Archive for May, 2004
S-M-R-T
Today’s frivilous lawsuit is brought to you by a moronic student from the University of Kent who pagiarized his papers and eventually got caught. His absurd argument goes like this: “I’ve been plagiarizing my papers for my whole time here. I should have been caught earlier and told it was a problem. But since they didn’t, they shouldn’t just send me away from school this close to graduation.” Amazing.
I wonder if serial killers use this same logic? Clearly, the more you get away with something, the less you should be penalized when you finally get caught.
By no means am I equating stealing academic papers and murder. But come on! You’re an English student! Your entire major is some combination of reading and writing. Do you think it’s fair that you should get a degree when you’ve admitted to only doing half the work? And don’t fake it: you knew it was wrong to plagiarize. Nobody has to explain this, although I’m sure they did repeatedly (all my profs did in every class). Suck it up, kid: you did wrong and there is a cost.
Wise words
I just read this passage from Bjórn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist:
Legend has it that when someone remarked to Voltaire, “life is hard,” he retorted, “compared to what?”
Nice. Deep, and funny.
Little Hooters
Thank God for people like this who put out a little effort and fix insanely stupid things in their communities. Did it take a giant government and more non-sensical laws that steal our freedoms? No. It just took an upset parent and a couple of phone calls to reign in this stupidity. Kudos for watching out for your own.
*$
Clever people may now refer to Starbuck’s as “*$” in instant messenger, email and chat communications. This message was brought to you by the letter “S” and the number “f”.
Stop wasting my time
Dear No-Talent-Ass-Clowns:
Please stop applying for jobs at my company. We are good at interviewing. If you put JDBC on your resume, but haven’t ever used PreparedStatement, we’re bound to notice. If you have Oracle listed in your skillset, please be familiar with SELECT statements at a bare minimum. The ability to mention the concept of a JOIN in describing the retrieval of data from multiple tables is a real plus. Also note that being skilled with J2EE and Servlet technologies should include having used HttpSession once or twice. And when I give you a very simple method signature to fill out, don’t try to talk your way out of it. I’m interviewing you to write code, so I don’t think asking knock out a few trivial lines on the whiteboard is out of line.
Oh, and your rock called. It would like you to come home and climb back under it as soon as you can. And pick up some milk on the way.
Thank you, don’t come again.
Pat on the head
In today’s litigious America, it’s good to see judges being recognized for acting as gatekeepers on the legal system. Since so many people seem to lack common sense and will sue over anything, we really need men and women on the bench that will tell these people to take a hike and stop wasting taxpayer money. Kudos!
Perl is cool
Let’s say you work for a company that deals in email and need to look through giant mbox-format files for things. This might be hard, but with a very short perl script, you can make it easy…
› Continue reading