Mr. Stephenson, you're just part of a much larger bunch. Technophobic literature and movies have been around for a long time. The mad scientist has been a stock character since Frankenstein, and these days he's usually combined with today's other knee-jerk evildoer, the businessman. George Lucas wanting to show technology defeated by cute, fuzzy little commercial tie-ins probably had a lot more effect than your writings--again, with all due respect, and no indication of relative quality implied.

How many films these days are masturbatory fantasies for the greens? Rise of the Planet of the Apes, The Day After Tomorrow, The Hunger Games.... or TV series, like the History Channel's Life After Humans.

All that said, you're right to the extent that you're certainly not helping. Once upon a time, Lloyd Biggle Jr. accurately said, as best I can recall, "Given a bunch of people in a sewer, mainstream literature will lovingly describe those who are content to stay there. Science fiction will write about those trying to get out." That's at best less true than it was.

Ada Lovelace, judging by portraits, was no slouch for looks. I vaguely recall reading secondary sources, but I can't cite them. Ditto for Sonja Kovalevsky (for her, there's photographic evidence).

That said, you're right. Beauty doesn't matter in this context.

Those private entities would have the ultimate accountability--parents could take their children elsewhere and tell said entities where to go... as opposed to the current situation.

Funny how, here on Slashdot where there's so much concern about MS's monopoly status and freedom of choice for computing, very few either notice or care about the government's effective monopoly on grade school education.

I don't know about child abuse, but... from Mamoru Iga, "Suicide of Japanese Youth" (Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, v.11, Issue 1, pp.17-30): "The uniquely intense stress due to the Examination Hell (shiken jigoku) not only generates a basic drive for Japan's economic success but also contributes to a high rate of young people's suicide."

My sole experience in Scouting was with an Explorer post at what was then the Oklahoma City Western Electric works where my mother worked. A group of us (I remember two sisters and their brother and myself) went there, I forget how many evenings a week, and learned FORTRAN on an IBM 1130 and FOCAL and PDP-8 assembly language (on a PDP-8, of course). That would be around 1973 or 1974.

At least these schools give one a choice. Unfortunately, I bet that everybody still has to fund public schools whether their children go there or not--and while that's precisely analogous to the "Microsoft tax", I bet there will be slashdotters who will defend it.

Google should give the user control. In my estimation, someone who puts up a profile photo giving the viewer the finger is likely to be a jerk that I'll have no interest in, so I'll avoid that person, and would like tools a la the old newsreader killfiles so that I'm not troubled with that person's output, be it visual, text, or audio-- but that's just my opinion; I'd rather a social network that I use not make that decision for me or other users.

Actually, Jon McCann, in an interview, seemed to say that user configurability is a bug, detracting from GNOME presenting a single face to people who might consider switching to GNOME. "And I think there is a lot of value to have that experience you show the world to be consistent. In GNOME2 we didn't do that particularly well because everyone's desktop was different."

Shame on me for typing literal greater than and less than. That should have been "g/<regular expression>/p".

"Catenate" is actually a word and means the same thing as "concatenate". Unfortunately, 1 - epsilon of people associate "cat" with F. domesticus, so "cat" was a really lousy choice.

Alas, history and lots of shell scripts have probably made existing command names unchangeable. History in this case goes back to the time people got RSI from ASR-33 Teletypes and didn't want to have to type very much, and names that make sense only if you know other programs (in ed, "g//p" prints all lines containing the specified regular expression, hence the name "grep").

That said, we programmers are users of programming languages as much as Joe Sixpack is a user of the desktop, and surely we deserve good design as much as they do, so we can get things done rather than taking perverse pride in mastering needlessly ghastly syntax.

..if the government will pay me $30/hour or so to do it.

Um, if their OS were secure, why would they need antivirus software?

"What's the point in locking yourself in if there isn't anything special about the hardware in the first place?"

Don't you remember Microsoft's campaign against "naked PCs" (i.e. computers sold without an operating system)? I'm sure that we'll see a similar campaign for OEM systems and motherboards set up to preclude installing a non-MS operating system.