All black market activities fund terrorism in one way or another. That is how the black market works. Alcohol sales funded terrorism in the US during prohibition. Cocaine, stolen art, fake Levi jeans, ivory, all contribute to terrorism.
What if a terrorist works at McDonald's? McDonald's funds terrorism!!!
This will not boost enrollment. This will drive students away. Believe it or not, MS products are not reviled outside of subgroups of the IT/Geek community. I know this will be hard for Slashdotters to grasp.
Believe it or not, in a university setting as well as the industry many of us are employed in, MS products are looked down upon. I know this will be hard for MS apologists to grasp.
Remember, CS/CEN/EE professors at universities and people who are looking to hire you, are the IT/Geek community. We teach your classes, we write the software you run. We provide you with jobs. We keep your servers running. We guard you while you sleep. Do not fuck with us.
It's odd, but it would hurt the economy. Cannabis production is the #1 cash producing crop in every state simply because it's illegal.
Well, cannabis is different then hemp, and isn't what I was talking about. Hemp contains such low quantities of THC that it is of no use as a drug. Though admittedly, being allowed to grow hemp would make it much easier for a farmer to hide cannabis plants among the hemp plants. We'd have a lot more illegal cannibis available, and lot more people selling it, which is debatable whether this would hurt or help the economy.
Legalizing cannabis production is whole different argument, and I don't want to go offtopic to address that one.
However, lifting the ban on hemp production is a very reasonable thing to ask for. Its not a drug, and is immensely useful. We can only import it right now. Why should this money be going out of the country?
How about harvestable fuels based on corn/flax/hemp oil, rather than pumping it out of the ground? Sounds reasonable to me.
Yes. There was recently someone driving a car around the United States (and Canada I believe) fueled by nothing but hemp oil. There are so many uses for hemp that it simply baffles me how the U.S. can ban its production over this whole drug war nonsense. Why do we have to continue to import it? Imagine how lifting the ban on hemp production could help the economy.
Along the same vein, ten years ago, I would never have believed that I'd be rooting for MS to die off. Ten years ago I was rooting for MS to put the hurt on IBM.
Really? 10 years ago I hated MSFT more than I do now, mainly because of the general cruminess of Windows 3.xx (and MSDOS 5.xx and 6.xx), and the direction they were leading software. Thankfully I found UNIX (SunOS/Solaris, AIX, BSD, etc) and Linux around that time.
Well, I never asked you to switch to Linux. Linux/UNIX as a primary OS is for the experienced. If you want to learn, give it a try and spend the time to get experienced. If you're too unmotivated to figure it out, don't bother. It takes time to learn these things. You have to give Linux/UNIX at least 6 months of solid use before you can even call yourself a beginner. It will not be easy, no one said it would. But in the end you will be more comfortable in this environment then you ever were in Windows. You'll feel the true power as you will be able to do things that are effortless to do in Linux but nearly impossible to do in Windows.
I want to use Linux. I want to use a command line. I want to know how to add and remove programs. I want to know how to add and remove hardware refences in the kernal. I want to know how to access my data. I want to know what programs are on my system, and what they do. I want to find programs that do specific tasks.
Sounds like you want to give Debian a try.
Also, Linux is not the only OS you can try. Try a *BSD or even OS X.
What are you talking about? This is normal in most professional college or university environments. The only thing is that it is usually scheduled to run during "off" hours such as 1am to 5am. This ways, there are no viruses, no worms, no fucked up systems because some dumbass messed with its settings, etc.
What I'm talking about is this happened whenever you logged off, not during off hours. But, yeah, its normal practice, though still kinda annoying, especially when they have only one PC which you can print from and that one reinstalls Windows after logoff.
That's pretty bad. My college had similar issues in the labs. Once you logoff, it would erase the entire harddrive and install Windows again, which could take quite a while. I guess it was a solution that worked, but left a lot of people sitting around waiting when the lab was really busy.
rant: God forbid what would happen on/. if MS released their next OS which needed to load an instance of Windows XP everytime you used an older app. But when Apple does it, everything's cool. Yeah, like I wanna buy office again.
Well, what if this new MSFT OS ran on top of Linux or BSD? Everything's cool with Apple because they released a UNIX-based OS, that's my take on it (and probably many others on Slashdot). Many of us wouldn't even consider buying a Mac had they not done this.
Though, having said that, I don't really know the point the guy you are responding to was trying to make, and don't think I agree with his other points, either. Linux/BSD will go places OS X simply can't go. You don't see renderfarms running on OS X. Nor servers for large web sites (Google, Yahoo, etc). Any kind of clustering, OS X can't touch; it's simply isn't worth the money to buy Apple hardware/software for these purposes.
I don't see OS X as a business desktop, either. Sure its viable, but it's not worth the premium. You'll see a machine running OS X here and there, but you won't see major businesses buying 100's of Apple machines at a time. Apple has a niche market, but is restricted to that niche, and will never come out of it (without some radically different business strategies than what they've been doing). Linux can go anywhere, with anyone. And Windows is already everywhere.
About 7% of the class said 'Enjoy yourself in high school because college is really hard.'
That's weird, I found the opposite to be true. High school kicked my ass with all boring classes like english, history, foreign language, etc. However, college was really easy and was actually interesting (I was a CEN major). And as for enjoying myself, I did much more of that in college.
Personally, I've always found Windows to be boring. But that's just me. I found Linux to be extremely powerful, including on the desktop. There is so much you can do, that you simply cannot do in Windows.
But hey, its not necessarilly for everyone. One man's fun is another man's headache. If you think WinXP is a better desktop OS, by all means, use it. But for me, I'm much more comfortable in Linux/UNIX.
yeah, my parents wouldn't get net access because they didn't want to spend money. so i started cracking accounts when i was 15 just to have net access. you bet your ass it gave me a head start, not to mention UNIX experience. Everything I learned during those years are now permanently fixed in my brain. I don't regret breaking the law for the purpose of learning.
creating a socio-economic-political profile of you to better manipulate your behavior for corporate means.
I don't see how you can expect the search terms you enter into a search engine (and IP address, etc) to be private. They are not looking at what's on your computer. You are entering data into their computers and they are simply recording what you do with their system.
Anyone running any kinda system that is accessed by the public is going to keep detailed statistics on how its accessed. Webmaster keep logs of all the IP addresses that access their websites and what pages they access and at what time and what browser they use. They have the right to share these logs and even to post these logs for everyone to see. If someone searches their website, they can log the data for these searches. If someone posts a message on their message board, their IP can be logged and recorded along with their message. With a search engine such as Google it is nothing different. Welcome to the Internet, your IP address is known to all that you touch.
I think it is unreasonable to expect a search engine to discard the data it collects. I doubt any of it will ever be directly connected to individuals, but in that case (as unlikely as it is), people can just quit using it once they find they are getting spammed based on their searches. I never put my real address in Mapquest.
I can see the whole paranoid fantasy, though, but I don't buy into it. So they got my IP address. But then they gotta match my IP address to who I am. Corporations don't have the power to go asking who is using a particular IP address (unless all it takes is a WHOIS). However, maybe the government does. Maybe a governmental agency has struck a deal with Google that allows it access to all the user data it collects. It then matches it up with your IP address and finds out who you are to create a profile on you. Well, guess what? The government probably already has the power to monitor all Internet traffic, so why should it even bother with Google? If you're going to be paranoid, Google should be the least of your worries.
Besides, they are just collecting data for the Zeitgeist
See how you like it 10 years from now.
I see it as the future business model. Offer free service and profit from datamining. I'll be willing to take a job in this industry, or even to start a business with such a business model.
Again I notice the problems of Valentine's Day. Single folk use it as a day to be miserable, and coupled folk have to spend a lot of money so that their SO will still think they love them (which had been taken for granted the past weeks/months).
I'm single, and I use this day to go out to a party or club, get moderately drunk, and find some lonely girl to have some fun with. It's worked for me before. And Valentine's Day is on a Friday this year, which pretty much quadruples my chances. I will be meeting some nice ladies tonight. No misery here.
However, if I had a girlfriend, I would use this day to make some sweet sweet love to my woman--for hours and hours. And all day Saturday, and then Sunday too.
You know what? Valentine's day isn't much different from any other weekend for me.
What you meant to ask was : How does a 15 year old Kevin Mitnick in 1986 learn about Unix? He goes to the nearest University and cracks the system. I was a 15 year old in 1986. I wanted to learn about Unix. I went to the local University and TOOK CLASSES, you jerk-off.
I was 15 yrs old in 1993. I took classes at my local university during the summer (pre-engineering courses). They refused to give me a UNIX account! My parents refused to pay for a shell account at a local ISP as well (and money I made doing well-paying computer jobs went into their pockets). So I cracked every UNIX system at the University. It was a great way for learning a variety of UNIX flavors, and I learned a bit of the adminning end of it, too. Didn't do any harm to the systems and I learned a lot. And I scared away the crackers who were pests, running IRC bots and other stupidity that would've exposed them anyways. It would've been nicer if I could've done this in a legit manner, but I didn't have that luxury.
Kevin, how are your typing skills after all these years? Considering the length and detail of your responses you must still have it. Have you been using typewriters all this time to maintain your typing abilities?
Well, the idea behind this is that the banner ad does not show up at all. Meaning the space that the banner would normally take up is not even used, giving you more space and more of the actual content of the page. Where as just using a hosts file with IE, with the blocks sites set to 127.0.0.1 (I'm assuming you're not using any additional software here), you see the not found error in the place where the ad would be, using up space on your screen. As for pop-ups, if you're using Mozilla, they never even pop up. It's not a matter of giving revenue (if they make money, that's fine with me, as long as it doesn't annoy me), its a matter of improving the browsing experience so you don't have to waste time closing windows or scrolling past ad banners.
I tried this Mozilla CSS hack, but only on a few pages.. It works, but not flawlessly. Most pages loaded up nicely, without any banner ads and freeing up space where the ad would normally be. There are false-positives though, where images that were somewhat important to the page were blocked.
Re:The best socialism...
on
Corporate KDE
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You bring up an interesting point. I'm glad MY government doesn't fund open source projects. Why should MY tax dollars fund development that is going to be used by people who don't pay taxes to the US? This is just one more thing that the government has no business wasting my money on.
If I remember correctly, software developed by the U.S. government is generally released immediately into the public domain (if licensing permits and there is no proprietary or secret information in it). Do a little research and you will find plenty of free software developed by the U.S. government. Why shouldn't the government open the source on software they develop? They don't stand to gain anything by keeping it proprietary; and they are not a business trying to make money off of software they develop. Governmental agencies develop software (or fund its development) for the simple reason that they need the software. I'd much rather have the government spend money on open source solutions (and preferably free) than proprietary solutions. After all, my tax dollars are paying for it, why shouldn't I be able to use and modify this software?
Yeah contact is the most important part.. but work is not the place to meet people, especially not women. I go to work to work and not much else. I work in a small company, too, and not any hotties around here. My whole point, is go out on the weekends. Meet girls, get their numbers, and call them up and set up a date. It's not easy, but try enough and it'll eventually work.
True, those people who work for large companies on huge campuses have it a bit easier. And yes, those people who don't have time to go out on the weekends have it more difficult. But I've seen the most busy, socially inept, hardcore geeks find a girl. All you gotta do is do it.
So people like you should STFU about it being so easy to get laid!!
I did NOT say it was easy. It just takes effort, and persistant effort (not necessarilly with the same girl, though). And most of us will get rejected a lot. But its a matter of statistics, the more you get rejected, the closer you are to meeting someone who won't turn you down.
When I was in high school, I had a crush on this really beautiful girl, and I couldn't even manage to say two words to her. Got rejected plenty over and over again all my life. But once you realize you've got nothing to lose it gets much easier.
That's because only "shes" need to know this sheet. Guys are already in the know. How many "shes" do you ever see doing GOOD coding? And I'm not talking B.J.s, but real coding, how many?
Actually, one of our female coders writes some of the best code, and I've learned a lot from her and just reading her code.
you end up having very little contact with the softer gender
I don't know where everyone gets this from. Maybe this was somewhat true 10-20 years ago, but not now. Not all programmers are socially inept dorks with no lives outside of computers. Or am I the exception to the rule? I tell women I'm a software developer and it *increases* my chances with them (I suppose they think $$$). Hey, and I've been a geek most of my life--and I still spend much of my free time on computers. Women like a guy who can fix a computer. Trust me. Being somewhat successful in your profession helps also, so reading "How to get a Programmer" will indirectly help you get chicks.
If you're a geek, you *can* have luck with the ladies; especially if you've got a job and some cash to spend. Shave that beard, get a decent haircut. Buy some nice clothes. Go out, drink a coupla beers, and just talk to women. There are ladies out there for everyone. Trust me, they are just waiting for you.
Slashdot Mirror
All black market activities fund terrorism in one way or another. That is how the black market works. Alcohol sales funded terrorism in the US during prohibition. Cocaine, stolen art, fake Levi jeans, ivory, all contribute to terrorism.
What if a terrorist works at McDonald's? McDonald's funds terrorism!!!
Get a subscription for paxil and go the fuck outside.
I initially read that as "go fuck outside" which I thought was also a good idea.
This will not boost enrollment. This will drive students away. Believe it or not, MS products are not reviled outside of subgroups of the IT/Geek community. I know this will be hard for Slashdotters to grasp.
Believe it or not, in a university setting as well as the industry many of us are employed in, MS products are looked down upon. I know this will be hard for MS apologists to grasp.
Remember, CS/CEN/EE professors at universities and people who are looking to hire you, are the IT/Geek community. We teach your classes, we write the software you run. We provide you with jobs. We keep your servers running. We guard you while you sleep. Do not fuck with us.
It's odd, but it would hurt the economy.
Cannabis production is the #1 cash producing crop in every state simply because it's illegal.
Well, cannabis is different then hemp, and isn't what I was talking about. Hemp contains such low quantities of THC that it is of no use as a drug. Though admittedly, being allowed to grow hemp would make it much easier for a farmer to hide cannabis plants among the hemp plants. We'd have a lot more illegal cannibis available, and lot more people selling it, which is debatable whether this would hurt or help the economy.
Legalizing cannabis production is whole different argument, and I don't want to go offtopic to address that one.
However, lifting the ban on hemp production is a very reasonable thing to ask for. Its not a drug, and is immensely useful. We can only import it right now. Why should this money be going out of the country?
How about harvestable fuels based on corn/flax/hemp oil, rather than pumping it out of the ground? Sounds reasonable to me.
Yes. There was recently someone driving a car around the United States (and Canada I believe) fueled by nothing but hemp oil. There are so many uses for hemp that it simply baffles me how the U.S. can ban its production over this whole drug war nonsense. Why do we have to continue to import it? Imagine how lifting the ban on hemp production could help the economy.
Along the same vein, ten years ago, I would never have believed that I'd be rooting for MS to die off. Ten years ago I was rooting for MS to put the hurt on IBM.
Really? 10 years ago I hated MSFT more than I do now, mainly because of the general cruminess of Windows 3.xx (and MSDOS 5.xx and 6.xx), and the direction they were leading software. Thankfully I found UNIX (SunOS/Solaris, AIX, BSD, etc) and Linux around that time.
Well, I never asked you to switch to Linux. Linux/UNIX as a primary OS is for the experienced. If you want to learn, give it a try and spend the time to get experienced. If you're too unmotivated to figure it out, don't bother. It takes time to learn these things. You have to give Linux/UNIX at least 6 months of solid use before you can even call yourself a beginner. It will not be easy, no one said it would. But in the end you will be more comfortable in this environment then you ever were in Windows. You'll feel the true power as you will be able to do things that are effortless to do in Linux but nearly impossible to do in Windows.
I want to use Linux. I want to use a command line. I want to know how to add and remove programs. I want to know how to add and remove hardware refences in the kernal. I want to know how to access my data. I want to know what programs are on my system, and what they do. I want to find programs that do specific tasks.
Sounds like you want to give Debian a try.
Also, Linux is not the only OS you can try. Try a *BSD or even OS X.
What are you talking about? This is normal in most professional college or university environments. The only thing is that it is usually scheduled to run during "off" hours such as 1am to 5am. This ways, there are no viruses, no worms, no fucked up systems because some dumbass messed with its settings, etc.
What I'm talking about is this happened whenever you logged off, not during off hours. But, yeah, its normal practice, though still kinda annoying, especially when they have only one PC which you can print from and that one reinstalls Windows after logoff.
That's pretty bad. My college had similar issues in the labs. Once you logoff, it would erase the entire harddrive and install Windows again, which could take quite a while. I guess it was a solution that worked, but left a lot of people sitting around waiting when the lab was really busy.
rant: God forbid what would happen on /. if MS released their next OS which needed to load an instance of Windows XP everytime you used an older app. But when Apple does it, everything's cool. Yeah, like I wanna buy office again.
Well, what if this new MSFT OS ran on top of Linux or BSD? Everything's cool with Apple because they released a UNIX-based OS, that's my take on it (and probably many others on Slashdot). Many of us wouldn't even consider buying a Mac had they not done this.
Though, having said that, I don't really know the point the guy you are responding to was trying to make, and don't think I agree with his other points, either. Linux/BSD will go places OS X simply can't go. You don't see renderfarms running on OS X. Nor servers for large web sites (Google, Yahoo, etc). Any kind of clustering, OS X can't touch; it's simply isn't worth the money to buy Apple hardware/software for these purposes.
I don't see OS X as a business desktop, either. Sure its viable, but it's not worth the premium. You'll see a machine running OS X here and there, but you won't see major businesses buying 100's of Apple machines at a time. Apple has a niche market, but is restricted to that niche, and will never come out of it (without some radically different business strategies than what they've been doing). Linux can go anywhere, with anyone. And Windows is already everywhere.
Computer Engineering
About 7% of the class said 'Enjoy yourself in high school because college is really hard.'
That's weird, I found the opposite to be true. High school kicked my ass with all boring classes like english, history, foreign language, etc. However, college was really easy and was actually interesting (I was a CEN major). And as for enjoying myself, I did much more of that in college.
I think DistroWatch puts it best:
"Put fun back into computing. Use Linux."
FreeBSD is good, too.
Personally, I've always found Windows to be boring. But that's just me. I found Linux to be extremely powerful, including on the desktop. There is so much you can do, that you simply cannot do in Windows.
But hey, its not necessarilly for everyone. One man's fun is another man's headache. If you think WinXP is a better desktop OS, by all means, use it. But for me, I'm much more comfortable in Linux/UNIX.
yeah, my parents wouldn't get net access because they didn't want to spend money. so i started cracking accounts when i was 15 just to have net access. you bet your ass it gave me a head start, not to mention UNIX experience. Everything I learned during those years are now permanently fixed in my brain. I don't regret breaking the law for the purpose of learning.
creating a socio-economic-political profile of you to better manipulate your behavior for corporate means.
I don't see how you can expect the search terms you enter into a search engine (and IP address, etc) to be private. They are not looking at what's on your computer. You are entering data into their computers and they are simply recording what you do with their system.
Anyone running any kinda system that is accessed by the public is going to keep detailed statistics on how its accessed. Webmaster keep logs of all the IP addresses that access their websites and what pages they access and at what time and what browser they use. They have the right to share these logs and even to post these logs for everyone to see. If someone searches their website, they can log the data for these searches. If someone posts a message on their message board, their IP can be logged and recorded along with their message. With a search engine such as Google it is nothing different. Welcome to the Internet, your IP address is known to all that you touch.
I think it is unreasonable to expect a search engine to discard the data it collects. I doubt any of it will ever be directly connected to individuals, but in that case (as unlikely as it is), people can just quit using it once they find they are getting spammed based on their searches. I never put my real address in Mapquest.
I can see the whole paranoid fantasy, though, but I don't buy into it. So they got my IP address. But then they gotta match my IP address to who I am. Corporations don't have the power to go asking who is using a particular IP address (unless all it takes is a WHOIS). However, maybe the government does. Maybe a governmental agency has struck a deal with Google that allows it access to all the user data it collects. It then matches it up with your IP address and finds out who you are to create a profile on you. Well, guess what? The government probably already has the power to monitor all Internet traffic, so why should it even bother with Google? If you're going to be paranoid, Google should be the least of your worries.
Besides, they are just collecting data for the Zeitgeist
See how you like it 10 years from now.
I see it as the future business model. Offer free service and profit from datamining. I'll be willing to take a job in this industry, or even to start a business with such a business model.
Again I notice the problems of Valentine's Day. Single folk use it as a day to be miserable, and coupled folk have to spend a lot of money so that their SO will still think they love them (which had been taken for granted the past weeks/months).
I'm single, and I use this day to go out to a party or club, get moderately drunk, and find some lonely girl to have some fun with. It's worked for me before. And Valentine's Day is on a Friday this year, which pretty much quadruples my chances. I will be meeting some nice ladies tonight. No misery here.
However, if I had a girlfriend, I would use this day to make some sweet sweet love to my woman--for hours and hours. And all day Saturday, and then Sunday too.
You know what? Valentine's day isn't much different from any other weekend for me.
What you meant to ask was : How does a 15 year old Kevin Mitnick in 1986 learn about Unix? He goes to the nearest University and cracks the system.
I was a 15 year old in 1986. I wanted to learn about Unix.
I went to the local University and TOOK CLASSES, you jerk-off.
I was 15 yrs old in 1993. I took classes at my local university during the summer (pre-engineering courses). They refused to give me a UNIX account! My parents refused to pay for a shell account at a local ISP as well (and money I made doing well-paying computer jobs went into their pockets). So I cracked every UNIX system at the University. It was a great way for learning a variety of UNIX flavors, and I learned a bit of the adminning end of it, too. Didn't do any harm to the systems and I learned a lot. And I scared away the crackers who were pests, running IRC bots and other stupidity that would've exposed them anyways. It would've been nicer if I could've done this in a legit manner, but I didn't have that luxury.
Kevin, how are your typing skills after all these years? Considering the length and detail of your responses you must still have it. Have you been using typewriters all this time to maintain your typing abilities?
Well, the idea behind this is that the banner ad does not show up at all. Meaning the space that the banner would normally take up is not even used, giving you more space and more of the actual content of the page. Where as just using a hosts file with IE, with the blocks sites set to 127.0.0.1 (I'm assuming you're not using any additional software here), you see the not found error in the place where the ad would be, using up space on your screen. As for pop-ups, if you're using Mozilla, they never even pop up. It's not a matter of giving revenue (if they make money, that's fine with me, as long as it doesn't annoy me), its a matter of improving the browsing experience so you don't have to waste time closing windows or scrolling past ad banners.
I tried this Mozilla CSS hack, but only on a few pages.. It works, but not flawlessly. Most pages loaded up nicely, without any banner ads and freeing up space where the ad would normally be. There are false-positives though, where images that were somewhat important to the page were blocked.
You bring up an interesting point. I'm glad MY government doesn't fund open source projects. Why should MY tax dollars fund development that is going to be used by people who don't pay taxes to the US? This is just one more thing that the government has no business wasting my money on.
If I remember correctly, software developed by the U.S. government is generally released immediately into the public domain (if licensing permits and there is no proprietary or secret information in it). Do a little research and you will find plenty of free software developed by the U.S. government. Why shouldn't the government open the source on software they develop? They don't stand to gain anything by keeping it proprietary; and they are not a business trying to make money off of software they develop. Governmental agencies develop software (or fund its development) for the simple reason that they need the software. I'd much rather have the government spend money on open source solutions (and preferably free) than proprietary solutions. After all, my tax dollars are paying for it, why shouldn't I be able to use and modify this software?
Yeah contact is the most important part.. but work is not the place to meet people, especially not women. I go to work to work and not much else. I work in a small company, too, and not any hotties around here. My whole point, is go out on the weekends. Meet girls, get their numbers, and call them up and set up a date. It's not easy, but try enough and it'll eventually work.
True, those people who work for large companies on huge campuses have it a bit easier. And yes, those people who don't have time to go out on the weekends have it more difficult. But I've seen the most busy, socially inept, hardcore geeks find a girl. All you gotta do is do it.
So people like you should STFU about it being so easy to get laid!!
I did NOT say it was easy. It just takes effort, and persistant effort (not necessarilly with the same girl, though). And most of us will get rejected a lot. But its a matter of statistics, the more you get rejected, the closer you are to meeting someone who won't turn you down.
When I was in high school, I had a crush on this really beautiful girl, and I couldn't even manage to say two words to her. Got rejected plenty over and over again all my life. But once you realize you've got nothing to lose it gets much easier.
Hmm, it might be possible to write a program to converse with a female.
;)
Yeah, its called instant messenger. Then if things get serious, you can move on to video-conferencing.
That's because only "shes" need to know this sheet. Guys are already in the know. How many "shes" do you ever see doing GOOD coding? And I'm not talking B.J.s, but real coding, how many?
Actually, one of our female coders writes some of the best code, and I've learned a lot from her and just reading her code.
you end up having very little contact with the softer gender
I don't know where everyone gets this from. Maybe this was somewhat true 10-20 years ago, but not now. Not all programmers are socially inept dorks with no lives outside of computers. Or am I the exception to the rule? I tell women I'm a software developer and it *increases* my chances with them (I suppose they think $$$). Hey, and I've been a geek most of my life--and I still spend much of my free time on computers. Women like a guy who can fix a computer. Trust me. Being somewhat successful in your profession helps also, so reading "How to get a Programmer" will indirectly help you get chicks.
If you're a geek, you *can* have luck with the ladies; especially if you've got a job and some cash to spend. Shave that beard, get a decent haircut. Buy some nice clothes. Go out, drink a coupla beers, and just talk to women. There are ladies out there for everyone. Trust me, they are just waiting for you.