Sierra Club and OnEarth (from NRDC) for a robust defense of the envirorment, something rarely seen anywhere else, and for giving some perspectives on the environmental crimes of the current administration.
SoftwareDevelopment, LinuxJournal, Dr.Dobbs, JavaPro, and occasionally Wired.
Well do they really, or is that just accepted wisdom? My vote goes for deadly dull accepted wisdom. I've seen one museum after another abandon their core mission and turn into some bastardized version of tv/entertainment/museum. And the ones that don't, like the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, are sued out of existence by the very people who have decided to offer Bread and Circuses instead of Art.
At some point someone has to say, well maybe we're doing more harm than good by going after the Average Joe so that we can get funding so that we can survive, etc. At that point they illustrate the phrase "a bureaucracie's main purpose is to perpetuate itself." Sadly this seems to happen to all bureaucracies, museums included, and in doing so they sign their own death warrant. On the other hand a visionary museum, author, cook, or whatever stakes his/her future on the belief that what he offers is valuable enough that people will come to him, not the other way around.
Most any other type of entertainment is better, maybe even intrinsically better as you suggest, because you can't get much more passive than tv. In other words you can't really be engaged with it and call upon your own faculties to interact with it. Basically you're a passive consumer.
I know, sometimes you want to be a passive consumer. I think that's the great addictive quality of tv. You feel like being a passive consumer once and pretty soon you don't know how to be anything other than a passive consumer. Reading a story for instance forces you to mentally visualize what the author says. Obviously everyone does this somewhat differently but I think that for most people it does require them to recollect their own experiences in order to make the words seem like pictures or at least something than just mere words. At the same time the slowness of this process gets your mind and imagination working. Perhaps it drifts off to something other than what you're reading. Perhaps it drifts off based on what you're reading. Some people would say that's the whole problem. You don't get far reading. It's work, you lose your attention and you drift off, when you really just want to be entertained. But for others it's the actual drifting off, coming to new thoughts, exercising your imagination that makes it valuable.
Obviously I could go on forever here, and many people have in books and articles. So I'll just leave it at this. I think the main point is that reading is a less passive activity and in most cases, that turns out to be more rewarding, mainly because it forces me to become involved. TV doesn't force much of anything other than watching mind-numbing commercials.
I hesitate to get going on another topic but will anyway. The last time I served on a jury I felt that a good number of fellow jurors thought they were reenacting something they'd seen on tv, like they were on their own tv show, rather than being individuals coming to an important decision about the defendants' and the plaintiffs' lives. It was scary.
I think the question is the quality of the entertainment. Spend your life in front of a tv and you'll never know that richer more rewarding types of entertainment, like reading for one, are available.
I think the idea is to just try it for a week. If you don't like in then go back to tv. But if you're afraid to even try, then tv sounds a wee bit like an addiction:-)
But who cares really, it's your life. As far as I'm concerned people who encourage you to watch less tv are like people who encouraged you not to smoke 25 years ago. Anyone can take or leave the advice but many people who took it were glad that they did.
There are a number of perspectives anyone can take on all of this, some purely economic, more purely political and all sorts of odd mixtures.
The one I'm most interested in is this: what obligation does the government have to its citizens? Should it do whatever it can to facilitate profits for businesses? Should it do whatever it can to maintain/attain a high standard of living for all its citizens. Most communities form out of self-interest. They gain more by being together than apart, and often hard compromises are necessary where individuals must give up something for the common good that they've agreed to support. My feeling is that citizens, government and business have all lost any sense of this commonality of interest. So the first question I would ask is: who gains by offshoring and is that gain for the common good or for a specialized good. My feeling is that it's really for a specialized good, large corporations, but I may be wrong. But I do think this is the most important question to ask.
Ever hear of Velcro? A great confluence of nature and technology.
All great technology is actually somewhat organic, IMHO, and in that sense has much to learn from nature. This on the other hand is just one more example of trees being wasted in order to create a facade, otherwise known as veneer. Sort of like a ranch house fronted by Greek columns. The owners usually never know how the rest of the world is laughing at them for their bad taste.
I think that will be the end result of this and in that case I have to agree with you. It's not that nature and technology mix, in fact I think the opposite. But rather a cheap imitation nature (wood veneer imitiating solid wood) being plastered on top of something that's wholly mechanical. There's no natural affinity for the wood and what's inside of it. So they'll always be a pretty dumb mixture.
On the other hand I've always wondered why I've never seen wooden computer furniture that didn't look bad. Wood and computer innards really don't have any organic connection. But I would think that wood furniture would be able to happily coexist with computers. But I've yet to see it, and I have seen a lot of craft woodworking attempts to make computer furniture.
That's interesting. I've always liked their hedcuts and also wondered how they did them. Long live the hand-drawers!
Re:Why are highly rated comments always sarcastic?
on
Junkie Loves His Spam
·
· Score: 1
Thanks. I will soon be changing all Funny mods to - something or other.
Re:Why are highly rated comments always sarcastic?
on
Junkie Loves His Spam
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for the advice. Someone else suggested -6 for funny. Either way I think adding the - to funny will make my reading much more enjoyable.
Why are highly rated comments always sarcastic?
on
Junkie Loves His Spam
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
This was on the front page of WSJ yesterday so I assume they did some fact checking on it. It wasn't buried in the back of the paper.
That said, my first reaction, is one I always have: why when an interesting topic comes up: why do I find only sarcastic/hopefully humorous comments get through my level 4 filter? Still waiting for an answer on that.
I read the article in paper and my reaction was that they did everyone a service by writing about such people. I have no idea why anyone would buy this stuff but the fact of the matter is that spammers wouldn't spam if they didn't make money from it. MS will only change the type of software they make when they don't make money from it. It's a simple, though perhaps unlikeable fact. For every piece of junk that clutters your tv screen, your mailbox or whatever there is a reason for it other than just to bother you (and me!). It's there because someone is making money from it and because someone, like the guy in article, actually buys it.
I don't think educating such buyers is a reasonable option. Sort of like educating the user of one OS to choose to go to another one. This afternoon I'm going to educate my.NET co-workers to move to Java. I don't think so.
But the only way to solve a problem is to understand it. The more we understand people like this guy the more likely it is that someone can find a way to direct spam/bad commercials to them and not the rest of us. Maybe a Do Call Me list.
Perhaps it's really just some study to show how much free time slashdotters have that they can respond to just about the most nonsensical thing I've seen so far this year.
$250 for a bulky contraption that will stink up the house? A joke. It's not Apri1 1 is it?
It's not ugly!! It's only ugly to people who haven't taken the time to learn it, just as vi is ugly to people who haven't taken the time to learn it.
Perl's ugliness just strikes me as a untested/unproven urban programmer myth.
I also code in Java. Its verbosity was originally as ugly to me as perl seems to be to others. But I no longer think so. They're just different, neither ugly, and both highly functional.
I completely agree. My spam has gone to 0-1%. The vast majority of it is correctly placed in Junk-Email or Junk-Suspects folders by SpamBayes.
And it does force some responsibility on the user in terms of setting it up. That's what makes it work so well.
Of course if you work at a place where people have nothing better to do than open e-cards then no filtering, outside of paycheck deductions, will have much effect.
I'd call it the longest article I've read on outsourcing but it really didn't say much. Today's story on front of WSJ about the lives of Indian call center workers was really much more interesting and informative.
But what I'd like to see is some thoughtful writing on what programmers and other workers whose jobs will be outsourced over the next few years can do to help themselves. Protests and legislation are one thing, and not an unimportant one, but they're not enough. The articles that I'v read take a very rosy view of creative destruction and the new better jobs that will arise here as these jobs are lost. I'd like to see some thoughful, not wishful, ideas on just what those might be.
Perhaps there are none. In that case we will have outsourced our most valuable jobs and soon nothing will be left to do here, outside of making more reality tv shows perhaps, and we'll decline quickly. Or maybe the security threat of moving such important work outside of US will prove to be real and people will reconsider the wisdom of outsourcing. Obviously history has a way of playing tricks with what people expect.
In my view, sad to say, outsourcing will continue, new and better jobs will not be created here, and we'll all be a little too late in realizing it. Hope I'm wrong.
That's because many years ago all the business in U.S. if not elsewhere opted to act like lemmings and choose Windows over the Mac, which at the time had a better OS, and certainly a better desktop. Once that happened users learned Windows at work and learned that computers were supposed to crash daily. Now that Windows doesn't crash that often the general user is happy and that's what he buys for home.
I wish it weren't so. But the only way that Linux will be successful on the desktop is when it's as easily installed as Windows, or more realistically comes from the factory installed on the pc, and blows up less than Windows currently does. These days Windows doesn't actually blow up all that much, unless of course, you choose to install a service pack or patch:-)
It's really only service packs and viruses that give Linux half a chance on the desktop. As I said, I wish it weren't so, and I do use Linux as my desktop, at least at home.
any intelligent suggestions, at least at my level 4 filtering. So I might ask why that is: 1)Is it because slashdotters are more interested in being clever than helpful? Most probably. 2)No one goes to trade shows or they go barefoot? 3)It didn't offer the proper rant opportunity. Who can rant about shoes or a shoe monopoly or hopelessly misguided cobblers?
I vote for number 1. My immediate response to the question before reading any replies was: what an interesting question. This really is a way to get some real world suggestions. But as I said all I've seen was "clever/funny" responses. I know it's easy to poke fun at such mundane questions but I hope that as the day wears on someone will actually offer some "informative" suggestions.
All I all I wonder if this doesn't say more about slashdotters than it does about shoes?
Modern literary criticism is like long drawn out hari-kari. Who knows why anyone would torture themselves with it. It reminds me of many years ago when I went back to college for an MFA in painting and happened to also take a cross-disciplinary course in literary criticism. My first degree had been in English and I'd decided not to pursue it because it just seemed fatuous, completely unrelated to the world I live in. Well anyway I'd hadn't been in this cross-disciplinary seminar for more than 10 minutes before my head started spinning and I had this horrible feeling of deja-vu, stuck in fatuous neverneverland, where anything could be said but nothing could be proved or disproved.
It's sort of like all code can only consist of goto statements and you spend all your time chasing your tail trying to find out what something really means, or where it gets its value. You can't because there'e nothing concrete there. Every goto goes to a new goto. The buck stops nowhere.
I suppose someone might be able to enjoy this but I think that the best artists and the best programmers eventually realize that total freedom is total chaos. There have to be some truths/constants/final variables/whatever. From there you can build something worth building.
Let's look at this from another perspective: Outsourcing Kills a Few Programmers
The blankety-blank today reported that a few programmers are dying each month due to lack of salary and consequent lack of food, heat, etc. But large corporations are thriving on the move and we really need to end the vicissitudes of the economy. We need large corporations to thrive and as they do they increase the value of their stock that is owned by all the people worth considering. That it turn keeps the economy humming.
Yes it is too bad that some talented and basically likeable people may die because of this but we really do need to get out from under the vicissitudes of a wavering economy.
Right you are. How can anyone whose been burnt by Windows think that anyone has the user in mind. Though I assume MS isn't really this nefarious it always seems to me like MS products are made to SEEM easy for Aunt Midge or whomever. Only when they've bought the program do they find that's it's only easy until it breaks and then you're SOL. If MS programmers cared about users the Help programs would come off as a Offer of Help not a Plea. Has anyone ever really found the answer to anything in a Windows Help file?? Give me a break. Sorry for the cliche but I just couldn't help myself.
SpamBayes is the answer at least in my experience. Yes it is a little work and makes the user become responsible for email management to some extent. But users are also responsible for putting gas in their cars.
Authentication is something I'm pretty unfamiliar with, at least in terms of how it would actually be implemented, but that seems to me like another example of users becoming responsible for themselves.
Perhaps the people who depend on email most will learn to use bayesian filters as well as authentication and the others will be left to just whine. Eventually they'll catch on as well.
Just my two cent prediction for what will eventually happen.
My god! Two informative responses in a row, by someone who actually read the article. I was wondering if I'd misread it myself since I recalled it saying that password was sniffed and then everyone went on about what type of password it was and how to come up with good passwords. If they're sniffed I don't see that it makes any difference.
This reminds me of an article, perhaps first read here, about someone saying that the age of IT departments was about over. The problem of security and general ignorance about security seems to indicate that that really is untrue. It's sort of like people having their first gas stoves and no one warning them that it's not safe to just leave the gas turned on all day, or having their first car and not being told about the brakes. When computer users use their computers with the same intelligence that they use appliances like stoves and cars (and I do realize it's probably a minority of population that DOES use them with intelligence) then I think it will be safe to say IT departments are no longer necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
Sierra Club and OnEarth (from NRDC) for a robust defense of the envirorment, something rarely seen anywhere else, and for giving some perspectives on the environmental crimes of the current administration.
SoftwareDevelopment, LinuxJournal, Dr.Dobbs, JavaPro, and occasionally Wired.
Oh yes, FineWoodworking, for keeping me sane!
Well do they really, or is that just accepted wisdom? My vote goes for deadly dull accepted wisdom. I've seen one museum after another abandon their core mission and turn into some bastardized version of tv/entertainment/museum. And the ones that don't, like the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, are sued out of existence by the very people who have decided to offer Bread and Circuses instead of Art.
At some point someone has to say, well maybe we're doing more harm than good by going after the Average Joe so that we can get funding so that we can survive, etc. At that point they illustrate the phrase "a bureaucracie's main purpose is to perpetuate itself." Sadly this seems to happen to all bureaucracies, museums included, and in doing so they sign their own death warrant. On the other hand a visionary museum, author, cook, or whatever stakes his/her future on the belief that what he offers is valuable enough that people will come to him, not the other way around.
Take a chance. Believe in what you're doing.
I'm just curious as to which Rembrandt sculpture you're talking about, number 0 or number -1.
Most any other type of entertainment is better, maybe even intrinsically better as you suggest, because you can't get much more passive than tv. In other words you can't really be engaged with it and call upon your own faculties to interact with it. Basically you're a passive consumer.
I know, sometimes you want to be a passive consumer. I think that's the great addictive quality of tv. You feel like being a passive consumer once and pretty soon you don't know how to be anything other than a passive consumer. Reading a story for instance forces you to mentally visualize what the author says. Obviously everyone does this somewhat differently but I think that for most people it does require them to recollect their own experiences in order to make the words seem like pictures or at least something than just mere words. At the same time the slowness of this process gets your mind and imagination working. Perhaps it drifts off to something other than what you're reading. Perhaps it drifts off based on what you're reading. Some people would say that's the whole problem. You don't get far reading. It's work, you lose your attention and you drift off, when you really just want to be entertained. But for others it's the actual drifting off, coming to new thoughts, exercising your imagination that makes it valuable.
Obviously I could go on forever here, and many people have in books and articles. So I'll just leave it at this. I think the main point is that reading is a less passive activity and in most cases, that turns out to be more rewarding, mainly because it forces me to become involved. TV doesn't force much of anything other than watching mind-numbing commercials.
I hesitate to get going on another topic but will anyway. The last time I served on a jury I felt that a good number of fellow jurors thought they were reenacting something they'd seen on tv, like they were on their own tv show, rather than being individuals coming to an important decision about the defendants' and the plaintiffs' lives. It was scary.
I think the question is the quality of the entertainment. Spend your life in front of a tv and you'll never know that richer more rewarding types of entertainment, like reading for one, are available.
I think the idea is to just try it for a week. If you don't like in then go back to tv. But if you're afraid to even try, then tv sounds a wee bit like an addiction:-)
But who cares really, it's your life. As far as I'm concerned people who encourage you to watch less tv are like people who encouraged you not to smoke 25 years ago. Anyone can take or leave the advice but many people who took it were glad that they did.
There are a number of perspectives anyone can take on all of this, some purely economic, more purely political and all sorts of odd mixtures.
The one I'm most interested in is this: what obligation does the government have to its citizens? Should it do whatever it can to facilitate profits for businesses? Should it do whatever it can to maintain/attain a high standard of living for all its citizens. Most communities form out of self-interest. They gain more by being together than apart, and often hard compromises are necessary where individuals must give up something for the common good that they've agreed to support. My feeling is that citizens, government and business have all lost any sense of this commonality of interest. So the first question I would ask is: who gains by offshoring and is that gain for the common good or for a specialized good. My feeling is that it's really for a specialized good, large corporations, but I may be wrong. But I do think this is the most important question to ask.
Ever hear of Velcro? A great confluence of nature and technology.
All great technology is actually somewhat organic, IMHO, and in that sense has much to learn from nature. This on the other hand is just one more example of trees being wasted in order to create a facade, otherwise known as veneer. Sort of like a ranch house fronted by Greek columns. The owners usually never know how the rest of the world is laughing at them for their bad taste.
I think that will be the end result of this and in that case I have to agree with you. It's not that nature and technology mix, in fact I think the opposite. But rather a cheap imitation nature (wood veneer imitiating solid wood) being plastered on top of something that's wholly mechanical. There's no natural affinity for the wood and what's inside of it. So they'll always be a pretty dumb mixture.
On the other hand I've always wondered why I've never seen wooden computer furniture that didn't look bad. Wood and computer innards really don't have any organic connection. But I would think that wood furniture would be able to happily coexist with computers. But I've yet to see it, and I have seen a lot of craft woodworking attempts to make computer furniture.
Long live nature! Long live technology!
That's interesting. I've always liked their hedcuts and also wondered how they did them. Long live the hand-drawers!
Thanks. I will soon be changing all Funny mods to - something or other.
Thanks for the advice. Someone else suggested -6 for funny. Either way I think adding the - to funny will make my reading much more enjoyable.
This was on the front page of WSJ yesterday so I assume they did some fact checking on it. It wasn't buried in the back of the paper.
.NET co-workers to move to Java. I don't think so.
That said, my first reaction, is one I always have: why when an interesting topic comes up: why do I find only sarcastic/hopefully humorous comments get through my level 4 filter? Still waiting for an answer on that.
I read the article in paper and my reaction was that they did everyone a service by writing about such people. I have no idea why anyone would buy this stuff but the fact of the matter is that spammers wouldn't spam if they didn't make money from it. MS will only change the type of software they make when they don't make money from it. It's a simple, though perhaps unlikeable fact. For every piece of junk that clutters your tv screen, your mailbox or whatever there is a reason for it other than just to bother you (and me!). It's there because someone is making money from it and because someone, like the guy in article, actually buys it.
I don't think educating such buyers is a reasonable option. Sort of like educating the user of one OS to choose to go to another one. This afternoon I'm going to educate my
But the only way to solve a problem is to understand it. The more we understand people like this guy the more likely it is that someone can find a way to direct spam/bad commercials to them and not the rest of us. Maybe a Do Call Me list.
And I thought it was just because I had decaf this morning........
Perhaps it's really just some study to show how much free time slashdotters have that they can respond to just about the most nonsensical thing I've seen so far this year.
$250 for a bulky contraption that will stink up the house? A joke. It's not Apri1 1 is it?
It's not ugly!! It's only ugly to people who haven't taken the time to learn it, just as vi is ugly to people who haven't taken the time to learn it.
Perl's ugliness just strikes me as a untested/unproven urban programmer myth.
I also code in Java. Its verbosity was originally as ugly to me as perl seems to be to others. But I no longer think so. They're just different, neither ugly, and both highly functional.
I completely agree. My spam has gone to 0-1%. The vast majority of it is correctly placed in Junk-Email or Junk-Suspects folders by SpamBayes.
And it does force some responsibility on the user in terms of setting it up. That's what makes it work so well.
Of course if you work at a place where people have nothing better to do than open e-cards then no filtering, outside of paycheck deductions, will have much effect.
I'd call it the longest article I've read on outsourcing but it really didn't say much. Today's story on front of WSJ about the lives of Indian call center workers was really much more interesting and informative.
But what I'd like to see is some thoughtful writing on what programmers and other workers whose jobs will be outsourced over the next few years can do to help themselves. Protests and legislation are one thing, and not an unimportant one, but they're not enough. The articles that I'v read take a very rosy view of creative destruction and the new better jobs that will arise here as these jobs are lost. I'd like to see some thoughful, not wishful, ideas on just what those might be.
Perhaps there are none. In that case we will have outsourced our most valuable jobs and soon nothing will be left to do here, outside of making more reality tv shows perhaps, and we'll decline quickly. Or maybe the security threat of moving such important work outside of US will prove to be real and people will reconsider the wisdom of outsourcing. Obviously history has a way of playing tricks with what people expect.
In my view, sad to say, outsourcing will continue, new and better jobs will not be created here, and we'll all be a little too late in realizing it. Hope I'm wrong.
That's because many years ago all the business in U.S. if not elsewhere opted to act like lemmings and choose Windows over the Mac, which at the time had a better OS, and certainly a better desktop. Once that happened users learned Windows at work and learned that computers were supposed to crash daily. Now that Windows doesn't crash that often the general user is happy and that's what he buys for home.
I wish it weren't so. But the only way that Linux will be successful on the desktop is when it's as easily installed as Windows, or more realistically comes from the factory installed on the pc, and blows up less than Windows currently does. These days Windows doesn't actually blow up all that much, unless of course, you choose to install a service pack or patch:-)
It's really only service packs and viruses that give Linux half a chance on the desktop. As I said, I wish it weren't so, and I do use Linux as my desktop, at least at home.
any intelligent suggestions, at least at my level 4 filtering. So I might ask why that is:
1)Is it because slashdotters are more interested in being clever than helpful? Most probably.
2)No one goes to trade shows or they go barefoot?
3)It didn't offer the proper rant opportunity. Who can rant about shoes or a shoe monopoly or hopelessly misguided cobblers?
I vote for number 1. My immediate response to the question before reading any replies was: what an interesting question. This really is a way to get some real world suggestions. But as I said all I've seen was "clever/funny" responses. I know it's easy to poke fun at such mundane questions but I hope that as the day wears on someone will actually offer some "informative" suggestions.
All I all I wonder if this doesn't say more about slashdotters than it does about shoes?
Modern literary criticism is like long drawn out hari-kari. Who knows why anyone would torture themselves with it. It reminds me of many years ago when I went back to college for an MFA in painting and happened to also take a cross-disciplinary course in literary criticism. My first degree had been in English and I'd decided not to pursue it because it just seemed fatuous, completely unrelated to the world I live in. Well anyway I'd hadn't been in this cross-disciplinary seminar for more than 10 minutes before my head started spinning and I had this horrible feeling of deja-vu, stuck in fatuous neverneverland, where anything could be said but nothing could be proved or disproved.
It's sort of like all code can only consist of goto statements and you spend all your time chasing your tail trying to find out what something really means, or where it gets its value. You can't because there'e nothing concrete there. Every goto goes to a new goto. The buck stops nowhere.
I suppose someone might be able to enjoy this but I think that the best artists and the best programmers eventually realize that total freedom is total chaos. There have to be some truths/constants/final variables/whatever. From there you can build something worth building.
Let's look at this from another perspective:
Outsourcing Kills a Few Programmers
The blankety-blank today reported that a few programmers are dying each month due to lack of salary and consequent lack of food, heat, etc. But large corporations are thriving on the move and we really need to end the vicissitudes of the economy. We need large corporations to thrive and as they do they increase the value of their stock that is owned by all the people worth considering. That it turn keeps the economy humming.
Yes it is too bad that some talented and basically likeable people may die because of this but we really do need to get out from under the vicissitudes of a wavering economy.
So what to you value more? Birds or progammers?
Ride a bike, enjoy the birds you see on your trip.
Right you are. How can anyone whose been burnt by Windows think that anyone has the user in mind. Though I assume MS isn't really this nefarious it always seems to me like MS products are made to SEEM easy for Aunt Midge or whomever. Only when they've bought the program do they find that's it's only easy until it breaks and then you're SOL. If MS programmers cared about users the Help programs would come off as a Offer of Help not a Plea. Has anyone ever really found the answer to anything in a Windows Help file?? Give me a break. Sorry for the cliche but I just couldn't help myself.
SpamBayes is the answer at least in my experience. Yes it is a little work and makes the user become responsible for email management to some extent. But users are also responsible for putting gas in their cars.
Authentication is something I'm pretty unfamiliar with, at least in terms of how it would actually be implemented, but that seems to me like another example of users becoming responsible for themselves.
Perhaps the people who depend on email most will learn to use bayesian filters as well as authentication and the others will be left to just whine. Eventually they'll catch on as well.
Just my two cent prediction for what will eventually happen.
My god! Two informative responses in a row, by someone who actually read the article. I was wondering if I'd misread it myself since I recalled it saying that password was sniffed and then everyone went on about what type of password it was and how to come up with good passwords. If they're sniffed I don't see that it makes any difference.
This reminds me of an article, perhaps first read here, about someone saying that the age of IT departments was about over. The problem of security and general ignorance about security seems to indicate that that really is untrue. It's sort of like people having their first gas stoves and no one warning them that it's not safe to just leave the gas turned on all day, or having their first car and not being told about the brakes. When computer users use their computers with the same intelligence that they use appliances like stoves and cars (and I do realize it's probably a minority of population that DOES use them with intelligence) then I think it will be safe to say IT departments are no longer necessary.
Half way through my Level 4 threshold filtering of this thread and I think this is the first serious response to the thread.
Humor's fine but you do have to wonder when over 90% of the highly rated responses in a thread are comic or flip.
Thanks for some serious responses to the topic.
Maybe it's time for me to stop reading as I find I spend more time commenting on the comments than anything else!!