The ex-Soviets I know that are living in the United States (and I know quite a few, some very well) are simply better educated, better emotionally adjusted, and much more impressive people than their American counterparts for the same age and level of experience. I don't mean a small difference, I mean a veritable world of difference. They are very fundamentally happy and very, very smart, and they do very, very well here. They also tend to be somewhat anti-Soviet and complain about closedness, bread lines, limited housing sizes, etc.
It's a funny paradox to see, because they also quite clearly perceive that their American counterparts are by and large under- or poorly educated in comparison, have little work ethic, and are emotionally unstable and borderline pathological in their individualist-amoral tendencies, despite having every "advantage" of material wealth and an "open" society.
The question of what the Soviet state got right and what it got wrong and the reasons for its eventual collapse are of course heavily debated between right and left camps, but the one thing I always tell them: the Soviet Union produced you—and as a high-quality, world-class individual, you are not the sort that very often comes from America.
Of course there is some selection bias—the very fact of their being here implies that. Still, I know of zero Americans (myself included) that even begin to approach the degree to which all of the post-Soviets I know are impressive, qualified, warm, and engaging. It's really quite an amazing contrast and it's quite amazing in turn to hear them decry the very system that produced and socialized them to be as clearly happy and well-adjusted as they are.
As always, things only exist for us in the social world once we have a name by which we can mutually refer to them. Without the word, there is no way to leverage the object. With the word, the object is called into existence even if it grows increasingly weak ontologically. Ask any linguist or sociologist.
But my experience bears this hypothesis out. I haven't lived more than a year in a single place in a decade, and my time has been split between west coast car-oriented suburban sprawl cities and east coast and midwest dense subway-and-sidewalk cities, all in the U.S. I've gone back and forth a bunch of times.
Each time I move east to a dense subway-and-sidewalk city, I lose a good 40 pounds without even thinking about it. (I'm a pretty tall guy, so it's not as drastic as it may at first seem.) When I move to a suburbs-and-car city, I gain it back without even thinking about it. The difference in mode of transit (walking and standing a lot vs. driving a lot) seems to be enough to tip the balance. There may also be a dietary component, since I've noticed that (for example) living in L.A. I seem to live almost entirely on standardized-menu fast food (which tends to be junk food) because it's simply what's available to those who don't cook, while living in New York (as I am now), I tend to live almost entirely on local deli and mom-pop-restaurant food, much more "fresh ingredients" and much less "whatever the warehouse supplier sends over to the drive-thru."
I don't have Vista. Can anyone with Vista verify what this guy says about the file dialog? I'm just a bit shocked and even with my general lack of respect for Microsoft hesitant to believe they'd release something that broken.
I spent 1995-2002 telecommuting and when I wanted to switch companies and move back into an office setting, I was told a number of times that the fact that I wasn't "used to the structure of an office environment anymore" was a negative. There was a kind of assumption that "telecommuter" == "unmanageable cowboy" that I had to overcome. Even after I did get hired, for my first couple of months I kept hearing, "I know you're used to having more freedom than this, but this is how we do X Y Z around here..."
In short, it made it harder to get a non-telecommuting job and harder to fit in after I did, just because people were aware that I'd been a telecommuter.
Hmmm, check to see that you actually do have Flash 9 (do the "about:plugins" thing in your URL bar). Barring that... I dunno... ?! It worked for me and I've still got the beta installed, haven't bothered to install the "official release" yet since I've experienced absolutely zero problems with the beta over the months I've had it installed.
Um, my Treo 650 doesn't just play video, it records video, with full audio, via the built-in cam. And I have gigabytes of MP3s on it thanks to the built-in SD slot. And I shop eBay, use Gmail, and read CNN with it. And its several years old. As to where I formed my opinion about the iPhone... I formed it from Apple's marketing materials and press releases. If you have a better source at the moment I'm all ears.
You make an interesting point (re: openness). Are there any companies out there making reference hardware platforms for GSM phones with PDA-like form factors? Perhaps it's time for an "OpenPhone Project" that implements wacky OSS coolness and innovation on top of a reference smartphone design and that can ultimately make its way into the hands of interested manufacturers? I'd be interested in reading about that on the front page of Slashdot...
...but now I have to say it: how many iPhone stories a day are we gonna get on the Slashdot front page, and for how long? This is a hell of a lot of coverage for a mere _phone_ that a) offers no new features not already available on other smartphones, b) is priced mostly out of the market, c) isn't on the market yet, and d) is tied to one carrier.
They are paid less than most professionals in the white-collar world, they must routinely adapt to clueless and often unimplementable (or perilous) edicts from upper management, and they are expected to solve all problems (most of which are you must admit created by users themselves, often as the result of ignoring previous IT advice) instantly, or heads will roll, people will be upset, the entire company grinds to a halt. At the same time, computing and networking resources are often limited and IT has the role of actually trying to manage access to these in such a way that users and departments are satisfied without upsetting management or having budgetary or downtime issues.
In short, it's one of the more political jobs inside most corporations, has to answer to nearly everyone, has more immediate responsibility for ongoing operations that most anyone, and yet is typically seen as not truly white collar--and thus doesn't enjoy quite the same level of respect or pay as the bunch doctors, editors, stockbrokers, or whomever else happens to be around.
It's basically a tough job and it's easy to see how IT professionals might develop a short fuse. In my experience (and having worked in IT years ago) it's not so much a bad attitude as a very limited (often for very pragmatic reasons) tolerance for bullshit, cowboyism, or the failure of employees to take responsibility for themselves and the damage they can cause to things.
- Tube 2 NYC (subway route map and travel planner) - Adarian Money (personal financial management) - PhatNotes (application to handle 1,000s of notes, exportable to CSV) - OpenChess (GNU chess engine for Palm)
None of these are typical of the applications bundled with a smartphone/PDA as standard fare, yet without them there would be no point to my having the Treo at all, since I don't use most of the other data features at all (apart from the contacts manager, which I can get with a standard mobile phone).
I thought the iPhone looked interesting, and as a Treo-Cingular user, I'm just the market Apple ought to be going for... but they've lost me. A device I can't customize is no device at all. (Now I'm just waiting for an OS X poster from a GNOME vs. KDE story to start telling me once again how this indicates a fault in me and my ability to appreciate "perfect" user interfaces, since the Apple products are by definition perfect and require no customization.)
People who talk about the "big picture" over thousands of years (including pre-human periods). What does this have to do with us? Do you have no survival instinct? Global warming is fine if it kills off the human race but the cockroaches live?
The goal here for some of us is avoid the total destruction and/or collapse of the global civilization that we have now and to prevent our sons/daughters/nieces/nephews from having to live agonizing, suffering-laden, possibly abbreviated lives on a planet undergoing a massive change toward not supporting our species at its current population level.
It seems to me such a moot point whether the earth was hotter XX thousand years ago before modern humans existed. So fucking what? We are modern humans and and I fail to see how it's rational to include in any human-framed definition of "normal Earth" an Earth in which humans can no longer survive. It just blows my mind whenever I see people talking as if the goal is anything other than to avoid pain and suffering for ourselves.
Be careful, their "SmartPhone Connect" plan does NOT apply to devices they class as "PDAs." This includes things like the Treo and Blackberry (and, I would suspect, the iPhone). For "PDA" devices you must buy "PDA Connect" at a much heftier $44.99 a month (in addition to your actual calling minutes). There are stories all over the net (just search for these terms) of people getting sold "SmartPhone Connect" by a clueless in-store Cingular salesman only to find that they were billed by the kilobyte to the tune of $thousands on the first bill because their PDA class device (by Cingular's estimation) was not eligible for "unlimited" data under the mere "smartphone" plan.
I absolutely agree; I think borders that are used as anything other than an administrative and organizational convenience are immoral. The notion that hard-working immigrants can be kept out "to preserve [my] way of life" is little more than saying "I have more than you by an accident of birth and am willing to use force to ensure that I don't have to share." Why exactly should an accident of birth guarantee someone more wealth than another? Property is an invention of the state and the social contract and historically the social contract has been limited (and thus discriminatory) in scope; "illegal" immigration is just the codification of social inequality by the more powerful group.
"The fact is, if KDE was any good, you wouldn't have to spend time customizing it."
Sorry, but this is just silly. What you are suggesting is that all computer users are identical and have identical needs, and that there is thus an "ideal" desktop that, once achieved, will simultaneously serve all users ideally, out of the box.
That's just nonsense. The "ideal" desktop is the most customized, not the least customized. An editor, a photographer, and a sysadmin all should have radically different computing desktops that look almost nothing alike one another and that behave in very different ways. If they don't they're not working at peak efficiency. Fine for some, but I want my desktop to match my workflow as closely as possible.
How about this: I don't spend any time customizing GNOME or Mac OS X. But that doesn't mean they're ideal for me. It means they're nonfunctional for me. They can't be made to do what I want them to do, and therefore I don't use them at all. I do use KDE. Why? Because (even if you think this means its imperfect), I can get it to do what I need it to do without installing lots of 3rd party hacks or descending into registry editing.
And that's what. Period.
And yes, I have used GNOME, including recent versions (Fedora Core 6 in fact, I administer a number of FC6 desktop labs) and also Mac OS X 10.2.
So (and try to LISTEN this time), let the "significant majority" of people use GNOME which is exactly what you claim to want. Your totalitarian impulse to make sure that nobody has any choice but the one you want is not welcome here. I like KDE, so naturally you tell me that I'm wrong and you wish I didn't have it, even though you already have a desktop that you like. Well excuse me, but fsck you and all you GNOME trolls who post to every KDE story with "KDE MUST BE STOPPED! USERS MUST NOT HAVE CHOICE! IT IS NOT ENOUGH THAT GNOME TAKES IT AWAY; WE MUST REMOVE IT FROM ALL OTHER SOFTWARE PRODUCTS AS WELL! YOU POWER USERS MUST BE FORBIDDEN FROM HAVING A DESKTOP THAT YOU LIKE!"
Um, if you like the way GNOME does things, you should be using GNOME. Leave KDE for those of us that like the way KDE does things, including the control center (which I like very much, since my KDE is heavily customized, and I didn't have to edit a registry to do it).
they don't care about it because they can't take a trip into space or to the Moon. They've grown up knowing that we went to the moon all the way back when the Beatles were considered radical and offensive, and their entire lives have been filled with documentary video of trips through galaxies and universes and time and space, full of aliens and lasers and faster-than-light travel. Yes, this video evidence is fictional, but it doesn't change the fact that they've experienced such things.
So knowing that we already landed people on the moon when their parents were kids (before, for example, the invention of the microcomputer, the cell phone, the CD player, the video game, or anything else they see as modern) and that they've spent their whole lives thinking of space as an exciting wild west of oddball physics and rowdy extraterrestrials, it's no wonder that a couple of orbits of the earth, a tinfoil space station, and a few probes don't get them going.
I personally am very excited by space exploration, but also very disappointed at our unwillingness to really go after it (compare NASA's budget to the budget for the Iraq war, for example), but I can easily see how a younger person might simply feel a little "been there, done that, a hundred years ago" about the whole thing.
Everybody is busy pointing out the "first causes" of traffic jams without noticing that every one of these causes is caused by interaction with the roads in the first place.
The real "first cause" of traffic jams is differences in driving decisions and style. If everyone drove at 120mph, or everyone drove a 30mph, or everyone could anticipate exactly what the other driver would do before they did it, and adjust accordingly in advance, there would be no traffic jams.
Traffic jams happen because one guy is driving 45 mph thinking "look at all these damn idiots driving too fast for this weather and this level of congestion, well not me, I'm a good driver" and the guy behind him steps on the gas and passes at 80 mph thinking "look at all these damn idiots impeding the flow of traffic, well not me, I'm going to pass so that others behind me can pass afterward" and the guy in the next lane over is thinking "jesus, look at these idiotic fast and slow drivers passing each other and holding up traffic, I'm going to stay in my lane and not accommodate any of them or let them use my lane to pass, since they're all rotten-ass drivers."
It's the conflicting intentions and behaviors in similar situations that lead to brake-slamming, passing, swerving, wrecks, and the other causes of the density patterns that characterize traffic jams.
Social networking sites increasingly get you friends, appointments/engagements, and jobs. Yes, people who previously didn't might now exclude you based on the public information about you, but so many more people know about you and can connect with you that you may just be better off.
What we're seeing is the tipping point at which the risks of giving up some kinds of privacy are overcome by the undeniable power of the network to create and maintain social circles (and all of the advantages that they confer) by uniting like-thinking folks at a rate never before seen.
Matthew, you don't listen (or read). I was at eBay before I was in publishing and I was a tech writer at a Linux startup before that. Some of us are more versatile than others, apparently.
And yes, my opinion is anecdotal. I don't claim otherwise. But that doesn't change the fact that at the last five companies I've worked for/with over the last decade (three of them national publishers where I worked in trade nonfiction), I have spent almost my entire time working in MS Word and collaborating with other people in MS Word.
Your apparent hatred of the application is clouding your abilities to read and communicate civilly.
Slashdot Mirror
The ex-Soviets I know that are living in the United States (and I know quite a few, some very well) are simply better educated, better emotionally adjusted, and much more impressive people than their American counterparts for the same age and level of experience. I don't mean a small difference, I mean a veritable world of difference. They are very fundamentally happy and very, very smart, and they do very, very well here. They also tend to be somewhat anti-Soviet and complain about closedness, bread lines, limited housing sizes, etc.
It's a funny paradox to see, because they also quite clearly perceive that their American counterparts are by and large under- or poorly educated in comparison, have little work ethic, and are emotionally unstable and borderline pathological in their individualist-amoral tendencies, despite having every "advantage" of material wealth and an "open" society.
The question of what the Soviet state got right and what it got wrong and the reasons for its eventual collapse are of course heavily debated between right and left camps, but the one thing I always tell them: the Soviet Union produced you—and as a high-quality, world-class individual, you are not the sort that very often comes from America.
Of course there is some selection bias—the very fact of their being here implies that. Still, I know of zero Americans (myself included) that even begin to approach the degree to which all of the post-Soviets I know are impressive, qualified, warm, and engaging. It's really quite an amazing contrast and it's quite amazing in turn to hear them decry the very system that produced and socialized them to be as clearly happy and well-adjusted as they are.
"I'm going down to the MegaPlug."
"I'm going down to the ElectroPlex."
"I'm going down to the Charge Barn."
"I'm going down to the Surge & Shop."
We do everything we brand names in this country.
As always, things only exist for us in the social world once we have a name by which we can mutually refer to them. Without the word, there is no way to leverage the object. With the word, the object is called into existence even if it grows increasingly weak ontologically. Ask any linguist or sociologist.
But my experience bears this hypothesis out. I haven't lived more than a year in a single place in a decade, and my time has been split between west coast car-oriented suburban sprawl cities and east coast and midwest dense subway-and-sidewalk cities, all in the U.S. I've gone back and forth a bunch of times.
Each time I move east to a dense subway-and-sidewalk city, I lose a good 40 pounds without even thinking about it. (I'm a pretty tall guy, so it's not as drastic as it may at first seem.) When I move to a suburbs-and-car city, I gain it back without even thinking about it. The difference in mode of transit (walking and standing a lot vs. driving a lot) seems to be enough to tip the balance. There may also be a dietary component, since I've noticed that (for example) living in L.A. I seem to live almost entirely on standardized-menu fast food (which tends to be junk food) because it's simply what's available to those who don't cook, while living in New York (as I am now), I tend to live almost entirely on local deli and mom-pop-restaurant food, much more "fresh ingredients" and much less "whatever the warehouse supplier sends over to the drive-thru."
I don't have Vista. Can anyone with Vista verify what this guy says about the file dialog? I'm just a bit shocked and even with my general lack of respect for Microsoft hesitant to believe they'd release something that broken.
"Me"
The American Way. Our values do persist in these troubled times! Hurrah!
I spent 1995-2002 telecommuting and when I wanted to switch companies and move back into an office setting, I was told a number of times that the fact that I wasn't "used to the structure of an office environment anymore" was a negative. There was a kind of assumption that "telecommuter" == "unmanageable cowboy" that I had to overcome. Even after I did get hired, for my first couple of months I kept hearing, "I know you're used to having more freedom than this, but this is how we do X Y Z around here..."
In short, it made it harder to get a non-telecommuting job and harder to fit in after I did, just because people were aware that I'd been a telecommuter.
Hmmm, check to see that you actually do have Flash 9 (do the "about:plugins" thing in your URL bar). Barring that... I dunno... ?! It worked for me and I've still got the beta installed, haven't bothered to install the "official release" yet since I've experienced absolutely zero problems with the beta over the months I've had it installed.
Visit the download page from a Linux browser and you can download Flash 9 for Linux now. And P.S. the beta was out for months before this was...
Um, my Treo 650 doesn't just play video, it records video, with full audio, via the built-in cam. And I have gigabytes of MP3s on it thanks to the built-in SD slot. And I shop eBay, use Gmail, and read CNN with it. And its several years old. As to where I formed my opinion about the iPhone... I formed it from Apple's marketing materials and press releases. If you have a better source at the moment I'm all ears.
You make an interesting point (re: openness). Are there any companies out there making reference hardware platforms for GSM phones with PDA-like form factors? Perhaps it's time for an "OpenPhone Project" that implements wacky OSS coolness and innovation on top of a reference smartphone design and that can ultimately make its way into the hands of interested manufacturers? I'd be interested in reading about that on the front page of Slashdot...
...but now I have to say it: how many iPhone stories a day are we gonna get on the Slashdot front page, and for how long? This is a hell of a lot of coverage for a mere _phone_ that a) offers no new features not already available on other smartphones, b) is priced mostly out of the market, c) isn't on the market yet, and d) is tied to one carrier.
They are paid less than most professionals in the white-collar world, they must routinely adapt to clueless and often unimplementable (or perilous) edicts from upper management, and they are expected to solve all problems (most of which are you must admit created by users themselves, often as the result of ignoring previous IT advice) instantly, or heads will roll, people will be upset, the entire company grinds to a halt. At the same time, computing and networking resources are often limited and IT has the role of actually trying to manage access to these in such a way that users and departments are satisfied without upsetting management or having budgetary or downtime issues.
In short, it's one of the more political jobs inside most corporations, has to answer to nearly everyone, has more immediate responsibility for ongoing operations that most anyone, and yet is typically seen as not truly white collar--and thus doesn't enjoy quite the same level of respect or pay as the bunch doctors, editors, stockbrokers, or whomever else happens to be around.
It's basically a tough job and it's easy to see how IT professionals might develop a short fuse. In my experience (and having worked in IT years ago) it's not so much a bad attitude as a very limited (often for very pragmatic reasons) tolerance for bullshit, cowboyism, or the failure of employees to take responsibility for themselves and the damage they can cause to things.
I use a Treo 650. My most used applications are:
- Tube 2 NYC (subway route map and travel planner)
- Adarian Money (personal financial management)
- PhatNotes (application to handle 1,000s of notes, exportable to CSV)
- OpenChess (GNU chess engine for Palm)
None of these are typical of the applications bundled with a smartphone/PDA as standard fare, yet without them there would be no point to my having the Treo at all, since I don't use most of the other data features at all (apart from the contacts manager, which I can get with a standard mobile phone).
I thought the iPhone looked interesting, and as a Treo-Cingular user, I'm just the market Apple ought to be going for... but they've lost me. A device I can't customize is no device at all. (Now I'm just waiting for an OS X poster from a GNOME vs. KDE story to start telling me once again how this indicates a fault in me and my ability to appreciate "perfect" user interfaces, since the Apple products are by definition perfect and require no customization.)
People who talk about the "big picture" over thousands of years (including pre-human periods). What does this have to do with us? Do you have no survival instinct? Global warming is fine if it kills off the human race but the cockroaches live?
The goal here for some of us is avoid the total destruction and/or collapse of the global civilization that we have now and to prevent our sons/daughters/nieces/nephews from having to live agonizing, suffering-laden, possibly abbreviated lives on a planet undergoing a massive change toward not supporting our species at its current population level.
It seems to me such a moot point whether the earth was hotter XX thousand years ago before modern humans existed. So fucking what? We are modern humans and and I fail to see how it's rational to include in any human-framed definition of "normal Earth" an Earth in which humans can no longer survive. It just blows my mind whenever I see people talking as if the goal is anything other than to avoid pain and suffering for ourselves.
Be careful, their "SmartPhone Connect" plan does NOT apply to devices they class as "PDAs." This includes things like the Treo and Blackberry (and, I would suspect, the iPhone). For "PDA" devices you must buy "PDA Connect" at a much heftier $44.99 a month (in addition to your actual calling minutes). There are stories all over the net (just search for these terms) of people getting sold "SmartPhone Connect" by a clueless in-store Cingular salesman only to find that they were billed by the kilobyte to the tune of $thousands on the first bill because their PDA class device (by Cingular's estimation) was not eligible for "unlimited" data under the mere "smartphone" plan.
I absolutely agree; I think borders that are used as anything other than an administrative and organizational convenience are immoral. The notion that hard-working immigrants can be kept out "to preserve [my] way of life" is little more than saying "I have more than you by an accident of birth and am willing to use force to ensure that I don't have to share." Why exactly should an accident of birth guarantee someone more wealth than another? Property is an invention of the state and the social contract and historically the social contract has been limited (and thus discriminatory) in scope; "illegal" immigration is just the codification of social inequality by the more powerful group.
"The fact is, if KDE was any good, you wouldn't have to spend time customizing it."
Sorry, but this is just silly. What you are suggesting is that all computer users are identical and have identical needs, and that there is thus an "ideal" desktop that, once achieved, will simultaneously serve all users ideally, out of the box.
That's just nonsense. The "ideal" desktop is the most customized, not the least customized. An editor, a photographer, and a sysadmin all should have radically different computing desktops that look almost nothing alike one another and that behave in very different ways. If they don't they're not working at peak efficiency. Fine for some, but I want my desktop to match my workflow as closely as possible.
How about this: I don't spend any time customizing GNOME or Mac OS X. But that doesn't mean they're ideal for me. It means they're nonfunctional for me. They can't be made to do what I want them to do, and therefore I don't use them at all. I do use KDE. Why? Because (even if you think this means its imperfect), I can get it to do what I need it to do without installing lots of 3rd party hacks or descending into registry editing.
And that's what. Period.
And yes, I have used GNOME, including recent versions (Fedora Core 6 in fact, I administer a number of FC6 desktop labs) and also Mac OS X 10.2.
So (and try to LISTEN this time), let the "significant majority" of people use GNOME which is exactly what you claim to want. Your totalitarian impulse to make sure that nobody has any choice but the one you want is not welcome here. I like KDE, so naturally you tell me that I'm wrong and you wish I didn't have it, even though you already have a desktop that you like. Well excuse me, but fsck you and all you GNOME trolls who post to every KDE story with "KDE MUST BE STOPPED! USERS MUST NOT HAVE CHOICE! IT IS NOT ENOUGH THAT GNOME TAKES IT AWAY; WE MUST REMOVE IT FROM ALL OTHER SOFTWARE PRODUCTS AS WELL! YOU POWER USERS MUST BE FORBIDDEN FROM HAVING A DESKTOP THAT YOU LIKE!"
Um, if you like the way GNOME does things, you should be using GNOME. Leave KDE for those of us that like the way KDE does things, including the control center (which I like very much, since my KDE is heavily customized, and I didn't have to edit a registry to do it).
they don't care about it because they can't take a trip into space or to the Moon. They've grown up knowing that we went to the moon all the way back when the Beatles were considered radical and offensive, and their entire lives have been filled with documentary video of trips through galaxies and universes and time and space, full of aliens and lasers and faster-than-light travel. Yes, this video evidence is fictional, but it doesn't change the fact that they've experienced such things.
So knowing that we already landed people on the moon when their parents were kids (before, for example, the invention of the microcomputer, the cell phone, the CD player, the video game, or anything else they see as modern) and that they've spent their whole lives thinking of space as an exciting wild west of oddball physics and rowdy extraterrestrials, it's no wonder that a couple of orbits of the earth, a tinfoil space station, and a few probes don't get them going.
I personally am very excited by space exploration, but also very disappointed at our unwillingness to really go after it (compare NASA's budget to the budget for the Iraq war, for example), but I can easily see how a younger person might simply feel a little "been there, done that, a hundred years ago" about the whole thing.
Everybody is busy pointing out the "first causes" of traffic jams without noticing that every one of these causes is caused by interaction with the roads in the first place.
The real "first cause" of traffic jams is differences in driving decisions and style. If everyone drove at 120mph, or everyone drove a 30mph, or everyone could anticipate exactly what the other driver would do before they did it, and adjust accordingly in advance, there would be no traffic jams.
Traffic jams happen because one guy is driving 45 mph thinking "look at all these damn idiots driving too fast for this weather and this level of congestion, well not me, I'm a good driver" and the guy behind him steps on the gas and passes at 80 mph thinking "look at all these damn idiots impeding the flow of traffic, well not me, I'm going to pass so that others behind me can pass afterward" and the guy in the next lane over is thinking "jesus, look at these idiotic fast and slow drivers passing each other and holding up traffic, I'm going to stay in my lane and not accommodate any of them or let them use my lane to pass, since they're all rotten-ass drivers."
It's the conflicting intentions and behaviors in similar situations that lead to brake-slamming, passing, swerving, wrecks, and the other causes of the density patterns that characterize traffic jams.
Social networking sites increasingly get you friends, appointments/engagements, and jobs. Yes, people who previously didn't might now exclude you based on the public information about you, but so many more people know about you and can connect with you that you may just be better off.
What we're seeing is the tipping point at which the risks of giving up some kinds of privacy are overcome by the undeniable power of the network to create and maintain social circles (and all of the advantages that they confer) by uniting like-thinking folks at a rate never before seen.
You mean you'd rather have one of those bathroom fixture-lookin' Apples that just exude indecisiveness and shallow fashion obsession?
Taste is in the eye of the beholder. Thinkpads are still the best looking portable hardware on the planet, bar none.
Matthew, you don't listen (or read). I was at eBay before I was in publishing and I was a tech writer at a Linux startup before that. Some of us are more versatile than others, apparently.
And yes, my opinion is anecdotal. I don't claim otherwise. But that doesn't change the fact that at the last five companies I've worked for/with over the last decade (three of them national publishers where I worked in trade nonfiction), I have spent almost my entire time working in MS Word and collaborating with other people in MS Word.
Your apparent hatred of the application is clouding your abilities to read and communicate civilly.