I wish I'd gotten in on this topic sooner but it's been a wild day.
Kids will be kids. There will be picking. There will be discipline problems. In the past, discipline was meaded out with a paddle. I strongly favor a return to corporal punishment. It works better for most miscreants than anything else. Throwing kids out of school or charging them with felonies is counterproductive.
As for the picking, if a kid is getting picked on he needs to be trained how to fight effectively. He must be able to handle bullies. Any kids identified as being picked on should be given training in boxing, wrestling, karate, jujitsu, judo or other martial arts. Strength training is also likely to be of benefit. This will empower the one being picked on to defend themselves. Bullies will find an easier mark. The school system should provide such kids with stipends.
Do I have a vested interest in this? You bet. I teach kids like this all the time.
Will training kids in self defense and returning to corporal punishment prevent Columbines from happening? Probably. Growing up today ain't no easier or harder than it was then. Kids probably had better access to guns 30 years ago. Heck, I had 2 rifles, shotgun and a pistol when I was 13. There's no way I'd have taken them to school. The threshold for a butt whuppin' was real low. Nobody shot up schools then. I carried a pocket knife then. Still do. But any kid with one today gets arrested. If anyone had cut someone else with their pocket knife, they would have gotten 2 whuppins. One right then and there and another at home.
It's like the little old lady with the shopping cart who wheels grocery sacks full of money through the ghetto. Nobody knocks her over because they know retribution will be sure, severe and swift.
That may not be too good either. Having too many fans can cause bad circulation pushing air back and forth to each other, doing nothing at all. Check out a pic at this site towards the bottom how "ATX Standards" show how to cool off the system...
Basically, let the fan in the back suck air into the case and blow it over the CPU. If you put one in the front, point it so it blows air out of the case. That will help the other fan. If you turn it so that it blows inward, it will create back pressure for the other fan. As an old technician buddy of mine would say, "NFG".
This "war on drugs" has corrupted all levels of government and business, right down to the core. The essence of the corruption is the financial stake in the forfeiture of property and the business drug investigations, arrests, testing, incarceration, etc. generates. Probably about half of law enforcement budgets and a growing amount of the military budgets are justified by the "war on drugs". Since they stand to profit from investigations, arrests, seizures, etc., it is in their best interest to take steps to ensure that this arrangement continues indefinitely. The "war on drugs" will therefore never end. There are already too many people making too much money. Amtrak is just the latest company to be corrupted.
Big corporations aren't the scare, its the government that's the scare.
Bzzzzzzt! Wrong, Mor-ton! Big corporations ARE the government! Issue 2...
Opt-out of all you can...
This is infeasible. If just one outfit slips one by on you (your fault, right?) they'll all have your information because they'll buy and sell it amoung themselves. This "opt out" business is baloney.
Back when I was more enamored with Libertarian ideas, one that had greatest appeal was the notion that the central role of government was to protect individuals. This idea was put forth by the "limited governmentalists", not the "anarco-capitalist" faction. That was 20 years ago. Today, people describing themselves as Libertarians seem to be advocating corporate welfare.
I'm a Libertarian (card carrying) and I don't see how this is a problem.
... was that the powers that be wanted to change everything over to NT. Well, the first thing they had to do was find all these Novell servers. Some were behind desks, wedged between file cabinets, in people's offices under mounds of books and magazines, in closets and yep, one was walled up. They worked. No one had a reason to hunt them down. Now that they've been switched out with NT servers, I'll bet they never lose track of where these NT servers are.
...the US already with 2% of its own population in jail...
That stat astounds me each time I see it. 1 in 50 people in jail...
So now lets increase that further. Yes sir. Security and prisons are now a growth industry. Is that making you proud? It casts an ugly pall. This cameras everywhere advocate is just another fear mongering opportunist. My blood boils when I'm around these kinds of people.
There certainly is some real child porn out there. But the way law enforcement officials define child porn is pretty broad. They say if you do not have files on hand documenting the ages of each model depicted in a film or still photo, they are assumed under 18. So, we are not just talking about pictures which depict what appears to be a 9 or 10 year old child performing oral sex. You must also include nude photos of nubile 19 year old college girls who could pass for 16 or 17. Both of these are painted with the same broad brush. So, when I hear about some guy getting busted because child porn has been found on his hard drive, I wonder whether he had real child porn or the trumped up variety.
The last couple of years, it's been interesting to watch Xerox's downward spiral. Maybe what's left of PARC will be completely autonomous once the rest of Xerox finally goes around the bowl and down the hole. It's probably too late for PARC. It's a shame. Lots of good ideas came from there. Xerox management was too myopic to do anything with it.
NCSU undertook a pilot project to get 25 courses on the web by 2000. They succeeded but got mixed results.
Someone has to keep up the web pages. Ultimately, the professor is responsible for the content. Many professors didn't want the extra work. One math professor did an excellent job. I thoroughly enjoyed his course. After this pilot, only a few courses are still offered on the internet there, including the ones taught by this professor.
You have to show up for the exam.
There's a trend toward online books with passwords. This trend should be resisted. The online books are inconvenient, password protected and you'll have no reference book when the course is over.
Many colleges trumpet their internet courses but doing the necessary work required for a CSC degree online is usually not an option.
There's little doubt that if M$ had been so aggressive about enforcing it's licenses long ago, M$ would not have the market share it has today. Now, their market has more or less reached a saturation point. Acceptance of new products like Win2k and WinME has been underwhelming. They are resorting to hardball tactics to make up for profit shortfalls. I'm sure many customers did not go with Microsoft with the expectation that M$ would later impose onerous audit requirements on them. Thus, the perceived terms of ownership have been switched from the ones these companies were baited in with.
Building a network of fiber to the curb is not really different in principle than building the curb itself and the road that it is part of. It's just another part of our infrastructure. Like roads, water, sewer, electrical power and phone service, high speed internet access is infrastructure. Providing infrastructure is a legitimate function of governmnet. With electric power, natural gas and phone systems, the gov't has more of a regulatory role with a company acting as a regulated monopoly. The DOTs of each state contract out work on highways. That's the way infrastructure has been built. It ain't going to happen by private companies, out of the goodness of their hearts building roads. They never do. They ain't going to run fiber to the curb either. There ain't nothing liberal or conservative about this. It's strictly pragmatic. While many folks want to cuss the gov't and regulated monopolies, nobody has a better solution. California has veered away from this type of approach and they are paying the price. That's not the only reason they are in trouble but it's a major part of the reason. What passes for deregulation these days is really a thinly veiled form of corporate welfare. There are no technical reasons we can't have fiber to the curb right now, only political ones. It all comes back to sticking with what has worked before. If you want new infrastructure, stick with implementation approaches which have worked in the past.
I'll bet unless you have 256Megs of RAM, you'll be seeing lots of your disk drive light. I'll also bet that unless it is preinstalled, most people will not be able to get it to run worth a damn or even half a damn.
If anyone was surprised at how long there were Windows 3.1 systems still in use, just wait. Heck we've never made the move to Win2k. We're still running NT at work.
Does M$ honestly expect people are going to run out and buy a new PC just so they can run this OS? Win2k and WinME have not exactly set the world on fire. Why will WinXP?
what if you don't have an internet connection? are you now excluded from running windows if you aren't connected?
... or what if you're connecting via dialup. It seems to me that's going to be a pain unless you have DSL or cable. Updating via dialup will likely be slow. The machine may dial up when it thinks it's out of date, etc. ET, phone home.
"According to this article in the nytimes, scientists are reporting unexpected levels of defects in sheep and other animals cloned in recent years. Apparently, the cloned DNA is more susceptible to damage during the procedure. This pretty much rules out cloning humans for now."
And it doesn't bode well for cloning animals either.
I don't understand how you people somehow feel that you have any right to release proprietary information about a previous employer.
I don't believe anyone has advocated releasing proprietary info about a previous employer. The problem is this "inevitable disclosure" concept being used to justify depriving workers of their livelyhood. Combine that with the tendancy of some people to define common knowledge as intellectual property and this becomes kinda jack-booted.
Lots of people still regard email as a novelty. Only half the people I know check it daily. Only a couple dozen check it hourly. So I'm not surprized that Congress ignores email. Heck, they might as well not have it. Here's yet another example of a technology that really hasn't panned out, at least not all the way.
The RIAA is guilty of making money off someone else's work, then stiffing them for it. That's even worse than Napster users listening the music for free. At least most of them aren't reselling this music.
The RIAA just doesn't want any competing "pirates".
The problem with the Web isn't that there was anything wrong with it, but instead that people who didn't understand it wanted a piece of it.
Yep. It was a gold rush land grab. Fools rush in where fools have been before. The zeal wore off and the speculators pulled out but the damage they've done to the net is permanent.
Me and my engineering buddies were laughing our asses off over this article. I like the 36 year old "programmer" who listed his skills as c, java, xml, cgi, js, fortran, basic. That sentence is like a giant red flag
Agreed. Jack of all trades, master of none...
36 years old and only making 110k a year?
You'd be surprised at how many good system programmers over 40 make less than $100k a year. It depends on what part of the country too. $100k isn't that high a figure in California but it is in North Carolina.
By 36, a programmer should have his shit together in a big way or he should be in management.
Perhaps, assuming this person started at age 23. Suppose someone starts at age 36 and gets 5 years of solid systems programming. They might be promotable to senior level developer but probably not a manager unless they were in there previous career say as a mechanical engineer. Arguably, they should at least have their shit together in a fairly substantial pile.
We've all been waiting for the other shoe to drop so we could laugh at these poseurs.
I understand the resentment toward html editors using M$ playtoys calling themselves programmers but I wouldn't be so smug. I've worked through the last 3 major recessions. This one came on alot faster than the others. The layoff news stories are coming at a much more rapid clip this time. The trend looks very ugly.
Regardless what your race is, using the "N" word is ill advised, particularly in mixed company.
By then the brits will have had enough cameras in place to make a difference. The question will be whether street crime has dropped dramatically and whether there have been abuses of civil liberties of non-criminals.
I can certainly see how this could cut down on gang violence but I also know that police and companies can't resist the opportunity to get in your mess. So, lets hold off for a year and see what shakes out.
At NCSU, you'll get half the undergrad curriculum in EE courses and the other half in CSC courses if you major in ECE. In essence, that's what I am.
I graduated as an EE 20 years ago and worked as an analog circuit designer and a magnetic compnent designer for 14 years. The last several years of that stint in electronics, I became a self taught programmer. Then I went to work for a CAD vendor and started taking CSC courses. I took the core undergrad CSC curriculum and did well. Now I write debuggers. Careers sometimes have a mind of their own. Do what interests you most. The "hot" areas are always a moving target.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish I'd gotten in on this topic sooner but it's been a wild day.
Kids will be kids. There will be picking. There will be discipline problems. In the past, discipline was meaded out with a paddle. I strongly favor a return to corporal punishment. It works better for most miscreants than anything else. Throwing kids out of school or charging them with felonies is counterproductive.
As for the picking, if a kid is getting picked on he needs to be trained how to fight effectively. He must be able to handle bullies. Any kids identified as being picked on should be given training in boxing, wrestling, karate, jujitsu, judo or other martial arts. Strength training is also likely to be of benefit. This will empower the one being picked on to defend themselves. Bullies will find an easier mark. The school system should provide such kids with stipends.
Do I have a vested interest in this? You bet. I teach kids like this all the time.
Will training kids in self defense and returning to corporal punishment prevent Columbines from happening? Probably. Growing up today ain't no easier or harder than it was then. Kids probably had better access to guns 30 years ago. Heck, I had 2 rifles, shotgun and a pistol when I was 13. There's no way I'd have taken them to school. The threshold for a butt whuppin' was real low. Nobody shot up schools then. I carried a pocket knife then. Still do. But any kid with one today gets arrested. If anyone had cut someone else with their pocket knife, they would have gotten 2 whuppins. One right then and there and another at home.
It's like the little old lady with the shopping cart who wheels grocery sacks full of money through the ghetto. Nobody knocks her over because they know retribution will be sure, severe and swift.
A transparent, Open Source society needn't be a bad place to live.
Oh, so you think people would just let it all hang out and lead gleeful, uninhibited lives, fearing no closet skeletons.
Privacy is a function of fear - the fear of others. If that privacy is removed, the fear is too.
... so long as you're in conformity with the majority. If you aren't, you'll have plenty to be afraid of.
That may not be too good either. Having too many fans can cause bad circulation pushing air back and forth to each other, doing nothing at all. Check out a pic at this site towards the bottom how "ATX Standards" show how to cool off the system...
Basically, let the fan in the back suck air into the case and blow it over the CPU. If you put one in the front, point it so it blows air out of the case. That will help the other fan. If you turn it so that it blows inward, it will create back pressure for the other fan. As an old technician buddy of mine would say, "NFG".
This "war on drugs" has corrupted all levels of government and business, right down to the core. The essence of the corruption is the financial stake in the forfeiture of property and the business drug investigations, arrests, testing, incarceration, etc. generates. Probably about half of law enforcement budgets and a growing amount of the military budgets are justified by the "war on drugs". Since they stand to profit from investigations, arrests, seizures, etc., it is in their best interest to take steps to ensure that this arrangement continues indefinitely. The "war on drugs" will therefore never end. There are already too many people making too much money. Amtrak is just the latest company to be corrupted.
Big corporations aren't the scare, its the government that's the scare.
...
...
Bzzzzzzt! Wrong, Mor-ton! Big corporations ARE the government! Issue 2
Opt-out of all you can
This is infeasible. If just one outfit slips one by on you (your fault, right?) they'll all have your information because they'll buy and sell it amoung themselves. This "opt out" business is baloney.
Back when I was more enamored with Libertarian ideas, one that had greatest appeal was the notion that the central role of government was to protect individuals. This idea was put forth by the "limited governmentalists", not the "anarco-capitalist" faction. That was 20 years ago. Today, people describing themselves as Libertarians seem to be advocating corporate welfare.
I'm a Libertarian (card carrying) and I don't see how this is a problem.
In time, you will.
... was that the powers that be wanted to change everything over to NT. Well, the first thing they had to do was find all these Novell servers. Some were behind desks, wedged between file cabinets, in people's offices under mounds of books and magazines, in closets and yep, one was walled up. They worked. No one had a reason to hunt them down. Now that they've been switched out with NT servers, I'll bet they never lose track of where these NT servers are.
...the US already with 2% of its own population in jail ...
...
That stat astounds me each time I see it. 1 in 50 people in jail
So now lets increase that further. Yes sir. Security and prisons are now a growth industry. Is that making you proud? It casts an ugly pall. This cameras everywhere advocate is just another fear mongering opportunist. My blood boils when I'm around these kinds of people.
There certainly is some real child porn out there. But the way law enforcement officials define child porn is pretty broad. They say if you do not have files on hand documenting the ages of each model depicted in a film or still photo, they are assumed under 18. So, we are not just talking about pictures which depict what appears to be a 9 or 10 year old child performing oral sex. You must also include nude photos of nubile 19 year old college girls who could pass for 16 or 17. Both of these are painted with the same broad brush. So, when I hear about some guy getting busted because child porn has been found on his hard drive, I wonder whether he had real child porn or the trumped up variety.
The last couple of years, it's been interesting to watch Xerox's downward spiral. Maybe what's left of PARC will be completely autonomous once the rest of Xerox finally goes around the bowl and down the hole. It's probably too late for PARC. It's a shame. Lots of good ideas came from there. Xerox management was too myopic to do anything with it.
NCSU undertook a pilot project to get 25 courses on the web by 2000. They succeeded but got mixed results.
Someone has to keep up the web pages. Ultimately, the professor is responsible for the content. Many professors didn't want the extra work. One math professor did an excellent job. I thoroughly enjoyed his course. After this pilot, only a few courses are still offered on the internet there, including the ones taught by this professor.
You have to show up for the exam.
There's a trend toward online books with passwords. This trend should be resisted. The online books are inconvenient, password protected and you'll have no reference book when the course is over.
Many colleges trumpet their internet courses but doing the necessary work required for a CSC degree online is usually not an option.
There's little doubt that if M$ had been so aggressive about enforcing it's licenses long ago, M$ would not have the market share it has today. Now, their market has more or less reached a saturation point. Acceptance of new products like Win2k and WinME has been underwhelming. They are resorting to hardball tactics to make up for profit shortfalls. I'm sure many customers did not go with Microsoft with the expectation that M$ would later impose onerous audit requirements on them. Thus, the perceived terms of ownership have been switched from the ones these companies were baited in with.
Building a network of fiber to the curb is not really different in principle than building the curb itself and the road that it is part of. It's just another part of our infrastructure. Like roads, water, sewer, electrical power and phone service, high speed internet access is infrastructure. Providing infrastructure is a legitimate function of governmnet. With electric power, natural gas and phone systems, the gov't has more of a regulatory role with a company acting as a regulated monopoly. The DOTs of each state contract out work on highways. That's the way infrastructure has been built. It ain't going to happen by private companies, out of the goodness of their hearts building roads. They never do. They ain't going to run fiber to the curb either. There ain't nothing liberal or conservative about this. It's strictly pragmatic. While many folks want to cuss the gov't and regulated monopolies, nobody has a better solution. California has veered away from this type of approach and they are paying the price. That's not the only reason they are in trouble but it's a major part of the reason. What passes for deregulation these days is really a thinly veiled form of corporate welfare. There are no technical reasons we can't have fiber to the curb right now, only political ones. It all comes back to sticking with what has worked before. If you want new infrastructure, stick with implementation approaches which have worked in the past.
I'll bet unless you have 256Megs of RAM, you'll be seeing lots of your disk drive light. I'll also bet that unless it is preinstalled, most people will not be able to get it to run worth a damn or even half a damn.
If anyone was surprised at how long there were Windows 3.1 systems still in use, just wait. Heck we've never made the move to Win2k. We're still running NT at work.
Does M$ honestly expect people are going to run out and buy a new PC just so they can run this OS? Win2k and WinME have not exactly set the world on fire. Why will WinXP?
what if you don't have an internet connection? are you now excluded from running windows if you aren't connected?
... or what if you're connecting via dialup. It seems to me that's going to be a pain unless you have DSL or cable. Updating via dialup will likely be slow. The machine may dial up when it thinks it's out of date, etc. ET, phone home.
"According to this article in the nytimes, scientists are reporting unexpected levels of defects in sheep and other animals cloned in recent years. Apparently, the cloned DNA is more susceptible to damage during the procedure. This pretty much rules out cloning humans for now."
And it doesn't bode well for cloning animals either.
I don't understand how you people somehow feel that you have any right to release proprietary information about a previous employer.
I don't believe anyone has advocated releasing proprietary info about a previous employer. The problem is this "inevitable disclosure" concept being used to justify depriving workers of their livelyhood. Combine that with the tendancy of some people to define common knowledge as intellectual property and this becomes kinda jack-booted.
Lots of people still regard email as a novelty. Only half the people I know check it daily. Only a couple dozen check it hourly. So I'm not surprized that Congress ignores email. Heck, they might as well not have it. Here's yet another example of a technology that really hasn't panned out, at least not all the way.
Tcsh, the Tenex C shell
I thought the t was for tectronix.
The RIAA is guilty of making money off someone else's work, then stiffing them for it. That's even worse than Napster users listening the music for free. At least most of them aren't reselling this music.
The RIAA just doesn't want any competing "pirates".
The problem with the Web isn't that there was anything wrong with it, but instead that people who didn't understand it wanted a piece of it.
Yep. It was a gold rush land grab. Fools rush in where fools have been before. The zeal wore off and the speculators pulled out but the damage they've done to the net is permanent.
Me and my engineering buddies were laughing our asses off over this article. I like the 36 year old "programmer" who listed his skills as c, java, xml, cgi, js, fortran, basic. That sentence is like a giant red flag
...
Agreed. Jack of all trades, master of none
36 years old and only making 110k a year?
You'd be surprised at how many good system programmers over 40 make less than $100k a year. It depends on what part of the country too. $100k isn't that high a figure in California but it is in North Carolina.
By 36, a programmer should have his shit together in a big way or he should be in management.
Perhaps, assuming this person started at age 23. Suppose someone starts at age 36 and gets 5 years of solid systems programming. They might be promotable to senior level developer but probably not a manager unless they were in there previous career say as a mechanical engineer. Arguably, they should at least have their shit together in a fairly substantial pile.
We've all been waiting for the other shoe to drop so we could laugh at these poseurs.
I understand the resentment toward html editors using M$ playtoys calling themselves programmers but I wouldn't be so smug. I've worked through the last 3 major recessions. This one came on alot faster than the others. The layoff news stories are coming at a much more rapid clip this time. The trend looks very ugly.
Regardless what your race is, using the "N" word is ill advised, particularly in mixed company.
By then the brits will have had enough cameras in place to make a difference. The question will be whether street crime has dropped dramatically and whether there have been abuses of civil liberties of non-criminals.
I can certainly see how this could cut down on gang violence but I also know that police and companies can't resist the opportunity to get in your mess. So, lets hold off for a year and see what shakes out.
They would be just as well off to shut off all internet access in Australia. That way, no one would be tempted to break any of these foolish laws.
At NCSU, you'll get half the undergrad curriculum in EE courses and the other half in CSC courses if you major in ECE. In essence, that's what I am.
I graduated as an EE 20 years ago and worked as an analog circuit designer and a magnetic compnent designer for 14 years. The last several years of that stint in electronics, I became a self taught programmer. Then I went to work for a CAD vendor and started taking CSC courses. I took the core undergrad CSC curriculum and did well. Now I write debuggers. Careers sometimes have a mind of their own. Do what interests you most. The "hot" areas are always a moving target.
Be a liberal arts major
I have to agree. Many good programmers have a liberal arts background. Lots of programmers are musicians.