Agreed. I think GP has libertarianism confused with anarchy. He's calling in to question the ability of a government to enforce its laws. But don't let that stop you from attacking his strawman. He was probably trolling for that response anyway just to further this meme that wanting marriage equality (please don't confuse me with a farm animal, although knowing that Republicans see me as a farm animal has given me wise advice where I spend my hard earned cash), legal and taxed industrial marijuana cultivation, balanced budgets (srsly wtf), at least non-imperialism, elimination of the useless income tax (protip, the 1% don't have "incomes" so we're right back in 1870 and no income tax will fix that), etc all are a sign of anarchy and a destruction of the one true American Way.
Let me bring this back on topic. What about returning copyrights to their LIMITED time and putting our government back in its place as subservient to its own laws? Oops, must be anarchy.
Despite common stereotypes, programming is not out of reach for the average person
Hahaha, no.
Shit like this is the reason I need to get my ass back to college already and change careers away from computers, as fucking far away from them as I can get.
Everybody I work with who has not tried thinks that programming is just so fucking simple.
Guess what?
It's not that fucking simple.
You have to be willing to ask "what if?" You have to be willing to admit you've made a mistake when you find a contradiction in your algorithm. You have to be able to admit you've made a mistake when your algorithm doesn't produce the correct answer. You have to be able to admit you weren't thorough enough when there's a corner case that you hadn't planned for.
You know what? You have to be able to admit you went wrong when the computer goes wrong if you want to program..
The average person is completely incapable of that. There is no fucking tool in the entire god-damned world that is going to make somebody comfortable with approaching a subject matter where they can be wrong.
You're comparing something physically arduous to a woman that will give her a dependent minor child and seriously affect the next 18-19 years of her life to a vaccination?
Are you loony?
Personally, I don't get flu vaccines, but that's because I'd rather have the sniffles a couple days out of the year than get poked with a needle. I'm also not working in an environment where I'll be routinely exposed to the flu. If I were, I'd give it a second thought, especially given the benefit that I won't pass it on to the patients I'm responsible for.
It'd be like working at a security firm surfing porn and malware sites as part of my job, and then insisting that I need to use IE 6 without any anti-virus on Windows ME because of religious reasons. Although I guess at that rate, my box would be one hell of a thing to study... if you're interested in malware of the 90s that's already well known....
But, whatever, once again I've been trolled. So, let me ask you this. Would you want to be born to a single mother who blames you for ruining 19 years of her life? Would you want to be born to a woman who doesn't love you?
Careful how you answer. It's not pretty when that happens. Maybe as karma chugs along, you might get to find out next life. (See what I did there by invoking a belief in reincarnation? Oh well. You probably don't.)
Ok, color me naive, but lately all I hear is bitching about what an awful president Obama is. Why?
Seriously, what, specifically, has he done? Or is this about federalized Romneycare? Or is it about something else like not directing drug enforcement against the voters in Washington and Colorado that legalized marijuana? Or is there something else yet, like a vague threat to the military-industrial complex by not antagonizing Iran? Or something else?
I wrote in Johnson's name to vote for him and voted Republican for governor where I live, so whatever.
In short, I'm supposed to be a horrible person because I can't get pregnant. I'm supposed to revile the idea that I might be forced to be a woman.
Well, Sebastopol, riddle me this. Why is it that I take estrogen, have breasts, and like wearing skirts?
If those things are all so horrible, such horrible things that I need to feel personally guilty about forcing on women because I had the audacity to choose to be born without a womb, why do I prefer those things?
For that matter, why the hell do genetic girls wear skirts. They can just fucking choose not to if they want, but they still do.
You see, feminism falls apart once you consider that our bodies aren't who we are. Feminism absolutely cannot deal with the idea that somebody might want to be a woman, can it?
Feminists love to say that feminism is a philosophy of equality, but why does feminism constantly espouse the idea that all men are the exact damned same? That's not very equalist, is it? How is reducing me to by body parts and then turning around and saying it's the evils of men that reduce women to their body parts in any way productive?
Why don't feminists like you really reduce me to my body parts? Reduce me to my breasts that can create milk (if I screw up my estrogen dose, maybe TMI, but it's happened)? Reduce me to my female brain? Reduce me to my attraction to men and reduce me to the feelings of disgust that come over me when a female gets too close to me in that way?
You can't, can you? All that feminism can do is reduce me to my penis. not even to the fact that it's mutilated and still sometimes painful to this day, but that it's a penis. In fact, feminism takes all those parts of me I just presented that are woman-like and calls them a rape of the female form!
It's utterly stupid. Please come back when you want to talk real gender equality. Perhaps you're just too afraid of facing the privilege YOU have of being unaware of YOUR cis-female privilege. Maybe that's why feminists like you always react with incredulity and hollow accusations of being sexist whenever I talk about real equality.
Well, I don't know if you're a ciswoman and you can say you're whatever you want on the internet. Maybe you're just a pathetic little boy who's gotten used to sucking up to feminism to get dates I don't know.
Either that, or if feminists hate being women so much and want to be men so much, maybe they should talk to a psychologist about gender transition. Born women DO transition to live as men. And the two female-to-male trans men I've met were totally hot.
Ideas that, ironically, are based in sexism. We'll start with the idea that all men are rapists, that all men are irresponsible, that all men are responsible for all the problems in the world, etc.
Then we move on to more sexist ideas like all women are oppressed, and that the only reason women aren't paid the same is the fault of all men.
Every now and then you have a bright gem that calls the entire gender dichotomy into question, but those are ever so rare. The bulk of feminism assumes a gender dichotomy and relies on a gender dichotomy in order to formulate the basis for its logic (to use the word loosely).
In fact, we even learn that all men are so completely afraid of role reversal that they took it upon themselves to oppress women so that they would never have to do anything like change a diaper or clean a counter ever again? Why? Because cleaning is so completely horrible to all men.
The role reversal and sexualization arguments are the most hilarious to me. We're taught that the most horrific thing in a man's mind is becoming a woman. And this is supposed to re-enforce the idea that men oppress women because men hate women and men want to make sure that they would never be like a woman. In fact, some writings that were presented to me indicated that the perfect punishment for a man and the sins he supposedly commits every time he gets a paycheck or starts a conversation with a woman is to force him to become a woman.
So, sure, give me something I wish for by letting me be a woman and somehow call that punishment?
What's supposed to be so attractive about womens' disgusting bodies that I'm suppose to involuntarily visually rape them every time I look at them again? Remind me, because I keep forgetting.
Why the hell would I even waste my time starting conversations with women when the average woman has nothing of substance to talk about, especially after giving me feminist essay after feminist essay about how opening a conversation with a female stranger is the same as date rape?
Perhaps feminism should look a little deeper... they write so often about how they want to be everything a man is, but they never write about wanting to be a man. Perhaps the basis of the revulsion that the average person feels when imagining being forced to be the opposite sex isn't based in a power dynamic. Maybe there are even males who don't find disgusting female bodies to be attractive and something to use and rape and defile?
Try to argue that with an English teacher, and it's a quick way to get an F. Oh, but say how guilty you are for choosing to be a man and how bad of a person you are for being a man, and instant A.
Because all men are the same. Because all women are unique snowflakes, and it's only the male hegemony that uses terms like all women. Except when feminists use the term all women.
I think my favorite conundrum was when I had an assignment to write about how to determine when a house is pregnant or not. A house. The teacher had assigned that to the class to teach all us young men a lesson about how inferior we are because we couldn't become pregnant, therefore we could not comprehend pregnancy. And since we couldn't comprehend pregnancy, we couldn't understand giving life. And since we couldn't understand giving life, we were all horrible, murderous monsters.
That kind of feminist nonsense. All inherently, completely sexist.
I was reading the diet section of The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga by Swami Vishnu-devananda earlier today since I've been evaluating my diet in an attempt to get rid of a beer gut I've grown over the past couple years, when I came across this section. It seems to be a rebuttal to your macho appeal to nature.
According to the Bhagavad Gita, there are three types of food: namely, sattvic food (pure food) rajasic food (stimulating food), and tamasic (impure and rotten food).
Milk, butter, fruits, vegetables, and grains come under the category of good or sattvic foods. Spices, hot substances, meat, alcohol, fish, and eggs, which stimulate the nervous system, come under the heading of stimulating or rajasic foods, while food that is rotten, putrefied, and overripe comes under the tamasic or impure food category.
Man's preference for one of the above-mentioned food types is in accordance with the evolution of his mind. Spiritually and mentally advanced people prefer the pure type of food....
So, the correct answer may not be doing as other predators do. Additionally, I think categorizing compassion for other living organisms and making conscious dietary decisions to avoid even the most humane kind of animal death as "mental illness" represents something that might not be quite right with your head. Overreaction much?
To wit: you're hardly the only person I know who likes meat. You're only one of a handful I know who thinks it's a mental illness to find meat disgusting, and if you're anything like those people, you're somebody I wouldn't want to be around. It's one thing to disagree with someone. It's another to attack their opinion as a disease.
Now where did I leave that buffalo sauce? The wings are almost ready....
Can't say I disagree with the white privilege one. Racism still exists and is pretty disgusting. But, I've notice that it's mostly white women who are hanging on to these attitudes.
So ANYWAY, here we go!
1. My odds of being hired for a job, when competing against female applicants, are probably skewed in my favor. The more prestigious the job, the larger the odds are skewed.
Nope. Well, unless a female is doing the hiring. It never ceases to irritate me how backwards most non-trans (cis) women I know are.
2. If I fail in my job or career, I can feel sure this wonâ(TM)t be seen as a black mark against my entire sexâ(TM)s capabilities.
Nope. See Home Improvement.
3. I am far less likely to face sexual harassment at work than my female co-workers are.
Nope. There's a breast cancer account that comes up every year where we have to ask callers if they have implants. I've received no end of sexual harassment on that and in general as well.
4. If I do the same task as a woman, and if the measurement is at all subjective, chances are people will think I did a better job.
Nope.
5. If I choose not to have children, my masculinity will not be called into question.
Well, this is a strange one. I'm trans, so the minute they grow a female reproductive system from my stem cells, I'll have children.
6. If I have children and a career, no one will think Iâ(TM)m selfish for not staying at home.
What about men who WANT to stay home? #6 fails for its own sexism.
7. My elected representatives are mostly people of my own sex. The more prestigious and powerful the elected position, the more this is true.
Nope.
8. When I ask to see âoethe person in charge,â odds are I will face a person of my own sex. The higher-up in the organization the person is, the surer I can be.
Nope.
9. As a child, chances are I was encouraged to be more active and outgoing than my sisters.
I don't have sisters.
10. As a child, chances are I got more teacher attention than girls who raised their hands just as often.
OH HELL NO.
11. If Iâ(TM)m careless with my financial affairs it wonâ(TM)t be attributed to my sex.
lololololololololol. haha *snort* ha
12. If Iâ(TM)m careless with my driving it wonâ(TM)t be attributed to my sex.
Fair enough.
13. Even if I sleep with a lot of women, there is no chance that I will be seriously labeled a âoeslut,â nor is there any male counterpart to âoeslut-bashing.â
There's a reason for this. All a woman has to do is go to bar on ladies night, get liquored up for free, and get laid. I've also dated men before as a woman, and it's way, way easier than even thinking about dating a woman, even if I end up picking up the check.
14. I do not have to worry about the message my wardrobe sends about my sexual availability or my gender conformity.
I don't think as long as I'm working in the male gender that I'm supposed to care. Although, I've been thinking lately I need a suit. Always wanted one.
15. My clothing is typically less expensive and better-constructed than womenâ(TM)s clothing for the same social status. While I have fewer options, my clothes will probably fit better than a womanâ(TM)s without tailoring.
Hoo boy. If this isn't a self-created problem for women. It's called the changing room. Use it. At least if you're a genetic girl, you don't get carded and treated like shit.
That does raise a question, though. Why do boys do better when they're graded remotely, and why do girls do better when they're graded by their own teacher? I don't suppose there's a bit of favoritism going on, no? I suppose that ties back into the point of my rant.
We live in a world where when a woman fails, we find every excuse we can up to some unprovable discrimination that *must* exist otherwise she wouldn't have failed.
I submit my co-workers as a counterexample. Anything but rule followers. Nearly every woman I have worked with wants to do things her way and her way only, standards be damned.
That being said, the problem here is gender discrimination.
What do we do with this study?
The narrative here is that since girls are getting more college degrees that they're somehow better. Why do they earn less? Why do they do more poorly at standardized testing?
It could be that percent of degrees being awarded to women is a bad metric. I'd suspect it's simply because higher learning is simply more accessible to women. Let's skip over the gender-specific scholarships, because frankly they're probably not significant. How many women end up clashing swords with their families over trivial matters? How many parents try to push their daughters out to the streets instead of letting them stay at home while they finish a degree?
There's a whole lot of crap that's being missed by this troll story.
But boys are still smarter.
No, no, a thousand times NO. You cannot judge somebody by the contents of their pants. Ok?
That is the big fucking elephant in the room that gets missed every time here. We want gender equality, right? We want career women, right? What about house-husbands? Oops, can't have that, sounds too much like homosexuality and weakness.
Women are never going to be equal until we get rid of gender stereotypes. And I mean really equal, as in being required to sign up for selective service, as in protecting boys' genitals from mutilation as well as girls' genitals. And that will never happen as long as we continue to judge, categorize, and discriminate against our children by their body parts.
Socialization starts in the cradle. Are boys and girls different? Yes. I couldn't be transgendered if male and female brains were biologically the same. What that doesn't mean is that we can take women who have been told from day one that their biggest achievement in life will be having children and compare them to men who have been told from day one that if they don't get a real job it's the gutter for them.
The way forward in my view is to find some middle ground. Of course, I'd be happy just extending that same threat of "in the gutter" to girls and taking away benefits for getting pregnant (welfare, subsidized housing, medicaid etc). Of course put in the exemptions for rape, etc.
Either that or let's just give up on this whole idea of gender equality if we can't move past the men are expendable meme vs. protect women so they can get pregnant, fuck all who pays for the pregnancy and child care.
I should probably read TFA, but this is Slashdot. So, uhh, if girls do worse on standardized tests, how do we conclude they do better at school?
Let me guess. This is all going to come down to some kind of thing where when the girls underperform, we change the school, and when the boys underperform, we change the boys.
To try to keep a rant short, let's see why boys do so poorly. Could it have anything to do with rampant gender discrimination at the primary level and being forcefed feminist nonsense and guilt-tripping at the secondary level?
Jeebus. I remember many times when we did projects in class in elementary that the girls were given more options for what they could do than boys. Why? Well, everyone knows girls are more responsible than boys. One year even it was a school-wide policy that during indoor recess, the girls had the option to go to the gym to play basketball or volleyball, but the boys had to stay in their classroom.
Hell, I even remember one teacher I had who once decided to punish all the boys because of a few in the back who were acting up. Why? Well, we had it coming. I challenged the teacher about how it was fair to punish me when I hadn't done anything wrong, and I'll never forget the response. "You're just as well-behaved as a girl, but it wouldn't be fair to the rest of the boys if I let you off." Holy shit.
How about if we just get rid of gender stereotyping and discrimination? How about if we stop imprinting girls with math phobia? How about if we stop treating boys like they're already rapists and thugs?
My ex-parents gave me so much bad and delusional advice. They even talked me out of applying to MIT because they thought we wouldn't be able to afford it and that there was no reason to expect getting a degree there was any better than a local no-name college. Years later, I find out that, no, I damned well could have afforded it, fuck we affording it. I have a feeling the real reason they discouraged me from applying was that they were afraid I'd be exposed to leftist ideas.
Not everybody is qualified to be a parent. I'd suppose that a lot of people aren't qualified. How many folks who want to be parents care to do their own research about things like circumcision so they can be prepared if something goes wrong? How many people who want to be parents are prepared for the very real possibility that their child might be homosexual? How many people think that circumcision problems only happen to other people, and that their kids ain't gonna be no queer?
Looking back on my childhood, I'm convinced that I was something that happened to my parents. They didn't want me. They wanted to have a hot steamy night, but their religious principles prevented them from using protection. Do I wish they would have sought abortion? A lot of times, I do. But I'm here, still alive and doing science and trying to learn how to live as a normal person instead of the puritan robot they tried to make me.
This will sound cheesy, but once in high school I started growing my hair out because I wanted long hair. I still remember crying myself to sleep after my ex-father finally got me to cut it off. Sure, I was a myopic teenager at the time, but that's not what strikes me about that memory. I didn't do it because I was forced; I did it because for some sick reason I loved my ex-father and respected his judgement. Most people's fathers get smarter the older they get; my ex-father just gets more idiotic and warped the older I get. I wonder what I'd do instead if I could go back and time and tell myself that in 3 years I'd be spending a weekend homeless.
I was employed, I could have moved out. But I didn't because I trusted two people who turned out to be completely untrustworthy. They didn't even give me a week's notice so that I could look for an apartment and sign a lease. They made sure to keep me nice and sheltered as their 4.0 GPA machine so I wouldn't know what to do on my own, then they gave me until the end of the work day to find somewhere to couch surf or they'd have me thrown in jail for trespassing. I'm still grateful to the friends that made sure I didn't end up permanently homeless and talked me out of suicide.
They said I'd die homeless in a gutter from AIDS. Well, years later after they tried to make that happen, I bought a house. So whatever. Over 10 years, and it still hurts, but I suspect it never will stop hurting. Everyone's got something inside that hurts all the time I suppose. This is my thing inside that hurts.
If I could have children, I'd do so many things differently. First would probably be to love them and try to do the best for them, not for my own ego.
Oh well, that's enough out of me. Posting without karma bonus. Maybe some day there will be a way for me to have my own children.
If you're referring to me, you'll have to excuse me for being unable to feel sorry for someone seeking to legitimize something so horrible as this brain surgery, and I'm suggesting that his friend may have killed himself regardless if he had been forced to undergo the surgery.
Shit happens. Let's not try to seek making life a living hell for others to try to bring back somebody who's already dead.
There are other places and ways he can grieve rather than publicly supporting something completely inhumane.
Yes, something did go horribly wrong. Unfortunately, nobody's cared to understand non-obvious failure modes of that procedure. So, nobody thought that anything could go wrong when they decided to do it, at least not anything non-obvious that can not be corrected by further surgery. It didn't stop it from going wrong, though.
In fact, when I started estrogen HRT (I'm transgendered) I asked my doctor about it just to make sure I wasn't making some awful mistake. His theory was that it was only because it seemed that my brain was female, and he postulated that a female brain might not, to put it in slashdot speak, have the proper device driver for it all to work right. Unfortunately, nobody told my doctor that what happened to me is possible. I'm not even sure I'm faulting circumcision correctly, but what I do know is what I feel, that I'm circumcised, that problem is with the same body part involved in that, and that no other trans person I've met can corroborate my experience. (I would likely still be transgendered and seek estrogen HRT even intact--I believe that because there are intact trans women and I can't figure out what difference it would make anyway in that matter.)
What do I do about it, though? I guess I have to wait until they can grow me a new one from stem cells and replace it. I'm SOL in the meantime. Fortunately, I found other ways to satisfy myself, so all's not lost. I just may never be successful in giving my parents grandchildren.
I'm comparing this to circumcision to hopefully make readers think. Some may agree with circumcision but disagree with this brain surgery and vice-versa.
I only meant to raise the question of what can possibly go wrong and is it worth it to risk the occasional disaster when something less invasive and traumatic, like relaxed drug laws and treatment, might solve the problem just as well or even better.
Which drugs are we talking about here? Some drugs, like meth, are "modern chemistry." Other drugs, like opium, alcohol, caffeine, weed, shrooms, etc, etc are as old as the hills.
For that matter, who are we to judge what form of pleasure somebody may experience or not? It also calls into question the term "addicted." What constitutes addiction, and when do we determine "addiction" is bad? SSRI-class drugs are highly addictive; I know that firsthand from quitting. They tell me sex is addictive, but I'm on slashdot so I wouldn't know lol. Cheesecake can be addictive, and so can caffeine.
Are we performing this horrific procedure on people simply because our own lives are miserable and we don't like that somebody found a way to be happy? Or is this a person who is unable to support themselves? Would this person be able to support themselves if not for whatever habit we want to correct by completely annihilating their ability to feel pleasure of any kind?
I agree with your conclusion. Creepy and dangerous.
I'd view it a bit the same as stomach stapling for weight loss
Agreed, but because I think it's the completely wrong approach and that it completely ignores the root cause. It's like using circumcision to treat urinary tract infections. There are plenty less-traumatic and less-invasive ways of achieving the goal. At least there may be a way to undo a stomach staple that I haven't cared to learn about. If things go horribly wrong after that piece of brain is flushed down a garbage disposal, how do you ever get it back? Or is suicide the option left for whoever you may wish this upon?
It probably isn't appropriate to bring circumcision into this thread, because brain surgeries like this are a whole world more revolting and horrific.
Would you want to be upgraded into a real-life Cyberman because somebody disagreed with one of your habits?
Perhaps the true horror here is the complete lack of empathy I find in comments like yours.
*sigh* I let myself be trolled by yet another Slashdot troll story.
Never being able to feel satisfied again? Who the hell would want to live like that? Jesus. At least I was only circumcised so that I'd only feel pain from just my genitals and never pleasure. If my whole world were that way... christ, the things people like you would wish on other people is frightening.
How much moralizing did your friend have to put up with that only drove him to be more addicted rather than accepting he's addicted and choosing treatment. How much stigma was associated with "being committed" in his mind? For that matter, how many shitty, controlling people were in his life that he needed to escape into a drug. For that matter, WHAT drug. Alcohol? Cocaine? Cough syrup? Meth? Heroin? Weed? Ah, I see, it was just... drugs. Because every one I just listed is exactly the same.
At least in the mind of a puritan. I know people who moralize about using tylenol. I'm not kidding. I don't know if that's you, but come on.
If you haven't already, go read I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.
The sad fact is the world is moving towards electronics away from general purpose computers...making experts like you redundant!
There's nothing sad about this. Not everybody needs a general purpose computer. What they want is a Facebook machine, a Tumblr machine, a Youtube machine, and a Netflix machine. And give it to them. I'm sick and tired of hand-holding users who can't handle a general-purpose computer that can run more than 1 thing at once. I don't run Windows at home. I don't get paid to do support. When something blows up, I get called over to read over the dialogs and apply common sense, because I'm the "computer guy," and apparently anything on a computer is illegible to anyone who isn't a "computer guy." Maybe there's a small hope that when folks get their MyFace device, they'll take responsibility for knowing how to operate it themselves.
Where your post really baffles me is this:
I not a doctor - Do I deserve to get sick, I'm not a mechanic - Do I have to walk..How about fixing leaky tap!...how about making a violin!!. I am not an expert in everything
When your doctor tells you to stop eating unhealthy foods because you're at risk of diabetes, do you give him shit like that? When your mechanic tells you that you need to bring your car in to get an oil change on time, do you throw your hands up in the air and bitch about not being an expert?
Back when I used to try to help people improve their computing experience, I would regularly recommend Firefox and install it for them after cleaning up a ton of malware.
Then a month later when they were drowning in malware again, what did I find? They were back to using IE.
I'm afraid GP is correct, but partially. If a home user is still using IE on XP, they've probably already been warned multiple times by experts, and they deserve whatever happens to them.
However, as others have pointed out, the most likely to be affected by this is corporate users. I've started to run into web apps at work that refuse to work under IE 8, but guess what? Installing Firefox or Chrome isn't even an option because we have vendor lockin to a call center vendor that insists on using IE 8 despite what the default browser is. I also have a feeling that there's no way the company will pay to upgrade about 30 agent stations from XP to 7. After all, why should they? The vendor we're locked into considers Vista support experimental, and it's not like XP's gotten rusty and is breaking down or anything.
This is just a sad, sad tale of vendor lockin and short-sightedness by closed-source corporate software developers. Welcome to the world of closed-source! Yes, we know it's broken, but shit we can do about it! It's closed-source, and the vendor I was talking about, Microsoft, and any other closed-source vendor doesn't give a shit how much pain they cause end users.
It would seem to make more sense if you compared, say, health inspections to code reviews. The other half of your analogy would better compare end users to restaurant goers.
In general, I know a good restaurant when I eat at one and a bad restaurant when I eat at one.
One restaurant owner who didn't want to hear my complaints had the audacity to call the police, as though his rudeness wasn't enough to scare me away on its own (Dairy Queen if you're curious, will never go to any again, especially after learning how little International Dairy Queen cares about the quality of any of the businesses that franchise that name). It was even worse on the owner because he didn't know that friends I was with that he wanted to eject along with me had paid for food and were waiting for it to finish cooking and be taken out to them. So, when the cops arrived, the cops ended up forcing him to refund my friends before they would escort anybody off the property. I don't think I need a professional qualification to call that a bad restaurant, at least the one I went to.
Hopefully, however, his kitchen would pass a health inspection.
On the other hand, there are several local restaurants I've learned I never need to worry about having a less-than-perfect experience with. The thing about most reviews is that they reflect, in the end, how much the business cared about the customer's experience. If the Dairy Queen owner who lost his shit with me had handled my complaint professionally, I might have given the place a 4 or 5 star (granted, it's Dairy Queen, it's a low bar). All he really needed to do was remake my order, something that was a fairly typical way of handling complaints I remember from my fast food days. It's worth more than the cost of some ice cream and cheese cake to turn a complaint into a positive experience for the customer to most rational business owners, and I typically look to reviews of that kind of thing to weed out bad management and toxic ownership (the kind that doesn't care that I'm going to continue to tell this story as long as there are still Dairy Queens in business around me).
Professional reviews don't really touch on that kind of thing. I imagine it's bad business to be too frank in any review world. I also imagine that business owners would never dream of allowing a known reviewer's experience to go nearly as poorly as my Dairy Queen experience. There is value in a lay person's review, even if it's a different kind of value.
How does this answer the criticism that nuclear can be a safe, viable power source if only we weren't too busy sticking our heads in the sand and letting our existing nuclear plants deteriorate to the point where we can only look forward to more nuclear disasters to further fuel the anti-nuclear sentiment?
Ok, I'm going to get modded to hell for suggesting this, but I can't help but to wonder. I read all these comments from non-USians about how this is a US problem, not a video game problem. So, ok, the rest of the world consumes the same video games, same movies, same news broadcasts, pretty much same everything. So what's different?
It's not even gun laws that are necessarily different. Look at Sweden.
What's different is that we mutilate the genitals of boys at birth.
Why can't we have a study to see whether there's a correlation and causation there between circumcision and tendency to violence and extreme emotions? I heard over the summer that the rate of circumcision is down to something like 50%, so we should have some populations to gather data from.
It seems to me that it's more likely than causing the forming mind of an infant to undergo an experience of indescribable pain might be more potent than any violent or disturbing video game.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. I think GP has libertarianism confused with anarchy. He's calling in to question the ability of a government to enforce its laws. But don't let that stop you from attacking his strawman. He was probably trolling for that response anyway just to further this meme that wanting marriage equality (please don't confuse me with a farm animal, although knowing that Republicans see me as a farm animal has given me wise advice where I spend my hard earned cash), legal and taxed industrial marijuana cultivation, balanced budgets (srsly wtf), at least non-imperialism, elimination of the useless income tax (protip, the 1% don't have "incomes" so we're right back in 1870 and no income tax will fix that), etc all are a sign of anarchy and a destruction of the one true American Way.
Let me bring this back on topic. What about returning copyrights to their LIMITED time and putting our government back in its place as subservient to its own laws? Oops, must be anarchy.
Despite common stereotypes, programming is not out of reach for the average person
Hahaha, no.
Shit like this is the reason I need to get my ass back to college already and change careers away from computers, as fucking far away from them as I can get.
Everybody I work with who has not tried thinks that programming is just so fucking simple.
Guess what?
It's not that fucking simple.
You have to be willing to ask "what if?" You have to be willing to admit you've made a mistake when you find a contradiction in your algorithm. You have to be able to admit you've made a mistake when your algorithm doesn't produce the correct answer. You have to be able to admit you weren't thorough enough when there's a corner case that you hadn't planned for.
You know what? You have to be able to admit you went wrong when the computer goes wrong if you want to program..
The average person is completely incapable of that. There is no fucking tool in the entire god-damned world that is going to make somebody comfortable with approaching a subject matter where they can be wrong.
What does that have to do with it?
No, seriously, what does that have to do with it?
You're comparing something physically arduous to a woman that will give her a dependent minor child and seriously affect the next 18-19 years of her life to a vaccination?
Are you loony?
Personally, I don't get flu vaccines, but that's because I'd rather have the sniffles a couple days out of the year than get poked with a needle. I'm also not working in an environment where I'll be routinely exposed to the flu. If I were, I'd give it a second thought, especially given the benefit that I won't pass it on to the patients I'm responsible for.
It'd be like working at a security firm surfing porn and malware sites as part of my job, and then insisting that I need to use IE 6 without any anti-virus on Windows ME because of religious reasons. Although I guess at that rate, my box would be one hell of a thing to study... if you're interested in malware of the 90s that's already well known....
But, whatever, once again I've been trolled. So, let me ask you this. Would you want to be born to a single mother who blames you for ruining 19 years of her life? Would you want to be born to a woman who doesn't love you?
Careful how you answer. It's not pretty when that happens. Maybe as karma chugs along, you might get to find out next life. (See what I did there by invoking a belief in reincarnation? Oh well. You probably don't.)
Ok, color me naive, but lately all I hear is bitching about what an awful president Obama is. Why?
Seriously, what, specifically, has he done? Or is this about federalized Romneycare? Or is it about something else like not directing drug enforcement against the voters in Washington and Colorado that legalized marijuana? Or is there something else yet, like a vague threat to the military-industrial complex by not antagonizing Iran? Or something else?
I wrote in Johnson's name to vote for him and voted Republican for governor where I live, so whatever.
Oops, sorry, meant to put this here.
In short, I'm supposed to be a horrible person because I can't get pregnant. I'm supposed to revile the idea that I might be forced to be a woman.
Well, Sebastopol, riddle me this. Why is it that I take estrogen, have breasts, and like wearing skirts?
If those things are all so horrible, such horrible things that I need to feel personally guilty about forcing on women because I had the audacity to choose to be born without a womb, why do I prefer those things?
For that matter, why the hell do genetic girls wear skirts. They can just fucking choose not to if they want, but they still do.
You see, feminism falls apart once you consider that our bodies aren't who we are. Feminism absolutely cannot deal with the idea that somebody might want to be a woman, can it?
Feminists love to say that feminism is a philosophy of equality, but why does feminism constantly espouse the idea that all men are the exact damned same? That's not very equalist, is it? How is reducing me to by body parts and then turning around and saying it's the evils of men that reduce women to their body parts in any way productive?
Why don't feminists like you really reduce me to my body parts? Reduce me to my breasts that can create milk (if I screw up my estrogen dose, maybe TMI, but it's happened)? Reduce me to my female brain? Reduce me to my attraction to men and reduce me to the feelings of disgust that come over me when a female gets too close to me in that way?
You can't, can you? All that feminism can do is reduce me to my penis. not even to the fact that it's mutilated and still sometimes painful to this day, but that it's a penis. In fact, feminism takes all those parts of me I just presented that are woman-like and calls them a rape of the female form!
It's utterly stupid. Please come back when you want to talk real gender equality. Perhaps you're just too afraid of facing the privilege YOU have of being unaware of YOUR cis-female privilege. Maybe that's why feminists like you always react with incredulity and hollow accusations of being sexist whenever I talk about real equality.
Well, I don't know if you're a ciswoman and you can say you're whatever you want on the internet. Maybe you're just a pathetic little boy who's gotten used to sucking up to feminism to get dates I don't know.
Either that, or if feminists hate being women so much and want to be men so much, maybe they should talk to a psychologist about gender transition. Born women DO transition to live as men. And the two female-to-male trans men I've met were totally hot.
Ideas that, ironically, are based in sexism. We'll start with the idea that all men are rapists, that all men are irresponsible, that all men are responsible for all the problems in the world, etc.
Then we move on to more sexist ideas like all women are oppressed, and that the only reason women aren't paid the same is the fault of all men.
Every now and then you have a bright gem that calls the entire gender dichotomy into question, but those are ever so rare. The bulk of feminism assumes a gender dichotomy and relies on a gender dichotomy in order to formulate the basis for its logic (to use the word loosely).
In fact, we even learn that all men are so completely afraid of role reversal that they took it upon themselves to oppress women so that they would never have to do anything like change a diaper or clean a counter ever again? Why? Because cleaning is so completely horrible to all men.
The role reversal and sexualization arguments are the most hilarious to me. We're taught that the most horrific thing in a man's mind is becoming a woman. And this is supposed to re-enforce the idea that men oppress women because men hate women and men want to make sure that they would never be like a woman. In fact, some writings that were presented to me indicated that the perfect punishment for a man and the sins he supposedly commits every time he gets a paycheck or starts a conversation with a woman is to force him to become a woman.
So, sure, give me something I wish for by letting me be a woman and somehow call that punishment?
What's supposed to be so attractive about womens' disgusting bodies that I'm suppose to involuntarily visually rape them every time I look at them again? Remind me, because I keep forgetting.
Why the hell would I even waste my time starting conversations with women when the average woman has nothing of substance to talk about, especially after giving me feminist essay after feminist essay about how opening a conversation with a female stranger is the same as date rape?
Perhaps feminism should look a little deeper... they write so often about how they want to be everything a man is, but they never write about wanting to be a man. Perhaps the basis of the revulsion that the average person feels when imagining being forced to be the opposite sex isn't based in a power dynamic. Maybe there are even males who don't find disgusting female bodies to be attractive and something to use and rape and defile?
Try to argue that with an English teacher, and it's a quick way to get an F. Oh, but say how guilty you are for choosing to be a man and how bad of a person you are for being a man, and instant A.
Because all men are the same. Because all women are unique snowflakes, and it's only the male hegemony that uses terms like all women. Except when feminists use the term all women.
I think my favorite conundrum was when I had an assignment to write about how to determine when a house is pregnant or not. A house. The teacher had assigned that to the class to teach all us young men a lesson about how inferior we are because we couldn't become pregnant, therefore we could not comprehend pregnancy. And since we couldn't comprehend pregnancy, we couldn't understand giving life. And since we couldn't understand giving life, we were all horrible, murderous monsters.
That kind of feminist nonsense. All inherently, completely sexist.
lol. sexist? how?
I was reading the diet section of The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga by Swami Vishnu-devananda earlier today since I've been evaluating my diet in an attempt to get rid of a beer gut I've grown over the past couple years, when I came across this section. It seems to be a rebuttal to your macho appeal to nature.
According to the Bhagavad Gita, there are three types of food: namely, sattvic food (pure food) rajasic food (stimulating food), and tamasic (impure and rotten food).
Milk, butter, fruits, vegetables, and grains come under the category of good or sattvic foods. Spices, hot substances, meat, alcohol, fish, and eggs, which stimulate the nervous system, come under the heading of stimulating or rajasic foods, while food that is rotten, putrefied, and overripe comes under the tamasic or impure food category.
Man's preference for one of the above-mentioned food types is in accordance with the evolution of his mind. Spiritually and mentally advanced people prefer the pure type of food....
So, the correct answer may not be doing as other predators do. Additionally, I think categorizing compassion for other living organisms and making conscious dietary decisions to avoid even the most humane kind of animal death as "mental illness" represents something that might not be quite right with your head. Overreaction much?
To wit: you're hardly the only person I know who likes meat. You're only one of a handful I know who thinks it's a mental illness to find meat disgusting, and if you're anything like those people, you're somebody I wouldn't want to be around. It's one thing to disagree with someone. It's another to attack their opinion as a disease.
Now where did I leave that buffalo sauce? The wings are almost ready....
True. I need to get better at framing that as "I've been on the other side of the fence. The grass is greener."
Although to get a feminist to admit that I could be a legitimate woman would be the end of the world. It's at odds with their victim narrative.
Can't say I disagree with the white privilege one. Racism still exists and is pretty disgusting. But, I've notice that it's mostly white women who are hanging on to these attitudes.
So ANYWAY, here we go!
1. My odds of being hired for a job, when competing against female applicants, are probably skewed in my favor. The more prestigious the job, the larger the odds are skewed.
Nope. Well, unless a female is doing the hiring. It never ceases to irritate me how backwards most non-trans (cis) women I know are.
2. If I fail in my job or career, I can feel sure this wonâ(TM)t be seen as a black mark against my entire sexâ(TM)s capabilities.
Nope. See Home Improvement.
3. I am far less likely to face sexual harassment at work than my female co-workers are.
Nope. There's a breast cancer account that comes up every year where we have to ask callers if they have implants. I've received no end of sexual harassment on that and in general as well.
4. If I do the same task as a woman, and if the measurement is at all subjective, chances are people will think I did a better job.
Nope.
5. If I choose not to have children, my masculinity will not be called into question.
Well, this is a strange one. I'm trans, so the minute they grow a female reproductive system from my stem cells, I'll have children.
6. If I have children and a career, no one will think Iâ(TM)m selfish for not staying at home.
What about men who WANT to stay home? #6 fails for its own sexism.
7. My elected representatives are mostly people of my own sex. The more prestigious and powerful the elected position, the more this is true.
Nope.
8. When I ask to see âoethe person in charge,â odds are I will face a person of my own sex. The higher-up in the organization the person is, the surer I can be.
Nope.
9. As a child, chances are I was encouraged to be more active and outgoing than my sisters.
I don't have sisters.
10. As a child, chances are I got more teacher attention than girls who raised their hands just as often.
OH HELL NO.
11. If Iâ(TM)m careless with my financial affairs it wonâ(TM)t be attributed to my sex.
lololololololololol. haha *snort* ha
12. If Iâ(TM)m careless with my driving it wonâ(TM)t be attributed to my sex.
Fair enough.
13. Even if I sleep with a lot of women, there is no chance that I will be seriously labeled a âoeslut,â nor is there any male counterpart to âoeslut-bashing.â
There's a reason for this. All a woman has to do is go to bar on ladies night, get liquored up for free, and get laid. I've also dated men before as a woman, and it's way, way easier than even thinking about dating a woman, even if I end up picking up the check.
14. I do not have to worry about the message my wardrobe sends about my sexual availability or my gender conformity.
I don't think as long as I'm working in the male gender that I'm supposed to care. Although, I've been thinking lately I need a suit. Always wanted one.
15. My clothing is typically less expensive and better-constructed than womenâ(TM)s clothing for the same social status. While I have fewer options, my clothes will probably fit better than a womanâ(TM)s without tailoring.
Hoo boy. If this isn't a self-created problem for women. It's called the changing room. Use it. At least if you're a genetic girl, you don't get carded and treated like shit.
16. The grooming regimen e
Thanks. I missed that while my knee was jerking.
That does raise a question, though. Why do boys do better when they're graded remotely, and why do girls do better when they're graded by their own teacher? I don't suppose there's a bit of favoritism going on, no? I suppose that ties back into the point of my rant.
We live in a world where when a woman fails, we find every excuse we can up to some unprovable discrimination that *must* exist otherwise she wouldn't have failed.
If a man fails, we blame him.
Girls in general are natural rule-followers.
I submit my co-workers as a counterexample. Anything but rule followers. Nearly every woman I have worked with wants to do things her way and her way only, standards be damned.
That being said, the problem here is gender discrimination.
What do we do with this study?
The narrative here is that since girls are getting more college degrees that they're somehow better. Why do they earn less? Why do they do more poorly at standardized testing?
It could be that percent of degrees being awarded to women is a bad metric. I'd suspect it's simply because higher learning is simply more accessible to women. Let's skip over the gender-specific scholarships, because frankly they're probably not significant. How many women end up clashing swords with their families over trivial matters? How many parents try to push their daughters out to the streets instead of letting them stay at home while they finish a degree?
There's a whole lot of crap that's being missed by this troll story.
But boys are still smarter.
No, no, a thousand times NO. You cannot judge somebody by the contents of their pants. Ok?
That is the big fucking elephant in the room that gets missed every time here. We want gender equality, right? We want career women, right? What about house-husbands? Oops, can't have that, sounds too much like homosexuality and weakness.
Women are never going to be equal until we get rid of gender stereotypes. And I mean really equal, as in being required to sign up for selective service, as in protecting boys' genitals from mutilation as well as girls' genitals. And that will never happen as long as we continue to judge, categorize, and discriminate against our children by their body parts.
Socialization starts in the cradle. Are boys and girls different? Yes. I couldn't be transgendered if male and female brains were biologically the same. What that doesn't mean is that we can take women who have been told from day one that their biggest achievement in life will be having children and compare them to men who have been told from day one that if they don't get a real job it's the gutter for them.
The way forward in my view is to find some middle ground. Of course, I'd be happy just extending that same threat of "in the gutter" to girls and taking away benefits for getting pregnant (welfare, subsidized housing, medicaid etc). Of course put in the exemptions for rape, etc.
Either that or let's just give up on this whole idea of gender equality if we can't move past the men are expendable meme vs. protect women so they can get pregnant, fuck all who pays for the pregnancy and child care.
I should probably read TFA, but this is Slashdot. So, uhh, if girls do worse on standardized tests, how do we conclude they do better at school?
Let me guess. This is all going to come down to some kind of thing where when the girls underperform, we change the school, and when the boys underperform, we change the boys.
To try to keep a rant short, let's see why boys do so poorly. Could it have anything to do with rampant gender discrimination at the primary level and being forcefed feminist nonsense and guilt-tripping at the secondary level?
Jeebus. I remember many times when we did projects in class in elementary that the girls were given more options for what they could do than boys. Why? Well, everyone knows girls are more responsible than boys. One year even it was a school-wide policy that during indoor recess, the girls had the option to go to the gym to play basketball or volleyball, but the boys had to stay in their classroom.
Hell, I even remember one teacher I had who once decided to punish all the boys because of a few in the back who were acting up. Why? Well, we had it coming. I challenged the teacher about how it was fair to punish me when I hadn't done anything wrong, and I'll never forget the response. "You're just as well-behaved as a girl, but it wouldn't be fair to the rest of the boys if I let you off." Holy shit.
How about if we just get rid of gender stereotyping and discrimination? How about if we stop imprinting girls with math phobia? How about if we stop treating boys like they're already rapists and thugs?
Or is that just asking too damned much?
This is horrible. There's no excusing it.
Yet, some part of me can't help but to laugh.
My ex-parents gave me so much bad and delusional advice. They even talked me out of applying to MIT because they thought we wouldn't be able to afford it and that there was no reason to expect getting a degree there was any better than a local no-name college. Years later, I find out that, no, I damned well could have afforded it, fuck we affording it. I have a feeling the real reason they discouraged me from applying was that they were afraid I'd be exposed to leftist ideas.
Not everybody is qualified to be a parent. I'd suppose that a lot of people aren't qualified. How many folks who want to be parents care to do their own research about things like circumcision so they can be prepared if something goes wrong? How many people who want to be parents are prepared for the very real possibility that their child might be homosexual? How many people think that circumcision problems only happen to other people, and that their kids ain't gonna be no queer?
Looking back on my childhood, I'm convinced that I was something that happened to my parents. They didn't want me. They wanted to have a hot steamy night, but their religious principles prevented them from using protection. Do I wish they would have sought abortion? A lot of times, I do. But I'm here, still alive and doing science and trying to learn how to live as a normal person instead of the puritan robot they tried to make me.
This will sound cheesy, but once in high school I started growing my hair out because I wanted long hair. I still remember crying myself to sleep after my ex-father finally got me to cut it off. Sure, I was a myopic teenager at the time, but that's not what strikes me about that memory. I didn't do it because I was forced; I did it because for some sick reason I loved my ex-father and respected his judgement. Most people's fathers get smarter the older they get; my ex-father just gets more idiotic and warped the older I get. I wonder what I'd do instead if I could go back and time and tell myself that in 3 years I'd be spending a weekend homeless.
I was employed, I could have moved out. But I didn't because I trusted two people who turned out to be completely untrustworthy. They didn't even give me a week's notice so that I could look for an apartment and sign a lease. They made sure to keep me nice and sheltered as their 4.0 GPA machine so I wouldn't know what to do on my own, then they gave me until the end of the work day to find somewhere to couch surf or they'd have me thrown in jail for trespassing. I'm still grateful to the friends that made sure I didn't end up permanently homeless and talked me out of suicide.
They said I'd die homeless in a gutter from AIDS. Well, years later after they tried to make that happen, I bought a house. So whatever. Over 10 years, and it still hurts, but I suspect it never will stop hurting. Everyone's got something inside that hurts all the time I suppose. This is my thing inside that hurts.
If I could have children, I'd do so many things differently. First would probably be to love them and try to do the best for them, not for my own ego.
Oh well, that's enough out of me. Posting without karma bonus. Maybe some day there will be a way for me to have my own children.
If you're referring to me, you'll have to excuse me for being unable to feel sorry for someone seeking to legitimize something so horrible as this brain surgery, and I'm suggesting that his friend may have killed himself regardless if he had been forced to undergo the surgery.
Shit happens. Let's not try to seek making life a living hell for others to try to bring back somebody who's already dead.
There are other places and ways he can grieve rather than publicly supporting something completely inhumane.
Yes, something did go horribly wrong. Unfortunately, nobody's cared to understand non-obvious failure modes of that procedure. So, nobody thought that anything could go wrong when they decided to do it, at least not anything non-obvious that can not be corrected by further surgery. It didn't stop it from going wrong, though.
In fact, when I started estrogen HRT (I'm transgendered) I asked my doctor about it just to make sure I wasn't making some awful mistake. His theory was that it was only because it seemed that my brain was female, and he postulated that a female brain might not, to put it in slashdot speak, have the proper device driver for it all to work right. Unfortunately, nobody told my doctor that what happened to me is possible. I'm not even sure I'm faulting circumcision correctly, but what I do know is what I feel, that I'm circumcised, that problem is with the same body part involved in that, and that no other trans person I've met can corroborate my experience. (I would likely still be transgendered and seek estrogen HRT even intact--I believe that because there are intact trans women and I can't figure out what difference it would make anyway in that matter.)
What do I do about it, though? I guess I have to wait until they can grow me a new one from stem cells and replace it. I'm SOL in the meantime. Fortunately, I found other ways to satisfy myself, so all's not lost. I just may never be successful in giving my parents grandchildren.
I'm comparing this to circumcision to hopefully make readers think. Some may agree with circumcision but disagree with this brain surgery and vice-versa.
I only meant to raise the question of what can possibly go wrong and is it worth it to risk the occasional disaster when something less invasive and traumatic, like relaxed drug laws and treatment, might solve the problem just as well or even better.
Which drugs are we talking about here? Some drugs, like meth, are "modern chemistry." Other drugs, like opium, alcohol, caffeine, weed, shrooms, etc, etc are as old as the hills.
For that matter, who are we to judge what form of pleasure somebody may experience or not? It also calls into question the term "addicted." What constitutes addiction, and when do we determine "addiction" is bad? SSRI-class drugs are highly addictive; I know that firsthand from quitting. They tell me sex is addictive, but I'm on slashdot so I wouldn't know lol. Cheesecake can be addictive, and so can caffeine.
Are we performing this horrific procedure on people simply because our own lives are miserable and we don't like that somebody found a way to be happy? Or is this a person who is unable to support themselves? Would this person be able to support themselves if not for whatever habit we want to correct by completely annihilating their ability to feel pleasure of any kind?
I agree with your conclusion. Creepy and dangerous.
I'd view it a bit the same as stomach stapling for weight loss
Agreed, but because I think it's the completely wrong approach and that it completely ignores the root cause. It's like using circumcision to treat urinary tract infections. There are plenty less-traumatic and less-invasive ways of achieving the goal. At least there may be a way to undo a stomach staple that I haven't cared to learn about. If things go horribly wrong after that piece of brain is flushed down a garbage disposal, how do you ever get it back? Or is suicide the option left for whoever you may wish this upon?
It probably isn't appropriate to bring circumcision into this thread, because brain surgeries like this are a whole world more revolting and horrific.
Would you want to be upgraded into a real-life Cyberman because somebody disagreed with one of your habits?
Perhaps the true horror here is the complete lack of empathy I find in comments like yours.
*sigh* I let myself be trolled by yet another Slashdot troll story.
Never being able to feel satisfied again? Who the hell would want to live like that? Jesus. At least I was only circumcised so that I'd only feel pain from just my genitals and never pleasure. If my whole world were that way... christ, the things people like you would wish on other people is frightening.
How much moralizing did your friend have to put up with that only drove him to be more addicted rather than accepting he's addicted and choosing treatment. How much stigma was associated with "being committed" in his mind? For that matter, how many shitty, controlling people were in his life that he needed to escape into a drug. For that matter, WHAT drug. Alcohol? Cocaine? Cough syrup? Meth? Heroin? Weed? Ah, I see, it was just... drugs. Because every one I just listed is exactly the same.
At least in the mind of a puritan. I know people who moralize about using tylenol. I'm not kidding. I don't know if that's you, but come on.
If you haven't already, go read I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.
The sad fact is the world is moving towards electronics away from general purpose computers...making experts like you redundant!
There's nothing sad about this. Not everybody needs a general purpose computer. What they want is a Facebook machine, a Tumblr machine, a Youtube machine, and a Netflix machine. And give it to them. I'm sick and tired of hand-holding users who can't handle a general-purpose computer that can run more than 1 thing at once. I don't run Windows at home. I don't get paid to do support. When something blows up, I get called over to read over the dialogs and apply common sense, because I'm the "computer guy," and apparently anything on a computer is illegible to anyone who isn't a "computer guy." Maybe there's a small hope that when folks get their MyFace device, they'll take responsibility for knowing how to operate it themselves.
Where your post really baffles me is this:
I not a doctor - Do I deserve to get sick, I'm not a mechanic - Do I have to walk..How about fixing leaky tap!...how about making a violin!!. I am not an expert in everything
When your doctor tells you to stop eating unhealthy foods because you're at risk of diabetes, do you give him shit like that? When your mechanic tells you that you need to bring your car in to get an oil change on time, do you throw your hands up in the air and bitch about not being an expert?
Back when I used to try to help people improve their computing experience, I would regularly recommend Firefox and install it for them after cleaning up a ton of malware.
Then a month later when they were drowning in malware again, what did I find? They were back to using IE.
I'm afraid GP is correct, but partially. If a home user is still using IE on XP, they've probably already been warned multiple times by experts, and they deserve whatever happens to them.
However, as others have pointed out, the most likely to be affected by this is corporate users. I've started to run into web apps at work that refuse to work under IE 8, but guess what? Installing Firefox or Chrome isn't even an option because we have vendor lockin to a call center vendor that insists on using IE 8 despite what the default browser is. I also have a feeling that there's no way the company will pay to upgrade about 30 agent stations from XP to 7. After all, why should they? The vendor we're locked into considers Vista support experimental, and it's not like XP's gotten rusty and is breaking down or anything.
This is just a sad, sad tale of vendor lockin and short-sightedness by closed-source corporate software developers. Welcome to the world of closed-source! Yes, we know it's broken, but shit we can do about it! It's closed-source, and the vendor I was talking about, Microsoft, and any other closed-source vendor doesn't give a shit how much pain they cause end users.
That's funny. I find myself going \LaTeX{} when nothing else will do and arguing with it is easier than arguing with Word.
I'm not quite sure I understand your analogy.
It would seem to make more sense if you compared, say, health inspections to code reviews. The other half of your analogy would better compare end users to restaurant goers.
In general, I know a good restaurant when I eat at one and a bad restaurant when I eat at one.
One restaurant owner who didn't want to hear my complaints had the audacity to call the police, as though his rudeness wasn't enough to scare me away on its own (Dairy Queen if you're curious, will never go to any again, especially after learning how little International Dairy Queen cares about the quality of any of the businesses that franchise that name). It was even worse on the owner because he didn't know that friends I was with that he wanted to eject along with me had paid for food and were waiting for it to finish cooking and be taken out to them. So, when the cops arrived, the cops ended up forcing him to refund my friends before they would escort anybody off the property. I don't think I need a professional qualification to call that a bad restaurant, at least the one I went to.
Hopefully, however, his kitchen would pass a health inspection.
On the other hand, there are several local restaurants I've learned I never need to worry about having a less-than-perfect experience with. The thing about most reviews is that they reflect, in the end, how much the business cared about the customer's experience. If the Dairy Queen owner who lost his shit with me had handled my complaint professionally, I might have given the place a 4 or 5 star (granted, it's Dairy Queen, it's a low bar). All he really needed to do was remake my order, something that was a fairly typical way of handling complaints I remember from my fast food days. It's worth more than the cost of some ice cream and cheese cake to turn a complaint into a positive experience for the customer to most rational business owners, and I typically look to reviews of that kind of thing to weed out bad management and toxic ownership (the kind that doesn't care that I'm going to continue to tell this story as long as there are still Dairy Queens in business around me).
Professional reviews don't really touch on that kind of thing. I imagine it's bad business to be too frank in any review world. I also imagine that business owners would never dream of allowing a known reviewer's experience to go nearly as poorly as my Dairy Queen experience. There is value in a lay person's review, even if it's a different kind of value.
How does this answer the criticism that nuclear can be a safe, viable power source if only we weren't too busy sticking our heads in the sand and letting our existing nuclear plants deteriorate to the point where we can only look forward to more nuclear disasters to further fuel the anti-nuclear sentiment?
Ok, I'm going to get modded to hell for suggesting this, but I can't help but to wonder. I read all these comments from non-USians about how this is a US problem, not a video game problem. So, ok, the rest of the world consumes the same video games, same movies, same news broadcasts, pretty much same everything. So what's different?
It's not even gun laws that are necessarily different. Look at Sweden.
What's different is that we mutilate the genitals of boys at birth.
Why can't we have a study to see whether there's a correlation and causation there between circumcision and tendency to violence and extreme emotions? I heard over the summer that the rate of circumcision is down to something like 50%, so we should have some populations to gather data from.
It seems to me that it's more likely than causing the forming mind of an infant to undergo an experience of indescribable pain might be more potent than any violent or disturbing video game.
I'm surprised we haven't seen a fully-automated fast food restaurant yet, for instance.
Not quite the same, but here you go: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm