Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (Oracle Press Series)

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SAP said they were disappointed by the verdict and might appeal. After the accord has been approved, Oracle can ask a federal appeals court to reinstate the earlier jury verdict. Oracle Corporation produces and distributes the "Oracle ClearView" series of videos as part of its marketing mix.

In , Oracle attracted attention from the computer industry and the press after hiring private investigators to dig through the trash of organizations involved in an antitrust trial involving Microsoft. When asked how he would feel if others were looking into Oracle's business activities, Ellison said: We believe in full disclosure.

In , Oracle Corporation marketed many of its products using the slogan "Can't break it, can't break in", or "Unbreakable". Oracle Corporation also stressed the reliability of networked databases and network access to databases as major selling points. However, two weeks after its introduction, David Litchfield , Alexander Kornbrust, Cesar Cerrudo and others demonstrated a whole suite of successful attacks against Oracle products. In , then- United States Attorney General John Ashcroft sued Oracle Corporation to prevent it from acquiring a multibillion-dollar intelligence contract.

After Ashcroft's resignation from government, he founded a lobbying firm, The Ashcroft Group , which Oracle hired in With the group's help, Oracle went on to acquire the contract. Computer Sciences Corporation reportedly spent a billion dollars developing a computer system for the United States Air Force that yielded no significant capability, because, according to an Air Force source, the Oracle software on which the system was based could not be adapted to meet the specialized performance criteria.

Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. When the site tried to go live on October 1, , it failed, and registrations had to be taken using paper applications until the site could be fixed. On April 25, , the State of Oregon voted to discontinue Cover Oregon and instead use the federal exchange to enroll Oregon residents. Oracle president Safra Catz responded to Cover Oregon and the OHA in a letter claiming that the site's problems were due to OHA mismanagement, specifically that a third-party systems integrator was not hired to manage the complex project.

In August , Oracle Corporation sued Cover Oregon for breach of contract, [84] and then later that month the state of Oregon sued Oracle Corporation, in a civil complaint for breach of contract, fraud, filing false claims and " racketeering ". The acquisition was delayed for several months by the EU Commission because of concerns about MySQL , but was unconditionally approved in the end. State Department Embassy cables were leaked [94] to WikiLeaks. One cable revealed that the U.

How the Net Generation is Changing The World

The lawsuit argues that the government received deals inferior to those Oracle gave to its commercial clients. The DoJ added its heft to an already existing whistleblower lawsuit filed by Paul Frascella, who was once senior director of contract services at Oracle. Oracle, the plaintiff, bought the Java computer programing language when it acquired Sun Microsystems in January The pre-developed code is organized into separate " packages " which each contained a set of methods.

The packages are further organized into larger " classes. Oracle and Google the defendant tried to negotiate an agreement for Oracle to license Java to Google, which would have allowed Google to use Java in developing programs for mobile devices using the Android operating system. However, the two companies never reached an agreement.

After negotiations failed, Google created its own programming platform, which was based on Java, and contained a mix of 37 copied Java packages and new packages developed by Google. In , Oracle sued Google for copyright infringement for the use of the 37 Java packages. Alsup who taught himself how to code computers []. By the end of the first jury trial the legal dispute would eventually go on to another trial the arguments made by Oracle's attorneys focused on a Java function called "rangeCheck.

Of all the lines of code that Oracle had tested—15 million in total—these were the only ones that were 'literally' copied. Every keystroke, a perfect duplicate. Although Google admitted to copying the packages, Judge Alsup found that none of the Java packages were covered under copyright protection, and therefore Google did not infringe. API stands for "application programming interface" and are how different computer programs or apps communicate with each other. However, the appeals court also left open the possibility that Google might have a " fair use " defense. On October 6, , Google filed a petition to appeal to the U.

Supreme Court , but the Supreme Court denied the petition. The case was then returned to the U. District Court for another trial about Google's fair use defense. In February , Oracle filed another appeal to the U. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

On August 13, , an internal Oracle memo leaked to the Internet cited plans for ending the OpenSolaris operating system project and community. In an official statement made by Larry Ellison, Phillips had previously expressed his desire to transition out of the company. Ellison had asked Phillips to stay on through the integration of Sun Microsystems Inc. There is no executive in the IT world with more relevant experience than Mark.

On September 20, Oracle and HP published a joint press release announcing the resolution of the lawsuit on confidential terms and reaffirming commitment to long-term strategic partnership between the companies. A number of OpenOffice. Oracle expressed no interest in sponsoring the new project and asked the OpenOffice. On August 1, , a California judge said in a tentative ruling that Oracle must continue porting its software at no cost until HP discontinues its sales of Itanium-based servers.

Oracle has announced it will appeal both the decision and damages.

Oracle has previously used this portal for around four hundred million dollars a year in revenue. Oracle Corporation originally leased two buildings on the site, moving its finance and administration departments from the corporation's former headquarters on Davis Drive, Belmont, California.

Eventually, Oracle purchased the complex and constructed a further four main buildings. The distinctive Oracle Parkway buildings, nicknamed the Emerald City, [] served as sets for the futuristic headquarters of the fictional company "NorthAm Robotics" in the Robin Williams film Bicentennial Man Oracle Corporation operates in multiple markets and has acquired several companies which formerly functioned autonomously. In some cases these provided the starting points for global business units GBUs targeting particular vertical markets.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Sun acquisition by Oracle. Oracle in Markham, Ontario. This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. Retrieved August 10, United States Securities and Exchange Commission. Retrieved October 27, Retrieved February 8, Look What Happened to the Co-founders of Oracle". Retrieved March 29, Retrieved July 16, Communications of the ACM.

Archived from the original on June 12, Retrieved April 17, Retrieved July 14, Oracle E-Business Suite Retrieved July 31, Oracle software and documentation can be downloaded from the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud website at: Retrieved April 21, Retrieved July 1, The first NHII conference in demonstrated that many experts agree that the government must become part of the solution in terms of financial incentives for EHR adoption.

However, although the federal government recognizes that it must provide financial incentives for EHR adoption, the current federal deficit and competing priorities for limited funds, make it uncertain whether the government will make sufficient investments in underwriting widespread EHR implementation. In addition, it has been suggested that while the physicians will have to substantially change their practices, most of the EHR benefits may go to the organization, the payers, or even the patient, rather than directly to the physician.

The unique personal identifier is still a contentious issue. What is different now from earlier eras is that two broad policy tracks related to EHR implementation are likely to converge. The second track focuses on the record of underperformance of our current health care system and the need to make major improvements in health care quality and safety, access, and cost. The convergence of these policy initiatives is reflected in the appointment of the National Healthcare IT Coordinator and the recognition at the top levels of government that regulatory barriers should be addressed, and some financial incentives will be needed to overcome physician resistance to EHRs.

These changes would create, for the first time, a U. These elements, combined with a focus on assuring a health care system that is safe, patient centered, effective, efficient, equitable, and timely, should make for a compelling formula that will get the job done. However, as exciting as the current initiatives are, the field must remember earlier times when other compelling initiatives failed to produce major changes in either health care or the widespread use of electronic health record systems.

While there is concern nationally about the need to improve the quality of care, it is not clear that these concerns are sufficient motivation for individual physicians to rush to adopt systems that not only may cost them large sums of money, but also could be perceived as markedly less convenient and more time-consuming than the current system. The optimism that we have today must be tempered with the recognition that the receptive environment is only the prerequisite for widespread adoption. For the wave to break, we must surmount the resistance to change across in the entire process of health care delivery.

Based on the presentations given by Drs. The authors thank the other ACMI Symposium participants for their contributions in discussions on these issues. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. J Am Med Inform Assoc. Berner , EdD, Don E. Affiliations of the authors: Received Aug 5; Accepted Sep This article has been cited by other articles in PMC. Abstract For over thirty years, there have been predictions that the widespread clinical use of computers was imminent.

The Beginning of Computers in Healthcare—s to s Computers were first used for administrative and fiscal functions in hospital settings in the early s, following prior use in business and in research settings.

Notes Based on the presentations given by Drs. Dick R, Steen EB eds. The Computer-based Patient Record. National Academy Press, Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st century. Fostering Rapid Advances in Health Care: Learning from System Demonstrations. Achieving a New Standard for Healthcare.

Medicine and the computer. The promise and the problems of change. N Engl J Med. Computerized physician order entry in U. Protocol-based reminders , the quality of care and the non-perfectibility of man. National Library of Medicine: J Am Soc Inf Sci. Medication prescribing on a university medical service. Johns Hopkins Med J. HELP, a program for medical decision making. A computerized obstetric medical record. The Computer and Medical Care. Am J Public Health. The more things change…: Defining and measuring quality of care: Int J Qual Health Care.

DXplain—an evolving diagnostic decision-support system. Reminders to physicians from an introspective computer medical record. The decade of health information technology: Accessed Sept 15, Accessed June 24, Such open-minded and exploratory exchanges seem vital as we struggle to understand why our children are so invested in these images.

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We should be prepared to learn, for example, that violent images are far less central to their experience of these stories than they are to our perception of them. Children and adolescents may take violent images for granted, not because they are desensitized to violence, but because they aren't especially interested in the violence. What draws them to these stories might have to do with the larger than life heroics of their protagonists, with the intensity of emotion and experience these programs offer, with the heady rush of rapid action and flashy visual style.

In researching my recent book on gender and computer games, I stumbled onto the Quake Grrlz movement. What drew these young women to games like Quake and Doom, however, wasn't that you could see blood spurt when you shot your opponents but simply that the digital environment, for the first time, allowed women to aggressively compete with men without regard to the physical differences between the genders.

These women were taking great pleasure in beating the boys at their own games; they experienced the aggressive on-line play as a vehicle of empowerment, arguing that learning to play fantasy combat as a child would help them prepare --mentally and emotionally --for professional lives where they would have to compete with men. One of the women explained, "Maybe it's a problem Maybe that's why we are still underpaid, still struggling, still fighting for our rights.

Maybe if we had the mettle to take on an entire planet, we could fight some of the smaller battles we face everyday. Writing for the slashdot. Schools are shutting down student access to the net and the web. Parents are cutting their children off from access to their on-line friends or forbidding them to play computer games. Students are being suspended for coming to school displaying one or another cultural symbol black trench coats, heavy metal T-shirts.

Students are being punished or sent into therapy because they express opinions in class discussions or essays that differ from the views about the events being promoted by their teachers. Guidance counselors are drawing on checklists of symptoms of maladjustment to try to ferret out those students who are outsiders and either force them into the mainstream or punish them for their dissent. The various letters Katz has reproduced through his column make for chilling reading because they suggest the consequence of adult ignorance about youth culture and their intolerance of any form of expression that differs from their own norms and values.

Rather than teaching students to be more tolerant of the diversity they encounter in the contemporary high school, these educators and administrators are teaching their students that difference is dangerous, that individuality should be punished, and that self expression should be curbed. In this polarized climate, it becomes impossible for young people to explain to us what their popular culture means to them without fear of repercussion and reprisals. We are pushing this culture further and further underground where it will be harder and harder for us to study and understand it.

We are cutting off students at risk from the lifeline provided by their on-line support groups. We all want to do something about the children at risk. We all want to do something about the proliferation of violent imagery in our culture. We all want to do something to make sure events like the Littleton shootings do not occur again.

But repression of youth culture is doomed not only to fail but to backfire against us. Instead, we need to take the following steps: We need to create contexts where students can form meaningful and supportive communities through their use of digital media. Sameer Parekh, a year-old software entrepreneur, has offered one such model through his development of the High School Underground website http: His site invites students who feel ostracized at school to use the web as a means of communicating with each other about their concerns, as a tool of creative expression and social protest, as the basis for forming alliances that leads to an end of the feelings of loneliness and isolation.

A number of websites have been built within the goth subculture to explain its perplexing images to newcomers, to challenge its representati on in the major media, and to rally support for the victims of the shootings. A core assumption behind any democratic culture is that truth is best reached through the free market of ideas, not through the repression of controversial views. Popular culture has become a central vehicle by which we debate core issues in our society.

Our students need to learn how to process and evaluate those materials and reach their own judgements about what is valuable and what isn't in the array of media entering their lives.

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They need to do this in a context that respects their right to dignity and protects them from unreasoned and unreasonable degrees of abuse. What should have rang alarm bells for us in the aftermath of the Littleton shooting is how alone and at risk students can feel in their schools and how important it is for us to have a r ange of different activities, supported by caring and committed teachers, which can pull all of our students into the school community and not simply those the school values because of their good grades, good sports skills, or good conduct.

All signs are that Harris and Klebold were enormously talent and created kids who never found an outlet where they could get respect for what they created from the adults in their community. We need to provide more support for media education in our schools. Given the centrality of media in contemporary life, media issues need to be integrated into all aspects of our K curriculum, not as a special treat, but as something central to our expectations about what children need to learn about their environment.

Most contemporary media education is designed to encourage children to distance themselves from media culture. The governing logic is "just say no to Nintendo" and "turn off your television set. Research suggests that when we tell students that popular culture has no place in our classroom discussions, we are also signaling to them that what they learn in school has little or nothing to say about the things that matter to them in their after school hours.

Such understanding cannot start from the assumption that such culture is meaningless or worthless, but has to start from the recognition that popular culture is deeply significant to those who are its most active consumers and participants. The contents of that culture shift constantly and so we need to be up to date on youth subcultures, on popular music, on popular programs. We need to provide fuller information to parents about the content of media products so that they can make meaningful and informed choices about what forms of popular culture they want to allow into their homes.

They need to know what their children are consuming and why it appeals to them. The ratings system introduced by the game industry goes a long way towards addressing this concern, establishing a consistent base-line against which to measure the content of video games. But the ratings system for games and for television needs to be more nuanced, needs to provide more specific information. We also need to create more websites where parents respond to the games and other media products they have purchased and share their insights and reactions with other parents.

We need to challenge the entertainment industry to investigate more fully why violent entertainment appeals to young consumers and then to become more innovative and creative at providing alternative fantasies that satisfy their needs for empowerment, competition, and social affiliation. Sources [ 1 ] Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Greenfield and Rodney R. Interacting with Video Norwood, NJ: A Semiotic Approach Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, Sylva Eds , Play: Singer and Jerome L.

Singer, The House of Make-Believe: Harvard University Press, [ 12 ] For useful overviews of the role of cultural symbols in defining youth subcultures, see Dick Hebdidge, Subculture: The Meaning of Style London: Random House, , p. Gender and Computer Games Cambridge: The MIT Press, , pp. Arthur Rotundo, American Manhood: Oxford University Press, We talk about making school safe for all every day, and that means the geeks, too. Is it so wrong for everyone to be safe from getting picked on?

From my own experience, without all of my teachers' support, I might have went ahead and blew up the school myself, too. The human mind seeks attention anyway it could get. However, none of us killed anyone. In my case, it certainly wasn't due to lack of weapons. In high school, we had guns in the house, locked in a safe to which I had the combo, and I went to the shooting range with my father.

I had a recurring fantasy of cutting off the hair of the girl who's locker was next to mine, because she fucking brushed it in my face every fucking day. But I didn't kill her. Part of it is the timing of certain influences. I had really supportive older sisters. One of my friends had an older brother whom he worshipped who became a militantly racist skinhead, and he followed right along. I was deeply disappointed at what I considered the loss of that friend.

Anyway, personal anecdotes aside, I think the abuse that goes on in schools played a part in this. I hate the fact that this is written off as a normal part of adolescence. The "concerned adults" involved should think about preventing this abuse, rather than waiting until these kids are on the verge of actually snapping before they intervene. Also, I think there was something much more fundamentally wrong with these kids, either with their home lives and influences, some inherent mental problems, or both.

I think the fundamental part of my existence has always been an intense feeling of isolation, which manifested itself in all my different phases of conformity. Teased from a young age simply because the kids knew they could get a rise out of me- I tried and tried to be like everyone else.

Got the Gap pants, the jean jacket and everything. Purposefully did average on spelling tests and the like. I'd always be accepted for a little while, then it'd become apparent that I was somehow different maybe I tried too hard then the circle would come full round and I'd get ostracized. Once I joined the jocks, once the punk rockers, once the drama kids, once the college students, once the towers club, whatever.

It didn't ever come down to expression of the self. It was always a desire to connect with others. And it still pervades my actions. And I still feel isolated. Although admittedly, MIT and my own personal achievements has given me just enough of an ego to be able to say "Fuck You" and not let the isolation affect me. But hey, I still cry about it. I kind of empathize with the Col. To do what they did, they couldn't have been part of any group, not even trench-coat wearing doom players I was one of those kids once too , they were completely alone and maybe they suffered from some major chemical imbalance too.

Those of you in the house that know me at all and especially those of you that have seen me in person lately know that something like this thing in Colorado would've and did bother me a lot. A couple of words on it: To begin with, the media coverage of the incident has made me so outraged I've barely been able to restrain myself.

I have never been so angered by the combination of poor journalism in lack of proper facts , buzzword use, and general tastelessness. The first two of these issues are incredibly apparent in the media's depiction of the gunmen. Immediately, the gunmen were completely bogusly classified as "goths" simply because they wore black trenchcoats and supposedly listened to Marilyn Manson. This is the most absurd thing I could've ever imagined. If wearing black trenchcoats made one goth or a killer, than half of Boston in the winter time are crazied goth maniacs. Additionally, if the media had done even a modicum of research, they would've learned that Marilyn Manson is so far from goth its ridiculous.

This instant "goth" classification was replicated throughout the media and spread like wild fire. It's kind of interesting, with a few rare exceptions such an article today in the NY Post , no retraction of this error was made. BTW, as an aside, numerous goth boys and girls at high schools all over the U. I doubt you'll hear anything about that either. But besides the extreme slandering of goths, not only was the goth subculture dragged out as the whipping boy on this one The media also couldn't have been more tacky and tasteless.

The very next day on the NY Times website, a virtual walk through of the Columbine high school marking rooms where the gunmen killed people was on line. Am I the only one who finds this incredibly in poor taste?! Also, the very next day, every talk show was doing a special on the shootings, from Oprah to Leeza, and so forth. And from the snippets I saw of any of them, they were all so ridiculously manipulative of the sad emotions surrounding the incident for ratings it was sickening. Here's the thing, I, like a couple others of you I suspect, was horribly made fun of in school. For eleven years of my life, I was the subject of nearly constant ridicule, remarks, physical violence, you name it.

And thinking back, I do remember numerous times throughout my youth when while being mocked, ridiculed, tortured, whatever, that I thought to myself "man, I'm gonna kill that sucker". So what made me different than these kids in Colorado? This seems like a deceptively simple question at first -- "they were sickos" -- but it really isn't. I mean it's like the old bumper sticker someone pointed out to me recently: What events occurred in my life that prevented me from doing something like this that didn't occur in theirs? Or vice versa, what events occurred in their lives that I never encountered that made them lash out in the manner they did?

It really isn't a simple question Now, quite frankly, when I heard about this, I wasn't too surprised. I was shocked at the size of it, and I will always be utterly disgusted by the entire incident, but I wasn't too surprised I seem to hear about incidents like this every week with just a much lower body count.

However, it's the b of above that bothers me the most. I get a sick feeling whenever I see these cheap 2-bit psychologists tell the warning signs of your child is going to snap and whatever show their on puts in on the air with some slick computer graphics. For not only are they incredibly broad and encompassing, such that almost everyone I know fits them, they are completely the wrong goal. Why does no one understand that when these incidents happen time and time again, in each case, the kids doing this are in massive amounts of pain from something and incredibly angry about something.

Parents and teachers shouldn't be looking for "once these students are in pain and troubled, here's some signs that they might snap", instead, it should be a step before that. There should be warning signs for "the student is starting to become hurt and angry" ie. The mind set is just completely wrong. Stories all over the country embarked on witch hunts that amounted to little more than Geek Profiling. All weekend, after Friday's column here, these voiceless kids -- invisible in media and on TV talk shows and powerless in their own schools -- have been e-mailing me with stories of what has happened to them in the past few days.

Here are some of those stories in their own words, with gratitude and admiration for their courage in sending them.

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The big story out of Littleton isn't about violence on the Internet, or whether or not video games are turning out kids into killers. It's about the fact that for some of the best, brightest and most interesting kids, high school is a nightmare of exclusion, cruelty, warped values and anger. The big story never seemed to quite make it to the front pages or the TV talk shows. It wasn't whether the Net is a place for hate-mongers and bomb-makers, or whether video games are turning your kids into killers.

It was the spotlight the Littleton, Colorado killings has put on the fact that for so many individualistic, intelligent, and vulnerable kids, high school is a Hellmouth of exclusion, cruelty, loneliness, inverted values and rage. From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Todd Solondz's Welcome To The Dollhouse, and a string of comically-bitter teen movies from Hollywood, pop culture has been trying to get this message out for years.

For many kids -- often the best and brightest -- school is a nightmare. People who are different are reviled as geeks, nerds, dorks. The lucky ones are excluded, the unfortunates are harassed, humiliated, sometimes assaulted literally as well as socially.

Odd values - unthinking school spirit, proms, jocks - are exalted, while the best values - free thinking, non-conformity, curiousity - are ridiculed. Maybe the one positive legacy the Trenchcoat Mafia left was to ensure that this message got heard, by a society that seems desperate not to hear it. Minutes after the "Kids That Kill" column was posted on Slashdot Friday, and all through the weekend, I got a steady stream of e-mail from middle and high school kids all over the country -- especially from self-described oddballs. They were in trouble, or saw themselves that way to one degree or another in the hysteria sweeping the country after the shootings in Colorado.

Many of these kids saw themselves as targets of a new hunt for oddballs -- suspects in a bizarre, systematic search for the strange and the alienated. Suddenly, in this tyranny of the normal, to be different wasn't just to feel unhappy, it was to be dangerous. Schools all over the country openly embraced Geek Profiling.

One group calling itself the National School Safety Center issued a checklist of "dangerous signs" to watch for in kids: I don't know about you, but I bat a thousand. The panic was fueled by a ceaseless bombardment of powerful, televised images of mourning and grief in Colorado, images that stir the emotions and demand some sort of response, even when it isn't clear what the problem is.

The reliably blockheaded media response didn't help either. Sixty Minutes devoted a whole hour to a broadcast on screen violence and its impact on the young, heavily promoted by this tease: Suzanne Angelica her online handle was told to go home and leave her black, ankle-length raincoat there. On the Web, kids did flock to talk to each other. On Star Wars and X-Files mailing lists and websites and on AOL chat rooms and ICQ message boards, teenagers traded countless countless stories of being harassed, beaten, ostracized and ridiculed by teachers, students and administrators for dressing and thinking differently from the mainstream.

Many said they had some understanding of why the killers in Littleton went over the edge. The Littleton killings have made their lives much worse. I'm really into it. I play Doom a lot too, though not so much anymore. I'm up till 3 a.

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I really love it. But after Colorado, things got horrible. People were actually talking to me like I could come in and kill them. It wasn't like they were really afraid of me - they just seemed to think it was okay to hate me even more? People asked me if I had guns at home. This is a whole new level of exclusion, another excuse for the preppies of the universe to put down and isolate people like me.

The e-mailed stories ranged from suspensions and expulsions for "anti-social behavior" to censorship of student publications to school and parental restrictions on computing, Web browsing, and especially gaming. There were unconfirmed reports that the sale of blocking software had skyrocketed. Everywhere, school administrators pandered and panicked, rushing to show they were highly sensitive to parents fears, even if they were oblivious to the needs and problems of many of their students.

In a New Jersey private school, a girl was expelled for showing classmates a pocket-knife. School administrators sent a letter home: In light of the recent tragedy in Littleton, Colorado, we all share a heightened sensitivity to potential threats to our children. I urge you to take this time to discuss with your children the importance of turning to adults when they have concerns about the behavior of others.

In fact, this was one of the things it's protagonist Winston was jailed for: Few of the weeks' media reports - in fact, none that I saw - pointed out that the FBI Uniform Crime reports, issued bi-annually, along with the Justice Departments reports statistical abstracts on violence are available on the Department's website and in printed form academic studies and some news reports have reporters for years now.

Violence among the young is dropping across the country, even as computing, gaming, cable TV and other media use rises. Unhappy, alienated, isolated kids are legion in schools, voiceless in media, education and politics. But theirs are the most important voices of all in understanding what happened and perhaps even how to keep it from happening again. I referred some of my e-mailers to peacefire. I sent others to freedomforum.

I've chosen some e-mailers to partially reprint here. Although almost all of these correspondents were willing to be publicly identified - some demanded it - I'm only using their online names, since some of their stories would put them in peril from parents, peers or school administrators.

From Jay in the Southeast: But that I could, on some level, understand these kids in Colorado, the killers. Because day after day, slight after slight, exclusion after exclusion, you can learn how to hate, and that hatred grows and takes you over sometimes, especially when you come to see that you're hated only because you're smart and different, or sometimes even because you are online a lot, which is still sound cool to many kids?

After the class, I was called to the principal's office and told that I had to agree to undergo five sessions of counseling or be expelled from school, as I had expressed? In other words, for speaking freely, and to cover their ass, I was not only branded a weird geek, but a potential killer. That will sure help deal with violence in America. That's what I thought of when I saw it. You lose track of what is real and what isn't. The worst people are the happiest and do the best, the best and smartest people are the most miserable and picked upon.

The cruelty is unimaginable. If Dan Rather wants to know why those guys killed those people in Littleton, Colorado, tell him for me that the kids who run the school probably drove them crazy, bit by bit? That doesn't mean all those kids deserved to die. But a lot of kids in America know why it happened, even if the people running schools don't. This is not to say I will end the lives of my classmates in a hail of bullets, but that their former situation bears a striking resemblance to my own.

For the most part, the media are clueless.

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