Heh, nice. Somewhat after Plato (at 300 B.C.) Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth) wrote Do not say, “Why were the old days better than these?” For it is not wise to ask such questions.. Being 35 years old (born on 5 May 1977), I remember that many of the children of my age group, not reading books on their own volition, and being rude and not preparing their homework, and hanging out with their friends, and being rude to their teachers, and parents, and being mischevious. Today is not different. And there were well-mannered boys and girls and naughty boys and girls and there still are today. I myself am pretty happy with a lot of the younger generations today, and many 14 years olds or so I met on IRC and elsewhere, were both more mature (and still very fun people) than I was at 14 years old as well as 10 years ago when I was 25.

Despite my age, I am quite a trendy fellow, and maintain collections of Chuck Norris/etc. facts, watch YouTube videos of either comedies, covers and original songs by independent artists, or whatever, have a lot of Gangnam Style mixes, spin-offs and covers that I enjoyed, wrote several stories and screenplays that mostly take place in the present (and often feature teens or other young people), and have an active presence in many sites across the Net. That put aside, I often draw on inspiration from a lot of ancient memes such as Aesop's fables, the Hebrew Bible, Saladin’s noble teaching and practice, the Greek mythology, various folk-tales, and many other things (so for example, whenever someone criticises someone for something silly about them, I bring up Aesop’s tale about the donkey for support). You got to combine both old and new, and realise that it's important to borrow memes from other idea systems - old and new - because "All truth is God's truth".

I promised myself that I won't grow cynical, and to never stop being an idealist and to always have a living growth, and it worked. I'm a very different idealist than I was a year ago (much less 10 years ago) but I still am idealistic and non-cynical, and am productive, energetic, and look forward to living every day. You can be too, even if you've grown cynical recently.

Yes, I agree with you. Eric S. Raymond (of The Cathedral and the Bazaar fame) has written a post titled “Michael Meets Mozart" about this on his Armed and Dangerous blog. He was saying that while classical music was engaging the audience back at those days, times have moved on and now most Classical music is just museum pieces. To play classical and neo-classical music properly, it should be spiced up with more modern elements like various crossover classical artists such as the aforementioned The Piano Guys, as well as Vanessa-Mae, Bond, Coolio's rap/pop adaptation of Pachelbel's Canon as "I C U when you get there", the Hooked on Classics series, etc. There is no reason that in these times, with all the great and lively music, that classical music should stay boring.

This is a stream of thought comment. I remember QBasic, and MS-DOS vividly (though I did not study them as much as my friends - and I had started with XT BIOS BASIC, BASIC.COM, and GWBASIC on an old PC XT machine), and the world now requires more training. I think that it is now best to start either by learning Python (which is relatively easy to learn and minimalistic and still widely useful and used), or by learning Perl 5 or Ruby (which are more pluralist, easier to express oneself, and less lock you into The One True Python Way). See what we wrote about it in the Freenode ##programming FAQ (which you are welcome to visit).

Anyway, there are few entry level jobs, and I think that you can try building a reputation by learning one or more of those languages and contributing to open source projects, chatting on IRC in order to learn and help, helping on mailing lists, web forums, Stack Overflow/etc. and even starting some blogs (blogs should be as specialised as possible). Some people tease me that at 35 (1977-born) I am now too old to be a programmer, but I feel that I have improved in most aspects, and have a more solid methodology and more discipline than I used to have (and also have some knowledge). I don't think it's ever too old to start or to continue because you should learn as if you were going to live forever. (See what I wrote in “Advice for the young (or the young at heart)".

Good luck!

Oh, and it seems like a slow day on the Slashdot front-page, because it seems that nothing there, except this teaches us anything new about the world. See What business can learn from open source. Here's something a little better and new. Maybe you can improve it. :-).

This is not a question - it's a comment. We should not strive to find “the truth” because it is a static assertion that has no basis in reality. We should strive to read ourselves of mysticism, i.e: the belief that “willed realities” can replace the actual reality outside. It's hard to instill positives, but it is easy to liquidate negatives. And mysticism exists in all domains of life: art, relationships, philosophy, language, science, computers, law, etc.

How was mysticism vanquished? I think now (and it could be stupid because I'm a little hypomanic now) that the final blows were delivered by a few 90s-2000s popular Television shows: Friends, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and naturally Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. Those shows were fun and entertaining, and featured many good and attractive actors and actresses, but they were subtle and direct in their undermining of mysticism. Since then all the action moved to the Internet: to email, IRC, blogs, microblogs, social networks, source sharing sites, web comics, lolcats/captioned images, video-sharing sites (YouTube), wikis, etc. etc. Now, Television may be entertaining and good, but it's no longer subversive. It no longer pushes the boundaries of knowledge.

I have called the people who have conquered mysticism from inside permanently, Qs after the Qs in Star Trek, who are omnipotent. I have written Star Trek: “We, the Living Dead” as my own fan fiction episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, where it is mashed up together with Objectivism and Neo-Tech, with Judaism and Israeli culture, with all parts of history, with geek hackerdom, with some parts about love, sex and relationships, and with crazy Illuminati/Elders-of-Zion/vampires theories. It features a friendly talking vampire cat who is older than Planet Earth, and yet still likes human affection ; the still alive version of Moses who has married girls who were 40 times his junior, and testifies that they were more mature than him in most respects. “Deborah the prophetess” who had lived in the same place in Israel since before the Israelite conquest, and is now the chief ambassador of Earth at the Q continuum; and Katie Jacobson - a female software developer in her twenties, originating from Berkeley california, who is a big admirer of Jake Sisko's stories, and a graduate of the Technion in Haifa, who joins the Star Trek crew, and in a typical millenial manner finds everything she encounters to be exhilirating.

Thing is, that such shows as those featured a lot of supposedly mystical, unethical, and irrational elements (demons, vampires, lies, innocent deaths, superpowers, etc.) while still maintaining a healthy dose of rationalism, objectivism and individualism. Note that the new age (and we have entered the new age) rationalism and individualism is pluralistic: some Roman Catholics are value producers, while some Randian Objectivism fanatics are value destroyers. The pope now has a Twitter account, because back at the time, Gutenberg's Bible was so clearly inferior to the one written by Monks, that people thought the Printing Press was a fad and that it would never catch on. But it did, and changed everything in Europe. Twitter and Facebook now face similar criticisms, in part because they are very quick and have a low barrier of entry. The pope (and most other spritual leaders) don't want to stay behind the times, and instead wish to endorse change. Only Totalitarian countries such as Iran and China, try to block Facebook, Twitter, the Cheezeburger network, YouTube, GitHub, imgur.com and other subversive mediums. My guess is that it won't help them a lot because the Internet is distributed. Wikipedia is now unblocked because it's no longer so subversive, and that's because it became mainstream and the Internet has become slightly more subversive as a result.

You should dedicate your life to fight mysticism (from within and from without) instead of exposing certain "Truths" about lame (and not so harmful) conmen.

My personal philosophy is now Rindolfism (after my nickname on some IRC networks and because Shlomifism sounds silly), and it is my own, dynamic and changes in time, expands and expressed in my various online writings. You shouldn't say you're a "Rindolfist", but instead build upon Rindolfism and other inspirations, because we're pluralists, and competitive and cooperating (like GitHub or Bitbucket or whatever). As much as I like fans, I derive more value from people who criticise my work and who try to outcompete me.

Oh, and as awesome as Aristotle was (And he was awesome), I want to crush that Greek fool-on-the-hill like the bug that he is (and you should too). ;-)