Not to mention that, when traveling, you'd most often be in places where this is totally and completely impractical. You can't break this crap out at the airport (well, you technically could, but most airports I go through are pretty bright places and besides, what a pain in the ass compared to opening a freaking laptop), so you're effectively cutting yourself off from the net anytime you're not parked in a hotel room. Seems like more than I'd be willing to sacrifice even if it did free up some space.
My little ASUS netbook weighs like 3 pounds or something and is the size of a thin hardcover book. If that's considered a lot of space then I'd hate to see what you're wearing when you travel.
Of course...she was a single-mother with zero help from my drug-addicted father, working two jobs over 16-hour days to provide for us. I admit, I was pretty bitter about it growing up, seeing as how I almost never even saw her face-to-face for days at a stretch (we communicated mostly through notes on the fridge) and I had a young brother to care for when other kids spent their days after school playing Nintendo, but now that I'm an adult, I understand completely that she would have rather been home with us if she could have afforded to be.
Our campus was totally closed, although the degree with which it was closed changed a lot over my 4 years there. When I first started going there, there were portables that were adjacent to the student parking lots, and the teachers stationed in those portables would watch out the windows for students trying to leave school grounds...but generally you could slip out if you were super-sneaky about it, although it sometimes required Mission: Impossible style coordination with students in those particular portables at a given period to act as a distraction to the teachers inside, who could just look up out the window and see the bulk of the lot from their desk.
Towards the end of my high-school career, though, they'd finally had it with kids like us getting off campus and started posting security guards out there, and a year or so after I left (when Columbine happened) they graduated up to a toll-booth style checkpoint with a permanent security guard and checked the badges of everyone entering and leaving campus. Our school was surrounded by woods on 3 sides so a lot of kids used to just park off-campus and sneak through the woods instead, but I've heard from a few people I went to school with that stayed in the area after graduation they've completely fenced in the grounds and removed a lot of the brush since I was last there almost 20 years ago to make this more difficult.
It's really shocking how much different the vibe is at school these days. I wouldn't want to be a student in today's public schools, that's for sure...I'd probably have been arrested a dozen times already for the shit we used to pull when we were in school, and it's not like I'm talking about the distant past or anything, I'm talking mid-90's here.
I would be totally effed. I simply cannot for the life of me use chopsticks; I've been coached many times over my life but in the end, I always have to revert to western utensils if I'm going to actually finish the meal while it's still at a temperature suitable for eating.
It's funny, too, because I play guitar which obviously requires a fair amount of manual dexterity, and I type 80-something words a minute, but put a pair of chopsticks in my hands and I can't even pick up a fried dumpling without just impaling the fucking thing like a goddamned Neanderthal...
Given the way that some high schools treat their students [like little children] it's no wonder that so many young people today have such a hard time taking care of themselves after they graduate.
If you want to see something truly disturbing, check out the documentary The War on Kids. It is currently available on Netflix; I just watched it a few days ago and was totally disgusted. The section on the over-medication of our children is especially troubling, and the coverage of the full SWAT raid at a South Carolina High School at the behest of the administration (which turned up absolutely no drugs at all) is both infuriating and chilling at the same time.
Much of the documentary focuses on the testimony of kids dealing with the rise in police involvement in our schools, not to mention the ineffectiveness (and outright insanity) of zero-tolerance policies. The kid's themselves know it's a complete joke, all the anti-drug programs like D.A.R.E., plus the teachers talking about kids looking like fucking lobotomy patients after a change in meds, literally drooling...
I can tell you emphatically, there is no way in hell I'm going to allow my child to go to a school that even kids themselves cannot differentiate from a prison (they actually do an experiment with children in the documentary examining just that). I will be home-schooling my children, no matter what it takes. My kids will not be drones. They may not be able to diagram a sentence, but they'll damn sure know their rights.
Of course not, I'm just saying that the bulk of the ire is likely to be directed at the people that have little to no control over what they're serving. At least, that's what they told me when we used to complain about the poor quality of our food when I was in grade school.
Given the current political climate as concerns teachers and other school employees these days in the states, I doubt there would be very many taxpayers out there that would support actually hiring Nutritionists to run the lunch rooms and give them the autonomy to purchase and prepare lunches according to their own judgement. It seems to me that it's going in the opposite direction, they'd rather just shit-can the school lunch program and just put a Pizza Hut in instead, because that will save them the.01% of their property taxes they need so badly.
Maybe in some districts, but I know for a fact that was not the case in Philadelphia when I was in grade school. Believe me, many of us complained to the lunch ladies that the food was borderline unpalatable, and they would commiserate, but they all told us they didn't get a say in what we ate, they just prepared it.
Maybe they were bullshitting us, but then again, why bullshit a 9-year-old when you can just tell them to sit down, shut up, and eat their lunch?
I've always thought it was odd that kids got cafeteria meals in grade school.
It obviously depends a lot on where you live and go to school. I grew up in one of the poorer areas of Philadelphia and the vast majority of the kids I went to school with were latchkey kids in single-parent households (many of whom had younger siblings to care for when they got home, myself included, even in grade school), and I'm betting many of them ate even worse at home, as horrifying as that thought is to me.
I was in the reduced lunch program so my cafeteria meal only cost my mother $0.40 a day each for me and my younger brother, which even brown-bagging it couldn't really compete with cost-wise...
Later, when I was in high school (by that point my mother had married my stepfather who was in the U.S. Army and we were stationed in GA) the lunches were much higher quality than the Philly ones (but my God in heaven did they love their fucking chicken-fried steak, that was served at least once a week, if not more), but the rules on what you could bring were much, much more restrictive. So help you if they caught you drinking a can of soda, even the juices that come in cans like soda would be confiscated. They'd take candy from you if they caught you eating it, which was doubly ridiculous when you consider the fact that they sold candy at the fucking school store. You had to take it directly to your locker after purchase and leave it there or else they would take it. This is high school students we're talking about here, mind you, 18-year-old's getting hassled over Now-and-Laters, it was unreal.
It's called sarcasm (or facetiousness, I suppose)...obviously I don't really think the girl would be picked up by DHS. Didn't the part grouping serious criminals with those uploading HD rips to the internet tip you off that it was a jocular statement?
Well, I would probably be pretty pissed off if I was catching all the heat for the school district's poor meal choices. It's not like the lunchroom workers get to choose what the kids are served, they just prepare it. At least, that's how it is here in the US in my own experiences, maybe in the UK it's different and the individual schools have more autonomy?
Growing up in Philly, we ate what was called "satellite lunches", which were nothing more than prepackaged meals made by some private company. They literally served us a white box with "food" in it on a tray. Our school didn't even have a proper kitchen, just some ovens to heat them up. They were fucking nasty as shit, too...I bet prisoners ate better then we were. The fried chicken was especially gross, because we could smell it throughout the school in the period just before lunch, so as soon as someone caught a whiff and said "Aw, man, friend chicken again?" a collective groan went through the entire building.
I would have brown-bagged it but we were poor so I was on reduced lunch and thus forced to eat the crap by my mother.
They get fucking popsicles in the UK?! Christ, even way back when I was in school, decades ago, the best we could hope for was "nature's candy", raisins, which nobody ever, ever ate, and instead lobbed at each other across the lunch room.
Not sure about the UK, but the U.S. courts have repeatedly upheld that students do not have free speech. The case Morse v. Frederick comes to mind, otherwise known as the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case.
Long story short, the students were released from school early so they could watch the torch pass from the 2002 Winter Olympics, and Joseph Fredrick, a student at the school, along with friends, held up a banner they'd made earlier that said "Bong Hits 4 Jesus". He was suspended for 5 days (later increased to the maximum 10 days after quoting Thomas Jefferson, which is hysterical), sued, and lost several times. School speech can be regulated both on and off campus; Frederick was not technically in school at the time of his banner (as they'd been dismissed) and he was also standing across the street from the school, thus not technically on campus, but in view of those that were.
If this girl had been here in the U.S., she'd probably already be charged with some form of terrorism by DHS and thrown in a cell with murderers, rapists, and people that upload HD rips of hit movies to the internet.
I disagree...hacking is tons of fun when everyone is involved in hacking and it's not being used to beat people unfairly. Hell, even going back to the Game Genie/Gameshark days on the consoles, there was tons of fun to be had just playing with the codes and seeing what you could do and what kind of bizarre behavior you could coax out of the game...
I agree, if only because you simply cannot play a multiplayer game on the internet these days without someone accusing someone else of cheating, hacking, 'glitching', whatever you want to call it. Very few people lose because they're just not as good as the other people in that particular match, no, it's because everyone else is cheating. I mean, people bitch and complain about campers for Christ's sake, and they're not even cheating, they're just not running around like the rest of the retards and are actually employing some strategy beyond "Mash all the buttons!! Fire all the weapons! Jump jump jump jumpity jump jump!!!!!"
If some chickenshit 12 year old accused me of cheating because I had the audacity to kill him more than he killed me, and I ended up lumped in with a bunch of fucking wall-hackers and aim-botters for all eternity because of his butthurt, I would be furious and demand my money back. If they refused, I would never purchase another game from them ever again. There'd better be some sort of concrete proof required other than community feedback, even if they're depending on repeated infractions, because obviously people that are very good play a lot and hence will probably have a lot of bullshit reports of hacking/cheating just by virtue of that fact alone.
Ask Microsoft how many bogus "system tampering" reports they get from butthurt players. I bet less than 5% of those reported are actually guilty of anything other than being better than the person that reported them.
Outside of all that, though, I like the idea of a dedicated place to hack and such. I just disagree with the whole "email suspicious behavior" thing because I feel that is just going to be totally abused.
Based on the number of times I've heard Republicans scream about 'States Rights' lately, I bet if that same situation were to come before the Republicans of today, a fair number of them would vote to allow slavery because "government just gets in the way" and "regulations stifle innovation" and "the government which governs least governs best". Look at the hard work going on in conservative America right now to roll back labor laws, all the comments made by people like Newt Gingrich about how we should put the young to work rather than 'forcing them to get an education', the concerted effort in state legislatures all over the country to dismantle unions, the relaxation of environmental regulations (Republican Representative Joe Barton even apologizing to the head of BP in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster)...
You really don't see how the two parties have pretty much completely flipped in ideology since the mid-1800's? Come on.
CompUSA did go out of business (what is called CompUSA today was purchased by eMachines to act as a direct online portal for their customers to purchase their hardware, but has nothing in common with the former corporation outside of the name), but it didn't have a single fucking thing to do with the people in the stores, that was corporate ineptitude (and some theorized shady bullshit on the part of Carlos Slim Helu and his retinue) that really killed that chain off. For instance, the massive, bulk shipments of brand new, in-box merchandise to Mexico just before the bankruptcy hit, once even literally taking product off of one trailer bringing the shit to us and putting it right on another trailer going down there.
Believe me or not, I really don't give much of a shit, but most of the people that were coming in there looking at computers were totally clueless and would opt for familiarity over quality almost every single time. The general public is nothing like the general/. reader. The general public is going to want USB because that's what they know. Thunderbolt is just another goofy port that they'll never use, just like firewire.
(I'll assume you're speaking from a windows point of view on FW?)
As does the vast, vast majority of computer users out there. I don't think anyone would argue that fact, right?
That's why USB 3.0 is going to ultimately be the standard...it's backward compatible and everyone is still using mostly USB peripherals. Until that changes (which it probably won't, regardless of capability, look at how long VGA has been hanging on, and that standard is 30 years old), USB x.0 will likely be the dominant standard for peripherals based on that fact alone.
Geeks like going out and buying new peripherals to take advantage of the new capabilities of new standards. Most people, though, just want something that's going to work with the shit they've already got.
Most people are not in it. That is precisely why it will fail. Nobody is going to put money into developing for the standard unless there is real money to be made (unless it gets forced on them, like Apple's mini-DV port), and with the ubiquity of USB (and it's backward compatibility) that means that most users are going to opt for utility and familiarity over capability.
Oh, Thunderbolt is totally the new Firewire. Better in terms of specs, sure, but the average joe already has a bajillion USB peripherals, and USB 3.0 is backwards compatible. I used to sell computers at CompUSA, and speaking as someone that actually dealt with the real "average computer user" (not just the least knowledgeable programmer at the office), believe me...they're going to go into the store, look at all those rectangle ports that look like all the rectangle ports on their beige Compaq tower at home they bought back in 2004, and they're going to go with the one that has the most for less than $400.
Backwards compatibility with the myriad devices out there is why USB 3.0 isn't going anywhere and likely won't anytime soon. Without virtually every peripheral on the market coming out with a Thunderbolt alternative to sit on the shelf side-by-side with their USB 3.0/2.1/2.0/1.0 counterpart, the standard is going to be a niche product that geeks love and bash their heads against the wall wondering why nobody else does. All the capabilities in the world aren't going to transcend that. So it can be used to drive a monitor, so what? Most people are still using VGA for Christ's sake, and when did that standard get adopted? 1980-something? I know people that are still rocking CRT's for fuck's sake, and they're not enthusiasts, they're just going to continue using that monitor until it stops turning on (which, given that they're tank-like CRT's, will probably not be until the EMPs knock them out at the start of WWIII).
People need to seriously stop thinking that the quality of technology has anything to do with it's longevity or adoption. I would think that we would have learned the fallacy in that line of thought back when Betamax was getting bargain binned in the early 80's...
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Not to mention that, when traveling, you'd most often be in places where this is totally and completely impractical. You can't break this crap out at the airport (well, you technically could, but most airports I go through are pretty bright places and besides, what a pain in the ass compared to opening a freaking laptop), so you're effectively cutting yourself off from the net anytime you're not parked in a hotel room. Seems like more than I'd be willing to sacrifice even if it did free up some space.
My little ASUS netbook weighs like 3 pounds or something and is the size of a thin hardcover book. If that's considered a lot of space then I'd hate to see what you're wearing when you travel.
I think its time to forgive her, bro :)
Of course...she was a single-mother with zero help from my drug-addicted father, working two jobs over 16-hour days to provide for us. I admit, I was pretty bitter about it growing up, seeing as how I almost never even saw her face-to-face for days at a stretch (we communicated mostly through notes on the fridge) and I had a young brother to care for when other kids spent their days after school playing Nintendo, but now that I'm an adult, I understand completely that she would have rather been home with us if she could have afforded to be.
Our campus was totally closed, although the degree with which it was closed changed a lot over my 4 years there. When I first started going there, there were portables that were adjacent to the student parking lots, and the teachers stationed in those portables would watch out the windows for students trying to leave school grounds...but generally you could slip out if you were super-sneaky about it, although it sometimes required Mission: Impossible style coordination with students in those particular portables at a given period to act as a distraction to the teachers inside, who could just look up out the window and see the bulk of the lot from their desk.
Towards the end of my high-school career, though, they'd finally had it with kids like us getting off campus and started posting security guards out there, and a year or so after I left (when Columbine happened) they graduated up to a toll-booth style checkpoint with a permanent security guard and checked the badges of everyone entering and leaving campus. Our school was surrounded by woods on 3 sides so a lot of kids used to just park off-campus and sneak through the woods instead, but I've heard from a few people I went to school with that stayed in the area after graduation they've completely fenced in the grounds and removed a lot of the brush since I was last there almost 20 years ago to make this more difficult.
It's really shocking how much different the vibe is at school these days. I wouldn't want to be a student in today's public schools, that's for sure...I'd probably have been arrested a dozen times already for the shit we used to pull when we were in school, and it's not like I'm talking about the distant past or anything, I'm talking mid-90's here.
I would be totally effed. I simply cannot for the life of me use chopsticks; I've been coached many times over my life but in the end, I always have to revert to western utensils if I'm going to actually finish the meal while it's still at a temperature suitable for eating.
It's funny, too, because I play guitar which obviously requires a fair amount of manual dexterity, and I type 80-something words a minute, but put a pair of chopsticks in my hands and I can't even pick up a fried dumpling without just impaling the fucking thing like a goddamned Neanderthal...
Given the way that some high schools treat their students [like little children] it's no wonder that so many young people today have such a hard time taking care of themselves after they graduate.
If you want to see something truly disturbing, check out the documentary The War on Kids . It is currently available on Netflix; I just watched it a few days ago and was totally disgusted. The section on the over-medication of our children is especially troubling, and the coverage of the full SWAT raid at a South Carolina High School at the behest of the administration (which turned up absolutely no drugs at all) is both infuriating and chilling at the same time.
Much of the documentary focuses on the testimony of kids dealing with the rise in police involvement in our schools, not to mention the ineffectiveness (and outright insanity) of zero-tolerance policies. The kid's themselves know it's a complete joke, all the anti-drug programs like D.A.R.E., plus the teachers talking about kids looking like fucking lobotomy patients after a change in meds, literally drooling...
I can tell you emphatically, there is no way in hell I'm going to allow my child to go to a school that even kids themselves cannot differentiate from a prison (they actually do an experiment with children in the documentary examining just that). I will be home-schooling my children, no matter what it takes. My kids will not be drones. They may not be able to diagram a sentence, but they'll damn sure know their rights.
Of course not, I'm just saying that the bulk of the ire is likely to be directed at the people that have little to no control over what they're serving. At least, that's what they told me when we used to complain about the poor quality of our food when I was in grade school.
Given the current political climate as concerns teachers and other school employees these days in the states, I doubt there would be very many taxpayers out there that would support actually hiring Nutritionists to run the lunch rooms and give them the autonomy to purchase and prepare lunches according to their own judgement. It seems to me that it's going in the opposite direction, they'd rather just shit-can the school lunch program and just put a Pizza Hut in instead, because that will save them the .01% of their property taxes they need so badly.
Is that silverware o.o?
I know, right?! We got a plastic spork and a single-ply napkin wrapped in cellophane.
Maybe in some districts, but I know for a fact that was not the case in Philadelphia when I was in grade school. Believe me, many of us complained to the lunch ladies that the food was borderline unpalatable, and they would commiserate, but they all told us they didn't get a say in what we ate, they just prepared it.
Maybe they were bullshitting us, but then again, why bullshit a 9-year-old when you can just tell them to sit down, shut up, and eat their lunch?
I've always thought it was odd that kids got cafeteria meals in grade school.
It obviously depends a lot on where you live and go to school. I grew up in one of the poorer areas of Philadelphia and the vast majority of the kids I went to school with were latchkey kids in single-parent households (many of whom had younger siblings to care for when they got home, myself included, even in grade school), and I'm betting many of them ate even worse at home, as horrifying as that thought is to me.
I was in the reduced lunch program so my cafeteria meal only cost my mother $0.40 a day each for me and my younger brother, which even brown-bagging it couldn't really compete with cost-wise...
Later, when I was in high school (by that point my mother had married my stepfather who was in the U.S. Army and we were stationed in GA) the lunches were much higher quality than the Philly ones (but my God in heaven did they love their fucking chicken-fried steak, that was served at least once a week, if not more), but the rules on what you could bring were much, much more restrictive. So help you if they caught you drinking a can of soda, even the juices that come in cans like soda would be confiscated. They'd take candy from you if they caught you eating it, which was doubly ridiculous when you consider the fact that they sold candy at the fucking school store. You had to take it directly to your locker after purchase and leave it there or else they would take it. This is high school students we're talking about here, mind you, 18-year-old's getting hassled over Now-and-Laters, it was unreal.
It's called sarcasm (or facetiousness, I suppose)...obviously I don't really think the girl would be picked up by DHS. Didn't the part grouping serious criminals with those uploading HD rips to the internet tip you off that it was a jocular statement?
Well, I would probably be pretty pissed off if I was catching all the heat for the school district's poor meal choices. It's not like the lunchroom workers get to choose what the kids are served, they just prepare it. At least, that's how it is here in the US in my own experiences, maybe in the UK it's different and the individual schools have more autonomy?
Growing up in Philly, we ate what was called "satellite lunches", which were nothing more than prepackaged meals made by some private company. They literally served us a white box with "food" in it on a tray. Our school didn't even have a proper kitchen, just some ovens to heat them up. They were fucking nasty as shit, too...I bet prisoners ate better then we were. The fried chicken was especially gross, because we could smell it throughout the school in the period just before lunch, so as soon as someone caught a whiff and said "Aw, man, friend chicken again?" a collective groan went through the entire building.
I would have brown-bagged it but we were poor so I was on reduced lunch and thus forced to eat the crap by my mother.
They get fucking popsicles in the UK?! Christ, even way back when I was in school, decades ago, the best we could hope for was "nature's candy", raisins, which nobody ever, ever ate, and instead lobbed at each other across the lunch room.
Not sure about the UK, but the U.S. courts have repeatedly upheld that students do not have free speech. The case Morse v. Frederick comes to mind, otherwise known as the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case.
Long story short, the students were released from school early so they could watch the torch pass from the 2002 Winter Olympics, and Joseph Fredrick, a student at the school, along with friends, held up a banner they'd made earlier that said "Bong Hits 4 Jesus". He was suspended for 5 days (later increased to the maximum 10 days after quoting Thomas Jefferson, which is hysterical), sued, and lost several times. School speech can be regulated both on and off campus; Frederick was not technically in school at the time of his banner (as they'd been dismissed) and he was also standing across the street from the school, thus not technically on campus, but in view of those that were.
Then, of course, are the myriad cases cropping up over the last few years where student's Facebook posts are getting them suspended Just a few months ago a 12-year-old girl was interrogated at length by the administration at her school, with police officers present (but not her parents, of course), and ultimately forced to give up her Facebook password.
If this girl had been here in the U.S., she'd probably already be charged with some form of terrorism by DHS and thrown in a cell with murderers, rapists, and people that upload HD rips of hit movies to the internet.
They've got plenty of Plutonian Niborg, though...
The Turtle can't help us...
Not that I'd expect a fan of that soft-scifi trash to know the difference...
I love sci-fi snobs, almost as entertaining as music snobs. Were you into sci-fi before it was cool?
But can he mind meld with it??
Wouldn't make the actual game very fun though.
I disagree...hacking is tons of fun when everyone is involved in hacking and it's not being used to beat people unfairly. Hell, even going back to the Game Genie/Gameshark days on the consoles, there was tons of fun to be had just playing with the codes and seeing what you could do and what kind of bizarre behavior you could coax out of the game...
I agree, if only because you simply cannot play a multiplayer game on the internet these days without someone accusing someone else of cheating, hacking, 'glitching', whatever you want to call it. Very few people lose because they're just not as good as the other people in that particular match, no, it's because everyone else is cheating. I mean, people bitch and complain about campers for Christ's sake, and they're not even cheating, they're just not running around like the rest of the retards and are actually employing some strategy beyond "Mash all the buttons!! Fire all the weapons! Jump jump jump jumpity jump jump!!!!!"
If some chickenshit 12 year old accused me of cheating because I had the audacity to kill him more than he killed me, and I ended up lumped in with a bunch of fucking wall-hackers and aim-botters for all eternity because of his butthurt, I would be furious and demand my money back. If they refused, I would never purchase another game from them ever again. There'd better be some sort of concrete proof required other than community feedback, even if they're depending on repeated infractions, because obviously people that are very good play a lot and hence will probably have a lot of bullshit reports of hacking/cheating just by virtue of that fact alone.
Ask Microsoft how many bogus "system tampering" reports they get from butthurt players. I bet less than 5% of those reported are actually guilty of anything other than being better than the person that reported them.
Outside of all that, though, I like the idea of a dedicated place to hack and such. I just disagree with the whole "email suspicious behavior" thing because I feel that is just going to be totally abused.
Based on the number of times I've heard Republicans scream about 'States Rights' lately, I bet if that same situation were to come before the Republicans of today, a fair number of them would vote to allow slavery because "government just gets in the way" and "regulations stifle innovation" and "the government which governs least governs best". Look at the hard work going on in conservative America right now to roll back labor laws, all the comments made by people like Newt Gingrich about how we should put the young to work rather than 'forcing them to get an education', the concerted effort in state legislatures all over the country to dismantle unions, the relaxation of environmental regulations (Republican Representative Joe Barton even apologizing to the head of BP in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster)...
You really don't see how the two parties have pretty much completely flipped in ideology since the mid-1800's? Come on.
CompUSA did go out of business (what is called CompUSA today was purchased by eMachines to act as a direct online portal for their customers to purchase their hardware, but has nothing in common with the former corporation outside of the name), but it didn't have a single fucking thing to do with the people in the stores, that was corporate ineptitude (and some theorized shady bullshit on the part of Carlos Slim Helu and his retinue) that really killed that chain off. For instance, the massive, bulk shipments of brand new, in-box merchandise to Mexico just before the bankruptcy hit, once even literally taking product off of one trailer bringing the shit to us and putting it right on another trailer going down there.
Believe me or not, I really don't give much of a shit, but most of the people that were coming in there looking at computers were totally clueless and would opt for familiarity over quality almost every single time. The general public is nothing like the general /. reader. The general public is going to want USB because that's what they know. Thunderbolt is just another goofy port that they'll never use, just like firewire.
Don't worry, The Pirate Bay will have a single-player version available any day now...
(I'll assume you're speaking from a windows point of view on FW?)
As does the vast, vast majority of computer users out there. I don't think anyone would argue that fact, right?
That's why USB 3.0 is going to ultimately be the standard...it's backward compatible and everyone is still using mostly USB peripherals. Until that changes (which it probably won't, regardless of capability, look at how long VGA has been hanging on, and that standard is 30 years old), USB x.0 will likely be the dominant standard for peripherals based on that fact alone.
Geeks like going out and buying new peripherals to take advantage of the new capabilities of new standards. Most people, though, just want something that's going to work with the shit they've already got.
There is a market, but you're not it
Most people are not in it. That is precisely why it will fail. Nobody is going to put money into developing for the standard unless there is real money to be made (unless it gets forced on them, like Apple's mini-DV port), and with the ubiquity of USB (and it's backward compatibility) that means that most users are going to opt for utility and familiarity over capability.
Oh, Thunderbolt is totally the new Firewire. Better in terms of specs, sure, but the average joe already has a bajillion USB peripherals, and USB 3.0 is backwards compatible. I used to sell computers at CompUSA, and speaking as someone that actually dealt with the real "average computer user" (not just the least knowledgeable programmer at the office), believe me...they're going to go into the store, look at all those rectangle ports that look like all the rectangle ports on their beige Compaq tower at home they bought back in 2004, and they're going to go with the one that has the most for less than $400.
Backwards compatibility with the myriad devices out there is why USB 3.0 isn't going anywhere and likely won't anytime soon. Without virtually every peripheral on the market coming out with a Thunderbolt alternative to sit on the shelf side-by-side with their USB 3.0/2.1/2.0/1.0 counterpart, the standard is going to be a niche product that geeks love and bash their heads against the wall wondering why nobody else does. All the capabilities in the world aren't going to transcend that. So it can be used to drive a monitor, so what? Most people are still using VGA for Christ's sake, and when did that standard get adopted? 1980-something? I know people that are still rocking CRT's for fuck's sake, and they're not enthusiasts, they're just going to continue using that monitor until it stops turning on (which, given that they're tank-like CRT's, will probably not be until the EMPs knock them out at the start of WWIII).
People need to seriously stop thinking that the quality of technology has anything to do with it's longevity or adoption. I would think that we would have learned the fallacy in that line of thought back when Betamax was getting bargain binned in the early 80's...