Ahm, actually, it is a form of magic mind control. While yes, people have free will, people tend to underestimate just how much advertising affects us, with people who believe that it does no being especially vulnerable.

I think the person's point was that the person who wrote the original piece was treating it like theft, them viewing people's actions in terms of how much money they should be making and accusing people who negatively impact that prediction as thieves.

*nod* in some ways one can see the adblock stuff as a bit of a referendum on how welcome these forces are on the internet. The original piece starts with the assumption that the internet needs people like them, but it is not all that clear. The internet they want needs people like them, but it got along fine before that crowd started monetizing the 'net, and a lot of the changes which resulted from their interest are not always viewed as positive.

So this whole 'if you do not do things our way, we will pick up our toys and go home' has the opposite intended effect for a lot of people, many of us do not like what they have done...

People tend to overlook that in attacking this, one is also saying that women simply do not have as much merit and ability as men. And then people are surprised when they are called sexist for it.. it shows just how deeply ingrained the idea of female inferiority is in their minds... that the natural order, which just happens to disproportionately benefit them, is simply the way nature intended and any attempt to question that is somehow hurting them.

Well, it is a problem every day. That is one of the things about the 'privilege' concept, privilege gives one the luxury of not having to think about or notice something because it does not impact them. Which is why you get such a big backlash of 'I do not want to hear about this' from guys on boards like this, it is not their problem, they can't see it, they do not want to think about it. They really do not want to consider they might be feeding into a problem that hurts people who are not like them.

Ah, the old 'we are abused, so we need someone below us in order to feel better!' argument.

Hate to break it to you, but 'nerdy men' who are not sexist bitter asshats have no particular problem with women, esp when they do not act like only the most popular women around are worthy of their attention and *gasp* date people within their own social tier.

If nursing and elementary education paid the same as STEM, or if you had piles of complaints about how men are treated in those fields including things like lack of promotions (oddly enough, in nursing and education, somehow the men manage to bubble up to higher paid positions such as administration, go figure), then you might have a point.

Well of course not. Problems that face men are 'real' problems worth discussing. Women's problems are only problems if they ALSO affect men, otherwise it is just 'social justice warriors'.

He could have done this easily enough, but it would have resulted in less sales. He had to weigh the advantages of the marketing ploy against the risk of, well, what happened. If he had advertized as 'novelty only' and kept to just the specific polygraph training he probably would have been fine, or at least a much stronger case.

And here I am without mod points...

Generally when I have to worry about integration or longevity, it is still hard to compete with ASCII & LaTeX. While they do not have the every day visibility of various office document types or pdfs, renderers, search tools always know exactly what to do with them. They can even interact with version control systems cleanly since the underlying tools do not need to know anything about the formatting to manipulate it.

*nod* in a way, I think agile, as an actual methodology, has not failed at all, but instead has been integrated into the toolbag of any competent project manager (or ad-hoc equivalent). What has failed is the hyped up "A"gile method, which, like any hype, over promised on its universalness as a replacement for everything.

Sometimes I wonder if tech people are just inherently excitable. So much of our culture and identity is linked to loving what we do and related topics, it would not surprise me if we are unusually (but not uniquely) susceptible to irrational exuberance.

That would be an excellent example. If you use copyright to gain more control than you are legally permitted to have (there are limits in contract law regarding what a contract can and can not do) more than 6 times than you lose your ability to use such enforcement mechanisms. Given how they have been pushing to treat each download as a seperate infringement, that would mean if your DRM prevented more than 6 cases of time shifting than that is 6 violations and your rights are revoked.

Oh I agree those are real cases, but you get that with pretty much any development methodology . I have no problem with companies being called out on implementing a system badly or 'in name only', but that really does not feel what the author is doing. Instead he is casting failure of agile to be a failing of inferior developers and if people were more willing to work or change then it would have worked. This will no doubt be true in some cases, but it is also true when looking at waterfall or spiral patterns, so it really can not be claimed as a problem with 'agile' adoption.

All he has really done is rehash the 'if people were smart and hard working they would realize how brilliant I am' argument rather than address opposing views as having actual points or other solutions having their own strengths which shine or tarnish depending on the project.

This.

Small town corruption has always been a significant and insidious problem, and you can do a case study with pretty much any town under 20k people with a few families holding the power and retribution being common enough to simply assume.

On the other hand, one of the big 'battle grounds' with voting right now are conflicts regarding how narrow those windows are for casting a ballot, with a focus on decreasing availability to populations based on, well, who they tend to vote for.

One major advantage of postal and internet voting is they both are things that individuals can take steps to access on their own schedules, while polling places require enough community organization to counter decisions being made by other organizations. Individuals have little say.