I am tired of having to defend my purchase of the PS3 to people blindly assuming 'everyone has a 360, why get a PS3?'
Uh... why do you feel you need to defend your purchase of the PS3? I'm pretty confident nobody on the Internet really cares what you, personally, have bought and why.
If you're happy with your PS3, that's great. But any anguish from "having to defend" is just coming from within yourself. There will always be flame wars around consoles on the Internet. Learn to just relax and enjoy the consoles you own. Who cares what other people on the Internet think is the better console? If you're happy with your console, that's all that matters, right?
nowaday, a lot of people do "bad deeds" unknowingly because their computer was zombified. But even then, after a single warning, you should get your shit together and get your computer fixed, cleaned, protected. A 30$ router and a 60$ AV/AS software works wonders (not PERFECT, but a lot better than an unpatched unprotected computer plugged in directly in the cablemodem).
A lot of people have no idea how computers work and are not interested in learning. Router may prevent external computers from exploiting open ports or whatever, but nothing's going to stop the user who downloads and runs an ".exe" because the website claimed it was a "required plugin" for viewing the secret porn content. Even if the antivirus pops up a warning, the user is just as likely to disable it, or add this.exe as an "exception", to be able to get at the porn.
Yes, heaven forbid that a group of people try to maintain and preserve their unique culture and heritage - just like China, Japan, and hundreds of other countries do.
Preserving culture and heritage is fine. Forcing people who have no interest in your culture and heritage to learn your language is not fine.
There are at least 85 languages which are extinct in North America alone (citation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinct_languages_of_North_America). If someone wants to preserve the culture by learning one or more of those languages, that's perfectly fine by me. What's completely ridiculous is forbidding people to send their children to English schools (because English is not a dying language), and forcing them to attend a Molalan school instead, all in the name of preserving culture. What's completely ridiculous is making it illegal to post any commercial signs in English, and instead saying all commercial signs be written in Coquille. "Sorry, you can't name your cafe 'Starbucks Coffee'. You'll have to translate the name to whatever the Coquille equivalent is." What's completely ridiculous is forbidding the sales of videogames unless they've been translated to Piro.
Montreal (a city in Quebec, for those less geographically inclined) has a beautiful section of the city called "Chinatown", and no sane person would argue that Chinatown is not part of the unique culture and heritage of Montreal (and thus of Quebec). So why do the Quebec language police go to Chinatown and tell the restaurant owners there that they can't have their signs in Chinese, instead these signs must be written in French?
If it were up to me, people should be allowed to learn whatever languages they want, and post commercial signs in whatever languages they want, and provide service in whatever languages they want. You want to open up a restaurant where all the staff only speak Yaquinan? Perfectly fine with me. Maybe it'll turn out to be a bad idea because none of your potential customers speak Yaquinan, and thus your business will suffer. Or maybe it'll turn out great, and you'll revive the Yaquinan language. You're an adult, and thus allowed to make these decisions yourself and live responsibly with the consequences.
The only exception to this rule is any government provided service should speak, at a minimum, all the official languages of the region. So for example, since the official languages of Canada are French and English, then post offices employees, public transport employees, police officers, firefighters, public school teachers, free clinic doctors, etc. would all be required by law to speak both French and English, and have signs in at least these two languages. They are free to speak more languages, and have signs translated into more languages if they like. Private businesses (like restaurants, stores, etc.) have no minimum requirements on language at all. The capitalistic free-market is enough of a pressure to push them towards supporting whatever languages are spoken in their region.
Does being at the top of the geek game seriously require the lack of a 15 minute shower or a 10 minute trip to the washer/dryer for laundry? Isn't there some sort of larger personality issue involved there?
The lack of showering and laundering is a facet of that "personality issue". If you're the type of person who would rather spend an extra 15 minutes learning Haskell than shower, then you're a "true geek". If you value "smelling good", "having clean clothes", etc. more than "having 15 more minutes to tinker with your computer", then you're not a "true geek".
Also, I don't hang my hat on being straight - do you really need to point out that you're gay in your xbox profile?
You probably don't mention that you're straight in your profile because most people are straight. Usually you don't bother listing data which applies to the majority of people. For example, I bother listing that I'm a "drummer" on my profile, because most people aren't. I don't do it because I have an agenda I'm pushing whereby I feel like drummers are being persecuted and I want to push this fact into everyone's face or anything like that. I don't bother mentioning that "I am not blind nor deaf" because most people are not blind nor deaf.
Perhaps the woman in the article was pretty average in most respects (does okay in school, doesn't really like school, but doesn't hate it either. Likes music. Likes mass media like movies, TV, etc. Not blind. Not deaf. Not in a wheelchair. Right handed. Enjoys junk food sometimes. Not a vegetarian. Etc.), and being a lesbian happened to be the most "unusual" thing about her that she was willing to admit to the world.
So when faced with the task of writing her own profile, she tried to think about what information was most striking about her, and she figured that was it.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with the concept of "prescriptivism vs descriptivism". If not, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descriptive_linguistics and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription I just want to say that you are taking a "prescriptivist" stance, whereas I am a descriptivist. We simply disagree about something, and there aren't really any arguments that would compel a prescritivist to convert to descriptivism nor vice versa. So that's all I'll say about this particular point. Now, moving on:
A phobia is not a hatred, it's a fear; a paralyzing fear of something, one so great that it's debilitating.
Whatever else you wish to say about opponents of homosexuality, they don't have a phobia.
It's not unusual for words to have a meaning different from that which their components would imply. "Pencil lead" is not made from lead. "steamroller" does not use steam. "shooting stars" are neither shooting, nor are they stars. "peanut" is neither a pea, nor a nut. A palm tree is neither a palm, nor a tree (it's actually a type of grass). You can't park on a "parkway". "Filming" doesn't always involve film (e.g. when using digital video). "Tin foil" are usually made from aluminum, not tin. A "windmill" is sometimes used to refer to things which are not actually mills, but a turbines. People talk of "dialing" telephone numbers, even when push buttons are used instead of a dial. "Starfish" are not fish, and aren't even shaped like stars (which are giant spheres, not pointed geometric figures).
In other words, that's just the way English is. And trying to fight it is a losing battle. Even if you convince everyone in the word to stop using the term "homosexual", do you think you could convince everyone to stop using the term "starfish"?
I think you completely misinterpreted the Grandparent's post. Here it is again:
Stop it. Stop the Homophobia bullshit. There's no such thing as Homophobia. There are people that think homosexual conduct is immoral, or abnormal. That doesn't mean they have a phobia. A phobia is a clinical condition, recognized by psychologists. There's no such thing in the DSM. "Homophobia" is a marketing term for one side of the argument, a buzzword.
The GP is basically arguing that "phobia" has a very specific technical meaning in psychology, and there are no known cases of people having a phobia of homosexuals. (Note I'm not saying I agree with the GP, I'm just clarifying what the GP is saying). In particular, notice that the GP has no made any value judgements about homosexuals at all. We do not know if the GP respects homosexual's rights or not. There is no information in that posts which indicates one way or another. It is purely a linguistic-criticism post.
And since you bring it up, you may want to look in your latest DSM to see if homosexuality is immoral or abnormal.
You're implying that the GP has mistaken beliefs about whether or not homosexuality is immoral and/or abnormal. There is no evidence of this in the GP's post. The GP said that there exist people who think homosexuality is immoral and/or abnormal. And it's true that such people exist (for evidence, read this slashdot thread; there are people are who explicitly admitting that they think homosexuality is immoral and abnormal). The GP did not say that (s)he was one of these people. And in case it needs to be said, notice that I also am not claiming to be one of these people.
You can justify your bigotry any way you like, but it is still bigotry.
You're implying that the GP was trying to justify some form of bigotry. Instead, the GP was just making a linguistic criticism. The GP simply wants people to stop using the word "homophobia" because it "doesn't mean what people think it means".
Note that I disagree with the GP, and think "homophobia" is a perfectly appropriate term to describe dislike for homosexuals. I am not agreeing with the GP. I am merely clarifying what the GP is saying.
Just because some dude in a weird outfit claims that some invisible guy in the sky says that something is bad and wrong does not make it so.
Please don't arbitrarily bring up religion out of nowhere to mock it. It makes atheists like me look bad. =( It makes it easier for religious people I debate against to offer evidence that atheists are persecuting them.
The only people who think homosexuality is abnormal or immoral are people who's religion or culture told them that.
I disagree. It's easily conceivable that an isolated tribes of humans somewhere in the tropical rain forest would be small enough to have never actually encountered homosexuality at all. They might not even have a word for the concept. Thus these people have not had their religion nor their culture tell them that homosexuality is abnormal. Then, when you present explain homosexuality to them, it is very plausible that they would consider it "abnormal", since by definition what is normal to them is that which occurs frequently, and homosexually has never occurred for them.
Nobody is born thinking it is wrong.
True, but unfair. Nobody is born thinking that homosexuality is right either. You're not capable of thinking very complex thoughts at all when you're born.
Nobody arrives at that conclusion without coercion from an outside source.
I disagree, see the example of the isolated amazon tribe I presented earlier.
i understand your point, and frankly, i don't use xbox live, so i don't know how visible/important the profile is.
I've had an Xbox Live account for about 2 years now, and probably played with thousands of different people online. I've only ever looked at 3 profiles. Why? Because it's a hassle to stop playing the game, go to list of people I'm playing with, select them, then scroll to the section which shows their profile info. During this time I'm wasting looking for their profile, I could be playing instead.
Er, no. I seriously don't give the slightest damn about anyone's sexual orientation unless they are female and I'm in the process of offering them a drink.
Yeah, yeah, we get it. You are attracted to females. Will you stop repeating that in every fricking post you make? Geez, you're starting to get annoying flaunting your sexuality like that.
The game of playing the victim regardless of what actually happened. This case is not in any way equatable to real discrimination. She wasnt kicked because she IS a lesbian. She was kicked because she was flaunting it and refused to stop.
How did you arrive at this conclusion? From what I understand from the article, the woman in question mentioned that she was a lesbian in her profile. There is no evidence that she actually mentioned that she was a lesbian via any other medium (e.g. in-game chat). People started harassing her for being a lesbian. She was willing to leave the current map and go to other maps to avoid confrontation with these people. These people followed her into the new maps, and asked other people to join in in harassing her.
This doesn't sound like "flaunting it and refusing to stop" to me.
I personally do not like homosexuality at all (BTW, where is my freedom of speech to say that without being flamed for it?),
I'm assuming you live in some developed western nation (e.g. USA, Canada, Europe, etc.). If so, you have "freedom of speech". Everyone in those nations do. You don't have "freedom of speech without being flamed for it". Nobody in those nations do.
You have the freedom to say "I don't like gay people". Other people have the freedom to say "I don't like people who don't like gay people."
In an elective setting where you are there of your own choice (like a live account) then the owner/manager of that setting has the right to say what they will or will not allow.
Hmm, I'm not so sure about that. I don't know what nation you live in, but in the one I live in, there are laws against discriminating against sexual orientation (among other things). For example, going to a restaurant is an "elective setting where you are there of your own choice", but the owner/manager is not allowed to kick you out of the restaurant simply for being gay.
Perhaps the owner can kick you out if you're shouting at the other customer (and it doesn't really matter if they are shouting "I am a lesbian" or "Pi is approximately 3.14" or anything else, it's the shouting itself which is innappropriate).
But if the owner of the restaurant provides everyone with a piece of paper with the heading "Profile: Please write a few words about yourslef here", they probably cannot kick someone out for writing "I am a lesbian" in the profile.
And again, you seem to have the impression that the woman was "flaunting it". I am of the impression that she wasn't.
maybe even shut up about your sexual orientation like all of us straight people do about ours.
While I don't want to argue that it is appropriate to identify your sexual orientation in your profile, the "shut up about your sexual orientation like all of us straight people do about ours" is not very fair, because if someone is silent about their orientation, the default assumption is that they are straight.
I guess to get an idea of what it would feel like to be forced to "shut up" about being homosexual, you could perform this experiment: Go to a gay bar, and "shut up" about being straight. If someone hits on you, you can turn them down by saying you're not interested in them, or that you're only here to relax or something, but you cannot turn them down by saying "Sorry, I'm straight."
Even then, I'm not sure you'd get the full effect as the person in the article did, because presumably girls on Xbox live get a lot more unwanted sexual advances than a typical guy (I'm assuming you're a guy since your username is "rob") would get in a gay bar.
And seriously, most users really don't care. Mp3 is a proprietary format. Microsoft Word.doc is a proprietary format. Excel is a proprietary format. Flash is a proprietary format. People still use them anyway. Perhaps some of them figure that if it becomes an issue, "someone" will do "something" about it. Didn't the EU make a big push to force Microsoft Office formats to be more open, for example?
But I'm probably being too generous to those users. Probably most of them really don't think that far ahead, or at all, about the implications of closed formats.
Open Source zealots still use IE to post to Slashdot. Why?
Because MS is an OS monopoly that illegally ties its browser to its OS. It's difficult to get away from Windows and IE, because of their anticompetitive behavior. That's the whole point of the EU decision!
Wait, what?
Seriously?
There exists open-source zealots who find it "difficult" to find another browser than IE to post on Slashdot? Let me help them out, then: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
Your calculator and notepad examples are relevant.. IF Microsoft had not been suppling these apps since the 3.0 days and there where people selling them as separate apps, you can bet your ass they would be pissed when all of a sudden MS included them in the OS for free. What do you think would happen if the next version of Windows suddenly included a photo editor that was on par or better than Photoshop ?
End-users like me would be ecstatic. We wouldn't have to pay-for/pirate Photoshop anymore. We'd think it's great. We'd think of it as progress. We'd think everything is as it should be: We upgraded Windows, and now we're getting more functionality. What's there to not like about that?
If Abobe started firing off lawsuits to force Microsoft to make their photo-editor more crappy, so that they could compete, we'd get pissed at Adobe. We might compare them to the RIAA, or those DRM makers who lobby to have products intentionally made more crappy just so that they could line their products better. We'd make satirical analogies to the horse industry outlawing the development of automobiles, less they go out of business. We'd say "That's free market. Nobody OWES you guaranteed success in business. Sometimes a game changer will show up that will put you out of business. The government should be serving the common people, and not corporate fatcats like Adobe."
I make a competing calculator (hypothetically). I want an icon on the desktop for the Windows Calculator, Maxima, Octave and Mathematica.
I also (again, hypothetically) make a notepad replacement. I want my product, Notepad++, Wordpad, Microsoft Word, and a half dozen scintilla-based knockoffs.
I also hypothetically make an alternative desktop shell. Because Microsoft FORCES you to use theirs, before you even get to see all of the five BILLION other fucking icons, I want a screen to pop up with only a mouse, and a choice of shells. Mine, which doesn't support UAC, separation of privileges, explorer shells (which will confuse the heck out of people,) explorer extensions (bye-bye TortoiseSVN, TortoiseHG, etc,) or other features. Also included should be shells that barely work.
And finally, after booting into Windows becomes a clusterfuck of choosing about eighteen trillion defaults, I as a developer expect my users to have a relatively stable and ubiquitous set of APIs available.
Oh wait, we threw that out the window.
Fuck.
Here's an idea. Let Microsoft keep doing what they're doing and easily choose between default programs, and even allow those programs to prompt the user to alter their default. Because any other option is fraught with favoritism and is just going to cram OEM desktops with more bullshit than ever before, and make the idea of targeting the Windows desktop from a developer or support perspective laughable.
Oh, God... Mod parent up! This is one of the things I really don't like about most Linux distributions (why do we have 20 text editors installed by default?), and one of the things I like about Ubuntu. They chose Gedit for me. I like it that they chose for me. It saves people like me, who really don't care about which text editor they use, the hassle of needing to make yet another decision, and yet doesn't restrict the people who actually care from firing up Synaptic and getting the text editor they want.
I like Ubuntu's policy of "choose defaults for me, and give me the freedom to override them if I actually care enough to do so." I like Microsoft's policy of "choose defaults for me, and give me the freedom to override them if I actually care enough to do so."
If you're curious about this philosophy, I strongly recommend reading Barry Schartz's book, "The Paradox Of Choice". It talks about how people tend to become less happy the more choices they have presented to them.
I think what would be even better would be an option when you get a new computer that says "Would you like to fully uninstall windows on this machine and be mailed your money back for the cost of windows that you have paid when purchasing this machine?". That would be pretty neat:)
I think it would cause a lot of angry clueless users (the most dangerous kind). They'll see the words "money", and so they'll click yes, and then complain to their OEMs when their machine stops working, and won't be interested in learning what an "OS" is, or why their computer needs one.
What a stupid statement. This is not an unreasonable request, and is something that the US gov should have done a long time ago. Microsoft has produced such shitty browsers, they should in fact be banned from being allowed to produce such an important piece of software.
Personally, I am of the opinion that people should not be banned from producing software just because it is shitty. Imagine the very first build of Linux: it was probably shitty at first, perhaps it only ran on Linus' machine, and wasn't portable, couldn't actually run any applications at all, etc. It got better over time, right? But even if it hadn't gotten better, who are we to stop him from producing it? He can do what he wants with his free time.
A more realistic solution would be to allow people to permanently uninstall Internet Explorer. This really is my biggest gripe. There is no choice because even if you choose another browser, you can't choose to not have Internet Explorer at the same time.
If you look further up the thread, someone else already addressed this point quite well. In summary, they wrote that you *CAN* uninstall IE. It'll just leave behind various DLLs related to things such as HTML rendering, which is used by other applications (e.g. the "help" system depends on HTML rendering). To drive this point home, they add sarcastically (paraphrased here from memory): "IE uses scrollbars, right? IE isn't *completely* uninstalled unless it should also uninstall any DLLs related to renderign scrollbar GUI widgets."
Why not just take a simple approach. When the user clicks a "Internet" button for the first time, they are presented with an option to either install IE or are given links to install files for a bunch of competitors browsers?
MS-hater double clicks on the "Internet" icon.
Windows asks MS-hater if they want to use Internet Explorer.
MS-hater chooses "no".
Windows says "Fine, here are the links to competing browsers...."
MS-hater gleefully copies the links into his clipboard.
MS-hater says to himself "Now, all I have to do is paste this link into a web browser to navigate to the site and install a web browser."
Why don't they instead consider, at least in Europe, dropping IE and replacing it with something more standards complaint. Bundling Opera would sure make some people ecstatic.
Or maybe they could sell a new version of Windows exclusively to Europe -- "Windows 7 - Crappy Edition For Europeans" -- which doesn't include any webbrowser at all? They could do this knowing full well that everyone in Europe will just import the non-European versions anyway.
"here are two sets of rules, those for Microsoft, and those for Apple."
No, there is the set of rules for the convicted monopolist Microsoft, and then no rules for anybody else, including Apple, Linux (distributions thereof), BSD (distributions thereof), Sun,...
And I agree with the grand-parent-post that having one rule set of rules for Microsoft, and a different set of rules (call it the "null set", if you like) for "anybody else" kind of sucks. I fully understand the argument behind it, but I still think it's a bad idea.
I think the GPP's core arguments still apply and are left unaddressed:
The OS's features are stripped to shit as it is because of these stupid laws.
MS may like having IE intergrated into the OS, where as Firefox doesnt like that approach. Why cant MS intergrate the browser the way they want and leave Firefox to develope how they want?
What browsers CANT you run on windows? Opera, Safari, Firefox... they all run on windows. Where is the problem?
Sure, Microsoft killed off Netscape in the past. But Netscape was a "for-profit" project. You had to actually pay money to run a copy of the "Netscape Navigator Gold" webbrowser. Firefox is open source, not-for-profit, and open source, so it cannot "go bankrupt". It's open source, and so whoever wants to keep working on it and keep working on it. Microsoft cannot kill FF. Isn't that protection enough? Doesn't this show that the current situation is not analogous to the past situation?
Maybe you're too young to remember, but Netscape 4 was truly far superior to anything Microsoft had developed up to that point.
Actually, one thing that annoyed me about "Navigator" (as it was referred to in my circle of friends back then) was that they integrated newsgroup, e-mail, web browsing, and web-authoring too tightly together.
This was back in the days of the "blink" tag, so I don't think anyone was really thinking about W3C compliance back then. While I certainly care now about HTML4 compliance (and probably will care about HTML5 compliance as soon as Firefox 3 comes out), I didn't really care about it back then, and can't say whether Navigator or Explorer was "more compliant". We just knew certain tags worked in one browser, and other tags worked in the other.
Back, then, as far as I remember, all the browsers seemed equally suited for web browsing (even Mosaic -- remember that one?), and IE was bundled with Windows, so it was the most convenient option. Plus, IE was free, where Navigator had a "Gold" edition which cost money, and a free edition which was implied to be inferior in some way (I guess to get you to go buy the gold edition).
I am claiming that the cent is not the smallest unit of currency produced by the US.
You and I can trade in picodollars and do the accounting between us in the same, but good luck enacting those transactions through any banking or clearing system.
Take in the full context of the thread, and you will see that I said you may very well trade in millidollars in the future, thanks to microtransactions. If I give some millidollars to Microsoft, Nintendo or Sony purchasing add-on content for for a game, doesn't that count as "enacting a transaction through a banking or clearing system"?
the US did produce physical currency smaller than a cent.
did != does.
And again, I did not claim it "does" (nor for that matter do I claim that it doesn't). In the greater context of this thread, I am providing evidence for the point of view that perhaps rounding off our transactions at the "cent leve" is indeed arbitrary, given that we've rounded off our transactions at other levels in the past and it looks like we will round them off at yet other levels in the future.
I don't know what else I can clarify to avoid strawmans here.
I didn't read the entire article, but I did skim it. Did I miss the part where the US would be printing/minting currency under a penny?
I don't think the article ever says microtransactions exist, but that doesn't microtransactions don't exist.
I am not claiming that the US will print/mine currency under a penny, but I am claiming that the cent is not the smallest unit of currency produced by the US. Here I am using the term "produce" in the sense of "causing to exist" in as "the new law produced many complaints". Microtransactions involves US currency smaller than 1 cent.
That said, the US did produce physical currency smaller than a cent. See Mill.
Slashdot Mirror
I am tired of having to defend my purchase of the PS3 to people blindly assuming 'everyone has a 360, why get a PS3?'
Uh... why do you feel you need to defend your purchase of the PS3? I'm pretty confident nobody on the Internet really cares what you, personally, have bought and why.
If you're happy with your PS3, that's great. But any anguish from "having to defend" is just coming from within yourself. There will always be flame wars around consoles on the Internet. Learn to just relax and enjoy the consoles you own. Who cares what other people on the Internet think is the better console? If you're happy with your console, that's all that matters, right?
nowaday, a lot of people do "bad deeds" unknowingly because their computer was zombified. But even then, after a single warning, you should get your shit together and get your computer fixed, cleaned, protected. A 30$ router and a 60$ AV/AS software works wonders (not PERFECT, but a lot better than an unpatched unprotected computer plugged in directly in the cablemodem).
A lot of people have no idea how computers work and are not interested in learning. Router may prevent external computers from exploiting open ports or whatever, but nothing's going to stop the user who downloads and runs an ".exe" because the website claimed it was a "required plugin" for viewing the secret porn content. Even if the antivirus pops up a warning, the user is just as likely to disable it, or add this .exe as an "exception", to be able to get at the porn.
Yes, heaven forbid that a group of people try to maintain and preserve their unique culture and heritage - just like China, Japan, and hundreds of other countries do.
Preserving culture and heritage is fine. Forcing people who have no interest in your culture and heritage to learn your language is not fine.
There are at least 85 languages which are extinct in North America alone (citation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinct_languages_of_North_America). If someone wants to preserve the culture by learning one or more of those languages, that's perfectly fine by me. What's completely ridiculous is forbidding people to send their children to English schools (because English is not a dying language), and forcing them to attend a Molalan school instead, all in the name of preserving culture. What's completely ridiculous is making it illegal to post any commercial signs in English, and instead saying all commercial signs be written in Coquille. "Sorry, you can't name your cafe 'Starbucks Coffee'. You'll have to translate the name to whatever the Coquille equivalent is." What's completely ridiculous is forbidding the sales of videogames unless they've been translated to Piro.
Montreal (a city in Quebec, for those less geographically inclined) has a beautiful section of the city called "Chinatown", and no sane person would argue that Chinatown is not part of the unique culture and heritage of Montreal (and thus of Quebec). So why do the Quebec language police go to Chinatown and tell the restaurant owners there that they can't have their signs in Chinese, instead these signs must be written in French?
If it were up to me, people should be allowed to learn whatever languages they want, and post commercial signs in whatever languages they want, and provide service in whatever languages they want. You want to open up a restaurant where all the staff only speak Yaquinan? Perfectly fine with me. Maybe it'll turn out to be a bad idea because none of your potential customers speak Yaquinan, and thus your business will suffer. Or maybe it'll turn out great, and you'll revive the Yaquinan language. You're an adult, and thus allowed to make these decisions yourself and live responsibly with the consequences.
The only exception to this rule is any government provided service should speak, at a minimum, all the official languages of the region. So for example, since the official languages of Canada are French and English, then post offices employees, public transport employees, police officers, firefighters, public school teachers, free clinic doctors, etc. would all be required by law to speak both French and English, and have signs in at least these two languages. They are free to speak more languages, and have signs translated into more languages if they like. Private businesses (like restaurants, stores, etc.) have no minimum requirements on language at all. The capitalistic free-market is enough of a pressure to push them towards supporting whatever languages are spoken in their region.
Does being at the top of the geek game seriously require the lack of a 15 minute shower or a 10 minute trip to the washer/dryer for laundry? Isn't there some sort of larger personality issue involved there?
The lack of showering and laundering is a facet of that "personality issue". If you're the type of person who would rather spend an extra 15 minutes learning Haskell than shower, then you're a "true geek". If you value "smelling good", "having clean clothes", etc. more than "having 15 more minutes to tinker with your computer", then you're not a "true geek".
Also, I don't hang my hat on being straight - do you really need to point out that you're gay in your xbox profile?
You probably don't mention that you're straight in your profile because most people are straight. Usually you don't bother listing data which applies to the majority of people. For example, I bother listing that I'm a "drummer" on my profile, because most people aren't. I don't do it because I have an agenda I'm pushing whereby I feel like drummers are being persecuted and I want to push this fact into everyone's face or anything like that. I don't bother mentioning that "I am not blind nor deaf" because most people are not blind nor deaf.
Perhaps the woman in the article was pretty average in most respects (does okay in school, doesn't really like school, but doesn't hate it either. Likes music. Likes mass media like movies, TV, etc. Not blind. Not deaf. Not in a wheelchair. Right handed. Enjoys junk food sometimes. Not a vegetarian. Etc.), and being a lesbian happened to be the most "unusual" thing about her that she was willing to admit to the world.
So when faced with the task of writing her own profile, she tried to think about what information was most striking about her, and she figured that was it.
But that's not correct usage of the word.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with the concept of "prescriptivism vs descriptivism". If not, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descriptive_linguistics and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription I just want to say that you are taking a "prescriptivist" stance, whereas I am a descriptivist. We simply disagree about something, and there aren't really any arguments that would compel a prescritivist to convert to descriptivism nor vice versa. So that's all I'll say about this particular point. Now, moving on:
A phobia is not a hatred, it's a fear; a paralyzing fear of something, one so great that it's debilitating.
Whatever else you wish to say about opponents of homosexuality, they don't have a phobia.
It's not unusual for words to have a meaning different from that which their components would imply. "Pencil lead" is not made from lead. "steamroller" does not use steam. "shooting stars" are neither shooting, nor are they stars. "peanut" is neither a pea, nor a nut. A palm tree is neither a palm, nor a tree (it's actually a type of grass). You can't park on a "parkway". "Filming" doesn't always involve film (e.g. when using digital video). "Tin foil" are usually made from aluminum, not tin. A "windmill" is sometimes used to refer to things which are not actually mills, but a turbines. People talk of "dialing" telephone numbers, even when push buttons are used instead of a dial. "Starfish" are not fish, and aren't even shaped like stars (which are giant spheres, not pointed geometric figures).
In other words, that's just the way English is. And trying to fight it is a losing battle. Even if you convince everyone in the word to stop using the term "homosexual", do you think you could convince everyone to stop using the term "starfish"?
I think you completely misinterpreted the Grandparent's post. Here it is again:
Stop it. Stop the Homophobia bullshit. There's no such thing as Homophobia. There are people that think homosexual conduct is immoral, or abnormal. That doesn't mean they have a phobia. A phobia is a clinical condition, recognized by psychologists. There's no such thing in the DSM. "Homophobia" is a marketing term for one side of the argument, a buzzword.
The GP is basically arguing that "phobia" has a very specific technical meaning in psychology, and there are no known cases of people having a phobia of homosexuals. (Note I'm not saying I agree with the GP, I'm just clarifying what the GP is saying). In particular, notice that the GP has no made any value judgements about homosexuals at all. We do not know if the GP respects homosexual's rights or not. There is no information in that posts which indicates one way or another. It is purely a linguistic-criticism post.
And since you bring it up, you may want to look in your latest DSM to see if homosexuality is immoral or abnormal.
You're implying that the GP has mistaken beliefs about whether or not homosexuality is immoral and/or abnormal. There is no evidence of this in the GP's post. The GP said that there exist people who think homosexuality is immoral and/or abnormal. And it's true that such people exist (for evidence, read this slashdot thread; there are people are who explicitly admitting that they think homosexuality is immoral and abnormal). The GP did not say that (s)he was one of these people. And in case it needs to be said, notice that I also am not claiming to be one of these people.
You can justify your bigotry any way you like, but it is still bigotry.
You're implying that the GP was trying to justify some form of bigotry. Instead, the GP was just making a linguistic criticism. The GP simply wants people to stop using the word "homophobia" because it "doesn't mean what people think it means".
Note that I disagree with the GP, and think "homophobia" is a perfectly appropriate term to describe dislike for homosexuals. I am not agreeing with the GP. I am merely clarifying what the GP is saying.
Just because some dude in a weird outfit claims that some invisible guy in the sky says that something is bad and wrong does not make it so.
Please don't arbitrarily bring up religion out of nowhere to mock it. It makes atheists like me look bad. =( It makes it easier for religious people I debate against to offer evidence that atheists are persecuting them.
The only people who think homosexuality is abnormal or immoral are people who's religion or culture told them that.
I disagree. It's easily conceivable that an isolated tribes of humans somewhere in the tropical rain forest would be small enough to have never actually encountered homosexuality at all. They might not even have a word for the concept. Thus these people have not had their religion nor their culture tell them that homosexuality is abnormal. Then, when you present explain homosexuality to them, it is very plausible that they would consider it "abnormal", since by definition what is normal to them is that which occurs frequently, and homosexually has never occurred for them.
Nobody is born thinking it is wrong.
True, but unfair. Nobody is born thinking that homosexuality is right either. You're not capable of thinking very complex thoughts at all when you're born.
Nobody arrives at that conclusion without coercion from an outside source.
I disagree, see the example of the isolated amazon tribe I presented earlier.
i understand your point, and frankly, i don't use xbox live, so i don't know how visible/important the profile is.
I've had an Xbox Live account for about 2 years now, and probably played with thousands of different people online. I've only ever looked at 3 profiles. Why? Because it's a hassle to stop playing the game, go to list of people I'm playing with, select them, then scroll to the section which shows their profile info. During this time I'm wasting looking for their profile, I could be playing instead.
Er, no. I seriously don't give the slightest damn about anyone's sexual orientation unless they are female and I'm in the process of offering them a drink.
Yeah, yeah, we get it. You are attracted to females. Will you stop repeating that in every fricking post you make? Geez, you're starting to get annoying flaunting your sexuality like that.
The game of playing the victim regardless of what actually happened. This case is not in any way equatable to real discrimination. She wasnt kicked because she IS a lesbian. She was kicked because she was flaunting it and refused to stop.
How did you arrive at this conclusion? From what I understand from the article, the woman in question mentioned that she was a lesbian in her profile. There is no evidence that she actually mentioned that she was a lesbian via any other medium (e.g. in-game chat). People started harassing her for being a lesbian. She was willing to leave the current map and go to other maps to avoid confrontation with these people. These people followed her into the new maps, and asked other people to join in in harassing her.
This doesn't sound like "flaunting it and refusing to stop" to me.
I personally do not like homosexuality at all (BTW, where is my freedom of speech to say that without being flamed for it?),
I'm assuming you live in some developed western nation (e.g. USA, Canada, Europe, etc.). If so, you have "freedom of speech". Everyone in those nations do. You don't have "freedom of speech without being flamed for it". Nobody in those nations do.
You have the freedom to say "I don't like gay people". Other people have the freedom to say "I don't like people who don't like gay people."
In an elective setting where you are there of your own choice (like a live account) then the owner/manager of that setting has the right to say what they will or will not allow.
Hmm, I'm not so sure about that. I don't know what nation you live in, but in the one I live in, there are laws against discriminating against sexual orientation (among other things). For example, going to a restaurant is an "elective setting where you are there of your own choice", but the owner/manager is not allowed to kick you out of the restaurant simply for being gay.
Perhaps the owner can kick you out if you're shouting at the other customer (and it doesn't really matter if they are shouting "I am a lesbian" or "Pi is approximately 3.14" or anything else, it's the shouting itself which is innappropriate).
But if the owner of the restaurant provides everyone with a piece of paper with the heading "Profile: Please write a few words about yourslef here", they probably cannot kick someone out for writing "I am a lesbian" in the profile.
And again, you seem to have the impression that the woman was "flaunting it". I am of the impression that she wasn't.
maybe even shut up about your sexual orientation like all of us straight people do about ours.
While I don't want to argue that it is appropriate to identify your sexual orientation in your profile, the "shut up about your sexual orientation like all of us straight people do about ours" is not very fair, because if someone is silent about their orientation, the default assumption is that they are straight.
I guess to get an idea of what it would feel like to be forced to "shut up" about being homosexual, you could perform this experiment: Go to a gay bar, and "shut up" about being straight. If someone hits on you, you can turn them down by saying you're not interested in them, or that you're only here to relax or something, but you cannot turn them down by saying "Sorry, I'm straight."
Even then, I'm not sure you'd get the full effect as the person in the article did, because presumably girls on Xbox live get a lot more unwanted sexual advances than a typical guy (I'm assuming you're a guy since your username is "rob") would get in a gay bar.
And seriously, most users really don't care. Mp3 is a proprietary format. Microsoft Word .doc is a proprietary format. Excel is a proprietary format. Flash is a proprietary format. People still use them anyway. Perhaps some of them figure that if it becomes an issue, "someone" will do "something" about it. Didn't the EU make a big push to force Microsoft Office formats to be more open, for example?
But I'm probably being too generous to those users. Probably most of them really don't think that far ahead, or at all, about the implications of closed formats.
Open Source zealots still use IE to post to Slashdot. Why?
Because MS is an OS monopoly that illegally ties its browser to its OS. It's difficult to get away from Windows and IE, because of their anticompetitive behavior. That's the whole point of the EU decision!
Wait, what?
Seriously?
There exists open-source zealots who find it "difficult" to find another browser than IE to post on Slashdot? Let me help them out, then: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
Your calculator and notepad examples are relevant.. IF Microsoft had not been suppling these apps since the 3.0 days and there where people selling them as separate apps, you can bet your ass they would be pissed when all of a sudden MS included them in the OS for free. What do you think would happen if the next version of Windows suddenly included a photo editor that was on par or better than Photoshop ?
End-users like me would be ecstatic. We wouldn't have to pay-for/pirate Photoshop anymore. We'd think it's great. We'd think of it as progress. We'd think everything is as it should be: We upgraded Windows, and now we're getting more functionality. What's there to not like about that?
If Abobe started firing off lawsuits to force Microsoft to make their photo-editor more crappy, so that they could compete, we'd get pissed at Adobe. We might compare them to the RIAA, or those DRM makers who lobby to have products intentionally made more crappy just so that they could line their products better. We'd make satirical analogies to the horse industry outlawing the development of automobiles, less they go out of business. We'd say "That's free market. Nobody OWES you guaranteed success in business. Sometimes a game changer will show up that will put you out of business. The government should be serving the common people, and not corporate fatcats like Adobe."
I make a competing calculator (hypothetically). I want an icon on the desktop for the Windows Calculator, Maxima, Octave and Mathematica.
I also (again, hypothetically) make a notepad replacement. I want my product, Notepad++, Wordpad, Microsoft Word, and a half dozen scintilla-based knockoffs.
I also hypothetically make an alternative desktop shell. Because Microsoft FORCES you to use theirs, before you even get to see all of the five BILLION other fucking icons, I want a screen to pop up with only a mouse, and a choice of shells. Mine, which doesn't support UAC, separation of privileges, explorer shells (which will confuse the heck out of people,) explorer extensions (bye-bye TortoiseSVN, TortoiseHG, etc,) or other features. Also included should be shells that barely work.
And finally, after booting into Windows becomes a clusterfuck of choosing about eighteen trillion defaults, I as a developer expect my users to have a relatively stable and ubiquitous set of APIs available.
Oh wait, we threw that out the window.
Fuck.
Here's an idea. Let Microsoft keep doing what they're doing and easily choose between default programs, and even allow those programs to prompt the user to alter their default. Because any other option is fraught with favoritism and is just going to cram OEM desktops with more bullshit than ever before, and make the idea of targeting the Windows desktop from a developer or support perspective laughable.
Oh, God... Mod parent up! This is one of the things I really don't like about most Linux distributions (why do we have 20 text editors installed by default?), and one of the things I like about Ubuntu. They chose Gedit for me. I like it that they chose for me. It saves people like me, who really don't care about which text editor they use, the hassle of needing to make yet another decision, and yet doesn't restrict the people who actually care from firing up Synaptic and getting the text editor they want.
I like Ubuntu's policy of "choose defaults for me, and give me the freedom to override them if I actually care enough to do so." I like Microsoft's policy of "choose defaults for me, and give me the freedom to override them if I actually care enough to do so."
If you're curious about this philosophy, I strongly recommend reading Barry Schartz's book, "The Paradox Of Choice". It talks about how people tend to become less happy the more choices they have presented to them.
I think what would be even better would be an option when you get a new computer that says "Would you like to fully uninstall windows on this machine and be mailed your money back for the cost of windows that you have paid when purchasing this machine?". That would be pretty neat :)
I think it would cause a lot of angry clueless users (the most dangerous kind). They'll see the words "money", and so they'll click yes, and then complain to their OEMs when their machine stops working, and won't be interested in learning what an "OS" is, or why their computer needs one.
What a stupid statement. This is not an unreasonable request, and is something that the US gov should have done a long time ago. Microsoft has produced such shitty browsers, they should in fact be banned from being allowed to produce such an important piece of software.
Personally, I am of the opinion that people should not be banned from producing software just because it is shitty. Imagine the very first build of Linux: it was probably shitty at first, perhaps it only ran on Linus' machine, and wasn't portable, couldn't actually run any applications at all, etc. It got better over time, right? But even if it hadn't gotten better, who are we to stop him from producing it? He can do what he wants with his free time.
A more realistic solution would be to allow people to permanently uninstall Internet Explorer. This really is my biggest gripe. There is no choice because even if you choose another browser, you can't choose to not have Internet Explorer at the same time.
If you look further up the thread, someone else already addressed this point quite well. In summary, they wrote that you *CAN* uninstall IE. It'll just leave behind various DLLs related to things such as HTML rendering, which is used by other applications (e.g. the "help" system depends on HTML rendering). To drive this point home, they add sarcastically (paraphrased here from memory): "IE uses scrollbars, right? IE isn't *completely* uninstalled unless it should also uninstall any DLLs related to renderign scrollbar GUI widgets."
Why not just take a simple approach. When the user clicks a "Internet" button for the first time, they are presented with an option to either install IE or are given links to install files for a bunch of competitors browsers?
Why don't they instead consider, at least in Europe, dropping IE and replacing it with something more standards complaint. Bundling Opera would sure make some people ecstatic.
Or maybe they could sell a new version of Windows exclusively to Europe -- "Windows 7 - Crappy Edition For Europeans" -- which doesn't include any webbrowser at all? They could do this knowing full well that everyone in Europe will just import the non-European versions anyway.
"here are two sets of rules, those for Microsoft, and those for Apple."
No, there is the set of rules for the convicted monopolist Microsoft, and then no rules for anybody else, including Apple, Linux (distributions thereof), BSD (distributions thereof), Sun, ...
And I agree with the grand-parent-post that having one rule set of rules for Microsoft, and a different set of rules (call it the "null set", if you like) for "anybody else" kind of sucks. I fully understand the argument behind it, but I still think it's a bad idea.
I think the GPP's core arguments still apply and are left unaddressed:
Sure, Microsoft killed off Netscape in the past. But Netscape was a "for-profit" project. You had to actually pay money to run a copy of the "Netscape Navigator Gold" webbrowser. Firefox is open source, not-for-profit, and open source, so it cannot "go bankrupt". It's open source, and so whoever wants to keep working on it and keep working on it. Microsoft cannot kill FF. Isn't that protection enough? Doesn't this show that the current situation is not analogous to the past situation?
Maybe you're too young to remember, but Netscape 4 was truly far superior to anything Microsoft had developed up to that point.
Actually, one thing that annoyed me about "Navigator" (as it was referred to in my circle of friends back then) was that they integrated newsgroup, e-mail, web browsing, and web-authoring too tightly together.
This was back in the days of the "blink" tag, so I don't think anyone was really thinking about W3C compliance back then. While I certainly care now about HTML4 compliance (and probably will care about HTML5 compliance as soon as Firefox 3 comes out), I didn't really care about it back then, and can't say whether Navigator or Explorer was "more compliant". We just knew certain tags worked in one browser, and other tags worked in the other.
Back, then, as far as I remember, all the browsers seemed equally suited for web browsing (even Mosaic -- remember that one?), and IE was bundled with Windows, so it was the most convenient option. Plus, IE was free, where Navigator had a "Gold" edition which cost money, and a free edition which was implied to be inferior in some way (I guess to get you to go buy the gold edition).
Let's say IE8 was a repackaged Firefox, what would we learn?
[...]
Why would anyone already using Firefox switch back? There's no reason. But a real reason still exists for IE8 users to move forward to Firefox.
That's the magic of open source. The competitive advantage is that they want people to copy them. Who chooses the copy over the original?
Lots of people chose Ubuntu over Debian.
You and I can trade in picodollars and do the accounting between us in the same, but good luck enacting those transactions through any banking or clearing system.
Take in the full context of the thread, and you will see that I said you may very well trade in millidollars in the future, thanks to microtransactions. If I give some millidollars to Microsoft, Nintendo or Sony purchasing add-on content for for a game, doesn't that count as "enacting a transaction through a banking or clearing system"?
the US did produce physical currency smaller than a cent.
did != does.
And again, I did not claim it "does" (nor for that matter do I claim that it doesn't). In the greater context of this thread, I am providing evidence for the point of view that perhaps rounding off our transactions at the "cent leve" is indeed arbitrary, given that we've rounded off our transactions at other levels in the past and it looks like we will round them off at yet other levels in the future.
I don't know what else I can clarify to avoid strawmans here.
I didn't read the entire article, but I did skim it. Did I miss the part where the US would be printing/minting currency under a penny?
I don't think the article ever says microtransactions exist, but that doesn't microtransactions don't exist.
I am not claiming that the US will print/mine currency under a penny, but I am claiming that the cent is not the smallest unit of currency produced by the US. Here I am using the term "produce" in the sense of "causing to exist" in as "the new law produced many complaints". Microtransactions involves US currency smaller than 1 cent.
That said, the US did produce physical currency smaller than a cent. See Mill.