Oh, and by the way - give Coppola back his Rumblefish
Better yet, give it to S.E. Hinton -- Rumble Fish was a novel written by her several years before she co-wrote the screenplay based on it with Coppola.
That, and there's the reality (which most people in tech tend to forget) that intelligence is rarely distributed evenly across abilities even in geniuses, and that it takes a specific combination to produce someone capable of being a good programmer. So even if we were to identify people of "a certain intelligence" and target their education towards programming, only a fraction of them would thrive -- the rest would be better off studying to become surgeons, architects, anthropologists, linguists... That's even without taking psychological quirks into account that could be incompatible enough with programming to make the person too distracted or unhappy to function well.
I know that you weren't denigrating people that aren't designed to work with code, but you still seemed to be falling into the trap of assuming that it must be from a lack of intelligence or overall mental ability.
Oh, they'll be employed. But, many people will be employed doing things that we'd consider utterly frivolous today
Why assume that these jobs will materialize in the future, with a salary that will allow the person to have a decent quality of life, when they don't exist now?
...there was a story on local news about a cat that got a knee-replacement -- there were 10 people involved in the surgery.
Those aren't brand-new jobs, though. They'd all be specialized forms of existing veterinary careers, i.e. a subset of vet surgeons, nurses, anesthesiologists, and so forth, just like the shift seen in human medicine.
Can you imagine anybody in the 1950s thinking "Oh, yes, our cat can't walk. Let's get him surgery."?
Well, interest in medical care for pets, much like tech purchases, has shifted in sync with it things becoming possible & affordable for the middle class. It's hard to imagine something that wasn't remotely close to being a realistic technical or financial option in the given era, whether it's feline knee replacement or a computer for every resident in a household.
Speak for yourself: you don't represent all non-supergeek users.
My mother's a semi-computer-illiterate "average user" that primarily uses computers for watching videos & websurfing, yet she easily uses & likes Linux environments like KDE 4 & GNOME 2; loves that she can change the colors and all that. She has a few more problems with Windows 7 as it doesn't work the same way XP used to... However, when she tried Mac OS X at my brother's urging, she found it very confusing even with a lot of help.
I'm an almost-average user: I can't program, I want/need to be able to focus on my writing and other tasks without a struggle, keeping my tech-tinkering a hobby on the side when it's convenient -- yet I have chosen to use Linux full-time for almost 4 years. It "just works" for me, it has little abilities I'd always wanted in Windows; I occasionally use the command-line when it's convenient or lets me do things that aren't possible in any OS's GUI. I found OS X frustrating and counter-intuitive.
I haven't run into that problem in Linux within the past four years, provided I don't switch to radically different desktops. OTOH my mother had asked repeatedly for help with Windows 7, and I have the same internal dialogue you describe: "let's see, how did I do that in XP...er...no, that option isn't there... what about that other one? no, that can't be changed now either? bah, fuck it, she can call my brother."
It'd be fun to be a voice actor and be able to take credit for that at parties... I think that the emphasis changed between commercials, but here's how I remember it: meow, meow, meow, meow -- meow, meow, meow, meow meow...meow...meow...meow...meow, meow, meow, meow
I just switched to Bing after noticing that not only are its results more relevant, it allows & even suggests Boolean search operators, and it doesn't keep second-guessing me (the most it does is notice a contextual synonym and optionally include it in the search). Google's big mistake isn't just in sucking, it's in irritating users enough jar them out of complacency so they start giving alternatives a serious chance.
Bingo... My mother has fairly average media habits for her age (61), which includes the various local/national news shows on ABC, and she hadn't heard about SOPA. Worse, she's one of the Clueless Public in many ways (not for lack of effort on my part) and in order to get her to really grasp why SOPA is a problem, I had to carefully step her through ways it could/would likely be abused along with examples proving that each possibility could really happen here.
Unless every single anti-SOPA person with communicative skills gets out there and starts carefully educating their Clueless Relatives on it, we're completely fucked, and even then it's probably too late.
I know it's somewhat of a technicality, but what you described isn't Stockholm Syndrome, it's a Battered Partner (either gender or sexuality)/Child Syndrome one.
Stockholm Syndrome takes place when somebody is held hostage by someone they're not in a romantic relationship with, can't escape, and is far more likely to be brutally beaten, raped, and/or killed if they displease their captor. When they're spared or given basics like food/water after going without, their mind interprets it as affectionate kindness in a sort of survival mechanism and attaches to the person in order to motivate them to do all they can to please him/her.
Battered (Whatever) Syndrome is when somebody gets into a romantic relationship, then is subject to verbal/emotional/physical abuse, and comes to believe/internalize the attacker's "you made me do this to you" & "you need me, nobody else wants you" type claims.
In this case, I think our country is more like a bunch of abused kids (citizens) with two abusive, lying parents (media & government). The individual kids react either by trying to please the parent or rebelling, and a large percentage of both will try to redirect abuse onto siblings that don't share whichever reaction they favor.
Last I saw, there was a note posted on the Mageia website that says there's no set pronunciation since accents vary so wildly by region/language... I've always 'read' it as rhyming with mage, magic, magenta, or similar.
Believing outdated nonsense like that nearly drove me away from Linux when I was having horrible stability/speed problems with Ubuntu for the second half of 2009 as a semi-newbie. Luckily I gave the others a try instead of going back to Windows, because it turned out that they're just as user-friendly, if not moreso -- in fact, the last time I did have to touch X.org was back in Ubuntu.
You really should test your own hypothesis by trying the distros you're maligning, so other users that share our interest in Linux don't feel forced into using Windows if they're not thrilled with Ubuntu or Canonical. There's plenty of legit strengths & weaknesses to point out in every distro out there, after all -- and since you're somewhat representing your fellow Ubuntu fans, not sounding like you're an unhinged clueless fanboy would be a good idea.
It might, it might not. From what I've heard, sanitation workers had been very highly paid, but it still wasn't the kind of job one's parents went around bragging about. Also, blue-collar parents have often encouraged their kids to aim for white-collar work (especially if the kid was talented or got great grades) because a day at a desk in a climate-controlled room is a lot easier on the body than spent doing most blue-collar work. That placed a stigma on the blue-collar jobs as being the ones a young person took if they weren't talented, skilled, or especially smart.
The "blue collar" (I think) jobs that might be the most likely to improve in standing if they were well-paid would be skilled caregiving for elderly/disabled people. The bottom-of-the-barrel pay only attracts people nobody else will hire, and since they generally can't be trusted or relied upon, they're not given responsibility or much work that requires a brain, which in turn is part of why the pay is awful. Raise the pay & responsibilities to lighten the load on nurses & family members, and things would change drastically -- which would be a good thing, given the surge in demand that will show up in a decade or so.
The media needs to stop telling young men that no woman will want them if they work a blue collar job, stop telling young women to abandon any man who is not a millionaire
Your earlier statement was much closer to correct: the media and our society need to stop telling young people that they'll be an unwanted failure if they spend their time doing any kind of productive, positive task. Based on discussions with my fellow mid-30somthing friends, both sexes were given strong messages that we needed to have a full education & successful career to the limit of our ability, otherwise we'd be a personal & romantic failure.
The gender gap primarily showed up in that while both were told to date people similar to them, the men were pushed to see themselves as failures if surpassed by a mate, while women were warned we'd be disappointments worthy only of scorn from peers if our mate lagged too far behind us. It was also impressed upon women that having kids erases the failure of being undereducated/underemployed, while being childless or childfree would mark us as damaged goods (to put it politely).
I really wish I had mod points to give you... Whenever I see somebody casually saying that we should pay through the nose in extra gas taxes (sometimes with "we can just reduce income tax to make up for it") I can only assume that the person is either non-disabled (or at least, not in a way that makes public transit a non-option like mine does), wants to impose their hatred of cars or love of cities onto everyone, lives in a country where the poor/disabled/elderly have substantial support, and/or earns enough to have their income taxed.
How many remember that people these days are driving substantial distances because they're taking whatever job they can get, especially if they have dependents to support -- or that polls show most people would happily take a pay cut if it meant drastically reducing their commute time? The few people that are "choosing" to live farther away do so for practical reasons: the housing is affordable/decent in that community, schools are nicer there, they have family members that they're helping out or that can help their kids, and so forth.
I'd say that the people that believe gas/other taxes should be higher to "promote" & expand public transit should be the ones to pay whatever high taxes they recommend regardless of what transit method they use (including walking/biking as they do use our sidewalks, roads, stoplights, etc.). Let them put their money where their mouths are: if they feel a gas tax of X% would be dandy, they should be perfectly happy to pay an equivalent to expand their chosen form of transit so it's practical & appealing to far more people, rather than expecting it to be subsidized by the very individuals they want to see using it.
I'm not sure what's worse, the changes Google has made, or the way they've been blowing off thousands of rational (i.e. not ranting) user complaints about it in their forums.
After becoming frustrated with those changes a few months ago, I started using Dogpile as my primary engine for the search operators (which give me much better results) & simpler interface. Mixing that with Yubnub.org so I can move my search terms between all different engines has been working out really well.
Depends on what level we're defining them as existing. My impression is that the Constitution/Bill of Rights formally recognizes that humans have specific rights on a moral/ethical level, and outlines the government in a way that protects them.
The fact that 'nerd' isn't an insult doesn't make people whose talents lean in that direction (or their lives) superior, it just means they're no longer demonized for it.
Users just give up when the GUI won't do it. Pretty much leaves them either relying on a nerd to help, or up shit creek. Must be a horrible way to live -- if you can even call that living.... Seems being an information tool-maker is up there with having opposable thumbs on the "competitive advantage" scale, right?
Nope, try again... People with practically any ability or profession can look down upon about others that don't share that trait, regardless of what it happens to be. Mature people grasp that individuals find different things natural or pleasurable, and that their strengths and interests are balanced out by weaknesses & boredom with things that others find easy. Someone that finds a task a dull hassle is preserving/improving their quality of life by asking someone skilled in that field to do so for them, as it means they can focus their energy on something more suited to them.
It wouldn't work. Average successful writers & composers don't get anywhere near enough in royalties to live off of, while the ones that have been blockbuster-level successful get good enough advances/royalties right away to justify releasing more work.
There's also that most people that create are either in a state where they're driven to work on projects, or something blocks the ability beyond their control. The main difference that money makes -- unless it's one of the unusually large amounts that is enough to live on -- is that it can justify the stress of working to strict deadlines, letting others rip the work to shreds during the editing process, and other things needed to make the creation good enough that people find it appealing.
1. It takes a lot of time to create: working 60-90 hours/week depending on how close a deadline looms, the first draft of a book takes 4-7 months for an average experienced writer. It then takes 6-8 months of back-and-forth revision with the editor (during which the writer works on the next book while waiting reply) before publication if there's already a contract in place; if the agent needs to find a publisher, it can take a lot longer.
2. For authors, at least, in addition to writing the book, they're now also expected (often as part of the contract) to maintain a Twitter account, blog, Facebook, and email account, plus show up for conferences/readings; that's another 20+ hours or so.
3. Pay is a small advance on royalties (maybe $5k), plus a small percentage of royalties (around 8%); this doesn't count the money that then gets diverted to the agent as pay. The resulting amount is little enough that it typically requires a New York Times Bestseller to cross the poverty line.
4. Being an author (or other creator) doesn't come with any form of health insurance, computer access, paid vacation days, an office/cubicle, or other aspects of regular work, so that all comes straight out of their pockets.
How many people -- let alone skilled professionals -- do *you* know would work 80-110 hours per week with no benefits and pay for all of their own equipment/office furniture, etc. for a poverty-level income if they're lucky? Would you? (Yes, writing fiction at the professional level is a skilled profession, as it requires education and at least several years of practice.)
The Baby Boomers seemingly split into two camps (with individuals sometimes crossing over) in the late 60s: Group A transformed their hippie-era beliefs into volunteering, donating, helping others, etc. after getting regular jobs & having kids. Group B is known for the "greed is good" pro-corporate mentality; they were the ones eventually referred to as yuppies.
The two can look identical on the outside, hold the same jobs, and live as neighbors, to be clear -- it's how they acted out their political beliefs that makes all the difference.
Knights aren't part of the British government except by coincidence. The UK has the monarch as a figurehead, the House of Commons (elected by regular people) and House of Lords (a mix of non-partisan religious leaders, people elected by the political parties, plus a small percentage of people that were allowed to keep inherited seats when hereditary rule ended).
While I agree with you otherwise, this part is way off.
The "backlash" to Gnome3, Unity and a few other projects that have rev'd their UI designs has not come from "casual people"... Casual users love it, though - stick an average user in front of Gnome3 or Unity and the first thing they comment on is how they really like the visual look and feel
There are three specific crowds that love GNOME3/Unity and overlap (but don't come close to eclipsing) the geek/casual communities: 1. Hardcore GNOME/Ubuntu fans that will cheer on anything "their" team produces 2. People that feel strongly driven towards anything "new" or that are averse to anything non-new 3. People that for various reasons adore Apple-style interfaces Quite a few people that weren't happy with GNOME 3 or Unity have tested the new interface on friends/family that are in the casual end, and while some of the users commented on it looking nice, virtually all of the users went on to essentially say it's broken. At the same time, all of the "eek it's the best thing evar" commentary I've seen has come from hardcore Linux users that write for well-known 'zines/blogs.
Yeah, just like those silly paranoid students that thought their universities might release their personal info in response to RIAA/MPAA demands -- oh wait...
Seriously, consider it this way: 1. Google wants people's real-life name, cellphone number, in some cases they've demanded a driver's license or state ID; they freely hand over information when any government agency in the US (and many other countries) requests 2. The RIAA has a reputation for going overboard in identifying, harassing & prosecuting anyone that may have downloaded illicit copies of songs, not particularly caring that they've repeatedly been caught targeting obviously innocent people 3. Our government currently favors the "rights" or well-being of corporations far more than citizens (innocent or not)
So when Google offers to host personal libraries bound to hold plenty of files (some of which are illegally downloaded or could only be obtained by illegally circumventing DRM), you figure the RIAA won't take advantage of it, Google won't hand the named member's personal info over, and the government won't play along? You should revise your signature, most people with a real cognitive impairment would know better...
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and by the way - give Coppola back his Rumblefish
Better yet, give it to S.E. Hinton -- Rumble Fish was a novel written by her several years before she co-wrote the screenplay based on it with Coppola.
That, and there's the reality (which most people in tech tend to forget) that intelligence is rarely distributed evenly across abilities even in geniuses, and that it takes a specific combination to produce someone capable of being a good programmer. So even if we were to identify people of "a certain intelligence" and target their education towards programming, only a fraction of them would thrive -- the rest would be better off studying to become surgeons, architects, anthropologists, linguists... That's even without taking psychological quirks into account that could be incompatible enough with programming to make the person too distracted or unhappy to function well.
I know that you weren't denigrating people that aren't designed to work with code, but you still seemed to be falling into the trap of assuming that it must be from a lack of intelligence or overall mental ability.
Oh, they'll be employed. But, many people will be employed doing things that we'd consider utterly frivolous today
Why assume that these jobs will materialize in the future, with a salary that will allow the person to have a decent quality of life, when they don't exist now?
...there was a story on local news about a cat that got a knee-replacement -- there were 10 people involved in the surgery.
Those aren't brand-new jobs, though. They'd all be specialized forms of existing veterinary careers, i.e. a subset of vet surgeons, nurses, anesthesiologists, and so forth, just like the shift seen in human medicine.
Can you imagine anybody in the 1950s thinking "Oh, yes, our cat can't walk. Let's get him surgery."?
Well, interest in medical care for pets, much like tech purchases, has shifted in sync with it things becoming possible & affordable for the middle class. It's hard to imagine something that wasn't remotely close to being a realistic technical or financial option in the given era, whether it's feline knee replacement or a computer for every resident in a household.
You might try Trinity Desktop, the fork/continuation of KDE 3.5.x: TrinityDesktop.org.
Speak for yourself: you don't represent all non-supergeek users.
My mother's a semi-computer-illiterate "average user" that primarily uses computers for watching videos & websurfing, yet she easily uses & likes Linux environments like KDE 4 & GNOME 2; loves that she can change the colors and all that. She has a few more problems with Windows 7 as it doesn't work the same way XP used to... However, when she tried Mac OS X at my brother's urging, she found it very confusing even with a lot of help.
I'm an almost-average user: I can't program, I want/need to be able to focus on my writing and other tasks without a struggle, keeping my tech-tinkering a hobby on the side when it's convenient -- yet I have chosen to use Linux full-time for almost 4 years. It "just works" for me, it has little abilities I'd always wanted in Windows; I occasionally use the command-line when it's convenient or lets me do things that aren't possible in any OS's GUI. I found OS X frustrating and counter-intuitive.
I haven't run into that problem in Linux within the past four years, provided I don't switch to radically different desktops. OTOH my mother had asked repeatedly for help with Windows 7, and I have the same internal dialogue you describe: "let's see, how did I do that in XP...er...no, that option isn't there... what about that other one? no, that can't be changed now either? bah, fuck it, she can call my brother."
It'd be fun to be a voice actor and be able to take credit for that at parties... I think that the emphasis changed between commercials, but here's how I remember it:
meow, meow, meow, meow -- meow, meow, meow, meow
meow...meow...meow...meow...meow, meow, meow, meow
I just switched to Bing after noticing that not only are its results more relevant, it allows & even suggests Boolean search operators, and it doesn't keep second-guessing me (the most it does is notice a contextual synonym and optionally include it in the search). Google's big mistake isn't just in sucking, it's in irritating users enough jar them out of complacency so they start giving alternatives a serious chance.
Bingo... My mother has fairly average media habits for her age (61), which includes the various local/national news shows on ABC, and she hadn't heard about SOPA. Worse, she's one of the Clueless Public in many ways (not for lack of effort on my part) and in order to get her to really grasp why SOPA is a problem, I had to carefully step her through ways it could/would likely be abused along with examples proving that each possibility could really happen here.
Unless every single anti-SOPA person with communicative skills gets out there and starts carefully educating their Clueless Relatives on it, we're completely fucked, and even then it's probably too late.
I know it's somewhat of a technicality, but what you described isn't Stockholm Syndrome, it's a Battered Partner (either gender or sexuality)/Child Syndrome one.
Stockholm Syndrome takes place when somebody is held hostage by someone they're not in a romantic relationship with, can't escape, and is far more likely to be brutally beaten, raped, and/or killed if they displease their captor. When they're spared or given basics like food/water after going without, their mind interprets it as affectionate kindness in a sort of survival mechanism and attaches to the person in order to motivate them to do all they can to please him/her.
Battered (Whatever) Syndrome is when somebody gets into a romantic relationship, then is subject to verbal/emotional/physical abuse, and comes to believe/internalize the attacker's "you made me do this to you" & "you need me, nobody else wants you" type claims.
In this case, I think our country is more like a bunch of abused kids (citizens) with two abusive, lying parents (media & government). The individual kids react either by trying to please the parent or rebelling, and a large percentage of both will try to redirect abuse onto siblings that don't share whichever reaction they favor.
Ma-Gay-a sounds worse.
Last I saw, there was a note posted on the Mageia website that says there's no set pronunciation since accents vary so wildly by region/language... I've always 'read' it as rhyming with mage, magic, magenta, or similar.
Believing outdated nonsense like that nearly drove me away from Linux when I was having horrible stability/speed problems with Ubuntu for the second half of 2009 as a semi-newbie. Luckily I gave the others a try instead of going back to Windows, because it turned out that they're just as user-friendly, if not moreso -- in fact, the last time I did have to touch X.org was back in Ubuntu.
You really should test your own hypothesis by trying the distros you're maligning, so other users that share our interest in Linux don't feel forced into using Windows if they're not thrilled with Ubuntu or Canonical. There's plenty of legit strengths & weaknesses to point out in every distro out there, after all -- and since you're somewhat representing your fellow Ubuntu fans, not sounding like you're an unhinged clueless fanboy would be a good idea.
It might, it might not. From what I've heard, sanitation workers had been very highly paid, but it still wasn't the kind of job one's parents went around bragging about. Also, blue-collar parents have often encouraged their kids to aim for white-collar work (especially if the kid was talented or got great grades) because a day at a desk in a climate-controlled room is a lot easier on the body than spent doing most blue-collar work. That placed a stigma on the blue-collar jobs as being the ones a young person took if they weren't talented, skilled, or especially smart.
The "blue collar" (I think) jobs that might be the most likely to improve in standing if they were well-paid would be skilled caregiving for elderly/disabled people. The bottom-of-the-barrel pay only attracts people nobody else will hire, and since they generally can't be trusted or relied upon, they're not given responsibility or much work that requires a brain, which in turn is part of why the pay is awful. Raise the pay & responsibilities to lighten the load on nurses & family members, and things would change drastically -- which would be a good thing, given the surge in demand that will show up in a decade or so.
The media needs to stop telling young men that no woman will want them if they work a blue collar job, stop telling young women to abandon any man who is not a millionaire
Your earlier statement was much closer to correct: the media and our society need to stop telling young people that they'll be an unwanted failure if they spend their time doing any kind of productive, positive task. Based on discussions with my fellow mid-30somthing friends, both sexes were given strong messages that we needed to have a full education & successful career to the limit of our ability, otherwise we'd be a personal & romantic failure.
The gender gap primarily showed up in that while both were told to date people similar to them, the men were pushed to see themselves as failures if surpassed by a mate, while women were warned we'd be disappointments worthy only of scorn from peers if our mate lagged too far behind us. It was also impressed upon women that having kids erases the failure of being undereducated/underemployed, while being childless or childfree would mark us as damaged goods (to put it politely).
I really wish I had mod points to give you... Whenever I see somebody casually saying that we should pay through the nose in extra gas taxes (sometimes with "we can just reduce income tax to make up for it") I can only assume that the person is either non-disabled (or at least, not in a way that makes public transit a non-option like mine does), wants to impose their hatred of cars or love of cities onto everyone, lives in a country where the poor/disabled/elderly have substantial support, and/or earns enough to have their income taxed.
How many remember that people these days are driving substantial distances because they're taking whatever job they can get, especially if they have dependents to support -- or that polls show most people would happily take a pay cut if it meant drastically reducing their commute time? The few people that are "choosing" to live farther away do so for practical reasons: the housing is affordable/decent in that community, schools are nicer there, they have family members that they're helping out or that can help their kids, and so forth.
I'd say that the people that believe gas/other taxes should be higher to "promote" & expand public transit should be the ones to pay whatever high taxes they recommend regardless of what transit method they use (including walking/biking as they do use our sidewalks, roads, stoplights, etc.). Let them put their money where their mouths are: if they feel a gas tax of X% would be dandy, they should be perfectly happy to pay an equivalent to expand their chosen form of transit so it's practical & appealing to far more people, rather than expecting it to be subsidized by the very individuals they want to see using it.
I'm not sure what's worse, the changes Google has made, or the way they've been blowing off thousands of rational (i.e. not ranting) user complaints about it in their forums.
After becoming frustrated with those changes a few months ago, I started using Dogpile as my primary engine for the search operators (which give me much better results) & simpler interface. Mixing that with Yubnub.org so I can move my search terms between all different engines has been working out really well.
Depends on what level we're defining them as existing. My impression is that the Constitution/Bill of Rights formally recognizes that humans have specific rights on a moral/ethical level, and outlines the government in a way that protects them.
I find American political system quite peculiar.
It's not a bug, it's a feature! (Or so we're told.)
Using "nerd" in the pejorative sense is archaic.
The fact that 'nerd' isn't an insult doesn't make people whose talents lean in that direction (or their lives) superior, it just means they're no longer demonized for it.
Users just give up when the GUI won't do it. Pretty much leaves them either relying on a nerd to help, or up shit creek. Must be a horrible way to live -- if you can even call that living. ... Seems being an information tool-maker is up there with having opposable thumbs on the "competitive advantage" scale, right?
Nope, try again... People with practically any ability or profession can look down upon about others that don't share that trait, regardless of what it happens to be. Mature people grasp that individuals find different things natural or pleasurable, and that their strengths and interests are balanced out by weaknesses & boredom with things that others find easy. Someone that finds a task a dull hassle is preserving/improving their quality of life by asking someone skilled in that field to do so for them, as it means they can focus their energy on something more suited to them.
It wouldn't work. Average successful writers & composers don't get anywhere near enough in royalties to live off of, while the ones that have been blockbuster-level successful get good enough advances/royalties right away to justify releasing more work.
There's also that most people that create are either in a state where they're driven to work on projects, or something blocks the ability beyond their control. The main difference that money makes -- unless it's one of the unusually large amounts that is enough to live on -- is that it can justify the stress of working to strict deadlines, letting others rip the work to shreds during the editing process, and other things needed to make the creation good enough that people find it appealing.
There are some huge differences:
1. It takes a lot of time to create: working 60-90 hours/week depending on how close a deadline looms, the first draft of a book takes 4-7 months for an average experienced writer. It then takes 6-8 months of back-and-forth revision with the editor (during which the writer works on the next book while waiting reply) before publication if there's already a contract in place; if the agent needs to find a publisher, it can take a lot longer.
2. For authors, at least, in addition to writing the book, they're now also expected (often as part of the contract) to maintain a Twitter account, blog, Facebook, and email account, plus show up for conferences/readings; that's another 20+ hours or so.
3. Pay is a small advance on royalties (maybe $5k), plus a small percentage of royalties (around 8%); this doesn't count the money that then gets diverted to the agent as pay. The resulting amount is little enough that it typically requires a New York Times Bestseller to cross the poverty line.
4. Being an author (or other creator) doesn't come with any form of health insurance, computer access, paid vacation days, an office/cubicle, or other aspects of regular work, so that all comes straight out of their pockets.
How many people -- let alone skilled professionals -- do *you* know would work 80-110 hours per week with no benefits and pay for all of their own equipment/office furniture, etc. for a poverty-level income if they're lucky? Would you? (Yes, writing fiction at the professional level is a skilled profession, as it requires education and at least several years of practice.)
The Baby Boomers seemingly split into two camps (with individuals sometimes crossing over) in the late 60s:
Group A transformed their hippie-era beliefs into volunteering, donating, helping others, etc. after getting regular jobs & having kids.
Group B is known for the "greed is good" pro-corporate mentality; they were the ones eventually referred to as yuppies.
The two can look identical on the outside, hold the same jobs, and live as neighbors, to be clear -- it's how they acted out their political beliefs that makes all the difference.
Knights aren't part of the British government except by coincidence. The UK has the monarch as a figurehead, the House of Commons (elected by regular people) and House of Lords (a mix of non-partisan religious leaders, people elected by the political parties, plus a small percentage of people that were allowed to keep inherited seats when hereditary rule ended).
While I agree with you otherwise, this part is way off.
The "backlash" to Gnome3, Unity and a few other projects that have rev'd their UI designs has not come from "casual people" ... Casual users love it, though - stick an average user in front of Gnome3 or Unity and the first thing they comment on is how they really like the visual look and feel
There are three specific crowds that love GNOME3/Unity and overlap (but don't come close to eclipsing) the geek/casual communities:
1. Hardcore GNOME/Ubuntu fans that will cheer on anything "their" team produces
2. People that feel strongly driven towards anything "new" or that are averse to anything non-new
3. People that for various reasons adore Apple-style interfaces
Quite a few people that weren't happy with GNOME 3 or Unity have tested the new interface on friends/family that are in the casual end, and while some of the users commented on it looking nice, virtually all of the users went on to essentially say it's broken. At the same time, all of the "eek it's the best thing evar" commentary I've seen has come from hardcore Linux users that write for well-known 'zines/blogs.
Yeah, just like those silly paranoid students that thought their universities might release their personal info in response to RIAA/MPAA demands -- oh wait...
Seriously, consider it this way:
1. Google wants people's real-life name, cellphone number, in some cases they've demanded a driver's license or state ID; they freely hand over information when any government agency in the US (and many other countries) requests
2. The RIAA has a reputation for going overboard in identifying, harassing & prosecuting anyone that may have downloaded illicit copies of songs, not particularly caring that they've repeatedly been caught targeting obviously innocent people
3. Our government currently favors the "rights" or well-being of corporations far more than citizens (innocent or not)
So when Google offers to host personal libraries bound to hold plenty of files (some of which are illegally downloaded or could only be obtained by illegally circumventing DRM), you figure the RIAA won't take advantage of it, Google won't hand the named member's personal info over, and the government won't play along? You should revise your signature, most people with a real cognitive impairment would know better...