[shrug] Very few of us meet the original definition for geekhood. I know I don't make my living biting the heads off live chickens; do you?
So with that out of the way... "geek" is what we make it. I consider myself a geek because of my interests. I enjoy programming, science, science fiction, history, and offbeat music -- all the classic geek stuff -- much more than I do, say, football and MTV. Yet somehow, I've managed to surround myself with good people who share my interests. What bothers me about the geek stereotype, more than anything else, is the assumption that we're asocial. We don't have to be; we may let ourselves be that way, but it is in fact a conscious choice.
As for being fat and smelly (which pretty much guarantees the lack of a sex life) -- that too is a choice. The truth of the matter is, most of my geek friends are clean and reasonably fit and attractive; I think the stereotype, like most stereotypes, has a grain of truth to it, but is far exaggerated. The few I do know who live down the stereotype make me want to grab them and shake them and say, "It's okay to shower! It's okay to exercise! It's okay to put on clean clothes! No one's going to take your geek card away! You'll still be smart!"
More specifically, this is a response which makes perfect sense in evolutionary terms: if you're not sleeping and/or generally stressed, to the caveman brain that means that you're in danger, and danger usually means lean times ahead. Best to stock up on food now, because you're never sure when you might get your next meal. Like an awful lot of primitive responses that make perfect sense in a wild state, this is (obviously) short-circuited by modern society. Er, in First World countries, anyway.
As a gainfully employed 35-year-old techie (not so much a gamer, but that's largely due to lack of time) who exercises and bathes regularly, owns his own home, and has a sex life, I get really goddamn tired of all the geek stereotyping (fat smelly unepmployed virgins living in their parents' basements, etc.) It's especially annoying here on/. -- don't we get enough of that from the rest of the world? -- but wherever it comes up, it's useful to have this kind of information to counter it.
My 11-year-old daughter, and my friends' 9- and 12-year-old daughters, and all their friends, are video game fanatics. They not only pester their parents to buy them games and equipment, they save up their money and spend most of it on... you guessed it... games and game equipment. I don't see any difference between the sexes in how kids that age think about games, and I don't see any reason to think that will change when they get older.
There really is a generational difference at work here. When I was a teenager in the 80's, video gaming was largely a boy thing and largely a geek thing -- and being a geek, or at least an electronics geek, was of course largely a boy thing itself. It seems to me that all of this has changed dramatically.
But a corporation isn't just a group of individuals; it is a legal entity in itself, with legal rights. I think what GP was trying to say was that it's okay if Joe Schmoe wants to patent something, and it's okay of Joe Schmoe and his brother Jim Schmoe want to patent something, but it's not (or shouldn't be) okay if Schmoe Bros. Inc. wants to patent something -- a proposition with which I tend to agree.
Daniel (haven't I seen you on GEnie way, way in the past?),
Most likely, yes. What was your nic?
But the issue here is that with Windows 3.1x versions you still have to download, install and configure Trumpet Winsock to get PPP connectivity to the Internet, something that the majority of end users will not try to do! But with Windows 95 offering SLIP/PPP connectivity as part of its network configuration, that made it possible for very easy setup to connect to the Internet.
I understand what you're saying. My point is that while "the majority of end users" may not have bothered with the Trumpet Winsock config process (or the equivalent process with the various add-ons available on other OSs) enough users did to make Web use fairly widespread well before Windows came bundled with SLIP/PPP. Microsoft was, as usual, responding to and exploiting an existing phenomenon, not creating one.
I think this is a bit backwards. Win95 had built-in SLIP/PPP because of the popularity of third-party add-ons. The Web was obviously nowhere as big in 1995 as it is today (or was even in the late 90's) but it was already well established in the public consciousness.
Watch for Canada, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland to form a competing coalition that loses out because they're too nice.
Oh, I suspect the Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes, at least, might do a little, ah, rediscovering their heritage if things get nasty enough. The Scandinavian reputation for politeness is a pretty recent phenomenon.
Comp. bio. is my field; I'm the first author on a paper that's hopefully coming out this summer -- and yes, my adviser is a co-author; I probably could have asked him to cover publication fees, but I'd rather not. And in this particular field, publication fees seem to be pretty rare unless you go over the journal's page count or you have exotic requirements for your illustrations.
As a grad student, for financial reasons I'd given up on the idea of publishing in open-access journals until I get my Ph.D., and hopefully a position at a university that would pay the publication fees. I'm a strong believer in the open-access models, but the fact that traditional subscription journals don't charge authors is a real point in their favor. (NB: I'm also a fiction author, and in the fiction world, you should never ever ever pay a publisher to publish your work. EVER. But academic publishing has always worked by different rules.) However, maybe I wasn't reading the fine print carefully enough; PLoS Comp. Bio. has this to say:
Authors are asked to pay $1500 upon acceptance of their article, to help defray the costs of publication (see the FAQs on publication fees). However, if you have insufficient funds to cover this payment, we allow payment of whatever amount you can afford or waive the charge entirely if necessary. Inability to pay never influences the decision of whether to publish a paper.
That's a good start. Ideally, I'd like to see a formal multi-level pricing structure: some nominal fee for grad students, with progressively higher fees for faculty at various levels, and corporate authors. But it does assuage some of my fears about the open-access publishing model in general.
Actually using this logic Desktop Linux wins hands down. Every year its arrival is trumpeted yet we still wait.
There's a difference, though. The Year Of Linux On The Desktop(tm) is something that users and pundits keep predicting, not something any one company, or even any group of companies, is promising. In fact, there are a number of distros which meet the requirements for a usable desktop OS, and this has been the case for a couple of years now; if these fail to live up to people's inflated expectations for commercial success, that's the fault of the people with the expectations, not the fault of the people delivering the (very solid) products. This is utterly different from Microsoft's continual promises of secure, stable, feature-rich software that always seems to be Right Around The Corner.
If I murder someone, I am a murder. It doesn't matter if I am ever convicted of being a murder or not.
It's worth noting that, from a legal point of view, this isn't true; in the eyes of the law, you are not a murderer, and cannot suffer the penalties the law specifies for murderers, until and unless you are convicted.
"...all we have is theory, belief and evidence (theory and belief being differentiated only by the reliance on evidence)."
Seems awfully like religon to me. Facts are what make true science, no? Perhaps you reveal that science relies on the same basis and lacking anything else to prove otherwise, becomes fact?
Yes, actually, if you put it that way, it does make science sound something like religion... if you ignore the "evidence" part. That's what religion invariably fails to provide. And no, someone's book of collected folktales does not constitute evidence. At most, it provides a clue as to where to look.
GP poster unfortunately got the terms mixed up, which is where the erroneous "it's just a theory" argument gets its foot in the door. A better way to put it would be: "... all we have is hypothesis, evidence, and theory (hypothesis and theory being differentiated only by the reliance on evidence)." And "theory" in the scientific sense is what most people mean when they say "scientific fact," not "educated guess" as it is in everyday speech. (An educated guess in science is, of course, a "hypothesis.")
This is something a lot of people seem to have trouble getting their minds around, but it's critical to an understanding of what science is. Science does not, and cannot, make a claim to Absolute Truth in the way that religion does; if it does, it's no longer science. 2+2=4 is a fact; E=mc^2 is a theory, although one that's extraordinarily well supported by the evidence, and unlikely ever to be disproven -- unlikely, not certain. Everything, including the evidence itself, is subject to revision if someone else comes along and does a better job.
This uncertainty bothers a lot of people, which (I assume, as a nonbeliever) is why they so often seek the comfort of religious absolutes. But it is also the attitude which has produced every bit of technology, from flint spearheads to the internet, that separates us from the apes -- and that technology is what enables us to live our lives as human beings. So, judging by the evidence, it's the way to go.
Fair enough; I will grant that you have your own understanding, based on your own experience, and that it (obviously) differs from mine. But if you deny that mine is valid, simply because of a political disagreement, then you're not the kind of troop I'd want at my back.
Interesting. So in other words, I don't understand military tradition, having, you know, lived it, because my politics differ from yours. What a narrow little world you must inhabit.
So, please, enlighten me as to your understanding of military tradition, and the source of that understanding. Let me guess, you've read a bunch of Tom Clancy novels?
... with breathless and uncritical support from NPR, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, BBC, and on and on...
This is the core of the myth that pisses me off so much. To say that the "MSM" sources you reel off gave "breathless and uncritical support" to Kerry, or the corollary claim that they tried to bury the SBV, is to deny reality. In fact, most TV and print media gave "breathless and uncritical support" to Bush's made-up war hero image, while treating Kerry with a kind of skeptical amusement from the beginning, and picked up the SBV slander with glee. The relentless right-wing hammering at the "liberal media" has reduced these once-respectable news sources to neutered lapdogs who uncritically report Karl Rove's talking points for fear of being charged with liberal bias.
1. Splitting the infinitive is fine. It's always been fine; the rule against it is a bit of Latin grammar arbitrarily and pointlessly wedged into English (a Germanic language) and modern language authorities are starting to recognize how absurd this is.
2. GP poster didn't split the infinitive; splitting the infinitive is, by definition, inserting another word after the "to" in a verb of the form "to ___." Thus, "to boldly go" is a split infinitive, although a perfectly correct one; "they badly ruin" is not, and is correct by the standards of the most pedantic Latinophile.
In the case of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, here was a story the MSM didn't want to touch with a ten-foot poll because it went against the narrative the had already decided on ("John Kerry, War Hero Turned Protestor"). (Just imagine if there had been an organization with some 80-odd National Guard vets swearing that they witnessed Bush shirking his duty; there would have been an hour-long prime time special...) Since no media outlet was covering their ads, it was the blogsphere that carried information about the group. It's ironic that the Swift Boat Vets spent about 1/100th what Moveon.org did, and was still 100 times more effective.
Nice spin -- have you considered applying for a job with Fox?
I'm about as much of an internet news junkie as anyone, but IIRC, it was through the "MSM" that I first heard about the Swift Boat Vet ads, and it was certainly TV that first brought their slander to the attention of the majority of the voting public. If "the MSM... had already decided on [the narrative] of 'John Kerry, War Hero Turned Protestor'," the SBV would have received the burying they so richly deserved. Instead, the White House propaganda team picked it up and ran with it, and their media lapdogs played along. Remember the Purple Heart band-aids at the RNC? Can you imagine the firestorm that would have resulted if Clinton's people had done something similar to Dole in 1996?
You people are repulsive. You glorify chickenhawks like Bush, Cheney, et al., mock the heroism of your opponents like Kerry (and even turn on your own, like McCain, when they challenge the Master Plan), use media organizations owned by your sympathizers to spread your lies, and still present yourselves as scrappy underdogs fighting the status quo. It reminds me of nothing so much as corrupt third-world dictatorships calling themselves "The People's Party Of Perpetual Glorious Revolution"... and you are taking our country down that road.
Yes, absolutely. Whenever the idea of HTML as a teaching language comes up, there are usually lots of people who scream, "But it's not a real language!" They're missing the point. It's not a Turing-complete programming language, no; but it is, in fact, a programming language, in the sense that you feed the computer input, or code, and get back an output which is both noticeably different from the input and clearly related to it. This is a rather large step up from the way most people use computers, which is to start up a particular application and then do something with that application which produces instant results on screen. HTML is the perfect middle ground between writing code (vs. just using an application) and the instant gratification most people expect from the standard apps.
Ah, good ol' Tom Jefferson, always trying to reconcile his populist ideals with his aristocratic instincts. Sometimes he did better than others; the line you quote is not, IMNSGDHO, one of his high points.
You're right, of course, that direct democracy on a nationwide scale has never been done; ditto for communism. However, practical experience shows that attempts at communism inevitably end in autocracy and horror -- while those nations which, through whatever mechanism they use, attempt to hew closest to democratic ideals tend to be much better places to live. We're never going to achieve the Platonic ideal of anything, not in government, not in an encyclopedia, not anywhere. All we can do is try our best, and it seems to me that's what Wikipedia is doing, with pretty good results overall.
Slashdot Mirror
It will be interesting to see how the US empire collapses.
More like the Spanish than the British or the Russian, I gloomily suspect.
Easy enough to test: sleep-deprive a bunch of mice, and see if they eat more. ;)
[shrug] Very few of us meet the original definition for geekhood. I know I don't make my living biting the heads off live chickens; do you?
... "geek" is what we make it. I consider myself a geek because of my interests. I enjoy programming, science, science fiction, history, and offbeat music -- all the classic geek stuff -- much more than I do, say, football and MTV. Yet somehow, I've managed to surround myself with good people who share my interests. What bothers me about the geek stereotype, more than anything else, is the assumption that we're asocial. We don't have to be; we may let ourselves be that way, but it is in fact a conscious choice.
So with that out of the way
As for being fat and smelly (which pretty much guarantees the lack of a sex life) -- that too is a choice. The truth of the matter is, most of my geek friends are clean and reasonably fit and attractive; I think the stereotype, like most stereotypes, has a grain of truth to it, but is far exaggerated. The few I do know who live down the stereotype make me want to grab them and shake them and say, "It's okay to shower! It's okay to exercise! It's okay to put on clean clothes! No one's going to take your geek card away! You'll still be smart!"
Um, quite possibly they did include someone like you in the study; it's just that most someones aren't like you.
More specifically, this is a response which makes perfect sense in evolutionary terms: if you're not sleeping and/or generally stressed, to the caveman brain that means that you're in danger, and danger usually means lean times ahead. Best to stock up on food now, because you're never sure when you might get your next meal. Like an awful lot of primitive responses that make perfect sense in a wild state, this is (obviously) short-circuited by modern society. Er, in First World countries, anyway.
Quit yer bitchin'.
/. -- don't we get enough of that from the rest of the world? -- but wherever it comes up, it's useful to have this kind of information to counter it.
As a gainfully employed 35-year-old techie (not so much a gamer, but that's largely due to lack of time) who exercises and bathes regularly, owns his own home, and has a sex life, I get really goddamn tired of all the geek stereotyping (fat smelly unepmployed virgins living in their parents' basements, etc.) It's especially annoying here on
My 11-year-old daughter, and my friends' 9- and 12-year-old daughters, and all their friends, are video game fanatics. They not only pester their parents to buy them games and equipment, they save up their money and spend most of it on ... you guessed it ... games and game equipment. I don't see any difference between the sexes in how kids that age think about games, and I don't see any reason to think that will change when they get older.
There really is a generational difference at work here. When I was a teenager in the 80's, video gaming was largely a boy thing and largely a geek thing -- and being a geek, or at least an electronics geek, was of course largely a boy thing itself. It seems to me that all of this has changed dramatically.
But a corporation isn't just a group of individuals; it is a legal entity in itself, with legal rights. I think what GP was trying to say was that it's okay if Joe Schmoe wants to patent something, and it's okay of Joe Schmoe and his brother Jim Schmoe want to patent something, but it's not (or shouldn't be) okay if Schmoe Bros. Inc. wants to patent something -- a proposition with which I tend to agree.
Daniel (haven't I seen you on GEnie way, way in the past?),
Most likely, yes. What was your nic?
But the issue here is that with Windows 3.1x versions you still have to download, install and configure Trumpet Winsock to get PPP connectivity to the Internet, something that the majority of end users will not try to do! But with Windows 95 offering SLIP/PPP connectivity as part of its network configuration, that made it possible for very easy setup to connect to the Internet.
I understand what you're saying. My point is that while "the majority of end users" may not have bothered with the Trumpet Winsock config process (or the equivalent process with the various add-ons available on other OSs) enough users did to make Web use fairly widespread well before Windows came bundled with SLIP/PPP. Microsoft was, as usual, responding to and exploiting an existing phenomenon, not creating one.
I think this is a bit backwards. Win95 had built-in SLIP/PPP because of the popularity of third-party add-ons. The Web was obviously nowhere as big in 1995 as it is today (or was even in the late 90's) but it was already well established in the public consciousness.
Watch for Canada, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland to form a competing coalition that loses out because they're too nice.
Oh, I suspect the Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes, at least, might do a little, ah, rediscovering their heritage if things get nasty enough. The Scandinavian reputation for politeness is a pretty recent phenomenon.
Comp. bio. is my field; I'm the first author on a paper that's hopefully coming out this summer -- and yes, my adviser is a co-author; I probably could have asked him to cover publication fees, but I'd rather not. And in this particular field, publication fees seem to be pretty rare unless you go over the journal's page count or you have exotic requirements for your illustrations.
As a grad student, for financial reasons I'd given up on the idea of publishing in open-access journals until I get my Ph.D., and hopefully a position at a university that would pay the publication fees. I'm a strong believer in the open-access models, but the fact that traditional subscription journals don't charge authors is a real point in their favor. (NB: I'm also a fiction author, and in the fiction world, you should never ever ever pay a publisher to publish your work. EVER. But academic publishing has always worked by different rules.) However, maybe I wasn't reading the fine print carefully enough; PLoS Comp. Bio. has this to say:
Authors are asked to pay $1500 upon acceptance of their article, to help defray the costs of publication (see the FAQs on publication fees). However, if you have insufficient funds to cover this payment, we allow payment of whatever amount you can afford or waive the charge entirely if necessary. Inability to pay never influences the decision of whether to publish a paper.
That's a good start. Ideally, I'd like to see a formal multi-level pricing structure: some nominal fee for grad students, with progressively higher fees for faculty at various levels, and corporate authors. But it does assuage some of my fears about the open-access publishing model in general.
Actually using this logic Desktop Linux wins hands down. Every year its arrival is trumpeted yet we still wait.
There's a difference, though. The Year Of Linux On The Desktop(tm) is something that users and pundits keep predicting, not something any one company, or even any group of companies, is promising. In fact, there are a number of distros which meet the requirements for a usable desktop OS, and this has been the case for a couple of years now; if these fail to live up to people's inflated expectations for commercial success, that's the fault of the people with the expectations, not the fault of the people delivering the (very solid) products. This is utterly different from Microsoft's continual promises of secure, stable, feature-rich software that always seems to be Right Around The Corner.
If I murder someone, I am a murder. It doesn't matter if I am ever convicted of being a murder or not.
It's worth noting that, from a legal point of view, this isn't true; in the eyes of the law, you are not a murderer, and cannot suffer the penalties the law specifies for murderers, until and unless you are convicted.
Yes, actually, if you put it that way, it does make science sound something like religion
GP poster unfortunately got the terms mixed up, which is where the erroneous "it's just a theory" argument gets its foot in the door. A better way to put it would be: "... all we have is hypothesis, evidence, and theory (hypothesis and theory being differentiated only by the reliance on evidence)." And "theory" in the scientific sense is what most people mean when they say "scientific fact," not "educated guess" as it is in everyday speech. (An educated guess in science is, of course, a "hypothesis.")
This is something a lot of people seem to have trouble getting their minds around, but it's critical to an understanding of what science is. Science does not, and cannot, make a claim to Absolute Truth in the way that religion does; if it does, it's no longer science. 2+2=4 is a fact; E=mc^2 is a theory, although one that's extraordinarily well supported by the evidence, and unlikely ever to be disproven -- unlikely, not certain. Everything, including the evidence itself, is subject to revision if someone else comes along and does a better job.
This uncertainty bothers a lot of people, which (I assume, as a nonbeliever) is why they so often seek the comfort of religious absolutes. But it is also the attitude which has produced every bit of technology, from flint spearheads to the internet, that separates us from the apes -- and that technology is what enables us to live our lives as human beings. So, judging by the evidence, it's the way to go.
NP.
Fair enough; I will grant that you have your own understanding, based on your own experience, and that it (obviously) differs from mine. But if you deny that mine is valid, simply because of a political disagreement, then you're not the kind of troop I'd want at my back.
Interesting. So in other words, I don't understand military tradition, having, you know, lived it, because my politics differ from yours. What a narrow little world you must inhabit.
So, please, enlighten me as to your understanding of military tradition, and the source of that understanding. Let me guess, you've read a bunch of Tom Clancy novels?
... with breathless and uncritical support from NPR, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, BBC, and on and on ...
This is the core of the myth that pisses me off so much. To say that the "MSM" sources you reel off gave "breathless and uncritical support" to Kerry, or the corollary claim that they tried to bury the SBV, is to deny reality. In fact, most TV and print media gave "breathless and uncritical support" to Bush's made-up war hero image, while treating Kerry with a kind of skeptical amusement from the beginning, and picked up the SBV slander with glee. The relentless right-wing hammering at the "liberal media" has reduced these once-respectable news sources to neutered lapdogs who uncritically report Karl Rove's talking points for fear of being charged with liberal bias.
Individuals such as yourself, don't have a clue as to what military tradition is. Or what actually constitutes a medal.
Oh, really?
-- Daniel Dvorkin
USAR 1988-1989
USAF 1989-1997
Desert Storm veteran
1. Splitting the infinitive is fine. It's always been fine; the rule against it is a bit of Latin grammar arbitrarily and pointlessly wedged into English (a Germanic language) and modern language authorities are starting to recognize how absurd this is.
2. GP poster didn't split the infinitive; splitting the infinitive is, by definition, inserting another word after the "to" in a verb of the form "to ___." Thus, "to boldly go" is a split infinitive, although a perfectly correct one; "they badly ruin" is not, and is correct by the standards of the most pedantic Latinophile.
In the case of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, here was a story the MSM didn't want to touch with a ten-foot poll because it went against the narrative the had already decided on ("John Kerry, War Hero Turned Protestor"). (Just imagine if there had been an organization with some 80-odd National Guard vets swearing that they witnessed Bush shirking his duty; there would have been an hour-long prime time special...) Since no media outlet was covering their ads, it was the blogsphere that carried information about the group. It's ironic that the Swift Boat Vets spent about 1/100th what Moveon.org did, and was still 100 times more effective.
... had already decided on [the narrative] of 'John Kerry, War Hero Turned Protestor'," the SBV would have received the burying they so richly deserved. Instead, the White House propaganda team picked it up and ran with it, and their media lapdogs played along. Remember the Purple Heart band-aids at the RNC? Can you imagine the firestorm that would have resulted if Clinton's people had done something similar to Dole in 1996?
... and you are taking our country down that road.
Nice spin -- have you considered applying for a job with Fox?
I'm about as much of an internet news junkie as anyone, but IIRC, it was through the "MSM" that I first heard about the Swift Boat Vet ads, and it was certainly TV that first brought their slander to the attention of the majority of the voting public. If "the MSM
You people are repulsive. You glorify chickenhawks like Bush, Cheney, et al., mock the heroism of your opponents like Kerry (and even turn on your own, like McCain, when they challenge the Master Plan), use media organizations owned by your sympathizers to spread your lies, and still present yourselves as scrappy underdogs fighting the status quo. It reminds me of nothing so much as corrupt third-world dictatorships calling themselves "The People's Party Of Perpetual Glorious Revolution"
Yes, absolutely. Whenever the idea of HTML as a teaching language comes up, there are usually lots of people who scream, "But it's not a real language!" They're missing the point. It's not a Turing-complete programming language, no; but it is, in fact, a programming language, in the sense that you feed the computer input, or code, and get back an output which is both noticeably different from the input and clearly related to it. This is a rather large step up from the way most people use computers, which is to start up a particular application and then do something with that application which produces instant results on screen. HTML is the perfect middle ground between writing code (vs. just using an application) and the instant gratification most people expect from the standard apps.
Ah, good ol' Tom Jefferson, always trying to reconcile his populist ideals with his aristocratic instincts. Sometimes he did better than others; the line you quote is not, IMNSGDHO, one of his high points.
You're right, of course, that direct democracy on a nationwide scale has never been done; ditto for communism. However, practical experience shows that attempts at communism inevitably end in autocracy and horror -- while those nations which, through whatever mechanism they use, attempt to hew closest to democratic ideals tend to be much better places to live. We're never going to achieve the Platonic ideal of anything, not in government, not in an encyclopedia, not anywhere. All we can do is try our best, and it seems to me that's what Wikipedia is doing, with pretty good results overall.