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yes, exactly

AOL!

all freedoms have natural, logical limitations: where they impinge on someone else's freedoms

Sure. Now, please, explain, whose freedoms were impinged by the speech in TFA...

What are you talking about? Steven Wozniak built the first Apple computer.

YHBT.

The Gnome keyring is nice for SSH keys and GPG keys is nice.

The rest of it is a direct violation of every one of Eric Raymond's guidelines in "The Luxury of Ignorance" essay about open source interfaces.

                    http://www.catb.org/esr/writin...

systemd has much of the same problem. Lots of "ooohh, shiny!!" and not much "let's make this clear to ordinary humans".

A better version of Linus' Law would be the original one.

So, if rapid releases and leveraging the Internet medium to the hilt were not accidents but integral parts of Linus's engineering-genius insight into the minimum-effort path, what was he maximizing? What was he cranking out of the machinery?

Put that way, the question answers itself. Linus was keeping his hacker/users constantly stimulated and rewardedâ"stimulated by the prospect of having an ego-satisfying piece of the action, rewarded by the sight of constant (even daily) improvement in their work.

Linus was directly aiming to maximize the number of person-hours thrown at debugging and development, even at the possible cost of instability in the code and user-base burnout if any serious bug proved intractable. Linus was behaving as though he believed something like this:

        8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.

Or, less formally, ``Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.'' I dub this: ``Linus's Law''.

My original formulation was that every problem ``will be transparent to somebody''. Linus demurred that the person who understands and fixes the problem is not necessarily or even usually the person who first characterizes it. ``Somebody finds the problem,'' he says, ``and somebody else understands it. And I'll go on record as saying that finding it is the bigger challenge.'' That correction is important; we'll see how in the next section, when we examine the practice of debugging in more detail. But the key point is that both parts of the process (finding and fixing) tend to happen rapidly.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writi...

Years ago, this was a common mistake by people trying to touch type to fast for their skill level that actually became sort of a fad when talking about computers. Your boxen or my boxen actually refered to our computer hardware.

Sigh.
You know you are old when you remember what a vax was.

Have you never read The Jargon File. It's required reading for any hacker.

Read it long ago, then realized that apparently I was "no true hacker" as I didn't fit much of their rather lengthy description of one.

Have you never read The Jargon File. It's required reading for any hacker.

How can you call yourself a /. reader having not read The Jargon File?

What I mean by that, is traditionally the Linux "Philosophy" regarding the OS system and tools is that it should be made up of a collection of small stand alone software pieces that each do one small job and do it well.

To be clear, the unix philosophy is much deeper than that. Here's an example. Here is a different set.

IMO the only way to describe the unix philosophy in a single sentence is, "write good code."

But the best aspire to be like Mel. Well, more or less.

Don't just pretend that your question was always "What authoring tools do I have?" when your question WAS "What do I use instead?".

I was trying to avoid causing the XY problem by asking for tools to perform a step toward the wrong goal. Asking "What are usable authoring tools for animated SVG?" isn't helpful when animated SVG itself isn't a viable technology. So instead, I first asked for the right goal (what tech) and followed up by asking for the right step (what authoring tools). My question in full could have been phrased more formally as follows: "What is the most viable technology to replace SWF, and what are usable authoring tools for said technology whatever it might be?" What is the correct etiquette for asking a question contingent on another question?

From http://www.catb.org/esr/writin...

(ii) Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don't clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don't insist on interactive input.

My biggest problem with systemd is the excessively tight coupling that seems inherent in its design philosophy. I wouldn't have any real objection for using systemd for my init, but I can't use my syslogger - logs always have to go through journald first. If you disable journald, even if you have another logger running, daemons started with systemd will produce no logs. I don't use it myself, but apparently the same is now true of logind (whatever that does), it used to be able to run seperately but it apparently can't be done any more. I think the same is scheduled to happen to udev.

The interfaces between these components also seem to change very frequently, making implementing a third-party tool to replace functionality very difficult. From http://www.freedesktop.org/wik... - "A number of systemd's APIs expose Linux or systemd-specific features that cannot sensibly be implemented elsewhere"

As a friend put it; the linux kernel uses a monolithic architecture but a modular construction, systemd uses a modular architecture but a monolithic construction.

While you can find the following on Wikipedia, the first definition from the world of computer security is somewhat of a late comer. Hacker culture was well established before before the term began to be used for the ilk who break things. The term Cracker is much more descriptive, draws a distinction between the two but, just never seemed to catch the ear of the media darlings the put on the news.

I think it's technically a misfeature - or maybe a wart. It was intentional...

To be blunt, that's exactly why this was found. If it were closed source, the bugs would still be in there.

The bugs could potentially be found no matter if the software was open or closed-source. There is no evidence that proves your statement, unless of course you happen to work for Xi Graphics (authors of the closed-source X windows server, a.k.a. Accelerated-X, which is what the free XFree86 was supposed to supercede) and have a story to share there.

The point the OP was trying to make was that Linus's Law, specifically Eric S. Raymond's "given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow" argument, is ridiculously idealistic as it operates under the pretence that everyone has as much insight and knowledge into the software as the author(s) have, focusing solely on the quantity of eyes. The Wikipedia reference I cite goes into a bit more depth as to why this socially-propagated belief in the open-source world is unfounded and has been repeatedly proven false. The short of it: just because the source code is available and viewable does not mean that a person viewing it has the capability, familiarity, or time to invest in reverse-engineering it and finding flaws. Anecdotally, in my experience most open-source users can't understand the code of the applications they use: they're simply generic end-users. Open vs. closed has no real bearing when you consider that data point (i.e. having the source available to read/view != having the capability to understand said source).

Please note my statement doesn't mean closed-source has a defined/distinct advantage over open-source. They both have their pros and cons. But this age-old belief that open-source is superior solely because "the code is out there" needs to stop. Ironically, that subsection of ESR's the Cathedral and the Bazaar may in fact be one of the most damaging things to the open-source movement ever written simply because of it's head-in-the-sand viewpoint; other subsections (e.g. "The Importance of Having Users") are much more justified.

But hey, that's just my two cents as someone who's been in all of this since the early 90s, and I'm just one person. With one set of eyes. ;-)

Is it really that hard to imagine that people wouldn't want to scroll down to the bottom of a message every time they get a new email? That it might be more convenient if the new message was the first thing they see?

The idea (which is much older than any of the MUAs you mentioned) is that you trim the original message to the parts relevant to your reply, and answer them in-line, much like we do it here on /., you know? The point is to have the context of a discussion readily available instead of having to backwards dig though miles of fullquotes.

Relevant: How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

(philip.paradis posting AC, as I don't log in on this computer)

Seriously one night I was coding in VB6 and I accidentally created an infinite loop....I shit you not it opened a portal to the ninth plane of hell and demons came pouring out.

This is common in C too http://www.catb.org/jargon/htm...

Why do the media feel the urge to distort the old meaning of a word? Trolls target a side of an argument and are thrown in a public space. They don't target a person. Hiding harassment behind another name isn't helping.

although they are all essentially the same concept.

"Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers"
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writi...

And then he turned into a neoconservative/fringe libertarian nutbar after that business with the skyscrapers in '01.

Do you have any proof of that? In this Slashdot interview from 1999, which you will astutely note is before 9/11, people were complaining about him in similar terms to today. What is this big change that you claim happened? Is there something in his writings or blog?

After 9/11 some people went cold turkey on the bat shit insanity that they had been involved in, others found a moment or two of sanity and then relapsed. And some others couldn't even manage that.

You seem to have made clear how you view ESR, but I guess we know where you stand too, eh?

That depends: if the microwave is the kind with only a mechanical dial timer, then no. If it's the kind with a number pad interface and presets, then I expect to be able to program presets. If it can read email (I'm not even joking -- see "Messages Sending Function"), then I expect to be able to program it like a general-purpose computer.

Apple is not the developer of CUPS. Apple bought CUPS back in 2007 and hired its main developer.

CUPS is an example of the sort of hairy mess that open-source developers don't like to deal with, like OpenSSL. It was the inspiration for Eric Raymond (the main guy of the Open Source movement) to scold the OSS community back in 2004. I think Eric Raymond's ire is misplaced; CUPS was uniquely horrible back then. But printing in Unix has always been bad, and CUPS made it much better than before, so everybody standardized on it.

Or - of course, just including the control character "EOU" in any message sent:
http://www.catb.org/jargon/htm...

Or - of course, just including the control character "EOU" in any message sent:
http://www.catb.org/jargon/htm...

I think you've confused RMS with ESR. Those statements sound like chapter three of The Magic Cauldron. This sort of argument is typical of "Open Source" types, who tend to promote open source on the basis of economic arguments, as opposed to "Free Software" types, who promote free software on moral/ethical grounds.

So you think the only goal of a university is to teach "the prime concern"? How sad.

Regardless, there are many sorts of programming jobs, and at the big players there are still plenty of jobs doing systems and kernel-level tasks, not just code grinder jobs ("I'm writing an inventory database - in the cloud!"). As programmers start aging out of the workforce, with no/few universities teaching the low-level stuff any more, supply of qualified programmers will dwindle, while demand stays steady - seems like a worthwhile skill set to me!

A Real Programmer

Jokes aside, i don't think Mel would get much work now. We're so far from doing that low level (for most things) that he'd spin his wheels for 2 days on a loop while real work needed to get done

http://www.catb.org/jargon/htm... A REAL programmer.

Sounds like you've descended into yak shaving. On the plus side, that does get you some hair to spin into yarn, but that means you also need a spinning wheel, a compatible shade of pink dye, a tub to dye the stuff in, maybe a mordant to set the dye... by the time you're done, you'll probably have a complete textile production framework.

but when I'm asking about some detail

Can you really not figure out that the solution to such a problem is to add more detail to your question, indicating what you've already researched?

Methinks more people should read "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way".
http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#beprecise

For any who do not know it (and a reminder to those who do): The Story of Mel

vaxocentrism.

Apparently, no one told USENIX about this 22 year old revelation.

(also, I was compelled to fix the typo in my Re: of your title, unless you really meant "Code unrelated to sables", which I assume would cover most code)

Consider the following.

I'm at a loss to understand how that giant huge mess called "Registry" could be labeled "nice" by anyone...

Exactly, Knowing how things works opens all sorts of doors... Reading The Story of Mel really showed me the diffrence between just knowing a little and understanding how it all fits togther. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

1. There is no such thing as 'rape culture' or 'patriarchy.' In any other circumstance we'd view this kind of thinking as conspiracy.

I believe you're interpreting the terms "rape culture" and "patriarchy" as implying that there's an organization controlling or promoting them, yes? Hence the reference to conspiracies.

There's no such implication. The Internet has a culture of trolling, but that doesn't imply that there's some Trollmaster behind it all. That our society normalizes sexual assault doesn't mean that there's some group of people encouraging it.

Our society treats rape as worse than murder, you ignorant fool. There is no rape culture. Look at this thread, about concern over women victims when male murder victims are ignored. 90% of violent crimes are committed against MEN, it's only news when it happens to women because it's actually fucking rare, and when it does we blow our gaskets over it. That's not "normalization" of violence against women, let alone rape.

2. Enough of the victimhood bullshit. I tire of being labeled an 'oppressor' because of my sex or my skin tone. Don't tell me to check my privilege.

This seems to have nothing to do with the article. Chu never called you an oppressor.

Misogyny is what? Hatred of WOMEN, hence claiming that there is a prevalence of women being victimized by hatred, despite any peer reviewed empirical evidence of rampant hatred towards women. Why isn't there any? Because the social justice brigade doesn't need evidence, they just need a narrative and a witch to hunt. Google: "White Cis Gendered Male Privilege" -- Who are said to be the ones doing the "normalization" and "perpetuation" of this hatred and oppression of women. Chu is calling all male nerds tolerant of women hating, when that's the opposite of what nerds are.

3. That 1/6 ratio is bullshit. If that were true, police stations around the country would be inundated with complaints of rape. That's not the case... Quit lying about them too. One out of six men are NOT rapists. Chu must have a crazy self loathing complex to write what he did.

... you know that none of that is actually in the article, and you're really just making stuff up, right? Here's the quote:

We’re not the ones where one out of six of us will have someone violently attempt to take control of our bodies in our lifetimes.

Does that say that "one out of six men are rapists"? Does it even say that one in six women are "raped"? Even if it did, what tremendous leap of logic did you perform to assume that if 16% of women are raped, then 16% of men must be rapists, because rapists only ever commit one rape or something? In fact, did you just see the words "one out of six" and flip out without reading the rest of the sentence?

I agree. It's a majority of people who are rapists doing repeat rapes. Same for violence. Same for hatred. So, why are we castigating entire demographics: "Misogyny, Entitlement and Nerds", or "Teach men not to rape" -- The latter is not in the article, but the point is all this shit is germane to its discussion. Stop trying to dismiss the points: A pigeon hole isn't a counter argument.

The 1/6 and 1/4, etc. rape figures are completely bogus. They were fabricated by a deliberately deceptive, biased, and hateful bigot named: Marry P. Koss

Let's consult the Lexicon: Portrait of J. Random Hacker (from usenet trial-baloon)

Gender and Ethnicity
Hackerdom is still predominantly male. However, the percentage of women is clearly higher than the low-single-digit range typical for technical professions, and female hackers are generally respected and dealt with as equals.

In the U.S., hackerdom is predominantly Caucasian with strong minorities of Jews (East Coast) and Orientals (West Coast). The Jewish contingent has exerted a particularly pervasive cultural influence (see Food, above, and note that several common jargon terms are obviously mutated Yiddish).

The ethnic distribution of hackers is understood by them to be a function of which ethnic groups tend to seek and value education. Racial and ethnic prejudice is notably uncommon and tends to be met with freezing contempt.

When asked, hackers often ascribe their culture's gender- and color-blindness to a positive effect of text-only network channels, and this is doubtless a powerful influence. Also, the ties many hackers have to AI research and SF literature may have helped them to develop an idea of personhood that is inclusive rather than exclusive — after all, if one's imagination readily grants full human rights to future AI programs, robots, dolphins, and extraterrestrial aliens, mere color and gender can't seem very important any more.

Gamers? What about the programmers? They can't be straight.

Portrait of J. Random Hacker: Ceremonial Chemicals

I have often found that when any problem is to be solved, be it creating universes from singularities, forming life from atoms, building solutions from syntax, etc. the process will benefits from an entropy gradient: Energizing and expansion, Heating then chilling, Randomizing design patterns then benchmarking, Changing strategies and sorting what works. Any who think that drugs are inherently evil and detrimental are arguing against the nature of the universe itself.

Sometimes considering every option methodically gives insight, but that is not the only way, that is not natures way. Sometimes the entropy added is natural, sometimes deliberate. Sometimes induced by the disjoint dreams of sleep. Humans are tool using creatures, and with moderation of dosage they may even use drugs as tools. A recreational chemical may give a different perspective, heighten some inherent ability, dull some pain or inhibition, or mix up the approaches to problems. A little entropy can be a good thing in a self corrective system. Without chaos there would be no order: There would be no life, only crystals; No mutation only stagnation; No adaptation only the vulnerability of the monoculture; No new discoveries only existing knowledge; No new innovations only the dark ages.

Sometimes the temporary detrimental effects of being mixed up inside are worth the resultant order that settles out from the chaos. Even the ancients knew of catharsis. Their trial by fire is yet another stress then relaxation.

Must be true. You are statistically significant.

At a young age I learned to read beyond the words of humans. Frequently the ignorant will have valid points when they talk on subjects even if they are unable to speak on the pertinent issue with the nuance it requires.

I wrote my first wireframe 3D game while stoned. I hadn't been taught trig yet so I invented vector math independently after discovering what you'd call the "unit circle" by drawing a radiant diagram of line slope ratios represented in decimal form; Ultimately I ended up creating the equivalent to sin(), cos() and dot() functions because I didn't know what those were useful for (seriously 'online' documentation sucks sans Internet). It was one of the most productive nights of my young life. I doubt I'd have come to the conclusions about connectedness between the mathematic properties in geometry with just a knowledge of linear equations, a glorified graphing calculator, and no mind expanding chemicals. The next school year I realized there was no such thing as Genius. I couldn't understand the reverence my teacher had for these dead dudes: If a stoned kid could discover in a single night much of what took Pythagoras decades to do when confronted with the same problem spaces, then maybe we're just teaching kids wrong... I digress.

We do have a bit of research which found that downers are less common among Hackers. We typically don't like things that make us stupid or slow. Today's Marijuana is very potent compared to the 70's or even 90's, so many Hackers tend to shy away from what I would call an overdose (meaning above recommended, the term does not imply lethal). IMHO, a brownie shouldn't put you out of commission; Eat herbal confections responsibly. However, for those that Marry Jane doesn't dance with in 'detrimental' ways it's not uncommon to do some light buzzed hacking sometimes with surprisingly clever results (especially for harder problems). Indeed, after I woke the next afternoon I was refreshed and amazed at my output. I was only confounded by a single block of dense hand optimized code with only the comment, // Refactored symbiotic slope system to remove branching. Whether such "here be dragons" comments in code should be taken as quite literal statements or if they arise from the ceremonial chemistry itself is still a great mystery each code-fu master must overcome for themselves. Mine turned out to be matrix math sans matrix idiom.

Think about it: Hackers like exploiting systems for interesting or clever results; Drugs are the tools we hack organic computers with... Well, that and tDCS, but the latter may blow your fuses before our stem-cell and n.net replacements are ready. As with even alcohol, caffeine or self modifying instructions: Moderation is the key when dealing in any form of computer altering substance.

Now reconsider the GP's post: Here is someone who has since the early 90's never heard of anyone enjoying recreational mind expanding chemicals in programming. However, when we polled Usenet via trial balloon that's not what we found at all among hackers. Consider that the corporate-clone workplace strongly filters against non-authoritarian approved drug use with the help of the state. The environment itself even hackers find somewhat hostile. Consider that many people sacrifice their pleasures if these are made to cause their livelihood risk. Consider that Hackers do have ways of defeating many unjust social systems such as these. Consider that we may be letting some great minds slip through the cracks for no other reason than a form of Orwellian thought control. Even consider that GP is posting AC and propagating anti-drug propaganda, just as we've seen since the 60's and 70's. With a bit of context even a seemingly dumb comment can stir up the probability matrix quite well. The trick is not to assume anything absolutely or concretely,

And don't forget about the jargon file.

Why not go whole-hog? http://www.catb.org/jargon/htm... I know I've spent hours rolling on the floor laughing and developing goosebumps reading that. And speaking of whole-hog: http://steve-parker.org/articl...

For example, here; http://www.catb.org/jargon/htm...

I have fielded this question a number of times.

Right now, the job market for developers is not very discriminatory. They'll take anyone they can. That means your barrier for entry is low. That being said, I've done a bit more research, and I can say that the most lucrative and mobile entry level development job you can land is probably web application developer. Not designer, but rather, someone who makes a web-based application 'go'.

With that in mind, you'll need the following skills: SQL, HTML, CSS, Javascript (jQuery specifically, but other libraries are good), and a backing language - probably Java or C#/ASP.NET. You'll also need to become familiar with your web execution framework - Tomcat is big in the Java world, and naturally IIS is used in the .NET world. Luckily for you, there are many resources to learn all these things absolutely free of charge, with huge communities of volunteers helping each other out. So, what level do you need these skills at?

Well, as a new hire - regardless of your skill level - you're unlikely to be given a new project to start on. Likely, your first few months are going to be a combination of learning your company's domain knowledge (like finances or autos, or whatever), and tackling bug fixes and/or feature enhancements. For that you'll need to understand how the programs work so that you can source problems. You'll have to be familiar with IDE's and the debugging capabilities - especially learning how to setup and debug web based programs on your local system, as well as remote debugging. You're going to have to be able to read code well enough that you can translate most of it into english in your head - without having to go line by line until you have to dig down that deep. That means recognizing structures and flow easily (which is why I also recommend you avoid ruby on rails and spring - and maybe even hibernate/nhibernate until you've learned more).

You're also going to need to know enough about a development environment to know how to ask an intelligent question about it. There's a world of difference between "I can't get it to work," and something like "I tried increasing the max heap size, but I'm still getting an out of memory error each time I execute a prepared statement after the first call." See here: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/s... . One important quote to take away from this: "What we are, unapologetically, is hostile to people who seem to be unwilling to think or to do their own homework before asking questions." That faq will help you get past the newbie phase without giving up.

So, an unasked followup question, how long will it take to get there? Well, hour-by-hour, you can compress the entirety of a CS degree program into 4 months of 8 hours, 5 days a week, but you won't need all that. I'm going to say that to get there, to really be employable, worst case it'll take about 250 hours of study total. If you take it at a light pace, about 10 hours a week, you should be ready in 6 months.

With today's environment, I wouldn't be at all surprised if you halved that and still got a job, but I would feel bad for suggesting that was an adequate amount of study and practice.

One last important thing that I've only touched on indirectly; you absolutely must learn how to teach yourself. New libraries and frameworks come out every day, and the flavor of the month changes at a rapid pace. At some point, you'll realize that all languages do more or less the same thing, they just have different syntactical sugar, or internal constructs that make a given task easier or harder, sometimes even between versions of the same language. You need to be able to stay on top of those changes, while googling or asking for solutions to odd problems or configuration errors.

RMS: Pay with coding skills or money to free a tablet.

Why? I have an avenue for getting the stuff I want RIGHT NOW. If free software/hardware is superior, why does it not already exist to do the same thing as I can get with non-free software/hardware?

You cannot argue superiority of free when it doesn't accomplish what people are used to doing with non-free.

Hence why RMS needs to keep saying the same thing over and over again.

Why free a tablet? Because freedom is better than bondage. RMS doesn't claim that freedom leads to higher-quality software. That's ESR. RMS claims that freedom is better for society, so we should simply reject non-free software, no matter how inconvenient it is.

Why doesn't free hardware exist? Free hardware doesn't exist for the same reason why so few software companies produce free software: The socio-economic system favors exploitative producer-consumer relationships. RMS's message is ultimately a social message, not a technological message.

As for streaming, there are free technologies, but they are not widely installed and therefore little used. That's probably one reason why RMS still considers Gnash to be so important.

Just don't spend too much time talking about old systems.

Back in my day, we had to program in Machine code.

I've been reading Slashdot since 2001 and there have always been posts on gun laws and acrimonius debate in the comments section. Among the prominent figures in the rise of "open source" in the 1990s you have a few "gun nuts" like Eric S. Raymond, and the cypherpunks had at least one major figure calling for Americans to buy guns to defend themselves from tyrannical government. There has always been overlap between nerd culture and love of guns.

There is gamer culture. There is comic culture. There is anime culture. There is hacker culture. There was a punk culture. There was a hippie culture. However, there never was Geek or Nerd culture, just like there was never Nigger culture. Geek, Nerd, and Nigger are disparaging terms. Without corporations appropriating the culture for the commodification thereof, there would not be a Geek or Nerd culture. The whole "Geek and Nerd" culture is just commodification, even here on Slashdot. "News for nerds" -- Whatever, Dork. Dork culture! Oh I'm such a Dweeb! Hey I know, "Gnus for Goobers, Stuff that Chatters!" It's not "Goober" culture is it? We don't run around calling each other Dorks and Dweebs right? That's what you sound like calling yourselves "Nerd" or "Geek" culture. That's very some fake bullshit there.

You can buy "Punk" clothes at hot topic... That's not punk at all! That's cultural commodification of the do-it-yourself anti-conformist punk culture. Thug culture started off as artists singing about making endsmeat to survive in the ghetto while being persecuted for your race. Now it's about being more violent, having more money, nicer cars, more "fresh" clothes, more "bling", and impressing women to have more sex than your peers -- This is a culture that has been commodified. Wearing bell bottom pants and floral print blouses and tie-died bandannas, etc? That style was a cultural construction of a "hippie", and had nothing to do with the free love, ride hitching, anti-establishment, communal counter culture.

The Poindexter nerd stereotype was created by conflating social outcasts with intellectuals. This just never was the case. It's true that having the passion to create something that takes a lot of time means you'll likely be somewhat introverted, and less extroverted, placing less value on social life; However the socially awkward "geek" had nothing to do with intellectual pursuits. People will make fun of the outcast for having the wrong color backpack, or being "too" rich or poor, or for a variety of reasons. The bully doesn't really care that you like ancient 3D Unix file system explorers, it's just an excuse to pick on you. There's lot's of other folks getting picked on for being socially awkward introverts but they're not "geeks"? "Geek" culture was never really about D&D, hacking, videogames or any of the other things they shove under that umbrella. The media is just monetizing culture by selling you on the label of geek, including the sense of belonging to a fucking news website -- though, cut the Slashdot admins some slack, they're just newbies who can barely think for themselves and didn't know better when they bought into the cultural commodification themselves. Nerd culture never existed, it's fake. All Geek Girls are Fake because all Geek Guys are Fake too.

Read up about the typical hacker, and you'll get a very different idea than that portrayed in media, one that I suspect many here will match. Computer Hacker is a group identity that self assembled through a natural process and was not commercially constructed. The media hates this, and the powers that be fear hackers -- Those who could crack systems and reveal secrets are the feared worst enemy of the anti-activist governmental bodies, and so they make sure not to use the term in a positive light in mainstream media. Instead the naturally emerging "frisbie throwing, skateboarding, kung fu practicing, intensely abstracted, computer whiz kid" stereotype was quickly replaced with the undesirable, pimple faced, social outcast Poindexter who ineffectually rages against machines from the dark safety of his parent's basement.

Likewise, gamer culture was self emergent. Those card, paper and dice games which required extremely imaginative minds were the very antithesis of anti-socialites. They overcame their shyness to come together with strangers and cast spells, summon m

There is gamer culture. There is comic culture. There is anime culture. There is hacker culture. There was a punk culture. There was a hippie culture. However, there never was Geek or Nerd culture, just like there was never Nigger culture. Geek, Nerd, and Nigger are disparaging terms. Without corporations appropriating the culture for the commodification thereof, there would not be a Geek or Nerd culture. The whole "Geek and Nerd" culture is just commodification, even here on Slashdot. "News for nerds" -- Whatever, Dork. Dork culture! Oh I'm such a Dweeb! Hey I know, "Gnus for Goobers, Stuff that Chatters!" It's not "Goober" culture is it? We don't run around calling each other Dorks and Dweebs right? That's what you sound like calling yourselves "Nerd" or "Geek" culture. That's very some fake bullshit there.

You can buy "Punk" clothes at hot topic... That's not punk at all! That's cultural commodification of the do-it-yourself anti-conformist punk culture. Thug culture started off as artists singing about making endsmeat to survive in the ghetto while being persecuted for your race. Now it's about being more violent, having more money, nicer cars, more "fresh" clothes, more "bling", and impressing women to have more sex than your peers -- This is a culture that has been commodified. Wearing bell bottom pants and floral print blouses and tie-died bandannas, etc? That style was a cultural construction of a "hippie", and had nothing to do with the free love, ride hitching, anti-establishment, communal counter culture.

The Poindexter nerd stereotype was created by conflating social outcasts with intellectuals. This just never was the case. It's true that having the passion to create something that takes a lot of time means you'll likely be somewhat introverted, and less extroverted, placing less value on social life; However the socially awkward "geek" had nothing to do with intellectual pursuits. People will make fun of the outcast for having the wrong color backpack, or being "too" rich or poor, or for a variety of reasons. The bully doesn't really care that you like ancient 3D Unix file system explorers, it's just an excuse to pick on you. There's lot's of other folks getting picked on for being socially awkward introverts but they're not "geeks"? "Geek" culture was never really about D&D, hacking, videogames or any of the other things they shove under that umbrella. The media is just monetizing culture by selling you on the label of geek, including the sense of belonging to a fucking news website -- though, cut the Slashdot admins some slack, they're just newbies who can barely think for themselves and didn't know better when they bought into the cultural commodification themselves. Nerd culture never existed, it's fake. All Geek Girls are Fake because all Geek Guys are Fake too.

Read up about the typical hacker, and you'll get a very different idea than that portrayed in media, one that I suspect many here will match. Computer Hacker is a group identity that self assembled through a natural process and was not commercially constructed. The media hates this, and the powers that be fear hackers -- Those who could crack systems and reveal secrets are the feared worst enemy of the anti-activist governmental bodies, and so they make sure not to use the term in a positive light in mainstream media. Instead the naturally emerging "frisbie throwing, skateboarding, kung fu practicing, intensely abstracted, computer whiz kid" stereotype was quickly replaced with the undesirable, pimple faced, social outcast Poindexter who ineffectually rages against machines from the dark safety of his parent's basement.

Likewise, gamer culture was self emergent. Those card, paper and dice games which required extremely imaginative minds were the very antithesis of anti-socialites. They overcame their shyness to come together with strangers and cast spells, summon m

>He's also well to the right of most republicans from forty years ago, but there again, so are most democrats today - and practically all republicans now.

Let's test this thesis of yours. With an actual test.

Who said this?

1) "Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom."

Was it: A) Cliven Bundy, B) John F. Kennedy, C) Rush Limbaugh, or D) Ted Nugent?

2) "Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms. [...] the right of the citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government and one more safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible."

Was it: A) Obama, B) Hubert Humphrey, C) Ronald Reagan, or D) The Tea Party?

3) "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

Was it: A) Antonin Scalia, B) John F. Kennedy, C) Che Guevara, or D) Al Gore?

Ok, that might have been too easy. How about this one:

4) "The people of the United States should be forbidden to have in their possession any firearms, or any other type of weapon. The possession of weapons can make it difficult to collect taxes and dues and supports rebellion."

Was it: A) FDR, B) Al Gore, C) Truman, or D) Harry Reid?

If you want to cheat, these quotes can be found here: http://catb.org/~esr/guns/quot...

But more importantly, think about your thought processes as you try to answer them. Nobody would seriously think that Obama would ever in a thousand years say something like #2 (in fact, if you didn't laugh at that option, you probably don't have much of a sense of humor). But we'd seriously have to consider if it was Al Gore or Harry Reid that said that, since, again, the older Democrats were far to the right of the modern party.

JFK fought with Nixon in the debates over who was more anti-communist, and LBJ had that whole Vietnam thing. Modern Democrats are far, far to the left of the older Democrat party on most issues. Read LBJ talk about how the federal government shouldn't be in the business of law enforcement some time, and then contrast that against Harry Reid calling in snipers to try to push Cliven Bundy off his ranch.