My policy was that if your kid was sick, you could take a sick day once a month. Any more than that, you had to make it up or lose the pay.
I'm a guy, and it kind of does sound like you were Hitler. Suppose both the husband and wife worked for you. Then they would have a grand total of two days a month to take care of their sick children. Suppose your employee was unmarried -- suppose her husband died in Iraq. You would be placing her at a disadvantage vs. all your other, married employees (who would have the option of balancing, the way you suggest). On the whole, your policy sounds unfair and, with the realities of our society, clearly gender-biased toward men (who are less likely to be single parents or, indeed, be expected to take care of the kids).
Children get sick. Chicken pox takes about a week to run through. No, it's not life-threatening, but it's just not appropriate to leave a six-year-old at home, alone, unsupervised, with a fever, for a week. What would you propose a parent do? Presumably you paid your employees enough to hire a babysitter for 40 hours?
In college I took a few archaeology courses. In all, men were in the minority; in one, I was the only man...You don't see "Coping Strategies for Men in Archaeology" on archaeology websites.
Of course not. From the sound of it, those "strategies" would be unprintable.
Good for you if you can choose jobs from a menu.
Some people are not so lucky and, still, they have to eat.
If you have no control over what job you can do then what the hell are you doing poking around on Slashdot? You should be in night classes.
Seriously, getting a job you like is not about looking for a hand-out. 9/10 of landing a good job comes down to initiative, assertiveness, and attitude. Sitting around bemoaning the fact that your job sucks because you can't get a better job sounds like a circular argument, not to mention a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Tighten your belt. Take the money you were going to spend on a Nintendo Wii and put it in the bank. Quit going to the movies; download them instead. Put that money in the bank. Develop yourself enough of a nest egg that you can afford to go a couple months without work. I manage it and I live in San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities in America. When you don't have a financial gun to your head you will have the flexibility to start looking at that menu of jobs, because it really does exist.
But most of all, stop thinking of yourself as a victim. You gain nothing from it, not even sympathy.
If you're expected to personally handle all aspects of a job, around the clock, then I think you're exaggerating when you call yourself a "manager." Managers have direct reports. If you have none, then you are a tech. What's more, it sounds like you are an overworked tech and should be lobbying to get some help.
If you do have direct reports, then it's your responsibility as manager to delegate tasks to them. Some should be available to do the tasks that take place after hours, while others should be available to handle those tasks that come up first thing in the morning. Nobody should be expect to work 16 hours a day.
You are expected to put in ridiculous amounts of hours, sometimes be on call 24/7, all for pay that's in many cases only somewhat better than that of a janitor.
Can we please put this one to rest? If you have a job that expects you to put in ridiculous hours, you have a crap job. Period. Any job that demands that you sacrifice your life for the sake of some company in which you have no stake is not sustainable. You will burn out and quit -- or worse, you will burn out, start passive-aggressively acting out, and get fired. IT geeks need to stop listing their long hours as a point of pride. Willingly putting yourself on the burnout track does not make you a superhero. Rather, it makes your life hell, and it makes every one of your coworkers' lives hell because you set unrealistic expectations and fail to voice your genuine employment concerns to management.
Does anybody remember Starflight 1 and 2? Whole galaxies full of believable-enough planets fit on two 360KB floppy disks. Did these games do something similar to what the author of this article is still desperately trying to comprehend?
I'm sorry to say but you seem to act like these people are pure unrefined evil and just want to destroy America. They aren't some inhuman savage monster, they are people with ideals (no matter how corrupt YOU or I may see them) and they are standing up to America in the only way they can.
That's an appropriately lefty, liberal way to look at it, but I take issue with this point.
Look at the Taliban in Afghanistan. That wasn't about fighting back at America. That was about seizing power over an entire population. Yes, you could say that it was in the name of "ideals," but the truth is that people who seek power do it because they want the power, not the ideal.
You see the same thing in Iraq right now, with the civil war. For a lot of the so-called insurgents, job #1 is not striking back at America. It's gaining control of Iraq. Will they go after the West after that? Probably. But to say that everything Arab extremists do in the Middle East is an understandable response to Western aggression is just silly.
These are power games at work. The average citizens of Iraq are the ones caught in the middle. Yes, the U.S. has shamed itself in the region. But the Islamic agitators are no better.
Does anyone know the capabilities of China's regular broadcast television standards? I would hope that it would be better than NTSC, something on the order of PAL/SECAM maybe.
Though they were lucky to have an employee such as you to facilitate smoothness, at least at that store.
That's true, and in that sense maybe it was a bad example. Maybe management could have done more to ensure that there wouldn't have been a problem -- like having two registers running, just for a couple of hours. But at the very least you can credit them for having me work the shift, even if that was largely a coincidence. The crazy tweakers from the graveyard shift would never have been given a busy rush hour.
My main point is simply that, if the GP is trying to tell us that Symantec is totally blameless and that their woes could have happened to anybody, he's fooling himself. Some companies see the hurdles coming and they jump. Others just crash right through the barricades. In Symantec's case, it's a safe bet there's gross mismanagement at work here. Whether it's at the strategic or operational level remains to be seen.
Either way, I wouldn't feel too good about Symantec if they were one of my vendors.
Especially since Symantec seems to be saying that their band-aid was to overstaff so extravagantly that wait times are down to 2 minutes, without fixing any of the underlying problems. We'll see the impact of that on their next SEC filing, no doubt.
One time, a local TV station decided to air some cheesy old 3-D flick for the 8 O'Clock Movie in actual 3-D, using a new 3-D process for television. The station struck a deal with 7-11 to distribute the 3-D glasses. The catch? They would cost about 33 cents apiece.
So here's me, Mr. 7-11 Guy in my orange smock, standing behind the counter. All of a sudden, at about 5pm, customers start filing into the store. It seems that just about everybody got a call at work at some point during the day, asking if mommy could pleeeeaaaasse go and get some of those 3-D glasses so everybody could watch the fun movie tonight. 33 cents was no big deal, so everybody did.
The problem was, if they were free I could just toss them at people as they walked through the door. That's the way dumb promotions usually worked. But because they were 33 cents, every single customer that came into the store just for 3-D glasses had to wait in line at my register (I was the only employee on duty). Not to mention all the other people who came in for beer etc., just like usual.
Well, I lost track at some point. But the following day my manager told me that, according to the register tapes, I spent the next three hours ringing up roughly one customer every thirty seconds.
The thing is, a few people walked out. At times the line was as much as 12 people long, which is pretty long for a 7-11. But most of them didn't (as testified by the fact that I rang up so many of them). I kept my cool, cracked jokes, and pretty much nobody yelled at me. In fact, one guy even gave me a $5 tip on a 33 cent pair of 3-D glasses. And because people were waiting in line at 7-11, half of them grabbed a candy bar or a bag of chips or beer or something while they were waiting to get their glasses rung up, so it was a huge windfall for the store.
My point? No, you can't control it when you get excessive wait times at random. But that doesn't mean you can't control your customer service.
Well, for starters, "cirrect" has never been correct usage. "Linux" is always capitalized, as are words at the beginnings of sentences, whether you think they're supposed to be capitalized or not. "Unix" is always capitalized. And no publication I've ever worked for would allow a trademark to appear in print in all caps unless it was an acronym. Companies regularly try to do that to call attention to their brands in print, and we don't let them get away with it. So please, if you want to criticize, know something about how the English language works in print, first.
Generally people refer to things that have their roots in the old Bell Labs UNIX as "unix" or "unix-like" (notice the lower case u's).
OK, I've been in this field a long time and I've edited a lot of copy, and I've never once seen this usage in print. Who are these "generally" people you're talking about?
Seriously though, looking around from my own personal experience, scarily, I think a whole social underclass is being created.
Oy! Lads! Trevor over 'ere finks there's an whole 'social underclass' being created. Any a you seen any 'underclass' being created in the UK? Not bloody likely in my lifetime, mate! Pull the other one, Trevor!
No, it mostly boils down to social skills and the caste system(clicks/niches) in school
I was going to say pretty much the same thing(s) as you. I'd imagine, also, that this "finding a deep and fulfilling intellectual relationship" or "finding an equal" thing is probably part of the problem.
Let's imagine that you find such a person at age 17 and let's imagine, further, that you somehow manage to convince her that she can stand to be around you. Presumably she, too -- if she's really your equal -- is looking for that ultimate fulfilling relationship. She is therefore going to be cautious about whom she has sex with. Getting to "the first time" is going to be a laborious process of long talks about your feelings and what your relationship means to you, followed by weeks of figuring out when your over-protective, academically-minded parents are going to be away, maybe the problem of trying to buy a bottle of wine when neither of you has a fake ID because it never occurred to you before, culminating in the "awkward flopping" that another poster mentioned, and finally a couple of weeks at school where she acts strange toward you because "everything has changed now."
Myself, I actually didn't have sex until after high school. The way it happened was I met a girl who liked me. Being a big dork, I was baffled by this and I even asked her what it was she liked about me. I was expecting her to say I was smart or funny or at least "nice" or something. She just said I was cute. This baffled me even more, but I was willing to play along. The trick, of course, was that she was somebody who had never met me before -- who hadn't grown up with me since elementary school and watched all the bad fashion and the annoying questions I asked in class and who hadn't hated all the people I was friends with. It was finally simply one of those truly random things where somebody catches someone else's eye. And I wouldn't call her intelligent or my "soul mate" by a long shot, but she laughed a lot and was fun and cute. What's more, though she only really did it within the context of relationships, she liked sex. She liked to do it often, in fact. Way more often than I would expect her to want to, in fact. And I was certainly willing to play along with that, so the upshot was that I got comfortable with the whole thing very quickly and it was therefore something that I could do decently well later, when I found somebody who was maybe a little more suited to me.
And the rest, as they say, is history. In fact, I'd be surprised if this wasn't at least sort of how it happens for most people. This "fulfilling relationship in your teens" stuff sounds like bollocks to me.
But in the final analysis, a law that requires $375,000 in punitive damages for putting a few dozen cds on a web server, when the songs can be bought on itunes for $1 each is massively excessive, and that excessiveness can render it unconstitutional.
There's one part you're leaving out, though, and that's the fact that putting a track from a CD onto a Web server is not necessarily the "final" act of copyright infringement. If you just ripped the track and put it on your iPod, that's one thing. That might not even be illegal under Fair Use provisions. But when you offer it up on a public Web server, any reasonably intelligent person could count that act at least as intent to commit multiple acts of copyright infringement for the same work. Figuring out just how many times the copyright was infringed would require a detailed analysis of Web server logs, going back to whenever the file was first posted. I could see where the RIAA could argue that it's neither fair nor reasonable to require that level of investigation for each and every track posted. Hence, some form of statutory damages might be appropriate.
# It's very much like the Apple Resouce Fork - a quite nice (if imperfectly implemented and historically limited) approach to enhancing files. ResEdit was amazing. Unfortunately, the resource fork is fading from use because it was always a royal PITA for cross platform work, and because portable apps can't rely on it.
A little offtopic, but I never really understood people's love for the resource fork idea. Yes, separating out resources and metadata was a good thing and Apple was right to encourage that. But did doing so really require a filesystem that was completely alien to pretty much everything else on the market? Why couldn't Apple have just proposed a file format that packaged all that metadata at the end of the code or something? You could still have ResEdit; it would just read its data from the end of the file, instead of from a different place in the filesystem. All cross-platform problems would have been eliminated. Because after all, it's all just data on a hard drive anyway. Apple seemed to want you to think of resource forks as existing somewhere in Dimension X, instead of sitting right there next to your other data, which just seemed silly and needlessly complicating.
So yes, banks do take care of your customers. If yours doesn't, why are you still banking there?
I dunno where you live or where your Aunt banks, but this certainly seems like an anomalous case in 2007. Example: The big banks offer discounted-rate checking if you agree to bank using only the ATM and never actually walk into a branch. If something goes wrong and you have to speak to a live human being, they charge you a fee.
What really sucks is that people pretend that A Wrinkle in Time is full of witchcraft, but the witches weren't ever witches, and I remember the book making that quite plain. According to the Wikipedia article you mention, though, what really seems to tick people off is that, despite the fact that there are clear Christian undertones in L'Engle's books, hers is a "liberal" Christianity. When Jesus is mentioned, he is listed alongside some other great thinkers and spiritual leaders (including Euclid, Gandhi, and Buddha) and the Christian Right simply can't have that.
I'm surprised (but I guess not shocked) that there hasn't been more discussion on/. as to the technical matters behind what he's saying. I, for one, do not follow Linux kernel development closely enough to be up on any of this stuff. If you make it that far in TFA, though, you'll find that his main gripe was the incredible resistance he got to his desire to include a "fair" CPU scheduler in the kernel. He even went so far as to develop a pluggable architecture that would allow you to pick which scheduler you wanted at boot time, but this was also met with resistance. Then you get this:
Then one day presumably Ingo decided it [fair scheduling] was a good idea and the way forward and... wrote his own fair scheduling interactive design with a modular almost pluggable CPU scheduling framework... and had help with the code from the person who refused to accept fair behaviour in my flamewar.
Presumably this is not the whole story, but I'd expect/. to talk at least a little bit about this aspect of the story, rather than all these "Linux on the desktop" comments we get. How does Ingo's new CFS compare to the code Kolivas wrote? Which design is superior? Does Ingo's design actually borrow from Con's code, or does it just do more or less the same thing? And what about Con's implied accusation that the kernel development process is impenetrable, both to end users and even key developers when they reach an impasse with one of the "elite" -- is this a fair criticism? Like I said, there's no way for me to answer these questions for myself with my current knowledge.
Your point of course ignores the fact that one of the most pivotal events of said war -- the slaying of the Witch-King of Angmar -- was perpetrated by a woman.
Oh, fuck it, I'll bite. In what way are Tolkien's works not well-written works of prose? Granted, "The Hobbit" is pretty much a children's book (kind of like the Harry Potter books). But "The Lord of the Rings" consistently gets counted as one of the greatest novels ever written -- quite unlike any of the Harry Potter books -- so I'm curious as to what about it makes you think it's written in a "terrible writing style." Is it just because you grew up decades after it was written and so were exposed to countless imitators (Dungeons and Dragons included) before you were introduced to the real thing?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a guy, and it kind of does sound like you were Hitler. Suppose both the husband and wife worked for you. Then they would have a grand total of two days a month to take care of their sick children. Suppose your employee was unmarried -- suppose her husband died in Iraq. You would be placing her at a disadvantage vs. all your other, married employees (who would have the option of balancing, the way you suggest). On the whole, your policy sounds unfair and, with the realities of our society, clearly gender-biased toward men (who are less likely to be single parents or, indeed, be expected to take care of the kids).
Children get sick. Chicken pox takes about a week to run through. No, it's not life-threatening, but it's just not appropriate to leave a six-year-old at home, alone, unsupervised, with a fever, for a week. What would you propose a parent do? Presumably you paid your employees enough to hire a babysitter for 40 hours?
OK smart guy, so which ones should get it? Hint: Where do the Kurds fit in?
Of course not. From the sound of it, those "strategies" would be unprintable.
If you have no control over what job you can do then what the hell are you doing poking around on Slashdot? You should be in night classes.
Seriously, getting a job you like is not about looking for a hand-out. 9/10 of landing a good job comes down to initiative, assertiveness, and attitude. Sitting around bemoaning the fact that your job sucks because you can't get a better job sounds like a circular argument, not to mention a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Tighten your belt. Take the money you were going to spend on a Nintendo Wii and put it in the bank. Quit going to the movies; download them instead. Put that money in the bank. Develop yourself enough of a nest egg that you can afford to go a couple months without work. I manage it and I live in San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities in America. When you don't have a financial gun to your head you will have the flexibility to start looking at that menu of jobs, because it really does exist.
But most of all, stop thinking of yourself as a victim. You gain nothing from it, not even sympathy.
If you're expected to personally handle all aspects of a job, around the clock, then I think you're exaggerating when you call yourself a "manager." Managers have direct reports. If you have none, then you are a tech. What's more, it sounds like you are an overworked tech and should be lobbying to get some help.
If you do have direct reports, then it's your responsibility as manager to delegate tasks to them. Some should be available to do the tasks that take place after hours, while others should be available to handle those tasks that come up first thing in the morning. Nobody should be expect to work 16 hours a day.
Can we please put this one to rest? If you have a job that expects you to put in ridiculous hours, you have a crap job. Period. Any job that demands that you sacrifice your life for the sake of some company in which you have no stake is not sustainable. You will burn out and quit -- or worse, you will burn out, start passive-aggressively acting out, and get fired. IT geeks need to stop listing their long hours as a point of pride. Willingly putting yourself on the burnout track does not make you a superhero. Rather, it makes your life hell, and it makes every one of your coworkers' lives hell because you set unrealistic expectations and fail to voice your genuine employment concerns to management.
Does anybody remember Starflight 1 and 2? Whole galaxies full of believable-enough planets fit on two 360KB floppy disks. Did these games do something similar to what the author of this article is still desperately trying to comprehend?
That's an appropriately lefty, liberal way to look at it, but I take issue with this point.
Look at the Taliban in Afghanistan. That wasn't about fighting back at America. That was about seizing power over an entire population. Yes, you could say that it was in the name of "ideals," but the truth is that people who seek power do it because they want the power, not the ideal.
You see the same thing in Iraq right now, with the civil war. For a lot of the so-called insurgents, job #1 is not striking back at America. It's gaining control of Iraq. Will they go after the West after that? Probably. But to say that everything Arab extremists do in the Middle East is an understandable response to Western aggression is just silly.
These are power games at work. The average citizens of Iraq are the ones caught in the middle. Yes, the U.S. has shamed itself in the region. But the Islamic agitators are no better.
Last I heard, China uses PAL.
That's true, and in that sense maybe it was a bad example. Maybe management could have done more to ensure that there wouldn't have been a problem -- like having two registers running, just for a couple of hours. But at the very least you can credit them for having me work the shift, even if that was largely a coincidence. The crazy tweakers from the graveyard shift would never have been given a busy rush hour.
My main point is simply that, if the GP is trying to tell us that Symantec is totally blameless and that their woes could have happened to anybody, he's fooling himself. Some companies see the hurdles coming and they jump. Others just crash right through the barricades. In Symantec's case, it's a safe bet there's gross mismanagement at work here. Whether it's at the strategic or operational level remains to be seen.
Especially since Symantec seems to be saying that their band-aid was to overstaff so extravagantly that wait times are down to 2 minutes, without fixing any of the underlying problems. We'll see the impact of that on their next SEC filing, no doubt.
One time, a local TV station decided to air some cheesy old 3-D flick for the 8 O'Clock Movie in actual 3-D, using a new 3-D process for television. The station struck a deal with 7-11 to distribute the 3-D glasses. The catch? They would cost about 33 cents apiece.
So here's me, Mr. 7-11 Guy in my orange smock, standing behind the counter. All of a sudden, at about 5pm, customers start filing into the store. It seems that just about everybody got a call at work at some point during the day, asking if mommy could pleeeeaaaasse go and get some of those 3-D glasses so everybody could watch the fun movie tonight. 33 cents was no big deal, so everybody did.
The problem was, if they were free I could just toss them at people as they walked through the door. That's the way dumb promotions usually worked. But because they were 33 cents, every single customer that came into the store just for 3-D glasses had to wait in line at my register (I was the only employee on duty). Not to mention all the other people who came in for beer etc., just like usual.
Well, I lost track at some point. But the following day my manager told me that, according to the register tapes, I spent the next three hours ringing up roughly one customer every thirty seconds.
The thing is, a few people walked out. At times the line was as much as 12 people long, which is pretty long for a 7-11. But most of them didn't (as testified by the fact that I rang up so many of them). I kept my cool, cracked jokes, and pretty much nobody yelled at me. In fact, one guy even gave me a $5 tip on a 33 cent pair of 3-D glasses. And because people were waiting in line at 7-11, half of them grabbed a candy bar or a bag of chips or beer or something while they were waiting to get their glasses rung up, so it was a huge windfall for the store.
My point? No, you can't control it when you get excessive wait times at random. But that doesn't mean you can't control your customer service.
Well, for starters, "cirrect" has never been correct usage. "Linux" is always capitalized, as are words at the beginnings of sentences, whether you think they're supposed to be capitalized or not. "Unix" is always capitalized. And no publication I've ever worked for would allow a trademark to appear in print in all caps unless it was an acronym. Companies regularly try to do that to call attention to their brands in print, and we don't let them get away with it. So please, if you want to criticize, know something about how the English language works in print, first.
The trick is to write a set of macros that implement Pico in EMACS. Then you're safe.
OK, I've been in this field a long time and I've edited a lot of copy, and I've never once seen this usage in print. Who are these "generally" people you're talking about?
Oy! Lads! Trevor over 'ere finks there's an whole 'social underclass' being created. Any a you seen any 'underclass' being created in the UK? Not bloody likely in my lifetime, mate! Pull the other one, Trevor!
I was going to say pretty much the same thing(s) as you. I'd imagine, also, that this "finding a deep and fulfilling intellectual relationship" or "finding an equal" thing is probably part of the problem.
Let's imagine that you find such a person at age 17 and let's imagine, further, that you somehow manage to convince her that she can stand to be around you. Presumably she, too -- if she's really your equal -- is looking for that ultimate fulfilling relationship. She is therefore going to be cautious about whom she has sex with. Getting to "the first time" is going to be a laborious process of long talks about your feelings and what your relationship means to you, followed by weeks of figuring out when your over-protective, academically-minded parents are going to be away, maybe the problem of trying to buy a bottle of wine when neither of you has a fake ID because it never occurred to you before, culminating in the "awkward flopping" that another poster mentioned, and finally a couple of weeks at school where she acts strange toward you because "everything has changed now."
Myself, I actually didn't have sex until after high school. The way it happened was I met a girl who liked me. Being a big dork, I was baffled by this and I even asked her what it was she liked about me. I was expecting her to say I was smart or funny or at least "nice" or something. She just said I was cute. This baffled me even more, but I was willing to play along. The trick, of course, was that she was somebody who had never met me before -- who hadn't grown up with me since elementary school and watched all the bad fashion and the annoying questions I asked in class and who hadn't hated all the people I was friends with. It was finally simply one of those truly random things where somebody catches someone else's eye. And I wouldn't call her intelligent or my "soul mate" by a long shot, but she laughed a lot and was fun and cute. What's more, though she only really did it within the context of relationships, she liked sex. She liked to do it often, in fact. Way more often than I would expect her to want to, in fact. And I was certainly willing to play along with that, so the upshot was that I got comfortable with the whole thing very quickly and it was therefore something that I could do decently well later, when I found somebody who was maybe a little more suited to me.
And the rest, as they say, is history. In fact, I'd be surprised if this wasn't at least sort of how it happens for most people. This "fulfilling relationship in your teens" stuff sounds like bollocks to me.
There's one part you're leaving out, though, and that's the fact that putting a track from a CD onto a Web server is not necessarily the "final" act of copyright infringement. If you just ripped the track and put it on your iPod, that's one thing. That might not even be illegal under Fair Use provisions. But when you offer it up on a public Web server, any reasonably intelligent person could count that act at least as intent to commit multiple acts of copyright infringement for the same work. Figuring out just how many times the copyright was infringed would require a detailed analysis of Web server logs, going back to whenever the file was first posted. I could see where the RIAA could argue that it's neither fair nor reasonable to require that level of investigation for each and every track posted. Hence, some form of statutory damages might be appropriate.
Does nobody read TFA anymore? It's the Intellectual Property Enhanced Criminal enforcement Act of Congress ... IPECAC for short.
A little offtopic, but I never really understood people's love for the resource fork idea. Yes, separating out resources and metadata was a good thing and Apple was right to encourage that. But did doing so really require a filesystem that was completely alien to pretty much everything else on the market? Why couldn't Apple have just proposed a file format that packaged all that metadata at the end of the code or something? You could still have ResEdit; it would just read its data from the end of the file, instead of from a different place in the filesystem. All cross-platform problems would have been eliminated. Because after all, it's all just data on a hard drive anyway. Apple seemed to want you to think of resource forks as existing somewhere in Dimension X, instead of sitting right there next to your other data, which just seemed silly and needlessly complicating.
I dunno where you live or where your Aunt banks, but this certainly seems like an anomalous case in 2007. Example: The big banks offer discounted-rate checking if you agree to bank using only the ATM and never actually walk into a branch. If something goes wrong and you have to speak to a live human being, they charge you a fee.
What really sucks is that people pretend that A Wrinkle in Time is full of witchcraft, but the witches weren't ever witches, and I remember the book making that quite plain. According to the Wikipedia article you mention, though, what really seems to tick people off is that, despite the fact that there are clear Christian undertones in L'Engle's books, hers is a "liberal" Christianity. When Jesus is mentioned, he is listed alongside some other great thinkers and spiritual leaders (including Euclid, Gandhi, and Buddha) and the Christian Right simply can't have that.
Your point of course ignores the fact that one of the most pivotal events of said war -- the slaying of the Witch-King of Angmar -- was perpetrated by a woman.
Oh, fuck it, I'll bite. In what way are Tolkien's works not well-written works of prose? Granted, "The Hobbit" is pretty much a children's book (kind of like the Harry Potter books). But "The Lord of the Rings" consistently gets counted as one of the greatest novels ever written -- quite unlike any of the Harry Potter books -- so I'm curious as to what about it makes you think it's written in a "terrible writing style." Is it just because you grew up decades after it was written and so were exposed to countless imitators (Dungeons and Dragons included) before you were introduced to the real thing?