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My point was summed up quite succinctly in the first sentence. But I forgot to qualify it by the fact that he denied the particular quote attributed to him. As it was by the Daily Mail newspaper, who neglected to respond, I give him the benefit of the doubt.

While I don't suggest that any particular negative account of him is untrue, since he has become such a caricature it's easy, though unfair, to assume that everything written about him is true. In this case, at least, it appeared to be false.

First off, the process of jailbreaking an iPhone is so trivial that "hack" hardly does the process justice. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to describe it as a non-Apple approved upgrade.

Well, it's not exactly trivial according to the guide I read, but perhaps the state of the art has moved on since then.

However, it's worse than "non-Apple approved": Apple has been claiming that jailbreaking is illegal. Now, personally, I'm not at all opposed to copyright infringement, but given the choice between two devices that do all the same things, I'd still choose the one that does them legally (and I'd certainly recommend that one to friends who might be concerned about the law than I am).

Second, are you hainging out on the right website? It used to be the Slashdot mantra that the easy way was less desirable.

Er, I think that was a caricature of the "Slashdot mantra". Only a masochist would prefer the difficult way just for the sake of adding difficulty to his life.

But again, it's about more than whether it's easy or difficult to hack the device. It's about being treated with respect by the vendor. A vendor that gives you specs and drivers is better than one that gives you no support and makes you fend for yourself, even if it's a fun challenge to reverse engineer their hardware. A vendor that lets you install your own software right out of the box is better than one that makes you violate their recommendations and terms (and, potentially, the law) in order to do the same thing.

> If you had any sense at all, you'd realize that the debacle is neither a positive or negative commentary on the US, since the US had very little to do with it

If you actually believe that, you should spend some time doing research before posting about issues you don't know anything about. Sincerely.

Oh, and you are the one that said "Don't kid yourself - murder is acceptable in every country" in another thread. Yeah.

So, you are NOT American, but you seem to try to be act as like an even worse caricature of their right-wing extremists. Aren't you Canadian, by chance ?

Its completely socially unacceptable to systematically go to each establishment and take all their 'spare change' once a week.

That's what sheriff Hongisto found out many years ago in San Francisco.

One of the alternative free newspapers had a front-page caricature of him where it was plain to see that his baton was strategically held so as to look like a huge dick.

His answer to the affront was to send his deputies out to round up the issue from every newsstand in the city. He tried to say he wasn't "confiscating" the papers because they were "free". Nor was he "censoring" them -- they had printed what they wanted with no interference from him.

Yet, this episode hung on him like an albatross for many years following.

People in SF may be stupid, but they're not _that_ stupid.

You know, I was not a big Bush fan, but I also never drank the kool-aid that he's the devil incarnate either. Now that we're seeing Obama adopt some of the same positions after a careful and studied review of the facts available to the Office of the President, there are two possibilities to consider. (1) Obama is Bush III. (2) zOMG just because Bush did it doesn't automatically make it wrong and evil.

It's easy to oversimply situations and reduce people to caricatures. It's easy, and it's a mistake, and many of you are guilty of doing it with Bush. Again, not a huge Bush fan...but do we really have to start judging Obama not based on what he does, but only based on what he does differently?

Do you know what a caricature is? Artistically, it is a drawing where the artist draws a person grossly out of proportion, with a strong emphasis on any way in which the subject differs from "normal".

Apply that to an argument. It means to latch on to the first thing that doesn't make sense to you and blow it way out of proportion.

It's a very effective tactic, when you only need it to work long enough to get out of hearing distance of your opponent; especially in a room full of their peers. I have a coworker who "wins" arguments like that all the time, except that we all know he does it, so he's really losing every time he opens his mouth; even if he's right.

The difference is that the judge will actually listen to his argument, instead of dismissing a caricature of his argument.

Sorry, but what does a caricature of his argument mean?

The difference is that the judge will actually listen to his argument, instead of dismissing a caricature of his argument.

No. The Second Amendment of our Constitution guarantees the slave states the right to quickly put down slave uprisings on their own (with a "militia") ...

But don't take my word for it.

"To disarm the people - that was the best and most effectual way to enslave them." -- George Mason

You're probably one of less than 1% who reads that quote and suggests that it's about slavery in that direction. George Mason was right, but it's the rest of us who are being disarmed, what with the "give up your guns to improve Mexico" spiel that's coming out AG Holder's mouth and all ... If you take this flippantly, then we'll all become slaves.

And I do not fit one of those caricatured stereotypes you'll want to throw back at me to make yourself feel okay for being complacent about everything.

Not to mention the fact that Dee, Tori and Felix were the only major minority characters (well, and 8, but her Boomer version is pretty horrible up until the end). I mean, sure, I hated Tori as much as anyone, but did they have to make her that way? And if we're believing (roughly) in the Christian god, Dee's suicide is probably some kind of sin. So here we have two potentially strong female, racial minority characters making morally wrong decisions. Not classy.

I was even more upset by Felix's downfall. Here we had this great character who was both believable as a member of the crew and as a gay man (I love that they understated his sexuality, as the "gay caricature" is insulting and overused). So why on earth did he have to become so spiteful and lead the mutiny? I wish they had been a little more thoughtful about what he represents.

Also, I didn't like Cavill being the poster child for atheism. It's like equating atheism to sadism and irrational close-mindedness, which is hardly the case.

I think you did a good job summing up the position of traditional protestants. I would, however, caution against inferring the mindset of the average atheist, as you do in the second paragraph. I say this only because most of the "this is probably what they're thinking" posts by atheists/agnostics above trying to infer the mindset of the average church-goer are horribly, even to the point of caricature, off the mark. I imagine I would sound as ridiculous doing the reverse.

In short, I think the study is meaningless, and no one should read too much into it.

I'm not the mods, of course, so I can't say; but I'm sincerely hoping that the "insightful" mods are a mixture of "funny; but I think you deserve karma" and "Insightful; because you have correctly caricatured precisely the response that a creepy statist would actually exhibit".

I urge anybody who actually agrees with my original post to explore a fulfilling career in being on fire.

I don't know who this Josh is; but he's a caricature of the Coder BOFH variant. Personally, I've never met anyone like him.

Oh, I've met IT people with poor BO. I've been accused (falsely, because it was a convenient stereotype) of it myself. I've met people who are socially inept and say inappropriate things. But, by and large, these people are also the best at what they do. Sure, they're cocky.

What it is, is a pecking order game. They think they're the best. In my experience, it's not so much a matter of being respected for being the best, or left alone, or any of that. They just want to do their thing, yes - and a little healthy competition (real or perceived) for the "alpha geek" role can help this out tremendously.

I've been accused of having borderline Asperger's before, though I would argue that I've got a great deal more social graces than most who have the 'geek disease'. For the most part, I'm able to go between the haves, and the have nots. What I have found is that the best way to relate to them is the way they relate to others - as much as possible. If they try to intellectually domineer people, show them, or pretend, that you're tops. No, you don't have to lie to them. But that posturing/soliloquy stuff they do to bolster their self confidence and show you they're intellectually/whatever on top? They (we) tend to respect that, if as nothing other than healthy competition and "one of our own". Kid gloves (where you treat them like a child, or generally treat them 'sensitively' like you would a normal employee) doesn't work.

Again, this "Josh" is a cruel caricature. Nobody is like that: attitudes like that don't make it past interviews.

Although academia was never really the ivory tower of caricature, where people sat around and smoked pipes and "just thought", it does feel from what I've read that it's less that than ever. Doing things other than The Project With A Deadline is really, I think, necessary for significant progress other than churning out incremental results. Everyone's big on "interdisciplinary" work these days, for example, but that seems to usually mean frantically cribbing something from another field that you can shallowly map to your problem at hand. I think a deeper interdisciplinarity really requires academics to have free time to pursue other interests, where they can run into possible areas of cross-pollination that would never happen in the shallow "I need something from biology to support this grant proposal" style of interdisciplinarity.

But that really ties into the "tons of publications is necessary" culture being bad for all sorts of reasons. It's bad for people raising kids, which is bad for retaining a whole class of people. It's bad for interdisciplinary work and fostering long-term research. It's bad for readers, who have to wade through papers that would never have been published if the author didn't feel compelled to churn them out (sometimes somewhat guiltily).

This is a caricature and there are plenty of counter-examples.

There are indeed. That doesn't mean the statistical tendency doesn't exist.

This is a caricature and there are plenty of counter-examples. Look up Barbara Mc Clintock. She spent 40 years demonstrating gene transposition. Nobody believed her for the first 20. Pretty much all the successful women in science display single-minded dedication to some degree like you describe.

> We do that because we can and it's cheaper than paying for it.

The fact that there is a nonzero number of users for Netflix's streaming service proves that's not true. Yeah, I could get everything off Bittorrent, but instead I'm an outspoken enthusiast for Netflix's instant streaming. Why would I, when it's cheaper and easier to just grab the torrent?

Because not everyone who downloads is the {MP,RI}AA caricature you seem to have bought into. We very much _want_ to "go legit", and we're waiting on the much-vaunted free market to deliver a solution that isn't 3 orders of magnitude more stressful to deal with than the Bittorrent method.

As a further example; since Amazon started selling non-DRM'd MP3 files that could be accessed from a Linux browser, I haven't gotten a single song that was available from them through any other channel, and every song that I've listened to from my pre-existing collection, I've gone back and purchased from them.

(Some) people want, very much, to support a legitimate online content delivery mechanism. We're still waiting on the free market to come up with one that isn't awful.

Did you see the reaction to the New York times caricature of Obama to a chimp? No one was talking about differences in policies in their "outrage."
Guess what, New York times APOLOGIEZED. So you can intellectualize the differences between them, but in fact, it is the skin that most people see -- that is the reality.

The generals/President was kind of corny. I don't know how intentional it was, but they felt like one dimensional cartoons compared to the main characters.

I think given time, Nixon probably would have evolved into even more of a caricature of himself than what we remember of him.

That being said, the somewhat subtle reference to Doctor Strangelove (the war room) was cute.

Dawkinsâ(TM)s caricature of Christianity may well carry weight with his increasingly religiously illiterate or religiously alienated audiences, who find in his writings ample confirmation of their prejudices, but merely persuades those familiar with religious traditions to conclude that Dawkins has no interest in understanding what he critiques. . . The classic Christian tradition has always valued rationality and does not hold that faith involves the abandonment of reason or the absence of evidence. Indeed, the Christian tradition is so strong on this matter that it is often difficult to understand where Dawkins got these ideas

What I see in Christianity is a fully divided set of beliefs, ranging from deranged lunatic (young earth) to invitingly spiritual. There is however not a general consensus about anything. Due to its basis on the belief of a God, people are free to subscribe any belief to this God, and come to any conclusion whatsoever. The Christian tradition is also riddled with questionable assumptions, outright power struggles, and irrevocable dogma (that later got revoked). Where in the Christian tradition can we find this intellectual honesty that the author is talking about, and, more importantly, what are the Christian methods to distinguish between the frauds and the intellectual leaders?