Also disabled folk -- those of us that can't get out of the house easily often get most of our socialization online, especially if the Internet was around when we were still kids or young adults. Many of us (not me) don't identify publicly online as being disabled outside of the relevant discussion groups, though, so our online presence is often far underestimated.
(Unfortunately, most Slashdotters don't seem to realize that we're here reading, whether "we" is referring to being female or being disabled. At least, that's the kind assumption I prefer to make, given people generally don't make comments about how women are stupid or disabled people should be killed when they're aware a member of either group they're slamming is present.)
Yes... I'm sick of reading posts by people that classify the disabled/sick (like myself) as inhuman enough to just "let die" as if we are just mindless objects that lack any value or will to live. (Newsflash, trolls: we are people too!) Especially since those same people seek medical help quite readily when *they* need it.
While the trolls don't acknowledge it, people like me also do in fact contribute to society -- as much or more than they do. Sometimes we are a source of joy or companionship for others, sometimes we are professors, writers, surgeons, physicists, babysitters... That we have different needs, and that our rarity makes handling those needs more expensive, should not determine whether we "deserve" to live. Especially since the majority of non-disabled people contribute absolutely nothing: they are born, they eat, they breed a couple more humans, and then they die without having made any mark. How is that more worthy of survival than Einstein (autistic), Hawking (ALS), Roosevelt (polio), or any of the other disabled people that *have* made a big difference?
My ex-bf was the same way (one of the reasons he's my ex) -- though he had an "addictive" personality in general. Instead of getting a handle on the major psych issues he had that caused him to escape reality any way he could, he just leapt into one addiction after another, including (at points) drugs and alcohol.
I finally left him in the middle of his internet-gaming addiction, after I realized that until he did treat/control the underlying issues, no matter how many addictions he broke, there would always be a new one to interfere. Merely achieving *online* contact with him required I completely structure/center my life around his addictions in order to be free at any particular moment he might not be engaging in them.
Note that I do tend to spend extended amounts of time doing a single activity, am online a lot, and so forth. The difference is that I don't let my interests interfere in what's necessary or meaningful to me; I do stop if somebody needs help or something needs to be done. He couldn't do that regardless of how hard he tried; even faced with losing everything else that mattered to him, being on the verge of homelessness, losing all of his friends, his one relationship, contact with his family, etc. he couldn't control the addictive compulsions. (When forced to rely on friends/family to pay his rent because he had lost his job, after he had 'chosen' his addictions over all of us for years, he still only managed to focus on looking for a job an hour or two per day, engaging in his addictions the rest of his waking hours... He just couldn't deal with being in reality more than that.)
People saying addiction doesn't exist haven't seen a genuine addict in action.
WTF? I should have prepared in the womb for being born with severe physical disabilities and to a mother that's mentally ill? Or perhaps, as a little kid, I should have tried harder to not develop PTSD from my experiences in the hospital? Maybe my grandmother should have 'prepared' better so she didn't die of cancer at a scarily young age?
Sometimes things do happen that change life in a really bad way that you can't prepare for. You've lived a very lucky life compared to most if you seriously think that it's always the victim's fault for not being ready, because some of us (like me) knew better even as little kids.
Incidentally, your kind of attitude is part of why I dumped religion. I'm not angry with your deity, but I did lose belief in it after rationally thinking over some of the things its followers claimed.
Aspergers isn't an illness -- it's a neurodevelopmental disorder on the autism spectrum. It's also not "shortcomings" to be designed to do things differently than most people.
According to experts on autism Baron-Cohen, Atwood, and Wing, people identifying as being on the autism spectrum are accurate 99% of the time, because the internal characteristics are so striking. They can include severe sensory sensitivity, extreme motor clumsiness, weak or lacking depth perception, difficulty speaking (often with loss of speech under stress), extreme difficulty changing from one task to the other even if we want to, native use of different (autistic) body language that is incompatible with that of non-autistics, having multiple senses report one sense's information (like seeing colors for sounds)...
A LOT of stuff that comes nowhere near the neurotypical experience, and that we're aware is different long before we can name it.
Speaking as the moderator of three of the largest online discussion groups for adults on the spectrum, plus having been heavily involved in the community for four years now, I can pretty much verify their claim. Out of the many hundreds of people that have joined thinking that they're AS, I can only offhand think of one clearly that was obviously wrong, and two or three where I was uncertain.
Also, I can't imagine why anybody would *want* to claim they're one of us if they aren't. It doesn't get us out of anything that isn't obviously a meltdown-inducing problem (plus rarely even then), we're subject to constant criticism based on our differences or what we are... I'm proud to be autistic, but I hate the prejudice I encounter.
There are women that are good looking (and in shape), encourage the BF to buy whatever he wants, don't care for feminine stuff, like tech/geek toys (including talking about them intelligently), are into sex/blowjobs, don't really want him to spend money on us, and like 'nice' guys, all of that. We don't play head games or hint at stuff, because that repulses us as much as it does many guys.
Trouble is, the result isn't a happy relationship where both partners get what they want. Instead, the (happy) guy just caters to all of the still-demanding other people in his life (friends, family, employer, whatever) at the expense of the relationship. So while we watch all of our "demanding" friends enjoying fairly happy partners, we also see OUR partner run around spending energy/time/money on everybody else under the sun. After a few years, being 'nice' and 'accommodating' starts translating out to 'being a doormat so even the nicest guy can take advantage of you.'
Sorry, just had to vent. I'm just tired of seeing guys bitch about the women they'd treat decently, while knowing that if they DID have a GF that tried to make them happy, they'd probably ditch her in order to cater to all the PITA types.:-p
A huge percentage of the "poorest and most dependent" folks in NO *couldn't* leave. They are disabled, elderly, and rely on the minimal amount of aid offered to survive that only shows up at the beginning of every month -- that's *why* they are the "poorest and most dependent" in the first place.
They wouldn't own (probably can't even drive) cars, so they couldn't drive themselves out, were likely too physically disabled to evacuate on foot, and the hurricane hit at a time of the month when they lacked the funds necessary for bus/lodging fare. How were they supposed to leave, where were they supposed to go?
"It seems like you simply haven't been exposed to some of the great Anime out there..."
Not necessarily. I used to be in a relationship with a fanboy that insisted he could make me like Anime if I just saw 'the good stuff.' So I watched hundreds of hours of 'the good stuff' with him. Note that I am not a 'fan' of American or European film/shows, whether animated or live, either: I only care about how well-written it is, not what media is used to present it.
Just to name a *few* we watched movies and/or full runs (all available seasons) of: Lain, Mononoke Hime, Nadesco, Slayers, Ranma, Evangelion (multiple endings), Kuroshin, Oh My Goddess, and a lot more I can't recall the names of. We watched it subbed, fansubbed, dubbed, both at once, and I agreed to try reading the manga. Basically, I did precisely what all the fans keep insisting will magically convert somebody.
It didn't work: I not only wasn't impressed, I thought it even sillier that people were claiming that these shows were "deep" and "complext" given it perhaps on the level of what I'd expect a twelve-year-old to understand in any other media form. Yes, the art was pretty, if you happened to like that style of art -- but the dialogue, plots, characters, metaphor, and so forth were sub-par.
Not surprisingly, though, when I told fans this and offered to give them detailed critical analysis of why, they shrieked "you just hate it for no reason because it's Anime!" No: I didn't like it because it was still at the complexity level I'd expect of a child, and gore/explosions doesn't make for maturity in my book.
Complete agreement -- I've been a Sonic.net customer since early 1996, got DSL through them back in 2002, and would never go with another ISP. Another few nice points to add to yours:
-- they offer web-chat based help (great if you have a speech/hearing disability, or if you're away from home)
-- nationwide dialup for just $5/month for traveling
-- almost never down (I think maybe 1 - 2 downtimes max in three years of DSL)
-- great Message Of The Day updates with whatever tiny hardware/software changes they're making, problems they're having, etc.
I liked them enough that even for the short time I temporarily had @Home (now Comcast) before DSL was available, I chose to keep paying my monthly Sonic.net membership just to help ensure they'd stay in business. Good choice, as it turned out I'd been so spoiled by Sonic.net that @Home's crappy service was intolerable, so I dumped them to wait on dialup for DSL to be available.
1. The Logitech wireless mice aren't appreciably heavier than wired ones.
2. Some wireless mice have recharging base stations -- when you're done for the day, you put it into the charger and it's fresh for the next morning. (Logitech MX700 at least does this.)
3. All the wireless ones I've used rely on AA batteries, nothing special in that.
"I believe that part of the reason that alternative browsers like Firefox are beginning to gain ground is because of MS's discontinued support of IE on the Mac."
The overwhelming majority of Mac users I know, including the geeks, default to the pre-installed browser (Safari) just like Windows newbies do, except with even less willingness to try an alternative. The few Mac users I know that do use (or even try) Firefox are already super-geeks, so they'd be using it even if they were in Windows and therefore can't really count.
So while the non-geek Mac contingent might be a "part" of the rise of Firefox, my guess is that it's an extremely small one at best.
"When people visit our country and overstay their welcome our government punishes them by giving them the right to vote."
At least immigrants are required to demonstrate knowledge of our political system and national history before being granted the right to vote through citizenship. That's a great deal more than can be said of the majority of people that were given voting rights simply because they were born here.
"Believe me, it's heartbreaking to see a child locked in his own world unable to communicate with others or even unaware WHY he should."
It's even more heartbreaking as an autistic to have people assume that my not relying on speech/pointing/other 'normal' communication methods means I'm 'unable to communicate' or 'unaware.'
Actually, I find that non-religious people that *aren't* into wild materialism like Giftmas that tend to be the most insightful. The 'socially acceptable' ones aren't better, society's constant praising of their lack of differences just makes them *think* they are.
I'd much rather spend an evening with a nice guy with lots of overclocking tales than somebody 'socially acceptable' that refers to people that don't adhere to societal norms as "poor bastards."
I don't care how much "better" Miranda is otherwise, I need a client that supports video -- it's been one of the saving-points in my (very long-distance) relationship.
It's entirely possible to create HTML profiles in Trillian... It doesn't have widgets to do all the work for you, but if you code it that way, it will show up properly on the other end. (I just discovered this recently myself.)
File transfers with people using other IM programs also work in Trill 2.x at least for AIM. I send/receive files fairly often with non-Trillian users. That only started working within the past year, though.
No. People with prosopagnosia can often have excellent or even photographic visual memory, yet have an extremely hard time at best recognizing faces.
Irlen Syndrome can make it hard to perceive objects as a whole, even if we have extremely good physical vision.
There really is no such thing as "ordinary memory" -- the brain accesses and stores information in quite a variety of ways. I can't remember (ironically) the name for the specific loss of name-recognition, but it does exist, and is common in people born with other neurological abnormalities like the above.
Fingers slipped on the keyboard and accidentally submitted the post before I was done, so I'll rewrite it here.:-p
"KD-36XS955, HDR-FX1, DSC-F828..."
Those are all just model numbers, just as any manufacturer uses to identify specific product releases. Sony's actual lines are named no differently from how Apple or other companies do it: Cybershot, Clie, VAIO, etc. If you listed the full product name -- like CyberShot DSC-F828 -- it would be blatantly obvious what they were.
"Contrast this with the branding Apple pulled off after Jobs returned...iMacs, PowerMacs and PowerBooks and now iBooks and iPods. Easy."
Only easy if you never have to find need to find info about a specific model within those lines. Speaking from experience, Googling just "Powerbook" brings up a ton irrelevant pages, so you have to add in the speed, screen size, etc. -- even then, you get inaccurate results. Easier to have the model name and get the right answers immediately.
Also, while fans might intuitively know the difference between an iMac and a PowerMac and a PowerBook, the rest of us don't. *Far* less intuitive than just having ONE name for the whole computer line (with listed model numbers) like Sony does.
"KD-36XS955, HDR-FX1, DSC-F828 -- these are all real products I pulled off the Sony website. Do you have any clue what they are?"
You're forgetting that those are just specific model/release numbers, which *all* manufacturers use. The real 'names' of their products are no different from Apple or other manufacturers -- things like Cybershot, Clie, Vaio, etc. The model numbers are typically
"Contrast this with the branding Apple pulled off after Jobs returned...iMacs, PowerMacs and PowerBooks and now iBooks and iPods. Easy."
Complete agreement. Oddly, people in some metro areas seem to grasp this concept better than those in other areas. At least, that's my (limited) experience.
I wouldn't expect anybody outside California to read or even care about the SF Chronicle, however great it is. Yet more than one friend from the DC area has reacted with condescending shock when informed that we don't read the Washington Post. (I've read it; it had the same basic stuff as the Chronicle, just with a DC slant rather than a SF one. It certainly didn't make me feel like I'd ever been deprived of anything by not reading it otherwise.)
Just my experience, though. I might just know extremely DC-centric people and not enough SF-centric ones or something.:-)
Your sexist show of intellectual inadequacy aside, the fact is that Mensa has traditionally been heavily male-dominated.
(Don't even bother leaping to conclusions on what that implies unless you have a solid academic knowledge of historical sociology, either -- you'll just come off looking like an ignorant ass.)
If you're sure it's their service (with Comcast that's almost guaranteed; they really DO suck) rather than your hardware, then the answer is to lie... There's no way for them to know the difference from their end. If they send a tech out, just unplug the router, stash it in a drawer, and plug the modem back in directly for the day.
"Superglue's far to unclean a product, Yeh right! How many deaths are there a year due to contaminated super-glue?"
Super-glue generally isn't used on small cuts that don't require medical intervention, and if it were, the cut was nowhere near deep enough for an infecton to be much of an issue.
In a clinical setting, however, the medical grade stuff is used on open/surgical wounds -- "cuts" that if infected could cause a person to lose a limb or their life.
(Would you seriously want non-sterilized instruments used on you in surgery? No? Then why would you want potentially bacteria-laden adhesive lining the wound?)
Slashdot Mirror
Also disabled folk -- those of us that can't get out of the house easily often get most of our socialization online, especially if the Internet was around when we were still kids or young adults. Many of us (not me) don't identify publicly online as being disabled outside of the relevant discussion groups, though, so our online presence is often far underestimated.
(Unfortunately, most Slashdotters don't seem to realize that we're here reading, whether "we" is referring to being female or being disabled. At least, that's the kind assumption I prefer to make, given people generally don't make comments about how women are stupid or disabled people should be killed when they're aware a member of either group they're slamming is present.)
Yes... I'm sick of reading posts by people that classify the disabled/sick (like myself) as inhuman enough to just "let die" as if we are just mindless objects that lack any value or will to live. (Newsflash, trolls: we are people too!) Especially since those same people seek medical help quite readily when *they* need it.
While the trolls don't acknowledge it, people like me also do in fact contribute to society -- as much or more than they do. Sometimes we are a source of joy or companionship for others, sometimes we are professors, writers, surgeons, physicists, babysitters... That we have different needs, and that our rarity makes handling those needs more expensive, should not determine whether we "deserve" to live. Especially since the majority of non-disabled people contribute absolutely nothing: they are born, they eat, they breed a couple more humans, and then they die without having made any mark. How is that more worthy of survival than Einstein (autistic), Hawking (ALS), Roosevelt (polio), or any of the other disabled people that *have* made a big difference?
My ex-bf was the same way (one of the reasons he's my ex) -- though he had an "addictive" personality in general. Instead of getting a handle on the major psych issues he had that caused him to escape reality any way he could, he just leapt into one addiction after another, including (at points) drugs and alcohol.
I finally left him in the middle of his internet-gaming addiction, after I realized that until he did treat/control the underlying issues, no matter how many addictions he broke, there would always be a new one to interfere. Merely achieving *online* contact with him required I completely structure/center my life around his addictions in order to be free at any particular moment he might not be engaging in them.
Note that I do tend to spend extended amounts of time doing a single activity, am online a lot, and so forth. The difference is that I don't let my interests interfere in what's necessary or meaningful to me; I do stop if somebody needs help or something needs to be done. He couldn't do that regardless of how hard he tried; even faced with losing everything else that mattered to him, being on the verge of homelessness, losing all of his friends, his one relationship, contact with his family, etc. he couldn't control the addictive compulsions. (When forced to rely on friends/family to pay his rent because he had lost his job, after he had 'chosen' his addictions over all of us for years, he still only managed to focus on looking for a job an hour or two per day, engaging in his addictions the rest of his waking hours... He just couldn't deal with being in reality more than that.)
People saying addiction doesn't exist haven't seen a genuine addict in action.
"If life is bad, you didn't prepare properly."
WTF? I should have prepared in the womb for being born with severe physical disabilities and to a mother that's mentally ill? Or perhaps, as a little kid, I should have tried harder to not develop PTSD from my experiences in the hospital? Maybe my grandmother should have 'prepared' better so she didn't die of cancer at a scarily young age?
Sometimes things do happen that change life in a really bad way that you can't prepare for. You've lived a very lucky life compared to most if you seriously think that it's always the victim's fault for not being ready, because some of us (like me) knew better even as little kids.
Incidentally, your kind of attitude is part of why I dumped religion. I'm not angry with your deity, but I did lose belief in it after rationally thinking over some of the things its followers claimed.
Aspergers isn't an illness -- it's a neurodevelopmental disorder on the autism spectrum. It's also not "shortcomings" to be designed to do things differently than most people.
According to experts on autism Baron-Cohen, Atwood, and Wing, people identifying as being on the autism spectrum are accurate 99% of the time, because the internal characteristics are so striking. They can include severe sensory sensitivity, extreme motor clumsiness, weak or lacking depth perception, difficulty speaking (often with loss of speech under stress), extreme difficulty changing from one task to the other even if we want to, native use of different (autistic) body language that is incompatible with that of non-autistics, having multiple senses report one sense's information (like seeing colors for sounds)...
A LOT of stuff that comes nowhere near the neurotypical experience, and that we're aware is different long before we can name it.
Speaking as the moderator of three of the largest online discussion groups for adults on the spectrum, plus having been heavily involved in the community for four years now, I can pretty much verify their claim. Out of the many hundreds of people that have joined thinking that they're AS, I can only offhand think of one clearly that was obviously wrong, and two or three where I was uncertain.
Also, I can't imagine why anybody would *want* to claim they're one of us if they aren't. It doesn't get us out of anything that isn't obviously a meltdown-inducing problem (plus rarely even then), we're subject to constant criticism based on our differences or what we are... I'm proud to be autistic, but I hate the prejudice I encounter.
There are women that are good looking (and in shape), encourage the BF to buy whatever he wants, don't care for feminine stuff, like tech/geek toys (including talking about them intelligently), are into sex/blowjobs, don't really want him to spend money on us, and like 'nice' guys, all of that. We don't play head games or hint at stuff, because that repulses us as much as it does many guys.
:-p
Trouble is, the result isn't a happy relationship where both partners get what they want. Instead, the (happy) guy just caters to all of the still-demanding other people in his life (friends, family, employer, whatever) at the expense of the relationship. So while we watch all of our "demanding" friends enjoying fairly happy partners, we also see OUR partner run around spending energy/time/money on everybody else under the sun. After a few years, being 'nice' and 'accommodating' starts translating out to 'being a doormat so even the nicest guy can take advantage of you.'
Sorry, just had to vent. I'm just tired of seeing guys bitch about the women they'd treat decently, while knowing that if they DID have a GF that tried to make them happy, they'd probably ditch her in order to cater to all the PITA types.
A huge percentage of the "poorest and most dependent" folks in NO *couldn't* leave. They are disabled, elderly, and rely on the minimal amount of aid offered to survive that only shows up at the beginning of every month -- that's *why* they are the "poorest and most dependent" in the first place.
They wouldn't own (probably can't even drive) cars, so they couldn't drive themselves out, were likely too physically disabled to evacuate on foot, and the hurricane hit at a time of the month when they lacked the funds necessary for bus/lodging fare. How were they supposed to leave, where were they supposed to go?
"It seems like you simply haven't been exposed to some of the great Anime out there..."
Not necessarily. I used to be in a relationship with a fanboy that insisted he could make me like Anime if I just saw 'the good stuff.' So I watched hundreds of hours of 'the good stuff' with him. Note that I am not a 'fan' of American or European film/shows, whether animated or live, either: I only care about how well-written it is, not what media is used to present it.
Just to name a *few* we watched movies and/or full runs (all available seasons) of: Lain, Mononoke Hime, Nadesco, Slayers, Ranma, Evangelion (multiple endings), Kuroshin, Oh My Goddess, and a lot more I can't recall the names of. We watched it subbed, fansubbed, dubbed, both at once, and I agreed to try reading the manga. Basically, I did precisely what all the fans keep insisting will magically convert somebody.
It didn't work: I not only wasn't impressed, I thought it even sillier that people were claiming that these shows were "deep" and "complext" given it perhaps on the level of what I'd expect a twelve-year-old to understand in any other media form. Yes, the art was pretty, if you happened to like that style of art -- but the dialogue, plots, characters, metaphor, and so forth were sub-par.
Not surprisingly, though, when I told fans this and offered to give them detailed critical analysis of why, they shrieked "you just hate it for no reason because it's Anime!" No: I didn't like it because it was still at the complexity level I'd expect of a child, and gore/explosions doesn't make for maturity in my book.
Complete agreement -- I've been a Sonic.net customer since early 1996, got DSL through them back in 2002, and would never go with another ISP. Another few nice points to add to yours:
-- they offer web-chat based help (great if you have a speech/hearing disability, or if you're away from home)
-- nationwide dialup for just $5/month for traveling
-- almost never down (I think maybe 1 - 2 downtimes max in three years of DSL)
-- great Message Of The Day updates with whatever tiny hardware/software changes they're making, problems they're having, etc.
I liked them enough that even for the short time I temporarily had @Home (now Comcast) before DSL was available, I chose to keep paying my monthly Sonic.net membership just to help ensure they'd stay in business. Good choice, as it turned out I'd been so spoiled by Sonic.net that @Home's crappy service was intolerable, so I dumped them to wait on dialup for DSL to be available.
1. The Logitech wireless mice aren't appreciably heavier than wired ones.
2. Some wireless mice have recharging base stations -- when you're done for the day, you put it into the charger and it's fresh for the next morning. (Logitech MX700 at least does this.)
3. All the wireless ones I've used rely on AA batteries, nothing special in that.
"I believe that part of the reason that alternative browsers like Firefox are beginning to gain ground is because of MS's discontinued support of IE on the Mac."
The overwhelming majority of Mac users I know, including the geeks, default to the pre-installed browser (Safari) just like Windows newbies do, except with even less willingness to try an alternative. The few Mac users I know that do use (or even try) Firefox are already super-geeks, so they'd be using it even if they were in Windows and therefore can't really count.
So while the non-geek Mac contingent might be a "part" of the rise of Firefox, my guess is that it's an extremely small one at best.
Damn, I *just* had mod points yesterday -- wish I had them now!
"When people visit our country and overstay their welcome our government punishes them by giving them the right to vote."
At least immigrants are required to demonstrate knowledge of our political system and national history before being granted the right to vote through citizenship. That's a great deal more than can be said of the majority of people that were given voting rights simply because they were born here.
"Believe me, it's heartbreaking to see a child locked in his own world unable to communicate with others or even unaware WHY he should."
It's even more heartbreaking as an autistic to have people assume that my not relying on speech/pointing/other 'normal' communication methods means I'm 'unable to communicate' or 'unaware.'
(Before you leap to any conclusions about my functionality, make sure to read a letter to those that feel autistics capable of typing are magically more functional in any other way than those that currently aren't typing. I am a *lot* like the friend of mine that wrote that.)
Actually, I find that non-religious people that *aren't* into wild materialism like Giftmas that tend to be the most insightful. The 'socially acceptable' ones aren't better, society's constant praising of their lack of differences just makes them *think* they are.
I'd much rather spend an evening with a nice guy with lots of overclocking tales than somebody 'socially acceptable' that refers to people that don't adhere to societal norms as "poor bastards."
Miranda doesn't support video; Trillian does.
I don't care how much "better" Miranda is otherwise, I need a client that supports video -- it's been one of the saving-points in my (very long-distance) relationship.
It's entirely possible to create HTML profiles in Trillian... It doesn't have widgets to do all the work for you, but if you code it that way, it will show up properly on the other end. (I just discovered this recently myself.)
File transfers with people using other IM programs also work in Trill 2.x at least for AIM. I send/receive files fairly often with non-Trillian users. That only started working within the past year, though.
The disorder (which I have) is called prosopagnosia, also known as face-blindness.
No. People with prosopagnosia can often have excellent or even photographic visual memory, yet have an extremely hard time at best recognizing faces. Irlen Syndrome can make it hard to perceive objects as a whole, even if we have extremely good physical vision. There really is no such thing as "ordinary memory" -- the brain accesses and stores information in quite a variety of ways. I can't remember (ironically) the name for the specific loss of name-recognition, but it does exist, and is common in people born with other neurological abnormalities like the above.
Fingers slipped on the keyboard and accidentally submitted the post before I was done, so I'll rewrite it here. :-p
"KD-36XS955, HDR-FX1, DSC-F828..."
Those are all just model numbers, just as any manufacturer uses to identify specific product releases. Sony's actual lines are named no differently from how Apple or other companies do it: Cybershot, Clie, VAIO, etc. If you listed the full product name -- like CyberShot DSC-F828 -- it would be blatantly obvious what they were.
"Contrast this with the branding Apple pulled off after Jobs returned...iMacs, PowerMacs and PowerBooks and now iBooks and iPods. Easy."
Only easy if you never have to find need to find info about a specific model within those lines. Speaking from experience, Googling just "Powerbook" brings up a ton irrelevant pages, so you have to add in the speed, screen size, etc. -- even then, you get inaccurate results. Easier to have the model name and get the right answers immediately.
Also, while fans might intuitively know the difference between an iMac and a PowerMac and a PowerBook, the rest of us don't. *Far* less intuitive than just having ONE name for the whole computer line (with listed model numbers) like Sony does.
"KD-36XS955, HDR-FX1, DSC-F828 -- these are all real products I pulled off the Sony website. Do you have any clue what they are?"
You're forgetting that those are just specific model/release numbers, which *all* manufacturers use. The real 'names' of their products are no different from Apple or other manufacturers -- things like Cybershot, Clie, Vaio, etc. The model numbers are typically
"Contrast this with the branding Apple pulled off after Jobs returned...iMacs, PowerMacs and PowerBooks and now iBooks and iPods. Easy."
Sure, unless you happen
Complete agreement. Oddly, people in some metro areas seem to grasp this concept better than those in other areas. At least, that's my (limited) experience.
:-)
I wouldn't expect anybody outside California to read or even care about the SF Chronicle, however great it is. Yet more than one friend from the DC area has reacted with condescending shock when informed that we don't read the Washington Post. (I've read it; it had the same basic stuff as the Chronicle, just with a DC slant rather than a SF one. It certainly didn't make me feel like I'd ever been deprived of anything by not reading it otherwise.)
Just my experience, though. I might just know extremely DC-centric people and not enough SF-centric ones or something.
Your sexist show of intellectual inadequacy aside, the fact is that Mensa has traditionally been heavily male-dominated.
(Don't even bother leaping to conclusions on what that implies unless you have a solid academic knowledge of historical sociology, either -- you'll just come off looking like an ignorant ass.)
If you're sure it's their service (with Comcast that's almost guaranteed; they really DO suck) rather than your hardware, then the answer is to lie... There's no way for them to know the difference from their end. If they send a tech out, just unplug the router, stash it in a drawer, and plug the modem back in directly for the day.
"Superglue's far to unclean a product, Yeh right! How many deaths are there a year due to contaminated super-glue?"
Super-glue generally isn't used on small cuts that don't require medical intervention, and if it were, the cut was nowhere near deep enough for an infecton to be much of an issue.
In a clinical setting, however, the medical grade stuff is used on open/surgical wounds -- "cuts" that if infected could cause a person to lose a limb or their life.
(Would you seriously want non-sterilized instruments used on you in surgery? No? Then why would you want potentially bacteria-laden adhesive lining the wound?)