A woman's POV isn't worth much on what attracts women? Yeah, I can see that I made a big mistake there...
Who said a geek guy has to go out with a geek girl? My point is exactly not that. It's that "normal" girls won't find you unattractive because you're a geek, but they will find you unattractive if you don't wash and can't hold a conversation!
And if you really think I have a "large pool" of geek guys? You have to be kidding! You're all too convinced that women hate you to offer us more than a suspicious sneer;)
You're so right! And if the public schools weren't substandard, I wonder how many parents who "want a specific type of education for their child" would miraculously find that paying for that specific education isn't so important after all:) Happens a lot in the UK - parents will make a lot of effort to pretend to be religious in order to get their child into a decent school.
I'm a big photoshop user, and it does have several technical advantages over GIMP. I think that one of the key things, though, in getting GIMP accepted by the average home user would be the publication of a lot more user manuals, tips-n-tricks books, and that kind of thing. The point is that the average user, who just wants to manipulate a few photos, is probably also the kind of user for whom free software is a worry. They imagine that it contains spyware, viruses, annoying ads, or bugs that will "break" their computer. Online documentation won't help this, because it is automatically suspect by being published online (anyone could do that, right). Easily available and professionally produced books, on the shelves of their local bookstore, or with good reviews on Amazon, will go a long way to persuading them that this is a reputable product that is safe to download and use.
I know I'll get modded down for posting an offtopic reply, but my message is very, very important to all/. users (except the 1% who are female): guys, stop this "girls hate me because I'm a geek" nonsense!
The two great loves of my life have been CompScis, and they are two of the greatest guys I ever met. They've helped me learn to program, take things apart with screwdrivers, read some great books, and have a much more interesting life. Geeks are great. The only problem comes when you take being a geek as an excuse not to wash, to dress like an asshat, and to forget your social skills.
To the original poster - don't listen to anyone who tells you a computer-related job will kill your love life. Expand your knowledge, be passionate about what you do, and anyone who (metaphorically) mods you down for it isn't worth knowing. Also remember to shower, and get some nice shirts:)
Or... he just wasn't that into me. I'm amazed that you/. guys seem to assume that any man who declines sex with a female friend has something wrong with him! Get some self-esteem - you can say no, there will be other opportunities.:)
You missed an option - He's just not that into you!
Trust me, I tried the direct approach with one of my friends once, on the basis of the reasoning you just gave. Poor guy never quite got over it. Back to discreet hints for me.
:) England, in fact. But even in South Wales, where I grew up, Welsh is really a minority language. There, though, I speak to the clipboard/Bible people in French instead!
Ah, yes - it's even better if you actually speak an obscure language. I speak Welsh at people with clipboards or Bibles who try to talk to me in the street - strangely, I'd never thought of trying it with telemarketers. Though I think often the problem is that they have my name from somewhere, so I have to at least find out whether they're legitimately calling to, say, offer me a job or something before telling them to screw themselves.
There are a lot of posts here with a down on religion. That's the posters' prerogative. But there's an awful lot of variety in religions and the people who adhere to them, and lumping them all together is not helpful. There are many bad things that some religions or some religious people do. Focusing on those is one thing. People who attribute ignorance, pigheadedness, or evil motives indiscriminately to every religion and all its adherents can't make a valid and nuanced critique of any of them. It makes them sound as closed-minded as the religious people they are criticising.
Coming from the UK, I've grown up in the knowledge that pretty much the only people who have guns are a) farmers and landowners; b) the police and army; c) violent criminals. It's incredibly difficult to get a firearms licence. Like most adults, children (with perhaps the very rare exception of young people on farms, who need to be taught not to play with their parents' work guns) will only encounter guns in illegal situations. The idea of the average person owning a gun legally is completely foreign to me, so I guess I react to guns as though they're illegal and criminal objects, rather than tools which are only good or bad depending on who's handling them. Perhaps I am just prejudiced, and we would be safer with guns in our homes. But to me they are very frightening. So, the fact that I'm a pacifist and believe in non-violence, linked with my upbringing in a country with tight gun control, leads me to have what probably seem in the US like extreme views on this subject. The fact that it's part of my cultural context also means that I forget sometimes that my views could be offensive to a large number of people in the US - in the UK, my views would only apply personally to a small minority, most of whom only use guns for work or for criminal activity!
That was a long-winded way to try to explain my different perspective, but also to say I'm sorry if I was needlessly offensive, and I hope you can now understand where I was coming from. I've learned something from your posts. I also hope it isn't patronising for me to say that it sounds like you're great with your kids!
No, I don't believe in killing animals for food. We can easily do without it. But I accept that this is an extreme view.
Do I believe it's wrong to use deadly force to protect a life? Yes, I do. I would do anything I could to stop someone from causing serious harm to me or those around me, and if in that process I killed them, I might not mourn much. But I hope I would never, ever do something with the intent to inflict deadly force. Owning a gun, to my mind, symbolises a willingness to kill, which is something that really bothers me.
There's a big cultural divide between the UK and the US on this, I think, and perhaps I've been too hard to judge people who are pro-gun ownership in the US. Could you perhaps judge me less harshly if you understand that I live in a culture where I'm incredibly unlikely ever to need to defend myself against a gun, where hunting is generally a pastime of the rich, and where one's stereotype of a gun-owner is of a violent and vicious criminal?
I'm glad I'm not your kids' dad too, since it would involve a major operation and I'm pretty happy as a woman;)
I don't believe that "obscene" was too strong a word. "Wrong" certainly isn't. Guns are machines designed only for the purpose of causing death. I don't believe you can justify wielding one at all, let alone putting one in the hands of a child.
From the FAQ: A troll "is a prank comment intended to provoke indignant (or just confused) responses. A Troll might mix up vital facts or otherwise distort reality, to make other readers react with helpful "corrections." I was being totally serious, and therefore what I said wasn't a troll. It may have been flamebait - "comments whose sole purpose is to insult and enrage". Though I would argue not - mine is a commonly-held view, especially in the UK where I live, and although I inadvertently insulted some people, that was in no way my intent and I had no idea it would be taken in that way.
Modding a comment as "troll" and "flamebait" are not alternative ways of saying "I really don't like your views".
Okay, but times change. For example, it's only relatively recently that societies such as the UK have raised the age of consent to sixteen. Historically, it has ranged anywhere from the age of seven onwards. Just because tradition has always treated children in a particular way, that doesn't mean that we should continue to believe it's right. Historically, there have been times when people needed to learn to hunt, or defend their families, at very young ages. That isn't the case any more - it may be cheaper to hunt, but it isn't necessary to avoid starvation in countries like the UK or US. Growing vegetables and pulses is a perfectly acceptable alternative, for example, even if you're arguing against the costs of buying food.
Guns, in the end, have the primary purpose of killing things. While teaching children how to kill things may have been practically necessary two hundred years ago, it is not any longer and, in my view, it should be banned.
I'm interested that my original comment was modded as a troll. I wasn't meaning to troll, just expressing an opinion that I hold very deeply and that is shared by an awful lot of people.
But you're assuming that children are capable of levels of rational thought and knowing right from wrong which they just aren't. You can teach children not to play with matches, but a lot of them will still do it because they overestimate their ability to evaluate the risks.
Adolescents are notoriously unstable (the raging hormones aren't just a myth and can have some serious effects) and there's often little correlation between the relationship parents think they have with their child and the relationship which that child perceives.
I have very little fear of going outside - but then, I live in a country where possession of firearms is largely illegal.
The thing about children is that they don't have the same capabilities for rational thought as they will have when they're adults. They also don't have the same control over their emotions, especially when they are adolescents. You may tell your child how to be responsible around guns (though I'm not sure that I would classify your plan of "here's a gun, let's shoot small animals with it" as responsible). But that doesn't mean your child won't be persuaded by a playmate to take the gun out and let him play with it. It also doesn't guard against the possibility that your depressed adolescent daughter will take the gun and kill herself, or take it into school and kill her teachers or fellow students. And when she does that, you will have taught her to be a more effective shooter.
People should not own guns, period. But to put one in the hands of a child is obscene.
If I donate goods to charity, they get those goods without paying me money in return. If I give a gift to a friend, they also get goods without giving money in return. Those goods may have been paid for with my money, which was given to me by my employers, which comes from my employers' profits from their customers. I may be repaid with friendship or a good feeling in my heart. But that doesn't make the gift non-free at the point of donation. Similarly, when I download free (as in beer) software, the fact that I don't ever have to pay any money to use it makes it free for download, even though someone may have been paid to produce it or done so whilst subsidised by their parents. I may give the producers publicity, my thanks, my love and attention, but I don't give them money. If Microsoft claims that there is no such thing as software for which users don't have to pay money, they're blatantly wrong. If they claim that software is never produced without using time or resources which could otherwise be making money, perhaps they have a better case.
These gangs of thugs who roam our lawless streets preying on the weak and vulnerable? I've never seen one. No one I know has ever seen one. Most of Britain is not plagued with them. On the whole, where they exist they seem to be more worried about attacking rival gang members and their associates.
So, no, I wouldn't stand up at all well to attack by a gang. But I doubt I'll ever have to.
I know a lot of people who live in London (I live about an hour away myself), and not one of them has ever been attacked by thugs. They're not particularly well-off or rich people, either. And of course you can resist. You just can't carry a gun to do it with.
Never seen a gun in my life - never want to. Yes, people kill each other with guns - having more guns doesn't seem to me to be a great answer to that problem. I take your point about defence. It's true that if I were attacked by someone I would have no means of defending myself. But how many high school shootings have we had in Britain? How often has a child injured itself or someone else playing with a relative's gun? Gun ownership has its downside too.
Carrying weapons is illegal in the UK. Having any of those things with me (let alone using them) would be an arrestable offence, and the gun would land me in jail.
Not quite. He'd already agreed to have his work published before he died. They certainly weren't secret from the Church, since his ideas were known both to the Pope and to the Cardinal of Capua, who urged him to make them more widely available to scholars.
I'm not disputing that the Church has done incredibly dumbass things throughout its history. In the 1600s, they "corrected" Copernicus' text because of the heliocentrism row. But that's not the point here. The point is that Copernicus himself was a Catholic all his life, and that he doesn't seem to have been hugely secretive about his work (any more than a modern scientist is with preliminary findings) or to have tried to keep it from the Church.
I'm not an apologist for the Church, but I'm sick of seeing religious people attacked for their faith.
I think you mean "idiots savants" or just "savants".
Admittedly Copernicus is the odd man out there, though note that he was actually a priest, which is a step beyond adhering to Christianity because you have to. It's dangerous to assume that a medieval person was only a Christian because they had to be, even if it makes you feel better about some famous scientific figures of the past. Christianity was an absolutely monolithic force in society, and it's more likely that any given person believed in it than not.
Seems I'm a Troll, and Insightful, and Overrated. I always knew I had identity issues, but this is one to tell my therapist;)
Question: there seems to be a lot of complaining recently about specific people posting stories that aren't seen as well-researched or newsworthy. Why does this happen? I assumed that editors just evaluated stories as they came in against objective criteria - is that naive? Sorry if this is offtopic.
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A woman's POV isn't worth much on what attracts women? Yeah, I can see that I made a big mistake there...
Who said a geek guy has to go out with a geek girl? My point is exactly not that. It's that "normal" girls won't find you unattractive because you're a geek, but they will find you unattractive if you don't wash and can't hold a conversation!
And if you really think I have a "large pool" of geek guys? You have to be kidding! You're all too convinced that women hate you to offer us more than a suspicious sneer ;)
You're so right! And if the public schools weren't substandard, I wonder how many parents who "want a specific type of education for their child" would miraculously find that paying for that specific education isn't so important after all :) Happens a lot in the UK - parents will make a lot of effort to pretend to be religious in order to get their child into a decent school.
I'm a big photoshop user, and it does have several technical advantages over GIMP. I think that one of the key things, though, in getting GIMP accepted by the average home user would be the publication of a lot more user manuals, tips-n-tricks books, and that kind of thing. The point is that the average user, who just wants to manipulate a few photos, is probably also the kind of user for whom free software is a worry. They imagine that it contains spyware, viruses, annoying ads, or bugs that will "break" their computer. Online documentation won't help this, because it is automatically suspect by being published online (anyone could do that, right). Easily available and professionally produced books, on the shelves of their local bookstore, or with good reviews on Amazon, will go a long way to persuading them that this is a reputable product that is safe to download and use.
I know I'll get modded down for posting an offtopic reply, but my message is very, very important to all /. users (except the 1% who are female): guys, stop this "girls hate me because I'm a geek" nonsense!
The two great loves of my life have been CompScis, and they are two of the greatest guys I ever met. They've helped me learn to program, take things apart with screwdrivers, read some great books, and have a much more interesting life. Geeks are great. The only problem comes when you take being a geek as an excuse not to wash, to dress like an asshat, and to forget your social skills.
To the original poster - don't listen to anyone who tells you a computer-related job will kill your love life. Expand your knowledge, be passionate about what you do, and anyone who (metaphorically) mods you down for it isn't worth knowing. Also remember to shower, and get some nice shirts :)
Or... he just wasn't that into me. I'm amazed that you /. guys seem to assume that any man who declines sex with a female friend has something wrong with him! Get some self-esteem - you can say no, there will be other opportunities. :)
You missed an option - He's just not that into you!
Trust me, I tried the direct approach with one of my friends once, on the basis of the reasoning you just gave. Poor guy never quite got over it. Back to discreet hints for me.
:) England, in fact. But even in South Wales, where I grew up, Welsh is really a minority language. There, though, I speak to the clipboard/Bible people in French instead!
Ah, yes - it's even better if you actually speak an obscure language. I speak Welsh at people with clipboards or Bibles who try to talk to me in the street - strangely, I'd never thought of trying it with telemarketers. Though I think often the problem is that they have my name from somewhere, so I have to at least find out whether they're legitimately calling to, say, offer me a job or something before telling them to screw themselves.
There are a lot of posts here with a down on religion. That's the posters' prerogative. But there's an awful lot of variety in religions and the people who adhere to them, and lumping them all together is not helpful. There are many bad things that some religions or some religious people do. Focusing on those is one thing. People who attribute ignorance, pigheadedness, or evil motives indiscriminately to every religion and all its adherents can't make a valid and nuanced critique of any of them. It makes them sound as closed-minded as the religious people they are criticising.
Coming from the UK, I've grown up in the knowledge that pretty much the only people who have guns are a) farmers and landowners; b) the police and army; c) violent criminals. It's incredibly difficult to get a firearms licence. Like most adults, children (with perhaps the very rare exception of young people on farms, who need to be taught not to play with their parents' work guns) will only encounter guns in illegal situations. The idea of the average person owning a gun legally is completely foreign to me, so I guess I react to guns as though they're illegal and criminal objects, rather than tools which are only good or bad depending on who's handling them. Perhaps I am just prejudiced, and we would be safer with guns in our homes. But to me they are very frightening. So, the fact that I'm a pacifist and believe in non-violence, linked with my upbringing in a country with tight gun control, leads me to have what probably seem in the US like extreme views on this subject. The fact that it's part of my cultural context also means that I forget sometimes that my views could be offensive to a large number of people in the US - in the UK, my views would only apply personally to a small minority, most of whom only use guns for work or for criminal activity!
That was a long-winded way to try to explain my different perspective, but also to say I'm sorry if I was needlessly offensive, and I hope you can now understand where I was coming from. I've learned something from your posts. I also hope it isn't patronising for me to say that it sounds like you're great with your kids!
No, I don't believe in killing animals for food. We can easily do without it. But I accept that this is an extreme view.
Do I believe it's wrong to use deadly force to protect a life? Yes, I do. I would do anything I could to stop someone from causing serious harm to me or those around me, and if in that process I killed them, I might not mourn much. But I hope I would never, ever do something with the intent to inflict deadly force. Owning a gun, to my mind, symbolises a willingness to kill, which is something that really bothers me.
There's a big cultural divide between the UK and the US on this, I think, and perhaps I've been too hard to judge people who are pro-gun ownership in the US. Could you perhaps judge me less harshly if you understand that I live in a culture where I'm incredibly unlikely ever to need to defend myself against a gun, where hunting is generally a pastime of the rich, and where one's stereotype of a gun-owner is of a violent and vicious criminal?
I'm glad I'm not your kids' dad too, since it would involve a major operation and I'm pretty happy as a woman ;)
I understand a), but what's your rationale for b)?
I don't believe that "obscene" was too strong a word. "Wrong" certainly isn't. Guns are machines designed only for the purpose of causing death. I don't believe you can justify wielding one at all, let alone putting one in the hands of a child.
From the FAQ: A troll "is a prank comment intended to provoke indignant (or just confused) responses. A Troll might mix up vital facts or otherwise distort reality, to make other readers react with helpful "corrections." I was being totally serious, and therefore what I said wasn't a troll. It may have been flamebait - "comments whose sole purpose is to insult and enrage". Though I would argue not - mine is a commonly-held view, especially in the UK where I live, and although I inadvertently insulted some people, that was in no way my intent and I had no idea it would be taken in that way.
Modding a comment as "troll" and "flamebait" are not alternative ways of saying "I really don't like your views".
Okay, but times change. For example, it's only relatively recently that societies such as the UK have raised the age of consent to sixteen. Historically, it has ranged anywhere from the age of seven onwards. Just because tradition has always treated children in a particular way, that doesn't mean that we should continue to believe it's right. Historically, there have been times when people needed to learn to hunt, or defend their families, at very young ages. That isn't the case any more - it may be cheaper to hunt, but it isn't necessary to avoid starvation in countries like the UK or US. Growing vegetables and pulses is a perfectly acceptable alternative, for example, even if you're arguing against the costs of buying food.
Guns, in the end, have the primary purpose of killing things. While teaching children how to kill things may have been practically necessary two hundred years ago, it is not any longer and, in my view, it should be banned.
I'm interested that my original comment was modded as a troll. I wasn't meaning to troll, just expressing an opinion that I hold very deeply and that is shared by an awful lot of people.
But you're assuming that children are capable of levels of rational thought and knowing right from wrong which they just aren't. You can teach children not to play with matches, but a lot of them will still do it because they overestimate their ability to evaluate the risks.
Adolescents are notoriously unstable (the raging hormones aren't just a myth and can have some serious effects) and there's often little correlation between the relationship parents think they have with their child and the relationship which that child perceives.
I have very little fear of going outside - but then, I live in a country where possession of firearms is largely illegal.
The thing about children is that they don't have the same capabilities for rational thought as they will have when they're adults. They also don't have the same control over their emotions, especially when they are adolescents. You may tell your child how to be responsible around guns (though I'm not sure that I would classify your plan of "here's a gun, let's shoot small animals with it" as responsible). But that doesn't mean your child won't be persuaded by a playmate to take the gun out and let him play with it. It also doesn't guard against the possibility that your depressed adolescent daughter will take the gun and kill herself, or take it into school and kill her teachers or fellow students. And when she does that, you will have taught her to be a more effective shooter.
People should not own guns, period. But to put one in the hands of a child is obscene.
http://childrenwithguns.blogspot.com/
Depends on how you define "free", doesn't it?
If I donate goods to charity, they get those goods without paying me money in return. If I give a gift to a friend, they also get goods without giving money in return. Those goods may have been paid for with my money, which was given to me by my employers, which comes from my employers' profits from their customers. I may be repaid with friendship or a good feeling in my heart. But that doesn't make the gift non-free at the point of donation. Similarly, when I download free (as in beer) software, the fact that I don't ever have to pay any money to use it makes it free for download, even though someone may have been paid to produce it or done so whilst subsidised by their parents. I may give the producers publicity, my thanks, my love and attention, but I don't give them money. If Microsoft claims that there is no such thing as software for which users don't have to pay money, they're blatantly wrong. If they claim that software is never produced without using time or resources which could otherwise be making money, perhaps they have a better case.
These gangs of thugs who roam our lawless streets preying on the weak and vulnerable? I've never seen one. No one I know has ever seen one. Most of Britain is not plagued with them. On the whole, where they exist they seem to be more worried about attacking rival gang members and their associates.
So, no, I wouldn't stand up at all well to attack by a gang. But I doubt I'll ever have to.
I know a lot of people who live in London (I live about an hour away myself), and not one of them has ever been attacked by thugs. They're not particularly well-off or rich people, either. And of course you can resist. You just can't carry a gun to do it with.
Never seen a gun in my life - never want to. Yes, people kill each other with guns - having more guns doesn't seem to me to be a great answer to that problem. I take your point about defence. It's true that if I were attacked by someone I would have no means of defending myself. But how many high school shootings have we had in Britain? How often has a child injured itself or someone else playing with a relative's gun? Gun ownership has its downside too.
Yup. And we read about kids shooting up their schools with Dad's gun and bullets from Walmart. My country's not perfect. Neither's yours.
Carrying weapons is illegal in the UK. Having any of those things with me (let alone using them) would be an arrestable offence, and the gun would land me in jail.
Not quite. He'd already agreed to have his work published before he died. They certainly weren't secret from the Church, since his ideas were known both to the Pope and to the Cardinal of Capua, who urged him to make them more widely available to scholars.
I'm not disputing that the Church has done incredibly dumbass things throughout its history. In the 1600s, they "corrected" Copernicus' text because of the heliocentrism row. But that's not the point here. The point is that Copernicus himself was a Catholic all his life, and that he doesn't seem to have been hugely secretive about his work (any more than a modern scientist is with preliminary findings) or to have tried to keep it from the Church.
I'm not an apologist for the Church, but I'm sick of seeing religious people attacked for their faith.
I think you mean "idiots savants" or just "savants".
Admittedly Copernicus is the odd man out there, though note that he was actually a priest, which is a step beyond adhering to Christianity because you have to. It's dangerous to assume that a medieval person was only a Christian because they had to be, even if it makes you feel better about some famous scientific figures of the past. Christianity was an absolutely monolithic force in society, and it's more likely that any given person believed in it than not.
Seems I'm a Troll, and Insightful, and Overrated. I always knew I had identity issues, but this is one to tell my therapist ;)
Question: there seems to be a lot of complaining recently about specific people posting stories that aren't seen as well-researched or newsworthy. Why does this happen? I assumed that editors just evaluated stories as they came in against objective criteria - is that naive? Sorry if this is offtopic.