That's only if you shut your kid in a dark room. *shudder* My parents left the hall light on with my/my brother's doors open; since we weren't trapped in the dark, we felt safe enough to relax in bed. After they went to bed several hours later, they usually turned the hall light off and put a strong night-light on in the hall bathroom to add to the ones we had in our bedrooms. As pre-teens, we each lost our fear of the dark, gained an interest in privacy (or reading under the covers)and thus began closing our doors on our own.
FWIW,I did/do have a serious sleep disorder from a brain abnormality -- I naturally "sleep" at a light doze for 4-5 hours, and wake up whenever my body wants to move. As a kid, being able to see the light helped me feel safe enough to relax in bed with my eyes closed when awake; I eventually also was given a clock-radio tuned to a local classical station I could listen to softly, then was taught to enjoy the time by imagining a dream. As an adult, I take medication (gabapentin), though I know parents of kids with the same condition that swear by giving the child a melatonin supplement before bed.
Or just put a lamp near the computer, so you can have enough light to work comfortably there without affecting the TV or anyone sitting nearby watching it. At least, that's what my family did with our new L-shaped living room when Iwas a teen in the early 90s; whoever wanted to use the desk turned its little lamp (maybe 450 lumens) on when they got there and off when they left.
The cartridges for Canon printers are designed so their chips are very easily reset by rebooting the printer while holding down certain buttons, thankfully. They reportedly don't use DRMon their chips to interfere with third-party companies, so the third-party prices aren't artificially high-priced. My last set of cartridges (12ml for each CMYK color separately, 12ml graphics black + 19ml text black) cost me a grand total of $8 with free shipping from a company offering a full-refund satisfaction guarantee, and the ink was actually a bit nicer than the OEMstuff the printer came with.
There's also the option of using a continuous ink system, which brings ink prices down dramatically. Idon't own one (my printer isn't shaped quite right for it)but since they're available on consumer models, I'm aiming for it with my next one.
OP seemed pretty clear that #2 isn't an option, and most disabled Americans' income is too limited for a case of beer or equivalent bribe.
I wouldn't consider it whining and moaning when somebody finds a bug that breaks disability accessibility to the point that they won't be able to use their OS without a struggle, politely posts to the bugtracker about it, waits for 3 months while it's ignored, then politely posts to Slashdot asking for suggestions on how to handle it. Instead, I'd say it's maturely pointing out a legit issue and requesting help -- not every mention of a problem qualifies as a whine/moan, especially such a critical problem.
I'll repeat my response to someone else above: Most disabled people in the US are living on Supplemental Security Income of $600-850/month, and have no other source of money. Even a group of them are unlikely to be able to pool enough to hire somebody to fix a bug in something like Xorg.
There's one major problem there: most disabled people in the US are living on Supplemental Security Income of $600-850/month, and have no other source of money. Even a group of them are unlikely to be able to pool enough to hire somebody to fix a bug in something like Xorg.
People who preach tolerance need to be tolerant...
So by your logic, if I believed in white people 'tolerating' the presence of black people in the same schools, in the same restrooms, using the same parts of the bus, etc. then I automatically should've been equally "tolerant" of (that is, refrain from objecting to) the actions of the bigots that did their best to strip black people of that right? Or that anyone that felt physically disabled kids should be "tolerated" in regular classrooms would be hypocritical if they "tolerated" the efforts of non-disabled parents to force them into "special" schools rather than speaking out against them?
Besides that, most advocates realized years ago that "tolerance" isn't a good goal, as it still implies stereotyping & openly hating an entire group is peachy-keen, and that the group should have to hope others "let" them do things rather than having the same right to do them. That's when they switched over to showing gay people are just regular individuals, just as worthy/unworthy of respect & acceptance as the next human being -- and, once that idea started taking root, why they began pushing for equal civil rights.
So "tolerance" basically is a red herring at this point. I don't "tolerate" my longtime gay friend or lesbian cousin, I love them as the big brother I wish I'd had and the 'girl' I grew up playing with. They deserve the same rights & respect that I have simply by default -- including being able to go to work without having a leader that tried to make them second-class citizens. (Wanting to do it, or believing it should be the case, is one thing; actively trying to make it happen seems a whole lot more hostile.)
If as an atheist you were hired to run a Christian college and it turned out that you were active in a major political campaign to reduce their religious freedom, I can pretty well guarantee you that you wouldn't merely be asked politely to step down...
Most Linux distros have buttons on the right -- it's just Ubuntu (which isn't even the most popular anymore, and is slowly losing popularity) and a few close derivatives that don't follow suit.
"Complete" Themes change the icons as well, not just the backgrounds. It used to be that themes in general changed the icons & background, and the newer background-only customizations were called Personas -- but then Mozilla inexplicably decided to name both types "themes" and make "Personas"refer to some kind of account service.
The SeaMonkey site has an "extract to subdirectory &run" Linux release on the front page. I'm finding that quite a bit can be done to "update" the UIusing just themes & extensions over at "SeaMonkey Addons" like MonkeyFix and Sea Fox, but Iget the sense that a lot more can be done via about:config.
Odd. I use YouTube relatively often, and always have AdBlock Plus &Flashblock enabled/installed. The biggest problem I've run into with the combo is that ABP thus far can't get rid of the smallish semi-collapsing ad that appears within the video and is sponsored by the account holder.
From what I recall, though, the main difference between Firefox and other browsers is that it's the only one that lets ABP block sites from even requesting a resource; on other browsers, all ABP can do is hide elements from view once they're downloaded. That might somehow tie into the problem you're having.
FWIW I'm using Firefox 22 (I dislike the changes made as of 23) in Mepis Linux, on an old 2GHz Centrino laptop with 1GB of RAM.
Correction: 24/7 with Firefox almost always in use when I'm actively interacting with the system (6-12 hours/day, maybe). I didn't mean that there's always somebody using Firefox at all hours of day and night.
What distro/environment? In Mepis, Debian, OpenSUSE, and Fedora, it has been rock-solid stable for me using KDE 4, GNOME2, KDE 3/Trinity. I usually only keep 4-10 tabs open and use the Too Many Tabs extension for the rest, and Iusually kill off the Flash plugin via htop an hour or two after watching a video. That's a nine-year-old 2GHz Centrino laptop with 1GB of RAM, running 24/7 with Firefox almost always in use, AdBlock Plus & FlashBlock installed.
OTOH it crashed or froze up fairly often when I was using Ubuntu (roughly May 2008-Jan 2010) on a very similar laptop.
If NASA really was a matter of mankind "exploring strange new worlds" and "seek(ing) out new life and new civilizations"-- or if it had even just given us tangible improvements to the average person's quality-of-life that couldn't have been discovered on land or underwater -- then it wouldn't have eventually lost people's support. Effectively,you want to pour money into a dream based on an exciting science-fantasy TVshow that was as realistic about spaceflight/exploration as fantasy novels/shows are at depicting life in the middle ages.
Consider... What if your grandkids don't turn out to be any good at STEM work or at best could be minimum-wage codemonkeys, and thus land among the masses that make just enough to live paycheck-to-paycheck with few luxuries. Would you still feel it's a great idea to take money that could be spent on finding ways to make survival or employment easier and instead spend it on dreams conjured up by a TVshow from your youth? (Iagree with you about think tanks because they're directly tainted by politics, but the knowledge & research performed by high-end universities can very often predict the end-results of different paths.)
For the past several years, most suicide bombers have been involuntary, as the terrorism org ran low on angry young men and switched over to strapping bombs to people that couldn't fight back or fully understand due to psychiatric illness, cognitive disability, or youth. The ones that do it voluntarily are typically angry young adults that see themselves as having no future and relatively easily convinced that they'd be respected &revered as a hero for their sacrifice -- the same sort of patriotic bullshit that was common in the US up through the Vietnam War, as songs like I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin-To-Die-Rag parodied.
Thank you for making me choke on my soda with unexpected laughter -- I'm from the North Bay (Sonoma County), andmost of the longtimers are tired of both hearing how awesome SF & the wealthier parts of the South Bay are and with having outsiders assume that we share their belief. Insipid articles over-glorifying SF that use "Bay Area"as a synonym don't help.
I agree, but it's too easy to ignore email, so we should also all repost it to our journals with "publicize"checked (and be sure to vote for others doing the same); if enough of us do that, our angry complaints will fill the queue and hopefully part of the front page. That would be much harder for/. Admin & Dice to shrug off, especially as Idoubt advertisers will be happy at seeing the userbase openly planning to implode.
Corporate rights-holders like Disney are the ones that want over-long copyright periods. The actual creators just want the right to earn an income from their own work during their lifetime, and many would be happy with 10-20 years.
Ifavor an altered form of lifetime rights, as I'll explain quickly in part: -- The creator should not be able to sell or transfer ownership of the copyright. Instead, they would 'rent' non-exclusive licenses to companies for a limited timespan, with a certain guaranteed profit percentage for the creator (so they couldn't be screwed like writers & musicians are now). -- The company would have the right to full sell those copies, not rent them. If it sold copies it didn't have a license for, it would then be required to pay the creatorthe full cost plus a fine and any legal costs the creator would incur handling the matter. -- Ideally, the companies would compete with one another on cost, quality, and speed/ease of delivery. Few people with any money will pirate if they can get a high-quality copy to their device(s) in an instant by clicking a button. -- DRM wouldn't exist within ebooks. Instead, since many people just do whatever is easiest and don't care about DRM, allow store owners that produce their own branded e-readers have the default software place limits on lending out or reading lent-out books. (People willing to root their device to install third-party e-reader apps or that pick non-store readers could avoid it, as they're the ones motivated enough to crack DRManyway.) -- Rather than wasting resources fighting it as a blanket criminal issue, a tiny fraction of those funds could be used to stigmatize impersonal 'sharing' (obtaining from a stranger as opposed to a friend) as being on par with accepting the free lunch at school or being on welfare.
My logic: -- If someone does the hard work of creating something, IMHO they should be in control of it. Not a corporation, their neighbor, or their relatives. -- If copyright will expire within the creator's lifetime, the companies (Hollywood studios, game studios, publishers, etc.) will all refrain from touching the work until it expires in order to avoid having to pay up. -- Copyright is essentially an attempt to compensate for the fact that creators are paid by a lot of people over a long time period rather than an equivalent amount all at once by one person/group. These days, it takes far longer to reach that point than it used to.
I personally think electronic data should be free...
'Free' is fine for people that are happy with the amateur work found in fan fiction and (to a slightly lesser degree)that still dominates the self-published arena. The problem is, producing a high-quality novel takes a massive amount of time, hard work and frustration:
-- author dedicates 6-9 months worth of full-time to write the best they can on their own -- editor aggressively criticizes potential flaws, demanding drastic cuts & changes -- author picks up ego, spends another 2-3 full-time months rewriting based on criticisms -- editor criticizes that copy &suggests still more changes -- author (who by now hates the book) spends another1-2 full-time months rewriting it yet again
Writers that are working just from the joy of using their craft (e.g. for free) are very unlikely to go through the painful & frustrating chore of the editing stages (particularly as that would cost hundreds of dollars), will drop that particular story when they lose interest, and most will only share completed work with a small limited group. The ones that do earn some money but not enough to quit their day job don't have remotely as much time to hone the quality of the initial book or the rewrites, so the results end up subpar.
That's not a new, cavalier usage: "humbled"has been used that way for a very long time, enough that it appeared more than once in 50-150 year old literature Iread as an English major in college.
The phrase also matches the more nuanced definitions for the term 'humble' and its root in humility, both referring to an individual that doesn't overestimate their worth or believe they're worthy of accolades or adoration. When people are given a powerful show of confidence -- nomination for a prize or position, admission to a highly competitive university, etc. -- many initially feel lucky that others believe in them that much, less worthy than others that weren't chosen, and worried they won't live up to their supporters' expectations. In other words, no matter how arrogant and proud they were when secure in their old position, being pushed towards the new one humbles them, thus the "Iam humbled by" phrase.
If you're going by old stereotypes, why not a gay guy? After all, they're chock full of girly traits...
Yes, I'm being facetious, because the female geeks I've known had the same range of interest/ability in aesthetics or fashion as our male counterparts.
Your post reminds me of an incident in Radio Shack a couple of years ago... I was in my usual loose unisex t-shirt, jeans & ponytail (no makeup/jewelry), and hung out comparing circuitboard components before grabbing a soldering iron stand. When I paid, even though he'd been watching me part of the time, the manager/clerk asked with an amused condescending tone, "making jewelry?" When I answered cheerfully, "nope, learning to replace bad parts on PCBs" he was visibly dumbfounded. I guess he was so focused on his idea of what women are like that it didn't occur to him that we might not match it...
I can't imagine he's all that surprised, since his website says people are "actively encouraged" to syndicate its content.
The syndicated columns of our youth were a bit different, though. Newspapers had to contact the syndicating companyto seek permission and pay money for the right to reproduce the column for a certain period of time, and some writers (like Dave Barry) had their home paper mentioned at the beginning or end of each column. It wasn't a free-for-all where for-profit papers just copied the columns each week without contacting or compensating the creator, as is becoming the norm now.
Slashdot Mirror
That's only if you shut your kid in a dark room. *shudder* My parents left the hall light on with my/my brother's doors open; since we weren't trapped in the dark, we felt safe enough to relax in bed. After they went to bed several hours later, they usually turned the hall light off and put a strong night-light on in the hall bathroom to add to the ones we had in our bedrooms. As pre-teens, we each lost our fear of the dark, gained an interest in privacy (or reading under the covers)and thus began closing our doors on our own.
FWIW,I did/do have a serious sleep disorder from a brain abnormality -- I naturally "sleep" at a light doze for 4-5 hours, and wake up whenever my body wants to move. As a kid, being able to see the light helped me feel safe enough to relax in bed with my eyes closed when awake; I eventually also was given a clock-radio tuned to a local classical station I could listen to softly, then was taught to enjoy the time by imagining a dream. As an adult, I take medication (gabapentin), though I know parents of kids with the same condition that swear by giving the child a melatonin supplement before bed.
Or just put a lamp near the computer, so you can have enough light to work comfortably there without affecting the TV or anyone sitting nearby watching it. At least, that's what my family did with our new L-shaped living room when Iwas a teen in the early 90s; whoever wanted to use the desk turned its little lamp (maybe 450 lumens) on when they got there and off when they left.
The cartridges for Canon printers are designed so their chips are very easily reset by rebooting the printer while holding down certain buttons, thankfully. They reportedly don't use DRMon their chips to interfere with third-party companies, so the third-party prices aren't artificially high-priced. My last set of cartridges (12ml for each CMYK color separately, 12ml graphics black + 19ml text black) cost me a grand total of $8 with free shipping from a company offering a full-refund satisfaction guarantee, and the ink was actually a bit nicer than the OEMstuff the printer came with.
There's also the option of using a continuous ink system, which brings ink prices down dramatically. Idon't own one (my printer isn't shaped quite right for it)but since they're available on consumer models, I'm aiming for it with my next one.
OP seemed pretty clear that #2 isn't an option, and most disabled Americans' income is too limited for a case of beer or equivalent bribe.
I wouldn't consider it whining and moaning when somebody finds a bug that breaks disability accessibility to the point that they won't be able to use their OS without a struggle, politely posts to the bugtracker about it, waits for 3 months while it's ignored, then politely posts to Slashdot asking for suggestions on how to handle it. Instead, I'd say it's maturely pointing out a legit issue and requesting help -- not every mention of a problem qualifies as a whine/moan, especially such a critical problem.
I'll repeat my response to someone else above:
Most disabled people in the US are living on Supplemental Security Income of $600-850/month, and have no other source of money. Even a group of them are unlikely to be able to pool enough to hire somebody to fix a bug in something like Xorg.
There's one major problem there: most disabled people in the US are living on Supplemental Security Income of $600-850/month, and have no other source of money. Even a group of them are unlikely to be able to pool enough to hire somebody to fix a bug in something like Xorg.
People who preach tolerance need to be tolerant ...
So by your logic, if I believed in white people 'tolerating' the presence of black people in the same schools, in the same restrooms, using the same parts of the bus, etc. then I automatically should've been equally "tolerant" of (that is, refrain from objecting to) the actions of the bigots that did their best to strip black people of that right? Or that anyone that felt physically disabled kids should be "tolerated" in regular classrooms would be hypocritical if they "tolerated" the efforts of non-disabled parents to force them into "special" schools rather than speaking out against them?
Besides that, most advocates realized years ago that "tolerance" isn't a good goal, as it still implies stereotyping & openly hating an entire group is peachy-keen, and that the group should have to hope others "let" them do things rather than having the same right to do them. That's when they switched over to showing gay people are just regular individuals, just as worthy/unworthy of respect & acceptance as the next human being -- and, once that idea started taking root, why they began pushing for equal civil rights.
So "tolerance" basically is a red herring at this point. I don't "tolerate" my longtime gay friend or lesbian cousin, I love them as the big brother I wish I'd had and the 'girl' I grew up playing with. They deserve the same rights & respect that I have simply by default -- including being able to go to work without having a leader that tried to make them second-class citizens. (Wanting to do it, or believing it should be the case, is one thing; actively trying to make it happen seems a whole lot more hostile.)
If as an atheist you were hired to run a Christian college and it turned out that you were active in a major political campaign to reduce their religious freedom, I can pretty well guarantee you that you wouldn't merely be asked politely to step down...
Most Linux distros have buttons on the right -- it's just Ubuntu (which isn't even the most popular anymore, and is slowly losing popularity) and a few close derivatives that don't follow suit.
"Complete" Themes change the icons as well, not just the backgrounds. It used to be that themes in general changed the icons & background, and the newer background-only customizations were called Personas -- but then Mozilla inexplicably decided to name both types "themes" and make "Personas"refer to some kind of account service.
The SeaMonkey site has an "extract to subdirectory &run" Linux release on the front page. I'm finding that quite a bit can be done to "update" the UIusing just themes & extensions over at "SeaMonkey Addons" like MonkeyFix and Sea Fox, but Iget the sense that a lot more can be done via about:config.
Odd. I use YouTube relatively often, and always have AdBlock Plus &Flashblock enabled/installed. The biggest problem I've run into with the combo is that ABP thus far can't get rid of the smallish semi-collapsing ad that appears within the video and is sponsored by the account holder.
From what I recall, though, the main difference between Firefox and other browsers is that it's the only one that lets ABP block sites from even requesting a resource; on other browsers, all ABP can do is hide elements from view once they're downloaded. That might somehow tie into the problem you're having.
FWIW I'm using Firefox 22 (I dislike the changes made as of 23) in Mepis Linux, on an old 2GHz Centrino laptop with 1GB of RAM.
Correction: 24/7 with Firefox almost always in use when I'm actively interacting with the system (6-12 hours/day, maybe). I didn't mean that there's always somebody using Firefox at all hours of day and night.
What distro/environment? In Mepis, Debian, OpenSUSE, and Fedora, it has been rock-solid stable for me using KDE 4, GNOME2, KDE 3/Trinity. I usually only keep 4-10 tabs open and use the Too Many Tabs extension for the rest, and Iusually kill off the Flash plugin via htop an hour or two after watching a video. That's a nine-year-old 2GHz Centrino laptop with 1GB of RAM, running 24/7 with Firefox almost always in use, AdBlock Plus & FlashBlock installed.
OTOH it crashed or froze up fairly often when I was using Ubuntu (roughly May 2008-Jan 2010) on a very similar laptop.
If NASA really was a matter of mankind "exploring strange new worlds" and "seek(ing) out new life and new civilizations"-- or if it had even just given us tangible improvements to the average person's quality-of-life that couldn't have been discovered on land or underwater -- then it wouldn't have eventually lost people's support. Effectively,you want to pour money into a dream based on an exciting science-fantasy TVshow that was as realistic about spaceflight/exploration as fantasy novels/shows are at depicting life in the middle ages.
Consider... What if your grandkids don't turn out to be any good at STEM work or at best could be minimum-wage codemonkeys, and thus land among the masses that make just enough to live paycheck-to-paycheck with few luxuries. Would you still feel it's a great idea to take money that could be spent on finding ways to make survival or employment easier and instead spend it on dreams conjured up by a TVshow from your youth? (Iagree with you about think tanks because they're directly tainted by politics, but the knowledge & research performed by high-end universities can very often predict the end-results of different paths.)
For the past several years, most suicide bombers have been involuntary, as the terrorism org ran low on angry young men and switched over to strapping bombs to people that couldn't fight back or fully understand due to psychiatric illness, cognitive disability, or youth. The ones that do it voluntarily are typically angry young adults that see themselves as having no future and relatively easily convinced that they'd be respected &revered as a hero for their sacrifice -- the same sort of patriotic bullshit that was common in the US up through the Vietnam War, as songs like I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin-To-Die-Rag parodied.
Thank you for making me choke on my soda with unexpected laughter -- I'm from the North Bay (Sonoma County), andmost of the longtimers are tired of both hearing how awesome SF & the wealthier parts of the South Bay are and with having outsiders assume that we share their belief. Insipid articles over-glorifying SF that use "Bay Area"as a synonym don't help.
Q: "What do you like the most about /. Beta?" A: "This Space Intentionally Left Blank"
I agree, but it's too easy to ignore email, so we should also all repost it to our journals with "publicize"checked (and be sure to vote for others doing the same); if enough of us do that, our angry complaints will fill the queue and hopefully part of the front page. That would be much harder for /. Admin & Dice to shrug off, especially as Idoubt advertisers will be happy at seeing the userbase openly planning to implode.
Corporate rights-holders like Disney are the ones that want over-long copyright periods. The actual creators just want the right to earn an income from their own work during their lifetime, and many would be happy with 10-20 years.
Ifavor an altered form of lifetime rights, as I'll explain quickly in part:
-- The creator should not be able to sell or transfer ownership of the copyright. Instead, they would 'rent' non-exclusive licenses to companies for a limited timespan, with a certain guaranteed profit percentage for the creator (so they couldn't be screwed like writers & musicians are now).
-- The company would have the right to full sell those copies, not rent them. If it sold copies it didn't have a license for, it would then be required to pay the creatorthe full cost plus a fine and any legal costs the creator would incur handling the matter.
-- Ideally, the companies would compete with one another on cost, quality, and speed/ease of delivery. Few people with any money will pirate if they can get a high-quality copy to their device(s) in an instant by clicking a button.
-- DRM wouldn't exist within ebooks. Instead, since many people just do whatever is easiest and don't care about DRM, allow store owners that produce their own branded e-readers have the default software place limits on lending out or reading lent-out books. (People willing to root their device to install third-party e-reader apps or that pick non-store readers could avoid it, as they're the ones motivated enough to crack DRManyway.)
-- Rather than wasting resources fighting it as a blanket criminal issue, a tiny fraction of those funds could be used to stigmatize impersonal 'sharing' (obtaining from a stranger as opposed to a friend) as being on par with accepting the free lunch at school or being on welfare.
My logic:
-- If someone does the hard work of creating something, IMHO they should be in control of it. Not a corporation, their neighbor, or their relatives.
-- If copyright will expire within the creator's lifetime, the companies (Hollywood studios, game studios, publishers, etc.) will all refrain from touching the work until it expires in order to avoid having to pay up.
-- Copyright is essentially an attempt to compensate for the fact that creators are paid by a lot of people over a long time period rather than an equivalent amount all at once by one person/group. These days, it takes far longer to reach that point than it used to.
I personally think electronic data should be free ...
'Free' is fine for people that are happy with the amateur work found in fan fiction and (to a slightly lesser degree)that still dominates the self-published arena. The problem is, producing a high-quality novel takes a massive amount of time, hard work and frustration:
-- author dedicates 6-9 months worth of full-time to write the best they can on their own
-- editor aggressively criticizes potential flaws, demanding drastic cuts & changes
-- author picks up ego, spends another 2-3 full-time months rewriting based on criticisms
-- editor criticizes that copy &suggests still more changes
-- author (who by now hates the book) spends another1-2 full-time months rewriting it yet again
Writers that are working just from the joy of using their craft (e.g. for free) are very unlikely to go through the painful & frustrating chore of the editing stages (particularly as that would cost hundreds of dollars), will drop that particular story when they lose interest, and most will only share completed work with a small limited group. The ones that do earn some money but not enough to quit their day job don't have remotely as much time to hone the quality of the initial book or the rewrites, so the results end up subpar.
That's not a new, cavalier usage: "humbled"has been used that way for a very long time, enough that it appeared more than once in 50-150 year old literature Iread as an English major in college.
The phrase also matches the more nuanced definitions for the term 'humble' and its root in humility, both referring to an individual that doesn't overestimate their worth or believe they're worthy of accolades or adoration. When people are given a powerful show of confidence -- nomination for a prize or position, admission to a highly competitive university, etc. -- many initially feel lucky that others believe in them that much, less worthy than others that weren't chosen, and worried they won't live up to their supporters' expectations. In other words, no matter how arrogant and proud they were when secure in their old position, being pushed towards the new one humbles them, thus the "Iam humbled by" phrase.
If you're going by old stereotypes, why not a gay guy? After all, they're chock full of girly traits...
Yes, I'm being facetious, because the female geeks I've known had the same range of interest/ability in aesthetics or fashion as our male counterparts.
Your post reminds me of an incident in Radio Shack a couple of years ago... I was in my usual loose unisex t-shirt, jeans & ponytail (no makeup/jewelry), and hung out comparing circuitboard components before grabbing a soldering iron stand. When I paid, even though he'd been watching me part of the time, the manager/clerk asked with an amused condescending tone, "making jewelry?" When I answered cheerfully, "nope, learning to replace bad parts on PCBs" he was visibly dumbfounded. I guess he was so focused on his idea of what women are like that it didn't occur to him that we might not match it...
I can't imagine he's all that surprised, since his website says people are "actively encouraged" to syndicate its content.
The syndicated columns of our youth were a bit different, though. Newspapers had to contact the syndicating companyto seek permission and pay money for the right to reproduce the column for a certain period of time, and some writers (like Dave Barry) had their home paper mentioned at the beginning or end of each column. It wasn't a free-for-all where for-profit papers just copied the columns each week without contacting or compensating the creator, as is becoming the norm now.
"Dear God, what is that thing?!"