He, reminds me of Lem's short story "The Washing Machine Tragedy."
Sexy robot washing machines, sure they can only wash one napkin at a time but with all those other great features who wouldn't want one. The story gets more surreal and weird from then on in an oddly coherent way.
If you have housekeepers stealing from you have them arrested. Do you count how many bedsheets are in your closet or exactly how many of some other common item you have? Are you sure that you didn't just misplace that bottle of perfume? They're not idiots, contrary to what you may think, they steal things that they know from experience you won't notice. Even if you do notice there is no way to know that they stole it and the effort to prove they did it is far from worth it.
If they aren't doing a good job, fire them. If you accept a crappy job from them, why are we to believe you wouldn't accept a crappy job from a robot? They do a crappy job when they know (or strongly suspect) you won't notice even if you pay them to do otherwise. A robot has no such laziness circuit, it will do the job no matter how much you may or may not notice it not doing it.
Would you rather have your house cleaned by some cold, metal machine, or by some sexy, 20 year old, Russian girl? At least the robot won't be robbing me blind and will actually clean a disorganized house in detail (house cleaners generally don't as they doubt you'd notice).
I'd like to add that one of the main reasons we CAN break things down and so on in engineering is because HUMANS designed things to be that way. We needed to do that because we are so limited, if we didn't we couldn't even design the most basic of complex devices. When you have three hundred people working on something you NEED to be able to break it down into 300 small weakly related chunks. The end result won't be as efficient but it will be feasible to build.
Nature however lacks that restriction and has no problems dealing with massively complex systems. Everything may be related to everything else and the whole system changes constantly. Worse there was no rational or logical or even sane design (by human engineering standards that is) to the whole thing, it was simply patched together over billions of years in an ad-hoc manner. It's like those stories you hear of insanely optimized software designed by some crazy ukranian in the 70s (that takes advantage of the position of the head on the rotating drum that stores the software) taken to the Nth order.
Claiming that a method will work on such a system because it works on one that we basically designed for such a method to work on is patently absurd. Worse it's a system designed by and for something that has indecent computing power, every single molecule performing operations in parallel, so you can't even simulate it in any long term way.
Well someone better tell that to all the biologists who spend their life on these problems... oh wait a second this is what they fucking do. Except that every dimension is relevant in some way and there are billions of dimensions. Also due to our lack of quantum cloning technology (make a copy of a person every x nanoseconds) and temporal freeze technology (rip out and analyze the copies one cell at a time while nothing in them changes) getting data on all those dimensions is impossible. And unlike your cpu we can't reset cells so getting any data is a very slow process even for bacteria.
But don't try to hide in your ivory tower claiming that what you do is too complicated for mere mortals to understand. I doubt any human can ever comprehend how the human body works in any detail or breath.
VPN is for external connections (and even that may be crackable depending on the implementation), generally local network traffic is not encrypted (as they assume it is physically secure).
Well we better get rid of that whole supreme court "striking down of unconstitutional laws" thing, now shouldn't we?
After all, since all laws are proper and right and they never can be struck down or challenged in court (which usually requires someone to break them first) why bother even having that system?
A few thousand a year? It's called working during the summer. Even the abysmally paying undergrad summer research program at stanford paid out that much. Add in 5 hours a week doing some manual work such as the library or cafeteria at $7-8/hr. As for books, well thats what used and international editions are for (and borrowing from friends who already took the class). In the end you can take out loans, $20k isn't that much to pay back.
High SAT scores do almost nothing today to get you in to one of the top 5 universities. If you live in the middle of nowhere then you are screwed somewhat. Then again being the valedictorian of a small town school is probably worth more than being number 300 (but just as good) from a top high school. If there is a local community college you can take classes there during high school, even get college credit for them. If there is research done there then you can try to do research as well. There are also distance learning programs available although I'm not sure how much financial aid they have. If you're particularly brilliant (and can learn on your own) then once you know advanced topics you can try applying to college summer programs during high school.
Here's the thing that Americans seem to not understand: if you value something then you can't expect it to just come to you. If you want your kids to be educated, at a good school, then you need to sacrifice for it. THAT'S why Asians dominate in so many top school in the US. Their parents value education and will work their asses off to make sure their kids get a good one. If their current town doesn't offer what their kids need then they will move, simple as that.
So guess what a 80k dollar loan looks like when you get 80% tuition covered as a scholarship(yeah, it's about that according to stanford)? Well financial aid generally assumes your parents give a damn about your education so a decent portion of that 20% would be parental contribution. If they can't cover it then the financial aid is more. My friend got a pretty much free ride to Stanford for example. Also at 80% covered your loan would come out to $36k. My total 4-year cost minus financial aid came out to maybe $50k and my parents well far from poor.
That leaves maybe $5k/year let's say. There are plenty of jobs around for students such as the cafeteria, library and so on. You can also try for an RA (and associates R* positions) your sophomore year, if you're more socially adept people. Certain classes (intro CS one for example) have only undergrad low level TAs which you can get your sophomore year. Summer research, work or internships are also possible and available. There are a number of programs for undergrad summer research as that is a recent focus at Stanford. Even if you do finish with large loans that just means you will need to work your backside off for a few years after graduation.
If you're not rich you have to work harder but then again that's life. If you don't want to work harder or take on loans to do better in the future then that's your problem.
In other words you wish to justify your own failure to get in by claiming it was due to lack of money. If you're intelligent and hard working getting into a top school and being able to pay for it aren't problems. Top universities have very nice financial aid programs and furthermore there are outside scholarships. You can also make money on the side by TAing or doing paid research (or other less mentally stimulating jobs). As a last resort there are of course loans but those really shouldn't be necessary, save maybe to buy school supplies.
Like I said, there are tons of companies (including mine) that have thousands of developers and this isn't a problem. The secure data is kept away from most devs and the ones who need it have to go through hoops and legal paperwork to get the data. We're also generally too busy to deal with crap like SSHing home or something.
After all you can't give devs laptops either in your company or let them telecommute. Contractors can't use their own system or software, so you need to provide both to them. Internet access should also not be allowed at all (on systems with sensitive data) to prevent trojans and viruses from being a concern. USB keys are also out as are all other such things, otherwise you can't be sure where the data is.
If you want to be paranoid or need to be paranoid then that's fine but if you believe that you're anything but a tiny minority or that there isn't a decent efficiency hit then you're deluding yourself.
Oh? Every dev at my company, thousands of them, has admin/root access to their machines and dev servers (su to be exact for the servers). There are very few problems and everything works quite nicely.
I guess my company not hiring $5/hour retards who dropped out of middle school to do their dev work may explain why there are so few problems.
I don't know whether to laugh at you or feel sorry for you. What a useless human being. If you're that worried about offending someone, you should probably just kill yourself. So says the anonymous coward. Likely one with social issues. In real life we all hold back because we don't want to offend other people, those who don't fail miserably at life.
Protip: It's not your behavior on the internet losing you jobs. It's your lack of spine and fear of being yourself. Why would how I act online lose me jobs, not like my potential employers know. I'm actually doing very well in RL, I see no reason for introducing minor potential problems into it for no reason at all. If nothing else I argue too much with my superiors at work, of course I do that for work related reasons. My bosses have no reason to know my political views for example and I prefer if they didn't know them.
Nobody likes a kiss ass. There is a difference between not offending people pointlessly and kissing ass. Anyone successful knows it very well and that you don't says a lot about you. You don't make people your enemies unless you gain something from it and you don't do so needlessly.
The really funny part is, unless you're this delusional in real life, employers don't need to look at your internet activity to find most of that stuff. Delusional? Using my real name online gains me nothing, for the purposes I use the internet for that is, while having the potential to cost me something. I as a result decide that using my real name is not worth it. You claim that is delusional? Or do you simply not comprehend such a simple argument?
Also point 1 is likewise stupid. It assumes the blog poster is a total idiotic attention whore, which I am guessing is what the author is but not everyone is like him. I know a number of people very well and I could almost never find their online blogs with that alone no matter how much I search. Likewise it is perfectly trivial to hide enough details to prevent people from finding your real name from a blog even if they try real hard. It is a straw man argument or close to it, or rather making downright false claims and generalizations to justify a point.
Yet again I point out how humorous it is that you put so much value on his point, apparently simply because of his popularity.
You should be proud that they actually stood up for what they believed in, despite those consequences Fighting for your beliefs is pointless if you fail horribly in the end and achieve nothing, or as my grandparents did aid your future enemy. There are plenty of sheep to die for the cause when needed, I prefer to get a gun as they do so I can shoot the wolf.
Anecdotally, I think that anonymity on the internet is, to a small extent, playing a role in my generation's lack of motivation both politically and socially. When you are so used to being able to spout off your opinions without fear of repercussions (just as I am doing right now, ironically), you tend to end up complacent and reluctant, and to avoid confrontation when the same type of situation occurs in meatspace. You could argue that it also let's people more effectively question their own ingrained environmental values with a lot more freedom. Activism requires a somewhat fanatical and blind devotion to a cause even if reality doesn't agree with you. Harder to do when your arguments and views just got ripped to shreds by some random guy online.
Mostly however I think we simply live in an absurdly nice and peaceful society which makes it hard to muster up the drive to do anything to fix, in our eyes, minor problems.
Interesting, you try to put value on his argument based on the fact that it's a popular blog. So much so that you mention it in your post. You want us to value his words not because they are right in their own sense but because of the person who wrote them (ie: popularity of a person makes what he says true).
Your very own post highlights why some people prefer anonymity online, it makes everyone equal and prevent counter-productive social safeties (ie: popularity) from clouding the arguments in play.
I already wrote in another post why his view on point 3 is silly. Apparently he doesn't understand the issue at hand or the reasons people do this, he doesn't even try to understand. Either that or he does understand it but purposefully doesn't show the arguments for one side as that would make his own claim weaker. See if you to understand an issue truly you have to be able to argue both sides, if you only portray one side you either don't understand the other side or are hiding it. In other words he's either ignorant or deceitful. Also his writing has an amazing lack of information content and argument value, just fluff (circuses and bread) to appease the public it seems.
Nonetheless you put value on his writing without understanding the issue yourself either simply because HE said it.
So instead of a relatively open process you want your knowledge biased by a search engine that is supported by ads and uses an unknown algorithm to give back results?
Also I don't have time to read tons of primary sources when looking up some random topic for fun and analyze their importance. If I read wikipedia to know the 20 year history and time line of DC comics I do so because I don't WANT to have to read those 20 years of history.
It's more about setting an appropriate atmosphere for discussion, where you remember that the Internet is a part of the real world rather than separate from it, and that online discussion is a conversation between real people and not avatars or cyber-personalities. You assume that this makes a discussion better, I say it may make it worse. Historically a lot of writing has been anonymous or quasi-anonymous. Also there is reputation as within any single forum or discussion board or wiki (or across many in some cases) there are reputations attached to people's usernames. There is as a result accountability IF you value such a thing.
When I debate online I don't see names but only arguments. If I knew these people I couldn't help but be biased yet online I can't be. Likewise I don't need to triple think every thing I say to make sure I don't offend a particular person. As a result everyone is equal here, I have no reason to hold back or lie or not argue what I really think. I have no reason to hold back for fear that my actions in one context (discussion about say bondage) will negatively affect me in another context (job whose boss is say a conservative christian). I won't get fired or sued or sent to prison (well not with the same likelihood). Likewise what other people or me do outside a given context doesn't matter, someone being a high school drop out stripper doesn't matter if they know the subject absurdly well (and have demonstrated it).
Like I said people can't help but be biased, even if they try not to be they will perceive you differently depending on what they know about you. They may not even realize that they do.
I see real names as an ugly hack for accountability, using a more limited system (real life) instead of designing a proper way of doing what you want. You seem to want experts, a fluid way of defining (and levels of them) and maintaining experts. Instead you add a kludge system based on stuffing everything a person is into a single identity. You try to not define someone as a good source for a topic because of their history or knowledge but because others perceive all those biases attached to his name in a positive way. If Bill Gates was editing a topic on model airplanes do you think it would matter how much or little he knew on the topic or would it matter more that he is Bill Gates (and everything non-model airplane related attached to that, good or bad)?
We are social animals and have evolved a lot of inane irrational systems to help us cope with that. Instead of trying to find a way to bypass those limitations of evolution the idea seems to instead be to magnify them. Instead of knowledge alone mattering, now all the social attachments matter. Wikipedia is a mess because of all those things yet instead of trying to fix it the answer proposed is to make them even worse.
You'd use your real name if you were contributing code to Linux, or writing a letter to a newspaper; contributing to an online knowledge base should be no different. I may not use my real name for those things, it really depends on the subject in question and if I care.
When I get CVs through for possible new hires I like to Google the candidate's name and see what he has contributed online. Someone who is a total nonentity with zero relevant hits doesn't impress me much. My online real name identity is quite positive, lacking in recent activity but my field does not require me to maintain one.
"Dangerous"? No I simply don't assume that people don't judge others for the most inane of reasons. We usually can't help it, how we perceive people depends on tons of essentially inane reasons. I support the war in Iraq, I oppose the war in Iraq, I support Bush, I oppose Bush, I support gun control, I oppose gun control and the same things on hundreds of other topics. Maybe you contribute to topics of competing companies? Maybe you contributed a lot to topics about bi-polar disease. Maybe it was bondage. Maybe it was pro-Palestinian topics. Did you edit that entry on LARPing? What about that one on furries (cue furries screaming about using that name for them)? Did you make a lot of gun related edits while living in a highly liberal area? Microsoft may not look too kindly on all those Linux edits.
See I try to be open minded which means if nothing else that I know at least some about a lot of sometimes odd areas. I'm not involved in many of them in any real way myself but I may know people who are or have stumbled upon it some other way. If you tell me you're a black polygamous homosexual fur suit wearer who loves bondage and supports themselves by prostitution, then I'd be amazed at you for being secure enough to tell me but not much else. Well not quite, I would always have that description attached when I think of you even if the topic isn't related. A lot of people would view someone quite negatively if they even had one of those characteristics.
A resume may be seen by many people and even more may influence your chances of promotion or networking opportunities. I don't need to work for such a person but simply be X degrees of association from him or her. These people may be perfectly pleasant and you wouldn't ever notice that little hidden bias unless you knew them quite well.
I admit that I am paranoid (not that much compared to some people) and that I may be wrong but that's my own bias. I have however seen first hand how people view certain people with disdain despite knowing little about them, people who otherwise are perfectly nice and rational. Likewise I have heard first hand what the government can do and what it can turn into in a single decade.
Amazingly being quasi-anonymous online let's me both prevent annoying excessively-sensitive people in RL and let's me express my thoughts without bounds.
Also idealism attached to your real name is great, it caused two of my grandparents to get a government sponsored all expenses paid trip to Siberia and another to die relatively poor. And they were the lucky ones from that generation.
Oh joy, someone who can't understand an argument based on possibilities and sees the world as only black or white.
First of all I never said I'd get fired but that I may lose a potential job or a potential promotion or a potential networking ooprtunity. Those weeding out employee resumes google their names and who knows why they may not like someone.
I gain pretty much nothing from using my real name in many online situations. Nonetheless I may lose quite a bit by doing so. Or I may not but I'm slightly paranoid.
If you want to use your real name for something then you are free to do so right now. If you don't want to then you're free as well. That's how I prefer things.
Are you going to require SS, driver's license or passport numbers as well? After all my high school alone had 50 Chans in it, for example. I mean if you want people to be accountable you need to tie their identity to a person and a name does not tie to a person. A name ties to many people quite often.
However if you're not blessed enough to have a generic name that means that anyone can find everything you ever did under your real name. Anything online (and often even not online) you use your real name for is possibly tied to you, irrevocably and forever. This is the real world, not some fantasy world where everyone is nice and happy and non-prejudiced. People are petty and selfish and biased. I don't want to lose a potential job because some HR person decided they don't like my hobbies. Neither do I want to find myself in jail because some idiot policeman or prosecutor decided that my hobbies make me guilty of some crime (lots and lots of cases of innocent people getting shafted for being in the wrong place or time).
Grievous is a cyborg, as in he has a human brain (and some organs) in that metal body so technically he could use the force is he was sensitive and all that crap.
Warranty means jack shit as you still need to deal with the annoyance of a dead hard drive. MY time is worth something and this is not how I want to spend it.
This includes: -Downtime until you get a replacement -Time to set up replacement back to the state of the old machine -Annoyance of having to file warranty claim, package laptop and send it out (or drive to whatever local shop can do replacements) -Bugs when replacement differs from old machine in negative ways (which you will of course be told is officially an "upgrade" or "current equivalent" so you can't complain even though to you its a major downgrade). -Need to do constant hard drive images (and the space needed to store them). I think this requires a reboot which is annoying. -Need to do constant backups to fill in holes if you can't image often enough.
The rotodyne and v-22 use rather similar main engines, if you consider one to be a jet engine then both are jet engines. The rotodyne however also used "actual" jet engines on the wing tips (as in rocket type engine).
So by your own argument the rotodyne should be considered cooler.
In other words thank you for showing your own ignorance and destroying your own argument.
Slashdot Mirror
He, reminds me of Lem's short story "The Washing Machine Tragedy."
Sexy robot washing machines, sure they can only wash one napkin at a time but with all those other great features who wouldn't want one. The story gets more surreal and weird from then on in an oddly coherent way.
I'd like to add that one of the main reasons we CAN break things down and so on in engineering is because HUMANS designed things to be that way. We needed to do that because we are so limited, if we didn't we couldn't even design the most basic of complex devices. When you have three hundred people working on something you NEED to be able to break it down into 300 small weakly related chunks. The end result won't be as efficient but it will be feasible to build.
Nature however lacks that restriction and has no problems dealing with massively complex systems. Everything may be related to everything else and the whole system changes constantly. Worse there was no rational or logical or even sane design (by human engineering standards that is) to the whole thing, it was simply patched together over billions of years in an ad-hoc manner. It's like those stories you hear of insanely optimized software designed by some crazy ukranian in the 70s (that takes advantage of the position of the head on the rotating drum that stores the software) taken to the Nth order.
Claiming that a method will work on such a system because it works on one that we basically designed for such a method to work on is patently absurd. Worse it's a system designed by and for something that has indecent computing power, every single molecule performing operations in parallel, so you can't even simulate it in any long term way.
VPN is for external connections (and even that may be crackable depending on the implementation), generally local network traffic is not encrypted (as they assume it is physically secure).
Well we better get rid of that whole supreme court "striking down of unconstitutional laws" thing, now shouldn't we?
After all, since all laws are proper and right and they never can be struck down or challenged in court (which usually requires someone to break them first) why bother even having that system?
A few thousand a year? It's called working during the summer. Even the abysmally paying undergrad summer research program at stanford paid out that much. Add in 5 hours a week doing some manual work such as the library or cafeteria at $7-8/hr. As for books, well thats what used and international editions are for (and borrowing from friends who already took the class). In the end you can take out loans, $20k isn't that much to pay back.
Here's the thing that Americans seem to not understand: if you value something then you can't expect it to just come to you. If you want your kids to be educated, at a good school, then you need to sacrifice for it. THAT'S why Asians dominate in so many top school in the US. Their parents value education and will work their asses off to make sure their kids get a good one. If their current town doesn't offer what their kids need then they will move, simple as that. So guess what a 80k dollar loan looks like when you get 80% tuition covered as a scholarship(yeah, it's about that according to stanford)? Well financial aid generally assumes your parents give a damn about your education so a decent portion of that 20% would be parental contribution. If they can't cover it then the financial aid is more. My friend got a pretty much free ride to Stanford for example. Also at 80% covered your loan would come out to $36k. My total 4-year cost minus financial aid came out to maybe $50k and my parents well far from poor.
That leaves maybe $5k/year let's say. There are plenty of jobs around for students such as the cafeteria, library and so on. You can also try for an RA (and associates R* positions) your sophomore year, if you're more socially adept people. Certain classes (intro CS one for example) have only undergrad low level TAs which you can get your sophomore year. Summer research, work or internships are also possible and available. There are a number of programs for undergrad summer research as that is a recent focus at Stanford. Even if you do finish with large loans that just means you will need to work your backside off for a few years after graduation.
If you're not rich you have to work harder but then again that's life. If you don't want to work harder or take on loans to do better in the future then that's your problem.
In other words you wish to justify your own failure to get in by claiming it was due to lack of money. If you're intelligent and hard working getting into a top school and being able to pay for it aren't problems. Top universities have very nice financial aid programs and furthermore there are outside scholarships. You can also make money on the side by TAing or doing paid research (or other less mentally stimulating jobs). As a last resort there are of course loans but those really shouldn't be necessary, save maybe to buy school supplies.
Like I said, there are tons of companies (including mine) that have thousands of developers and this isn't a problem. The secure data is kept away from most devs and the ones who need it have to go through hoops and legal paperwork to get the data. We're also generally too busy to deal with crap like SSHing home or something.
After all you can't give devs laptops either in your company or let them telecommute. Contractors can't use their own system or software, so you need to provide both to them. Internet access should also not be allowed at all (on systems with sensitive data) to prevent trojans and viruses from being a concern. USB keys are also out as are all other such things, otherwise you can't be sure where the data is.
If you want to be paranoid or need to be paranoid then that's fine but if you believe that you're anything but a tiny minority or that there isn't a decent efficiency hit then you're deluding yourself.
Oh? Every dev at my company, thousands of them, has admin/root access to their machines and dev servers (su to be exact for the servers). There are very few problems and everything works quite nicely.
I guess my company not hiring $5/hour retards who dropped out of middle school to do their dev work may explain why there are so few problems.
Also point 1 is likewise stupid. It assumes the blog poster is a total idiotic attention whore, which I am guessing is what the author is but not everyone is like him. I know a number of people very well and I could almost never find their online blogs with that alone no matter how much I search. Likewise it is perfectly trivial to hide enough details to prevent people from finding your real name from a blog even if they try real hard. It is a straw man argument or close to it, or rather making downright false claims and generalizations to justify a point.
Yet again I point out how humorous it is that you put so much value on his point, apparently simply because of his popularity.
Mostly however I think we simply live in an absurdly nice and peaceful society which makes it hard to muster up the drive to do anything to fix, in our eyes, minor problems.
Interesting, you try to put value on his argument based on the fact that it's a popular blog. So much so that you mention it in your post. You want us to value his words not because they are right in their own sense but because of the person who wrote them (ie: popularity of a person makes what he says true).
Your very own post highlights why some people prefer anonymity online, it makes everyone equal and prevent counter-productive social safeties (ie: popularity) from clouding the arguments in play.
I already wrote in another post why his view on point 3 is silly. Apparently he doesn't understand the issue at hand or the reasons people do this, he doesn't even try to understand. Either that or he does understand it but purposefully doesn't show the arguments for one side as that would make his own claim weaker. See if you to understand an issue truly you have to be able to argue both sides, if you only portray one side you either don't understand the other side or are hiding it. In other words he's either ignorant or deceitful. Also his writing has an amazing lack of information content and argument value, just fluff (circuses and bread) to appease the public it seems.
Nonetheless you put value on his writing without understanding the issue yourself either simply because HE said it.
So instead of a relatively open process you want your knowledge biased by a search engine that is supported by ads and uses an unknown algorithm to give back results?
Also I don't have time to read tons of primary sources when looking up some random topic for fun and analyze their importance. If I read wikipedia to know the 20 year history and time line of DC comics I do so because I don't WANT to have to read those 20 years of history.
When I debate online I don't see names but only arguments. If I knew these people I couldn't help but be biased yet online I can't be. Likewise I don't need to triple think every thing I say to make sure I don't offend a particular person. As a result everyone is equal here, I have no reason to hold back or lie or not argue what I really think. I have no reason to hold back for fear that my actions in one context (discussion about say bondage) will negatively affect me in another context (job whose boss is say a conservative christian). I won't get fired or sued or sent to prison (well not with the same likelihood). Likewise what other people or me do outside a given context doesn't matter, someone being a high school drop out stripper doesn't matter if they know the subject absurdly well (and have demonstrated it).
Like I said people can't help but be biased, even if they try not to be they will perceive you differently depending on what they know about you. They may not even realize that they do.
I see real names as an ugly hack for accountability, using a more limited system (real life) instead of designing a proper way of doing what you want. You seem to want experts, a fluid way of defining (and levels of them) and maintaining experts. Instead you add a kludge system based on stuffing everything a person is into a single identity. You try to not define someone as a good source for a topic because of their history or knowledge but because others perceive all those biases attached to his name in a positive way. If Bill Gates was editing a topic on model airplanes do you think it would matter how much or little he knew on the topic or would it matter more that he is Bill Gates (and everything non-model airplane related attached to that, good or bad)?
We are social animals and have evolved a lot of inane irrational systems to help us cope with that. Instead of trying to find a way to bypass those limitations of evolution the idea seems to instead be to magnify them. Instead of knowledge alone mattering, now all the social attachments matter. Wikipedia is a mess because of all those things yet instead of trying to fix it the answer proposed is to make them even worse. You'd use your real name if you were contributing code to Linux, or writing a letter to a newspaper; contributing to an online knowledge base should be no different. I may not use my real name for those things, it really depends on the subject in question and if I care. When I get CVs through for possible new hires I like to Google the candidate's name and see what he has contributed online. Someone who is a total nonentity with zero relevant hits doesn't impress me much. My online real name identity is quite positive, lacking in recent activity but my field does not require me to maintain one.
"Dangerous"? No I simply don't assume that people don't judge others for the most inane of reasons. We usually can't help it, how we perceive people depends on tons of essentially inane reasons. I support the war in Iraq, I oppose the war in Iraq, I support Bush, I oppose Bush, I support gun control, I oppose gun control and the same things on hundreds of other topics. Maybe you contribute to topics of competing companies? Maybe you contributed a lot to topics about bi-polar disease. Maybe it was bondage. Maybe it was pro-Palestinian topics. Did you edit that entry on LARPing? What about that one on furries (cue furries screaming about using that name for them)? Did you make a lot of gun related edits while living in a highly liberal area? Microsoft may not look too kindly on all those Linux edits.
See I try to be open minded which means if nothing else that I know at least some about a lot of sometimes odd areas. I'm not involved in many of them in any real way myself but I may know people who are or have stumbled upon it some other way. If you tell me you're a black polygamous homosexual fur suit wearer who loves bondage and supports themselves by prostitution, then I'd be amazed at you for being secure enough to tell me but not much else. Well not quite, I would always have that description attached when I think of you even if the topic isn't related. A lot of people would view someone quite negatively if they even had one of those characteristics.
A resume may be seen by many people and even more may influence your chances of promotion or networking opportunities. I don't need to work for such a person but simply be X degrees of association from him or her. These people may be perfectly pleasant and you wouldn't ever notice that little hidden bias unless you knew them quite well.
I admit that I am paranoid (not that much compared to some people) and that I may be wrong but that's my own bias. I have however seen first hand how people view certain people with disdain despite knowing little about them, people who otherwise are perfectly nice and rational. Likewise I have heard first hand what the government can do and what it can turn into in a single decade.
Amazingly being quasi-anonymous online let's me both prevent annoying excessively-sensitive people in RL and let's me express my thoughts without bounds.
Also idealism attached to your real name is great, it caused two of my grandparents to get a government sponsored all expenses paid trip to Siberia and another to die relatively poor. And they were the lucky ones from that generation.
Oh joy, someone who can't understand an argument based on possibilities and sees the world as only black or white.
First of all I never said I'd get fired but that I may lose a potential job or a potential promotion or a potential networking ooprtunity. Those weeding out employee resumes google their names and who knows why they may not like someone.
I gain pretty much nothing from using my real name in many online situations. Nonetheless I may lose quite a bit by doing so. Or I may not but I'm slightly paranoid.
If you want to use your real name for something then you are free to do so right now. If you don't want to then you're free as well. That's how I prefer things.
uhhhmm...how about no.
Are you going to require SS, driver's license or passport numbers as well? After all my high school alone had 50 Chans in it, for example. I mean if you want people to be accountable you need to tie their identity to a person and a name does not tie to a person. A name ties to many people quite often.
However if you're not blessed enough to have a generic name that means that anyone can find everything you ever did under your real name. Anything online (and often even not online) you use your real name for is possibly tied to you, irrevocably and forever. This is the real world, not some fantasy world where everyone is nice and happy and non-prejudiced. People are petty and selfish and biased. I don't want to lose a potential job because some HR person decided they don't like my hobbies. Neither do I want to find myself in jail because some idiot policeman or prosecutor decided that my hobbies make me guilty of some crime (lots and lots of cases of innocent people getting shafted for being in the wrong place or time).
Grievous is a cyborg, as in he has a human brain (and some organs) in that metal body so technically he could use the force is he was sensitive and all that crap.
Warranty means jack shit as you still need to deal with the annoyance of a dead hard drive. MY time is worth something and this is not how I want to spend it.
This includes:
-Downtime until you get a replacement
-Time to set up replacement back to the state of the old machine
-Annoyance of having to file warranty claim, package laptop and send it out (or drive to whatever local shop can do replacements)
-Bugs when replacement differs from old machine in negative ways (which you will of course be told is officially an "upgrade" or "current equivalent" so you can't complain even though to you its a major downgrade).
-Need to do constant hard drive images (and the space needed to store them). I think this requires a reboot which is annoying.
-Need to do constant backups to fill in holes if you can't image often enough.
The rotodyne and v-22 use rather similar main engines, if you consider one to be a jet engine then both are jet engines. The rotodyne however also used "actual" jet engines on the wing tips (as in rocket type engine).
So by your own argument the rotodyne should be considered cooler.
In other words thank you for showing your own ignorance and destroying your own argument.