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An adaptation that tries to be close to a Heinlein book will flop: He makes about as much sense as Rand. The Starship Troopers movie is a hundred times more palatable than the book, mostly because it makes fun of Heinlein. The only way Stranger In a Strange Land can be filmed is as a porn caricature: Strippers in a Strange Land.

And Ringworld? Nothing happens in Ringworld.

I doubt that very much. Your argument sounds nice but logically it makes no sense. The "conservatives" would have wanted to make it sound MORE scary, not less.

Since largely speaking it was the liberals, not the conservatives, who were pushing the "global warming" agenda, it would only make sense that THEY were behind the change to make it "less scary" to the public.

Accepting for the sake of argument the common caricature of 'conservative' and 'liberal', I'm afraid the situation is quite the reverse. The common notion of a conservative in conversations like this is one who is pro-business and pro-fossil fuels. Such a one recognizes the many material benefits and the great we have gained through our fossil-fueled economy. He concludes, therefore, that undermining that fossil-fueled economy would undermine the economy and its concomitant benefits. If scientists come out and say that this fossil fueled economy directly increases CO2 to dangerous levels, the conservatives will want to minimize the scope of the threat in the public consciousness inasmuch as they fear the loss of the economy more than warnings of the scientists.

The common notion of a liberal in like context is one who is pro-regulation and pro-environment. Such a one believes rising CO2 levels a threat to the environment and would like to further regulate its emissions. Increasing public fear of the greenhouse effect (using more frightening terms like climate change) will increase the chances that the public will favor more regulation, even if that means paying more for energy. What would it profit a man, after all, to gain the whole world's wealth but to lose the world he can live in due to environmental catastrophe? So it really is quite the opposite of what you say. Such conservatives would desire a more subdued term, like climate change, while such liberals would prefer something more alarming.

All that being said, those are just the caricatures of 'conservative' and 'liberal' that act as tropes in our political discourse. The reality of both is rather more complicated. I count myself a conservative, for example, but one who in addition political, religious, and social traditions also thinks the environment something of conservation. (In this, I agree with the likes of Wendell Berry, inter al.)

Incidentally, you complain above about being marked troll and I think it a fair complaint. For what it's worth, I disagree with your position but I did not take you as trolling. I haven't a problem with people up-modding comments they agree with but I do not care for disagreement being expressed with down-mods--that's what replies are for. "Troll" mods should be saved for actual trolls; there are enough to choose from.

That's called caricaturing. Look it up, then look at the quote above in context of the previous post.

I understand what caricaturing is, I do not understand why the hell you put it in quotation marks if it was not a quotation.

Lol, that site is about as far from impartial as you can get.

You are confusing "political correctness" to "being correct".
In fact, it's often kinda impossible to keep on being "impartial" AND on topic when you start listing facts about something and all of them are quite bad.

"No, no, no... They don't say his writing lacks facts to back it up. They only have issues with the fact that he's drawing conclusions out of his ass and making up a 'better' version of facts cause he didn't understand the original, boring ones."

Not sure where that came from, it is not a quote from my reply to you or wikipedia. You do not source it, so not really sure how it pertains to anything unless it is what you are saying, in which case I am just confused by the quotation marks around it.

That's called caricaturing. Look it up, then look at the quote above in context of the previous post.

That WAS the main thrust of the criticism on the wikipedia page linked to originally though.

Aaaand that is why I said "Criticism of Gladwell is more extensive." to indicate how THAT which is listed on wikipedia is just the tip of the iceberg.

And why do you keep jumping back to "not on wikipedia page, not on wikipedia page..."?
Haven't you already disregarded it as "Bah, that's only wikipedia"?

I can find you just as many articles saying you shouldn't go to wikipedia looking for factual information either :)

It can't be that you'd want to limit the discussion in such a way that you can then disregard any counterargument with logical fallacies.
That would be silly.

I believe the term surrogate here is being used to mean substitute. As in abandoning ones real personality and substituting one created in social media.

In the past, it was accepted for some people to have stage names (or nom de plume). It was a way to separate work from private life. The stage name could go with an invented personality. Sometimes it was a character name that became associated with an actor. They could ham it up, then go home. It only got weird when someone permanently became the caricature they created.

With traditional media, that was limited and controlled. Not many people had reasons for stage names, and when and where they had to use it was easier to define. And the true wackos (unless it was matched by great talent) were sidelined.

With social media, everyone is creating a stage name. And blurring the lines of when they are using it. They spend huge amounts of time polishing the image they project. They use it as a substitute for real interactions with other human beings. For some, it becomes a warped substitute for their actual personality, which they neglect. Not for everyone, but all to many people.

As the actor playing the Doctor, Matt has seen some of the pressure to become the surrogate personality. To become the Doctor 24/7. He believes social media increases that pressure. So he's opted out of social media. And he's suggesting that others would benefit from opting out too. Not because there isn't anything to be gained, but because creating and becoming a surrogate personality is not worth it.

Nope, I'm just opposed to health insurance (in its current form.) Auto/fire/theft insurance is one of those "just in case" things. If you are careful, you may never need to use that insurance, and therefore your insurance costs will be lower, and that's a great thing.

Health insurance is a different thing altogether, because everyone is going to need to get health care throughout their life. Even if you're careful, exercise all the time, eat well, you could still have a incredibly costly genetic disease that will bankrupt you even with good insurance. If you avoid getting health care throughout your life, you're going to tend to be less healthy...and then eventually you'll need costly care, and in the end you haven't saved any money at all.

I agree we should extend the benefits of Medicare. In fact, let's extend it to cover everyone in the US, i.e. Medicare Part E (for everyone.) Great idea, I'm glad you recommended it. You do realize Medicare is a single payer system right?

Cato Institute? Puh-lease. Why don't you just link directly to redstate.com or huffingtonpost.com? It would be just as fair and balanced as anything from the Cato Institute, a well-known libertarian think tank that is opposed to the government being in charge of anything.

The free market has had plenty of time to demonstrate to us exactly how they handle healthcare insurance. If the free market worked, healthcare in the US wouldn't be in the state it is today. Instead what we get with free market healthcare is preexisting conditions, yearly and lifetime benefit limits, insurance companies that spend all their time figuring out how to not pay claims, insurance companies that will cancel your coverage if you have an expensive claim and forgot to mention on your insurance application that you had acne treatment when you were 17, etc.

I've worked in the healthcare industry for over 10 years, and I've been on both ends: I worked for an insurance company, and I work now for a healthcare clinic. Please don't try to tell me that insurance companies' hands are tied by the government, and that's why costs are high and coverage is bad. Insurance companies are in the business to make as much money as they can, and they do that by paying as little as they can, and charging as much money as they can get away with. Any savings they pass on to shareholders, they don't cut costs to their customers. They also raise costs to providers by each one having their own highly specific rules about how claims must be submitted and formatted, what information needs to be sent with each claim, etc. If the insurance companies would get together and decide on a set of common rules, we could reduce complexity and cost for providers and patients. But instead we have a Business Office with around 20 employees, processing claims for 30 physicians. It's sure great for providing a lot of jobs, but increases the prices for everyone.

Not sure where you got the part about "everyone who disagrees with you is an inhuman monster who just wants poor people to suffer and die". Was that directed at me, or just at some caricature Democrat/liberal/socialist that you are assuming I am?

But if he a great salesman but has not made any great products, but still continues to make great sales, what does it make him? A con man? The Great Snake Oil salesman?

They also say nice things about Bill Gates as a person. Apparently his assistants contested the property tax assessment from the city and Bill ordered it be withdrawn and paid the assessed tax quietly without fuss. Also both Bill and Melinda were very nice and polite to the parents of playmates and friends of their children.

Sorry no citations.

contracts are a fairly modern invention, which reply on a state level society with rule of law

I think state-level society and the rule of law are older concepts than you think. Certainly contracts are. The very earliest forms of writing are records of commercial agreements. This is beside the point of the universality of male-female marriage; a red herring.

a man and as many women as he can afford to marry

Note that I didn't say "one man and one woman". It's not accurate to say that marriage is regarded as a union between a man and one-or-more-women; this situation is (AFAICT) universally regarded as several marriages. Ancient societies that allowed polygamy certainly did not consider this some sort of union between the women involved, but between the man and each woman. This is again beside the point of marriage between men and women; a red herring.

if the man has no brothers, but has sisters, the sister's might be expected to take over the husbandly duties).

I've never heard of one - care to offer a reference? At any rate, generally speaking, ancient societies that operated in that way regarded the family member as acting as the representative of the dead man - so any children would be legally his. There was no general acceptance of same-sex marriage. This is, again, a red herring, though slightly nearer the point than the others.

For the vast majority of Western history, women were treated like property, and marriage was an exchange of property which happened to include a woman.

That is a popular myth, but I don't think it's even close to true. Certainly the formalities have always said that it is not true. If we are restricting ourselves to Western societies in the past thousand years or two then we are basically talking about Christian traditions of marriage. The Christian ceremony of marriage has always included a longish preamble that sets out the purpose of marriage and it certainly doesn't describe it as a transfer of property. It is centrally a promise to love and to cherish, not to own. Ecclesiastical (ie church) law has always recognised the invalidity of a marriage where one partner did not freely consent to the marriage and has provided for annulment of marriages on this basis. If we further restrict ourselves to Anglo-American culture, English law has always recognised the presumed agency of wives with respect to their husband's property - that is, a wife is free to enter into any and all contracts regarding her husband's property and the law will presume that she has the right unless there is specific evidence to rebut it. This is not a wife being part of her husband's property but having control over it.

I'm not making an argument in the women-always-had-it-good-they're-just-a-bunch-of-whingers line; there have certainly been gross injustices dished out to them and often the law has failed to protect them. But your description of marriage is just gross fabrication. People haven't changed much, you know; people have always grown up, fallen in love, got married, had children, died. It's not always perfect, in fact often enough we manage to hurt each other a lot, but yes, it's an institution that I think is worth legally enforcing. Since the nearest you can come up with to an argument for changing that definition of marriage is a gross caricature, count me unconvinced.

The short answer is that you can't. Your boss, if he / she is a programmer, will go to bat for you, and say "this won't happen; deal with it." If they aren't, you're screwed.

See, in the business world, much to its caricature, there are people who think they are business-savy. They watch 'The Apprentice' with a notepad in hand, and think that when it comes time to handling outside work, it's all about how fiercely you negotiate. Your non-programmer boss, who got his start in sales / marketing, is used to promising people stuff that others need to deliver on...as well as combing over any problems when a 'whoopsie' happens (missed deadline, etc.); he is also used to the idea of pandering to the client, and doesn't understand the intricacies of telling the client, in non-subtle, but non-insulting language, that something simply cannot happen.

So, when your client comes to negotiate with your boss, he's going to give them everything for nothing; he doesn't know this, but he does it. He's going to ask for time estimates from a programmer, where things operate in a completely different kind of world (every project is a new set of problems, first rule; ergo, all time estimates are vague and unreliable...even for 'easy' projects, because of some stuff I will touch on later); he's going to take these time estimates, and shave them down...asking the programmer, "Can't we try to get this done by Tuesday? And we can fall back to Friday if it doesn't work out." The programmer, of course, will tell him the truth (the programming / mathematical truth), which is "Sure, we can try to get it done faster." But in reality, it's not a magic button that gets pressed to make things 'go faster.' So, your boss tells the client his truth, which is that the project will possibly be done by Tuesday. The client, hearing this, thinks that it might be done by Monday, but will begin annoying your boss via phone calls as of Tuesday.

Now, let's take a moment to look closely at some of the elements around this scenario: your boss is going to charge the client for a certain amount ($2K), based off of your low wage, long hours, and another project that will be coming up a few days later for another client (it's all about volume). The actual cost of the project is $3K, but after your boss is worked down in negotiations ("We need to keep this client / build a relationship. We'll make it up to you with more work down the line / another project from them that will be worth more at some point in the future."), it'll be $2K. Bear in mind that the Tuesday deadline is actually negotiated by this client as well...so from their viewpoint, they've gotten a pretty sweet deal according to Apprentice 101: by dominating your boss, they got him to place their project at the top of the 'critical priority' pile...and they saved themselves $1K.

Your boss, believing the lies of his industry, thinks he's building a relationship with the client...he's not, since the client will bounce as soon as he tries increasing the costs anywhere near market rate, and they know that they can tweak him at will to speed things up / shave costs because he's already done it once before. Meanwhile, you, the programmer, are doing $7K worth of work, and enjoying near constant panic attacks because -> the client submits development requirement changes piecemeal, via email, telephone, SMS, Skype, and toilet paper. Your boss, of course, will come to you, and ask you if you can just do these extra tasks...that they won't take too much extra time, right? Of course not...changing the backend from SQL to NoSQL, and the frontend from ASP.NET to PHP shouldn't take any extra time at all...you're a programmer...you're second-kin to a magic elf...you can just not sleep, and reach into your magic bag of tricks, and pull off this thing by Tuesday's lunch. And skilled salesman that your boss is, he's either giving the changes away to the client for free, or taking on an absurdly low number for the additional work ("It'll pay for itself in the long run, you'll see!").

So, Monday

I've been treated at my $company to some Atlassian products (Jira, Confluence).

From my POV, it's just your "enterprise level Java hairball" (in marketing talk a "stack", perhaps because it sounds a bit more orderly) rendering a sad and bureaucratic caricature of things which already are around, like wiki and issue tracker. Crowd seems to be some single-sign-on thingie (think Kerberos and Moonshot, but perhaps pounded into a buzzword compliant but barely usable minceball).

The whole presence of scantily-clad women as a way of attracting attention to your booth assumes that the people whose attention you want to attract are heterosexual males who are inclined to pay attention to your exhibit because there's a scantily-clad woman there. It implicitly assumes that you're not trying to get the interest of/don't care about the opinions of, among others: women, homosexual men, the devoutly religious, etc. In the same way that an ad campaign that includes a of, say, racist caricatures of Asians effectively writes off the Asian population as potential customers (at the very least), this sort of thing writes off whole groups of people who are, you know, actually present in the tech industry. Funny how an industry that supposedly prides itself on evaluating results and actual ability so often tacitly assumes that it is the exclusive domain of straight, white males. It's almost as if cluelessly ignoring the reality of privilege, racism, sexism, and heteronormativity leads to cluelessly privileged, racist, sexist, heteronormative behavior.

Right, because monitoring for air and water pollution - protecting the natural Commons - is totally the same as funding amoral corporate agribusiness.

Did I say that? No. You're putting up a strawman.

I'm guessing you are a Brown Energy Libertarian, in favor of individual freedom when it comes to polluting shared resources, and totally authoritarian when it comes to spending tax dollars on nuclear boondoggles that taxpayers clearly do not want. Do I get a prize? Did I guess right? You have a couple of the tells.

Typical liberal moron: you are reducing everything to caricatures. It's not worth debating with you. Just understand: you are the source of the problem.

Despite volumes of information on how things like depression and anxiety are both physical and mental, sometimes inheritable, linked to genes that regulate serotonin, linked to biological (hormonal eg glucocorticoid) markers, and have drastic physical consequences on the body in terms of elevated stress responses that affect a manifold of parasympathetic CNS responses, and with that increased risk of major illnesses, despite all the information in the world detailing how it is real, you'll still find lots of people who claim it isn't, or that people are just making it up to be victims. They don't get that the brain is a physical thing, and what happens to it affects YOU, everything you do, your decisions, emotions, etc. It's almost like they are naive dualists who don't know they are espousing dualism.
I mean the top rated posts in this thread are great, but you know the types, the ones who give out terrible and useless advice. It's ironic how mental health issues turn ordinary people who claim to like science into much the same as creationists: utilizing straw men, attacking caricatures of real science, doing anything but addressing the real issues the science brings up.
And yes, as others have hinted, one can be incredibly intelligent, productive, one can be anything really, and still fall victim to it. /end rant

The way women are portrayed in much of the media has a negative effect on many of them, especially the younger ones who are extremely image concious. It is a problem for men as well of course, with most male characters in games being improbably proportioned. It's clearly worse for women though, with many female characters being little more than eye candy or some weird kind of action-man-in-a-woman's-body caricature like the old version of Lara Croft.

So instead we send them to a Pussycat Dolls or Beyonce concert...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=od0na1D3pwk ... but being 'scantily clad women' on a stage in front of thousands (earning $thousands for a few hours) is "empowered", while being a 'scantily clad woman' in front of a couple thousand gaming geeks is 'degrading'? And having our young girls growing up wanting to be dancing around on stage wearing next to nothing is "empowered", but having them want to grow up to be a stripper doing a poledance at the local strip club isn't. Seems like the only difference is fame & money to me.

So maybe if they pay these girls at the E3 show say $10K/day (good money!) then it'll be ok and it suddenly won't be "sexist" because they're obviously making a good buck doing it?

The way women are portrayed in much of the media has a negative effect on many of them, especially the younger ones who are extremely image concious. It is a problem for men as well of course, with most male characters in games being improbably proportioned. It's clearly worse for women though, with many female characters being little more than eye candy or some weird kind of action-man-in-a-woman's-body caricature like the old version of Lara Croft.

Being vigilant is not the same as being paranoid. It helps no one for an uninformed voice to be extolling the power and might of some imagined boogie man. In science, many things are possible. Yes I do work in the field. Therefore I feel I have a more realistic view of the situation firmly grounded in what is actually true or achievable. It takes a lot of dedication, discipline, and maturity to do science. That for the most part will weed out a lot of bad elements. On the other hand, you don't need a whole lot of training to build pipe bombs and shrapnel filled pressure cookers. And no one will deny the terror created by events of the Boston marathon. But for you to use the possibility of bio-terrorism as a means to express such a critical perspective to the benefits of investing in genomic research is deeply irresponsible to the enormous good that this emerging field has and will continue to do. Does anyone hold Henry Ford responsible for hundreds of thousands of vehicular deaths? Have the Wright brothers ever been vilified for creating the means to carpet bomb large swaths of civil infrastructure? I would like to think your heart is in the right place. But to be blunt, your foot is firmly planted in your mouth on this subject.

Your assertion that no one will ever try eugenics again is delusional. Hungary for example is already drifting towards an anti semitic neo nazi state in the heart of Europe. As Greece plunges in to an economic abyss, a fascist state is a highly possible outcome. Genomics would have been a boon to the final solution and breeding a master race.

If you believe it is the responsibility of today's genomic research pioneers to fix what is at its heart a social-economic-political problem, *YOU* are delusional. You are not going to abate someone's deep-seated sense of ill will or bigotry by limiting their means to do harm. If you ignore the source of someone's malevolence, no amount of sanctions suppression will stop them from standing against you. That is not the fault of the farmers who grow your food, the mechanics who fix your cars, *OR* the genomics-enabled health care professionals who treats your illness.

Claiming your commitment to "wisdom of civilization and culture" while you sling epithets like "redneck" and "skinhead" doesn't put you or your cause in a positive light. Labeling people as "rednecks" indicates you have a tendency to stereotype people the same way eugenicists do.

The only indication I can discern is that we have a mismatched sense of humor. I speak lightly of this because I find many of your arguments not very sensible and sometimes downright ridiculous. Yes, I singled out rednecks and skinheads as objects of caricature. I supposed I could have chosen any number of groups who would rather curse the darkness than light a match. Religious fundamentalists, uncompromising US congressional representatives, post-modern literary critics - take your pick.

I like the show, however sometimes I feel they go too far to try to portate the stereotype of the geek

The four main characters, to me, are all caricatures of me when I was young. That makes it even funnier to me. Apparently to Buzz Aldrin, George Smoot, and Stephen Hawkins, all fans of the show who have appeared on it poking fun at themselves. The Buzz Aldrin one was hilarious; Howard had just returned from the ISS and wouldn't shut up about space until Bernadette gave him a video of Aldrin passing out Halloween candy. "Here's a Mars bar. Mars is in space. Here's a Milkey Way. Here's a moon pie. I've been on the moon!"

If you can't laugh at yourself you have no right to laugh at anyone else.

And they make fun of stupid jocks as much as they make fun of us, like when the four were measuring the distance to the moon by shooting a high powered laser at the mirror astronauts left there, and Penny's stupid boyfriend says "You're shooting a laser at the moon? Aren't you afraid you'll blow it up?"

That last paragraph you made was insightful.

They are shown as Humans, not as some sort of freaks.

They're caricatures. Sheldon is the mad scientist. Howard is the horny Jew. Raj is the fresh-off-the-boat immigrant. Penny is the airheaded waitress. Despite the trappings of geek culture, the show is actually a pretty formulaic sitcom with simple plots and low-brow jokes. (Raj can't speak to women, so he takes experimental medicine and takes off his pants. A man in tighty-whities is always good for laughs.) They could all be factory workers and the show would be pretty much the same.

That said, if you judge it according to what it is trying to be, it is in fact very well done and a good example of a formulaic sitcom.

Frankly if I thought the idea of a sky-fairy running a magical kingdom keeping us all immortal forever was even remotely plausible, I'd convert yesterday. But, frankly, it ISN'T even remotely plausible, which is why I'm an atheist. Clearly some of the people in this article made the jump. Good for them. They get some consolation in their time of grief. Being right is overrated.

That bolded part is probably why people who believe in a higher power don't like talking to you. If you believe that is all there is to religion, and by that I mean the concept of a God figure consciously bending our world to his whims, then it would seem likely you have not put more thought into religion than "Caricatured Christianity sounds dumb, I'm doing something else."

Indeed, I'm astonished that anyone would think upper management drives innovation. Usually they're obsessed with insuring conformity and making sure no one shows any initiative - especially if it involves risks.

However, I'm delighted to learn that it is now possible to post articles from alternative universes...

So, "upper management" includes the people who run Apple, Google, Spotify, Nintendo, Amazon, Valve, etc. etc.. It is not synonymous with bad management and lack of innovation drive, even if that is the experience and/or caricature picture many have of how businesses are run. It too often is the case that corporations are run in an innovation-stifling manner, but that is bad management, nothing more, nothing less. And given how much bad management there is, and how important it is to have good management, it is interesting how under-appreciated this is sometimes, but let that lay..

The problem with giving to much innovation freedom to too many is that a business need to have and follow a strategy. If you are all over the place with ideas that are not supporting the same strategy you are not going to be successful -- even if they individually are good ideas. This is the key thing many struggle to understand. They might be good ideas, for another company, but if it is a diversion of resources and synergy (sorry) from what supports the main strategy, it can be dangerous, even if successful. Strategy is underrated, it eats innovation culture for breakfast.