I always thought that paranoids were the absolute height of egomania, since you have to think pretty highly of yourself to think that you're worth the effort.
You are obviously brilliant, because I have long said the same thing. Actually, the way I like to put it is that paranoia is a form of arrogance. As if we all have nothing better to do than plot ways to get some paranoid dweeb.
Zippy the Pinhead once referred to a glazed donut as a "toroidal carbohydrate module." Since I read that many years ago, I find it hard to just say "donut..."
That's ridiculas.(sic) And when did I bash anyone for bashing Bill Gates? Sounds like you misinterpreted something.
Maybe. I saw a harangue about the definition of success capped off with a sarcastic mock that Gates is evil, etc. Sure looks like you were accusing him of Gates-hate.
If you ask only unbiased people who have no vested interest in a topic, you're going to get some pretty useless information.
I understand your point. That it's in Bill Gates best interest to paint a picture that will sell the most Microsoft products. But that doesn't mean he's not also qualified to speak on the subject.
Clearly, you are not understanding my point, because you extrapolate that I somewhere said he wasn't qualified to speak on the subject. I said he has a conflict of interest, which means he lacks objectivity. That doesn't mean he's not qualified to speak, it means his words are likely to be self-serving and should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Not only that, but that kind of conflict of interest is likely to result in a lot of safe feel-good talk. Did you read the article? Lots of words that say nothing at all, except that PCs are great.
It's kind of like saying you can't trust a professional mathematicians answer to a complex math problem, because he has a conflict of interest.
That is a horrendous analogy. Really. A better one would be asking a professional mathematician if professional mathematicians should all have their salaries doubled. Since there is in fact no conflict of interest in a mathematician answering questions about mathematics, I wouldn't say what you suggest.
You can't be unbiased AND an expert at the same time. Any expert without real field time, is a self claimed expert. And anyone who chooses to take answers from an unqualified expert deserves what they get.
That's fine, but it has nothing to do with anything I said. Nobody's asking for someone completely unbiased! I never even said such a person existed!
You have a very black or white view of this subject. People aren't either biased beyond hope or completely free of bias. There is a wide range of biases, and it's important to know what they are when evaluating what they say. Gates has a huge stake in people buying as many PCs as possible. He's conducting marketing in a piece like this, not offering any degree of objectivity.
Despite all that, I find myself agreeing with your point. It's like saying since George W Bush is President of the United States, we shouldn't trust anything he says about the United States.
Damn... You're right.
Thanks for agreeing, but you're agreeing with some half-baked analogy you made up, not "my point."
I don't trust anything Bush says about the effectiveness of his policies, because he's just a cheerleader for them, like Gates is for PCs. If Bush talked about how many people live in Oklahoma or where Yellowstone Park is, well, I wouldn't trust that either, but that's because he's an idiot, not because he has any reason to lie about that.
Oh, who am I kidding with this post. Sorry, I'll revert. MICROSOFT BAD! BILL GATES ARE EVIL! BRAINS!!!!
I'm sorry to interrupt your knee-jerking session, but what the hell does this have to do with the post you replied to?
It has nothing at all to do with an opinion about BG. It's that he has a CONFLICT OF INTEREST. It's like asking Steve Jobs to write about the usefulness of an iPod. Not objective, see?
A thought occurs: If you want to flame people who bash Gates, that's cool, but how about saving it for someone who actually did bash Gates?
So...boring...losing...consciousness...
on
The PC Is Not Dead
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I hate this kind of tech marketing drivel. I'm not just bashing Gates specifically, and in fact I'd say this article isn't as bad as most, but it still boils down to a trite load of platitudes. You can summarize this kind of article easily:
"Long time ago dumb terminals look now richly appointed digital tapestry personal computing unleash potential provide collaborative strategic business enhancers future digito-infotainment convergence aggregation hub integrating synergies for advancement of opportunity. Buy more. Thanks. Oh, and thin clients suck, give people their own hard drive for all the above to happen. Thanks again."
Seriously, is there anything notable here? So very insight-free.
I have an essential tremor, albeit a mild one. It only manifests itself severely when my muscles are tensed, like making a tight fist. Most of this time it's not a problem, but I have days when my hands are a little bit shaky and I'm prone to stray clicks. Accidentally closing a window is seriously annoying.
Tremors suck. People who have severe tremors need all the help they can get. I know someone with a severe tremor, and she has to put up with a lot of stares and sometimes hostility. Once a nurse yelled at her to HOLD STILL! while trying to take a blood sample, as if she were doing it on purpose just to piss the nurse off. Of course, the stress of that situation only made it worse.
What would really be nice would be bowls, glasses, and spoons that stay level so someone with a shaky hand could drink a martini or have some soup without spilling. Right now all they have are weighted utensils, which suck.
BTW, age is a factor, but essential tremors can happen at any age. I'm 40, and I've had this tremor for 20 years or so. Fortunately, it hasn't gotten worse.
She was on one of the celebrity poker shows a while back and... [shudder]. She was totally obnoxious, loud, and overbearing, and her voice was like teeth on a chalkboard.
As for what "they" (the USGS is whom I presume you mean) plan to do, I imagine it is sit down and watch, issuing warnings if and when they are needed.
I read a book about Mt. Rainier (or as we call it up here, "The Mountain") in which the story was told of a USGS person who had to lay low in Orting as the bearer of bad news. He had been trying to get people to prepare for the possibility of a lahar like the Electron, which went right through where Orting now is. They asked him, "What can we do?" He said, "Get to high ground real fast." "No," they asked, "what do we do to protect our homes?" "Nothing," he said. They kept asking questions, and when he kept telling them there is nothing to be done to prevent this, many of them just got mad at him.
This is not to disparage the citizens of Orting. I understand they have a very good evacuation plan in place. But the initial reaction to the bad news appeared to be blaming the messenger.
It's hard for people to accept that there are forces of nature from which we can't shield ourselves. All we can do is try to get out of the way.
Here in Seattle (this goes for Redmond, too) we didn't get a whole lot of ash in 1980. The prevailing winds blow east, and we're north and a bit west. I remember one day when we got a light dusting, but that was about it.
My friend's dad was pulling his small boat back from a fishing trip to Moses Lake that day, and the boat filled up with ash.
It's entirely possible that the "baseline" that pundits and politicians and activists fight over is entirely a myth, and the national tests are simply badly designed. But than means that reailty is happilly out of sync with their understanding, not that you're in-line with their perception.
I think the fundamental problem with the tests is that they're only one metric. Not all students are good test-takers, but that doesn't mean they aren't capable. So the tests could be good, but by their very nature give an incomplete picture. Test scores are also better than most people think, which is not to say there aren't problems.
On a slightly related note--do you teach your students about alchemy, and show them how it's wrong?
Yes, I do. I also explain to them that alchemists found out a lot of useful things, albeit by chance. I tell them to remember that alchemists were intelligent people trying to make sense of their world, but they lacked the scientific method. We discuss philospher's stone and the universal panacaea, and I have the students tell me why they were never found, nor do they exist. I like to have students find answers, then I help them expand on them.
Assuming that you're a high school science teacher, which is the area under discussion:
I am. Mainly chemistry.
Are your students tested on the history of science, their ability to defend a conclusion, their experimental methedology, or their inquisitiveness? Or are they tested on facts, formulas, and figures?
Yes, and not only. Remember too that testing isn't the only assessment method. They are also graded on their lab notebooks, a research project in the history of science, problem sets, and so on. So I would prefer to substitute "graded" for "tested" in your question.
If the answers are "yes" and "not only", then you're a far better science teacher than any I've ever met, with a science program that I would love to enroll my children in.
You're kind to say that. All of the things I mentioned are part of my state's standards for science education. I try to go beyond the standards. But I've met some extraordinary colleagues in public schools. Contrary to popular opinion, we public school teachers don't all suck.
But you would also be far away from the baseline norm that the evolution vs. creationism argument is fought against.
How can you know this? Not being snotty, I really want to know.
I think there are more great teachers and schools out there than most assume.
No, they're not. They're for teaching about Scientific Discoveries. At the point in contention, students need to learn the what and the when far more than they need to know how we learned that. (And the "how we learned" is science.)
This is utterly wrong. I am a science teacher. I teach science, which includes history, the nature of science (I prefer that term to "scientific method"), the stories of the people who made scientific discoveries, and the plain facts of science as well. Teaching science is not simply to impart factual knowledge (which is very important, of course), but to lead to understanding and motivation. We want kids to want to become scientists. Learning that science has a fascinating history that is funny, tragic, messy, surprising, exciting, and so on both helps students place the discoveries in a proper context that leads to deeper understanding, and presents science as something one would want to be a part of.
A class that didn't address how we learned what we know would not only be boring, it would at best impart a very shallow understanding of science and fail to equip students to evaluate new discoveries that arise during the rest of their lives. Such a curriculum would be, in my opinion, educational malpractice.
Yeah. You got me. I typoed "unplug" when I meant "plug in." You win. I'm deeply ashamed. I wish you a wonderful weekend celebrating your decicive victory here today. Kudos.
There's a very simple SOP for Windows users that will completely eliminate the need for a fix:
1. Buy new PC 2. DO NOT PLUG IN NETWORK CABLE 3. Image drive to external storage wth Ghost or the like 4. Unplug external storage 5. Plug in network cable 6. Connect to Internet. Save any info needed for storage. 7. Unplug network cable 8. Print all info obtained in step 6 9. Plug external storage back in 10. Restore image made in step 3 11. File hardcopies in cabinet 12. Knock back 3 or more shots of your favorite liquor 13. Unplug network cable 14. Return to step 3 for new Internet sessions
I had a bad experience with graphology woo-woo-heads about 20 years ago. I wrote about it to Bob Carroll of The Skeptic's DIsctionary, and it was posted in the reader's comments section. I'll just copy that here rather than retype the story:
Just wanted to let you know how much I appreciate your remarks about graphology. I've found that a distressing number of people assume there must be "something to it" without thinking about it at all. Let me share an anecdote regarding my brush with graphology:
When I graduated from college in 1986 with a degree in chemistry, I went to an employment agency, which got me an interview with a local paint company I'll call FooBar Paint. The unusual thing was, they asked me to submit a handwritten essay about my hobbies before they would schedule the interview. I complied with this request, and a few days later was told they would not interview me since they had determined some unspecified character flaw through graphological analysis.
I was livid, of course -- Both because they had dismissed me without even talking to me, and they had been dishonest in failing to tell me what they planned to do with my essay. I wanted to do something, but I was an impoverished and unemployed 21-year-old. Unable to hire an attorney, I contacted the Seattle Human Rights department, who was very interested in my story. SHR filed suit against FooBar, and subpoenaed all of their documents regarding hiring policy. We were suing for a job and back pay. It was quite a heady feeling.
Two days later, I got a phone call from the president, Mr. FooBar himself, asking me to come in for a personal interview. Mr. FooBar wanted to "set things straight" as it was costing him time and money to comply with SHR's document subpoena. When I got to his office, he explained that graphology was their preferred method of determining who fits into the "FooBar mosaic," as he put it. I explained that this was a totally unsubstantiated method, and asked him why he didn't employ witch doctors or use a magic 8-ball to determine a candidate's fitness. He had no answer for that, instead offering me a job if I'd drop the suit and take another handwriting test. Apparently, one of the qualities FooBar likes in its "mosaic" is unmitigated gall.
I ended up dropping the suit after FooBar twisted in the wind for a while. I had to get on with my life, and the best I could get was a job working for those clowns. Still, I felt I had made my point.
I sincerely hope that people refuse to take workplace pseudoscience lying down. If this type of "new age" employer is given free reign to evaluate people on graphology, I Ching, auras, or whatever, they'll just keep doing it.
There wasn't that much at stake in my case, but there could have been much more if my circumstances were different. People need to educate themselves about pseudosciences like graphology, so they might have the conviction to stand up against it as well as the facts to win the fight.
--end quote--
I'd like to add that when I went to SHR, I wasn't looking to sue them. I just wanted to know if what they did was legal and if not, ask them to call them and tell them so. But they just went forward and did it, and I was fine with it.
I'll never forget sitting in that idiot's (Mr. FooBar's) office. I swear, he looked just like Lumbergh, but lacked his intellect and personality.
In fact I often find Office for OS X's poor database functionality (and in particular relational database functionality) to be a constant source of frustration.
What database functionality?!? As far as I can tell, there isn't any at all.
When I took computer programming in high school, it was all FORTRAN. We used a wonderfully dry textL FORTRAN IV with WATFOR and WATFIV. We didn't have any sort of microcomputer (this was 1980, and we were behind the times even then), but we had a keypunch, so we'd write code on a form, punch cards, rubber band 'em together, and send them off to be run on the district's big iron. Then you'd wait a week and get back a few sheet of green and white striped paper with ***SYNTAX ERROR*** all over it. And we liked it that way!
Although that was a toothache of a programming experience, I have never lost this bizarre fondness I have for that ugly, unwieldy, but somehow cool FORTRAN. Writing that stuff makes you feel like you're talking the language of a retro-scifi computer, like the ones in the original Star Trek that spoke in that odd mechanical monotone. Robby the Robot had to have been programmed in FORTRAN (and NO he was NOT a guy in a suit! I'm not listening! La la la!).
At any rate, old-fashioned FORTRAN may deserve to be bashed, but I can't help shedding a tear.
It was humor. You know, a funny ha-ha thing that makes you expel air and smile and make a noise (it's called laughter). See, grandparent made a rumor by stringing other rumors together. That's a way of making ha-ha. There are others. Give it a try some time.
There needs to be an onramp for the Internet and I don't see anyone else stepping up. Remember - you too were once an annoying helpless newbie!
I agree wholeheartedly. However, I also think USENET is not a good place for a complete noob. USENET is wonderful, but it can chew up newbies and spit them out pretty quickly. It's hard to be a useful contributor there without being well-versed in net culture, and AOL's interface made it look like just another discussion board and indirectly encouraged people to just wade in. One should spend some time reading a USENET group before posting.
I do get sick of the "AOL user = drooling idiot" meme, though.
Slashdot Mirror
I always thought that paranoids were the absolute height of egomania, since you have to think pretty highly of yourself to think that you're worth the effort.
You are obviously brilliant, because I have long said the same thing. Actually, the way I like to put it is that paranoia is a form of arrogance. As if we all have nothing better to do than plot ways to get some paranoid dweeb.
Zippy the Pinhead once referred to a glazed donut as a "toroidal carbohydrate module." Since I read that many years ago, I find it hard to just say "donut..."
Your reply is a dupe of a previous reply to a dupe of the article (dupe) to which you are replying. In dupe. I am outraged.
That's ridiculas.(sic) And when did I bash anyone for bashing Bill Gates? Sounds like you misinterpreted something.
Maybe. I saw a harangue about the definition of success capped off with a sarcastic mock that Gates is evil, etc. Sure looks like you were accusing him of Gates-hate.
If you ask only unbiased people who have no vested interest in a topic, you're going to get some pretty useless information.
I understand your point. That it's in Bill Gates best interest to paint a picture that will sell the most Microsoft products. But that doesn't mean he's not also qualified to speak on the subject.
Clearly, you are not understanding my point, because you extrapolate that I somewhere said he wasn't qualified to speak on the subject. I said he has a conflict of interest, which means he lacks objectivity. That doesn't mean he's not qualified to speak, it means his words are likely to be self-serving and should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Not only that, but that kind of conflict of interest is likely to result in a lot of safe feel-good talk. Did you read the article? Lots of words that say nothing at all, except that PCs are great.
It's kind of like saying you can't trust a professional mathematicians answer to a complex math problem, because he has a conflict of interest.
That is a horrendous analogy. Really. A better one would be asking a professional mathematician if professional mathematicians should all have their salaries doubled. Since there is in fact no conflict of interest in a mathematician answering questions about mathematics, I wouldn't say what you suggest.
You can't be unbiased AND an expert at the same time. Any expert without real field time, is a self claimed expert. And anyone who chooses to take answers from an unqualified expert deserves what they get.
That's fine, but it has nothing to do with anything I said. Nobody's asking for someone completely unbiased! I never even said such a person existed!
You have a very black or white view of this subject. People aren't either biased beyond hope or completely free of bias. There is a wide range of biases, and it's important to know what they are when evaluating what they say. Gates has a huge stake in people buying as many PCs as possible. He's conducting marketing in a piece like this, not offering any degree of objectivity.
Despite all that, I find myself agreeing with your point. It's like saying since George W Bush is President of the United States, we shouldn't trust anything he says about the United States.
Damn... You're right.
Thanks for agreeing, but you're agreeing with some half-baked analogy you made up, not "my point."
I don't trust anything Bush says about the effectiveness of his policies, because he's just a cheerleader for them, like Gates is for PCs. If Bush talked about how many people live in Oklahoma or where Yellowstone Park is, well, I wouldn't trust that either, but that's because he's an idiot, not because he has any reason to lie about that.
Oh, who am I kidding with this post. Sorry, I'll revert. MICROSOFT BAD! BILL GATES ARE EVIL! BRAINS!!!!
I'm sorry to interrupt your knee-jerking session, but what the hell does this have to do with the post you replied to?
It has nothing at all to do with an opinion about BG. It's that he has a CONFLICT OF INTEREST. It's like asking Steve Jobs to write about the usefulness of an iPod. Not objective, see?
A thought occurs: If you want to flame people who bash Gates, that's cool, but how about saving it for someone who actually did bash Gates?
I hate this kind of tech marketing drivel. I'm not just bashing Gates specifically, and in fact I'd say this article isn't as bad as most, but it still boils down to a trite load of platitudes. You can summarize this kind of article easily:
"Long time ago dumb terminals look now richly appointed digital tapestry personal computing unleash potential provide collaborative strategic business enhancers future digito-infotainment convergence aggregation hub integrating synergies for advancement of opportunity. Buy more. Thanks. Oh, and thin clients suck, give people their own hard drive for all the above to happen. Thanks again."
Seriously, is there anything notable here? So very insight-free.
I have an essential tremor, albeit a mild one. It only manifests itself severely when my muscles are tensed, like making a tight fist. Most of this time it's not a problem, but I have days when my hands are a little bit shaky and I'm prone to stray clicks. Accidentally closing a window is seriously annoying.
Tremors suck. People who have severe tremors need all the help they can get. I know someone with a severe tremor, and she has to put up with a lot of stares and sometimes hostility. Once a nurse yelled at her to HOLD STILL! while trying to take a blood sample, as if she were doing it on purpose just to piss the nurse off. Of course, the stress of that situation only made it worse.
What would really be nice would be bowls, glasses, and spoons that stay level so someone with a shaky hand could drink a martini or have some soup without spilling. Right now all they have are weighted utensils, which suck.
BTW, age is a factor, but essential tremors can happen at any age. I'm 40, and I've had this tremor for 20 years or so. Fortunately, it hasn't gotten worse.
10a Bilbo just poured hot grits down his pants!
She was on one of the celebrity poker shows a while back and... [shudder]. She was totally obnoxious, loud, and overbearing, and her voice was like teeth on a chalkboard.
Ye gods...
As for what "they" (the USGS is whom I presume you mean) plan to do, I imagine it is sit down and watch, issuing warnings if and when they are needed.
I read a book about Mt. Rainier (or as we call it up here, "The Mountain") in which the story was told of a USGS person who had to lay low in Orting as the bearer of bad news. He had been trying to get people to prepare for the possibility of a lahar like the Electron, which went right through where Orting now is. They asked him, "What can we do?" He said, "Get to high ground real fast." "No," they asked, "what do we do to protect our homes?" "Nothing," he said. They kept asking questions, and when he kept telling them there is nothing to be done to prevent this, many of them just got mad at him.
This is not to disparage the citizens of Orting. I understand they have a very good evacuation plan in place. But the initial reaction to the bad news appeared to be blaming the messenger.
It's hard for people to accept that there are forces of nature from which we can't shield ourselves. All we can do is try to get out of the way.
Here in Seattle (this goes for Redmond, too) we didn't get a whole lot of ash in 1980. The prevailing winds blow east, and we're north and a bit west. I remember one day when we got a light dusting, but that was about it.
My friend's dad was pulling his small boat back from a fishing trip to Moses Lake that day, and the boat filled up with ash.
It's entirely possible that the "baseline" that pundits and politicians and activists fight over is entirely a myth, and the national tests are simply badly designed. But than means that reailty is happilly out of sync with their understanding, not that you're in-line with their perception.
I think the fundamental problem with the tests is that they're only one metric. Not all students are good test-takers, but that doesn't mean they aren't capable. So the tests could be good, but by their very nature give an incomplete picture. Test scores are also better than most people think, which is not to say there aren't problems.
On a slightly related note--do you teach your students about alchemy, and show them how it's wrong?
Yes, I do. I also explain to them that alchemists found out a lot of useful things, albeit by chance. I tell them to remember that alchemists were intelligent people trying to make sense of their world, but they lacked the scientific method. We discuss philospher's stone and the universal panacaea, and I have the students tell me why they were never found, nor do they exist. I like to have students find answers, then I help them expand on them.
Assuming that you're a high school science teacher, which is the area under discussion:
I am. Mainly chemistry.
Are your students tested on the history of science, their ability to defend a conclusion, their experimental methedology, or their inquisitiveness? Or are they tested on facts, formulas, and figures?
Yes, and not only. Remember too that testing isn't the only assessment method. They are also graded on their lab notebooks, a research project in the history of science, problem sets, and so on. So I would prefer to substitute "graded" for "tested" in your question.
If the answers are "yes" and "not only", then you're a far better science teacher than any I've ever met, with a science program that I would love to enroll my children in.
You're kind to say that. All of the things I mentioned are part of my state's standards for science education. I try to go beyond the standards. But I've met some extraordinary colleagues in public schools. Contrary to popular opinion, we public school teachers don't all suck.
But you would also be far away from the baseline norm that the evolution vs. creationism argument is fought against.
How can you know this? Not being snotty, I really want to know.
I think there are more great teachers and schools out there than most assume.
Science classes are for teaching science.
No, they're not. They're for teaching about Scientific Discoveries. At the point in contention, students need to learn the what and the when far more than they need to know how we learned that. (And the "how we learned" is science.)
This is utterly wrong. I am a science teacher. I teach science, which includes history, the nature of science (I prefer that term to "scientific method"), the stories of the people who made scientific discoveries, and the plain facts of science as well. Teaching science is not simply to impart factual knowledge (which is very important, of course), but to lead to understanding and motivation. We want kids to want to become scientists. Learning that science has a fascinating history that is funny, tragic, messy, surprising, exciting, and so on both helps students place the discoveries in a proper context that leads to deeper understanding, and presents science as something one would want to be a part of.
A class that didn't address how we learned what we know would not only be boring, it would at best impart a very shallow understanding of science and fail to equip students to evaluate new discoveries that arise during the rest of their lives. Such a curriculum would be, in my opinion, educational malpractice.
Yeah. You got me. I typoed "unplug" when I meant "plug in." You win. I'm deeply ashamed. I wish you a wonderful weekend celebrating your decicive victory here today. Kudos.
There's a very simple SOP for Windows users that will completely eliminate the need for a fix:
1. Buy new PC
2. DO NOT PLUG IN NETWORK CABLE
3. Image drive to external storage wth Ghost or the like
4. Unplug external storage
5. Plug in network cable
6. Connect to Internet. Save any info needed for storage.
7. Unplug network cable
8. Print all info obtained in step 6
9. Plug external storage back in
10. Restore image made in step 3
11. File hardcopies in cabinet
12. Knock back 3 or more shots of your favorite liquor
13. Unplug network cable
14. Return to step 3 for new Internet sessions
What could be simpler?
(Why do people have to be told?)
I didn't. After the upgrade, I noticed I get jokes much more quickly! My comebacks are snappier, too!
LordPixie has just made the most perfectly on-target post I've seen on slashdot (and I've been here a while). Damn.
Please bend the rules, powers that be, and mod this one 6, Painful Truth.
Kudos, sir.
I had a bad experience with graphology woo-woo-heads about 20 years ago. I wrote about it to Bob Carroll of The Skeptic's DIsctionary, and it was posted in the reader's comments section. I'll just copy that here rather than retype the story:
Just wanted to let you know how much I appreciate your remarks about graphology. I've found that a distressing number of people assume there must be "something to it" without thinking about it at all. Let me share an anecdote regarding my brush with graphology:
When I graduated from college in 1986 with a degree in chemistry, I went to an employment agency, which got me an interview with a local paint company I'll call FooBar Paint. The unusual thing was, they asked me to submit a handwritten essay about my hobbies before they would schedule the interview. I complied with this request, and a few days later was told they would not interview me since they had determined some unspecified character flaw through graphological analysis.
I was livid, of course -- Both because they had dismissed me without even talking to me, and they had been dishonest in failing to tell me what they planned to do with my essay. I wanted to do something, but I was an impoverished and unemployed 21-year-old. Unable to hire an attorney, I contacted the Seattle Human Rights department, who was very interested in my story. SHR filed suit against FooBar, and subpoenaed all of their documents regarding hiring policy. We were suing for a job and back pay. It was quite a heady feeling.
Two days later, I got a phone call from the president, Mr. FooBar himself, asking me to come in for a personal interview. Mr. FooBar wanted to "set things straight" as it was costing him time and money to comply with SHR's document subpoena. When I got to his office, he explained that graphology was their preferred method of determining who fits into the "FooBar mosaic," as he put it. I explained that this was a totally unsubstantiated method, and asked him why he didn't employ witch doctors or use a magic 8-ball to determine a candidate's fitness. He had no answer for that, instead offering me a job if I'd drop the suit and take another handwriting test. Apparently, one of the qualities FooBar likes in its "mosaic" is unmitigated gall.
I ended up dropping the suit after FooBar twisted in the wind for a while. I had to get on with my life, and the best I could get was a job working for those clowns. Still, I felt I had made my point.
I sincerely hope that people refuse to take workplace pseudoscience lying down. If this type of "new age" employer is given free reign to evaluate people on graphology, I Ching, auras, or whatever, they'll just keep doing it.
There wasn't that much at stake in my case, but there could have been much more if my circumstances were different. People need to educate themselves about pseudosciences like graphology, so they might have the conviction to stand up against it as well as the facts to win the fight.
--end quote--
I'd like to add that when I went to SHR, I wasn't looking to sue them. I just wanted to know if what they did was legal and if not, ask them to call them and tell them so. But they just went forward and did it, and I was fine with it.
I'll never forget sitting in that idiot's (Mr. FooBar's) office. I swear, he looked just like Lumbergh, but lacked his intellect and personality.
You had zeroes?!? Before the punchcards, all we had were buckets of cow dung, and if we did anything at all, including nothing, we were killed! Twice!
I think 6 was the continuation column, in case you wanted to wrap a line.
In fact I often find Office for OS X's poor database functionality (and in particular relational database functionality) to be a constant source of frustration.
What database functionality?!? As far as I can tell, there isn't any at all.
When I took computer programming in high school, it was all FORTRAN. We used a wonderfully dry textL FORTRAN IV with WATFOR and WATFIV. We didn't have any sort of microcomputer (this was 1980, and we were behind the times even then), but we had a keypunch, so we'd write code on a form, punch cards, rubber band 'em together, and send them off to be run on the district's big iron. Then you'd wait a week and get back a few sheet of green and white striped paper with ***SYNTAX ERROR*** all over it. And we liked it that way!
Although that was a toothache of a programming experience, I have never lost this bizarre fondness I have for that ugly, unwieldy, but somehow cool FORTRAN. Writing that stuff makes you feel like you're talking the language of a retro-scifi computer, like the ones in the original Star Trek that spoke in that odd mechanical monotone. Robby the Robot had to
have been programmed in FORTRAN (and NO he was NOT a guy in a suit! I'm not listening! La la la!).
At any rate, old-fashioned FORTRAN may deserve to be bashed, but I can't help shedding a tear.
It was humor. You know, a funny ha-ha thing that makes you expel air and smile and make a noise (it's called laughter). See, grandparent made a rumor by stringing other rumors together. That's a way of making ha-ha. There are others. Give it a try some time.
There needs to be an onramp for the Internet and I don't see anyone else stepping up. Remember - you too were once an annoying helpless newbie!
I agree wholeheartedly. However, I also think USENET is not a good place for a complete noob. USENET is wonderful, but it can chew up newbies and spit them out pretty quickly. It's hard to be a useful contributor there without being well-versed in net culture, and AOL's interface made it look like just another discussion board and indirectly encouraged people to just wade in. One should spend some time reading a USENET group before posting.
I do get sick of the "AOL user = drooling idiot" meme, though.