You can always host stuff on your own website. Even then someone might use your content, and you're out of luck because they can pay their lawyers indefinitely and you're just a guy with a website.

I don't think that word means what you think it does. In my experience, nerd culture is more about cramming random science-y trivia facts into your skull than it is the dedicated pursuit of knowledge. Might as well say I study the back of the cereal box every morning. (Spoiler alert, they're still after his lucky charms.)

Also, it seems like there's a bit stereotyping underlying your post. Guess what, men are also turned off by constantly being made to feel stupid. They are also turned off by bad social skills, bad physical health, and the inclination to play video games and study all day every day (rather than going out and doing something fun with friends).

I don't think the dividing line here is men/women. I don't know that it's even geeks/non-geeks. Maybe it's closer to extroverts/introverts. Really what it seems like to me is that a minority of people who are dedicated to their hobbies are looked down on by people who pursue those hobbies only casually (or not at all.) Model train enthusiasts are going to have the same problems as video game geeks if they don't throw a little moderation into their lives. It's just that the latter is more common.

I looked into that, but I use a lot of specialized software in my work, and Android just doesn't cut it. I could install Ubuntu Touch, but I'd rather install another distro, which isn't easy to do. And 7 inches is friggin' tiny. I'm struggling with productivity on my 10 inch netbook.

The surface seems just about perfect for me. It's a tablet for reading papers when I want it in portrait mode, and I can plop it down and get some actual work done too. Even better, it seems like it's actually pretty easy to install whatever Linux distro I want on it.

From the article:

Yeah, I teach math at a large university in the deep south, and this doesn't surprise me at all. Students are unprepared for college math classes, and I see a lot of behavior that I wouldn't have expected in a math class. For example, I always have students that try to memorize their way through class, mostly in calculus 1. They don't practice any problems, they don't try to understand the material, but they've got flash cards and highlighted notes and sticky tabs out the wazoo.

It's like they all had a bunch of "study skills" drilled into them in high school and no one ever bothered to explain that these are supposed to aid actually understanding the material. They're so used to just regurgitating things onto tests that I guess a lot of them really do think memorizing is understanding.

Now I realize the following is just anecdotal, but I know several people who teach high school math throughout the deep south, and all of them say the same thing: they aren't really allowed to teach. School administrators have a death grip on teachers' jobs. Teachers are told what, when, and how to teach the material. They're basically reading scripts. And of course they're all teaching to the state end of course tests too, probably because those are used to measure administrators' performances.

Once, when I was curious what being old was like, I typed "the google" into Google and got this glorious Onion article.

I can configure the desktop to be more useful than just being there. For example, I work with a lot of LaTeX documents, in particular folders containing tests and assignments for the classes I teach. So I have a desktop with a set of folder view plasmoids pointing at this folder full of assignments. One view is filtered to show only .tex files, and the other view is filtered to show only .pdfs. Super convenient, better than popping open Konqueror (or Dolphin) and navigating the folder, even more convenient than popping open a terminal. Way nicer than the garbage dump of "maybe I'll need it later" files that desktops usually are.

Similarly I have a desktop full of folder views and other plasmoids that are useful for my research, a desktop full of folder views and plasmoids useful for coding, et cetera.

This is something I can't do with any other desktop environment, and I've looked. (Well, actually there's a couple of proprietary Windows 7 add-ons that give similar functionality, if I felt like forking over the dough. And using Windows 7.) And other than the desktop itself, the auxillary applications (the ones I use, at least) are all at least as good as they were in KDE3.

Also, KRunner (Alt+F2) with nepomuk is awesome. File search and program launching, yeah, every desktop is decent at those nowadays. But there's a lot of useful KRunner plugins too. Calculator, dictionary, spell-check, search wikipedia, mini command-line shell; it even has a task manager so if a process is misbehaving I don't even have to open a terminal and use htop (unless I'm in the mood to use htop.)

Give it a try, man; it's actually pretty great. And as far as eye-candy and bloat go, I do all this on a four year old netbook. I didn't even disable any of the eye-candy. What bloat?

I don't understand why people conflate my distaste for revenge (i.e. justice) with condoning his actions. The man was rightfully put down. I don't think that sort of criminal can be rehabilitated. But making sure he suffers puts us on his level. It's petty and barbaric, and when someone has the capacity to enjoy violence, for any reason, it gives me serious misgivings about them. Like, for example, all the people saying that he should have suffered.

I think you misunderstand. I'm not arguing against the death penalty. I think for some people it's completely justified, the same way you'd put down a dangerous animal. But it should be quick and humane. We shouldn't get any joy or satisfaction from ending a life. If we enjoy killing someone, we're not so different, deep down inside, from other people who enjoy killing people (e.g. serial killers.)

It's not that I think they should have let him live, it's that the capacity to enjoy violence terrifies me. And I'm seeing that capacity in a lot of Slashdotters right now.

I think you misunderstand. I'm not arguing against the death penalty. I think for some people it's completely justified, the same way you'd put down a dangerous animal. But it should be quick and humane. We shouldn't get any joy or satisfaction from ending a life. If we enjoy killing someone, we're not so different, deep down inside, from other people who enjoy killing people (e.g. serial killers.)

The capacity to enjoy violence terrifies me.

This is part of the problem. Justice is just another word for revenge. It's petty and primitive. Justice shouldn't feel like anything. Penal systems are not about getting justice; they're about protecting the general populace.

There are a lot of bloodthirsty people here on Slashdot.

I think it's a good thing to try to move away from the, "He made others suffer so he should suffer," mentality. Punishment, capital or otherwise, should be about rendering the criminal incapable of commiting futher crimes to protect the populace. It's self defense, nothing more. Making sure that criminals suffer is barbaric. It turns my stomach a bit, and I liked that cinnamon roll.

Crap, don't tell me that. I was planning on finding someone after grad school.

I think it bugs me more that you hear all about programs and charities to give aid to the poor in other countries, but you don't see the government handing out care packages to the homeless in the US.

Maybe it's just not as widely publicized, but I don't think that's the case.