jonny_noog

Not to disregard or in any way invalidate your point, which has been taken, but did Steve have a solution for the possible ear wax issue, or does his famed reality distortion field extend to ear wax as well? I'm generally not keen to use anyone else's earbuds, nor am I keen to lend mine to anyone else (and they're not even the kind that you need to wedge into your ear).

I highly recommend this doco if you are interested in the topic of this post and am pleased to find that it can be viewed here:

http://www.cgexplorer.com/2009/05/05/moebius-redux-video/

I also think you're right that there is likely some bipartisanship on this issue and yeah that's pretty scary. But it's not really surprising is it? Considering the somewhat perfect storm of social conservatism that we seem to have all over the place right now. Conroy, Fielding, Xenophon, Abbott, Rudd, they all have that streak in varying degrees and must be only the tip of the ice berg. I'm just hoping that some of these guys maintain a bit of practicality and reason.

It's always the religious social conservatives who fret and worry that society is going to hell in a hand basket and it's their self appointed task to save the misguided and punish the wicked. That's the root of the push IMO and yep, it seems to be pushing up though both sides of politics pretty well right now.

In a word, it comes from fear. Fear that the badies are going to blow us up while we sleep. Fear that the sexual deviants will molest us, or more likely just that they will have more fun than we can allow ourselves to have (being good religious folk). Fear that if someone holds an opposing viewpoint, this may make me feel like my own ridged, black and white outlook is not adequate to address the complexities of reality.

A lot of people know where it's coming from. That doesn't really make anything any better though.

Maybe people just don't like being lied to?

I would be very interested in any further links you could provide in relation to the Zamboni treatment (e.g. you mention a discussion on a forum) either for or against.

But I guess I figure a safe assumption to make in most situations involving musings on the motives of publicly owned corporations is that money and relatively shortsighted plans to acquire more of it tend to trump most else. e.g. Foxtel in Australia shows John Stuart and Stephen Colbert most weeknights. Not I suspect, because the execs at Fox agree with their POV but because there is an audience for that POV and the execs can spend their money in more places than they can spend their moral conviction in their position on the political spectrum.

For the English speaking countries at least, I have always assumed that there was a core audience agreeable to the views portrayed by Fox News, hence why it is shown. I'd be happy to be proven wrong though.

... Hopefully the non-sentient Internet browser will have something to say for its self a bit later on.

Personally I'd expect that line to work better on "good quality" girls, actually. Especially pretty girls that know they look good.

Uh huh.

With really beautiful and/or confident girls you're more likely for them to expect guys to be shy and deferential or just plain creepy.

Of course the chance of coming off as creepy with a line like that if not delivered with the perfect attitude is pretty high.

Uh? So if a pretty girl is more used to guys being shy or creepy and you deliver the line in question, which way do you think she's more likely to interpret the approach? You then go on to say that in any case, the chances of coming off as creepy while using such a line are pretty high.

Sexual intent, confidence and the perception that you're very successful with women and don't need to by shy about what you're after means far more than looks.

Well that really depends on how ugly you are, doesn't it. :) If you're average to good looking, then yeah I can see (and have personally seen) how attitude makes a difference. If you look like you fell off the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down, then good luck with that awesome confidence you're exuding. I suspect it will be just you and your hand tonight, as a lady once sung.

Sounds to me like you're more working off how you wish things were as opposed to how they are. It seems pretty self evident in my mind that no matter how the line in question is delivered, there will be girls who respond positively and girls who do not. The point I'm trying to make is that it's more about the girl than it is the opening line. How inebriated the girl is would make a large difference to the outcome of the interaction and at the risk of repeating myself, in my experience the girls who would respond positively to that line generally are not the ones I've wanted to sleep with.

It's another thing entirely if we're talking about using this line or something similar on a woman who you've know for a while and who has had a chance to get used to your personality and sense of humour. I think there might be a far greater chance of a positive response from a "quality girl" in this case. But this isn't what we're talking about here.

In the end, I guess you can test your expectations for yourself. Let me know how it goes. :) And hey, this is HN and I have no studies or statistics I can cite to prove my point so we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one.

But as I alluded to in my previous comment, all the womenizers I have known have had more than their fair share of skanky chicks because after all was said and done, they were pretty skanky themselves. There is usually a certain type of woman who will go for "Look, girls are into honesty right? Well the truth is I have a big d!&k and want to put it in you" and I've found by and large that those aren't the most interesting kind. My strategy has been quality over quantity and it's worked out pretty well so far.

I think it's also worthy to note that the origin makes a huge difference. If you e.g. have an underwear model trying that line on a woman, it will no doubt succeed more often than if a stereotypical truck driver delivered it in exactly the same way.

Consider also the spread of sex education courses through schools in the United States. The assumption is that you can change attitudes and behavior about sex through some form of teaching and instruction. If you assume that this is so (still a controversial issue among researchers) ...

Still a controversial issue among researchers? Yeah, kind of like how evolution is still a controversial issue among researchers. So this guy is a sex therapist who doubts the value of sex education in schools? I then realised that this document is actually just thinly veiled social conservative propaganda. I then stopped reading and dragged it to the trash.

This Dr. Victor B. Cline obviously has a massive personal bias, I assume stemming from his own religious beliefs, though this in only a hunch. You're going to have to do better than this ready for Fox News crap.

I also don't agree with you that "tearing opiates out of their context in medical treatment" as you so negatively frame it is a bad thing either. Who are you to say that's the only legitimate context for them to be in? If people want to take smack or any other drug recreationally, then that should be up to them[1]. I trust you can see how I would look at this analogy relating to your view on porn.

I put in the line about law because it's a point I was reminded of as I was writing. I do that sometimes, including a thought that occurs to me in my writing. Even in replies I don't always feel the need to limit my prose to issues specifically raised by others.

These things you're informing people about may be something you "know" however you wish to define that, but I don't see many objectively verifiable facts. I will read the PDF you linked to when I get the time (I have only been able to scan over it at this point), but I don't expect to find anything that will persuade me that your absolutist view is justified.

[1] It's another thing entirely if they endanger others by e.g. driving while under the influence of said drug, but this as you have said to me on another matter, is a different issue.

There is a default inclination toward drugs and other seriously harmful solutions, but that doesn't make heroin good, does it?

Doesn't make it all bad either. Opiates are used as effective pain killers. The legal status of drugs seems to correlate very loosely with how harmful they are.

If I was the prospective employer, it would actually serve a great purpose for me, it tells me that she has some amount of experience with the technicalities of the Internet, but not a great depth in this kind of area. She seems to be going for writing jobs ideally, not a dev or server admin position or something, so this would not necessarily be a detractor to her overall pitch. And you can tell she's pitching to non-technical people:

"I can even make that div float so that the text doesn’t get all messy. Don’t know what that means? See, you really should hire me."

I quite liked that passage.

She also refers to "software packages like Microsoft Office and Adobe Suite" where I would in any similar situation at least refer to it as "the Adobe Suite" and most likely I'd be a little more specific than that, going into further detail about which apps in the suite I actually have experience with. But again, I give her a pass because the way she's written things up I suspect works for the audience she's targeting.

There's more than two options out there. What about other Linux distros? What about BSD? If you're looking for something that's pretty, there's still no going past OS X, IMO.

To me, the choice is not Ubuntu vs. Windows, it's Unix/Unix-like vs Windows and Unix/Unix-like wins.

I have often stated and thought that the world to me is not black and white and that indeed no one does pure good or pure bad. But I can't say this view has ever lead me to the conclusion that therefore, no one is better than anyone else.

Turning this issue over in my head, I guess I always just assumed that things being on a grey scale - the operative word being "scale" - that this would surely mean that things existing at different points on that scale could not be considered as all being the same. Interesting to read that apparently this is not the view held by some.

In my personal experience, I find that those whose view is that the world is black and white tend to also be those who wish to impose this view on others. While those who see the world as grey (whether they fall into this trap of the "Fallacy of Gray" or not) tend to be less concerned with converting others to their viewpoint and if anything are more concerned with defending their viewpoint from attacks by the black/white people. I'm not entirely sure what conclusion to reach from this observation... Authoritarians tend to see black and white, while libertarians tend to see grey and sometimes the "Fallacy of Gray" possibly as a defensive overreaction?

On a related topic from that link, I don't think I've ever come across a banner ad made to look like a dialog box that has been good enough to fool me. But again my experience seems to suggest that those with less computer experience are far more easily fooled.