Muslim bashing is not considered PC. Christian bashing is. Full disclosure: I am an atheist.
PC is just what right wingers yell when they get in trouble for making racist comments. So, of course the phrase never applies to anything that offends them. They have an open disdain for the word.
Last year, there was a pretty big controversy over Christians trying to tell Muslims where they could and could not build their mosques. One of the worst things that right wingers could say about Obama (or the most inflammatory) was when they accused him of being a Muslim.
These are examples of blatant discrimination*. So, what does it matter if it is or isn't PC to tell a Muslim he can't build a church in Tennessee? We're talking about Christians debating about whether discrimination against others is ok, and everybody else saying "let's make fun of Christians". They're not the ones holding the short end of that stick.
* The anti-Muslim remark is discrimination because these people openly claim that they would never allow a Muslim (or non-Christian, in most cases) to be President, regardless of qualifications.
Oh, yeah, I forgot: Christian-Bashing is the last acceptable and politically-correct form of prejudice and ignorant hatred.
Homosexuals are still fighting for equality.
Many people proudly claim that they don't trust atheists, and in a recent gallup poll have stated that they would never vote for one.
And there was outcry a year ago, not just over an Islamic community center with a prayer room being built within walking distance of ground zero, but, in my home state, there was also vandalism over a new mosque being built in Memphis Tennessee. (It was on the Daily Show. The Muslims building the mosque had been there 20 years, and wanted to build a larger one to accommodate their growing community).
So, please understand that, while the worst we have to offer will mock you, there are other groups who are being discriminated against and denied civil liberties, based on who they are. You are nowhere near oppressed.
Compare the number of monitors turned in in your typical best buy to the number of monitors turned on in a typical cubical farm (if best buy is winning, it isn't by much). then consider the difference between a Best Buy Employee and a Desk Jockey. The Best Buy employee stands 3 feet away from a monitor that is turned on, and lifts PCs that are unplugged. A desk jockey sits a foot from a monitor that is turned on, stares directly into it most of the day, and does little heavy lifting. I would suspect that if monitors were the cause of Best Buy health problems, then they would have killed most of the people in my workplace by now.
That's because tentacle monsters are just visitors to japan and come from a far more sexually repressed society. When they get to japan they just go berserk.
On the other hand, it's well known that permanent resident tentacle monsters in japan are very polite and productive members of society.
But if you ever see a gang of snorks, fscking run!
You'll be fine just remember in the interview when Google when they ask "Are you Evil?" don't answer yes
When they ask "are you evil", show them a booklet with 50,000 pages saying "yes, he's evil", 100,000 pages saying "no he's not", and 2 million pages saying "Is he Evil? Click here to answer..."
If later on they come back and say "hey! Here's a list of files you have that look like they were downloaded from illegal public torrents. Delete them and purchase them from us." Then you just delete them, and... don't purchase them.
Music is only popular because people listen to it. If you stop listening to certain music due to political reasons (i.e. DRM / enforcement), then that just becomes part of the cultural landscape of music. If you let the recording industry push their musical tastes onto you and charge you for it, then, well, there are other words for that kind of relationship.
I think the RIAA is more likely to say "Here is a list of 30 files that you downloaded illegally from us. At $750 per file, we will drop the charges for $22,500". That has been their M.O., lately.
If you still have the original, then I'm pretty sure you are still legally sound (provided local laws allow for those rips) - but in the GP case, a fire claimed his stuff; if you are insured, you are reimbursed for those losses, but you don't get both, you can't both claim it was destroyed and cash out and also claim you still have those licenses.
And if you aren't insured then tough luck - you don't get to take a new couch from the store because the old one was destroyed.
This is more like saying "you can't use your old couch if you no longer have the receipt". He still has a perfectly useful "couch". The only thing he lacks is the evidence that he paid for it.
I think you may have missed the point... can we get a 'whoosh' mod for the cases where a poster must have had to duck to let the joke go over his head? I've got points to spare...
Maybe I have to turn in my nerd card now, but I'm no more comfortable with memorializing Gary Gygax than I am with a marble statue of John Wayne or Madonna.
Thinking that Gygax doesn't deserve a memorial doesn't disqualify you from geekhood any more than hating BSG and Babylon 5 would, or thinking that VB is the ultimate programming language would. Not knowing who he is (or any of the other things I mentioned) on the other hand, barring relative youth, definitely would disqualify you.
Of course. No one ever lost a geek card for being argumentative.
I may be splitting linguistic hairs here, but for my money full-fledged memorials are reserved for humanitarians or political, scientific, and military heroes.
So? "Geek" is a common term to describe, well, geeks. So to use the term "geek" as part of the name of a company or service that gives tech support to end users makes a lot of sense and I just don't see how it can be a protected term.
This is like "Cracker Barrel" suing any restaurant that uses the phrase "country" in relation to how they cook things. It seems too generic.
Congrats! You've pretty much illustrated exactly what this article is about!
Think of yourself in terms of having a customer and your competition is the cloud. Do you think the "cloud" provider is rude and surly? Do you think that they push back and make it seem like this whole idea is putting them out and making their life harder? I'm pretty sure they cheerfully offer services and then negotiate a price. Might even buy you dinner.
More importantly, they already have what you need. Instead of having meeting after meeting to discuss exactly how this will work and (in my company at least) having to bring in several potential stakeholders and argue about what it should do, what it should look like, what the main screen should look like, why it shouldn't have a link to automatically email the CEOs wife and tell her he'll be late for dinner, and how long it should take, you go to someone who already has a similar project completed and ready to go.
I have seen that situation several times. I have seen a situation where we sign up for a third party service, with plans to make money off of it immediately while we develop an in-house replacement. (And it doesn't hurt that we learn a little about what works well and what doesn't in the process)
yes, and if we say we live in a democracy, we get the pikers who have to insist it's a constitutional republic
Simple answer: don't correct others if you don't know what you're talking about. Smith tried to correct goodmanj on a semantic issue, and he was wrong. Once you bring up a subject, don't get pissy that someone continues the discussion.
Don't underestimate gamers or the gaming industry.
If every gamer switched to Linux, you'd see Windows become as irrelevant as OS/2, which also had a sizeable installed base in the corporate world, or Mac OS, which had a huge installed base in education. Corporate users hardly ever upgrade, and many of their biggest apps have already been ported to at least one other OS, if not more. In the corporate world, they cater to the customer's needs and desires. In the home market, they dictate to the market.
Agreed. At my workplace, there are three things driving decisions:
Does it work? How much does it cost? Do the CEO, his idiot brother-in-law, the CFO, the CIO, the various VPs of this and that, your boss, and your boss' boss personally get good vibes about this?
I'll leave it to the reader to determine which factors are more important than others. Either way, if the CEO had grown up playing video games on Linux, the only people using Linux workstations would be those who need specialized software that only exists on other platforms.
Back to the subject, from the article "Groups are more likely than individuals to come up with better results, they say, because they will be exposed to the best arguments". I don't think that it is a given at all.
Agreed.
It may be true in in a Darwinian sense. I.E., I would say the "best argument" is the one that most closely represents the truth, and that advocates a course of action that is in the best interests of those the argument is appealing to, but this is like assuming that evolution's ultimate goal is to make us completely honest, hardworking superheroes who never die.
But in the US, the biggest argument arenas seem to be politics, advertising, and academia. How often does the most truthful political argument or advertisement end up being the most effective? The norm is emotionally charged arguments based on irrational fears and dubious assertions.
Academia is the exception, specifically because they try to take measures to elevate the discourse. They try to overcome their nature.
And yet, here you are, taking advantage of a technology that is (for the purposes of your discussion) identical to that that you criticize them for enjoying. Now, maybe you don't care about human rights. Then, nobody could call you a hypocrite. So, you can be one of four things:
1. Someone who lives "off the grid" and never has any contact with the outside world, period. We all know that isn't the case. 2. Indifferent to the suffering of others. 3. You feel bad, but do nothing about it, because you don't want to be a hypocrite. 4. You do more about the problem than they do. (Would that make you a bigger hypocrite?)
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Muslim bashing is not considered PC. Christian bashing is. Full disclosure: I am an atheist.
PC is just what right wingers yell when they get in trouble for making racist comments. So, of course the phrase never applies to anything that offends them. They have an open disdain for the word.
Last year, there was a pretty big controversy over Christians trying to tell Muslims where they could and could not build their mosques. One of the worst things that right wingers could say about Obama (or the most inflammatory) was when they accused him of being a Muslim.
These are examples of blatant discrimination*. So, what does it matter if it is or isn't PC to tell a Muslim he can't build a church in Tennessee? We're talking about Christians debating about whether discrimination against others is ok, and everybody else saying "let's make fun of Christians". They're not the ones holding the short end of that stick.
* The anti-Muslim remark is discrimination because these people openly claim that they would never allow a Muslim (or non-Christian, in most cases) to be President, regardless of qualifications.
uhhh, what?
Oh, yeah, I forgot: Christian-Bashing is the last acceptable and politically-correct form of prejudice and ignorant hatred.
Homosexuals are still fighting for equality.
Many people proudly claim that they don't trust atheists, and in a recent gallup poll have stated that they would never vote for one.
And there was outcry a year ago, not just over an Islamic community center with a prayer room being built within walking distance of ground zero, but, in my home state, there was also vandalism over a new mosque being built in Memphis Tennessee. (It was on the Daily Show. The Muslims building the mosque had been there 20 years, and wanted to build a larger one to accommodate their growing community).
So, please understand that, while the worst we have to offer will mock you, there are other groups who are being discriminated against and denied civil liberties, based on who they are. You are nowhere near oppressed.
Compare the number of monitors turned in in your typical best buy to the number of monitors turned on in a typical cubical farm (if best buy is winning, it isn't by much). then consider the difference between a Best Buy Employee and a Desk Jockey. The Best Buy employee stands 3 feet away from a monitor that is turned on, and lifts PCs that are unplugged. A desk jockey sits a foot from a monitor that is turned on, stares directly into it most of the day, and does little heavy lifting. I would suspect that if monitors were the cause of Best Buy health problems, then they would have killed most of the people in my workplace by now.
That's because tentacle monsters are just visitors to japan and come from a far more sexually repressed society. When they get to japan they just go berserk.
On the other hand, it's well known that permanent resident tentacle monsters in japan are very polite and productive members of society.
But if you ever see a gang of snorks, fscking run!
You'll be fine just remember in the interview when Google when they ask "Are you Evil?" don't answer yes
When they ask "are you evil", show them a booklet with 50,000 pages saying "yes, he's evil", 100,000 pages saying "no he's not", and 2 million pages saying "Is he Evil? Click here to answer..."
Pretty much.
If later on they come back and say "hey! Here's a list of files you have that look like they were downloaded from illegal public torrents. Delete them and purchase them from us." Then you just delete them, and... don't purchase them.
Music is only popular because people listen to it. If you stop listening to certain music due to political reasons (i.e. DRM / enforcement), then that just becomes part of the cultural landscape of music. If you let the recording industry push their musical tastes onto you and charge you for it, then, well, there are other words for that kind of relationship.
I think the RIAA is more likely to say "Here is a list of 30 files that you downloaded illegally from us. At $750 per file, we will drop the charges for $22,500". That has been their M.O., lately.
If you still have the original, then I'm pretty sure you are still legally sound (provided local laws allow for those rips) - but in the GP case, a fire claimed his stuff; if you are insured, you are reimbursed for those losses, but you don't get both, you can't both claim it was destroyed and cash out and also claim you still have those licenses.
And if you aren't insured then tough luck - you don't get to take a new couch from the store because the old one was destroyed.
This is more like saying "you can't use your old couch if you no longer have the receipt". He still has a perfectly useful "couch". The only thing he lacks is the evidence that he paid for it.
I think you may have missed the point... can we get a 'whoosh' mod for the cases where a poster must have had to duck to let the joke go over his head? I've got points to spare...
I'd bet that woosh would sound better in FLAC.
Since those servers are "evidence", this is not unprecedented. I'm not defending it, but I am not expecting the courts to care either.
Maybe I have to turn in my nerd card now, but I'm no more comfortable with memorializing Gary Gygax than I am with a marble statue of John Wayne or Madonna.
Thinking that Gygax doesn't deserve a memorial doesn't disqualify you from geekhood any more than hating BSG and Babylon 5 would, or thinking that VB is the ultimate programming language would. Not knowing who he is (or any of the other things I mentioned) on the other hand, barring relative youth, definitely would disqualify you.
Of course. No one ever lost a geek card for being argumentative.
I may be splitting linguistic hairs here, but for my money full-fledged memorials are reserved for humanitarians or political, scientific, and military heroes.
You mean like Robocop?
Nerd card revoked, get the fuck out of here.
It wasn't so much a card as a character sheet.
Are you referring to the dos TSRs?
I think it'll just be a giant pile of books. Like every other nerd's personal memorial to him.
I know you're joking, but that's not a bad idea. The ultimate memorial for someone known for producing books is a library.
The two minute hate has been replaced by talk radio. And I'm pretty sure it's a three hour broadcast now.
when do we get to the part where we debate the difference between "dipshits" and "douche nozzles"?
So? "Geek" is a common term to describe, well, geeks. So to use the term "geek" as part of the name of a company or service that gives tech support to end users makes a lot of sense and I just don't see how it can be a protected term.
This is like "Cracker Barrel" suing any restaurant that uses the phrase "country" in relation to how they cook things. It seems too generic.
Congrats! You've pretty much illustrated exactly what this article is about!
Think of yourself in terms of having a customer and your competition is the cloud. Do you think the "cloud" provider is rude and surly? Do you think that they push back and make it seem like this whole idea is putting them out and making their life harder? I'm pretty sure they cheerfully offer services and then negotiate a price. Might even buy you dinner.
More importantly, they already have what you need. Instead of having meeting after meeting to discuss exactly how this will work and (in my company at least) having to bring in several potential stakeholders and argue about what it should do, what it should look like, what the main screen should look like, why it shouldn't have a link to automatically email the CEOs wife and tell her he'll be late for dinner, and how long it should take, you go to someone who already has a similar project completed and ready to go.
I have seen that situation several times. I have seen a situation where we sign up for a third party service, with plans to make money off of it immediately while we develop an in-house replacement. (And it doesn't hurt that we learn a little about what works well and what doesn't in the process)
Big government is when the government helps someone else. Small government is when they only help you.
yes, and if we say we live in a democracy, we get the pikers who have to insist it's a constitutional republic
Simple answer: don't correct others if you don't know what you're talking about. Smith tried to correct goodmanj on a semantic issue, and he was wrong. Once you bring up a subject, don't get pissy that someone continues the discussion.
Don't underestimate gamers or the gaming industry.
If every gamer switched to Linux, you'd see Windows become as irrelevant as OS/2, which also had a sizeable installed base in the corporate world, or Mac OS, which had a huge installed base in education. Corporate users hardly ever upgrade, and many of their biggest apps have already been ported to at least one other OS, if not more. In the corporate world, they cater to the customer's needs and desires. In the home market, they dictate to the market.
Agreed. At my workplace, there are three things driving decisions:
Does it work?
How much does it cost?
Do the CEO, his idiot brother-in-law, the CFO, the CIO, the various VPs of this and that, your boss, and your boss' boss personally get good vibes about this?
I'll leave it to the reader to determine which factors are more important than others. Either way, if the CEO had grown up playing video games on Linux, the only people using Linux workstations would be those who need specialized software that only exists on other platforms.
And the number of zero day flash exploits isn't a problem, but webGL is.
I agree. I was saying that the "best" argument is the one that persuades the most people, even though we wish the word had a more noble meaning.
How unreasonable of you.
Back to the subject, from the article
"Groups are more likely than individuals to come up with better results, they say, because they will be exposed to the best arguments".
I don't think that it is a given at all.
Agreed.
It may be true in in a Darwinian sense. I.E., I would say the "best argument" is the one that most closely represents the truth, and that advocates a course of action that is in the best interests of those the argument is appealing to, but this is like assuming that evolution's ultimate goal is to make us completely honest, hardworking superheroes who never die.
But in the US, the biggest argument arenas seem to be politics, advertising, and academia. How often does the most truthful political argument or advertisement end up being the most effective? The norm is emotionally charged arguments based on irrational fears and dubious assertions.
Academia is the exception, specifically because they try to take measures to elevate the discourse. They try to overcome their nature.
And yet, here you are, taking advantage of a technology that is (for the purposes of your discussion) identical to that that you criticize them for enjoying. Now, maybe you don't care about human rights. Then, nobody could call you a hypocrite. So, you can be one of four things:
1. Someone who lives "off the grid" and never has any contact with the outside world, period. We all know that isn't the case.
2. Indifferent to the suffering of others.
3. You feel bad, but do nothing about it, because you don't want to be a hypocrite.
4. You do more about the problem than they do. (Would that make you a bigger hypocrite?)