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I can hardly believe that this isn't a caricature of how kids are raised in the US. Is it really that bad? While this doesn't sound like it is a good preparation for leadership it also sounds like it isn't a good preparation for something far less ambitious but much more important: standing on your own legs, being able to deal with everyday life. Why the focus on leadership?

All this caricatureing merely proves that you're all a bunch of ignorant wankers circle-jerking together.

Really.

You're just wanking over the manufactured stupidity of someone that doesn't exist, thinking this somehow proves you're clever.

OK, a few riffs on the meme is amusing, but this was done dead on this thread along ages ago.

Read up on amplifier theory. Stop parroting "Nyquist limit! Nyquist limit!" at least long enough to read up what the fucking hell it means and what it DOESN'T mean.

Read up on the difference between solid state amplifiers and class A amplification. Read up on the difference between even harmonics and odd harmonics. Read up on the difference between digital amplification and analogue amplification.

Else you're merely displaying a level of ignorance barely distinguishable from the caricatured you're "joking" about.

You found out that despite reason and logic's many virtues, some people will purposefully blind themselves to them, if only to win an argument; that even though you may be correct, and the other person wrong, the other person will deny the correctness of your position if only to deny you hearing them say you are correct? That some people think that yelling, screaming, and violence are valid substitutes for leadership? That corruption is institutionalized, and couldn't be wiped out even if humanity were reduced to a handful of individuals? That you have more to fear from family that your enemies? That although a single word may be held to have the same meaning by all people, the emotional connotations associated with it alter its understanding in intangible ways? That you may spend more of your time defending your rights and asking others to keep their promises than you will planning a better world / understanding this one? That at the end of the day, your problems stem not from within, but from without? That you will spend more time combating caricatures of the points you are trying to make, in other's heads, than you are comfortable admitting?

And at age 180, you will only begin to understand what any of this means.

The caricature of the devil _reigning_ over hell is not a biblical one - rather, hell is where the devil will himself be punished (Matt 25:41, Rev 20:10). Your strawman pastor doesn't know his basic theology if he can't answer that one :)

*facepalms*

I agree with your assessment, but damn is that depressing to read at 4 AM.

Still the idea of bringing war to the internet is...well, you don't want to know what I think about it. Caricatures of Officer Farva (from Super Troopers, http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_a1Gr4UKmN6Y/S-nv_mdqNvI/AAAAAAAACTM/dQ0-RwCCau8/s1600/largefarva.png) come to mind when I think of the kinds of people training to be 'cyber-commandos.' The idea that they want to turn our playground into a battlefield...

Next time read the ACTUAL STUDY before shooting your mouth off about what it says.

I did read the actual study, and apparently you didn't :)

Again, from the ACTUAL STUDY:

"Contrary to SCT predictions, higher degrees of science literacy and numeracy are associated with a small decrease in the perceived seriousness of climate change risks. "

So again You can't tell the difference between generalised scientific literacy/numerical ability and knowledge of a very specific subject?

I can absolutely tell the difference, but apparently you can't - let's try again. Here's my statement:

"The more scientifically informed one was, the less likely one was to believe that human CO2 emissions are going to cause unprecedented, catastrophic global warming."

Apparently you don't understand that "scientifically informed" == "scientific literacy" :)

You deny previously admitting that the science was falsifiable - except below you admit it again.

You're being obtuse, yet again. You apparently cannot tell the difference between "CO2 has specific absorption properties" and "human CO2 emissions are going to cause catastrophic global warming". The two are *not* equivalent :)

You assert a very precise theory: that the effects of all that CO2 will be no effect to trivial effect on global climate.

I've said no such thing. The null hypothesis is that climate change today is natural, just as climate change has been natural for aeons. It is your burden, in the affirmative, to show that natural climate change no longer applies to our observations. And I still await your necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement to that effect :)

Seriously, do you read what you're writing before you hit "submit"? You do understand that you're continually avoiding the specific question, and willfully misunderstanding the careful and specific distinctions I'm making, right? Or does the world just get all red and fuzzy in an angry haze when you think about how many people are going to be killed by the use of natural petroleum products? I seriously couldn't create a caricature of a rabid warmist more extreme than you've been so far :)

It has little to do with beliefs at this point, tea partiers today are simply rooting for one side in a wrestling match. It's not that they think Triple-H has a better philosophy than The Rock Obama, they just have decided they really hate The Rock Obama.

What in specific have tea partiers said that leads you to believe they think that way? I think most of them have actual beefs with Obama. Their beefs may be wrong, but you're not going to be able to do any good if you refuse to understand the other side's point of view, which is what you're doing by thinking of them as these caricatures.

The people who support your ideal are the good guys, the people who don't are the bad guys.

This is moral relativism patronization. Didn't these kind of theories get debunked a few years ago? And can you give a concise view of how exactly this applies to the current situation and not just some shit you're flinging on the wall to sound oh so hipster cynical cool?

The issue I have always had was the double standard that a lot of people in the Open Source Community have. It is OK to pirate Closed Source tool, but if a company breaks a rule in the GPL they should be fully punished. That is the most damaging part, because in order for the GPL to be respected the GPL community needs to respect the other Licenses out there.

This is so far in the camp of oxymoron as to be a caricature. You cannot be a serious GPL supporter and advocate infringing proprietary software. Of course Slashdot stopped being an Oasis of common sense long ago so I fully expect your FUD to make it to +5 and me to get modded to oblivion.

I won't disagree with you about your points re OCD and that people can focus without being debilitated. Sometimes a clinical diagnosis of a disorder will depend on whether the sum of characteristics is debilitating or causes life problems. Me: I see nothing wrong with laughing at myself and fellow types while pointing out that one person's disability is another's advantage.

As far as being "Morlocks", we are all susceptible to caricature and stereotype. Could be worse: we could be "Fubar" oil-field trash headbangers and still be IT nerds. C'est la vie.

Cheers

How amusing that you claim an ad hominem bias when you utilize at least two in your above argument. First, your ad hominem attack on feminism (which is no singular view but a vast multiplicity of views that you clearly have constructed a caricature of), and second, your tu quoque ad hominem response to the above poster, claiming that it's ok to be biased against women, because supposedly, feminism is biased too.

"If you want to argue politics, argue with facts and figures, not with caricatures and extreme examples. It is actions like these that are the reason that political discourse has degenerated to an even lower low than normal."

"I'm sorry, but Tea Party = batshit insane."

The prosecution rests.

There are just as many "entitled cunts" that are politically opposed to the Tea Party - Maxine Waters comes to mind. Her political views here are immaterial to the first part of your post "Because she's batshit insane" - plenty of insane people on both sides of the aisle. Someone being a stupid nutjob is one thing, but using such a person in a straw-man argument against any of their other beliefs is a major logical fallacy that BOTH sides of the aisle need to stop if we are to have any hope of productive political discourse in the future.
Yes, she is clearly an unbalanced individual, and deserves the proper scorn for that. Her political beliefs, however, should be taken as secondary. If you want to argue politics, argue with facts and figures, not with caricatures and extreme examples. It is actions like these that are the reason that political discourse has degenerated to an even lower low than normal.

tl;dr - Batshit insane woman who believes X does not equal X is a batshit insane belief.
The difference between converse and contrapositive - learn it!

I've been reading his blog for years, and I wouldn't call him a "gun-toting tea party survivalist". That's a meme-loaded caricature that honestly just doesn't fit the man.

Now, he's a devoted follower of Rand Paul, which tells me that I couldn't vote for him. The son is not the father! But Massie is neither a super-trustworthy ultra-genius nor a serial-killer-worshipping Ayn Rand clone, he's a fairly normal politically naive idiot just like the ones nearly every slashdotters see when they look in the mirror in the morning.

Or, as most often is the case, his beliefs and politics do not conform to your caricatured image of Tea Party members. Most of us who complain that the "other side" has maliciously stereotyped us, pigeonholed us into permanent roles as communists, neo-cons, all-or-nothing liberals or all-or-nothing conservatives, often have trouble restraining ourselves from doing the same.

Just read through your argument.
You seemed to misapprehend a lot of valid points being made by your debating partner.

I think the problem stems from the notion of what a Free Market can be when used appropriately by a conscientious population, and our present reality which contains psychopaths and psychopathic thinking.

As it stands, the "Free Market" is an illusion. It's not free at all. (If one's definition of "Free" means unrestricted opportunity for everybody to exploit the market as they see fit.) I see a lot of restrictions, many of which are backed up by military and covert operations designed to reduce whole population centers into servitude.

In the psychopath's language, however, it certainly is a "Free" market. The psychopath's definition of "Free" means, "Freedom to ignore social and community responsibilities, moral obligations and rational long-term planning, in order to create and abuse slaves and pillage environments and resources for short term profit." Oppressive banana republics and puppet governments in oil producing nations are just one aspect of the legacy of these practices, all resultants from the psychopath's concept of "Freedom".

The banking system is another. Through usury, the banking controllers ensure that the money supply, by default due to its pyramid schematic nature, always lags far behind the amount of debt in existence. This results in deliberately controlled eras of widespread property foreclosure which swells the material holdings of banking entities and the wealth of the small number of people at the top of that system. The Free Market does not control for this; competitive economic models which would offer a much more level playing field have never been allowed to exist in any significant way. The recent bombing of Libya was an excellent example of this process; the first thing the CIA-appointed rebels did upon wresting power from the government was to establish a central bank modeled after the Western system to replace the more socialist system which had been in place. A true Free Market would have allowed the Libyan market to function and survive or die upon its own merits. Instead the psychopathic elements of the world governments interpreted "Freedom" according to their diseased cognitive functions and the free expression of the market was violently truncated.

Pan national corporate efforts create vast and concentrated pools of wealth and control which have the power, through a Market Free of rational oversight, to execute such maneuvers as the wholesale distribution of toxic foodstuffs (heavy in grains, sugars and vegetable oils), which create the very diseases for which they can then sell drugs. This tactic also creates a feebleness of mind which lowers the chances of people discerning reality with enough clarity to avoid such traps. Such is just one example of psychopathic exploitation of the market. There are many others.

Media similarly uses covert psychological control measures to enfeeble populations in ways they rarely even realize are happening, all so as to strip true Freedom from the markets and instill biased, restrictive systems under a caricatured rubric of "Freedom".

This is why a minimum of controls are necessary to maintain Freedom as Normal humans understand it in the Market place. Lying, cheating, stealing and bullying tactics, Normals naturally wish to be free of in a market place. Those are the ground rules which must be accepted in order for an otherwise Free Market to flourish. Of course, these basic humane rules the Psychopathic elements of the population see as a vast aggressive act against themselves and what they consider their version of "Freedom" to be.

Between these two concepts of "Freedom" people who wish to debate the issue are stuck and first need to define clearly in order to proceed.

Exactly so. Anyone who's not part of the mainstream political establishment, including Tea Partiers, Occupiers, and libertarians, should be working together to fight the corporatism that strangles us all. Instead, activists on the left and the right are assiduously kept distracted by hating the other side, often by being fed caricatures of the other side's motivations.

> "easy-of-use"
> software replacing photographers = outsourcing?

I'm not bothering to RTFA, as from my standpoint I'm not too worried about software replacing photographers. Some conveniences will come into play - an automated system at Rite Aid to take your photo, maybe a kiosk downtown that takes your picture and then makes a caricature. But then, the summary seems to focus on rendering vs actual photographs, which I think we won't really see much of - sometimes it's easier to render, but most of the time you pay a lot less to have someone go out and snap 20 photos vs having a 3D designer toil away on sketches, mockups, renderings, etc.

I agree with your general sentiment that many of these icons are not particularly outdated so long as you accept the underlying metaphor to begin with. For example, a magnifying glass is probably no more or less used today than it was 60 years ago. It was always a very loose metaphor, referring more to a caricature of Sherlock Holmes than anything else. Bookmarks are also quite easy to grok if you accept the notion of the web as a "book" of independent documents (which even in the 90s seemed weird to me, as places in cyberspace metaphor worked much better for the web than the documents in a sequential book metaphor did, even then).

For some of your specifics, though, I have to disagree. First, there is a definite bias towards items a paper-heavy office. That's fine, but the largest consumers of technology don't work in those anymore. Some are not in offices, and others are in offices where all of their work is through a company system on the computer.

Anything that's based on technology from 60-100 years ago is definitely dated, because they have to pic a single incarnation of the technology that stands out as much as possible from other items. Modern design aesthetic is to smooth corners, hide the pokey bit, and as much as possible reduce every device to a rectangle with a screen (which maybe you can touch).

Polaroids look like Polaroid prints. Most pictures look like Kodak prints (rectangles with a picture covering it completely) and pretty much no one prints their photos anymore. They are stored on their computer instead of in an album, or carried on a phone instead of in a wallet.

Many people receive bills in the form of an email saying either, "it's time to log in to the web site and pay your bill," or, "we have deducted the required amount from the bank account you provided. Thank you for using auto-pay."

Microphones used in bars an stages look something like a metal ice cream cone -- a conical grip and an a wire mesh screen -- not in the studio style, like a mesh hot dog suspended by a forked base.

The voicemail icon is wrong on a couple of different levels, because the answering machines that were replaced by voicemail hadn't used a removable reel-to-reel cassette in a decade. They really had to reach back.

True, if we go by the most reductionist interpretation possible, then everything a person does must be their (and only their own) complete responsibility, and any amount of coercion, compulsion, or what have you becomes irrelevant.

If we go the other way, then nothing anyone does is their own fault. Saw an advertisement and committed suicide? Their fault, no matter what it was. Murdered someone? Your parents' and society's fault.

PRECISELY. Hence, such reductionism is a bad thing.

I typically blame someone else if they're directly involved in some way. An example of that would be shooting someone with a gun. Not just displaying an advertisement (of which there are many) and indirectly causing certain people to starve themselves.

It seems our principal difference can be illustrated by the trolley problem. My favored solution is the utilitarian one, whereas you I believe would see that solution as the greater evil. Right?

I don't see it as being anything other than their choice. Just because others (or advertisements) make them feel bad (or however you wish to describe it) doesn't mean it's not their choice. I can certainly choose not to starve myself, and I have.

What's that to do with the price of fish? For a comparison to be made, the two choices must be even remotely equal, and they are not. Your choice is trivial because there is little pressure on you to make one.

Shit, as of this moment I just scarfed down some food from yesterday, because I was hungry and I chose not to accept that. I purposely made lots of extra food last time, so it was just a matter of putting it in the microwave. Does that mean I get to sneer at some starving peasant in Burundi for failing to summon the fortitude necessary to do the same? Of course not.

Tl; dr: Of course we can make it all about personal choice if we reduce the argument itself to a caricature. The real world is much more granular.

That's a nice broad brush you have there. Be a shame if anything were to happen to it...

When American population just sits at home watching TV or playing video games, Europeans and especially Dutch tend to spend time together. Sit at cafes getting high, eat at a restaurant and have some fine wine, and socialize with people.

Where exactly did you get the impression that there are no bars, coffee shops, restaurants, user groups, meetups, or hackerspaces in America?

One great geeky example about Americans making artificial social walls around them is how quick companies were to replace LAN gaming with online gaming so that you could sit alone and not interact with people.

A truly dizzying line of reasoning... Just because online games happen to exist does not mean nobody organizes LAN parties anymore. And honestly, how is a LAN party a social event? A bunch of gaming nerds cram themselves into a room to stare at their monitors with headphones on? Please.

Also, your notion that American culture is dominated by introverts is so wrong as to be hilarious. Introverts are routinely shamed simply for being intellectual, creative, shy, or socially awkward. The most popular prime-time sitcom right now in the U.S. is literally nothing but a solid half hour of poking fun at ridiculously stereotyped geek caricatures.