If you bothered to read the following comments from those who got the joke, it might occur to you that just because you don't get a joke doesn't mean that it was completely serious.
I seem to recall having this same conversation a few weeks ago over a wise-crack I made about Canadians... multiple replies came in from Canadians who thought it was pretty damn funny, along with a few comments from whiners like you who are just way too sensitive.
I would complain that you are hammering my subtle little joke home, but it is obvious from the other posts that several slashdotters completely missed it, so I guess there's no such thing as over-explaining with these people. Therefore, I might as well spell it out:
Hey morons! I was deliberately making a bigotted comment by calling white southerners bigots. Some of us (mostly among those of us with an education) find this kind of humor amusing.
Next time, I will be sure to include a dick joke or two so some of the humor will be directed to your sort of attention span.
Although I have never meet any personally, I'm sure there are seven or eight rednecks out there that are not bigotted white trash. They might even wear socks and would refrain from leaving an old Dodge on cinder blocks in the front lawn.
I know some people have suggested that libraries set up a separate "adult" room containing an unfiltered connection, but the computers in the main library would be filtered
If they did set something like this up at the library, I would hate to be the librarian who has to squeegee the CRT monitors in the "adult" room at the end of the day.
Rational people are able to make a distinction between ideals that you can compromise on ("I don't like censorware"), and ideals you should fight about ("redneck bigots are treating people unfairly").
Browsing the Internet while washing your jeans is not as big of an issue as racism. It's just not.
If you are unable to discern the difference, you will end up a mad hermit like Harrison Ford in "The Mosquito Coast", putting yourself and your loved ones through hell because of your unwillingness to participate in a society that forces you to make small compromises.
1. An intranet that lets users browse a local cache of the more popular sites. If somebody wants to reach something that's not cached, they could ask an attended to pull it down. The downsides to this method should be obvious to most of the people here: Forums like/. would not be very interactive, and people's tastes are so diverse you would be constantly responding to requests.
2. Only permit unaccompanied access to the system to adults. Then you have no need of any censorship at all. How many teen-aged kids actually use a laundromat by themselves anyway?
In 35 years, Christina Aguilera and 'N Sync will be "retro" and on all kinds of "Greatest hits of the '90s" compilations.
Good lord, just thinking about a 53 year-old Christina Aguilera in a crop top singing "Genie in a Bottle" like a latter-day Cher with a bleach-job... in the name of all that is beautiful and good we must prevent this from ever happening.
I'm sure everyone had the same complaints about Abba when they came out.
Take-a-chance-take-a-chance-take-a-chance on Muddy Waters. Perhaps few hours of listening to good music might cure you of the delusion that Abba doesn't suck.
Cheesy music seems to really offend everyone over 14 when it was written less than five years ago. But now all my friends have suddenly changed their position on the New Kids on the Block and are thinking they're pretty cool.
If they were really your friends you would care enough to point out to them that the New Kids on the block were never cool, and never will be.
(That was fun... my own little "Hollywood Minute" moment.)
All this is the fault of the State and local governments (in those states where it has occurred). It is the responsibility of the states to fund public schools. Federal dollars don't pay the teacher salaries, nor do they buy the text-books.
It is a fact that federal spending on education has ballooned for two solid decades. Since you were ranting about education being less of a priority than the military, I was compelled to point out that this is a load of crap. Of all the cuts to the federal budget in the last 10 years, the cuts to the defense department have been the most dramatic.
You are talking to a former teacher from a family almost entirely made up of educators. I'm not just pulling these facts out of my ass, I spent a lot of time on this topic.
It is worth noting that the population of the US would actually be in decline, if it were not for the steady immigration of people leaving less desirable places to live here.
Last I checked, our replacement rate in the USA is about 0.85 per person. If the rest of the world was more like the industrialized West, we would be having debates about the best way to increase human procreation, rather than whether we need to slow population growth down.
How can schools hope to stay afloat while government funding for education is falling faster than hot grits down a troll's trousers?
Federal dollars for schools have increased faster than the rate of inflation for the entire Reagan era, the entire Bush era, and the entire Clinton era.
I'm the last person to want to side with the record companies, but i gotta admit... anything that keeps George Michael from making albums can't be all bad.
Myopic and short-sighted? Inacurrate and incorrect? Man, you need to drop that thesaurus before you hurt someone.
I didn't mean all at once. Sometimes he's inaccurate, sometimes he's incorrect.:)
BTW, where is your nick from? It's familiar and I have a mental image of a short person connected with it... but I can't for the life of me remember where it comes from.
Golias was the (totally fictional) patron saint of the goliards (pronounced "GAHL-yards"), wandering musicians who studied their craft in churches and monasteries, and paid for their travel expenses by entertaining in pubs and various other... er... night spots. The goliards are sometimes credited with a lot of the drinking-song melodies that you can pick out of medieval chants (and a lot of bawdy pagan songs about the monks and priests who drink too much).
Webster describes the goliards like this: Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French, goliard, glutton, from gole throat, from Latin gula -- more at GLUTTON Date: 15th century : a wandering student of the 12th or 13th century given to the writing of satiric Latin verse and to convivial living and minstrelsy
(I was once a music teacher, before I became a professional techie.)
The football team at UVa is a HUGE money-MAKER. Why do they need corporate sponsorship?
To make more money, of course.
Women's sports are huge money losers (so far), but all schools are required, under the famous "Title IX" decision, to provide athletic scholarships and positions to an equal number of women as they do for men. Some schools respond by cutting their less-visible men's programs (like wrestling and swimming) until they have just as few men as women, but the better ones will do what it takes to come up with the cash and recruit enough women so they can continue to function. If that means the football team wears Reebok logos to help cover the costs of women's hockey, then so be it.
It should be obvious by now that he is preparing to write a book... probably called "The Corporate Republic", unless he makes up another fake buzzword.
Look at how many articles he's written along these lines. In spite of the constant and persistant ridicule he has generated on/.
I still think he writes these in batches, and just submits them to Slashdot in sections. There is no evidence that he is listening to anybody else here at all in anything he writes.
Nearly every argument he has put forward has been torn down as being misguided, inaccurate, overstated, ignorant of history, myopic, arrogant, short-sighted, wrong-headed, or just plain incorrect... yet he keeps trudging on with more of them, as though he has not even read the feedback from even the posts that got modded up to 4 or 5. Steering a train off its tracks would require less effort than getting Katz to deviate from his present course.
He's got a book to write, and has probably already accepted an advance from his publisher; if his basic premise is flawed, it is far too late to turn back now.
The barbarian hordes are selling women's magazines on the hallowed greens of our University lawns!
Our noble warriors of the gridiron have been stained with the horrid logo of a shoe manufacturer!
Great painters are rotting in the guilded cages of wealthy benefactors who wish to be seen supporting the arts (even as they lure the unsuspecting young artists out of the poverty from which all true art must come)!
The savages are even daring to use human cadavers for safety research!
Will the horrors never end? My fragile constitution cannot possibly stand the strain of it all! Ooooh, the pain, the pain...
Actually, I think Microsoft is evil, but I'm not going to get into a religious debate with you.
Otherwise you are right on... except if "mindshare" is still a buzzword, then so are "cyber", "information superhighway", "e-commerce", "girl power", "whippersnapper", "hootinanny", and "corporatism".:)
Thank you for correcting the typo which I had already corrected. You should be modded to +5, Insightful for that.
It wasn't just "certain types of clothing" that we are talking about here. He had a gas-mask case (when there was a city ordinace banning gas-masks in town), taget-shooting protective eyewear, a "body count tally scrawled on the back of my flak jacket", and a military-surpluss utility vest he proudly refers to as a "load bearing harness," one which was designed for carrying grenades.
In other words, from all external evidence, he was perfectly outfitted for a killing spree. Any cop that does not confront a nut-case like that and ask what he's carrying in his vest is failing to protect the public.
Slashdot Mirror
I seem to recall having this same conversation a few weeks ago over a wise-crack I made about Canadians... multiple replies came in from Canadians who thought it was pretty damn funny, along with a few comments from whiners like you who are just way too sensitive.
Hey morons! I was deliberately making a bigotted comment by calling white southerners bigots. Some of us (mostly among those of us with an education) find this kind of humor amusing.
Next time, I will be sure to include a dick joke or two so some of the humor will be directed to your sort of attention span.
(Dry wit is so lost on the /. crowd sometimes.)
Although I have never meet any personally, I'm sure there are seven or eight rednecks out there that are not bigotted white trash. They might even wear socks and would refrain from leaving an old Dodge on cinder blocks in the front lawn.
If they did set something like this up at the library, I would hate to be the librarian who has to squeegee the CRT monitors in the "adult" room at the end of the day.
Browsing the Internet while washing your jeans is not as big of an issue as racism. It's just not.
If you are unable to discern the difference, you will end up a mad hermit like Harrison Ford in "The Mosquito Coast", putting yourself and your loved ones through hell because of your unwillingness to participate in a society that forces you to make small compromises.
1. An intranet that lets users browse a local cache of the more popular sites. If somebody wants to reach something that's not cached, they could ask an attended to pull it down. The downsides to this method should be obvious to most of the people here: Forums like /. would not be very interactive, and people's tastes are so diverse you would be constantly responding to requests.
2. Only permit unaccompanied access to the system to adults. Then you have no need of any censorship at all. How many teen-aged kids actually use a laundromat by themselves anyway?
Not where I live. Maybe you need to elect better state legislators.
Good lord, just thinking about a 53 year-old Christina Aguilera in a crop top singing "Genie in a Bottle" like a latter-day Cher with a bleach-job... in the name of all that is beautiful and good we must prevent this from ever happening.
I'm sure everyone had the same complaints about Abba when they came out.
Take-a-chance-take-a-chance-take-a-chance on Muddy Waters. Perhaps few hours of listening to good music might cure you of the delusion that Abba doesn't suck.
Cheesy music seems to really offend everyone over 14 when it was written less than five years ago. But now all my friends have suddenly changed their position on the New Kids on the Block and are thinking they're pretty cool.
If they were really your friends you would care enough to point out to them that the New Kids on the block were never cool, and never will be.
(That was fun... my own little "Hollywood Minute" moment.)
It is a fact that federal spending on education has ballooned for two solid decades. Since you were ranting about education being less of a priority than the military, I was compelled to point out that this is a load of crap. Of all the cuts to the federal budget in the last 10 years, the cuts to the defense department have been the most dramatic.
You are talking to a former teacher from a family almost entirely made up of educators. I'm not just pulling these facts out of my ass, I spent a lot of time on this topic.
Last I checked, our replacement rate in the USA is about 0.85 per person. If the rest of the world was more like the industrialized West, we would be having debates about the best way to increase human procreation, rather than whether we need to slow population growth down.
Federal dollars for schools have increased faster than the rate of inflation for the entire Reagan era, the entire Bush era, and the entire Clinton era.
Sorry to ruin a perfectly good rant with facts.
I'm the last person to want to side with the record companies, but i gotta admit... anything that keeps George Michael from making albums can't be all bad.
I didn't mean all at once. Sometimes he's inaccurate, sometimes he's incorrect. :)
BTW, where is your nick from? It's familiar and I have a mental image of a short person connected with it... but I can't for the life of me remember where it comes from.
Golias was the (totally fictional) patron saint of the goliards (pronounced "GAHL-yards"), wandering musicians who studied their craft in churches and monasteries, and paid for their travel expenses by entertaining in pubs and various other... er... night spots. The goliards are sometimes credited with a lot of the drinking-song melodies that you can pick out of medieval chants (and a lot of bawdy pagan songs about the monks and priests who drink too much).
Webster describes the goliards like this:
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French, goliard, glutton, from gole throat, from Latin gula -- more at GLUTTON
Date: 15th century
: a wandering student of the 12th or 13th century given to the writing of satiric Latin verse and to convivial living and minstrelsy
(I was once a music teacher, before I became a professional techie.)
Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of Mr. Smith from Lost in Space than Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. :)
To make more money, of course.
Women's sports are huge money losers (so far), but all schools are required, under the famous "Title IX" decision, to provide athletic scholarships and positions to an equal number of women as they do for men. Some schools respond by cutting their less-visible men's programs (like wrestling and swimming) until they have just as few men as women, but the better ones will do what it takes to come up with the cash and recruit enough women so they can continue to function. If that means the football team wears Reebok logos to help cover the costs of women's hockey, then so be it.
Yep. Your earlier post had a strong Academic Snob vibe to it, and I thought it would be funny to extend it a little farther.
Glad you enjoyed it. Some people have no sense of humor about being roasted like that.
Look at how many articles he's written along these lines. In spite of the constant and persistant ridicule he has generated on /.
I still think he writes these in batches, and just submits them to Slashdot in sections. There is no evidence that he is listening to anybody else here at all in anything he writes.
Nearly every argument he has put forward has been torn down as being misguided, inaccurate, overstated, ignorant of history, myopic, arrogant, short-sighted, wrong-headed, or just plain incorrect... yet he keeps trudging on with more of them, as though he has not even read the feedback from even the posts that got modded up to 4 or 5. Steering a train off its tracks would require less effort than getting Katz to deviate from his present course.
He's got a book to write, and has probably already accepted an advance from his publisher; if his basic premise is flawed, it is far too late to turn back now.
It can't. Fortunately, capitalism does not require continuous growth.
The barbarian hordes are selling women's magazines on the hallowed greens of our University lawns!
Our noble warriors of the gridiron have been stained with the horrid logo of a shoe manufacturer!
Great painters are rotting in the guilded cages of wealthy benefactors who wish to be seen supporting the arts (even as they lure the unsuspecting young artists out of the poverty from which all true art must come)!
The savages are even daring to use human cadavers for safety research!
Will the horrors never end? My fragile constitution cannot possibly stand the strain of it all! Ooooh, the pain, the pain...
True... "corporatism" was invented and employed to pad out Jon Katz articles (which generate web hits to sell ads); totally different.
They don't "warrant a copy of our home game", but they do deserve to have a link to their press release posted on Slashdot?
Otherwise you are right on... except if "mindshare" is still a buzzword, then so are "cyber", "information superhighway", "e-commerce", "girl power", "whippersnapper", "hootinanny", and "corporatism". :)
It wasn't just "certain types of clothing" that we are talking about here. He had a gas-mask case (when there was a city ordinace banning gas-masks in town), taget-shooting protective eyewear, a "body count tally scrawled on the back of my flak jacket", and a military-surpluss utility vest he proudly refers to as a "load bearing harness," one which was designed for carrying grenades.
In other words, from all external evidence, he was perfectly outfitted for a killing spree. Any cop that does not confront a nut-case like that and ask what he's carrying in his vest is failing to protect the public.
It's a new language form a major vendor. Would you rather we poke our heads in the sand and pretend that the Redmond Empire does not exist?