Hell, most people can't tell the difference between a crookedly scanned all-image PDF and a Word document.
Then there are the clients who have shit fits when I tell them I can't make a 50 page fax that's obviously a print-out of an Excel or Word document go *bloop* into a database and that I need the actual file emailed to me otherwise I'll have to give them a data entry charge.
Yes, I've heard of OCR. I haven't heard of OCR that works well enough.
Ideally studying at a university isn't an exercise in delivering to spec. I'm not paying to produce a product for other people. I get paid to produce products for other people.
Eh, what the hell do I know. I stopped taking classes after I couldn't come up with a good way to echo the feminist sentiment that all women really do have penis envy and that I'm so lucky to have been born a guy without completely imploding. Somehow a body that causes you pain and discomfort one month out of the week is worse than a body that causes you pain and discomfort 12 times a day without ever letting up, and having a period is the equivalent of being raped. Oh, and long hair is the equivalent of being raped. So is putting on make up. In fact, just being female is like being continuously raped. At least that's all I learned in college.
Anyone whose knee jerks and mods me troll is actually modding feminism troll.
So they selected anti-social people who at the same time were highly social in joining fraternal organizations? Sounds perfectly and utterly non-contradictory.
Wish I had mod points. Of course it is. Look deep enough into any of this women-as-perpetual-victims crap and it always contradicts itself.
Feminism is built on the idea that all gender differences are the result of some direct action by a man in a position of authority.
No women stay in math class long enough to solve a simple equation (say 5 = 2x)? Somehow that's a man's fault, and it couldn't possibly be her mothers' fault. Even if her mother and her female, math-phobic teachers contributed to that, it's still somehow men's fault at large that the women a young girl is modeling herself after socially are math-phobic.
So, since men are clearly the culprit, women can't possibly be held responsible for being part of the solution. It's beyond feminism that these math-phobic older women should correct their own problems. It's far, far beyond feminism for these young women who learn math-phobia to fix their own problem.
What always floors me about feminism, though, is how they willfully ignore the fact that someone who can't do basic algebra, no matter whose fault that is, will never make a good programmer.
If I were hiring, why on earth would I hire a woman who can't do math over a man who's gone to school and has experience just to "even things out?"
It's completely ridiculous.
I'm not saying that women can't do math. There are female math majors out there that could run rings around me.
I'm not saying that women can't program, I just haven't met any.
I see no reason why a woman shouldn't be able to learn programming,
but it's not a skill that you just pick up during the first week or two of a new job out of the blue.
Women need to recognize that it's a skill that takes a long time to learn and a longer time to get good at.
Your first one - "Can I know" or "May I know" instead of "Can you tell me" or "What is"
There are other ones you learn to listen for quickly. An out-of-place conjugation here, an oddly colloquial phrase there... it adds up quickly.
I'm sure accent is more a part of it. I set up call scripts, and I'll get clients who will insist on any of those. If the agent says something else (because usually what the client wrote is awkward anyway since most clients don't know how to put themselves in the shoes of someone talking on the phone for some reason) we'll get an email back that says "This study I have here says blablabla so I"m going off service if your agents won't read my awkward phrasing verbatim."
Let me share my experience working in an American call center.
no authority to give any help at all outside the script on their desk
DING DING DING! Give the man a cigar!.
Quite often the people setting up accounts with us are outsourcing because the "girl who handles that" or "the lady at the front desk" is taking on additional responsibilities.
When they give us incomplete information or information that indicated that they really have no idea what kinds of procedures the "lady at the front desk" does to handle calls and schedule service (for example), they often given snippy answers like "you'll never get a call like that."
If we do get extra information, we're lucky to know that Bob's HVAC does refrigeration also. We're also lucky to get maybe a quarter of their staff list, so when someone calls up expecting to be transferred to Frank (because that's what the girl at the front desk always did), we don't even know Frank works there.
So all you can do is say, "I can take your name and number and let them know in the morning:)" and just hope your caller isn't going to be one of the really difficult ones.
If the caller is important enough and pissed off enough, then we'll get a snippy email that says, "I have concerns that you don't know how to answer calls. You need to always be doing xyz. And I'm not going to pay for that 20 minute call where the agent politely took toe-curling, foul-mouthed abuse and sexual harassment with a smile in her voice the whole time, either." Usually then one can cross-reference that with the other email where you proactively asked how to handle xyz and got "you'll never get calls like that" as the response.
The problem is nearly always (but not every time) the client. Don't even get me started about when we spend an hour reaching the only person we're allowed to reach only to finally get ahold of them, and either a.) we're never supposed to call them (along with various insults, etc) or b.) they haven't worked for the client in 2 years.
After all, we're just the call center. It's not like we answer their phones 128 hours out of the week.
(That being said, ask yourself who would want to be a call center agent and take abuse 8 hours a day without any way to even answer the caller's most simple questions and why can't they get a fast food job where they're at least doing something tangible, and you get the other half of the picture.)
Ok, I'm sure this is going to get modded to oblivion, but here goes.
Why the hell do I care?
When I dress up as a boy and go to work and have to deal with women who get bamboozled by basic Word features like tab stops, why do I care? If these women don't care about games or any other tech, why, as a guy, do I care?
When I dress up as a girl when I get home and fire up Monster Hunter or BlazBlue or whatever I feel like playing, why the hell do I care what some other woman wants out of games? If other women don't want to play video games, why do I care?
If women want to be "represented" in video games, they can get out GCC, SDL, and whatever else and make their own games. But they don't.
Besides, the girls at work who do play video games are perfectly happy with Smash Bros from what I understand anyway. I don't like Smash Bros. Does that make me underrepresented in Smash Bros? Why should anyone else care that I don't play Smash Bros?
Why do we all have to bend over backwards to try to get people who have no interest in our hobbies to be interested in our hobbies? They're just not interested, so why the hell should I care?
I think what disturbs me the most about this war on drugs is that people hear about the death and violence the black market brings to Mexico, then they get angry at the people using the drugs and blame them for the death and violence.
Most people are convinced that drugs cause death and violence, not prohibition
I've never understood the superstitious mindset.
Then they eat another pain pill and get high before that meeting with the difficult client.... Somehow in their minds getting high off something a doctor dealt them is completely different than weed, which apparently turns you into an antisocial, psychotic killer. Damn hypocrites, all of them.
I'll bet you do something that someone else would think is stupid, too. Grow up.
Did you know some people use dope because it allows them to live fuller lives? Maybe some day you'll find that marihuana is the best substance available to treat some symptoms you might have. Will you be an idiot then? Or is it smarter to take something less effective with more side effects that costs more just because it's approved by big brother?
But yes, I'm right with you on the democracy thing. Most people seem to share your views, i.e. that it should be legal but it's still "bad" somehow to use it. I guess whatever floats your morally superior boat. The will of the people will probably never prevail on this issue, though. Gotta vote for the politician who's tough on crime since you gotta be afraid to leave your front door in today's ever increasingly increasing society.
Don't worry, kid. You'll grow out of it. Worked for me.
What I don't get about this whole damn discussion is why anybody would want their kid to be the loser virgin fag on the bus who's the last to know how to cuss like a sailor and what every last slang term for girls' body parts are.
I'm infertile, but if I could have kids, I would not want them to have a repeat of my experience.
Hell, I'd want to teach these things to my kid myself so that when the other kids start obsessing about boners and pussies, he or she could just roll his or her eyes instead of being embarrassed to not know what the hell is going on.
I mean, Jesus, kid. You're going to be getting shitfaced on your 21st birthday before you know it. That's what I don't get about this whole discussion. Childhood is there, then it's gone. It's such a small fraction of your life. Parents need to realize that their kids grow up, and when their kids grow up, maybe their kids will hate them for making them into a sheltered virgin nerd faggot.
All these "parents" want grandkids some day right? You know how grandkids are made right? Your kid is going to have to fuck and have hot kinky sex just like they did.
I should get off the internet before hypocrites that think that failing to plan for the consequences of their animal functions make them wise piss me off too much. Seriously. If I could have kids, I'd plan ahead and want them and want to raise them with my partner, not this drama bullshit that the stork just magically makes kids appear, and I'm supposed to feel bad for these people having tons of sex all the time?
Uhh... most people use their real name on Facebook.
(I don't, but I've never understood using one's legal name on the interwebs. Most of my friends call me by this name IRL because I'm not either gender so my legal name doesn't make much sense.)
Damn it, I forgot to mention she was also 10 at the time. Or 11. I don't remember exactly. On the other hand, in this modern society, I suppose I should have been hauled off to a gulag for getting a kiss from a 10 year old girl. Child Porn! C'est la vie times a million.
Stupid puberty not happening until two years later. Stupid me for being attracted to men instead of the gender I'm supposed to be attracted to.
True enough. A friend who I tried to get to program also kissed me when we were 10. I could have gotten laid when I was 10 instead of being alone all my life. I didn't understand that she wanted to fuck me, so I turned out to be a faggot. I can't blame my choice to program for a living on that or vice-versa. C'est la vie.
I thought being forced to go somewhere and spend time around people who were routinely abusive towards me was punishment.
Seriously. I'm almost 30. Some scars never heal, I guess. At least I didn't go through with killing myself.
I've been in and out of talk therapy since I got away from that torture, but talk therapy isn't worth a damn.
Yeah, I know, someone's going to call me a pussy for posting this. I don't care. Bullying is a problem. For me, bullying caused me a life-long psychological problem.
You can call me a pussy and make fun of me some more for it, I don't care. I'm the one who has to deal with it. I guess if it hasn't gone away by now it's not going to.
A lot of times I wonder what I might have been capable of if I hadn't been forced into a school that seemed hell-bent on systematically destroying my self-esteem.
One smart kid somewhere else gets encouraged by his teachers to use his knowledge to find new medicines and cure diseases.
This smart kid gets a threat to get the FBI involved when all he wanted to do was find other kids who were interested in programming.
Good times. I'm all grown up now so why should I give a shit I guess.
I keep trying to recover from my problem, but the worst thing that public school did was teach me that despite having a 160 IQ and all the talent that god gave me, in the end I'm worthless.
That takes away all motivation to solve my problem.
Go ahead and call me a faggot pussy. I don't care. I'll just drink another beer. You're not going to hurt me any more than I already am. I'm just pointing out a problem with modern factory-style education that causes a sub-optimal allocation of resources. My money could feed starving children in worse parts of the world. Instead, I give it to the guy at the liquor store for some more booze. God gave me a lot of talent, but my will to live was crushed by my schooling. I'm not trying to toot my own horn. That was god's choice, and I wish I could use it better. C'est la vie.
I'd mod parent up, but I've already commented. Doctors are abusive, neglectful cheapskates. I've been told by the board of directors at a local hospital that it's not safe for me to go to their hospital any more over a billing dispute. If I ever have to deal with a doctor again, I'll be calling my lawyer, because after the threats I've received (on recordings I'd subpeona), I think it'd be easy for me to win malpractice against any area hospital.
Seriously, all I need is the recording of a doctor threatening that I'll wake up bloody in a ditch one day... Doctors are no better than drug dealers, because they are drug dealers.
Next time a "doctor" is about to put you under and saw through your sternum to operate on your heart, ask yourself the same question.
I hope if I get to that point (heart problems run in my family) I've another citizenship besides USA in a country that doesn't try to shoehorn capitalism into medicine.
After working at an answering service for 5 years, I've learned that doctors in the USA at least are duplicitous, technically inept (as in can't understand their pager doesn't work when turned off), and willing to lie left and right just to get a small discount on their bill.
I've stopped going to my doctor altogether because the board of directors at the affiliated hospital let us know that it might not be safe to be a patient of one of their doctors any more over a billing dispute.
I have less respect for doctors than I do lawyers, because at least the lawyer clients have some basis for an argument when they dispute their bill. All doctors know are cuss words, and I intend to drop my health insurance next open enrollment period because I'm sick of subsidizing these pigs.
I think what we're seeing here is a digital reflection of the same sort of information exchange that would happen normally verbally face to face or via telephone.
Just because Twitter does this 140 character limitation doesn't magically make it the equivalent of a conversation.
You hit on a lot of good points, but the equivalent of a pub conversation is IRC. Telephone? XMPP.
Twitter exists to publish your thoughts permanently.
IRC logs would be a gray area, but what if you tape-recorded the pub and published the audio at a later date?
What we're seeing here is an abuse of the legal system by some blockhead that the public sought fit to give tons of money because for some reason they find watching him kick a ball down a field entertaining, more entertaining than getting together with a bunch of their friends for a game themselves. So here's this jock with an overinflated ego who fucked up, someone found out about it, published it, and now there's hell to pay.
Same thing would happen if it were a physical bulletin board. Keep pinning up something annoying to someone with lots of money, and sooner or later you're going to get in trouble. Should you be in trouble? Ideally no, but you pissed off someone with tons of money. Doesn't matter what the law says, that's how life works, kid.
Victims don't want to put the blame "somewhere", they want to put the blame and find justice where it SHOULD be, which is why so many victims end up finding their own justice, because they know how screwed up the legal system is.
No, no, no. Let me guess. The legal system is "screwed up" because it lets the person you simply think did it go free because nobody could actually prove that he did it?
People like you need to live through being falsely accused of something to knock you back down a few notches.
I think there's something else lurking in that comparison. When you look at it, people who are really good with music have been doing it since they were small children. In my school district, if you wanted to join orchestra, you had to make the decision in 4th grade. Band or choir didn't start until middle school in 6th grade. Even then, the folks who joined jazz band when that opened up had been playing music before they joined regular band in 6th grade anyway.
Along those same lines, I've been programming since I was very little, too. I have an intuitive understanding of how programs work that at times simply flabbergasts people I'm working with. I have some shortcomings, too, because of the informal nature of being self-taught.
Perhaps being a professional programmer should be like being a professional musician. Most can't just start when they get to college. You have to be dedicated to it from an early age.
On the other hand, if I could do my life over, I would have picked music instead of programming. One gets you laid, the other makes girls run away.
Slashdot Mirror
Hell, most people can't tell the difference between a crookedly scanned all-image PDF and a Word document.
Then there are the clients who have shit fits when I tell them I can't make a 50 page fax that's obviously a print-out of an Excel or Word document go *bloop* into a database and that I need the actual file emailed to me otherwise I'll have to give them a data entry charge.
Yes, I've heard of OCR. I haven't heard of OCR that works well enough.
one month out of the week
Strike that. Reverse it.
I swear it was the right way around in the preview.
Ideally studying at a university isn't an exercise in delivering to spec. I'm not paying to produce a product for other people. I get paid to produce products for other people.
Eh, what the hell do I know. I stopped taking classes after I couldn't come up with a good way to echo the feminist sentiment that all women really do have penis envy and that I'm so lucky to have been born a guy without completely imploding. Somehow a body that causes you pain and discomfort one month out of the week is worse than a body that causes you pain and discomfort 12 times a day without ever letting up, and having a period is the equivalent of being raped. Oh, and long hair is the equivalent of being raped. So is putting on make up. In fact, just being female is like being continuously raped. At least that's all I learned in college.
Anyone whose knee jerks and mods me troll is actually modding feminism troll.
So they selected anti-social people who at the same time were highly social in joining fraternal organizations? Sounds perfectly and utterly non-contradictory.
Wish I had mod points. Of course it is. Look deep enough into any of this women-as-perpetual-victims crap and it always contradicts itself.
Feminism is built on the idea that all gender differences are the result of some direct action by a man in a position of authority.
No women stay in math class long enough to solve a simple equation (say 5 = 2x)? Somehow that's a man's fault, and it couldn't possibly be her mothers' fault. Even if her mother and her female, math-phobic teachers contributed to that, it's still somehow men's fault at large that the women a young girl is modeling herself after socially are math-phobic.
So, since men are clearly the culprit, women can't possibly be held responsible for being part of the solution. It's beyond feminism that these math-phobic older women should correct their own problems. It's far, far beyond feminism for these young women who learn math-phobia to fix their own problem.
What always floors me about feminism, though, is how they willfully ignore the fact that someone who can't do basic algebra, no matter whose fault that is, will never make a good programmer. If I were hiring, why on earth would I hire a woman who can't do math over a man who's gone to school and has experience just to "even things out?" It's completely ridiculous.
I'm not saying that women can't do math. There are female math majors out there that could run rings around me. I'm not saying that women can't program, I just haven't met any. I see no reason why a woman shouldn't be able to learn programming, but it's not a skill that you just pick up during the first week or two of a new job out of the blue. Women need to recognize that it's a skill that takes a long time to learn and a longer time to get good at.
Who says the 51% majority doesn't approve of what's being done to the 49% minority?
Your first one - "Can I know" or "May I know" instead of "Can you tell me" or "What is"
There are other ones you learn to listen for quickly. An out-of-place conjugation here, an oddly colloquial phrase there... it adds up quickly.
I'm sure accent is more a part of it. I set up call scripts, and I'll get clients who will insist on any of those. If the agent says something else (because usually what the client wrote is awkward anyway since most clients don't know how to put themselves in the shoes of someone talking on the phone for some reason) we'll get an email back that says "This study I have here says blablabla so I"m going off service if your agents won't read my awkward phrasing verbatim."
Let me share my experience working in an American call center.
no authority to give any help at all outside the script on their desk
DING DING DING! Give the man a cigar!.
Quite often the people setting up accounts with us are outsourcing because the "girl who handles that" or "the lady at the front desk" is taking on additional responsibilities.
When they give us incomplete information or information that indicated that they really have no idea what kinds of procedures the "lady at the front desk" does to handle calls and schedule service (for example), they often given snippy answers like "you'll never get a call like that."
If we do get extra information, we're lucky to know that Bob's HVAC does refrigeration also. We're also lucky to get maybe a quarter of their staff list, so when someone calls up expecting to be transferred to Frank (because that's what the girl at the front desk always did), we don't even know Frank works there.
So all you can do is say, "I can take your name and number and let them know in the morning :)" and just hope your caller isn't going to be one of the really difficult ones.
If the caller is important enough and pissed off enough, then we'll get a snippy email that says, "I have concerns that you don't know how to answer calls. You need to always be doing xyz. And I'm not going to pay for that 20 minute call where the agent politely took toe-curling, foul-mouthed abuse and sexual harassment with a smile in her voice the whole time, either." Usually then one can cross-reference that with the other email where you proactively asked how to handle xyz and got "you'll never get calls like that" as the response.
The problem is nearly always (but not every time) the client. Don't even get me started about when we spend an hour reaching the only person we're allowed to reach only to finally get ahold of them, and either a.) we're never supposed to call them (along with various insults, etc) or b.) they haven't worked for the client in 2 years.
After all, we're just the call center. It's not like we answer their phones 128 hours out of the week.
(That being said, ask yourself who would want to be a call center agent and take abuse 8 hours a day without any way to even answer the caller's most simple questions and why can't they get a fast food job where they're at least doing something tangible, and you get the other half of the picture.)
Well played, sir. Wish I had mod points!
hoover was a cross-dressing pinhead (not that there's anything wrong with cross-dressing
If there's nothing wrong with it, why are you using the term in that manner?
Ok, I'm sure this is going to get modded to oblivion, but here goes.
Why the hell do I care?
When I dress up as a boy and go to work and have to deal with women who get bamboozled by basic Word features like tab stops, why do I care? If these women don't care about games or any other tech, why, as a guy, do I care?
When I dress up as a girl when I get home and fire up Monster Hunter or BlazBlue or whatever I feel like playing, why the hell do I care what some other woman wants out of games? If other women don't want to play video games, why do I care?
If women want to be "represented" in video games, they can get out GCC, SDL, and whatever else and make their own games. But they don't.
Besides, the girls at work who do play video games are perfectly happy with Smash Bros from what I understand anyway. I don't like Smash Bros. Does that make me underrepresented in Smash Bros? Why should anyone else care that I don't play Smash Bros?
Why do we all have to bend over backwards to try to get people who have no interest in our hobbies to be interested in our hobbies? They're just not interested, so why the hell should I care?
No, it isn't!
Wish I had mod points.
I think what disturbs me the most about this war on drugs is that people hear about the death and violence the black market brings to Mexico, then they get angry at the people using the drugs and blame them for the death and violence.
Most people are convinced that drugs cause death and violence, not prohibition
I've never understood the superstitious mindset.
Then they eat another pain pill and get high before that meeting with the difficult client.... Somehow in their minds getting high off something a doctor dealt them is completely different than weed, which apparently turns you into an antisocial, psychotic killer. Damn hypocrites, all of them.
This dopeheads are idiots meme needs to go away.
I'll bet you do something that someone else would think is stupid, too. Grow up.
Did you know some people use dope because it allows them to live fuller lives? Maybe some day you'll find that marihuana is the best substance available to treat some symptoms you might have. Will you be an idiot then? Or is it smarter to take something less effective with more side effects that costs more just because it's approved by big brother?
But yes, I'm right with you on the democracy thing. Most people seem to share your views, i.e. that it should be legal but it's still "bad" somehow to use it. I guess whatever floats your morally superior boat. The will of the people will probably never prevail on this issue, though. Gotta vote for the politician who's tough on crime since you gotta be afraid to leave your front door in today's ever increasingly increasing society.
Don't worry, kid. You'll grow out of it. Worked for me.
What I don't get about this whole damn discussion is why anybody would want their kid to be the loser virgin fag on the bus who's the last to know how to cuss like a sailor and what every last slang term for girls' body parts are.
I'm infertile, but if I could have kids, I would not want them to have a repeat of my experience.
Hell, I'd want to teach these things to my kid myself so that when the other kids start obsessing about boners and pussies, he or she could just roll his or her eyes instead of being embarrassed to not know what the hell is going on.
I mean, Jesus, kid. You're going to be getting shitfaced on your 21st birthday before you know it. That's what I don't get about this whole discussion. Childhood is there, then it's gone. It's such a small fraction of your life. Parents need to realize that their kids grow up, and when their kids grow up, maybe their kids will hate them for making them into a sheltered virgin nerd faggot.
All these "parents" want grandkids some day right? You know how grandkids are made right? Your kid is going to have to fuck and have hot kinky sex just like they did.
I should get off the internet before hypocrites that think that failing to plan for the consequences of their animal functions make them wise piss me off too much. Seriously. If I could have kids, I'd plan ahead and want them and want to raise them with my partner, not this drama bullshit that the stork just magically makes kids appear, and I'm supposed to feel bad for these people having tons of sex all the time?
Feh.
It's still essentially a web of trust. You trust Verisign, Thawte, the DPRK, and all kinds of others, and they trust whomever they trust.
If you wanted to trust me, I could give you my public CA key, and you could install it.
You're correct in a social way, but incorrect in a mathematical way.
Uhh... most people use their real name on Facebook.
(I don't, but I've never understood using one's legal name on the interwebs. Most of my friends call me by this name IRL because I'm not either gender so my legal name doesn't make much sense.)
Damn it, I forgot to mention she was also 10 at the time. Or 11. I don't remember exactly. On the other hand, in this modern society, I suppose I should have been hauled off to a gulag for getting a kiss from a 10 year old girl. Child Porn! C'est la vie times a million.
Stupid puberty not happening until two years later. Stupid me for being attracted to men instead of the gender I'm supposed to be attracted to.
True enough. A friend who I tried to get to program also kissed me when we were 10. I could have gotten laid when I was 10 instead of being alone all my life. I didn't understand that she wanted to fuck me, so I turned out to be a faggot. I can't blame my choice to program for a living on that or vice-versa. C'est la vie.
Undoing some mods to reply, but c'est la vie.
I thought being forced to go somewhere and spend time around people who were routinely abusive towards me was punishment.
Seriously. I'm almost 30. Some scars never heal, I guess. At least I didn't go through with killing myself.
I've been in and out of talk therapy since I got away from that torture, but talk therapy isn't worth a damn.
Yeah, I know, someone's going to call me a pussy for posting this. I don't care. Bullying is a problem. For me, bullying caused me a life-long psychological problem.
You can call me a pussy and make fun of me some more for it, I don't care. I'm the one who has to deal with it. I guess if it hasn't gone away by now it's not going to.
A lot of times I wonder what I might have been capable of if I hadn't been forced into a school that seemed hell-bent on systematically destroying my self-esteem. One smart kid somewhere else gets encouraged by his teachers to use his knowledge to find new medicines and cure diseases. This smart kid gets a threat to get the FBI involved when all he wanted to do was find other kids who were interested in programming. Good times. I'm all grown up now so why should I give a shit I guess.
I keep trying to recover from my problem, but the worst thing that public school did was teach me that despite having a 160 IQ and all the talent that god gave me, in the end I'm worthless. That takes away all motivation to solve my problem.
Go ahead and call me a faggot pussy. I don't care. I'll just drink another beer. You're not going to hurt me any more than I already am. I'm just pointing out a problem with modern factory-style education that causes a sub-optimal allocation of resources. My money could feed starving children in worse parts of the world. Instead, I give it to the guy at the liquor store for some more booze. God gave me a lot of talent, but my will to live was crushed by my schooling. I'm not trying to toot my own horn. That was god's choice, and I wish I could use it better. C'est la vie.
I'd mod parent up, but I've already commented. Doctors are abusive, neglectful cheapskates. I've been told by the board of directors at a local hospital that it's not safe for me to go to their hospital any more over a billing dispute. If I ever have to deal with a doctor again, I'll be calling my lawyer, because after the threats I've received (on recordings I'd subpeona), I think it'd be easy for me to win malpractice against any area hospital.
Seriously, all I need is the recording of a doctor threatening that I'll wake up bloody in a ditch one day... Doctors are no better than drug dealers, because they are drug dealers.
Next time a "doctor" is about to put you under and saw through your sternum to operate on your heart, ask yourself the same question.
I hope if I get to that point (heart problems run in my family) I've another citizenship besides USA in a country that doesn't try to shoehorn capitalism into medicine.
After working at an answering service for 5 years, I've learned that doctors in the USA at least are duplicitous, technically inept (as in can't understand their pager doesn't work when turned off), and willing to lie left and right just to get a small discount on their bill. I've stopped going to my doctor altogether because the board of directors at the affiliated hospital let us know that it might not be safe to be a patient of one of their doctors any more over a billing dispute.
I have less respect for doctors than I do lawyers, because at least the lawyer clients have some basis for an argument when they dispute their bill. All doctors know are cuss words, and I intend to drop my health insurance next open enrollment period because I'm sick of subsidizing these pigs.
I think what we're seeing here is a digital reflection of the same sort of information exchange that would happen normally verbally face to face or via telephone.
Just because Twitter does this 140 character limitation doesn't magically make it the equivalent of a conversation. You hit on a lot of good points, but the equivalent of a pub conversation is IRC. Telephone? XMPP. Twitter exists to publish your thoughts permanently. IRC logs would be a gray area, but what if you tape-recorded the pub and published the audio at a later date?
What we're seeing here is an abuse of the legal system by some blockhead that the public sought fit to give tons of money because for some reason they find watching him kick a ball down a field entertaining, more entertaining than getting together with a bunch of their friends for a game themselves. So here's this jock with an overinflated ego who fucked up, someone found out about it, published it, and now there's hell to pay.
Same thing would happen if it were a physical bulletin board. Keep pinning up something annoying to someone with lots of money, and sooner or later you're going to get in trouble. Should you be in trouble? Ideally no, but you pissed off someone with tons of money. Doesn't matter what the law says, that's how life works, kid.
Holy shit. I never realized I was supposed to be so completely offended by the phrase "no pun intended."
Victims don't want to put the blame "somewhere", they want to put the blame and find justice where it SHOULD be, which is why so many victims end up finding their own justice, because they know how screwed up the legal system is.
No, no, no. Let me guess. The legal system is "screwed up" because it lets the person you simply think did it go free because nobody could actually prove that he did it?
People like you need to live through being falsely accused of something to knock you back down a few notches.
I think there's something else lurking in that comparison. When you look at it, people who are really good with music have been doing it since they were small children. In my school district, if you wanted to join orchestra, you had to make the decision in 4th grade. Band or choir didn't start until middle school in 6th grade. Even then, the folks who joined jazz band when that opened up had been playing music before they joined regular band in 6th grade anyway.
Along those same lines, I've been programming since I was very little, too. I have an intuitive understanding of how programs work that at times simply flabbergasts people I'm working with. I have some shortcomings, too, because of the informal nature of being self-taught.
Perhaps being a professional programmer should be like being a professional musician. Most can't just start when they get to college. You have to be dedicated to it from an early age.
On the other hand, if I could do my life over, I would have picked music instead of programming. One gets you laid, the other makes girls run away.