No, but you might want to know that your sump just quit working while out of town on vacation. Or you might want a little alarm to go off on the phone next to your bed if it's midnight and the garage door has been left open since 10:00 pm. Even better if you could shut it via the phone rather than having to get out of bed.
Personally, I'd want to know if 10 windows in the house are open and somebody turned on the AC, or a closet light has been left on since morning.
I work in the energy efficiency industry and our ability to collect data remotely from sensors monitoring the performance of HVAC and lighting systems in large buildings has saved us a ton of money and time.
At my kids' K through 8 school, they had 1 hour a week of Spanish class just so the school could say they taught a second language. I'd just as soon they didn't have it. Not because I don't think a second language is valuable, but because I don't think one hour a week accomplishes much. Middle school kids had no recess. I think they'd be better off using that hour and lengthening the school day a bit to get some recess in there.
Further, the kids spend much less time on music, art, and gym than when I was a kid. Personally, given all the time that was devoted to practicing cursive, I'd say there are more important things that kids can be doing with their study time. It's not that I don't think it has any value, but to me it's less valuable than things that are already lacking.
I have no idea how many models of cars of trucks are available in my area but I imagine it's quite a few.
Just a wild guess, but I'd say anywhere from 40 to 80% of them would be unsuitable for our family due to cost and features, yet they still exist and many are very popular. What I'm saying is that the fact that an e-Golf wouldn't work well for everyone doesn't mean it couldn't work very well for a large number of people.
My family might be a good example. We live in a city and are are fairly close to everything that we need to get to on a regular basis. In fact, I ride my bike to work most days (about 6 miles each way). We have one small fuel efficient car that's getting up there in age and one mid-sized SUV we use when hauling more stuff, more people, or when the roads are bad.
We don't put a lot of miles on either vehicle but the small car is driven less than 8,000 miles a year, - under 22 miles per day on average. We very rarely drive it over 90 miles a day and could easily avoid it.
What's left is only a quarter of the original machine that's been turned into some light show. The other 3/4 of the panels are owned by other people or are gone entirely. While I'm not saying it wasn't worth doing or that it wasn't hard work, it's not what I would call "refurbished".
It's like digging up a skeleton and having someone rig up a motion detector to play recorded phrases and move the jaw as people walk by it.
Unfortunately there seems to be a period of time where things are just old and past their usefulness, - their historical significance takes more time for people to appreciate. I understand that a true restoration would be hugely impractical, but it would be cool.
When it came to the iPhone, Apple wanted control over the safety, and to a limited extent, the quality of the 3rd party software available. That protects the consumer and Apple. Concentrating all the 3rd party software in one place also made it quickly appear that there was an abundance of it. Further, it's an additional revenue stream for Apple.
One idea that's starting to take hold here is the notion of community solar. An individual homeowner may not have the ideal site for a solar installation, but maybe there is a place in the neighborhood that does. So a community solar project gets funding from many individuals that share the energy and the expense.
You said you own the roof space. Do you own the whole dwelling? Can you insulate the walls, attic, and air seal bypasses? Can you run a heat pump? It still requires electricity but not that much. If you can purchase petrol when it's available and run a generator (or photovoltaics) when it's not, that might be the ticket. Of course the more more energy efficient your home and appliances are, the easier it will be to function off the grid, - even if it's just sporadically.
Do you really need to run your own server or can you have it hosted somewhere else?
I said nothing about socialism, - good or bad but I could spend quite a bit of time on both. My point is simply that capitalism has its downsides which you can either choose to try and mitigate or not.
Uh, hello genius, capitalistic enterprises can't hire people with no skills. You know how many welfare recipients can't even show up to work on time?
Employers hire unskilled people all the time and pay them accordingly. Education and experience are vehicles for becoming more skilled. Increasingly educational institutions expect students to have Internet access.
There are lots of different types of people on welfare for various reasons. When you're poor, transportation and child care can be barriers to employment. But even if some people on welfare are just plain lazy, I'd like it if their kids still had an opportunity to be contributing members of society, rather than just continuing the cycle. Wouldn't you?
I also can't help but notice the problems were all on the school's side...alternative communication methods could have been used, but darn it it's just too hard! (for us)
Alternative means of communication were used but were both slower and more expensive. And as I mentioned, more and more teachers want to use materials that are only available on-line.
We must eradicate capitalism and the free market! Forward to equalism! When everyone's income will be considered decent by a Pakistani bricklayer.
I said nothing about eradicating capitalism, but like any economic system, it has its downsides which can't be just waved away.
At my son's current high school (and even to a certain extent my daughter's grade school), having Internet access at home is an expectation.
At my son's grade school, it was a different story. They had a substantial number of kids whose families were below the poverty line and for whom Internet access could not be assumed. I was on the leadership council and the lack of Internet access for many families caused a lot of difficulties for the school both in terms of the educational materials that could be provided and in terms of communicating with parents.
It is my opinion that poverty is partially systemic. Our economic system depends on there being a pool of available workers (unemployed and underemployed). So as long as there is capitalism and a functioning free market, there will always be poor people. That being the case, we have a responsibility to make sure the basic needs of everyone are met. Increasingly in order to succeed in school and in life, Internet access isn't really a luxury.
Cars will use LIDAR, ultrasonic, and video for first party sensing.
But a lot of sensing will come from their party. Other cars reporting their position on the road. Their intent and upcoming moves.Details about the environment that they sense. Additional the infrastructure can provide info. The roads can report if cars are present. If there is ice, etc.
Anyways, the issue isn't if there is ice or snow on it's sensors. That will be easy to mitigate. The problem is the ice and snow in the environment that it needs to see through.
How much time have you spent scraping ice off of a windshield where it's gone from above freezing and raining when you parked your car to well below freezing overnight and sometimes even well below 0 F? How many times have you had to dig a car out of a snowbank? If you've had to do it over the course of a few winters you'll know that it's often not so easily mitigated.
I think people either don't know or often forget what a hostile environment winter can be in the the Northern part of our country. How densely packed are the sensors going to be in the road to tell reliably where there is ice, whether the ice is smooth or rough, whether there is snow and how deep it is and whether it is packed or fresh? How long are these sensors going to last when the roads I drive on end up filled with potholes each spring?
I'm sure it would all work great in a laboratory setting when every other car, plus all the roads and traffic control devices can talk. I'm not so convinced that it will work when things are in some state of disrepair as they often are in the real world.
The Newton is not noteworthy for being a pda, it's noteworthy for being a flop. Most notably the handwriting recognition. It was impressive technology at the time, but would often make glaring mistakes rendering it not so great in real world use.
Yes, but how badly does it degrade? Will it just stop if there is too much ice or snow on its sensors to "see" adequately. Will it just sit at a green light not knowing whether it's safe to proceed? Can it determine what the road conditions 10 to 30 yards ahead are and react accordingly?
It depends on whether you're doing it for a hobby or designing something you can build multiple copies of. It also depends on how important precise timing is. You may need a RTOS which Android isn't. Raspbian isn't either but there are ports of Real-Time OSes for RPi.
It sounds like the OP is looking for a long term solution to help the project move forward and attract new developers. A few of old timers might be willing to hang around and fix a few bugs or deal with security issues but that's just a slower death. And yeah, if these guys are currently getting paid by the company to maintain the software, they might not have any interest in doing so once they retire. Even if they are willing to maintain it, at any point on any open source project, there is nothing stoping anyone from deciding they're done. That's why you need new developers.
I personally have never worked on a single project that I was passionate enough about to want to make it a life long endeavor. Eventually I want to move on to something different. And I'm sure I'll reach a point in my life (or death) where I simply won't be able to do it anymore even if I wanted to.
And from maybe a more philosophical standpoint, one of the things I see as attractive about retirement is no longer having the burden of having to maintain anything.;)
I have no doubt that there are places where that kind of thing goes on, but certainly not everywhere. For what it's worth, my young daughter thrives on proving people wrong. She played on a boys football team. At the same time, she appears to be more interested in a medical career at this point. Nevertheless I'll be building Lego Mindstorm robots with her and my son... just in case.
My experience has been a bit different. I was the only one among my friends or family to get a computer science degree. Though they have all done alright for the most part, I had the easiest time getting a job in my field and I was making good money while many of them still struggled.
As time has gone on, I've been better able to pick who I work for rather than having to just take whatever I could. I WAS in a company for awhile where ridiculous working hours for programmers were the norm, - but I figured out I didn't need to settle for that.
As a person who hires coders, having so few women in the field limits the pool of good candidates. As a parent, I don't want my daughter steered away from a career that might be a rewarding one for her.
I would guess that most people who put off having kids until later end up having fewer kids anyway. If couples have two kids or less, statistically that will result in long term population decline. Looking at actual trends show that population is flat or declining in many parts of the world while exploding elsewhere.
Declining populations are problematic in several ways as well since many economic systems are designed around growth.
I don't disagree that unchecked world wide population growth isn't good, but draconian methods to keep women from having kids in regions where there is little if any population growth anyway isn't the answer.
"While still uncommon, egg-freezing allows women to remove and store eggs when they are in their prime fertility window, which often overlaps with prime career-advancement years. The quality of a woman’s eggs declines as she gets older, putting many women in a bind about whether to have children in their 20s and 30s. Egg freezing allows women to stockpile healthy eggs while advancing their careers or waiting to meet a partner with whom they’d like to start a family.
But the procedure is expensive, costing approximately $10,000 per round, and many doctors recommend two rounds to ensure the best possible batch of cells. In general, health insurance plans don’t cover the elective procedure."
The last sentence is key. You can bet we are inching towards this $10,000 elective procedure being mandated by American health insurance, which means men will be the ones paying for it through taxes as demonstrated here:
The sheer fact Apple and facebook are doing this is a "slippery slope". Give feminists an inch, and they will take a mile, and then blame you for not giving two miles. And the idea of giving $10,000 to a man to start a family? Nahhhhhhhh.
If a couple decides to delay having kids and takes advantage of this benefit, doesn't the husband (a male most likely) save $10,000 as well?
The reality is that balancing a career with being a parent is typically much more difficult for women. In most relationships, it's the woman that take's on the greater responsibility when it comes to child care, - whether she is working full time or not.
Given that, choosing to be a parent can have a bigger impact on a woman's career than a man's. Even as a man I've made career choices that I wouldn't have made if I didn't have my responsibilities as a parent to consider. It's worse for women.
So while I think it's great that companies are trying to give women more flexibility as to when in their lives to have kids, I question whether delaying it beyond their normal child bearing years is a good idea anyway. It just creates more problems later on. If you wait until your 40's to have kids, now you're approaching or are at retirement age when they are just getting out of college. This creates some potential financial issues if you're not careful. Were you saving for their college education and your own retirement? Also by the time they are having kids of their own, you are now approaching an age where they might also be helping taking care of you, - all while trying to juggle a career. Sucks to be them.
Not Really. We had around two hundred people at ours. My wife got her dress from a consignment shop and the reception was a luncheon at a large restaurant rather than an all night thing. The wedding party handed out the cake rather than paying the caterer $1.00 a slice to hand them out for us. It was a great way to mingle and the guests seemed to enjoy it.
At some of my friends's weddings, the bride paid more for her dress than we paid for the entire wedding.
So yeah, there's a whole set of skills to learn, but the idea that everything is all on the guy... is at least not true in many contexts. And women can fail just as hard, though there isn't a subculture about how men are colluding to control them by withholding the cock they have so obvious earned. There are a lot of skills for everyone to learn. No one is born knowing this stuff. And it takes work.** And while some people are more socially inclined, it's perfectly learnable with work. And I suspect if you (I mean the generic you) aren't actively putting yourself in a social situation in which you'll be interacting with folks you're sexually attracted to, you will never learn these skills.
The entitled whining just drives me up a tree. For that matter, the idea that if some random guy asks a random woman out, and she says no - oh, no, the trauma! Yeesh. I mean, first off, that's a pretty stupid set up. And yet, most of us have been through some variant of it.
* Especially when it was from relatively strangers who were clearly not part of my subculture. Major culture shock of moving to the midwest, random guys in suits would ask me out on the train. Or in the airport. While I was practicing martial arts forms in an empty terminal. *blink*
** Do not draw the conclusion from any of this that I was born socially adept, oh, no. I mean, I generally had more male friends because a lot of my interests (computers, electronics, RPGs) skewed that way, but, no. And then I went to college when I was 13 (well, the first time, it's complicated). But, y'know, hard work and paying attention - these things can be learned.
You are absolutely right, these are skills that can be learned. And rather than whine and complain that "women don't like nice guys", they need to get a clue that being nice isn't the problem. And it is rather interesting that a culture of men who will spend days and weeks mastering gaming or some computer related skill, won't spend time on such a key element to happiness.
However, I will still maintain that a shy, geeky guy is at a major disadvantage when it comes to dating. How many geeky males (shy or not) have random women approaching them in airport and train terminals?;-)
Thing about it, you and a friend could go trolling for geeky guys with a reasonable expectation of success. It doesn't work that way for geeky guys.
That's not to say there aren't women who struggle with dating. I think a big difference is that these women will more than likely blame themselves rather than blaming all men.
I agree with most of what you are saying. I'm often surprised by the bitterness I see in comments from some of the men here (I'm also a guy). At the same time, while both sexes experience rejection, the whole process of dating in our culture is pretty stacked against nerdy male introverts. As you correctly point out, they often don't know how to interact with women but yet they do want to date. And frankly, an introverted nerd is not exactly the type that most women are interested in anyway. So what will happen is that they will ask out some woman who was just being friendly and she'll say no. Not because she's mean, but because she's simply not interested. And this can happen multiple times. How many women do you know that have asked out a guy and was rejected?
The differences between a nerdy guy and a more social guy is that the social guy can pick up on clues more readily. He will likely be more attractive to women due to his social skills anyway. He's is less likely to experience rejection in the same way. Either he knows he's on a fishing expedition and will take the rejection in stride or he'll have a pretty good idea if the woman is interested before he even asks.
It's funny that you mention 8th grade because my son just finished 8th grade last spring. Guys often make the mistake of thinking it's all about looks or how athletic they are. But you could see it in my son's class. The boys who were way ahead in terms having "girl friends" were not necessarily the best looking ones. It was the ones that knew how to talk.
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No, but you might want to know that your sump just quit working while out of town on vacation. Or you might want a little alarm to go off on the phone next to your bed if it's midnight and the garage door has been left open since 10:00 pm. Even better if you could shut it via the phone rather than having to get out of bed.
Personally, I'd want to know if 10 windows in the house are open and somebody turned on the AC, or a closet light has been left on since morning.
I work in the energy efficiency industry and our ability to collect data remotely from sensors monitoring the performance of HVAC and lighting systems in large buildings has saved us a ton of money and time.
At my kids' K through 8 school, they had 1 hour a week of Spanish class just so the school could say they taught a second language. I'd just as soon they didn't have it. Not because I don't think a second language is valuable, but because I don't think one hour a week accomplishes much. Middle school kids had no recess. I think they'd be better off using that hour and lengthening the school day a bit to get some recess in there.
Further, the kids spend much less time on music, art, and gym than when I was a kid. Personally, given all the time that was devoted to practicing cursive, I'd say there are more important things that kids can be doing with their study time. It's not that I don't think it has any value, but to me it's less valuable than things that are already lacking.
I have no idea how many models of cars of trucks are available in my area but I imagine it's quite a few.
Just a wild guess, but I'd say anywhere from 40 to 80% of them would be unsuitable for our family due to cost and features, yet they still exist and many are very popular. What I'm saying is that the fact that an e-Golf wouldn't work well for everyone doesn't mean it couldn't work very well for a large number of people.
My family might be a good example. We live in a city and are are fairly close to everything that we need to get to on a regular basis. In fact, I ride my bike to work most days (about 6 miles each way). We have one small fuel efficient car that's getting up there in age and one mid-sized SUV we use when hauling more stuff, more people, or when the roads are bad.
We don't put a lot of miles on either vehicle but the small car is driven less than 8,000 miles a year, - under 22 miles per day on average. We very rarely drive it over 90 miles a day and could easily avoid it.
So essentially ENIAC is lost.
What's left is only a quarter of the original machine that's been turned into some light show. The other 3/4 of the panels are owned by other people or are gone entirely. While I'm not saying it wasn't worth doing or that it wasn't hard work, it's not what I would call "refurbished".
It's like digging up a skeleton and having someone rig up a motion detector to play recorded phrases and move the jaw as people walk by it.
Unfortunately there seems to be a period of time where things are just old and past their usefulness, - their historical significance takes more time for people to appreciate. I understand that a true restoration would be hugely impractical, but it would be cool.
When it came to the iPhone, Apple wanted control over the safety, and to a limited extent, the quality of the 3rd party software available. That protects the consumer and Apple. Concentrating all the 3rd party software in one place also made it quickly appear that there was an abundance of it. Further, it's an additional revenue stream for Apple.
One idea that's starting to take hold here is the notion of community solar. An individual homeowner may not have the ideal site for a solar installation, but maybe there is a place in the neighborhood that does. So a community solar project gets funding from many individuals that share the energy and the expense.
You said you own the roof space. Do you own the whole dwelling? Can you insulate the walls, attic, and air seal bypasses? Can you run a heat pump? It still requires electricity but not that much. If you can purchase petrol when it's available and run a generator (or photovoltaics) when it's not, that might be the ticket. Of course the more more energy efficient your home and appliances are, the easier it will be to function off the grid, - even if it's just sporadically.
Do you really need to run your own server or can you have it hosted somewhere else?
Imagine how we would look to someone from 1914.
"You've had 100 years and still no flying cars? Lame."
I said nothing about socialism, - good or bad but I could spend quite a bit of time on both. My point is simply that capitalism has its downsides which you can either choose to try and mitigate or not.
Uh, hello genius, capitalistic enterprises can't hire people with no skills. You know how many welfare recipients can't even show up to work on time?
Employers hire unskilled people all the time and pay them accordingly. Education and experience are vehicles for becoming more skilled. Increasingly educational institutions expect students to have Internet access.
There are lots of different types of people on welfare for various reasons. When you're poor, transportation and child care can be barriers to employment. But even if some people on welfare are just plain lazy, I'd like it if their kids still had an opportunity to be contributing members of society, rather than just continuing the cycle. Wouldn't you?
I also can't help but notice the problems were all on the school's side...alternative communication methods could have been used, but darn it it's just too hard! (for us)
Alternative means of communication were used but were both slower and more expensive. And as I mentioned, more and more teachers want to use materials that are only available on-line.
We must eradicate capitalism and the free market! Forward to equalism! When everyone's income will be considered decent by a Pakistani bricklayer.
I said nothing about eradicating capitalism, but like any economic system, it has its downsides which can't be just waved away.
At my son's current high school (and even to a certain extent my daughter's grade school), having Internet access at home is an expectation.
At my son's grade school, it was a different story. They had a substantial number of kids whose families were below the poverty line and for whom Internet access could not be assumed. I was on the leadership council and the lack of Internet access for many families caused a lot of difficulties for the school both in terms of the educational materials that could be provided and in terms of communicating with parents.
It is my opinion that poverty is partially systemic. Our economic system depends on there being a pool of available workers (unemployed and underemployed). So as long as there is capitalism and a functioning free market, there will always be poor people. That being the case, we have a responsibility to make sure the basic needs of everyone are met. Increasingly in order to succeed in school and in life, Internet access isn't really a luxury.
Cars will use LIDAR, ultrasonic, and video for first party sensing.
But a lot of sensing will come from their party. Other cars reporting their position on the road. Their intent and upcoming moves.Details about the environment that they sense. Additional the infrastructure can provide info. The roads can report if cars are present. If there is ice, etc.
Anyways, the issue isn't if there is ice or snow on it's sensors. That will be easy to mitigate. The problem is the ice and snow in the environment that it needs to see through.
How much time have you spent scraping ice off of a windshield where it's gone from above freezing and raining when you parked your car to well below freezing overnight and sometimes even well below 0 F? How many times have you had to dig a car out of a snowbank? If you've had to do it over the course of a few winters you'll know that it's often not so easily mitigated.
I think people either don't know or often forget what a hostile environment winter can be in the the Northern part of our country. How densely packed are the sensors going to be in the road to tell reliably where there is ice, whether the ice is smooth or rough, whether there is snow and how deep it is and whether it is packed or fresh? How long are these sensors going to last when the roads I drive on end up filled with potholes each spring?
I'm sure it would all work great in a laboratory setting when every other car, plus all the roads and traffic control devices can talk. I'm not so convinced that it will work when things are in some state of disrepair as they often are in the real world.
The Newton is not noteworthy for being a pda, it's noteworthy for being a flop. Most notably the handwriting recognition. It was impressive technology at the time, but would often make glaring mistakes rendering it not so great in real world use.
Yes, but how badly does it degrade? Will it just stop if there is too much ice or snow on its sensors to "see" adequately. Will it just sit at a green light not knowing whether it's safe to proceed? Can it determine what the road conditions 10 to 30 yards ahead are and react accordingly?
It depends on whether you're doing it for a hobby or designing something you can build multiple copies of. It also depends on how important precise timing is. You may need a RTOS which Android isn't. Raspbian isn't either but there are ports of Real-Time OSes for RPi.
It sounds like the OP is looking for a long term solution to help the project move forward and attract new developers. A few of old timers might be willing to hang around and fix a few bugs or deal with security issues but that's just a slower death. And yeah, if these guys are currently getting paid by the company to maintain the software, they might not have any interest in doing so once they retire. Even if they are willing to maintain it, at any point on any open source project, there is nothing stoping anyone from deciding they're done. That's why you need new developers.
;)
I personally have never worked on a single project that I was passionate enough about to want to make it a life long endeavor. Eventually I want to move on to something different. And I'm sure I'll reach a point in my life (or death) where I simply won't be able to do it anymore even if I wanted to.
And from maybe a more philosophical standpoint, one of the things I see as attractive about retirement is no longer having the burden of having to maintain anything.
I have no doubt that there are places where that kind of thing goes on, but certainly not everywhere. For what it's worth, my young daughter thrives on proving people wrong. She played on a boys football team. At the same time, she appears to be more interested in a medical career at this point. Nevertheless I'll be building Lego Mindstorm robots with her and my son... just in case.
My experience has been a bit different. I was the only one among my friends or family to get a computer science degree. Though they have all done alright for the most part, I had the easiest time getting a job in my field and I was making good money while many of them still struggled.
As time has gone on, I've been better able to pick who I work for rather than having to just take whatever I could. I WAS in a company for awhile where ridiculous working hours for programmers were the norm, - but I figured out I didn't need to settle for that.
As a person who hires coders, having so few women in the field limits the pool of good candidates. As a parent, I don't want my daughter steered away from a career that might be a rewarding one for her.
I would guess that most people who put off having kids until later end up having fewer kids anyway. If couples have two kids or less, statistically that will result in long term population decline. Looking at actual trends show that population is flat or declining in many parts of the world while exploding elsewhere.
Declining populations are problematic in several ways as well since many economic systems are designed around growth.
I don't disagree that unchecked world wide population growth isn't good, but draconian methods to keep women from having kids in regions where there is little if any population growth anyway isn't the answer.
From this article on the subject: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/20...
The last sentence is key. You can bet we are inching towards this $10,000 elective procedure being mandated by American health insurance, which means men will be the ones paying for it through taxes as demonstrated here:
http://money.cnn.com/2013/05/1...
The sheer fact Apple and facebook are doing this is a "slippery slope". Give feminists an inch, and they will take a mile, and then blame you for not giving two miles. And the idea of giving $10,000 to a man to start a family? Nahhhhhhhh.
If a couple decides to delay having kids and takes advantage of this benefit, doesn't the husband (a male most likely) save $10,000 as well?
;)
And last I checked, women were taxpayers too.
The reality is that balancing a career with being a parent is typically much more difficult for women. In most relationships, it's the woman that take's on the greater responsibility when it comes to child care, - whether she is working full time or not.
Given that, choosing to be a parent can have a bigger impact on a woman's career than a man's. Even as a man I've made career choices that I wouldn't have made if I didn't have my responsibilities as a parent to consider. It's worse for women.
So while I think it's great that companies are trying to give women more flexibility as to when in their lives to have kids, I question whether delaying it beyond their normal child bearing years is a good idea anyway. It just creates more problems later on. If you wait until your 40's to have kids, now you're approaching or are at retirement age when they are just getting out of college. This creates some potential financial issues if you're not careful. Were you saving for their college education and your own retirement? Also by the time they are having kids of their own, you are now approaching an age where they might also be helping taking care of you, - all while trying to juggle a career. Sucks to be them.
Not Really. We had around two hundred people at ours. My wife got her dress from a consignment shop and the reception was a luncheon at a large restaurant rather than an all night thing. The wedding party handed out the cake rather than paying the caterer $1.00 a slice to hand them out for us. It was a great way to mingle and the guests seemed to enjoy it.
At some of my friends's weddings, the bride paid more for her dress than we paid for the entire wedding.
So yeah, there's a whole set of skills to learn, but the idea that everything is all on the guy... is at least not true in many contexts. And women can fail just as hard, though there isn't a subculture about how men are colluding to control them by withholding the cock they have so obvious earned. There are a lot of skills for everyone to learn. No one is born knowing this stuff. And it takes work.** And while some people are more socially inclined, it's perfectly learnable with work. And I suspect if you (I mean the generic you) aren't actively putting yourself in a social situation in which you'll be interacting with folks you're sexually attracted to, you will never learn these skills.
The entitled whining just drives me up a tree. For that matter, the idea that if some random guy asks a random woman out, and she says no - oh, no, the trauma! Yeesh. I mean, first off, that's a pretty stupid set up. And yet, most of us have been through some variant of it.
* Especially when it was from relatively strangers who were clearly not part of my subculture. Major culture shock of moving to the midwest, random guys in suits would ask me out on the train. Or in the airport. While I was practicing martial arts forms in an empty terminal. *blink* ** Do not draw the conclusion from any of this that I was born socially adept, oh, no. I mean, I generally had more male friends because a lot of my interests (computers, electronics, RPGs) skewed that way, but, no. And then I went to college when I was 13 (well, the first time, it's complicated). But, y'know, hard work and paying attention - these things can be learned.
You are absolutely right, these are skills that can be learned. And rather than whine and complain that "women don't like nice guys", they need to get a clue that being nice isn't the problem. And it is rather interesting that a culture of men who will spend days and weeks mastering gaming or some computer related skill, won't spend time on such a key element to happiness.
;-)
However, I will still maintain that a shy, geeky guy is at a major disadvantage when it comes to dating. How many geeky males (shy or not) have random women approaching them in airport and train terminals?
Thing about it, you and a friend could go trolling for geeky guys with a reasonable expectation of success. It doesn't work that way for geeky guys.
That's not to say there aren't women who struggle with dating. I think a big difference is that these women will more than likely blame themselves rather than blaming all men.
I agree with most of what you are saying. I'm often surprised by the bitterness I see in comments from some of the men here (I'm also a guy). At the same time, while both sexes experience rejection, the whole process of dating in our culture is pretty stacked against nerdy male introverts. As you correctly point out, they often don't know how to interact with women but yet they do want to date. And frankly, an introverted nerd is not exactly the type that most women are interested in anyway. So what will happen is that they will ask out some woman who was just being friendly and she'll say no. Not because she's mean, but because she's simply not interested. And this can happen multiple times. How many women do you know that have asked out a guy and was rejected?
The differences between a nerdy guy and a more social guy is that the social guy can pick up on clues more readily. He will likely be more attractive to women due to his social skills anyway. He's is less likely to experience rejection in the same way. Either he knows he's on a fishing expedition and will take the rejection in stride or he'll have a pretty good idea if the woman is interested before he even asks.
It's funny that you mention 8th grade because my son just finished 8th grade last spring. Guys often make the mistake of thinking it's all about looks or how athletic they are. But you could see it in my son's class. The boys who were way ahead in terms having "girl friends" were not necessarily the best looking ones. It was the ones that knew how to talk.