I think "empathy" is generally characterized more by feelings. You see someone who looks upset, and you find it upsetting. I think this "Theory of Mind" business is more about understanding what else might be going on in another person's head.

Like... you know how when you're a kid, and you're shocked to see your teacher at the grocery store? You hadn't really thought about it, but you had somehow assumed that your teacher lived at the school, and perhaps didn't need to eat. And the important part there is, you hadn't really thought about it.

I think that's sort of an early level of the realization, "Other people are also people, like me. They have lives of their own, they think their own thoughts, just like me." There are deeper understandings of this that people develop, like perhaps realizing, "I sort of think of life like a story, and I'm the main character. But other people must also think of themselves as the main character. To an outside observer, there's no reason why my perspective is more correct."

And I think that in adulthood, some people develop that sensibility in much deeper and more profound ways. They can put themselves in another person's shoes, and not just feel empathy for them, but actually understand how things must appear to another person. They can think about things like, "I disagree with you, but I completely understand why you think that, and I'm not sure you're wrong." Some adults develop very strong skills and impulses along those lines, while others don't. Many people, even into adulthood, think as simply as, "I disagree with you, and therefore you must be wrong and stupid."

I'm not sure that's what they mean, but I would guess that's the sort of thing being included in "keeping track of what other people feel, know, and believe."

Well let's clarify your analogy a little bit. Let's say that in this land, people speak Language-X and Language-Y. Now, there's an industry dominated by people who speak Language-X, and a lot of people complain that there aren't enough Language-Y speakers in the industry. You're a business owner in that industry, and you look at your staff and, sure enough, everyone there speaks Language-X. You think, "You know, for our next hire, let's actively seek out a Language-Y speaking person.'

So you go through various channels, and you set up an interview. You have a Language-Y speaker come in. You and some of your employees interview the Language-Y speaker.

And then that Language-Y speaker complains, "I don't want to work there. Everyone there speaks Language-X! That seems like a terrible environment to work in!"

And then, still, people turn around and blame you for not hiring a Language-Y speaker. When you say, "I interviewed a Language-Y speaker. That person wouldn't take the job!" And they say, "Well of course. The interviewers were all Language-X speakers."

You respond, "But that's all I have right now! All of my employees speak Language-X, and that's the problem I'm trying to fix!"

And they fire back, "Well no Language-Y speaker is going to take a job working in an all Language-X environment. You should hire a bunch of people who speak Language-Y first, and once you have a lot of Language-Y speakers, then Language-Y speakers will be willing to work for you."

And as I'm writing this, I'm becoming very aware of two things. First, I've written "Language-X" and "Language-Y" a lot of times, and I hope I've kept them straight. I should have just said we were in Canada, in an area that speaks both French and English. It'd be easier to remember.

But second, there's a big problem with your analogy. Language is something that actually, directly keeps people from being able to work together, but on the other hand it's something that you can learn. Differences in gender/sex do not have that feature. It does not directly keep you from working with people, and a man can't "learn to also be female" the way English-speaking people can simply, "learn to speak French."

From what I've read, you're right that they didn't insult Muslims, but you're splitting hairs a bit. They intentionally offended Muslims, and they did it for the sake of offending Muslims.

But I disagree with the person who said, "I think Muslims, like anyone else, have the right for protection from such open insults." Nobody has the right to be protected from being offended. You can be offended all day long, and you have no right to respond with violence, and nobody has any obligation to prevent you from feeling offended.

It reminds me of this comedian, who makes the point that the right to "free speech" is the same as the right to "be offensive/insulting". It's terribly important that we can be offensive or insulting, because otherwise there's no limit to the restrictions that can be put on free speech. For anything you might say, someone might claim to be insulted. I also appreciate his point that we must be able to ridicule anyone (or anything) in a position of power, in order to have a free society.

I just think people are overreacting. You could argue that he shouldn't have said it, or he should have said something else, but what he's saying isn't wrong. Not in context.

First, he said that killing in the name of God is absolutely wrong. He made no concessions there. But yes, he also commented, “One cannot react violently, but if [someone] says something bad about my mother, he can expect a punch. It’s to be expected." So he's saying that violence is wrong. You shouldn't react with violence. But at the same time, "freedom of speech" is not "freedom from consequences of your speech." The point is, if you say something that you know others will find horribly offensive, you should expect that you have to deal with people being offended. That may have consequences to your life.

I think that's a misunderstand of what he's saying. Note that he didn't say, "if someone says a curse word against my mother, I'm going to punch him." He said, "he can expect a punch."

I may be wrong, but I think he's not advocating violence, but saying, "If you go around spitting in people's faces, and then someone punches you, don't be surprised." That is, it'd be foolish not to expect some kind of response.

Not so fast. What you're saying is great for home users or even small businesses, but for larger scale situations (enterprise or MSP, managing thousands of computers), it creates a lot of extra work to manage and maintain a fleet of computers of all kinds of different models from different manufacturers, running different operating systems deployed from different images, with different levels of warranty support, purchased over a range of time between "yesterday" and "10 years ago".

It's just not really the way you want to run things. Old machines break more often and take more time to fix. You use scripting to manage computers en masse, and you find that you have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get the scripts to run uniformly because different versions of the scripting language are supported on different versions of the operating system, and you have to support them all. Some things that you could easily do in a script, the old scripting language just doesn't support. The new imaging solution you've implemented because it saves your IT department a bunch of time, and therefore money, doesn't work on the computers from 7 years ago because the BIOS support is different, or you can't get the right kind of driver packages, or whatever bit of nonsense you run into dealing with old computers.

In short, when you're doing real IT work, "meeting the user's needs" is not the only consideration.

I would guess that's a component, but I suspect some of it was also just an issue of timing.

I work in IT servicing a lot of small businesses, and from what I've seen over the years, it seems like most businesses had gotten into the habit of buying new computers every few years. Both the hardware and software were improving quickly and drastically, and it made sense to buy a new computer every 3 years or so.

And then around... I don't know, 2006, when it came time for the 3 year upgrade cycle, a lot of businesses looked at the computer they already had and said, "Meh... this is still doing what I need it to do. I don't see there being much value in spending another $1,500 for a new computer."

And that continued, one year after the other. In 2010, they were still looking at some of their computers from 2005 and saying, "I know it's an old computer, but it still does everything we need it to do. I'm not going to spend money I don't need to."

But then in the last couple years, we hit a couple of milestones. First, a lot of those computers are now getting to be around 10 years old. In computer terms, "7 years old" sounds bad, but it sounds to the decision-makers like something they can live with, whereas "10 years old" apparently sounds like it ought to be replaced.

The other big milestone was that Microsoft dropped support for Windows XP, which means all of the old Windows XP machines either need to be replaced or updated to Windows 7 or Windows 8. Upgrading an old, outdated machine with no warranty is often not really worth the trouble, and so the need to move to a new version of Windows was the last straw for all those old machines that should have been replaced a few years ago.

So honestly, if I had to guess, I'd guess that you're going to see an uptick in laptop/desktop PC purchases over 2014-2015, and then you're going to see it drop off again. Once most of those old 10-year-old Windows XP machines are replaced, sales will go back down. But I also don't see them stopping anytime soon. Tablets are not going to be a real replacement for business use-- unless you're talking about something like the Microsoft Surface, where it's really just a laptop without a keyboard.

Yeah, that's kind of my first thought. I've been doing this IT thing for a while, and I think doing an occasional fire drill is great. But the fire drill itself costs money, and there's no point in doing it if you're not committed to fixing the problems you've found. So if you do a test restore to make sure your backups can be restored successfully, that's great. But if you find your backups don't restore successfully, are you willing to put in whatever time and money are required to fix those problems, and then test again to make sure your "fix" actually fixed the problem?

Too often, the answer is "no". People want the fire drill, but they want the result to come out that the drill was successful and nothing needs to change. They have no plan or budget for what to do if the drill is unsuccessful. It's purely a "cover-your-ass" move so that later on, they can say, "We performed regular tests." Those tests are a waste of money unless they're producing actionable information, and unless you're then willing to act on that actionable information.

Well, for one thing I would probably argue that the support expectations for phones have become different than for desktops/laptops, especially in businesses. People replace their phone every 2 years, and the OS is treated like an embedded OS.

But regardless, I think people are kind of being babies to complain about MS no longer patching v8, and only patching v8.1. It's a free update. It's basically a service pack. Just keep your damned OS up to date.

Yeah, imagine if, in order to get the new Windows service pack, not only did Microsoft have to write it, but Gateway 2000 had to modify it to their liking, and then AOL had to allow it to be installed. That's some nightmare fuel right there.

To me, this only really seems like a valid position if vendors allowed people to upgrade at will, but as far as I know, Android users are still held to whichever version their carrier/manufacturer allow. June 2012 is only 2.5 years ago, which means (I'm guessing) that it's possible you purchased a phone less than 2 years ago that had this version of the OS. That means, you could have purchased your phone brand new, it might still be under contract, and it's unsupported.

Now, if you're free to install the latest version on your phone, then it seems much more reasonable.

Given my experience with public education, I expect someone will take this idea seriously, and then we'll see classes on "grit" and "persistence" which will consist of a teacher telling kids that they should have "grit" and "persistence". Of course, they won't explain what these concepts mean to the children, because the teachers themselves won't understand it. But they will punish the students and generally try to make them feel bad for failing to live up to these ideals. A student seems hesitant to participate? Perhaps a little humiliation will help. A student acts out? Detention. A kid doesn't show persistence? Give him an F and hold him back a grade.

Wonderful.