I'm guessing you weren't around in the 80's when the ONLY home PC was an Apple.
Which '80s was that? The '80s on planet Zargon? Apple never had majority market share in home computers, nobody I knew in the '80s had one at home (though all the schools in my area seemed to have them), and my family owned no fewer than 4 home PCs by the end of the '80s, from 3 different manufacturers, none of them Apple. So I guess I wasn't around in your version of the '80s either.
DOS was hard to use for your average non-techie and Apple was ridiculously expensive.
Yet somehow I found it easy when I was 6 years old. Which DOS were you using in the '80s?
As the previous poster mentioned if you'd bother to quote them in their entirety, PC's don't have to worry about severely limited cpu power and battery life.
I have 3 android devices in my home...none of them run the same version, one has google apps natively, one has a hack to get it and the other one I haven't even bothered with because its too much of a pain in the ass. All have different front ends as well...
Whose fault is that? Is that the fault of Android, or Google? Is it the fault of your carrier(s)? Is it the fault of the application developers? Is it your fault for buying three different devices and expecting them to be the same?
I think the problem is that they've made it all so unclear that it's non-obvious whose fault it is, and equally non-obvious how to fix it.
The devices I mention are an Archos 7 Home Internet Tablet, An aPad and my Samsung Galaxy S.
Sorry to go OT, but which do you recommend? I'm looking at getting an Android tablet for note-taking in class and writing down appointments, that sort of thing. Also, reading books if the ones I need ever come out in digital format. I want something I can hack the Android Marketplace onto and with decent build quality. I've never owned a tablet before, so I'm kind of shooting in the dark here.
Oh my GOD! I can't believe you just said "Spanish Prisoner scam"! I hope no Spaniards were in earshot! No, but seriously, how can you argue this vociferously that the term "Nigerian scam" should be considered a slur when you consider "Spanish Prisoner scam" perfectly ok? And need I point out that most "Spanish Prisoner scams" are just as far-removed from Spain and from involving a Spanish prisoner as this scam was from Nigeria? So...double standardize much?
And if you are going to argue now that this scam was somehow different, then I refer you to an earlier post in this thread -- pointing out the differences of this particular scam with the original Nigerian scam:
The foreigner is seeking the victim to be a money collector, instead of a money distributor. E.g. the money comes FROM someone else and is sent TO the person doing the email exchange.
The person who "pointed out" this "difference" is clearly not very familiar with Nigerian scams. This type of scam (where you're supposed to provide your bank account as a vessel for them to transfer money, or you're supposed to cash a check or receive a wire transfer and then re-wire the money) is probably at least as common coming out of Nigeria as the older Spanish-Prisoner-style scam where they tell you they need money up-front to release more money later. In fact, most of the time when I've heard the phrase "Nigerian scam" it's been in reference to this newer type, which you want to call "Malaysian scam", though I've heard "Nigerian scam" used in reference to the other type as well. These days it's basically legitimate to refer to any scam via e-mail that gets people to believe they will get money if they cooperate as a "Nigerian scam" because believe me, if it can be done via e-mail, Nigerian scammers have done it.
If this happened often enough (which it is starting to), should we now call this the Malaysian scam? Good luck dealing with them Malaysians then.
No, because Nigerians have been doing the EXACT SAME THING for at least 20 years now.
Look around this article thread -- some posters didn't even KNOW that Malaysia was a different country and have mistakenly assumed that the scam DID originate from Nigeria. Of course they did not read the slashdot summary, but then if the term "Nigerian scam" was immediately clear to everyone that it did not originate from Nigeria, then they would NOT have posted those erroneous comments in the first place.
Ignorance the part of people who don't RTFA is nobody's fault but those who don't RTFA.
they STILL WOULD USE THE TERM because they considered those people who would be offended to be lesser
which is exactly the situation "having an assumption that '*no one* is being offended'".
No, it's the OPPOSITE situation from "having an assumption that no one is being offended". You're clearly having some problems with the logic of these sentences so let's break it down a bit. If you say "A decided to do X because C was not Y", and I say "no, I think A would have decided to do X anyway whether C was Y or not", and you said "X(A)->~Y(C) == X(A)", in other words that the two situations were exactly the same, that would be ridiculous. Now substitute "offended" for Y, "American Indians" for C, "white Americans" for A, and "use the phrase 'Indian giver'" for "do X". Hopefully the blatant and fundamental fallacy in your reasoning becomes clear.
You have not proven that Nigerians will NOT be offended when being attributed with a type of scam...
I haven't proven it because it was never my claim. I never said they would not be offended. Them not being offended was never a condition of any of my statements. Therefore I never had a burden of proving they wouldn't be offended. In fact, I pretty plainly stated "If they're offended, that's their right."
I need not say any more, seeing as is that you've descended to using outright scorn when I have been careful not to do so when addressing your points.
You haven't been addressing my points. You've been arguing the entire time against things I've neither said nor even implied, hence the scorn. Given that you've basically been making veiled accusations of racism the whole time since you brought the term "Indian giver" into this by implying the phrase "Nigerian scam" was equivalent, you're probably getting off light in the scorn department.
Nothing about suicide or spoiled babies; you're simply wrong: there are no limits to firearm ownership in the Constitution. None, zip, zero, nada; so, what makes you think the government has the right to impose them?
You're right. The 2nd Amendment clearly grants known criminals, even those who are also known to be planning to kill, the same right to have guns as everyone else, and given that it says "arms" and not "firearms" this also applies to chemical, biological, and nuclear arms as well. Anyone who thinks the government has a right to ban terrorists from acquiring weaponized anthrax and nuclear arms is simply wrong: there are no limits to arms ownership in the Constitution.
Oh genius oracle of all things past and future, please tell me more of what WILL happen, so that I may build my life around your omniscient predictions.
Let's see, is the tendency of the term to diminish the value of Nigerians, or to indicate that the type of scam originated in Nigeria?
Do you honestly think that the term "Indian giver" started with the intent to diminish the value of Native Americans?
Yes. If Native Americans were seen as equals, they would have to be respected. If they were seen as inferiors, they could be conquered.
At THAT TIME the Europeans thought of them just as some race they can conquer.
Exactly. That was MY point.
Their propensity to offend them did not stem from a direct WANT to offend but from a default mindset of not treating them as equals -- they uttered the term not as an expletive to the Native Americans, but as a description to fellow Europeans.
Descriptions to fellow Europeans of a race they wanted to treat as lesser. Hence the attempt to diminish said race. I never said their primary concern was wanting to offend the Indians. I was only contesting your statement:
It is precisely the assumption that "no one is being offended" which led to widespread careless use of the term "Indian giver".
which is obviously full of shit because people who think they are so superior to another race that they have the right to conquer them don't refrain from using terminology that would offend said race. No `assumption that "no one is being offended"` was ever necessary for the term to become widespread because even if they knew with 100% certainty someone would be offended, they STILL WOULD USE THE TERM because they considered those people who would be offended to be lesser, as you yourself admit.
Also, for the sake of all who care about the English language, get a fucking dictionary and look up the word "expletive" before using it again.
And yet it provides no evidence* for your claim, which to me suggests your claim was false. If your claim is true, I would find some documentation enlightening. Ball's in your court.
*one article comes up near the top linking foot fetishes to STD fear around the 13th century, but your claim was "most of the fetishes that exist today" have this origin, not just that one.
Here: The term "Indian gift" was first noted in 1765 by Thomas Hutchinson,[1] and "Indian giver" was first cited in John Russell Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms (1860)[2] as "Indian giver. When an Indian gives any thing, he expects to receive an equivalent, or to have his gift returned."Wikipedia, naturally.
I was taught that the phrase 'indian giver' referred to whitey breaking agreements with Indians, not the other way around.
In modern usage, possibly. Originally, no. If people want to re-purpose the term to mean that, I'll be the last person to criticize it, but where I live the term is still used by rednecks (the same people I hear saying "give me back the money you jewed me out of!") to put down Native Americans, so I refuse to use it.
As a person of mixed American heritage, I often have issues with determining when to self loathe and when to bask in martyrdom.
I know what you mean. As a person of majority English and other mixed European heritage, I often vacillate between pride in founding much of modern civilization and guilt in doing so many awful things to so many other peoples. I didn't even do either of those things, but somehow I feel responsible for the acts of my forebears.
The phrase originally came about because Native American tribes and European settlers had different ideas regarding trade vs. gifts.
That's putting it very generously to the Europeans. In many cases Europeans produced documents for Natives to sign without communicating their meaning, whose meaning in English(/Dutch/French/whatever) Legalese was that Europeans now owned the land the Natives lived on, without any knowledge on the part of the Natives that that's what they said or intent by them to assign any sort of ownership rights whatsoever. In most cases the Europeans who actually conducted the deals were fully cognizant of this. They then went and resold parts of the land to other Europeans, claiming to have valid title to it. When Natives didn't want to move, the Europeans then claimed the Natives had given them land and wanted to take it back (hence the term "Indian-giver") which claim was, in essence, a total lie, not a misunderstanding.
Again, in many cases, not all. There were undoubtedly some cases of legitimate misunderstanding but to act like the deliberate swindling did not occur would be to whitewash away history.
Nowadays, around here at least, most people consider the phrase Indian giver to be referring to how the white man and their government would take back anything that they agreed to with the Native American tribes if it was to their advantage to do so.
So, then, who are you to judge that it is not derogatory to Nigerians to call any confidence tricks of that type as a "Nigerian" scam?
Who am I to judge? A human being in possession of the faculty of reason, that's who. Let's see, is the tendency of the term to diminish the value of Nigerians, or to indicate that the type of scam originated in Nigeria? If the former, it's derogatory. If the latter, it's not. This follows directly from the definition of derogatory.
It is precisely the assumption that "no one is being offended" which led to widespread careless use of the term "Indian giver".
No, I'm pretty sure everyone knew Indians would be offended and didn't care. In fact, historical evidence suggests the originators of the phrase intended it to be offensive, and intended to diminish American Indians by using the phrase. In using the term "Nigerian scam" I don't assume no one will be offended. If they're offended, that's their right. It doesn't change the point of using the phrase, which is to reference the origin of that type of scam, not to diminish Nigerians.
Also, as in your argument, calling this a "Nigerian scam" was already based on a false belief in THIS context -- i.e., it was really a Malaysian that was involved, not a Nigerian.
Calling this a Nigerian scam WAS NOT BASED ON THE BELIEF THAT A NIGERIAN WAS INVOLVED in this context. If that's not clear, I don't know how to get through to you people. The people calling this a Nigerian scam ALREADY KNEW this particular case was perpetrated BY MALAYSIANS and were using a FIGURE OF SPEECH that is already well-established. Formation of the term "Nigerian scam" was based on the TRUE BELIEF that widespread use of the scam originated in Nigeria, and use of that term to refer to the same type of scam originating in other countries is already common practice.
If it's a confidential internal police document, how would he have posted it prior to it being leaked?
There isn't any hypocrisy here, is there?
I'm not trolling -- I mean, seriously?
Yeah, not being omniscient makes him a real hypocrite. I mean, seriously. If he's posting documents in his possession, then for God's sake, he ought to also post documents NOT in his possession! To do otherwise would be hypocrisy! It would be a double standard!
Shouldn't we be discussing things like the general dumbing-down of society that occurs when we tell people "now you know some Computer Science[TM]!" who have only learned application use?
So...we've got high schools misinforming the entire population about a major facet of modern life, and the worst problem we can think of is it might cause a couple percent of a couple percent decline in gender balance? Even that is speculative, as I have a hard time seeing a young woman being interested in algorithms and data structures and then concluding, based on her high school's offerings, that these were not part of computer science. By the time you're exposed to such things you're already aware that what your high school offers is a greatly-reduced version of the subject catering to your un-motivated peers, and therefore know not to jump to any conclusions based on it anyway. Shouldn't we be discussing something things like the general dumbing-down of society that occurs when we tell people "now you know some Computer Science[TM]!" who have only learned application use? I'd say that's a bigger concern.
High School computer classes have only ever taught proficiency in specific applications and that hash't changed in the 20~30 years schools have had computers...
In my high school we had a course in computer science that taught basic data structures and the theory behind the object-oriented paradigm, as well as how to program in C++. I used what I learned in that course to implement similar data structures in other languages. How that could constitute "proficiency in specific applications" is beyond me. And I didn't even go to a big school, my graduating class had 80 students.
Right at the beginning they would have asked my operating system and then told me, "We don't support Linux." Really helpful when the actual problem is their lines are down and I just want to know when they will be fixed.
Which is where you state "I have windows",
That doesn't work either; failure occurs as soon as they tell me to "click on the blue e" (because telling me to open Internet Explorer would be too hard). And if I lie about that, they'll tell me to click on some shit in my start menu, and so on...
The point is you can't get tech support for the ultimate problem because they're all trained to run you through a script to check for unrelated things, and all the technically competent ones resigned in frustration years ago.
unlikely to even be a lie, unless you live in a nuclear bunker, or your mom's basement...
You're right, because stereotypes are such a reliable indicator of people's situations.
Would you tell someone that s/he's an "Indian giver" if a Native American is within earshot?
I wouldn't use that term under any circumstances. It's both derogatory and based on false beliefs (the belief, once common in the US, that American Indians traded away their land fair and square and then wanted it back, when in reality it was the Europeans who went back on their word in the overwhelming majority of agreements between the two groups). Neither "Nigerian scam" nor "Swiss cheese" are derogatory terms, nor are they based on false assumptions. I would use the phrase "Nigerian scam" within earshot of a Nigerian, and would say "Swiss cheese" within earshot of a Swissman, without hesitation, if the appropriate circumstances arose.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing you weren't around in the 80's when the ONLY home PC was an Apple.
Which '80s was that? The '80s on planet Zargon? Apple never had majority market share in home computers, nobody I knew in the '80s had one at home (though all the schools in my area seemed to have them), and my family owned no fewer than 4 home PCs by the end of the '80s, from 3 different manufacturers, none of them Apple. So I guess I wasn't around in your version of the '80s either.
DOS was hard to use for your average non-techie and Apple was ridiculously expensive.
Yet somehow I found it easy when I was 6 years old. Which DOS were you using in the '80s?
That makes more sense than anything I've seen in a debate about Android so far. Thank you.
As the previous poster mentioned if you'd bother to quote them in their entirety, PC's don't have to worry about severely limited cpu power and battery life.
I surf on my 486 laptop, you insensitive clod!
I have 3 android devices in my home...none of them run the same version, one has google apps natively, one has a hack to get it and the other one I haven't even bothered with because its too much of a pain in the ass. All have different front ends as well...
Whose fault is that? Is that the fault of Android, or Google? Is it the fault of your carrier(s)? Is it the fault of the application developers? Is it your fault for buying three different devices and expecting them to be the same?
I think the problem is that they've made it all so unclear that it's non-obvious whose fault it is, and equally non-obvious how to fix it.
The devices I mention are an Archos 7 Home Internet Tablet, An aPad and my Samsung Galaxy S.
Sorry to go OT, but which do you recommend? I'm looking at getting an Android tablet for note-taking in class and writing down appointments, that sort of thing. Also, reading books if the ones I need ever come out in digital format. I want something I can hack the Android Marketplace onto and with decent build quality. I've never owned a tablet before, so I'm kind of shooting in the dark here.
Which was inaccurate to begin with. The Spanish Prisoner scam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Prisoner predates it by a century.
Oh my GOD! I can't believe you just said "Spanish Prisoner scam"! I hope no Spaniards were in earshot! No, but seriously, how can you argue this vociferously that the term "Nigerian scam" should be considered a slur when you consider "Spanish Prisoner scam" perfectly ok? And need I point out that most "Spanish Prisoner scams" are just as far-removed from Spain and from involving a Spanish prisoner as this scam was from Nigeria? So...double standardize much?
And if you are going to argue now that this scam was somehow different, then I refer you to an earlier post in this thread -- pointing out the differences of this particular scam with the original Nigerian scam:
The person who "pointed out" this "difference" is clearly not very familiar with Nigerian scams. This type of scam (where you're supposed to provide your bank account as a vessel for them to transfer money, or you're supposed to cash a check or receive a wire transfer and then re-wire the money) is probably at least as common coming out of Nigeria as the older Spanish-Prisoner-style scam where they tell you they need money up-front to release more money later. In fact, most of the time when I've heard the phrase "Nigerian scam" it's been in reference to this newer type, which you want to call "Malaysian scam", though I've heard "Nigerian scam" used in reference to the other type as well. These days it's basically legitimate to refer to any scam via e-mail that gets people to believe they will get money if they cooperate as a "Nigerian scam" because believe me, if it can be done via e-mail, Nigerian scammers have done it.
If this happened often enough (which it is starting to), should we now call this the Malaysian scam? Good luck dealing with them Malaysians then.
No, because Nigerians have been doing the EXACT SAME THING for at least 20 years now.
Look around this article thread -- some posters didn't even KNOW that Malaysia was a different country and have mistakenly assumed that the scam DID originate from Nigeria. Of course they did not read the slashdot summary, but then if the term "Nigerian scam" was immediately clear to everyone that it did not originate from Nigeria, then they would NOT have posted those erroneous comments in the first place.
Ignorance the part of people who don't RTFA is nobody's fault but those who don't RTFA.
they STILL WOULD USE THE TERM because they considered those people who would be offended to be lesser
which is exactly the situation "having an assumption that '*no one* is being offended'".
No, it's the OPPOSITE situation from "having an assumption that no one is being offended". You're clearly having some problems with the logic of these sentences so let's break it down a bit. If you say "A decided to do X because C was not Y", and I say "no, I think A would have decided to do X anyway whether C was Y or not", and you said "X(A)->~Y(C) == X(A)", in other words that the two situations were exactly the same, that would be ridiculous. Now substitute "offended" for Y, "American Indians" for C, "white Americans" for A, and "use the phrase 'Indian giver'" for "do X". Hopefully the blatant and fundamental fallacy in your reasoning becomes clear.
You have not proven that Nigerians will NOT be offended when being attributed with a type of scam...
I haven't proven it because it was never my claim. I never said they would not be offended. Them not being offended was never a condition of any of my statements. Therefore I never had a burden of proving they wouldn't be offended. In fact, I pretty plainly stated "If they're offended, that's their right."
I need not say any more, seeing as is that you've descended to using outright scorn when I have been careful not to do so when addressing your points.
You haven't been addressing my points. You've been arguing the entire time against things I've neither said nor even implied, hence the scorn. Given that you've basically been making veiled accusations of racism the whole time since you brought the term "Indian giver" into this by implying the phrase "Nigerian scam" was equivalent, you're probably getting off light in the scorn department.
Nothing about suicide or spoiled babies; you're simply wrong: there are no limits to firearm ownership in the Constitution. None, zip, zero, nada; so, what makes you think the government has the right to impose them?
You're right. The 2nd Amendment clearly grants known criminals, even those who are also known to be planning to kill, the same right to have guns as everyone else, and given that it says "arms" and not "firearms" this also applies to chemical, biological, and nuclear arms as well. Anyone who thinks the government has a right to ban terrorists from acquiring weaponized anthrax and nuclear arms is simply wrong: there are no limits to arms ownership in the Constitution.
In the future, people WILL mean it to offend...
Oh genius oracle of all things past and future, please tell me more of what WILL happen, so that I may build my life around your omniscient predictions.
Do you honestly think that the term "Indian giver" started with the intent to diminish the value of Native Americans?
Yes. If Native Americans were seen as equals, they would have to be respected. If they were seen as inferiors, they could be conquered.
At THAT TIME the Europeans thought of them just as some race they can conquer.
Exactly. That was MY point.
Their propensity to offend them did not stem from a direct WANT to offend but from a default mindset of not treating them as equals -- they uttered the term not as an expletive to the Native Americans, but as a description to fellow Europeans.
Descriptions to fellow Europeans of a race they wanted to treat as lesser. Hence the attempt to diminish said race. I never said their primary concern was wanting to offend the Indians. I was only contesting your statement:
It is precisely the assumption that "no one is being offended" which led to widespread careless use of the term "Indian giver".
which is obviously full of shit because people who think they are so superior to another race that they have the right to conquer them don't refrain from using terminology that would offend said race. No `assumption that "no one is being offended"` was ever necessary for the term to become widespread because even if they knew with 100% certainty someone would be offended, they STILL WOULD USE THE TERM because they considered those people who would be offended to be lesser, as you yourself admit.
Also, for the sake of all who care about the English language, get a fucking dictionary and look up the word "expletive" before using it again.
Man, I think we should all just give up and die right now.
[citation needed]
The power of googlefu is before you.
And yet it provides no evidence* for your claim, which to me suggests your claim was false. If your claim is true, I would find some documentation enlightening. Ball's in your court.
*one article comes up near the top linking foot fetishes to STD fear around the 13th century, but your claim was "most of the fetishes that exist today" have this origin, not just that one.
Citation?
Here:
The term "Indian gift" was first noted in 1765 by Thomas Hutchinson,[1] and "Indian giver" was first cited in John Russell Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms (1860)[2] as "Indian giver. When an Indian gives any thing, he expects to receive an equivalent, or to have his gift returned." Wikipedia, naturally.
I was taught that the phrase 'indian giver' referred to whitey breaking agreements with Indians, not the other way around.
In modern usage, possibly. Originally, no. If people want to re-purpose the term to mean that, I'll be the last person to criticize it, but where I live the term is still used by rednecks (the same people I hear saying "give me back the money you jewed me out of!") to put down Native Americans, so I refuse to use it.
As a person of mixed American heritage, I often have issues with determining when to self loathe and when to bask in martyrdom.
I know what you mean. As a person of majority English and other mixed European heritage, I often vacillate between pride in founding much of modern civilization and guilt in doing so many awful things to so many other peoples. I didn't even do either of those things, but somehow I feel responsible for the acts of my forebears.
The phrase originally came about because Native American tribes and European settlers had different ideas regarding trade vs. gifts.
That's putting it very generously to the Europeans. In many cases Europeans produced documents for Natives to sign without communicating their meaning, whose meaning in English(/Dutch/French/whatever) Legalese was that Europeans now owned the land the Natives lived on, without any knowledge on the part of the Natives that that's what they said or intent by them to assign any sort of ownership rights whatsoever. In most cases the Europeans who actually conducted the deals were fully cognizant of this. They then went and resold parts of the land to other Europeans, claiming to have valid title to it. When Natives didn't want to move, the Europeans then claimed the Natives had given them land and wanted to take it back (hence the term "Indian-giver") which claim was, in essence, a total lie, not a misunderstanding.
Again, in many cases, not all. There were undoubtedly some cases of legitimate misunderstanding but to act like the deliberate swindling did not occur would be to whitewash away history.
Nowadays, around here at least, most people consider the phrase Indian giver to be referring to how the white man and their government would take back anything that they agreed to with the Native American tribes if it was to their advantage to do so.
I think that's a fair re-purposing of the term. It's origin, however, was in reference to the supposed practice of Indians taking back gifts.
So, then, who are you to judge that it is not derogatory to Nigerians to call any confidence tricks of that type as a "Nigerian" scam?
Who am I to judge? A human being in possession of the faculty of reason, that's who. Let's see, is the tendency of the term to diminish the value of Nigerians, or to indicate that the type of scam originated in Nigeria? If the former, it's derogatory. If the latter, it's not. This follows directly from the definition of derogatory.
It is precisely the assumption that "no one is being offended" which led to widespread careless use of the term "Indian giver".
No, I'm pretty sure everyone knew Indians would be offended and didn't care. In fact, historical evidence suggests the originators of the phrase intended it to be offensive, and intended to diminish American Indians by using the phrase. In using the term "Nigerian scam" I don't assume no one will be offended. If they're offended, that's their right. It doesn't change the point of using the phrase, which is to reference the origin of that type of scam, not to diminish Nigerians.
Also, as in your argument, calling this a "Nigerian scam" was already based on a false belief in THIS context -- i.e., it was really a Malaysian that was involved, not a Nigerian.
Calling this a Nigerian scam WAS NOT BASED ON THE BELIEF THAT A NIGERIAN WAS INVOLVED in this context. If that's not clear, I don't know how to get through to you people. The people calling this a Nigerian scam ALREADY KNEW this particular case was perpetrated BY MALAYSIANS and were using a FIGURE OF SPEECH that is already well-established. Formation of the term "Nigerian scam" was based on the TRUE BELIEF that widespread use of the scam originated in Nigeria, and use of that term to refer to the same type of scam originating in other countries is already common practice.
I think the only reasonable conclusion is this: Julian Assange has an ungodly large penis.
Shouldn't Assange have already posted it?
If it's a confidential internal police document, how would he have posted it prior to it being leaked?
There isn't any hypocrisy here, is there?
I'm not trolling -- I mean, seriously?
Yeah, not being omniscient makes him a real hypocrite. I mean, seriously. If he's posting documents in his possession, then for God's sake, he ought to also post documents NOT in his possession! To do otherwise would be hypocrisy! It would be a double standard!
Shouldn't we be discussing things like the general dumbing-down of society that occurs when we tell people "now you know some Computer Science[TM]!" who have only learned application use?
There, fixed that for me.
So...we've got high schools misinforming the entire population about a major facet of modern life, and the worst problem we can think of is it might cause a couple percent of a couple percent decline in gender balance? Even that is speculative, as I have a hard time seeing a young woman being interested in algorithms and data structures and then concluding, based on her high school's offerings, that these were not part of computer science. By the time you're exposed to such things you're already aware that what your high school offers is a greatly-reduced version of the subject catering to your un-motivated peers, and therefore know not to jump to any conclusions based on it anyway. Shouldn't we be discussing something things like the general dumbing-down of society that occurs when we tell people "now you know some Computer Science[TM]!" who have only learned application use? I'd say that's a bigger concern.
High School computer classes have only ever taught proficiency in specific applications and that hash't changed in the 20~30 years schools have had computers...
In my high school we had a course in computer science that taught basic data structures and the theory behind the object-oriented paradigm, as well as how to program in C++. I used what I learned in that course to implement similar data structures in other languages. How that could constitute "proficiency in specific applications" is beyond me. And I didn't even go to a big school, my graduating class had 80 students.
This is also where departments separate the men from the boys (and women from girls).
Is that also where they separate the sheep from the goats?
Right at the beginning they would have asked my operating system and then told me, "We don't support Linux." Really helpful when the actual problem is their lines are down and I just want to know when they will be fixed.
Which is where you state "I have windows",
That doesn't work either; failure occurs as soon as they tell me to "click on the blue e" (because telling me to open Internet Explorer would be too hard). And if I lie about that, they'll tell me to click on some shit in my start menu, and so on...
The point is you can't get tech support for the ultimate problem because they're all trained to run you through a script to check for unrelated things, and all the technically competent ones resigned in frustration years ago.
unlikely to even be a lie, unless you live in a nuclear bunker, or your mom's basement...
You're right, because stereotypes are such a reliable indicator of people's situations.
Oracle has made an offer to purchase Sun Microsystems.
Isn't that old news?
There's this really great new device they have on sale at Best Buy. It's called a sarcasm detector.
This article is from April 7, 2009 and is old news. It's already been covered on Slashdot and other tech news sites a long time ago.
No way, man! The summary clearly says it happened "on Tuesday"!
Would you tell someone that s/he's an "Indian giver" if a Native American is within earshot?
I wouldn't use that term under any circumstances. It's both derogatory and based on false beliefs (the belief, once common in the US, that American Indians traded away their land fair and square and then wanted it back, when in reality it was the Europeans who went back on their word in the overwhelming majority of agreements between the two groups). Neither "Nigerian scam" nor "Swiss cheese" are derogatory terms, nor are they based on false assumptions. I would use the phrase "Nigerian scam" within earshot of a Nigerian, and would say "Swiss cheese" within earshot of a Swissman, without hesitation, if the appropriate circumstances arose.