What's wrong with a little fun with memes? The concept of comedy through popular imagery, even when it gets repetitious, is far older than the Internet. How long, exactly, have we been talking about chickens crossing the road? How many of the jokes in Shakespeare still resonate with English-speakers today (substitute equivalent literary references for other languages as needed; they all work)?
If you think about it, we've really just all been telling the same basic jokes for thousands of years. The forms are different, but the archetypes and general situations are the same. Despite this, they don't get old. Why pretend, when different tellings of the same joke remain funny, that the same or similar tellings don't likewise remain so?
Seriously, man. Come on. Come to think of it, maybe I can best illustrate with a story, so I'll tell you how I became the prince of a town called Bel-Air. In West Philadelphia, born and raised, on a playground was where I spent most of my days: chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool and all shooting some B-ball outside of the school, when a couple of guys who were up to no good started making trouble in my neighborhood. I got in one little fight and my mom got scared and said "You're moving with your auntie and uncle in Bel-Air."
I whistled for a cab, and when it came near the license plate said "FRESH" and it had dice in the mirror. If anything I could say that this cab was rare, but I thought "Naw, forget it. Yo Home, to Bel-Air!" I pulled up to the house about 7 or 8 and I yelled to the cabbie "Yo Home, smell you later!" I looked at my kingdom: I was finally there, to sit on my throne as the prince of Bel-Air.
It has long been established that when the court orders a search (for example, as part of an ongoing investigation), the defendant must cooperate, and that this does not run afoul of the Fifth Amendment. As long as due process is followed in obtaining the necessary warrants, I fail to see any difference between compelling the defendant to provide the key to one's hard drive versus, for example, the key to one's house. Put it under the same legal safeguards as any other search.
Double jeopardy means that the state can't come after you again once you're found not guilty. That's not what happened here. If you're found guilty and you can show that something was wrong with your trial, you can request a new one: not only is it a standard procedure, it's an important safeguard against abuse of the trial system.
It's pretty darn clear that something was terribly wrong with this guy's old trial. He should get a new one.
Honestly, this. I suppose there's something commendable in having the Congressfolk play by the same rules as everyone else, but I hope this raises awareness of the monster we created in the TSA: an organization whose devotion to safety has degenerated into cowardice.
You can't think of a single positive benefit of getting your partner sexually aroused looking at you?
Oh, I can. It's just that the smart way to do this is in person.
You don't think there's any relationship saved, intensified or even started by receiving or having erotic pictures of your partner?
Nope. A breakup forestalled and made considerably messier when it happens, yes, but relationship so far gone as to truly need such things is beyond the point of salvage. Best to get the breakup over with -make it quick and clean, without blackmail material persisting for decades to come- and introspect as to what went wrong such that things got to this point.
Long-distance relationships, temporary absences, love letters with a picture saying more than a thousand words?
As someone who made it through eight years long-distance and multiple "temporary absences" per year: nope. Maybe it's just because my relationship is strong enough to not need such illusions. This isn't a difficult thing to establish, it just takes determination and patience.
"Love letters with a picture saying more than a thousand words" is a romantic cliche, but it has no bearing on, and very little reflection of, reality.
People have done that since the 19th century you know, shortly since they invented photography.
Certainly they have. Many have lived to regret it, and that proportion only increases as communication technology improves.
Okay be the cynic and say the benefits don't outweigh the risks, particularly now that it can go all over the Internet but you'd be pretty blind to not see how it could help in courting women.
If this were a tool for courting women, or of any real help at all in doing so, then why are there so many more women sending pictures to men than the other way around, and why are women the only ones getting burned in the end?
Simple: because it doesn't help in courting women, and its only "help" in courting men is in providing an illusion of strength and stability in a relationship that features neither.
What, then, is the context that renders this problematic? The grandparent appears to state that the problem context is the person who said it, which would be an ad hominem.
Look me in the eye and tell me with a straight face that there is any reasonable chance of my assumption not being true.
It's true that I don't have scientific rigor to back my statement up. It's still common knowledge -despite your posturing, you know it to be true just as well as I do- and more to the point, it's the common perception. This last ensures that it has the same effects even if it's not true, so arguing that it's false is pretty much moot.
It's just like the rule of photography: any picture or video of you will find its way to the Internet, and it will go viral. If this would cause problems for you, then turn off the damn camera.
Applied to passwords: anyone to whom you give an account password will use it in a way that hurts you, emotionally, financially, or socially, at least once. They cannot be stopped from doing this, because in all likelihood they will not understand what exactly it is they are doing. If this would cause problems for you, then don't share the damn password.
And if the general movement were described by the rules of a couple of specialized forums, you'd be right. I wouldn't be surprised if the gender imbalance on the forums you cite were considerably less egregious than in the general movement.
But will the proportions be anywhere near what sociological aesthetics says they "should" be? Not a chance. Why not? Because the movement is not a forum, or even a small cluster of them: it's too big for that. Certainly it's not a group of forums clustered around single projects. If anything, it is reddit, 4chan, and the more unfocused sites, because these are the places where someone just getting into the movement, with no idea what to do, is going to turn to for those ideas. And when the morons get pervasive in these sites -the face of the movement- they ruin it for everybody, including the more civilized and specialized forums. Your sites are perhaps not contributing to the problem, but they still can't escape the problem, because it applies before people even get as far as you.
If you want to know why women aren't going into the open-source movement, looking at the men will give you all the answers you need. Seriously: this is something we cannot afford to kid ourselves about anymore.
There are plenty of decent, upstanding men in the movement. But there are also a disproportionate amount of people who, sad to say, fit the stereotypes that give us all a bad name. Call them basement-dwellers, neckbeards, louts, or whatever else you wish. And some of these people, as others have noted, are highly-respected figures in the movement: a fact that doesn't reflect so well on the rest of us. The fact is that these are people who push others away, and (as a group) women seem to find them especially creepy.
One of the most common cultural memes in existence is that women should beware of creepy men, for definitions of "creepy" that vary by culture and individual experience. Given what creepy men can do, it's tough to blame women for that. But it's so deeply ingrained that for many, avoiding creepy men becomes a powerful (if not always conscious) factor in decisions both major and minor. Every time you see someone who might have had promise in this industry turn away saying that she wasn't "nerdy enough" for it or that she "couldn't deal with the geeks," you're seeing someone for whom avoiding creepy men played a role in that decision. Every time you see someone online yelling "TITS OR GTFO" or "Make me a sammich," her decision is vindicated.
None of our attempts to do something about the gender imbalance is ever going to work until this is addressed: if this is worth doing, then there's no way around fixing the broken people who have become the face of the movement. But how does one even do that? I don't have an answer for that question. Any step toward doing this means rejecting some people out of hand, and the accepting nature of this movement has always been among its greatest strengths: no matter what we decide to reject means throwing a lot of metaphorical babies out with the bathwater. On the other hand, the current situation isn't really all that much different: the roles are reversed, as they reject us, but rejection still occurs, and by and large, the movement is still the driving force even if it isn't the one doing the actual rejecting. And so bathwater still gets thrown out, and so it goes that there are still babies in it.
What to do? We're not even really at the point of deciding that. We're still in the process of recognizing where the problem is. But that step has to come, one way or another.
Yeah; I've got to say, the situation with passwords could be improved just by allowing more space for them. xkcd/diceware-style phrases just plain don't fit in most password fields, but they'd be easier to remember and more secure.
Nobody said anything about getting heard when speaking.
People were being heard for hundreds of years before the Internet was invented. Have you forgotten that so quickly? Besides, while you have the right to speak, a "right to be heard" would infringe on others' rights to ignore you.
HDTVs lingered for years before people began to "upgrade." It was only when the TV makers began to drop their SD models that people started buying. because the upgrade really isn't significant at all: a marginally sharper picture and nothing else.
One step at a time, man. Getting them back to a semi-reasonable release and maintenance schedule is probably going to have to be enough for now. MCSE-friendly installation can come later, and this has to happen first anyway.
Consumers will flock to 3DTVs when there is basically nothing else on the market: otherwise, it just doesn't provide enough benefit to justify the added cost. This happened with HD too; did the TV makers really expect it to be different this time?
Yeah, this. Although even just getting off of IE6 is a big improvement, IE7 still represents a problem. IE8, while not perfect, is considerably better than either of those, and I look forward to its becoming the minimum.
Of course, the holy grail is IE9 or later, but until Microsoft swallows its pride and backports something to WinXP, that won't happen.
Nope. Unless you've failed to notice the events of just this past couple of years, (Gulf oil disaster, Fukashima, economic collapse, on-going war, etc.), the psychopaths of the planet are actively engaged in wiping us out.
Um, no. No, actually, the overwhelming majority of them are not; they may be psychopaths, but they are not as stupid as that. A few do indeed harm humanity at large, or even just the people around them, and they can be dealt with as they do what they do. Until they do wrong, however, they deserve punishment no more than anyone else who has done no wrong. They have no interest in warring with us, and we should have no interest in warring with them.
I also can't help but notice that you're lumping accidents in with deliberate acts. That smacks of conspiracy theorism.
Psychopaths are not human. (I define "human" as a being capable of compassion and the ability to function in a society without the ever-present need to sabotage it).
That's an awfully convenient definition: any person who has a trait you don't like isn't human. Isn't that something psychopaths do?
If you don't want to wipe out the psychopaths, then that's fine. I don't have any blood lust. I just want them out of the pilot's seat. Put them in jail.
In other words, silence them because of what they might do, based on a particular outlook and worldview. That's only slightly less unconscionable than killing them outright. The worst thing about democracy is that everyone gets a vote, but that's also the best thing about it, and there's really no way around it. If you don't want the possibility of silencing anybody, then you must not allow the possibility of silencing anybody.
And don't let a bunch of stupid TV bullshit programming sway your thoughts. They cannot be trained to serve society.
If the current political/economic structure is run by psychopaths as you seem to believe, then I'd be forced to call the modern lifestyles it has made possible prima facie evidence that not only can psychopaths be trained to serve society, but that they actually do a pretty darn good job of it once so trained. The trick is in ensuring that society has ways to harness that particular mindset and put it to work in ways that have a positive impact.
It needs a name that prominently features an adjective, so that voters can label themselves. Yeah, it sounds silly, but labels create something to rally around.
Slashdot Mirror
What's wrong with a little fun with memes? The concept of comedy through popular imagery, even when it gets repetitious, is far older than the Internet. How long, exactly, have we been talking about chickens crossing the road? How many of the jokes in Shakespeare still resonate with English-speakers today (substitute equivalent literary references for other languages as needed; they all work)?
If you think about it, we've really just all been telling the same basic jokes for thousands of years. The forms are different, but the archetypes and general situations are the same. Despite this, they don't get old. Why pretend, when different tellings of the same joke remain funny, that the same or similar tellings don't likewise remain so?
Seriously, man. Come on. Come to think of it, maybe I can best illustrate with a story, so I'll tell you how I became the prince of a town called Bel-Air. In West Philadelphia, born and raised, on a playground was where I spent most of my days: chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool and all shooting some B-ball outside of the school, when a couple of guys who were up to no good started making trouble in my neighborhood. I got in one little fight and my mom got scared and said "You're moving with your auntie and uncle in Bel-Air."
I whistled for a cab, and when it came near the license plate said "FRESH" and it had dice in the mirror. If anything I could say that this cab was rare, but I thought "Naw, forget it. Yo Home, to Bel-Air!" I pulled up to the house about 7 or 8 and I yelled to the cabbie "Yo Home, smell you later!" I looked at my kingdom: I was finally there, to sit on my throne as the prince of Bel-Air.
Exactly how does voting require Cloud?
Well, someone has to carry the huge frickin sword.
It has long been established that when the court orders a search (for example, as part of an ongoing investigation), the defendant must cooperate, and that this does not run afoul of the Fifth Amendment. As long as due process is followed in obtaining the necessary warrants, I fail to see any difference between compelling the defendant to provide the key to one's hard drive versus, for example, the key to one's house. Put it under the same legal safeguards as any other search.
Double jeopardy means that the state can't come after you again once you're found not guilty. That's not what happened here. If you're found guilty and you can show that something was wrong with your trial, you can request a new one: not only is it a standard procedure, it's an important safeguard against abuse of the trial system.
It's pretty darn clear that something was terribly wrong with this guy's old trial. He should get a new one.
So give him a new trial, with the illegally obtained evidence excluded.
Honestly, this. I suppose there's something commendable in having the Congressfolk play by the same rules as everyone else, but I hope this raises awareness of the monster we created in the TSA: an organization whose devotion to safety has degenerated into cowardice.
You can't think of a single positive benefit of getting your partner sexually aroused looking at you?
Oh, I can. It's just that the smart way to do this is in person.
You don't think there's any relationship saved, intensified or even started by receiving or having erotic pictures of your partner?
Nope. A breakup forestalled and made considerably messier when it happens, yes, but relationship so far gone as to truly need such things is beyond the point of salvage. Best to get the breakup over with -make it quick and clean, without blackmail material persisting for decades to come- and introspect as to what went wrong such that things got to this point.
Long-distance relationships, temporary absences, love letters with a picture saying more than a thousand words?
As someone who made it through eight years long-distance and multiple "temporary absences" per year: nope. Maybe it's just because my relationship is strong enough to not need such illusions. This isn't a difficult thing to establish, it just takes determination and patience.
"Love letters with a picture saying more than a thousand words" is a romantic cliche, but it has no bearing on, and very little reflection of, reality.
People have done that since the 19th century you know, shortly since they invented photography.
Certainly they have. Many have lived to regret it, and that proportion only increases as communication technology improves.
Okay be the cynic and say the benefits don't outweigh the risks, particularly now that it can go all over the Internet but you'd be pretty blind to not see how it could help in courting women.
If this were a tool for courting women, or of any real help at all in doing so, then why are there so many more women sending pictures to men than the other way around, and why are women the only ones getting burned in the end?
Simple: because it doesn't help in courting women, and its only "help" in courting men is in providing an illusion of strength and stability in a relationship that features neither.
What, then, is the context that renders this problematic? The grandparent appears to state that the problem context is the person who said it, which would be an ad hominem.
Isn't that pretty much the definition of an ad hominem attack?
it gives me crystal-clear digital connection to my monitor, and unlike HDMI, it works every time without fail.
Actually, those are the exact reasons: to force people into an upgrade cycle, and to plug the so-called analog hole.
Look me in the eye and tell me with a straight face that there is any reasonable chance of my assumption not being true.
It's true that I don't have scientific rigor to back my statement up. It's still common knowledge -despite your posturing, you know it to be true just as well as I do- and more to the point, it's the common perception. This last ensures that it has the same effects even if it's not true, so arguing that it's false is pretty much moot.
It's just like the rule of photography: any picture or video of you will find its way to the Internet, and it will go viral. If this would cause problems for you, then turn off the damn camera.
Applied to passwords: anyone to whom you give an account password will use it in a way that hurts you, emotionally, financially, or socially, at least once. They cannot be stopped from doing this, because in all likelihood they will not understand what exactly it is they are doing. If this would cause problems for you, then don't share the damn password.
And if the general movement were described by the rules of a couple of specialized forums, you'd be right. I wouldn't be surprised if the gender imbalance on the forums you cite were considerably less egregious than in the general movement.
But will the proportions be anywhere near what sociological aesthetics says they "should" be? Not a chance. Why not? Because the movement is not a forum, or even a small cluster of them: it's too big for that. Certainly it's not a group of forums clustered around single projects. If anything, it is reddit, 4chan, and the more unfocused sites, because these are the places where someone just getting into the movement, with no idea what to do, is going to turn to for those ideas. And when the morons get pervasive in these sites -the face of the movement- they ruin it for everybody, including the more civilized and specialized forums. Your sites are perhaps not contributing to the problem, but they still can't escape the problem, because it applies before people even get as far as you.
If you want to know why women aren't going into the open-source movement, looking at the men will give you all the answers you need. Seriously: this is something we cannot afford to kid ourselves about anymore.
There are plenty of decent, upstanding men in the movement. But there are also a disproportionate amount of people who, sad to say, fit the stereotypes that give us all a bad name. Call them basement-dwellers, neckbeards, louts, or whatever else you wish. And some of these people, as others have noted, are highly-respected figures in the movement: a fact that doesn't reflect so well on the rest of us. The fact is that these are people who push others away, and (as a group) women seem to find them especially creepy.
One of the most common cultural memes in existence is that women should beware of creepy men, for definitions of "creepy" that vary by culture and individual experience. Given what creepy men can do, it's tough to blame women for that. But it's so deeply ingrained that for many, avoiding creepy men becomes a powerful (if not always conscious) factor in decisions both major and minor. Every time you see someone who might have had promise in this industry turn away saying that she wasn't "nerdy enough" for it or that she "couldn't deal with the geeks," you're seeing someone for whom avoiding creepy men played a role in that decision. Every time you see someone online yelling "TITS OR GTFO" or "Make me a sammich," her decision is vindicated.
None of our attempts to do something about the gender imbalance is ever going to work until this is addressed: if this is worth doing, then there's no way around fixing the broken people who have become the face of the movement. But how does one even do that? I don't have an answer for that question. Any step toward doing this means rejecting some people out of hand, and the accepting nature of this movement has always been among its greatest strengths: no matter what we decide to reject means throwing a lot of metaphorical babies out with the bathwater. On the other hand, the current situation isn't really all that much different: the roles are reversed, as they reject us, but rejection still occurs, and by and large, the movement is still the driving force even if it isn't the one doing the actual rejecting. And so bathwater still gets thrown out, and so it goes that there are still babies in it.
What to do? We're not even really at the point of deciding that. We're still in the process of recognizing where the problem is. But that step has to come, one way or another.
Yeah; I've got to say, the situation with passwords could be improved just by allowing more space for them. xkcd/diceware-style phrases just plain don't fit in most password fields, but they'd be easier to remember and more secure.
Nobody said anything about getting heard when speaking.
People were being heard for hundreds of years before the Internet was invented. Have you forgotten that so quickly? Besides, while you have the right to speak, a "right to be heard" would infringe on others' rights to ignore you.
HDTVs lingered for years before people began to "upgrade." It was only when the TV makers began to drop their SD models that people started buying. because the upgrade really isn't significant at all: a marginally sharper picture and nothing else.
One step at a time, man. Getting them back to a semi-reasonable release and maintenance schedule is probably going to have to be enough for now. MCSE-friendly installation can come later, and this has to happen first anyway.
Consumers will flock to 3DTVs when there is basically nothing else on the market: otherwise, it just doesn't provide enough benefit to justify the added cost. This happened with HD too; did the TV makers really expect it to be different this time?
Because he would still have to live in a world with people who don't think like he does, which is his real complaint.
Someone needs to make a CoreBoot-style bootloader that uses this. Then they could call it "DOS Boot".
Yeah, this. Although even just getting off of IE6 is a big improvement, IE7 still represents a problem. IE8, while not perfect, is considerably better than either of those, and I look forward to its becoming the minimum.
Of course, the holy grail is IE9 or later, but until Microsoft swallows its pride and backports something to WinXP, that won't happen.
Nope. Unless you've failed to notice the events of just this past couple of years, (Gulf oil disaster, Fukashima, economic collapse, on-going war, etc.), the psychopaths of the planet are actively engaged in wiping us out.
Um, no. No, actually, the overwhelming majority of them are not; they may be psychopaths, but they are not as stupid as that. A few do indeed harm humanity at large, or even just the people around them, and they can be dealt with as they do what they do. Until they do wrong, however, they deserve punishment no more than anyone else who has done no wrong. They have no interest in warring with us, and we should have no interest in warring with them.
I also can't help but notice that you're lumping accidents in with deliberate acts. That smacks of conspiracy theorism.
Psychopaths are not human. (I define "human" as a being capable of compassion and the ability to function in a society without the ever-present need to sabotage it).
That's an awfully convenient definition: any person who has a trait you don't like isn't human. Isn't that something psychopaths do?
If you don't want to wipe out the psychopaths, then that's fine. I don't have any blood lust. I just want them out of the pilot's seat. Put them in jail.
In other words, silence them because of what they might do, based on a particular outlook and worldview. That's only slightly less unconscionable than killing them outright. The worst thing about democracy is that everyone gets a vote, but that's also the best thing about it, and there's really no way around it. If you don't want the possibility of silencing anybody, then you must not allow the possibility of silencing anybody.
And don't let a bunch of stupid TV bullshit programming sway your thoughts. They cannot be trained to serve society.
If the current political/economic structure is run by psychopaths as you seem to believe, then I'd be forced to call the modern lifestyles it has made possible prima facie evidence that not only can psychopaths be trained to serve society, but that they actually do a pretty darn good job of it once so trained. The trick is in ensuring that society has ways to harness that particular mindset and put it to work in ways that have a positive impact.
No Friday? How can they properly get down, if not on Friday?
It needs a name that prominently features an adjective, so that voters can label themselves. Yeah, it sounds silly, but labels create something to rally around.