People who are in love with this utopian vision of anonymity-free forums are always amazed to find out that not everyone shares their opinion.
People are assholes to each other offline despite knowing each other's real names (and addresses, and mothers, etc.).
People are assholes to each other online despite knowing each other's real names too. You can feel pretty secure being an asshole when you know for a fact that your target lives a continent away, or in another city. Unless you actually break some kind of harassment or hate speech law, what are they going to do?
The kind of person who would actually travel a vast distance to beat up someone who pissed them off on a forum would obviously have a field day with real names, and I doubt the reciprocal revelation of their own name would do much to deter them.
Some people don't want to connect their real names to their forum nicknames, not because they are ashamed of anything they say or think that there's anything wrong with it, but because they're aware that they might attract serious meatspace trouble for it anyway. Or because -- like me -- they just don't want everything they've ever said online to be instantly and trivially linked to their real names with a single search.
Finally, some people don't like to use their real names because the names themselves reveal things about them which invite additional crap from assholes: gender, nationality and race. The internet allows people to present a neutral public face to strangers, and thus communicate on a more level playing field than is ever possible face-to-face. I consider this to be one of the best things about the internet, and I'd like to cultivate it, not eradicate it.
A big shiny button is good for the shop. It increases the likelihood that people will buy more things. Not by buying things by mistake, but because they don't have the opportunity to reconsider purchases after seeing the intimidating total cost of all the items in their cart at checkout. Instead of confirming that you really want to buy something, you buy it right away and have the opportunity to cancel later. I imagine it has the same psychological effect as opt-out vs opt-in checkboxes.
I wouldn't mind having something like this for purchases which have an extremely low unit cost, like individual songs, or micropayment donations, because I don't want an elaborate confirmation procedure for that -- but in a shop with books or electronics? No way!
There are problems to be ironed out in every new release; it's inevitable that when many people suddenly start using the software on a wide range of hardware combinations, all kinds of previously unnoticed bugs are going to be found.
All the people I know who download and install the latest release the second it becomes available are very enthusiastic fans who are prepared to fiddle around and fix things and file bug reports. I don't really feel a burning need to upgrade as soon as I possibly can. I order a nice, packaged DVD and wait for it to arrive. By the time it does, the most egregious problems have usually been fixed. I've never had a show-stopping upgrade problem. The worst I've had to do is regenerate my xorg.conf (but that's so minimal now that it never happens anymore) or make sure that I had actually rebooted properly after the upgrade.
In South Africa some university courses are structured around textbooks and some forgo them completely and only have custom lecture notes (which are either given out by lecturers or have to be written down by students during lectures).
I have never heard of lecturers checking whether students have the right edition, though -- that's shocking. Our first-year maths course used a book which had recently come out in a new (bugfix) edition, and nobody cared if you had the old one. If the lecturers assigned problems from the book, they gave section numbers as well as page numbers so that people with older books would be able to find them.
The books were still heinously expensive, and this is even worse in a developing country.:|
Unless something has changed, I don't think there's anything stopping students here from sharing textbooks in lectures and having secret illegal photocopies at home.
Because "can walk through a door without turning sideways" = "girly man", evidently. Aaah, comicbook aesthetics.:/ The original model wasn't buff enough? Good grief; it looks nothing like an elf -- the only way you can tell what it's supposed to be is that the ears are pointed.
I don't play any MMORPGs, so I don't really have anything to complain about, except the principle of the thing. If I did play, I would like to have a character which is aesthetically pleasing to me. It would be nice if at least one race or class did not have men with huge muscles and women with ginormous cleavage. There are so many character types to choose from -- why do they all have to look the same? Surely there is room to have something for all tastes.
Even harmless edits like tributes ("you will be missed, steve"), while really not helpful, are classified as "vandalism" when people who don't understand Wikipedia keep putting them back in.
But that is vandalism, as the word is used in this context. It harms the quality of the article. It is no more a "harmless" edit than someone adding "so-and-so wuz here" or "Bush sucks" or "your mom".
Defacement by people unclear on the concept is not malicious, but there isn't a separate word for "inadvertent defacement by a clueless n00b who doesn't understand how Wikipedia works", so I guess "vandalism" will continue to have to do. The intent is different, but the effect on the quality of the article is the same, and should be dealt with in the same manner.
I think you'll find that the marketing department of De Beers started that crap, actually.
If my boyfriend and I get engaged, we're getting ourselves a data projector. It may not be forever, but a good few years of big-screen anime will certainly be a lot more fun than a stupid sparkly rock -- sure, you can cut glass with it, but that's pretty much the only redeeming quality.
Slashdot readers should know not to extrapolate from small data sets.
Ahahaha! Oh, boy. Come back the next time there's a discussion about gender issues. In these parts, two anecdotes add up to a vast body of compelling, indisputable empirical evidence.:P
I probably have a unique name + surname combination, and the first couple of pages of Google results are indeed all about me. Fortunately there's nothing embarrassing, or at least nothing I couldn't gracefully explain to a room full of dour middle-aged men (assuming I wanted to work somewhere full of dour middle-aged men).
My blog is on the front page (but I don't post anything in my blog that I wouldn't want my grandmother to see, if she could read English), along with some pages about a university magazine which list me as a contributor, and then lots and lots of tech-related questions and answers on various forums.
Normally I use one of my online pseudonyms for posting epic-length rants and other comments on more informal forums. There are only two lapses in the results, and both of them are pretty sane and reasonable, don't discuss any bizarre fetishes and don't call any person or group of people anything rude, so that's not so bad.
I'd say the most embarrassing of the lot are some questions about IIS logs that I posted on usenet during my very first job, which are near the top; they are eternally enduring proof that a) I once had to work on Windows and b) I once asked lame n00b questions on the internet.
Good article; it points out many of the obvious errors.
For those of you who are too lazy to REOTFA, I offer a highlight: the sample space of men was 39. The sample space of women was 29. And in the absence of information to the contrary, I can only assume that they were all from the same small geographical area. So you know what this study tells us about "inherent evolutionary imperatives" in the entire female gender? Bugger all, that's what.
Something the critical article doesn't address is the way "interest in infants" was determined in the men, which to me is the major WTF here. Other sources say that they were asked to choose between pictures of adults and pictures of babies, based on which they "preferred". The context in which this task was presented is not mentioned.
I don't think that there is any context which could possibly make this task an accurate metric for "interest in infants". If you don't tell the man what criteria he's supposed to be using to judge the photos, there's nothing stopping him from judging them on artistic merit (although if it's a series of photos, he'd have to be pretty daft not to notice that he has to choose between baby and non-baby every time, and infer that this is significant). On the other hand, if you say "choose the photo of the person you think you'd like the most", or anything like that, you are obviously asking him whether or not he likes children. You might as well just ask him if he likes children.
So I think all this elaborate effort was dead in the water before we even got to the stupidly leading questions that the women were asked.
In other news, 77% of women can identify men who subscribe to kooky pseudoscientific theories about psychology, on the basis of the insulting generalisations they habitually make in Slashdot posts.
Re:some are already doing it
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Abandoned Games
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This is being done with Linux distributions here in South Africa (where many people have either crappy dialup or no internet at all). The Shuttleworth Foundation has set up "Freedom Toasters" which you can use to burn distros to CD (for free, but you bring the CDs). There is in principle no reason why this shouldn't work for paid software as well.
Post after post here is missing the point. A Microsoft or Apple tech employee, who, asked "why doesnot my f***ing XYZ work", who responded with "RTFM, jackass!", would be fired on the spot.
What, and we're supposed to bemoan the fact that in our community we have the freedom to ignore or respond brusquely to rude people, instead of having to suck it up and coddle them, because the customer is always right, and we have jobs depending on it?
You are not "the Linux Community"'s customer. You are not paying "us" money to ensure that you, Joe Individual, are completely satisfied with "our" software, and that it works exactly the way you want it to, and does everything that you want it to do perfectly. (OK, if you bought a distro in a box from a shop, lured by the promise of tech support, then sure, you have the right to expect support from the people you paid. Random forum users who use the same distro are not, however, these people.)
I think that Linux could potentially be useful to lots of people who don't know a lot about computers, and I personally don't mind helping complete n00bs with their first steps in setting it up, because it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside to help someone discover what I think is nice and useful software. However, the essential element that will make me inclined to help someone is a willingness to learn.
Linux is not Windows. It was not designed to be Windows, and it will never be Windows. That means that it will never work in exactly the same way that Windows works, no matter how much you scream and stamp your feet, and that means that if you really want to use it, you will have to learn something. At some point you will have to look things up on Google, read written instructions and understand them, because finding someone to help you and finding someone to hold your hand are two very different things.
If I tell you how to do something once, and you don't bother to take note of it because you assume that you don't need to remember because I won't mind explaining it all again the next time you want to do it, I will rapidly lose interest in helping you. If you come onto a forum with a sense of entitlement the size of Antarctica, screaming that some vaguely described element is "broken" and you want it fixed "now, now, yesterday", having done no prior investigation by yourself and obviously unwilling to learn anything or put in any work, you should really not be surprised when you get ignored or flamed. You're acting like a jerk. And you're not paying anyone on the forum to put up with you acting like a jerk.
Back in the day, Buffy The Vampire Slayer had cast the female character Willow as 'the computer geek'.
Yeah, back in the day. Sadly, by the end of the series she hardly ever did anything with a computer; the emphasis had shifted to her awesome magical abilities. This is, in general, true of all the characters - they all start off as social misfits, but they end up very mainstream, and very normal (or at least wanting and trying to be), magical powers notwithstanding.
And then there was Season 6, and its tediously stereotypical male geek trio - with a dark, mean misogynistic edge which went beyond mere humorous social ineptitude around girls.
I think Firefly did a better job with Zoe, the no-nonsense soldier, Kaylee, the unselfconsciously enthusiastic engineer, and River, the child prodigy - all well-rounded characters who had intelligence and used it, and who did not simultaneously wear stupidly impractical cleavage-revealing clothing. Even Inara, the companion, was an interesting character who felt like a real person and not just scantily-clad eye candy.
The simple solution is to reduce the terms of copyrights to 20 years after death, which would approximate the old term of 75 years.
75 years?! I think a flat term of five years would be more appropriate. Maybe ten years, maximum. And I'm not entirely convinced that it's a good idea to have copyright at all, but I realise that keeping it with a severely reduced term is more likely to happen than getting rid of it entirely.
The original term of copyright was established in an era of much, much slower communication and distribution; today, five years is plenty of time to have a book published and shipped all around the world. Of course, you will get less money from one edition than from twenty editions, but I'm not sure when it was decided that after writing one book you can reasonably expect to be recompensed sufficiently to be able to put your children through university. I wish people would keep giving me free money for a finite, completed amount of work.
The other thing which needs to be fixed is the scope of copyright, which is currently completely out of control. Originally, copyright only covered publication of a work in a particular medium, and did not extend to adaptation of the work into other media, or derivative works. I would very much like to see a return to that.
Agreed. Then they would at least have to make an effort to keep their fountain of free income. Ideally, if the books they churned out were really terrible, nobody would buy them, no publisher would want them, and they would have to either find better ghostwriters or throw in the towel.
But in an ideal world, this particular reform would be one of many - if the duration of copyright were divided by (at least) ten and restored to something sensible, this issue would be moot. I think that fixing this bit while leaving the other (much worse and more fundamental) excesses as they are would be a waste of time.
A version of this idea which would be more appealing to intellectual "property" owners (and make them less likely to fight loss of the rights tooth-and-nail) would be not forcing them to cede them to the public domain for free, but simply forcing them to sell them to the highest bidder offering a price of at least [insert minimum mandated price here]. Sort of like having your assets auctioned off by the government to pay off your debts if you're insolvent.
That would, however, be worse for the public domain (and, one could argue, for society in general).
As others have pointed out, when you use Linux, you have options. There are many web browsers, and you can choose the one that you like best. There are many email clients. There are many text editors.
On Windows, there are also (now) several applications available for each task, but the ones which haven't been ported to Windows like to pretend that they are the only possible choice in their field, and tend to be named accordingly. I'm thinking especially of all the shitty third-party photo-editing software that you get bundled with the Windows drivers for various digital cameras, scanners, etc. They're all called Photo- or Image- something, usually with "Pro" or "Plus" appended for good measure, because it makes them sound better. Good luck telling them apart.
If you are a grandma-level user, and you like to believe that the icon with an e you click on is the only tool in the world for surfing the web (OK, let's not get ahead of ourselves, for "getting on the internet"), then you will be just as happy with the default web browser on whatever grandma-proof Linux distro your grandchild installed on your computer. Since you probably never changed or customised anything on your Windows system because you were scared that changing the background picture would break something, you will never know or care what actual programs launch when you click on "text editor", "word processor", "email", "image editor", "picture viewer", "movie player", etc. If something goes wrong, if the person on the phone helping you out knows enough about Linux to be able to help you, they should be smart enough to know how you can tell them what program you are actually using -- and an unambiguous name which sounds nothing like the names of all the other possibilities will be a help, not a hindrance, in communication.
As for people who are actually aware that there are multiple programs available for each task -- it is a lot easier to distinguish between Firefox, Opera, Epiphany, Mozilla and Galeon than it would be between Web Browser Pro, Web Surfer Pro, Internet Surfer Plus, Super Web Browser 2000, Super Web Surf, and similar generic names.
People have no problem with car names, clothing brands, food names and drink names, even though car names are usually random combinations of real-person-surname + arbitrary word, fashion houses are named after people, and food and drink names are usually total gibberish. It's just a question of familiarity. I know what Pringles are; I don't need them to be called "Flavoured Reconstituted Potato Oval Snacks" to constantly remind me.
If I were to arrive in a foreign country full of unfamiliar food brands, I would probably be a bit lost at first, but I should be capable of finding what I wanted by going to the appropriate sections of the supermarket, reading the descriptions on the packaging, and trying out different brands of the same thing to determine what was good and what was bad. It would be ridiculous of me to complain that the food is not actually named "Good Quality, Expensive Mayonnaise", "Mediocre Mayonnaise", "Awful Fake Mayonnaise", etc. to make it easier for me to remember which is which.
But then, not to be too political about it, current American enemies cut heads off, what would they do with a captured woman?
Haha. This is somewhat off-topic, but come on. Being raped is worse than having one's head cut off?!* And therefore putting women in the field would expose them to a simply unacceptable risk, compared to the ordinary, pedestrian risk of getting shot, blown up, otherwise horribly maimed or decapitated that male soldiers currently face?
I keep hearing this rationale for keeping women out of the nastier, more gory parts of the military, and I have always found it rather bizarre.
* I will concede that having one's head cut off and being raped is worse than just having one's head cut off, but only marginally.
Look, it's very simple: people are kicking up a fuss about this because it is hypocritical for Sony to maintain its anti-copyright-infringement stance, and attempt to take the moral high ground in this regard, if Sony itself is infringing copyright left, right and centre.
If a politically powerful, fanatical anti-drug campaigner who constantly lobbied for pot-smokers to be thrown in jail for years and fined huge sums of money were caught smoking pot, I would not be surprised to see large numbers of people demanding that he be thrown in jail and fined millions, in keeping with the laws that he himself helped establish, even if they were pro-legalisation activists who firmly believe that the laws are unjust.
It is a challenge to the legal system to treat everyone equally under the law, and thus either apply an unfair, draconian law to everyone, including powerful parties who have previously used the law against their enemies, or to concede that the law is unfair and change it.
But d20 is not D&D, so don't confuse the two. d20 actually works well, when used correctly, for just about any sort of game, save one.
Well, I'm glad to hear that Cthulhu d20 has no classes, at least.:)
PS: Also consider checking out Arcana Evolved by Monte Cook. It's expensive, but a really, really good d20 fantasy game. Arguably much better than D&D, though purists on both sides will tell you their own story.
I've heard good things about it. Apparently it's ditched alignment, which is a great start...
I'm going to cherry-pick a few points where I think we disagree, or you interpreted what I said oddly, because I don't have a ton of time...
Good idea, or we could be here for weeks.:)
Regarding classes specifically: the example I selected was possibly not a very good one for illustrating my point, since half the problem with a non-epic diplomat is that he isn't epic, and thus doesn't fit into the D&D setting very well. And that's a totally different quibble I have with D&D.
You have a high-level system with tons of choices made for you, so if you want to customize, you do so ON TOP of that system through role playing.
I don't like systems in which important in-character events have no system effect, or in fact contradict the system effects. A good D&D example of this is damage. According to the rules, a D&D character has three (four?) states: perfectly fine (positive HP), grievously injured (negative HP), and IIRC unconscious (-10 HP?) and dead (-[your full HP] HP).
If someone hits you with an axe for 30 points of damage, and you go down from 50 HP to 20 HP, as far as the system rules are concerned, you are still perfectly fine. Your ability to fight and do other things has not been impaired in any way. The only thing that has changed is the number of times that you'll need to be hit with an axe again before you are no longer perfectly fine.
Yes, I know that the designers of D&D keep repeating that hit points are not directly tied to health. So what are they supposed to represent, then? What's a good way of roleplaying losing 30 HP? If it is an injury, then why doesn't it make it more difficult for you to fight? If it isn't an injury, then what is it?
There's more. In the real world, armour is mostly effective at reducing damage done to you. In the D&D rules, armour makes you harder to hit. In real life, you can easily kill someone, no matter how skilled they are at fighting, with a single well-placed blow. In D&D, there isn't really a mechanism for that. In real life, a crossbow is deadly. In D&D, a crossbow fires toothpicks. In real life, if you are engaged in a mass combat you do not want to be completely surrounded by enemies. In D&D, you want there to be orcs in all the spaces around you on the map, so that you have lots of orcs to cleave after you kill the first one. In real life, you are unlikely to find two people whose hard-to-kill rating varies by a factor of ten. Etc., etc..
Maybe it doesn't bother you when there is a large disconnect between the workings of the rules and any sensible real world explanation, but it bothers me sufficiently that I really don't like using D&D for anything that is supposed to be even vaguely realistic. The discrepancies are a constant distraction. If I can pretend that the PCs are supermen who can keep on fighting while half-disembowelled and minus an arm, it's all good. If, however, the setting is going for gritty realism, my suspension of disbelief goes out the window.
I prefer systems in which the kind of situations and effects you want to roleplay are actually expressed in the system rules.
OK, what was meant to be a short comment has turned into a rather long rant.:/
My main point is that D&D is optimised for a particular kind of roleplaying game - a highly "gamist" roleplaying game, ideally focused on people with magical abilities or nearly supernatural fighting skills going on adventures and having epic battles in a not very realistic way. I don't think there's anything wrong with that kind of game, and I have enjoyed games like that a lot, but that is not the only kind of focus that a roleplaying game (even specifically a fantasy roleplaying game) can have. And I think D&D, and d20 in general, is not a very good system to use for many other kinds of games, for various reasons.
Buy some high "hit things with sword" skills and some good "be sneaky" skills."
And what skills would those be?
Well, for the combat skill, what weapons do you want your character to use? Take skills in those weapons. That's the way skills-based systems usually work. D&D doesn't handle weapon proficiency with individual skills; by default there are classes of weapons that you automatically know how to use if you are from one of the fighter classes, and IIRC if you want to be extra good with a particular weapon there's a special fighter feat for that. Personally, I think it makes more sense to have skills in specific weapons.
On the basic D&D character sheet, there are 10-20 skills that you have to choose from.
I am confused. Is a number between 10 and 20 supposed to be unmanageably large? Also, that is the total number of all skills in D&D. You do not have 10-20 different skills to choose from when choosing "be sneaky" skills, for example; as I recall the choices are "Sneak", "Hide" and possibly "Disguise". Each of which has a plain, simple-to-understand name and a description.
It's more a difference in attitude than a difference in the system itself. D&D gets the newbie up and playing fast.
I agree that D&D is an easy system to generate characters in if you have never roleplayed before. It is geared towards producing characters that are mostly finished, except for a few gaps that need to be filled in. However, this convenience comes at a price - the trade-off is that it is far more difficult to make highly customised characters who do not fit neatly into the stock D&D fantasy archetypes.
GURPS simply doesn't. I'd prefer to run GURPS any day of the week, but if I were running a game for new players, I'd probably pick a d20 variant.
I can't really comment on GURPS, since I haven't played it a lot and have generally found it to be awkward and unwieldy. The skill-based systems I am thinking of are mostly Ars Magica and Legend of the Five Rings. L5R has a minor class-like component (the school in which your character has trained), but it has far less influence on your character's structure than a D&D class, and it is tied directly into the setting, since it is a system representation of a tangible quality which exists in the game world (that is, being trained in a particular samurai school). In my experience, creating characters in these systems may require more familiarity with the available options (and thus more initial reading), and more decision-making, but is not inherently any more complex.
Oh, but it's not so simple. First off, I have to search through dozens of advantages and disadvantages to find those, and each of them is its own mechanic that I have to learn and understand.
The way you have to read through all the classes and feats to figure out what advantages they give you and how they work? And, again, if the advantages are named sensibly, you only have to skim through them until you find something called "berserker" or "magical talent", and there you go.
I give up, why would you want to be a druid? It was just my concept.
My point was that your suggestion of druid + barbarian does not simply fulfil the criteria of "magic user" and "berserker". Those classes come packaged with specific other characteristics which might be completely unsuitable for the kind of magic-using berserker character that the player has in mind.
Eh? How is any combination of classes unsupportable in-character? I dare you to come up with a combination of classes that I can't come up with a decent character concept for.
I am sure that, given any ludicrous combination of classes, you could make up a plausible character concept to explain it. That wouldn't mean that it isn't a ridiculous situation to try to explain. And the problem here is that I don't want to roll up
Good gods, NO! Character classes are a brilliant abstraction for the gamer who doesn't want to spend his time gaining a deep understanding of the entire system.
(...)
You don't have to understand the entire system in order to generate characters in a more freeform way by buying advantages/disadvantages and skills. As long as the bits are sensibly named and organised, it really isn't very difficult.
Want a character that can fight well and steal stuff? Roll stats. Add one level of rogue, one level of fighter. Thank you, come again.
Buy some high "hit things with sword" skills and some good "be sneaky" skills.
Want a character that can do magic and has a berserker-rage mentality toward combat? Roll stats. Add one level of druid, one level of barbarian. Thank you, come again.
Get a "magical ability" advantage and a "berserker" advantage/disadvantage. Buy skill in "hit things with axe".
The difference is that with a class you get a package of qualities which stereotypically "go with" the broad characteristics that you would like. For example, what if I want a magic-using berserker who isn't particularly in tune with nature and thinks all trees are good for is campfires? Why would I want to be a druid? What magic-using class should I slot in instead? What weird baggage which totally doesn't fit with my character idea am I going to get with that?
Sure, you can mix and match and multiclass in increasingly byzantine and unsupportable-in-character ways, or ignore some rules and swop some skills around, or apply prestige classes (which are essentially a way to get around the creative limitations of classes). Or you can just pick exactly what you want from a list.
It may mean reading a couple of pages of lists so that you can see what is available, but it really doesn't take any more time and effort than reading through a bunch of template descriptions and trying to decide which one fits what you're trying to do the best. And it makes it easier to create unique, varied and imaginative characters that don't feel like they've just stepped off a production line clutching a McWizard 1st level starter kit.
Actually gathering people up and playing at the table with chips, beer and "Monty Python's Holy Grail" playing in a vcr in the background are pretty much over.
Maybe that's true where you live, but over here tabletop RPGs are looking pretty healthy, even though we have to import all our books from overseas at a ridiculous markup. Substitute "coke" for "beer" and remove the background distraction, and you have my house every Wednesday evening. Or the houses of any number of people I know.
I think there was a period when tabletop RPGs were a relatively common teenage "phase" activity, and that phenomenon has mostly died out. You don't really get large numbers of people coming out of school today who played hack'n'slash DnD with their friends. That doesn't mean that nobody is playing anymore.
I think it's delusional to say math and science interest isn't dominated by the male gender. At least 3/4 of every math/science major is male.
I think the sci-fi channel's attempt to draw the female audience into its viewership has dramatically diluted the science content of their programming.
I'm not disagreeing that at present interest in science and technology is dominated by men. However, I doubt that the SciFi channel has abandoned hard SF for fantasy because it doesn't care about the male demographic and wants to attract more women. I think that they've done it because they have established that there are more people who watch fantasy than people who watch hard SF. It's more appealing to the mainstream. The mainstream does not find science fun. The mainstream treats science with deep suspicion and likes to relegate it to bad-guy status in the media.
If they really were trying to appeal to women specifically with shows like Xena, I don't think there would be so much T&A and jiggling female eye candy. Mainstream women are, however, likely to watch any show in which women are the main characters, so their interest is a beneficial side effect.
...it excluded and pushed away male viewers like myself who value hard(i.e. based on actual science) science fiction. I used to watch sci-fi, I don't anymore.
You imply that you can remember a time when SF TV series actually were hard SF. Could you mention some specific shows that you think are a good example? I seriously can't think of any.
Ah, yes. The mainstream media. They skim through what you're saying, latch onto something simple they think they've understood, and run with it. I have cringed through many articles about either Linux, open source in general, computers in general (urgh) or some geeky little subculture I belong to, wanting very much to track down the people who wrote them, force them to write a three-hour reading comprehension exam, and then beat them severely with their own rolled-up publication.:/
Slashdot Mirror
People who are in love with this utopian vision of anonymity-free forums are always amazed to find out that not everyone shares their opinion.
People are assholes to each other offline despite knowing each other's real names (and addresses, and mothers, etc.).
People are assholes to each other online despite knowing each other's real names too. You can feel pretty secure being an asshole when you know for a fact that your target lives a continent away, or in another city. Unless you actually break some kind of harassment or hate speech law, what are they going to do?
The kind of person who would actually travel a vast distance to beat up someone who pissed them off on a forum would obviously have a field day with real names, and I doubt the reciprocal revelation of their own name would do much to deter them.
Some people don't want to connect their real names to their forum nicknames, not because they are ashamed of anything they say or think that there's anything wrong with it, but because they're aware that they might attract serious meatspace trouble for it anyway. Or because -- like me -- they just don't want everything they've ever said online to be instantly and trivially linked to their real names with a single search.
Finally, some people don't like to use their real names because the names themselves reveal things about them which invite additional crap from assholes: gender, nationality and race. The internet allows people to present a neutral public face to strangers, and thus communicate on a more level playing field than is ever possible face-to-face. I consider this to be one of the best things about the internet, and I'd like to cultivate it, not eradicate it.
A big shiny button is good for the shop. It increases the likelihood that people will buy more things. Not by buying things by mistake, but because they don't have the opportunity to reconsider purchases after seeing the intimidating total cost of all the items in their cart at checkout. Instead of confirming that you really want to buy something, you buy it right away and have the opportunity to cancel later. I imagine it has the same psychological effect as opt-out vs opt-in checkboxes.
I wouldn't mind having something like this for purchases which have an extremely low unit cost, like individual songs, or micropayment donations, because I don't want an elaborate confirmation procedure for that -- but in a shop with books or electronics? No way!
There are problems to be ironed out in every new release; it's inevitable that when many people suddenly start using the software on a wide range of hardware combinations, all kinds of previously unnoticed bugs are going to be found.
All the people I know who download and install the latest release the second it becomes available are very enthusiastic fans who are prepared to fiddle around and fix things and file bug reports. I don't really feel a burning need to upgrade as soon as I possibly can. I order a nice, packaged DVD and wait for it to arrive. By the time it does, the most egregious problems have usually been fixed. I've never had a show-stopping upgrade problem. The worst I've had to do is regenerate my xorg.conf (but that's so minimal now that it never happens anymore) or make sure that I had actually rebooted properly after the upgrade.
In South Africa some university courses are structured around textbooks and some forgo them completely and only have custom lecture notes (which are either given out by lecturers or have to be written down by students during lectures).
I have never heard of lecturers checking whether students have the right edition, though -- that's shocking. Our first-year maths course used a book which had recently come out in a new (bugfix) edition, and nobody cared if you had the old one. If the lecturers assigned problems from the book, they gave section numbers as well as page numbers so that people with older books would be able to find them.
The books were still heinously expensive, and this is even worse in a developing country. :|
Unless something has changed, I don't think there's anything stopping students here from sharing textbooks in lectures and having secret illegal photocopies at home.
Because "can walk through a door without turning sideways" = "girly man", evidently. Aaah, comicbook aesthetics. :/ The original model wasn't buff enough? Good grief; it looks nothing like an elf -- the only way you can tell what it's supposed to be is that the ears are pointed.
I don't play any MMORPGs, so I don't really have anything to complain about, except the principle of the thing. If I did play, I would like to have a character which is aesthetically pleasing to me. It would be nice if at least one race or class did not have men with huge muscles and women with ginormous cleavage. There are so many character types to choose from -- why do they all have to look the same? Surely there is room to have something for all tastes.
Even harmless edits like tributes ("you will be missed, steve"), while really not helpful, are classified as "vandalism" when people who don't understand Wikipedia keep putting them back in.
But that is vandalism, as the word is used in this context. It harms the quality of the article. It is no more a "harmless" edit than someone adding "so-and-so wuz here" or "Bush sucks" or "your mom".
Defacement by people unclear on the concept is not malicious, but there isn't a separate word for "inadvertent defacement by a clueless n00b who doesn't understand how Wikipedia works", so I guess "vandalism" will continue to have to do. The intent is different, but the effect on the quality of the article is the same, and should be dealt with in the same manner.
I think you'll find that the marketing department of De Beers started that crap, actually.
If my boyfriend and I get engaged, we're getting ourselves a data projector. It may not be forever, but a good few years of big-screen anime will certainly be a lot more fun than a stupid sparkly rock -- sure, you can cut glass with it, but that's pretty much the only redeeming quality.
Slashdot readers should know not to extrapolate from small data sets.
Ahahaha! Oh, boy. Come back the next time there's a discussion about gender issues. In these parts, two anecdotes add up to a vast body of compelling, indisputable empirical evidence. :P
I probably have a unique name + surname combination, and the first couple of pages of Google results are indeed all about me. Fortunately there's nothing embarrassing, or at least nothing I couldn't gracefully explain to a room full of dour middle-aged men (assuming I wanted to work somewhere full of dour middle-aged men).
My blog is on the front page (but I don't post anything in my blog that I wouldn't want my grandmother to see, if she could read English), along with some pages about a university magazine which list me as a contributor, and then lots and lots of tech-related questions and answers on various forums.
Normally I use one of my online pseudonyms for posting epic-length rants and other comments on more informal forums. There are only two lapses in the results, and both of them are pretty sane and reasonable, don't discuss any bizarre fetishes and don't call any person or group of people anything rude, so that's not so bad.
I'd say the most embarrassing of the lot are some questions about IIS logs that I posted on usenet during my very first job, which are near the top; they are eternally enduring proof that a) I once had to work on Windows and b) I once asked lame n00b questions on the internet.
Good article; it points out many of the obvious errors.
For those of you who are too lazy to REOTFA, I offer a highlight: the sample space of men was 39. The sample space of women was 29. And in the absence of information to the contrary, I can only assume that they were all from the same small geographical area. So you know what this study tells us about "inherent evolutionary imperatives" in the entire female gender? Bugger all, that's what.
Something the critical article doesn't address is the way "interest in infants" was determined in the men, which to me is the major WTF here. Other sources say that they were asked to choose between pictures of adults and pictures of babies, based on which they "preferred". The context in which this task was presented is not mentioned.
I don't think that there is any context which could possibly make this task an accurate metric for "interest in infants". If you don't tell the man what criteria he's supposed to be using to judge the photos, there's nothing stopping him from judging them on artistic merit (although if it's a series of photos, he'd have to be pretty daft not to notice that he has to choose between baby and non-baby every time, and infer that this is significant). On the other hand, if you say "choose the photo of the person you think you'd like the most", or anything like that, you are obviously asking him whether or not he likes children. You might as well just ask him if he likes children.
So I think all this elaborate effort was dead in the water before we even got to the stupidly leading questions that the women were asked.
In other news, 77% of women can identify men who subscribe to kooky pseudoscientific theories about psychology, on the basis of the insulting generalisations they habitually make in Slashdot posts.
This is being done with Linux distributions here in South Africa (where many people have either crappy dialup or no internet at all). The Shuttleworth Foundation has set up "Freedom Toasters" which you can use to burn distros to CD (for free, but you bring the CDs). There is in principle no reason why this shouldn't work for paid software as well.
Post after post here is missing the point. A Microsoft or Apple tech employee, who, asked "why doesnot my f***ing XYZ work", who responded with "RTFM, jackass!", would be fired on the spot.
What, and we're supposed to bemoan the fact that in our community we have the freedom to ignore or respond brusquely to rude people, instead of having to suck it up and coddle them, because the customer is always right, and we have jobs depending on it?
You are not "the Linux Community"'s customer. You are not paying "us" money to ensure that you, Joe Individual, are completely satisfied with "our" software, and that it works exactly the way you want it to, and does everything that you want it to do perfectly. (OK, if you bought a distro in a box from a shop, lured by the promise of tech support, then sure, you have the right to expect support from the people you paid. Random forum users who use the same distro are not, however, these people.)
I think that Linux could potentially be useful to lots of people who don't know a lot about computers, and I personally don't mind helping complete n00bs with their first steps in setting it up, because it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside to help someone discover what I think is nice and useful software. However, the essential element that will make me inclined to help someone is a willingness to learn.
Linux is not Windows. It was not designed to be Windows, and it will never be Windows. That means that it will never work in exactly the same way that Windows works, no matter how much you scream and stamp your feet, and that means that if you really want to use it, you will have to learn something. At some point you will have to look things up on Google, read written instructions and understand them, because finding someone to help you and finding someone to hold your hand are two very different things.
If I tell you how to do something once, and you don't bother to take note of it because you assume that you don't need to remember because I won't mind explaining it all again the next time you want to do it, I will rapidly lose interest in helping you. If you come onto a forum with a sense of entitlement the size of Antarctica, screaming that some vaguely described element is "broken" and you want it fixed "now, now, yesterday", having done no prior investigation by yourself and obviously unwilling to learn anything or put in any work, you should really not be surprised when you get ignored or flamed. You're acting like a jerk. And you're not paying anyone on the forum to put up with you acting like a jerk.
Back in the day, Buffy The Vampire Slayer had cast the female character Willow as 'the computer geek'.
Yeah, back in the day. Sadly, by the end of the series she hardly ever did anything with a computer; the emphasis had shifted to her awesome magical abilities. This is, in general, true of all the characters - they all start off as social misfits, but they end up very mainstream, and very normal (or at least wanting and trying to be), magical powers notwithstanding.
And then there was Season 6, and its tediously stereotypical male geek trio - with a dark, mean misogynistic edge which went beyond mere humorous social ineptitude around girls.
I think Firefly did a better job with Zoe, the no-nonsense soldier, Kaylee, the unselfconsciously enthusiastic engineer, and River, the child prodigy - all well-rounded characters who had intelligence and used it, and who did not simultaneously wear stupidly impractical cleavage-revealing clothing. Even Inara, the companion, was an interesting character who felt like a real person and not just scantily-clad eye candy.
The simple solution is to reduce the terms of copyrights to 20 years after death, which would approximate the old term of 75 years.
75 years?! I think a flat term of five years would be more appropriate. Maybe ten years, maximum. And I'm not entirely convinced that it's a good idea to have copyright at all, but I realise that keeping it with a severely reduced term is more likely to happen than getting rid of it entirely.
The original term of copyright was established in an era of much, much slower communication and distribution; today, five years is plenty of time to have a book published and shipped all around the world. Of course, you will get less money from one edition than from twenty editions, but I'm not sure when it was decided that after writing one book you can reasonably expect to be recompensed sufficiently to be able to put your children through university. I wish people would keep giving me free money for a finite, completed amount of work.
The other thing which needs to be fixed is the scope of copyright, which is currently completely out of control. Originally, copyright only covered publication of a work in a particular medium, and did not extend to adaptation of the work into other media, or derivative works. I would very much like to see a return to that.
Agreed. Then they would at least have to make an effort to keep their fountain of free income. Ideally, if the books they churned out were really terrible, nobody would buy them, no publisher would want them, and they would have to either find better ghostwriters or throw in the towel.
But in an ideal world, this particular reform would be one of many - if the duration of copyright were divided by (at least) ten and restored to something sensible, this issue would be moot. I think that fixing this bit while leaving the other (much worse and more fundamental) excesses as they are would be a waste of time.
A version of this idea which would be more appealing to intellectual "property" owners (and make them less likely to fight loss of the rights tooth-and-nail) would be not forcing them to cede them to the public domain for free, but simply forcing them to sell them to the highest bidder offering a price of at least [insert minimum mandated price here]. Sort of like having your assets auctioned off by the government to pay off your debts if you're insolvent.
That would, however, be worse for the public domain (and, one could argue, for society in general).
As others have pointed out, when you use Linux, you have options. There are many web browsers, and you can choose the one that you like best. There are many email clients. There are many text editors.
On Windows, there are also (now) several applications available for each task, but the ones which haven't been ported to Windows like to pretend that they are the only possible choice in their field, and tend to be named accordingly. I'm thinking especially of all the shitty third-party photo-editing software that you get bundled with the Windows drivers for various digital cameras, scanners, etc. They're all called Photo- or Image- something, usually with "Pro" or "Plus" appended for good measure, because it makes them sound better. Good luck telling them apart.
If you are a grandma-level user, and you like to believe that the icon with an e you click on is the only tool in the world for surfing the web (OK, let's not get ahead of ourselves, for "getting on the internet"), then you will be just as happy with the default web browser on whatever grandma-proof Linux distro your grandchild installed on your computer. Since you probably never changed or customised anything on your Windows system because you were scared that changing the background picture would break something, you will never know or care what actual programs launch when you click on "text editor", "word processor", "email", "image editor", "picture viewer", "movie player", etc. If something goes wrong, if the person on the phone helping you out knows enough about Linux to be able to help you, they should be smart enough to know how you can tell them what program you are actually using -- and an unambiguous name which sounds nothing like the names of all the other possibilities will be a help, not a hindrance, in communication.
As for people who are actually aware that there are multiple programs available for each task -- it is a lot easier to distinguish between Firefox, Opera, Epiphany, Mozilla and Galeon than it would be between Web Browser Pro, Web Surfer Pro, Internet Surfer Plus, Super Web Browser 2000, Super Web Surf, and similar generic names.
People have no problem with car names, clothing brands, food names and drink names, even though car names are usually random combinations of real-person-surname + arbitrary word, fashion houses are named after people, and food and drink names are usually total gibberish. It's just a question of familiarity. I know what Pringles are; I don't need them to be called "Flavoured Reconstituted Potato Oval Snacks" to constantly remind me.
If I were to arrive in a foreign country full of unfamiliar food brands, I would probably be a bit lost at first, but I should be capable of finding what I wanted by going to the appropriate sections of the supermarket, reading the descriptions on the packaging, and trying out different brands of the same thing to determine what was good and what was bad. It would be ridiculous of me to complain that the food is not actually named "Good Quality, Expensive Mayonnaise", "Mediocre Mayonnaise", "Awful Fake Mayonnaise", etc. to make it easier for me to remember which is which.
But then, not to be too political about it, current American enemies cut heads off, what would they do with a captured woman?
Haha. This is somewhat off-topic, but come on. Being raped is worse than having one's head cut off?!* And therefore putting women in the field would expose them to a simply unacceptable risk, compared to the ordinary, pedestrian risk of getting shot, blown up, otherwise horribly maimed or decapitated that male soldiers currently face?
I keep hearing this rationale for keeping women out of the nastier, more gory parts of the military, and I have always found it rather bizarre.
* I will concede that having one's head cut off and being raped is worse than just having one's head cut off, but only marginally.
Look, it's very simple: people are kicking up a fuss about this because it is hypocritical for Sony to maintain its anti-copyright-infringement stance, and attempt to take the moral high ground in this regard, if Sony itself is infringing copyright left, right and centre.
If a politically powerful, fanatical anti-drug campaigner who constantly lobbied for pot-smokers to be thrown in jail for years and fined huge sums of money were caught smoking pot, I would not be surprised to see large numbers of people demanding that he be thrown in jail and fined millions, in keeping with the laws that he himself helped establish, even if they were pro-legalisation activists who firmly believe that the laws are unjust.
It is a challenge to the legal system to treat everyone equally under the law, and thus either apply an unfair, draconian law to everyone, including powerful parties who have previously used the law against their enemies, or to concede that the law is unfair and change it.
But d20 is not D&D, so don't confuse the two. d20 actually works well, when used correctly, for just about any sort of game, save one.
Well, I'm glad to hear that Cthulhu d20 has no classes, at least. :)
PS: Also consider checking out Arcana Evolved by Monte Cook. It's expensive, but a really, really good d20 fantasy game. Arguably much better than D&D, though purists on both sides will tell you their own story.
I've heard good things about it. Apparently it's ditched alignment, which is a great start...
I'm going to cherry-pick a few points where I think we disagree, or you interpreted what I said oddly, because I don't have a ton of time...
Good idea, or we could be here for weeks. :)
Regarding classes specifically: the example I selected was possibly not a very good one for illustrating my point, since half the problem with a non-epic diplomat is that he isn't epic, and thus doesn't fit into the D&D setting very well. And that's a totally different quibble I have with D&D.
You have a high-level system with tons of choices made for you, so if you want to customize, you do so ON TOP of that system through role playing.
I don't like systems in which important in-character events have no system effect, or in fact contradict the system effects. A good D&D example of this is damage. According to the rules, a D&D character has three (four?) states: perfectly fine (positive HP), grievously injured (negative HP), and IIRC unconscious (-10 HP?) and dead (-[your full HP] HP).
If someone hits you with an axe for 30 points of damage, and you go down from 50 HP to 20 HP, as far as the system rules are concerned, you are still perfectly fine. Your ability to fight and do other things has not been impaired in any way. The only thing that has changed is the number of times that you'll need to be hit with an axe again before you are no longer perfectly fine.
Yes, I know that the designers of D&D keep repeating that hit points are not directly tied to health. So what are they supposed to represent, then? What's a good way of roleplaying losing 30 HP? If it is an injury, then why doesn't it make it more difficult for you to fight? If it isn't an injury, then what is it?
There's more. In the real world, armour is mostly effective at reducing damage done to you. In the D&D rules, armour makes you harder to hit. In real life, you can easily kill someone, no matter how skilled they are at fighting, with a single well-placed blow. In D&D, there isn't really a mechanism for that. In real life, a crossbow is deadly. In D&D, a crossbow fires toothpicks. In real life, if you are engaged in a mass combat you do not want to be completely surrounded by enemies. In D&D, you want there to be orcs in all the spaces around you on the map, so that you have lots of orcs to cleave after you kill the first one. In real life, you are unlikely to find two people whose hard-to-kill rating varies by a factor of ten. Etc., etc..
Maybe it doesn't bother you when there is a large disconnect between the workings of the rules and any sensible real world explanation, but it bothers me sufficiently that I really don't like using D&D for anything that is supposed to be even vaguely realistic. The discrepancies are a constant distraction. If I can pretend that the PCs are supermen who can keep on fighting while half-disembowelled and minus an arm, it's all good. If, however, the setting is going for gritty realism, my suspension of disbelief goes out the window.
I prefer systems in which the kind of situations and effects you want to roleplay are actually expressed in the system rules.
OK, what was meant to be a short comment has turned into a rather long rant. :/
My main point is that D&D is optimised for a particular kind of roleplaying game - a highly "gamist" roleplaying game, ideally focused on people with magical abilities or nearly supernatural fighting skills going on adventures and having epic battles in a not very realistic way. I don't think there's anything wrong with that kind of game, and I have enjoyed games like that a lot, but that is not the only kind of focus that a roleplaying game (even specifically a fantasy roleplaying game) can have. And I think D&D, and d20 in general, is not a very good system to use for many other kinds of games, for various reasons.
And what skills would those be?
Well, for the combat skill, what weapons do you want your character to use? Take skills in those weapons. That's the way skills-based systems usually work. D&D doesn't handle weapon proficiency with individual skills; by default there are classes of weapons that you automatically know how to use if you are from one of the fighter classes, and IIRC if you want to be extra good with a particular weapon there's a special fighter feat for that. Personally, I think it makes more sense to have skills in specific weapons.
On the basic D&D character sheet, there are 10-20 skills that you have to choose from.
I am confused. Is a number between 10 and 20 supposed to be unmanageably large? Also, that is the total number of all skills in D&D. You do not have 10-20 different skills to choose from when choosing "be sneaky" skills, for example; as I recall the choices are "Sneak", "Hide" and possibly "Disguise". Each of which has a plain, simple-to-understand name and a description.
It's more a difference in attitude than a difference in the system itself. D&D gets the newbie up and playing fast.
I agree that D&D is an easy system to generate characters in if you have never roleplayed before. It is geared towards producing characters that are mostly finished, except for a few gaps that need to be filled in. However, this convenience comes at a price - the trade-off is that it is far more difficult to make highly customised characters who do not fit neatly into the stock D&D fantasy archetypes.
GURPS simply doesn't. I'd prefer to run GURPS any day of the week, but if I were running a game for new players, I'd probably pick a d20 variant.
I can't really comment on GURPS, since I haven't played it a lot and have generally found it to be awkward and unwieldy. The skill-based systems I am thinking of are mostly Ars Magica and Legend of the Five Rings. L5R has a minor class-like component (the school in which your character has trained), but it has far less influence on your character's structure than a D&D class, and it is tied directly into the setting, since it is a system representation of a tangible quality which exists in the game world (that is, being trained in a particular samurai school). In my experience, creating characters in these systems may require more familiarity with the available options (and thus more initial reading), and more decision-making, but is not inherently any more complex.
Oh, but it's not so simple. First off, I have to search through dozens of advantages and disadvantages to find those, and each of them is its own mechanic that I have to learn and understand.
The way you have to read through all the classes and feats to figure out what advantages they give you and how they work? And, again, if the advantages are named sensibly, you only have to skim through them until you find something called "berserker" or "magical talent", and there you go.
I give up, why would you want to be a druid? It was just my concept.
My point was that your suggestion of druid + barbarian does not simply fulfil the criteria of "magic user" and "berserker". Those classes come packaged with specific other characteristics which might be completely unsuitable for the kind of magic-using berserker character that the player has in mind.
Eh? How is any combination of classes unsupportable in-character? I dare you to come up with a combination of classes that I can't come up with a decent character concept for.
I am sure that, given any ludicrous combination of classes, you could make up a plausible character concept to explain it. That wouldn't mean that it isn't a ridiculous situation to try to explain. And the problem here is that I don't want to roll up
Good gods, NO! Character classes are a brilliant abstraction for the gamer who doesn't want to spend his time gaining a deep understanding of the entire system.
(...)You don't have to understand the entire system in order to generate characters in a more freeform way by buying advantages/disadvantages and skills. As long as the bits are sensibly named and organised, it really isn't very difficult.
Want a character that can fight well and steal stuff? Roll stats. Add one level of rogue, one level of fighter. Thank you, come again.
Buy some high "hit things with sword" skills and some good "be sneaky" skills.
Want a character that can do magic and has a berserker-rage mentality toward combat? Roll stats. Add one level of druid, one level of barbarian. Thank you, come again.
Get a "magical ability" advantage and a "berserker" advantage/disadvantage. Buy skill in "hit things with axe".
The difference is that with a class you get a package of qualities which stereotypically "go with" the broad characteristics that you would like. For example, what if I want a magic-using berserker who isn't particularly in tune with nature and thinks all trees are good for is campfires? Why would I want to be a druid? What magic-using class should I slot in instead? What weird baggage which totally doesn't fit with my character idea am I going to get with that?
Sure, you can mix and match and multiclass in increasingly byzantine and unsupportable-in-character ways, or ignore some rules and swop some skills around, or apply prestige classes (which are essentially a way to get around the creative limitations of classes). Or you can just pick exactly what you want from a list.
It may mean reading a couple of pages of lists so that you can see what is available, but it really doesn't take any more time and effort than reading through a bunch of template descriptions and trying to decide which one fits what you're trying to do the best. And it makes it easier to create unique, varied and imaginative characters that don't feel like they've just stepped off a production line clutching a McWizard 1st level starter kit.
Actually gathering people up and playing at the table with chips, beer and "Monty Python's Holy Grail" playing in a vcr in the background are pretty much over.
Maybe that's true where you live, but over here tabletop RPGs are looking pretty healthy, even though we have to import all our books from overseas at a ridiculous markup. Substitute "coke" for "beer" and remove the background distraction, and you have my house every Wednesday evening. Or the houses of any number of people I know.
I think there was a period when tabletop RPGs were a relatively common teenage "phase" activity, and that phenomenon has mostly died out. You don't really get large numbers of people coming out of school today who played hack'n'slash DnD with their friends. That doesn't mean that nobody is playing anymore.
I think it's delusional to say math and science interest isn't dominated by the male gender. At least 3/4 of every math/science major is male.
I think the sci-fi channel's attempt to draw the female audience into its viewership has dramatically diluted the science content of their programming.
I'm not disagreeing that at present interest in science and technology is dominated by men. However, I doubt that the SciFi channel has abandoned hard SF for fantasy because it doesn't care about the male demographic and wants to attract more women. I think that they've done it because they have established that there are more people who watch fantasy than people who watch hard SF. It's more appealing to the mainstream. The mainstream does not find science fun. The mainstream treats science with deep suspicion and likes to relegate it to bad-guy status in the media.
If they really were trying to appeal to women specifically with shows like Xena, I don't think there would be so much T&A and jiggling female eye candy. Mainstream women are, however, likely to watch any show in which women are the main characters, so their interest is a beneficial side effect.
You imply that you can remember a time when SF TV series actually were hard SF. Could you mention some specific shows that you think are a good example? I seriously can't think of any.
Ah, yes. The mainstream media. They skim through what you're saying, latch onto something simple they think they've understood, and run with it. I have cringed through many articles about either Linux, open source in general, computers in general (urgh) or some geeky little subculture I belong to, wanting very much to track down the people who wrote them, force them to write a three-hour reading comprehension exam, and then beat them severely with their own rolled-up publication. :/