What do I care if some doofus loudmouth on the bus, or a convenience store, or a random psychological experiment I got thrown in, thinks they're funny or has nutjob political or religious beliefs? The chance of my opinion changing them is close to zero.
That's a good argument. I am losing my mod points to post this. Your point is that we are polite (sic impersonal) to people whom we aren't closely associated. That's true up to an extent but we are living in a society that actually encourages overconfident (sic rude) and boisterous behavior. In a family, the assertive sibling prevails over the quieter ones, more looked after by the parents, at work the loudmouth employee prevails over his peers and is more favored by the boss. Consciously or subconsciously we all appreciate overconfident behavior unless it affects us personally. But there is a visible shift in social perception of overconfidence, what was considered overconfident behavior in past (say 60's) is now more acceptable, and a standard behavior more or less.
OK, I admit to careless reactionary phrasing, but still, the point stands. The phrasing of the original post implied that KDE 'lacks the simplest functions' - which is untrue, hence the rubbish comment. The feature is there, and if it doesn't work for them, that's a bug, not lacking the feature itself.
I do think its a problem if one tries to add a new empty panel after deleting the default. KDE pulled out the resize button since the 3.x release; the panel won't occupy the full width until you add enough widgets on it; which i suppose indeed is very annoying. This isn't a bug, it appears they want it to work that way. There's more to the list of KDE stupidities, you cannot drag a widget in the panel to change its position; cannot add a desktop icon for your custom binary or script etc. Compared to GNOME 3 insanity though, KDE is still a very usable desktop.
Which, sad to say, is ever-rarer nowadays. It seems to me that there are a great many otherwise competent authors (Sanderson, Rothfuss, Egan) who are troublingly mired in notions of female superiority (note: not equality; bona fide superiority). I suspect a lot of this derives from a backlash over previously male-dominated genres. Unfortunately, as humans only exist for a little while and die, backlash like that only ensures ongoing imbalance, rather than any kind of equality.
I agree. Those who want to sound politically correct (gender equality/neo-feminism being one of those areas) shouldn't write fiction, they should relegate themselves to lower forms of literature like magazines or newspapers. The concept of female superiority is as absurd as male superiority. Its just the social conditioning that makes an individual suitable for a job or task regardless of the gender. If you read the works of some so called "misogynist" authors of last century (Maupassant, Saki etc), you might notice that most of their characters were equally shared by men and women of doubtful morals. But its just because their portrayal of the latter that they were labeled as misogynists. Fiction should come from heart; without any desire for praise, or fear of ostracism. Sadly, popular authors of this era seem to be guided by both these factors.
I bet the human brain is a kludge. -- Marvin Minsky