My general philosophy is if you can read, you can spell...and if someone can't read, it makes you wonder what they're doing on SlashDot in the first place.
Probably goofing off on their job, which probably has something to do with Windows. Unix people, in general, seem to be MUCH more linguistically oriented. This isn't trolling, it's the truth. Unix's command-line-heavy nature means that to be truly proficient at operating Unix, you must by necessity be proficient at manipulating large strings of text. This, of course, ties in nicely with proficiency in writing. Whole essays have been written about this topic. I read one particularly nice one, but was unable to find it via a quick Google search.
In technical circles, most of the fucking morons constantly getting "it's"/"its", "lose"/"loose", and the like wrong are Windows people. The Unix nerds all write in a nearly impeccable manner. The point-n-click jockeys simply don't have to deal with language as frequently or intensely as the command-line dinosaurs.
if you allow anyone to use a trademark for any reason you risk loosing the trademark
LOSE is the opposite of GAIN. LOOSE is the opposite of TIGHT.
You learned this in school, motherfucker. GET IT RIGHT.
I'm really losing patience with this sort of shit, due to seeing the same moronic mistakes made over and over. How many goddamned times do people on SlashDot need to point out the difference between "lose" and "loose", or the difference between "it's" and "its", or the fact that "its'" (note trailing apostrophe) isn't a word (cromulent or otherwise), before people remember the basic shit they learned in school and get it right?
And to the mods reading this with your downmod trigger fingers itching: Go ahead, assholes, I can't stop you anyhow. But my point still stands. WE ALL LEARNED THIS SHIT IN SCHOOL. (SlashDotters raised in non-English-speaking nations are hereby exempted.) It's NOT hard, and an inability to get these very simple things right-- when the same few mistakes are constantly pointed out here on SlashDot-- just makes you look like a fucking retard.
Pointing this out doesn't make me a pedant, it makes me someone who takes pride in my ability to converse in my native tongue. Spare me the "wow, you need to get laid" comments.
More seriously: Microsoft invested (literally) millions of dollars into using the word "innovative" for their own purposes. So, yes, that word is kind of ruined for me now. Like in this story.
Am I the only one for whom MS's "Freedom to Innovate" campaign has ruined the word "innovation"? Now, when I hear "innovation", I mentally translate it into "derivative". So I guess this "innovative" ion trap is just a knockoff of another ion trap Xerox made in the 1970s and Apple aped in the 1980s, which mysteriously costs much more than most other ion traps, and breaks a lot...
"IT" people are management types. They run Windows. They read industry journals, and they love Dell. They ridicule Mac OS X since it has such a low market share. They usually can't code at all, but when they can, it's usually something like Visual BASIC and/or MS Access. Most of them use MSIE and only MSIE, and many of them enforce this preference as a policy on all company equipment, citing vague "compatibility" or "industry standard" reasons (if they even bother to justify their decision at all). The few who don't use MSIE disproportionately use Netscape (since it's an old name that they remember from back in the day, and-- importantly-- it's made by a company (very important to an "IT" type).
Geeks hate management types. They run some form of Un*xlike system (quite possibly Mac OS X) wherever they can. They read SlashDot; they don't give a good god damn what Dell's stock price is. They hack Perl. They use Firefox, Opera, or... well... anything but MSIE.
Totally different worlds, totally different demographics. There are plenty of female "IT" folks and plenty of athletic, outgoing "IT" folks; these people are not, however, "geeks".
"IT people" and "geeks" both specialize in using computers. Then again, peeping toms and astronomers both specialize in using telescopes.
Oh, good. That's very rare in an "IT" department. Every place I've worked, the folks in "IT" were the ones mandating Windows and Dells all over, IE only (no Firefox/Netscape/Opera/etc.) and crappy corporate antivirus programs like Norton/McAfee/Symantec instead of AVG/Avast!/etc.
Right now, in addition to tech consulting, I'm doing some temp work (technical manuals) at a place whose "IT" folks have locked down all the (Windows, IBM) workstations; they have only IE available. I'd put Firefox on this thing, but of course I'd have to break into Administrator to do that, and they'd can (and probably prosecute) me for that.
So you can imagine I'm kind of leery when I hear "IT". This sort of behavior has been repeated at many places I've worked in the past.
Social democracy works out better than the alternatives (e.g. communism (which invariably has devolved into tyranny) or fascism (which is tyranny by its very nature)). Libertarianism would work out worse than the present system, as well-intentioned as it is
By the by, pardon the defeatist tone of my posts. For the record, I'm not trying to disparage women. Quite the opposite. It's men I can't stand. It's men who established the "jocks come first" social order in the United States, which has caused such incredible suffering for so many innocent young geeks.
Look at a culture like Japan. In Japan, intelligence is more widely seen as a virtue and not a "weirdness" to be made fun of. The result? The Japanese (of both genders) are famously good at math and science, and they have a wonderful gender ratio among their technology enthusiasts. Here in the United States, technology is still seen as more of a "male" thing; in Japan, women are more likely than men to be heavily into digital communications technology.
All as it should be, of course. Women are natural communicators; the average male (or so it seems) can't muster a three-syllable word except for, of course, "quarterback" or "basketball"...
You are very lucky. In my entire career, I've had all of two managers who knew diddly-squat about computers. One was an old networking geek (or the like) and the other was a Mac geek.
Without exception, evreyone else I've worked under wouldn't know a ThinNet connection from an elephant's trunk.
All of these are just general observations. There are exceptions to every rule. You're your own person, I'm my own person, but there are trends. Every individual has to be judged on their own merits, but that doesn't mean that general statements like "most of the most hardcore geeks were picked on a lot in school" are false.
I'll put it to you this way. One of my ex-bosses was obsessed with finding a replacement for me who had all the talents of a geek but none of the liabilities. She wanted someone who looked good in a suit (be it a skirt suit or not), could relate to businesspeople and business culture, and yet could hack code like a geek.
Eventually she was forced to give up looking. And this was in NYC, where there's certainly no shortage of geeks or of stylish/"presentable" people. The shortage of stylish/presentable geeks (again, not Windows-hugging "IT Manager" types) is quite obvious.
There might be a few-- of either gender-- but they ain't common.
I meant no personal offense to you, by the way; I don't know what your job title is. You may be a geek, but I can almost guarantee you that your manager is not. (You mentioned "IT". "IT" usually seems to be a code word for "Microsoft's Unofficial Evangelical Corps" nowadays.)
Also, importantly, "in the computer field" != "geeks".
IT managers are not geeks.
Virtually anyone with "MIS", "IS" or "IT" in their title, as well as virtually any CxO (e.g. CTO, CIO) is not going to be a geek. They aren't as hardcore into computers as true geeks, most run Windows exclusively, and many scoff at both Linux and *BSD (as well as Mac OS X, which they view as a failure because it's failed to achieve the 97% market share of Windows).
The same is true (for obvious reasons) of virtually anyone with an MCSE and, more broadly, for virtually anyone with "A+" or other certs.
Virtually none of the most brilliant geeks I've met have had any sort of certification (except sometimes Brainbench, which of course is a joke), and virtually none have had "MIS", "IS", "IT", or any of the CxOs in their job title. Most true geeks are programmers, systems administrators, network engineers, or the like, and I challenge you to find attractive, exciting, well-adjusted people in that crowd. (N.b.: I am in that crowd myself, of course;))
And the most brilliant geeks tend to have bizarre personal habits. Witness RMS, for instance. One of the most brilliant geeks I've ever met was a furry with a fetish for muscular anthropomorphic dogs. This guy could quote you the specs on 70s-era computers at the drop of a hat.
In my experience, the more high-powered the geek, the more bizarre the person. YMMV, of course.
You must be living in a wholly different segment of the IT world than I am.
Then again, most of the geeks I've met have also been furries, so my perception of geeks has probably been twisted by that. Among furries (90+% of the serious ones are geeks), most females indeed fit the stereotype I mentioned.
Unfortunately, we are still animals. And as animals, we must compete to mate, just like any other animal. Females desire to mate with the males who are the most confident, successful (in things like "sports" and "business"), attractive, and physically strong. Geeks are generally not good at these things.
Geeks, by and large, are the people who didn't get the girl in Middle School/Junior High or High School-- and who are shunned and bullied due to their behavior and interests-- so they turned to computers instead.
This sort of thing doesn't happen to women because virtually any woman, even a heavy or unattractive one, can get a date.
Most female geeks I've met have been either [A] very overweight, [B] unattractive, [C] lesbian/bi (and therefore socially shunned) or [D] transgendered (and therefore really socially shunned)-- or, most commonly, some combination of the above. Please don't bore me with your anecdotal evidence to the contrary. I know exceptions to this rule exist.
Guy geeks become geeks because they can't get the girl in school. Girl geeks (who are rarer) become geeks because they're utterly socially rejected-- which is much, much rarer among girls than among guys. Girls usually have at least a small clique of friends, and girls can almost always find a date; a much, much higher percentage of guys are utterly alone and utterly sexually frustrated.
You can moderate the truth (-1, Flamebait) or (-1, Troll) all you want, but it will still be the truth. I stand behind my words. Not all ideas are equally valid. Libertarianism is idealistic nonsense. It assumes that consumers are all informed, make sensible decisions, and care about quality (or even price, to a point). It assumes that companies won't collude together to fix prices; it assumes competition is perfect and "by the books". It conveniently disregards such concepts as pre-existing mindshare (who'd buy phone service from Joe-Bob's Discount Long Distance if AT&T or Sprint already serves the area, and then some?), FUD, and barrier to entry. It's a pure form of idealistic free-market religionism, cut from the same cloth as the Pollyannas who constantly chirp about how America is "the land of opportunity" and anyone who really works hard and has a can-do attitude can make it rich here.
Just because libertarianism/Libertarianism is currently in vogue on SlashDot doesn't make it a good idea, and just because I'm pointing out similarities between a religious belief in obviously contradictory ideas and an economic belief in obviously contradictory ideas doesn't make me a troll. (Or wrong.)
In the PC world, there is no regulations on the cost, quality or performance of PCs. We have hundreds of companies selling products -- big boys like Dell and HP, small guys like Ram's PC Shop. Guess what? Prices have fallen even against inflation.
"No regulations on the quality or performance of PCs" have given us insecure, bloated operating systems and shitty crapware-infested factory installs (think Dell).
Also, there's no real "choice" in the PC market. You used to be able to choose between an x86, a 680x0, a PowerPC, a Z80, etc., with several different widely varying hardware platforms for each (e.g. 680x0 encompassed Amiga and Mac). Now, you can choose between... x86 or x86_64. Period. From... Intel or AMD. For the moment, Apple is still vending PPC hardware, but that's going to change soon.
A Dell is a Compaq is an HP is a Gateway is an Alienware Area51 is a Bob's Computer Shop SooperPC. These guys aren't manufacturers, they're just resellers, reselling the same crap from the same two companies (Intel and AMD).
Pretty soon, it'll be "a Dell is a Compaq is an HP is a Gateway is an Alienware Area51 is a Bob's Computer Shop SooperPC is a Mac"...
This is the outcome of your beloved "free market". Shitty, largely indistinguishable, highly derivative repackagings of the same generic crap from one or two sources.
For that matter, it's starting to make sense why so many libertarians/Libertarians are also Christian. It takes a mind capable of swallowing "God loves humanity, but he'll send most humans to Hell" to swallow the idea of "to make the market more open to little players, we'll let the big players do whatever they want".
This is complete Orwellian doublethink, and utter nonsense to boot.
Or, let me put it even more simply: Contrary to what libertarian dreamers like yourself would like to believe, in the absence of controls on the powerful, the powerful get more powerful (and the powerless get more powerless.)
This concept seems so ludicrously obvious, yet you completely don't understand it.
Even as things presently stand, the advances made by "the little guy" (E.g.: The rising influence (for better or worse) of bloggers) are the exception and not the rule. They are like those "human interest" stories you see on the evening news where a firefighter saved a precious cat named Muffins from a raging fire. Awww, how nice. Meanwhile, AIDS is still killing millions in Africa, and people are still being blown up in Iraq.
Loony Libertarian "to make the powerful less powerful, we'll remove all restrictions on them!!111" thought would only make the situation worse. It amazes me to think that there are those who cannot comprehend this.
Since when do you reduce the power of an entity by removing all restrictions on them!?
And please, spare me the lecture about how "with no regulations, barriers to entry in the [X] market would be lowered". It doesn't fucking matter. Little companies could enter the telco market-- they'd just fold inside of a year, since no one can compete with the marketshare and "mindshare" of the established carriers.
I'm starting to think that the entire libertarian/Libertarian movement/party was secretly funded by Fortune 500 companies seeking to grow their influence through eradicating all checks and balances on their nearly-limitless power.
Complete deregulation in the telecom field wouldn't lead to "thousands of little companies". It'd lead to one company.
With no regulations whatsoever, telecom companies would be free to merger and reverse-merger and acquisition themselves into a recreation of Ma Bell. Shit, they're already halfway there.
From what I've heard (I'm too young to remember it directly), things weren't too bad under the Ma Bell monopoly the first time around. Ah, but times have changed. It's 2005, and quaint, antiquated notions like "the customer is always right" have gone completely out the window. You know the old Saturday Night Live line, "We're the phone company, we don't have to care"? Substitute "a Fortune 500 company" for "the phone company". I could tell you horror story after horror story of how I've gotten jerked around by existing ISPs and telcos. Once they congeal back into a single monopolistic entity (as they were before), this will only get worse.
And you free market religionists will be to blame.
In the absence of regulations, things turn into a monopoly. No, "the system" doesn't work. It doesn't work because Joe Sixpack is ignorant, and the telcos like it that way. Capitalism, like democracy, assumes a well-educated and informed populace, and we do not have that.
Re:Your dogma's running over your karma.
on
Season's Givings?
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There is no reason to spite them just because they're largely made up of Christians.
Christianity isn't some warm, fuzzy religion. It's a religion that believes that all nonbelievers are going to be sent into a fiery pit forever ("where their worm shall not die", a place filled with the sounds of "gnashing of teeth"). It's also a religion based on the ridiculous Old Testament (Full disclosure: I am of Jewish stock, so this includes my birth faith too) which, in addition to condemning homosexuality and ordering the murder of anyone found having gay sex, condones slavery. You're allowed to sell your own daughter as a 'female slave' (read: 'sex slave'). In fact, you can even literally beat your slaves to death, so long as they persist (in suffering) for at least a day or so after the beating before expiring.
All of this is (or "was"*) supposedly written directly under the influence of Yahweh. Put plainly, if God exists, he is a TOTAL ASSHOLE, and not worth worshipping in the slightest. Don't believe me? Actually read your Bible. Including the parts you'd rather ignore, like all the "if a person [does X], they shalt be stoned to death" garbage in Leviticus.
Whether or not you believe it still applies, it's supposedly still part of the "holy", "God-inspired", "infallible" Bible.
I also find it quite amusing that you accuse me of following "dogma". I'm not the one hewing to a belief, against all evidence, that an invisible man lives in the sky and that he wrote a big book 2,000 years ago.
* (for those who believe Jesus's death changes things; does it really make God sound that much better that he "used to" tolerate this sort of garbage as opposed to tolerating it today?)
I didn't underline it for emphasis. I underlined it because it's a book title. (Although sometimes it's written _Nineteen Eighty-Four_; I'm not sure which is 'canon').
I know that _1984_ wasn't written in 1984.;P
Re:Your dogma's running over your karma.
on
Season's Givings?
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· Score: 1
It's not like charity for the Lord is any less a heartfelt act of kindness.
I beg to differ.
If you're only being charitable because you believe an invisible man in the sky is watching everything you do, I must question your true motives. Are you doing what's right for right's sake, or because you think it will impress the man upstairs?
It is the last gasp of a floundering industry, and could truly spell their end by revealing their true nature to every American.
I suppose it "could", in the sense that it's within the laws of Physics for that to happen. Realistically, though, it won't happen that way. Orwell was right (in _1984_) about the nature of the masses. They are truly asleep, and they won't ever awaken.
Let me spell out how it will actually go down:
1) The MPAA/RIAA companies will get together and come up with some doublespeak name for it (like "Consumer Digital Protection") that sounds nice and shiny.
2) They'll make some vague handwaving about how it does something good for the consumers (e.g.: "Better picture quality on new CDP-ready equipment!", or perhaps "Keeps costs down!").
3) The consumers will half-assedly accept it and buy new equipment. Grumbling a bit, perhaps, but they'll know they have no choice. They also won't care.
The MPAA/RIAA companies aren't stupid. They know what it takes to keep people paying them money. They'll never do anything dumb enough to actually drive off the Joe Sixpacks of the world from buying their wares. Mind you, it'd take a HUGE blunder to ever do that. In fact, I can't even think of an example. And that's depressing in a way...
Slashdot Mirror
Probably goofing off on their job, which probably has something to do with Windows. Unix people, in general, seem to be MUCH more linguistically oriented. This isn't trolling, it's the truth. Unix's command-line-heavy nature means that to be truly proficient at operating Unix, you must by necessity be proficient at manipulating large strings of text. This, of course, ties in nicely with proficiency in writing. Whole essays have been written about this topic. I read one particularly nice one, but was unable to find it via a quick Google search.
In technical circles, most of the fucking morons constantly getting "it's"/"its", "lose"/"loose", and the like wrong are Windows people. The Unix nerds all write in a nearly impeccable manner. The point-n-click jockeys simply don't have to deal with language as frequently or intensely as the command-line dinosaurs.
LOSE is the opposite of GAIN.
LOOSE is the opposite of TIGHT.
You learned this in school, motherfucker. GET IT RIGHT.
I'm really losing patience with this sort of shit, due to seeing the same moronic mistakes made over and over. How many goddamned times do people on SlashDot need to point out the difference between "lose" and "loose", or the difference between "it's" and "its", or the fact that "its'" (note trailing apostrophe) isn't a word (cromulent or otherwise), before people remember the basic shit they learned in school and get it right?
And to the mods reading this with your downmod trigger fingers itching: Go ahead, assholes, I can't stop you anyhow. But my point still stands. WE ALL LEARNED THIS SHIT IN SCHOOL. (SlashDotters raised in non-English-speaking nations are hereby exempted.) It's NOT hard, and an inability to get these very simple things right-- when the same few mistakes are constantly pointed out here on SlashDot-- just makes you look like a fucking retard.
Pointing this out doesn't make me a pedant, it makes me someone who takes pride in my ability to converse in my native tongue. Spare me the "wow, you need to get laid" comments.
More seriously: Microsoft invested (literally) millions of dollars into using the word "innovative" for their own purposes. So, yes, that word is kind of ruined for me now. Like in this story.
Wow, you are new here. I shouldn't even be talking to you; it's like robbing the cradle.
Am I the only one for whom MS's "Freedom to Innovate" campaign has ruined the word "innovation"? Now, when I hear "innovation", I mentally translate it into "derivative". So I guess this "innovative" ion trap is just a knockoff of another ion trap Xerox made in the 1970s and Apple aped in the 1980s, which mysteriously costs much more than most other ion traps, and breaks a lot...
"IT" != geek.
"IT" people are management types. They run Windows. They read industry journals, and they love Dell. They ridicule Mac OS X since it has such a low market share. They usually can't code at all, but when they can, it's usually something like Visual BASIC and/or MS Access. Most of them use MSIE and only MSIE, and many of them enforce this preference as a policy on all company equipment, citing vague "compatibility" or "industry standard" reasons (if they even bother to justify their decision at all). The few who don't use MSIE disproportionately use Netscape (since it's an old name that they remember from back in the day, and-- importantly-- it's made by a company (very important to an "IT" type).
Geeks hate management types. They run some form of Un*xlike system (quite possibly Mac OS X) wherever they can. They read SlashDot; they don't give a good god damn what Dell's stock price is. They hack Perl. They use Firefox, Opera, or... well... anything but MSIE.
Totally different worlds, totally different demographics. There are plenty of female "IT" folks and plenty of athletic, outgoing "IT" folks; these people are not, however, "geeks".
"IT people" and "geeks" both specialize in using computers. Then again, peeping toms and astronomers both specialize in using telescopes.
...of the rich exploiting the poor, I don't know what is.
Oh, good. That's very rare in an "IT" department. Every place I've worked, the folks in "IT" were the ones mandating Windows and Dells all over, IE only (no Firefox/Netscape/Opera/etc.) and crappy corporate antivirus programs like Norton/McAfee/Symantec instead of AVG/Avast!/etc.
Right now, in addition to tech consulting, I'm doing some temp work (technical manuals) at a place whose "IT" folks have locked down all the (Windows, IBM) workstations; they have only IE available. I'd put Firefox on this thing, but of course I'd have to break into Administrator to do that, and they'd can (and probably prosecute) me for that.
So you can imagine I'm kind of leery when I hear "IT". This sort of behavior has been repeated at many places I've worked in the past.
Social democracy works out better than the alternatives (e.g. communism (which invariably has devolved into tyranny) or fascism (which is tyranny by its very nature)). Libertarianism would work out worse than the present system, as well-intentioned as it is
By the by, pardon the defeatist tone of my posts. For the record, I'm not trying to disparage women. Quite the opposite. It's men I can't stand. It's men who established the "jocks come first" social order in the United States, which has caused such incredible suffering for so many innocent young geeks.
Look at a culture like Japan. In Japan, intelligence is more widely seen as a virtue and not a "weirdness" to be made fun of. The result? The Japanese (of both genders) are famously good at math and science, and they have a wonderful gender ratio among their technology enthusiasts. Here in the United States, technology is still seen as more of a "male" thing; in Japan, women are more likely than men to be heavily into digital communications technology.
All as it should be, of course. Women are natural communicators; the average male (or so it seems) can't muster a three-syllable word except for, of course, "quarterback" or "basketball"...
You are very lucky. In my entire career, I've had all of two managers who knew diddly-squat about computers. One was an old networking geek (or the like) and the other was a Mac geek.
Without exception, evreyone else I've worked under wouldn't know a ThinNet connection from an elephant's trunk.
All of these are just general observations. There are exceptions to every rule. You're your own person, I'm my own person, but there are trends. Every individual has to be judged on their own merits, but that doesn't mean that general statements like "most of the most hardcore geeks were picked on a lot in school" are false.
I'll put it to you this way. One of my ex-bosses was obsessed with finding a replacement for me who had all the talents of a geek but none of the liabilities. She wanted someone who looked good in a suit (be it a skirt suit or not), could relate to businesspeople and business culture, and yet could hack code like a geek.
Eventually she was forced to give up looking. And this was in NYC, where there's certainly no shortage of geeks or of stylish/"presentable" people. The shortage of stylish/presentable geeks (again, not Windows-hugging "IT Manager" types) is quite obvious.
There might be a few-- of either gender-- but they ain't common.
I meant no personal offense to you, by the way; I don't know what your job title is. You may be a geek, but I can almost guarantee you that your manager is not. (You mentioned "IT". "IT" usually seems to be a code word for "Microsoft's Unofficial Evangelical Corps" nowadays.)
Also, importantly, "in the computer field" != "geeks".
;))
IT managers are not geeks.
Virtually anyone with "MIS", "IS" or "IT" in their title, as well as virtually any CxO (e.g. CTO, CIO) is not going to be a geek. They aren't as hardcore into computers as true geeks, most run Windows exclusively, and many scoff at both Linux and *BSD (as well as Mac OS X, which they view as a failure because it's failed to achieve the 97% market share of Windows).
The same is true (for obvious reasons) of virtually anyone with an MCSE and, more broadly, for virtually anyone with "A+" or other certs.
Virtually none of the most brilliant geeks I've met have had any sort of certification (except sometimes Brainbench, which of course is a joke), and virtually none have had "MIS", "IS", "IT", or any of the CxOs in their job title. Most true geeks are programmers, systems administrators, network engineers, or the like, and I challenge you to find attractive, exciting, well-adjusted people in that crowd. (N.b.: I am in that crowd myself, of course
And the most brilliant geeks tend to have bizarre personal habits. Witness RMS, for instance. One of the most brilliant geeks I've ever met was a furry with a fetish for muscular anthropomorphic dogs. This guy could quote you the specs on 70s-era computers at the drop of a hat.
In my experience, the more high-powered the geek, the more bizarre the person. YMMV, of course.
You must be living in a wholly different segment of the IT world than I am.
Then again, most of the geeks I've met have also been furries, so my perception of geeks has probably been twisted by that. Among furries (90+% of the serious ones are geeks), most females indeed fit the stereotype I mentioned.
Unfortunately, we are still animals. And as animals, we must compete to mate, just like any other animal. Females desire to mate with the males who are the most confident, successful (in things like "sports" and "business"), attractive, and physically strong. Geeks are generally not good at these things.
Geeks, by and large, are the people who didn't get the girl in Middle School/Junior High or High School-- and who are shunned and bullied due to their behavior and interests-- so they turned to computers instead.
This sort of thing doesn't happen to women because virtually any woman, even a heavy or unattractive one, can get a date.
Most female geeks I've met have been either [A] very overweight, [B] unattractive, [C] lesbian/bi (and therefore socially shunned) or [D] transgendered (and therefore really socially shunned)-- or, most commonly, some combination of the above. Please don't bore me with your anecdotal evidence to the contrary. I know exceptions to this rule exist.
Guy geeks become geeks because they can't get the girl in school. Girl geeks (who are rarer) become geeks because they're utterly socially rejected-- which is much, much rarer among girls than among guys. Girls usually have at least a small clique of friends, and girls can almost always find a date; a much, much higher percentage of guys are utterly alone and utterly sexually frustrated.
Thus, male geeks.
You can moderate the truth (-1, Flamebait) or (-1, Troll) all you want, but it will still be the truth. I stand behind my words. Not all ideas are equally valid. Libertarianism is idealistic nonsense. It assumes that consumers are all informed, make sensible decisions, and care about quality (or even price, to a point). It assumes that companies won't collude together to fix prices; it assumes competition is perfect and "by the books". It conveniently disregards such concepts as pre-existing mindshare (who'd buy phone service from Joe-Bob's Discount Long Distance if AT&T or Sprint already serves the area, and then some?), FUD, and barrier to entry. It's a pure form of idealistic free-market religionism, cut from the same cloth as the Pollyannas who constantly chirp about how America is "the land of opportunity" and anyone who really works hard and has a can-do attitude can make it rich here.
Just because libertarianism/Libertarianism is currently in vogue on SlashDot doesn't make it a good idea, and just because I'm pointing out similarities between a religious belief in obviously contradictory ideas and an economic belief in obviously contradictory ideas doesn't make me a troll. (Or wrong.)
"No regulations on the quality or performance of PCs" have given us insecure, bloated operating systems and shitty crapware-infested factory installs (think Dell).
Also, there's no real "choice" in the PC market. You used to be able to choose between an x86, a 680x0, a PowerPC, a Z80, etc., with several different widely varying hardware platforms for each (e.g. 680x0 encompassed Amiga and Mac). Now, you can choose between... x86 or x86_64. Period. From
A Dell is a Compaq is an HP is a Gateway is an Alienware Area51 is a Bob's Computer Shop SooperPC. These guys aren't manufacturers, they're just resellers, reselling the same crap from the same two companies (Intel and AMD).
Pretty soon, it'll be "a Dell is a Compaq is an HP is a Gateway is an Alienware Area51 is a Bob's Computer Shop SooperPC is a Mac"...
This is the outcome of your beloved "free market". Shitty, largely indistinguishable, highly derivative repackagings of the same generic crap from one or two sources.
For that matter, it's starting to make sense why so many libertarians/Libertarians are also Christian. It takes a mind capable of swallowing "God loves humanity, but he'll send most humans to Hell" to swallow the idea of "to make the market more open to little players, we'll let the big players do whatever they want".
This is complete Orwellian doublethink, and utter nonsense to boot.
Or, let me put it even more simply: Contrary to what libertarian dreamers like yourself would like to believe, in the absence of controls on the powerful, the powerful get more powerful (and the powerless get more powerless.)
This concept seems so ludicrously obvious, yet you completely don't understand it.
Even as things presently stand, the advances made by "the little guy" (E.g.: The rising influence (for better or worse) of bloggers) are the exception and not the rule. They are like those "human interest" stories you see on the evening news where a firefighter saved a precious cat named Muffins from a raging fire. Awww, how nice. Meanwhile, AIDS is still killing millions in Africa, and people are still being blown up in Iraq.
Loony Libertarian "to make the powerful less powerful, we'll remove all restrictions on them!!111" thought would only make the situation worse. It amazes me to think that there are those who cannot comprehend this.
Since when do you reduce the power of an entity by removing all restrictions on them!?
And please, spare me the lecture about how "with no regulations, barriers to entry in the [X] market would be lowered". It doesn't fucking matter. Little companies could enter the telco market-- they'd just fold inside of a year, since no one can compete with the marketshare and "mindshare" of the established carriers.
I'm starting to think that the entire libertarian/Libertarian movement/party was secretly funded by Fortune 500 companies seeking to grow their influence through eradicating all checks and balances on their nearly-limitless power.
This is a complete load of bollocks.
Complete deregulation in the telecom field wouldn't lead to "thousands of little companies". It'd lead to one company.
With no regulations whatsoever, telecom companies would be free to merger and reverse-merger and acquisition themselves into a recreation of Ma Bell. Shit, they're already halfway there.
From what I've heard (I'm too young to remember it directly), things weren't too bad under the Ma Bell monopoly the first time around. Ah, but times have changed. It's 2005, and quaint, antiquated notions like "the customer is always right" have gone completely out the window. You know the old Saturday Night Live line, "We're the phone company, we don't have to care"? Substitute "a Fortune 500 company" for "the phone company". I could tell you horror story after horror story of how I've gotten jerked around by existing ISPs and telcos. Once they congeal back into a single monopolistic entity (as they were before), this will only get worse.
And you free market religionists will be to blame.
In the absence of regulations, things turn into a monopoly. No, "the system" doesn't work. It doesn't work because Joe Sixpack is ignorant, and the telcos like it that way. Capitalism, like democracy, assumes a well-educated and informed populace, and we do not have that.
I beg to differ with you.
Christianity isn't some warm, fuzzy religion. It's a religion that believes that all nonbelievers are going to be sent into a fiery pit forever ("where their worm shall not die", a place filled with the sounds of "gnashing of teeth"). It's also a religion based on the ridiculous Old Testament (Full disclosure: I am of Jewish stock, so this includes my birth faith too) which, in addition to condemning homosexuality and ordering the murder of anyone found having gay sex, condones slavery. You're allowed to sell your own daughter as a 'female slave' (read: 'sex slave'). In fact, you can even literally beat your slaves to death, so long as they persist (in suffering) for at least a day or so after the beating before expiring.
All of this is (or "was"*) supposedly written directly under the influence of Yahweh. Put plainly, if God exists, he is a TOTAL ASSHOLE, and not worth worshipping in the slightest. Don't believe me? Actually read your Bible. Including the parts you'd rather ignore, like all the "if a person [does X], they shalt be stoned to death" garbage in Leviticus.
Whether or not you believe it still applies, it's supposedly still part of the "holy", "God-inspired", "infallible" Bible.
I also find it quite amusing that you accuse me of following "dogma". I'm not the one hewing to a belief, against all evidence, that an invisible man lives in the sky and that he wrote a big book 2,000 years ago.
* (for those who believe Jesus's death changes things; does it really make God sound that much better that he "used to" tolerate this sort of garbage as opposed to tolerating it today?)
I didn't underline it for emphasis. I underlined it because it's a book title. (Although sometimes it's written _Nineteen Eighty-Four_; I'm not sure which is 'canon').
;P
I know that _1984_ wasn't written in 1984.
I beg to differ.
If you're only being charitable because you believe an invisible man in the sky is watching everything you do, I must question your true motives. Are you doing what's right for right's sake, or because you think it will impress the man upstairs?
I suppose it "could", in the sense that it's within the laws of Physics for that to happen. Realistically, though, it won't happen that way. Orwell was right (in _1984_) about the nature of the masses. They are truly asleep, and they won't ever awaken.
Let me spell out how it will actually go down:
1) The MPAA/RIAA companies will get together and come up with some doublespeak name for it (like "Consumer Digital Protection") that sounds nice and shiny.
2) They'll make some vague handwaving about how it does something good for the consumers (e.g.: "Better picture quality on new CDP-ready equipment!", or perhaps "Keeps costs down!").
3) The consumers will half-assedly accept it and buy new equipment. Grumbling a bit, perhaps, but they'll know they have no choice. They also won't care.
The MPAA/RIAA companies aren't stupid. They know what it takes to keep people paying them money. They'll never do anything dumb enough to actually drive off the Joe Sixpacks of the world from buying their wares. Mind you, it'd take a HUGE blunder to ever do that. In fact, I can't even think of an example. And that's depressing in a way...