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Good questions in the main article. Depriving English children of their childhood, trying to make white caucasians fit into the Chinese line-up-by-the-thousands for morning jump n' jacks is what we have allowed to happen. Computers aren't too blame. It's us. By going overboard acceptance of everyone else's methods, and the politically correct garbage, we forgot who we were, forgot what was best for us & our children. We transferred our adult inadequacies into the children, pushing them to learn guitar with fat fingers.

The Hell's Boomerang of the BOTH PARENTS HAVE TO WORK generation is coming home. Parents become surreal caricatures of parents the child doesn't see til it's bedtime, and even then the parents are too physically wasted & mentally drained from a dog eat dog day the children don't even rate a nighttime book reading. We are reaping what we are sowing by forgetting what we are sireing. Capitalism is killing us all, family member by family member, generation by generation. This will begin to turn around soon as we get completely off fossil fuels-powered engines that poisons us all, diminishes and degrades us to where we lose sight of what used to be our forefather's/mother's priorities. That day of Energy Freedom is a lot closer than most people know > http://www.newpath4.com/ . Here is a post I made on December 20, 2005 about Energy Freedom and what it will mean > http://www.renewamerica.us/bb/viewtopic.php?t=3975 . It is a non-political message for all to read and have new hope that we are about to all draw a second wind, get our bearings, re-establish familial priorities.

It requires three ZPMs to power the star drive for hyperspace.

Besides, last night they drained the ZPM to full entropy and it's no longer usable. Although how they released 75% of a ZPM's energy in thirty seconds without blowing a fuse is a bit of a mystery. And how three ZPMs were used to blow up Replicantis in orbit around the Atlanetean homeworld without destroying the entire solar system is a mystery. But the writers for season 2 and 3 of Atlantis and 9 and 10 of SG-1 haven't seemed to want to bother much with intriguing story lines, continuity, personable and real characters (General Landry, Tayla and the imaginatively named Ronin are about as deep as a cheese wheel), or anything else that made their brand of Science Fiction good for eight years.

Now SG-1 is an action show with MP5s and Uzis spraying bullets and killing entire SG teams like they're all wearing red shirts with no one batting an eye with starships and transporters and FTL always saving the day at the last second. The characters have become hollow caricatures of themselves. It's become self important science fiction masturbation instead of a story about people on Earth working to protect and make Earth better.

Stargate Atlantis lost everything it had going for it as soon as it made contact with Earth again. Now instead of roughing it on their own and struggling to make their way in a new galaxy they can just zip home and back in a few days and zipedeedoodah through the gate if they need to evacuate back. Instead of being forced to make new, geniune plot lines they're just rehashing the same crap from SG-1 (the trust? the IOC?) and haven't made a single discovery that's apparently worth sharing. You'd think that with the lost city of the Ancients and all their Ancient technology and a working ZPM for a year and a half they'd have, I don't know, learned something about their FTL drives, their weapons systems, their energy generation, their cloaking technology, their shield technology, medical science, nanotechnology, materials development, or gee, anything? Even SG-1 figured out naquadah generators from a 12 year old by the third season.

It seems like a lot of people got a big kick out of the campiness of the 200th episode of SG-1, with everyone saying "Oh, it's just the writers blowing off steam and really letting loose," as though the current writers put any work into their stories. It was supposed to be a joke about everything that's bad about science fiction like inversing the polarity to save the day, but it's SG-1 and Atlantis that have become the joke. Anyone that doubts that only needs to look at golden episodes of SG-1 to see how bad it's been these last two seasons (like the last five of season 8, Revisions, Abyss, Meridian, Absolute Power, 2010, Window of Opportunity, and The Fifth Race)--these days it's always inversing polarity or beaming them out of harm's way. Nothing is ever difficult to accomplish and nothing ever gets accomplished.

It's really too bad, too, because SG-1 was likely the best sci-fi show by consensus and Atlantis had a lot going for it with its initial idea. Now greed and poor decisions have robbed both, and my guess is Atlantis won't last long after SG-1 ends its run this season.

Didn't he roll up Arab caricatures into the Klingons?
Not as PC as he'd like to be remembered?

I'm talking "put up with little Johnny's abusive / antisocial behavior because he has a hard homelife - his parents both work and make $350K/yr. We should relish in Johnny's unique gifts."

Show us even ONE example of a tolerance curriculum embracing a child's abusive or antisocial behavior.

You are laboring under a caricature of the tolerance movement. And while I am sure that the occasional tolerance advocate goes off into the weeds, and begins teaching guff like that, it is obvious that they are an unimportant deviation from the core principle.

The core principle is "different is not automatically bad". Teaching this requires undoing a 100,000-year-old meme that once protected the tribe from predatory outsiders, which in turn requires the shifting of a great weight of social ballast. It will take a long time to get it right, and there will be many missteps along the way. But don't let that obscure your view of the goal's value.

Again, fair point. I was also generalising like crazy, but when you're talking about stereotypes of entire countries (especially ones the size or the USA) there are always going to be significant deviations from the mean.

All I was getting at was that the mean average loudness/patriotism/arrogance/forthrightness/whate ver was generally slightly higher amongst USians than Europeans.

It's also been observed that many nationalities tend to become more like their own caricatures the further they get from home - this is certainly the case with the "drunken Irish", "loud Australians" and "arrogant American" stereotypes.

Of course, the fact that local people expect these stereotypes can lead to them becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, and nothing's going to bump up your level of patriotism in a foreign land like having half the people you meet knocking your country down continuously...

Looks like I struck a nerve with a dipshit AC out there :-)

FWIW, tard, I respect people who are themselves without the airs and pretentions of being better than everbody else, which is a rare commodity especially with those thrust into (or seeking) celebrity.
As for caricature, you obviously never met the man. He may not have been as overly hyperactive as he was on the box, but he was damned close.

Next time try pulling your head out of your arse, I am no ocker but was always amused by the disdain wankers like you always held the man in for doing no more than being himself and getting paid arseloads of cash for doing it (as opposed to mortgaging up to the hilt to buy a BMW to sit around Double Bay pretending they are someone they are not).

It always does feel better for the try-hard urban pretentious wannabe sophisticate to run down the genuine down-to-earth ocker out there, get out of Sydney (you are from Sydney right) and go and meet some of them.

Ass-hat.

Yeah OK, so any Australian who doesn't go around in fucking khaki bshorts and a hat with corks screaming "crikey" "you beaut" like a retarded child is part of the chardonnay/latte sipping set (and therefore clearly not a Real Aussie, right?). You are a fucking idiot and I hope you choke on that watery dogs piss you call fourex.

Irwin was a middle of the road showman who appealed to American entertainment sensibilities by playing a caricature of what Americans think Australians are like. He was basically unknown in most of Australia until about 2002, so why the hell you're suddenly shedding tears now I'm fucked if I know.

I have nothing personally against the guy, and he probably did a bit for tourism here. Many people have mentioned that he did various things for environmental issues in Australia, though those people seem rather vague as to what those things actually were.

But the most ludicrous thing is this over the top outpouring of grief from Americans - even more so than usual with these creepy celebrity-death public mourning orgies. Christ, it's almost as bad as the Poms when Di died. Everyone piously trying to prove that they're more upset than everyone else.

Seriously - OK some entertainer is no longer around. It's sad for his family, but it's really nothing to do with you. Is anyone really that cut up that they're going to miss new episodes of some TV show?

I'm sorry, I just don't get the guy. Maybe its because I still remember Paul Hogan and am totally sick of people sending up Australians with these stupid caricatures. This afternoon I must have got five emails from people broadcasting the news.

After the first one I thought thats one less annoying thing on TV (100000 to go, maybe they can all go to FNQ). I'm sorry he's dead and I wish they had kept the news quiet until they tracked his wife down and told her properly. Now she is going to hear it from somebody on the overland walk and she is going to have to walk out. Thats really bad.

When you've living at (or below) subsistence level, $2 can make a hell of a lot of difference as to what goes in your shopping basket.

I'm sorry, but I find this highly unlikely. It sounds like a purely theoretical argument by someone imagining how things should work, rather than someone who's been there talking about how they actually do. I've been poor. There was a time when my family lived on food stamps and hand-me-down clothes from cousins. We ate a lot of beans and mystery meat. Going to the movies was a big deal and maybe we did it every few months or so. We had a television, but it was an 11" black-and-white job with the knobs busted off and a coat hanger for an antenna. Sometimes you had to hold the antenna to keep the picture from flopping around. My bed was an Army surplus bunk.

But if buying a $3 bulb instead of a $1 bulb would make a $10 difference over the next year, we'd have done it. It's not that hard to save up the extra $2. I can't imagine anyone not living in a cardboard box under a bridge who can't find $2 if he needs to.

Your argument, which I'll caricature as aw, those poor folks can't scrape up the capital, is very popular among the "helping" class. But I've never found it popular among the actual genuine poor. They feel -- heck I feel, having been there -- patronized. Just because you're poor doesn't mean you're an idiot and can't figure out how to finagle things so you can take advantage of a smart choice, even if it does mean you have to scrape up a little more capital up front.

If you were talking about finding the downpayment to buy a house in Southern California or the Bay Area, maybe you'd have a point. Although, even in that case, I know folks who started out poor who nevertheless figured out how to do it by discipline, patience and good planning.

bsurdity of the caricatures--one of smugness, the other abject squareness

Why would that make me want to buy EITHER?!?!

-Eric

I don't know. I think they're just right for the target audience; that is, if you find them callous and mean-spirited, maybe you take life too seriously to enjoy using a Mac at all. (Not you, of course. I mean "you" in the general.) On the other hand, if you're light-hearted enough to laugh along with the absurdity of the caricatures--one of smugness, the other abject squareness--you just might be the kind of person to appreciate a Mac.

Just one man's opinion.

for a sec there I thought you meant JAV cosplay conventions, and was going to beg for a link to schedules and registration, but then realizing you probably mean congregations of nerds as smelly, potbellied, bearded caricatures of fantasy and sci/fi novel, just forget it.

Actually, you are assigning motive to me in the absence of evidence.

Or, more particularly, I wrote the Ask Slashdot article in a way that would make it a good candidate to be posted as an Ask Slashdot lead article. The constraints are rather rigorous. It has to be short (I almost went over-long) it has to inspire interest. It has to be linkable even if it doesn't contain links (the editor added the link to the byzantine agreement page). It has to give sufficient context for both the questioner and the question (and I asked two questions).

In short it has to effectively communicate the conundrum(s) and points of conflict while remaining specific and topical.

In shorter, Ask Slashdot articles pretty much have to be caricatures of the issues.

I wasn't trying for "disdain" just "disappointment and chagrin" at what seemed to be a somewhat flawed experience. Others here seem to parrot that the experience is common, and may even be deliberate. If it is deliberate then _that_ (IMHO of course 8-) would be cause for disdain, but probably not for the individual interviewers.

In your senior / junior example, you miss an important point. The "most proper" way for a senior to train a junior with respect to "how would you find the index of an element of a sorted array with a particular value" demands the answer "I'd use bsearch". The follow up question "how does bsearch work" would have been appropriate. What I encountered instead was a demand that I reinvent the wheel letter-perfect instead.

To perfect your analogy, consider what would happen if the senior welder walked through and you demanded he weld a pipe to demonstrate his understanding of the importance of maintaining the static pressure, and having a man watching that pressure, in the main cooling loop. Wait, you say, that doesn't make sense. Exactly. Once the appropriate authority establishes that the guy has the necessary welding skills, you don't ask him to keep welding as a way of exploring the depth of his fitness to act as senior, you instead should be asking fitness related questions.

In our perfected analogy, it only takes one basic programming exercise to find out whether I have basic programming skills.

I was getting questions that, by this same analogy, would be like asking me to describe the reactor control room on a sub, and then complaining that my description didn't adequately account for the possibilities implicit in a municipal nuclear power station. Asking about a specific case instead of the general problem space, and then faulting the responder for answering the specific case asked, is just pointless.

Ah, trust... that's a funny concept. See, the funny thing is that at least mom actually trusted me and my brother. Or claimed to. I think we were pretty trustworthy kids, too, since basically (A) we didn't get enough time on our own to do anything bad anyway, and (B) for all other faults our education might have had, it was almost caricaturally Lawful Good.

Mom and dad were, and largely still are, complete nerds, and nerds often end up fond of distorted caricatures utopic ideals. Mom would have made a perfect D&D Paladin. Lawful Good to the bone, and willing to fight to death for the Right Thing. Regular knight in shiny armour, sworn to do her duty, and all that.

So we too got educated to honesty believe that kind of a distorted utopia. Don't lie, don't do anything bad, the good guys always win, etc. I _still_ have problems even playing an evil character in a video game like Knights Of The Old Republic, so I have trouble imagining that I would have been an evil backstabbing SOB as a kid.

Unfortunately if you've ever read about Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder, by now you also see the problem there. There's a name for that black-and-white good-vs-evil view of the world, and it's OCPD. OCPD people see very few shades of grey, if any. They live by the rules, do The Right Thing (TM), and anything less than a _perfectly_ done job is crap.

And so it came to apply to being a parent too. In mom's knight-in-shiny-armour view of the world, there were (and still are) no shades of grey between being completely uninvolved and smothering the living sanity out of us. Anything short of being 100% involved in 100% of what we ever do, would have counted as having failed her duty.

The same, incidentally, applied to everything we did too. Even a misplaced comma counted as a badly done homework in mom's view of the world. Hence the neverending negative feedback, and occasionally even more annoying consequences. She tried to turn us into, well, something that fit her black-and-white view of the world, and clearly in the white category at that.

I guess her being an Asperger's case there doesn't help either.

At any rate, rest assured that it wasn't lack of trust that basically cost me and my brother some 24 years each out of our lives. On the contrary. We were the most trusted prisoners ever. But, nevertheless, had a childhood and teenage life that is best compared to life in a federal prison.

If Weird Al were Luke Skywalker, then the RIAA would be the Empire and Sony would be the Emperor. Yes, the analogy's riddled with flaws, but you get the jist of it, right?

Before the DRM wars, Weird Al was one of about 4 artists whose every album I would purchase. The Sony relationship really pisses me off; it's getting harder and harder to avoid funding them these days. Someone else mentioned downloading songs & sending money directly to the artists -- an odd option, but perhaps worth considering. I like my MP3s at 320kbps though, so more likely I'll wait 'til I can find the album used, but still send Al at least the price of the CD.

Weird Al is an incredibly talented artist, and his attention to detail has gotten keener and keener over the years. Parodies and impressions get so much more punch when the artist catches some subtle detail of the original that you missed, then amplifies or caricatures it as a way of pointing it out to you. Yankovic is a master at this, so Poodle Hats off to him for his lifetime accomplishements in general, and for his spirit with stuff like DDTS in particular.

As a previous commenter suggested, the "RMS wants to forcibly prevent you from using proprietary software" is, from everything I've seen, a caricature of his position. He's arguably easy to caricature in this way, and that's unfortunate, but I don't believe you've done much research on what he's actually said. And with all due respect, even if Mr. Stallman has categorically stated that he would personally love to wave a magic wand and make all proprietary software vanish into a puff of smoke, that doesn't have much bearing on what the original poster you were responding to said. He argued why he feels proprietary software reduces your freedom. You may or may not agree, but he never argued your software should be taken away from you, and that is the argument you kept responding to. You were arguing against something he did not say in the first place.

Lest you think it's unfair of me to suggest that you're leaping to conclusions based on a fairly limited data set, I'll gently point out that you've already demonstrated doing that with me. I've said you seem to have constructed a straw man argument against the original poster, from which you've abstracted that not only does the OP agree in toto with RMS, but that I do as well. You'll find nothing in what I've said that's evidence I'm in significant agreement with the OP. Out of seven applications running on my machine right now, only one is open source; three are commercial third-party applications and the others are closed-source utilities that came with OS X.

For what's worth, I think closed source applications do "restrict your freedom" in the sense that you lack the freedom to (legally?) modify them. Having source available has helped me in a handful of cases over the years (such as an input manager for OS X I recently recompiled to work with my Intel MacBook -- Rosetta emulation didn't work in this case), so this isn't merely a theoretical advantage. Given a choice between a good proprietary package and a mediocre open source one, though, source code alone is not a sufficient factor to sway me, and the bugbear of "closed data formats your data will be lost forever!!!" isn't really very scary these days. (How many truly closed data formats are still in use outside vertical markets?) I'd rather be using TextMate than Emacs or Vim (and I've used both of those for years). Nothing in the open source world that I've found compares to Macromedia Fireworks, or OmniOutliner, or OmniGraffle Pro, and I'm going to keep using those, thanks. If someone really does choose to make a stand on having only open source software on their machine, though, good for them. If they want to advocate to me for why that's the One True Way, that's their right.

My point, I suppose, is simply this: fascism is a very, very strong word to being throwing around so facilely. I've heard more than one free software advocate claim that proprietary software is fascist, and I don't think that baldly stupid statement is best countered by claiming its inverse.

Now, the patent system and the patent community faced a major blow from the EU efforts. But the current problem is that US citizens are not organised and raise the issue of software patenting.

Us citizens like to play with the red herrings which are novelty and non-obviousness. You are unable to solve anything that way. The fundamental problem is not examination but that the patent system is applied to fields where it has no meaningful role/foundation such as software and business methods. there is no way to fix the problem with wiki solutions or input. The way to solve the problem is ptressure. The institutions will then come up with "wiki style participation and baseless patent reform discussions which lead nowhere. But what you really have to say is that there is no role for patents in software. Too radical? It is not. It is the only advocacy way to solve the problem.

Lawyers as an interest group. Sure, this should be made public. How our legal system and lawyers exploit business for their dirty battles. You know there was a funny caricature: One person takes the cow from the front, his antoganist pulls her from the back and the attoney sits in the middle and melks it. Political economy and economic foundation, these are the weak elements of the system.

Non-obviousness, novelty discussions, then you participate as an amateur in the patent toyground and the patent institutions laugh at you and aducate you about the importance of patent reform, however no improvements will be made.

Reminds me of a joke series by a French cartoonist, drawings from Eden featuring God, Adam, Eve and a lot of animals
Adam, slightly upset, leading a chimp by the hand, to Eve: "He even made a caricature of me!"

Funny how Islam took an end-run around that idea right from the start, and specifically made the Quran an infallible extension of God. Ever read The Satanic Verses? The parts about "the businessman" are basically a guidebook for how to establish a globe-spanning religion. I always wondered if Rushdie was inspired by the exploits of L Ron Hubbard, and based his caricature of Islam on Scientology.

Occasionally the odd peer does nod off during the debates. Who hasn't done this during a dull meeting? In general though, the quality of the debates is vastly greater than that in the Commons. This is partly because the peers do not have to worry about toeing the party line as much and partly because many of the life peers had already got to a very senior position in their field before gaining their peerage, so in that sense it is a meritocracy. One thing that really annoys me about our current government is that they love to caricature the Lords as being out of touch and undemocratic despite the fact that Tony Blair has created more life peers than any other Prime Minister so he must take a fair share of responsibility for its composition. Also, the government has back pedalled on its plans to make the second chamber more democratic as the more democratic legitamacy it gains, the stronger a challenge it becomes to the primacy of the Commons.