I don't think that being able to filter out signal from noise on the internet has very much to do with technological know-how. The technology involved is either transparent (if you're a competent computer user) or an obstacle in carrying out the decisions you've made (if you're not a competent computer user).
Whether you are capable of making the right decisions about what information to accept or reject is almost entirely an issue of language skills and reading comprehension.
The people who continue posting their sob-stories as comments to some random guy's blog entry because they're convinced that the blog entry is Maury Povich's homepage aren't doing it because they're confused by Teh Intarweb (although it is a secondary factor); they're doing it because they can't read.
The guy thinking "Why, yes, I would like a penis enlargement; let me send you my credit card number!" would probably be falling for a snail-mail snake-oil scam right now if it weren't for the internet.
People who don't have good language skills are usually oblivious to the mistakes made by others, and thus often can't tell the difference between a genuine official document and something which is obviously not an official document because it is full of spelling and grammar mistakes and makes no sense.
I admit that a familiarity with the types of information sources available on the internet, their usual form, and their relative usefulness and reliablility, is helpful. For example, someone new on the internet may be unaware that nobody ever sends official warnings of danger to random people over email - and so they may be fooled by a well-written email hoax which more knowledgeable people would immediately mark as BS.
I agree that the average person may never be exposed to formal computer training, because you don't need to get a licence to be allowed to use a computer. I think it's very unfortunate that nobody sees the widespread need for education like this, and that for example companies don't mind how incompetent their staff are at using computer equipment, and how much time they waste on tasks which should be simple.
But that doesn't mean that computer users are powerless to learn to be better users. There are plenty of tutorials on the web targeted at newbies. However, to effectively make use of them, a user has to take an interest, learn how to perform effective web searches for information, look up things they don't understand in simpler tutorials, and generally take responsibility for learning things by themselves in their own time. And lots of people are completely unwilling to try that at all.
In South Africa, there are many people who only LARP, and don't roleplay tabletop games much or at all - and consider themselves much more normal and less geeky than tabletop roleplayers.
For clarification, the LARPing scene in SA consists mostly of one-night, once-off LARPs with ready-made characters. LARP campaigns are very uncommon. Also, there are many LARPs with completely (or mostly) mundane modern or historical settings. Emphasis is placed on inter-character plotting. Combat is never resolved with physical mock-fighting (boffers and such); it is always abstracted into some kind of simple statistical mechanic, like a die roll or the drawing of cards.
It is thus completely unlike dressing up as armies of orcs and elves and running around in the forest hitting each other with sticks*. Which I hear is popular in Scandinavia.
* Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. It's just a completely different style of LARPing.
It's not the 90's anymore, guys. Being able to use a PC effectively is about as awe-inspiring as being able to use a toaster effectively.
Precisely! It is not hard to learn how to use a computer effectively at all! This is why I have absolutely no patience or sympathy for people who, after 10 years of computer use, have still not attained basic proficiency in using the computer for tasks they perform every day.
I don't expect average users to be programmers or hardware experts, but I sure as hell expect them to have a basic understanding of how to keep their computer safe, and what dangerous things they should watch out for. And that includes knowing terms like "browser", "trojan", "419 scam" and "phishing". Because they're not actually very hard to understand or remember, any more than terms like "engine", "steering wheel", "spark plug" or "gearbox". Which I know and understand, even though I am not a car mechanic.
I appreciate that part of the reason that average people think that computers are "hard", and beyond their understanding, is that the most widely used OS in the world has never aimed to educate its users, and in fact tries to make its inner workings as obscure as possible, and hides everything beneath several layers of interfaces with limited functionality. I know that if your computer crashes regularly for no apparent reason and must be rebooted or have the OS reinstalled, and the company that makes the OS insists that this is a normal part of computer use, and you don't know any better, you will end up believing that computers regularly malfunction and behave abnormally for reasons beyond mortal ken.
There are, however, limits to my tolerance of other people's ignorance, and this doesn't just apply to cluelessness about computers. I'll put up with someone doing stupid things out ignorance once or twice, and try to explain to them what their mistake is so that they'll know better next time. If they do it again and again and again, my sympathy evaporates.
People are smart. People can learn stuff. What's that? You don't want to learn? You want this to magically sort itself out without any hard work on your part, because now that you are no longer in school you shouldn't ever be required to learn anything new ever again? My heart bleeds.
eleven diehard Star Wars fans (i.e. lifelong virgins)...it appears that the guys with girlfriends will have the last laugh...
Slashdot is sounding more and more like high school jocks who pick on "nerds". (BTW, I'm not a Star Wars fan)
It's not just Slashdot, and it's not just Star Wars. Sadly, most members of subcultures which are mocked by the mainstream like to find at least one other subculture (or sub-subculture of their own subculture) which is mocked by the mainstream even more, so that they can point at it and loudly say "Hey, check those losers out! Aren't they totally pathetic? That's just sad, eh, guys? Eh?" whenever some cool people might be able to overhear them. It makes them feel warm and fuzzy inside.
For example, LARPers and people who play "deep" indie roleplaying games make fun of other roleplayers (especially D&D players), roleplayers make fun of card gamers, card gamers make fun of Magic players, Magic players undoubtedly make fun of people who favour a particular lame-ass deck, and everyone in the whole world makes fun of furries.
There's no reason for them to be inaccurate. Pi is a number which has a specific value, defined in terms of geometric constants. There is an absolute formula for working out how to express pi as a decimal number which goes on for ever. It's the sum of an infinite series of fractions. The further you sum the infinite series on a computer, the closer the decimal number you produce will be to pi, unless you make a mistake in your calculations. There is nothing to test for, and nothing to test against - you're not discovering an unknown value. It would be like testing whether every time you divide a number by two you actually get half of the number.
The point of using your computer to calculate pi isn't really to find a more accurate decimal representation for pi (alhough I'm sure some people are actually inherently interested in this, for posterity). It's not very useful to anyone, as far as I know. The point is to show off the processing power of your computer, by demonstrating that it can perform a known long, tedious calculation to degree X in time Y.
Hey, you learn a new thing every day. I will never ever say "whether or not" again.
I'm still weaning myself off using third person plural as a clumsy substitute for gender-non-specific third person singular. I never use it in writing anymore (it looks horrible), but I still say it a lot. *snap elastic band* Bad me!
And bad English language for not having better pronouns!
Yup, I totally agree with you. Some people, even when they're not terrified that if they click the wrong thing their computer will explode, are afraid of learning how to do new things and lack confidence that they can follow a set of instructions without stuffing up.
A couple of days ago I was helping my mom to get Firefox to work with the latest version of java installed on OS X. This is a relatively simple process - you download an extra plugin, move two files to the OS X internet plugins directory, and touch them on the command line (or at least those are the vague instructions I found; I never saw the actual readme file). But my parents have dialup, and I had to leave before the file finished downloading, so I had to explain to my mom what to do once it had been downloaded.
Now, my mom is an intelligent person. She has a university degree. She has been using a computer for at least fifteen years. Nevertheless, I had to explain it several times, and write it down, and open all the necessary windows - because she just seemed to assume that this process was too complicated for her to do, and she would mess something up. She is used to having stuff on the computer not work the way she wants it to, and just giving up because it's probably too hard to fix it (my dad is usually not particularly keen on fixing stuff unless it's bothering him).
Still, she sent me an SMS later to say that it worked, so that's good. And I recently finally got my parents to ditch the ancient Netscape Navigator they were really attached to and try Firefox in the first place. ("OMG, it's so much faster!")
if you keep making elementary mistakes like this, people who can write and speak English properly will think that you are a drooling idiot and dismiss your argument as worthless.
This is true, but not something to be proud of. Dyslexic people have problems with spelling, that doesn't mean they're stupid or that their arguments should be ignored. You might as well say that looks matter because people judge on them. The fact that people make arbitrary assumptions does not mean the things they base those assumptions on are important.
Sure, I agree with you on principle. However, I don't think that discriminating against bad spelling and grammar is arbitrary and unfair, since in my experience people whose grammar is poor and who make the sort of spelling mistakes that people with poor grammar skills make also tend to construct arguments poorly. I know it's not necessarily always the case, but I have noticed it so frequently that I am usually unwilling to waste my time decoding someone's gibberish on the off chance that they actually have something interesting to say.
Obviously people who don't speak English fluently deserve more leeway. I don't hold bad spelling and grammar against them. And if someone consistently spells badly but uses correct grammar, I assume that they have some kind of problem with spelling, and that by itself doesn't bother me that much.
I disagree. Firefly was a sci-fi series. The main seasonal story arc was a purely sci-fi plot.
Firefly simply did not assume that the tech level remained constant throughout its interstellar civilisation, hence you got cows and spaceships. It astonishes me that sci-fi TV is so homogenous that any slight deviation from a Star Trek-like universe is suddenly considered to be "not sci-fi".
I do agree that there was a strong "western" theme which didn't have to be there, but it didn't bother me, or detract from the quality of the series as sci-fi. I thought that it was better for there to be a cultural theme (which was perhaps somewhat improbably similar to a single Earthly historical period and location) than for the colony planets to be generic and flavourless McPlanets (like Star Trek Alien of the Week planets where everyone wears pastel-coloured robes). The prevalence of Mandarin Chinese also made the setting more realistic and interesting while introducting a major deviation from a purely "cowboys in space" feel.
The point is that the Firefly universe is built on a model in which the average tech level decreases the further away from the core civilised planets you go. And I think this is a perfectly sensible model.
Complex technology needs to be maintained. It requires a support structure of factories, spare parts and qualified technicians. When you colonise a primitive planet, there's nothing there to begin with. It would be silly to try to start with city dwellers and a complex tech level system when you can start with farmers and seeds.
I'm not saying that it would be impossible to maintain a high tech level on colonised worlds, but it would certainly be more expensive, whereas dumping farmers, cows and seeds out of a spaceship is about as cheap as you can get.
Not only that, but each of these words is similar in structure to other words which perform the same function.
"they're" has an apostrophe. It is a contraction. Ooh, look, it's exactly like "we're" and "you're". It is also completely unlike a pronoun, since pronouns don't have apostrophes.
"their" looks just like "our".
"there" looks just like "here".
It's not rocket science. Really, it's not. And I have no patience for people who say "I can't be bothered to learn the difference because it doesn't really matter; only content matters." It does matter; if you keep making elementary mistakes like this, people who can write and speak English properly will think that you are a drooling idiot and dismiss your argument as worthless. And if you put as much thought into the subject under discussion as you did into the way you formulated it in your language, they may well be justified in doing so.
You shouldn't have to learn the difference; it's blindingly obvious, unless you have some kind of learning disorder. You should have learned it in school. If you still can't get this straight (or "its" and "it's", or "lose" and "loose", or that past participles usually have a "d" at the end), then you haven't learned how to use your language correctly.
I can understand the occasional misspelling of a convoluted, rarely used word, but my god, man. This is not hard.
I know that the English grammar education in a lot of places leaves much to be desired, but the best way to learn correct English is by example - by reading correct English. Read more books. Reading things on the internet doesn't count, because other people on the internet are making the same mistakes.
As a counterexample which is more recent and better illustrates the wealth of creative expression which results when use of a writer's characters, places and situations is *not* restricted, I present HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.
Lovecraft allowed other horror writers to expand on the themes which he created - and as a result this corner of the horror world is a thriving little subculture. Because other writers have been able to draw on specific elements of the mythos as freely as fantasy writers can draw on Tolkienesque elves and dwarves, it has become ubiquitous. There are at least three rich and interesting roleplaying game settings based on it (I'm counting classical Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green and Cthulhu Dark Ages as three settings), many writers have created Mythos stories and books, and little homages to the mythos keep popping up in almost anything with a horror twist.
As an aside, I'd like to point out that whereas many of his contemporaries are almost completely unknown (outside enthusiasts of that specific genre and time period), almost every roleplayer and f/sf literature fan knows who HPL is. The continuation and re-interpretaton of his ideas has given him immortality. This isn't really relevant to my argument, but I think it's something people who make the "selfish" argument for restrictive copyright should consider. Would you rather have money or fame?
Unfortunately, I think a lot of the secondary mythos writers have copyrighted their extensions - which I think is rather unsporting, and illustrates the most fundamental problem with the public domain.
You are, deliberately I suspect, confusing commentary with derivative works. It is quite legal to comment on and cite copyright works (up to 10% I believe)...
No, I'm not. I'm aware that citing and commentary are legal. I am not talking about commentary. I am talking about producing a creative work based on and incorporating characters, events and situations from an earlier creative work by a different author.
...what is not legal is to pass off your work as related to that of the original author...
Because that is plagiarism - this issue is irrelevant to copyright infringement, which is illegal whether you are crediting the author or not.
...or to copy substantial portions of their work.
Really? And what do you define as "copying substantial portions of their work"? I would define it as "copying and pasting pages and pages of what the original author wrote", and I don't particularly mind that being considered copyright infringement, since I agree that it usually requires little work on the part of the creator of the derivative work - if it's a book, at least. But what about music? What about remixes?
Under current copyright law, however, you are also infringing copyright if, for example, you reinterpret the events of an existing book by presenting them from the point of view of a different character - entirely in your own words. Or write a sequel or spinoff about the characters, also entirely in your own words. Is that right? Do you think that this is also fair?
Man, that Tom Stoppard - what a hack; ripping off Shakespeare's hard work. Why can't he be more original?
In effect, copyright law has been extended from protecting the literal words of a written work (for example), which is what it is supposed to do, to also restrict the use of ideas and concepts within that work. It's as if those characters and places are patented - and the effect on the vitality of the culture of written work is much the same as the effect of actual patents on the fields in which they are active. Ideas get buried, or are released in a narrow, limited trickle by sanctioned sources.
Copyleft was created as a countermeasure which uses copyright law to subvert the traditional copyright system. With viral copyleft licences, content creators who are sick of the way copyright ties up the rights to creative works while shafting the public domain have created a collection of work which is like a protected public domain - derivative works which build on it must be released back into it.
If copyright law was reasonable, we wouldn't need copyleft. I would gladly sacrifice half of the term for which I am legally able to enforce copyright on my open content licenced work if this meant that the duration of the copyright on conventionally licenced works would also be halved.
Personally, I would like to see a world completely free of copyright and patent restrictions, since I believe them to be inherently nonsensical and unjust (their ostensibly well-intentioned beginnings notwithstanding). Until such a world exists, however (and I don't have high hopes of seeing it in my lifetime), I will continue to release any creative work I ever produce under copyleft licences, because that is one of the only legal ways of fighting against the system which is open to me.
Not really. Entire branches of expression have been driven to extinction (or at least legal limbo and extreme obscurity) by restrictive copyright laws.
For example, look at the amazing breadth of derivative works based on recent and current books, movies and songs, which build on the ideas that the original works have generated and let us examine them from angles which the original authors may not have considered, and from hundreds of fresh and different viewpoints.
Oh, wait. That's called fanfiction, it's technically illegal (*definitely* illegal if you try to make money from it), and regarded very dubiously by the mainstream (yes, I know most of it is crap; most of any art on the internet is).
Copyright law has crushed the derivative work, and most people don't care - because they have bought into the myth that derivative works are "not creative", "just ripping off the original author", etc. So it's OK, they don't deserve protection.
Think of a book that's been published within the last 50 years. Any book. You will not be legally allowed to publish a derivative work of that book as long as you live. You will die before the copyright expires. Maybe the book will be in the public domain in time for your grandchildren to be able to produce art based on it - if they care enough. How inspired are you to comment on the topical issues of the early 1900s?
Sure, if you're lucky, maybe a copyright holder will allow you to publish a derivative work - if they like it, and usually only if they were specifically looking to extend their franchise. If, however, your work is a scathing refutation of the original author's opinions, or a long-dead author's estate is just being contrary, good luck with that. The law is on their side.
See the legal battle over The Wind Done Gone for a recent example. They only won because the work was deemed to be a "parody".
1. Women on slashdot are nothing to do with women in real life. Partly because they're generally different people, partly because women on slashdot tend to pander to the crowd. Not many would come on and say 'I think nerds are all pathetic and ugly, at night I finger myself thinking of the captain of the football team' on slashdot, even if they were really thinking it.
Incidentally, how do you figure that? Did I miss a poll or something?
The only time I do not voice my actual opinions is when I want to be diplomatic and spare someone's feelings - in which case I opt to say nothing at all. And on a giant, impersonal internet forum this really doesn't apply. Who am I supposed to be trying to pander to? Most of you live a continent away from me.
Also, I'm greatly amused by your statement that real life women don't intersect with those who post on Slashdot. Damn, you've found me out. I am actually a sophisticated Eliza program.:)
All right, so you are against dyslexics, foreigners and heavy SMS/IM users. Not that there is anything wrong with it, but why the big deal? Coherency comes from content, not spelling and the sentence you gave is not enough to measure it:-)
It's not so much the spelling as the grammar, and there are degrees. There's a difference between not having a perfect memory for spelling, or typing so fast that you make a lot of typos, or occasionally abbreviating things, and constantly typing like an idiot.
By typing like an idiot I mean continuously demonstrating that you are incapable of formulating a coherent sentence in the language you are using, and continuously abbreviating three-letter words to single letters (ooh, the efficiency). If someone keeps doing that, I just assume that he or she is, in fact, an idiot.
While poor spelling by itself doesn't detract from coherence by itself, poor grammar does - more badly than a lot of people today seem to appreciate. Sure, I can probably figure out what the giant unbroken paragraph of stream-of-consciousness babble means eventually, but I shouldn't have to, because people are supposed to learn how to use language properly in school.
Most people type like that sentence above on email, and non-legible-typing people don't seem to have much trouble getting laid.
Weeeell, that's because ppl who tipe liek this come in both genders. The stupid memes are breeding true!
People who don't write correctly formed English make me froth at the mouth, especially if I have to decode their crap in my professional capacity. Mostly it scares me that so many people have to go to special effort not to sound like chimpanzees. And it's not just email - these people usually produce the same kind of garbage on paper too.
Heh. If I got an email from a prospective beau which said helo how R u im sitin heer thinkin of u lololol xxxxx bob, I would dump his ass, no matter how hot he was. That's kind of like meeting someone online and then discovering that he has halitosis, except in reverse.
Mind you, if someone was that incoherent, I would probably have noticed it before giving him my email address. The drool is a dead give-away.
I do get a flurry of "OMG, a girl!" comments whenever I post to the local LUG list, but 1) this is not hostile and 2) it would probably stop if I were a more frequent poster.
I am one of the only women (possibly the only woman) on said LUG list. But the list is specific to Linux, which makes it a somewhat different sample space, quite small, and geographically encompasses areas which are more socially conservative (*cough* the Boerewors Curtain;) ).
I don't think there is necessarily a straight correlation between progressive attitudes to gender equality and the tendency for more women to go into technical jobs. Social perceptions of technical jobs themselves possibly also matter, because they change what kind of jobs they are considered to be.
After reading the article and the coments, and observing the general theme that comments to any gender-related debate on/. follow, I have to wonder how much of this issue is specific to the US - and how much of it is due to social conservativism.
I keep reading anecdotes about female techies experiencing discrimination from clients and coworkers - people not believing that they were really techies, people assuming that they were incompetent, etc.
I live in South Africa and I'm a female programmer. I work in a small company which has a pleasant, informal atmosphere blissfully free of corporate BS, and I live in Cape Town, which is probably the most liberal city in SA. On the basis of what I have observed of mainstream US culture (and I admit that I am not an expert), we are considerably more socially progressive.
I have never experienced any of the problems I have seen described. Not once. Never ever. In my entire university and work career, in fact. I have never had my abilities questioned or been treated like a moron because I am a woman, by clients or by other technical staff. My gender has never been a big deal.
So I'm curious... what do programmers in other areas think? Are there many female programmers where you are? Do you think your work atmosphere is hostile to women? How progressive would you say your part of the world is?
Apparently the new cool thing is to offer your loud and dogmatic opinion on a licence when you have absolutely no idea what it says, because you were apparently too lazy even to look up a summary written in small words.
Please, type GPL into Google and click the little search button. It's not hard.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that being able to filter out signal from noise on the internet has very much to do with technological know-how. The technology involved is either transparent (if you're a competent computer user) or an obstacle in carrying out the decisions you've made (if you're not a competent computer user).
Whether you are capable of making the right decisions about what information to accept or reject is almost entirely an issue of language skills and reading comprehension.
The people who continue posting their sob-stories as comments to some random guy's blog entry because they're convinced that the blog entry is Maury Povich's homepage aren't doing it because they're confused by Teh Intarweb (although it is a secondary factor); they're doing it because they can't read.
The guy thinking "Why, yes, I would like a penis enlargement; let me send you my credit card number!" would probably be falling for a snail-mail snake-oil scam right now if it weren't for the internet.
People who don't have good language skills are usually oblivious to the mistakes made by others, and thus often can't tell the difference between a genuine official document and something which is obviously not an official document because it is full of spelling and grammar mistakes and makes no sense.
I admit that a familiarity with the types of information sources available on the internet, their usual form, and their relative usefulness and reliablility, is helpful. For example, someone new on the internet may be unaware that nobody ever sends official warnings of danger to random people over email - and so they may be fooled by a well-written email hoax which more knowledgeable people would immediately mark as BS.I agree that the average person may never be exposed to formal computer training, because you don't need to get a licence to be allowed to use a computer. I think it's very unfortunate that nobody sees the widespread need for education like this, and that for example companies don't mind how incompetent their staff are at using computer equipment, and how much time they waste on tasks which should be simple.
But that doesn't mean that computer users are powerless to learn to be better users. There are plenty of tutorials on the web targeted at newbies. However, to effectively make use of them, a user has to take an interest, learn how to perform effective web searches for information, look up things they don't understand in simpler tutorials, and generally take responsibility for learning things by themselves in their own time. And lots of people are completely unwilling to try that at all.
Hey, maybe in where you live... :)
In South Africa, there are many people who only LARP, and don't roleplay tabletop games much or at all - and consider themselves much more normal and less geeky than tabletop roleplayers.
For clarification, the LARPing scene in SA consists mostly of one-night, once-off LARPs with ready-made characters. LARP campaigns are very uncommon. Also, there are many LARPs with completely (or mostly) mundane modern or historical settings. Emphasis is placed on inter-character plotting. Combat is never resolved with physical mock-fighting (boffers and such); it is always abstracted into some kind of simple statistical mechanic, like a die roll or the drawing of cards.
It is thus completely unlike dressing up as armies of orcs and elves and running around in the forest hitting each other with sticks*. Which I hear is popular in Scandinavia.
* Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. It's just a completely different style of LARPing.
It's not the 90's anymore, guys. Being able to use a PC effectively is about as awe-inspiring as being able to use a toaster effectively.
Precisely! It is not hard to learn how to use a computer effectively at all! This is why I have absolutely no patience or sympathy for people who, after 10 years of computer use, have still not attained basic proficiency in using the computer for tasks they perform every day.
I don't expect average users to be programmers or hardware experts, but I sure as hell expect them to have a basic understanding of how to keep their computer safe, and what dangerous things they should watch out for. And that includes knowing terms like "browser", "trojan", "419 scam" and "phishing". Because they're not actually very hard to understand or remember, any more than terms like "engine", "steering wheel", "spark plug" or "gearbox". Which I know and understand, even though I am not a car mechanic.
I appreciate that part of the reason that average people think that computers are "hard", and beyond their understanding, is that the most widely used OS in the world has never aimed to educate its users, and in fact tries to make its inner workings as obscure as possible, and hides everything beneath several layers of interfaces with limited functionality. I know that if your computer crashes regularly for no apparent reason and must be rebooted or have the OS reinstalled, and the company that makes the OS insists that this is a normal part of computer use, and you don't know any better, you will end up believing that computers regularly malfunction and behave abnormally for reasons beyond mortal ken.
There are, however, limits to my tolerance of other people's ignorance, and this doesn't just apply to cluelessness about computers. I'll put up with someone doing stupid things out ignorance once or twice, and try to explain to them what their mistake is so that they'll know better next time. If they do it again and again and again, my sympathy evaporates.
People are smart. People can learn stuff. What's that? You don't want to learn? You want this to magically sort itself out without any hard work on your part, because now that you are no longer in school you shouldn't ever be required to learn anything new ever again? My heart bleeds.
It's not just Slashdot, and it's not just Star Wars. Sadly, most members of subcultures which are mocked by the mainstream like to find at least one other subculture (or sub-subculture of their own subculture) which is mocked by the mainstream even more, so that they can point at it and loudly say "Hey, check those losers out! Aren't they totally pathetic? That's just sad, eh, guys? Eh?" whenever some cool people might be able to overhear them. It makes them feel warm and fuzzy inside.
For example, LARPers and people who play "deep" indie roleplaying games make fun of other roleplayers (especially D&D players), roleplayers make fun of card gamers, card gamers make fun of Magic players, Magic players undoubtedly make fun of people who favour a particular lame-ass deck, and everyone in the whole world makes fun of furries.
There's no reason for them to be inaccurate. Pi is a number which has a specific value, defined in terms of geometric constants. There is an absolute formula for working out how to express pi as a decimal number which goes on for ever. It's the sum of an infinite series of fractions. The further you sum the infinite series on a computer, the closer the decimal number you produce will be to pi, unless you make a mistake in your calculations. There is nothing to test for, and nothing to test against - you're not discovering an unknown value. It would be like testing whether every time you divide a number by two you actually get half of the number.
The point of using your computer to calculate pi isn't really to find a more accurate decimal representation for pi (alhough I'm sure some people are actually inherently interested in this, for posterity). It's not very useful to anyone, as far as I know. The point is to show off the processing power of your computer, by demonstrating that it can perform a known long, tedious calculation to degree X in time Y.
Hey, you learn a new thing every day. I will never ever say "whether or not" again.
I'm still weaning myself off using third person plural as a clumsy substitute for gender-non-specific third person singular. I never use it in writing anymore (it looks horrible), but I still say it a lot. *snap elastic band* Bad me!
And bad English language for not having better pronouns!
Yup, I totally agree with you. Some people, even when they're not terrified that if they click the wrong thing their computer will explode, are afraid of learning how to do new things and lack confidence that they can follow a set of instructions without stuffing up.
A couple of days ago I was helping my mom to get Firefox to work with the latest version of java installed on OS X. This is a relatively simple process - you download an extra plugin, move two files to the OS X internet plugins directory, and touch them on the command line (or at least those are the vague instructions I found; I never saw the actual readme file). But my parents have dialup, and I had to leave before the file finished downloading, so I had to explain to my mom what to do once it had been downloaded.
Now, my mom is an intelligent person. She has a university degree. She has been using a computer for at least fifteen years. Nevertheless, I had to explain it several times, and write it down, and open all the necessary windows - because she just seemed to assume that this process was too complicated for her to do, and she would mess something up. She is used to having stuff on the computer not work the way she wants it to, and just giving up because it's probably too hard to fix it (my dad is usually not particularly keen on fixing stuff unless it's bothering him).
Still, she sent me an SMS later to say that it worked, so that's good. And I recently finally got my parents to ditch the ancient Netscape Navigator they were really attached to and try Firefox in the first place. ("OMG, it's so much faster!")
Sure, I agree with you on principle. However, I don't think that discriminating against bad spelling and grammar is arbitrary and unfair, since in my experience people whose grammar is poor and who make the sort of spelling mistakes that people with poor grammar skills make also tend to construct arguments poorly. I know it's not necessarily always the case, but I have noticed it so frequently that I am usually unwilling to waste my time decoding someone's gibberish on the off chance that they actually have something interesting to say.
Obviously people who don't speak English fluently deserve more leeway. I don't hold bad spelling and grammar against them. And if someone consistently spells badly but uses correct grammar, I assume that they have some kind of problem with spelling, and that by itself doesn't bother me that much.
I disagree. Firefly was a sci-fi series. The main seasonal story arc was a purely sci-fi plot.
Firefly simply did not assume that the tech level remained constant throughout its interstellar civilisation, hence you got cows and spaceships. It astonishes me that sci-fi TV is so homogenous that any slight deviation from a Star Trek-like universe is suddenly considered to be "not sci-fi".
I do agree that there was a strong "western" theme which didn't have to be there, but it didn't bother me, or detract from the quality of the series as sci-fi. I thought that it was better for there to be a cultural theme (which was perhaps somewhat improbably similar to a single Earthly historical period and location) than for the colony planets to be generic and flavourless McPlanets (like Star Trek Alien of the Week planets where everyone wears pastel-coloured robes). The prevalence of Mandarin Chinese also made the setting more realistic and interesting while introducting a major deviation from a purely "cowboys in space" feel.
The point is that the Firefly universe is built on a model in which the average tech level decreases the further away from the core civilised planets you go. And I think this is a perfectly sensible model.
Complex technology needs to be maintained. It requires a support structure of factories, spare parts and qualified technicians. When you colonise a primitive planet, there's nothing there to begin with. It would be silly to try to start with city dwellers and a complex tech level system when you can start with farmers and seeds.
I'm not saying that it would be impossible to maintain a high tech level on colonised worlds, but it would certainly be more expensive, whereas dumping farmers, cows and seeds out of a spaceship is about as cheap as you can get.
Not only that, but each of these words is similar in structure to other words which perform the same function.
It's not rocket science. Really, it's not. And I have no patience for people who say "I can't be bothered to learn the difference because it doesn't really matter; only content matters." It does matter; if you keep making elementary mistakes like this, people who can write and speak English properly will think that you are a drooling idiot and dismiss your argument as worthless. And if you put as much thought into the subject under discussion as you did into the way you formulated it in your language, they may well be justified in doing so.
You shouldn't have to learn the difference; it's blindingly obvious, unless you have some kind of learning disorder. You should have learned it in school. If you still can't get this straight (or "its" and "it's", or "lose" and "loose", or that past participles usually have a "d" at the end), then you haven't learned how to use your language correctly.
I can understand the occasional misspelling of a convoluted, rarely used word, but my god, man. This is not hard.
I know that the English grammar education in a lot of places leaves much to be desired, but the best way to learn correct English is by example - by reading correct English. Read more books. Reading things on the internet doesn't count, because other people on the internet are making the same mistakes.
</eternal spelling and grammar rant>As a counterexample which is more recent and better illustrates the wealth of creative expression which results when use of a writer's characters, places and situations is *not* restricted, I present HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.
Lovecraft allowed other horror writers to expand on the themes which he created - and as a result this corner of the horror world is a thriving little subculture. Because other writers have been able to draw on specific elements of the mythos as freely as fantasy writers can draw on Tolkienesque elves and dwarves, it has become ubiquitous. There are at least three rich and interesting roleplaying game settings based on it (I'm counting classical Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green and Cthulhu Dark Ages as three settings), many writers have created Mythos stories and books, and little homages to the mythos keep popping up in almost anything with a horror twist.
As an aside, I'd like to point out that whereas many of his contemporaries are almost completely unknown (outside enthusiasts of that specific genre and time period), almost every roleplayer and f/sf literature fan knows who HPL is. The continuation and re-interpretaton of his ideas has given him immortality. This isn't really relevant to my argument, but I think it's something people who make the "selfish" argument for restrictive copyright should consider. Would you rather have money or fame?
Unfortunately, I think a lot of the secondary mythos writers have copyrighted their extensions - which I think is rather unsporting, and illustrates the most fundamental problem with the public domain.
You are, deliberately I suspect, confusing commentary with derivative works. It is quite legal to comment on and cite copyright works (up to 10% I believe)...
No, I'm not. I'm aware that citing and commentary are legal. I am not talking about commentary. I am talking about producing a creative work based on and incorporating characters, events and situations from an earlier creative work by a different author.
Because that is plagiarism - this issue is irrelevant to copyright infringement, which is illegal whether you are crediting the author or not.
Really? And what do you define as "copying substantial portions of their work"? I would define it as "copying and pasting pages and pages of what the original author wrote", and I don't particularly mind that being considered copyright infringement, since I agree that it usually requires little work on the part of the creator of the derivative work - if it's a book, at least. But what about music? What about remixes?
Under current copyright law, however, you are also infringing copyright if, for example, you reinterpret the events of an existing book by presenting them from the point of view of a different character - entirely in your own words. Or write a sequel or spinoff about the characters, also entirely in your own words. Is that right? Do you think that this is also fair?
Man, that Tom Stoppard - what a hack; ripping off Shakespeare's hard work. Why can't he be more original?
In effect, copyright law has been extended from protecting the literal words of a written work (for example), which is what it is supposed to do, to also restrict the use of ideas and concepts within that work. It's as if those characters and places are patented - and the effect on the vitality of the culture of written work is much the same as the effect of actual patents on the fields in which they are active. Ideas get buried, or are released in a narrow, limited trickle by sanctioned sources.
Yup, you don't get it.
Copyleft was created as a countermeasure which uses copyright law to subvert the traditional copyright system. With viral copyleft licences, content creators who are sick of the way copyright ties up the rights to creative works while shafting the public domain have created a collection of work which is like a protected public domain - derivative works which build on it must be released back into it.
If copyright law was reasonable, we wouldn't need copyleft. I would gladly sacrifice half of the term for which I am legally able to enforce copyright on my open content licenced work if this meant that the duration of the copyright on conventionally licenced works would also be halved.
Personally, I would like to see a world completely free of copyright and patent restrictions, since I believe them to be inherently nonsensical and unjust (their ostensibly well-intentioned beginnings notwithstanding). Until such a world exists, however (and I don't have high hopes of seeing it in my lifetime), I will continue to release any creative work I ever produce under copyleft licences, because that is one of the only legal ways of fighting against the system which is open to me.
That would be very nice. I'd help you, but I live in South Africa.
(I'm assuming you're a US citizen; if you're talking about SA law, count me in. ;) )
PS Extinction is surely hyperbole no?
Not really. Entire branches of expression have been driven to extinction (or at least legal limbo and extreme obscurity) by restrictive copyright laws.
For example, look at the amazing breadth of derivative works based on recent and current books, movies and songs, which build on the ideas that the original works have generated and let us examine them from angles which the original authors may not have considered, and from hundreds of fresh and different viewpoints.
Oh, wait. That's called fanfiction, it's technically illegal (*definitely* illegal if you try to make money from it), and regarded very dubiously by the mainstream (yes, I know most of it is crap; most of any art on the internet is).
Copyright law has crushed the derivative work, and most people don't care - because they have bought into the myth that derivative works are "not creative", "just ripping off the original author", etc. So it's OK, they don't deserve protection.
Think of a book that's been published within the last 50 years. Any book. You will not be legally allowed to publish a derivative work of that book as long as you live. You will die before the copyright expires. Maybe the book will be in the public domain in time for your grandchildren to be able to produce art based on it - if they care enough. How inspired are you to comment on the topical issues of the early 1900s?
Sure, if you're lucky, maybe a copyright holder will allow you to publish a derivative work - if they like it, and usually only if they were specifically looking to extend their franchise. If, however, your work is a scathing refutation of the original author's opinions, or a long-dead author's estate is just being contrary, good luck with that. The law is on their side.
See the legal battle over The Wind Done Gone for a recent example. They only won because the work was deemed to be a "parody".
1. Women on slashdot are nothing to do with women in real life. Partly because they're generally different people, partly because women on slashdot tend to pander to the crowd. Not many would come on and say 'I think nerds are all pathetic and ugly, at night I finger myself thinking of the captain of the football team' on slashdot, even if they were really thinking it.
Incidentally, how do you figure that? Did I miss a poll or something?
The only time I do not voice my actual opinions is when I want to be diplomatic and spare someone's feelings - in which case I opt to say nothing at all. And on a giant, impersonal internet forum this really doesn't apply. Who am I supposed to be trying to pander to? Most of you live a continent away from me.
Also, I'm greatly amused by your statement that real life women don't intersect with those who post on Slashdot. Damn, you've found me out. I am actually a sophisticated Eliza program. :)
All right, so you are against dyslexics, foreigners and heavy SMS/IM users. Not that there is anything wrong with it, but why the big deal? Coherency comes from content, not spelling and the sentence you gave is not enough to measure it :-)
It's not so much the spelling as the grammar, and there are degrees. There's a difference between not having a perfect memory for spelling, or typing so fast that you make a lot of typos, or occasionally abbreviating things, and constantly typing like an idiot.
By typing like an idiot I mean continuously demonstrating that you are incapable of formulating a coherent sentence in the language you are using, and continuously abbreviating three-letter words to single letters (ooh, the efficiency). If someone keeps doing that, I just assume that he or she is, in fact, an idiot.
While poor spelling by itself doesn't detract from coherence by itself, poor grammar does - more badly than a lot of people today seem to appreciate. Sure, I can probably figure out what the giant unbroken paragraph of stream-of-consciousness babble means eventually, but I shouldn't have to, because people are supposed to learn how to use language properly in school.
Most people type like that sentence above on email, and non-legible-typing people don't seem to have much trouble getting laid.
Weeeell, that's because ppl who tipe liek this come in both genders. The stupid memes are breeding true!
People who don't write correctly formed English make me froth at the mouth, especially if I have to decode their crap in my professional capacity. Mostly it scares me that so many people have to go to special effort not to sound like chimpanzees. And it's not just email - these people usually produce the same kind of garbage on paper too.
Heh. If I got an email from a prospective beau which said helo how R u im sitin heer thinkin of u lololol xxxxx bob, I would dump his ass, no matter how hot he was. That's kind of like meeting someone online and then discovering that he has halitosis, except in reverse.
Mind you, if someone was that incoherent, I would probably have noticed it before giving him my email address. The drool is a dead give-away.
Amendments:
I do get a flurry of "OMG, a girl!" comments whenever I post to the local LUG list, but 1) this is not hostile and 2) it would probably stop if I were a more frequent poster.
I am one of the only women (possibly the only woman) on said LUG list. But the list is specific to Linux, which makes it a somewhat different sample space, quite small, and geographically encompasses areas which are more socially conservative (*cough* the Boerewors Curtain ;) ).
I don't think there is necessarily a straight correlation between progressive attitudes to gender equality and the tendency for more women to go into technical jobs. Social perceptions of technical jobs themselves possibly also matter, because they change what kind of jobs they are considered to be.
After reading the article and the coments, and observing the general theme that comments to any gender-related debate on /. follow, I have to wonder how much of this issue is specific to the US - and how much of it is due to social conservativism.
I keep reading anecdotes about female techies experiencing discrimination from clients and coworkers - people not believing that they were really techies, people assuming that they were incompetent, etc.
I live in South Africa and I'm a female programmer. I work in a small company which has a pleasant, informal atmosphere blissfully free of corporate BS, and I live in Cape Town, which is probably the most liberal city in SA. On the basis of what I have observed of mainstream US culture (and I admit that I am not an expert), we are considerably more socially progressive.
I have never experienced any of the problems I have seen described. Not once. Never ever. In my entire university and work career, in fact. I have never had my abilities questioned or been treated like a moron because I am a woman, by clients or by other technical staff. My gender has never been a big deal.
So I'm curious... what do programmers in other areas think? Are there many female programmers where you are? Do you think your work atmosphere is hostile to women? How progressive would you say your part of the world is?
...and I should apparently read the preview more carefully. Apparently.
Slashdot needs a new abbreviation:
RTFL!
Apparently the new cool thing is to offer your loud and dogmatic opinion on a licence when you have absolutely no idea what it says, because you were apparently too lazy even to look up a summary written in small words.
Please, type GPL into Google and click the little search button. It's not hard.