-enforced. I NEVER check my email on my coding system. I've pretty much become used to doing it this way now, and sort of "broke the chains" of being tied to my email, so I no longer miss it if I take even a few days without checking it. I do readily admit that 5 years ago, it was a different story though - I couldn't go more than 5 minutes without checking email, or if I heard an email come in (audio notification), I just HAD to check it there and then.
I've heard that the internet is changing the way that people think. They think in short quick bursts now instead of long thoughtful periods.
I find it depends on what people are doing - as a coder, I have no problem sitting down and coding non-stop (literally) for several hours. I enjoy reading also, and can do this for several hours without losing any concentration. Put me in front of something I don't want to do and I'll likely wander off and get distracted by randomly browsing Slashdot or something else (like right now at work, I'm brushing up on SharePoint to show to a managementy type just because I once wrote an integration in to SharePoint from our products and now they think I'm a SharePoint expert).
Also, it's probably worth noting that TV tends to have a worse effect because of the enforced breaks from advertisements...
Nice idea, but...
Or am I just talking a load of sh1t?
Yep, you pretty much are.
Completely simple, non-scientific way of putting it. You can't have less than zero apples, but there's no upper limit to the number of apples you can have. (yes, bad analogy, but run with it)
I've lived without privacy, and if you're not one of the mainstream majority, it's hell on earth.
Only in places where the "mainstream majority" consider anyone else to be "bad"/"wrong"/"evil"/etc. I'm pretty much an open book - I have no problem with most complete strangers knowing almost everything about me (note: I did say almost - I draw the line well before things like, "hey, here's my debit card and PIN!") and it really doesn't cause problems for me. I just make sure that the circles I put myself in are those of tolerant people. They don't care whether I'm "like them" or not, and while I see no problem with telling people things if they ask, they also generally don't ask.
The one real concern I've seen is if someone posts a picture of you drinking and a prospective employer sees it
Woah, what?!
Of course, it's an extremely stupid employer who is concerned about that type of thing in the first place, and I maintain that you're better off not working there, but I also realize it's unfortunately not always that simple.
Slightly better, but I'm still a bit dumbstruck by this. Every job I've ever had since I stopped doing "crappy little jobs", the first evening has been being taken out to dinner with my new boss and drinking a relatively large amount of beer. If they're going to do this, what's the problem with having pictures of yourself online drinking?!
It's actually also worth noting that on my Facebook profile, anyone who is my "friend" can see a picture of me sitting in front of a table, covered in empty beer bottles, some magic mushrooms and a hash pipe (it was my friend's pipe - I don't smoke that stuff (the mushrooms were mine though)). I also have detailed descriptions of many experiences with LSD and a rather large amount of LSD advocacy available online for pretty much anyone to find if they know where to look. I would have no problem with a potential future employer seeing any of this. If they don't give me the job because of it, then I don't want to work there - plain and simple.
It's also worth noting that I'm gainfully employed in a position of a reasonable amount of responsibility, make good money and am well respected both within the company and also the industry that it is a part of. I am who I am, and while I know that some people I work with disagree with my lifestyle (and others are strongly in favour of it), they also know that I am a reliable person who will get stuff done.
In a time when you can be excluded from consideration for a job because of what you wrote about on the web, it's probably best to say less.
I'm currently in the process of helping my boss look for a new employee (working side-by-side with myself). I don't hide that I've Googled every applicant, and found some pretty interesting stuff on some of them. But to me, "drunken party pics" are more of a positive than a negative - I have no intention of working with someone boring!
The problem with travelling to the US is that they don't even let you past the gates without a valid address. I discovered this on my first visit there several years ago. I was staying in a hotel in Connecticut, but didn't know the address (my colleagues would pick me up from the airport and take me there), but I flew in to Los Angeles and was to transfer to a domestic flight to get to CT. I was tied up at the checkpoint for about 4 hours while they tried (and tried and tried and tried) to call the CT office to make sure I was "legit" and to get the address of the hotel. It didn't occur to them that due to the timezone difference, everyone had already gone home for the day and the cleaning staff generally don't answer people's office phones. All this time, they just left me waiting around, not allowed through.
Eventually, they came to me and asked for an number back in my home country (Australia at the time) and after waiting another hour for someone to get in to the office there (don't forget the joy of timezones), they finally got through to someone, got the cell number of a guy in CT, woke him up (it was pretty late by that point), got the address and then let me through. NEVER again will I travel to the US without having an address written down somewhere!
Actually, thinking about it, never again will I travel to the US unless COMPLETELY necessary. If I need to have a meeting with my colleagues from the US again, they can bloody well fly over here to Germany (where I now live/work).
Absolutely. Just as the US decided to "make the world a better place" by invading various countries that were not directly threatening it, the rest of the world should have the chance to do the same thing. Only, we'd prefer the more peaceful method of simply choosing US leadership, because we're not a bunch of gun-nut psychopaths mixed with retarded monkeys that need warnings on everything just to avoid suing each other 20 times a day.
To the MANY US citizens that are not gun-nut psychopaths or retarded monkeys, I apologise and offer my sympathies, but don't retract my statement - I have several friends from the US, and I'll know you're not all bad. You just happen to live in a country with a disproportionate number of utter morons, and we in the rest of the world hope that you'll assist us should we be given the opportunity to do something about it.
(note: Believing in the right to bear arms, and the necessity of weapon ownership does not make one a "gun-nut psychopath" (I disagree with your viewpoints if you do think weapon ownership is necessary, but I disagree with a lot of my friends, so that's fine). Driving around shooting mailboxes while you're drunk, owning a small arsenal of automatic weaponry that you use regularly or spending more than an hour a week watching military weapons demonstration videos does however make you a gun-nut psychopath).