Verizon is doing 20 megabit symmetric home connectivity in the Northeast. Even though it’s Verizon, we’d kill for that. Here, we’ve got 3 mb down and 768k up, which bites.

You’ll need a Waterhobo.

(Via MeFi.)

Many are now aware of the long-running Net-joke “Chuck Norris Facts.” We’re not sure where they came from, and a bunch of them are Brasky retreads, but sometimes they’re funny.

The offshoot Bruce Schneier Facts are funnier: “If we built a Dyson sphere around Bruce Schneier and captured all of his energy for 2 months, without any loss, we could power an ideal computer running at 3.2 degrees K to count up to 2^256. This strongly implies that not only can Bruce Schneier brute-force attack 256-bit keys, but that he is built of something other than matter and occupies something other than space.”

It could easily happen. Five or so years ago, Danger released a very nice multifunction smart-ish phone exclusively tied to T-Mobile. It came with always-on Internet connectivity, and even a mobile AIM client. At first, the technorati were excited, but that feeling quickly cooled when folks realized that you never really own the Hiptop; T-Mobile and Danger had it so locked down that they alone could decide what kind of software you could run; they even retained the ability to remotely delete programs from “your” device. Consequently, the Danger went from being a potential huge hit with the geek crowd to being relegated to the Paris Hiltons of the world. We’re sure money was made on the Danger, but at the end of the day a huge amount of goodwill and potential was squandered because of carrier/manufacturer lockdown.

The lesson here is about control. Apple would do well to listen. Open the iPhone API and let a thousand developers bloom. That, plus cut-and-paste and real 3G connectivity, might convince Heathen Central to give it another look.

Richard “Lord British” Garriott owns a Sputnik. It’s not been to space, obviously, but it is apparently one of the early “spare” cases. As such, it also lacks innards. But still: Sputnik.

Read all the way through.

Joe Peacock has an amusing internal monologue posted in re: some bonehead client requests. Recommended.

This time, he’s right about the irrational act of buying an iPhone if you want to, you know, actually own the hardware:

Buy it for what it is, or don’t buy it at all. Your choices don’t get any more granular than that. Apple has been unwaveringly clear that the iPhone is theirs. Not yours, not Ambrosia’s, not J. Random Hacker’s. You may own the hardware, but you only have a limited license to use the software, and an ongoing contract to use the network. If you don’t like those terms, your only recourse is to shop somewhere else to begin with.

Listen to him: JWZ on Backups.

If you’re using a Mac, get SuperDuper. If you’re really geeky, try rdiff. We agree with his Windows advice, however.

The James Randi Educational Foundation is turning its guns on the snake-oil salesmen in high-end audio, defying Pear Cable to prove that their $7,250 interconnects materially affect the sound of any stereo.

They, like Stereophile and countless psychics before them, will quietly back down and refuse Randi’s million dollar challenge.

So, um, moving to a DSLR means it’s easily possible to burn a GIG of disk space in a single weekend of shooting.

Yikes.

Today’s Worse Than Failure is actually a meditation on the Mythical Business Layer in software; it’s a concept often hauled out in “enterprise” situations. Here’s a great quote, on the subsidary concept of a code-free “rules engine” supposedly set to encapsulate all the business logic:

Yes, I realize that the Enterprise Rules Engine — the ultimate example of a soft-coded business layer — has become my go-to example for bad software. But it’s for good reason. The ERE truly represents the absolute worst kind of software. It was as if its architects were given a perfectly good hammer and gleefully replied, neat! With this hammer, we can build a tool that can pound in nails.

We realize this post appeals to — and is understood by — a tiny fraction of our audience, but we’re pretty sure that tiny subset is nodding in furious agreement already. Don’t miss what they have to say on persistence, either; the Waterloo of any framework is typically the database, and it hasn’t escaped the notice of the author.

So, Vonage lost another ruling, which means we may end up having to change phone providers sometime.

Here’s what happened: Vonage made a success of VOIP precisely because it’s not an incumbent carrier. It has nothing to do with patents, and in fact if Vonage had a deeper bankroll we feel pretty sure they could prove that. Sprint, for its part, doesn’t even really care about the patents: they just want Vonage out of the marketplace precisely because Vonage did something they couldn’t or didn’t do: have success with VOIP.

As soon as Vonage goes under, if they fail, expect Sprint and the remaining oh-how-we-hate-’em telcos to offer some kind of crippled, locked-down, drastically less useful VOIP product that will cost more than Vonage’s offering. Further expect no one to enter the marketplace for fear of lawsuits from these telcos for quite some time.

As Techdirt put it in the link above:

[The incumbent carriers suing Vonage] were unable (and unwilling) to create the services that people wanted — and now they want to shut down the company that actually did innovate — and they’re likely to succeed. That’s not how the patent system is supposed to work.

Here’s something that surprises us: Thunderbird can’t seem to find the content for any email sent to us by a client who uses Groupwise. We see the mail, and we see (empty) attachments, and can even view the (encoded, illegible) source, but there’s no way to read the mail.

Outlook has no such trouble. Content pops right up.

Way to Fail!

Update: It turns out, “show attachments inline” will “fix” this. But still: Icky for both Tbird and GW.

We should note that the MIT student arrested for having a “hoax bomb” at Logan Airport this week was NOT in fact trying to get through security. She was at the airport to pick up a friend, not to take a flight, so she wasn’t subject to TSA’s tender ministrations. The cops took it upon themselves to arrest her anyway — again, even after ascertaining that her sweatshirt posed no threat to anyone, and was in fact an engineering project.

You know what’s cooler than robots? Theremins. You know what’s cooler than that? Robots that play theremins:

Thank you, and good night.

The first line of this story is amazing:

BOSTON – An MIT student wearing what turned out to be a fake bomb was arrested at gunpoint Friday at Logan International Airport and later claimed it was artwork, officials said.

It was only a “fake bomb” if anything that is not in fact a bomb can be legitimately termed a “fake bomb.” What she was wearing was a piece of tech art that did in fact have circuity and a battery, but the girl’s an MIT EE student. They do things like that.

By AP logic, apparently, our CAT is a “fake bomb.” So’s our cell phone, our computer, our iPod, our briefcase, our watch, and our left foot. Dumbasses.

N.B., too, that we’re talking about Boston, the same city that went absolutely bugfuck crazy over some other “fake bombs” that turned out to be promo devices for a movie. Here, just as before, the cops made no attempt to determine if she was a threat; they just arrested her.

More over at BoingBoing, including a photo of the garment in question:

Looks like the “improvised electronic device” consisted of a circuit board and a common battery that caused her sweatshirt, which had painted writing on it, to light up. Authorities referred to the paint as “putty.”

The hoodie reads “Socket To Me / COURSE VI.” A BB commenter familiar with MIT stuff says, “Course VI means she majors in Electrical Engineering / Computer Science.”

This is yet another example of absurd hysteria that very nearly got an innocent student killed. That is, by the way, the angle the police are taking — they don’t see anything wrong with having arrested someone who wasn’t committing any crime. They have, of course, charged her with “possession of a hoax device,” so apparently the Boston folks haven’t learned their lesson yet. In a comment at BB, Teresa Nielsen Hayden said:

Boston has a long dishonorable history of overreacting to unfamiliar objects, then claiming they were “hoax devices,” which are illegal under Massachusetts law. This is nonsense. A hoax bomb is something that a reasonable person could believe was a bomb, and which its owner claims is a real bomb in order to scare or coerce people in its vicinity.

Boston police pulled this same stunt with Joe Previtera, a nonviolent protester, in 2006. He was doing a silent imitation of the famous photo of the hooded guy standing on a box from Abu Ghraib. The police arrested him — as far as anyone can tell, because they disliked his politics — and claimed that the speaker wires hanging from his wrists constituted a “hoax device.”

[…]

(Just a month after the Great Mooninite Scare, the Boston Bomb Squad managed to come up with an encore: they blew up a traffic measuring device that had been put in place by the Boston Transportation Department.)

Judging from their record, charging someone with possession of a hoax device is Boston’s way of announcing that they’ve once again mistaken some harmless bit of electronic gear for a bomb.

As always, security expert Bruce Schneier has more, including a link to a better shot of the obviously benign device — it’s a breadboard, some LEDs, and a 9-volt, for crying out loud.

For a while now, folks in the Mac world have been agog about Parallels Workstation, a tool that allows Intel-based Macs to run Windows in a virtual machine, thereby allowing Macs access to whatever Windows-only software they need to run, but in a protected environment where Windows malware can’t hurt the rest of the machine. It’s a good tool.

Eventually, VMWare released a competitor, and given their background in virtualization, Fusion quickly became a better (more stable, more efficient) tool than Parallels. We bought a copy with our new MacBook Pro.

Well, said MacBook Pro developed an early fault, so it had to be swapped. No problem; moving machines in the Mac world is dead easy. There’s no need to reinstall software packages from disks or disk images, since the proper way to handle apps on a Mac is to create an “application bundle” that looks and acts like an executable, but is in fact a special class of directory containing the app and all its support libraries, executables, etc. What doesn’t go in the bundle is any sort of configuration information; that gets stuck in either your home directory’s ~/Library folder (for user settings), or in the computer’s own /Library folder (for global settings). It’s a nice, neat system, and one that makes managing a given machine MUCH simpler than the morass of crap you deal with on a Windows box.

Well, comes now VMWare, who are apparently eager to fuck it all up. When we tried to fire up VMWare today for the first time on this new computer, it behaved as expected and requested we paste in our license again. Several apps have asked for this in the last few days because license codes and authentication are stuck in the computer’s /Library folder, which we didn’t bother carrying over — it just wasn’t worth the hassle, since we have all the codes handy anyway, and the standard Apple behavior is that anything missing in Library should be reconstituted from the application bundle. (Remember, we have our personal settings in our own ~/Library, so we didn’t walk away from those.)

Except plugging in the code didn’t work. VMWare just sat there, doing nothing — no error or anything. We called the support line and got a singularly clueless drone who knew zero about Macs despite working support for a Mac product; his first suggestion was that we uninstall and reinstall (how Windows! And ironic, considering what came later!). It was us, actually, who discovered the problem: in our Mac’s console log, we found VMWare errors complaining of a path not found.

2007-09-21 14:30:19.062 vmware[4078] launch path not accessible

Yup. VMWare apparently sticks things it can’t afford to lose in /Library, and standards be damned. The support drone also told us that — get this! — Fusion also sticks some executables in /Library, such as its uninstall routine and a few other goodies. “That’s just how we designed our software,” he says.

The mind boggles.

There are guides for this sort of thing, you know. It’s not just an oral tradition. There’s a right way and a wrong way, and VMWare, for whatever reason, chose poorly. We’re now waiting for the 160 megabyte download to finish so we can re-install the one package brain-dead enough to require it. Thanks, VMWare! Not even Microsoft screws up on the Mac this well!

This morning, we had a software design meeting via the Internet, between Heathen HQ in Houston, the CEO in Dallas, the Ops guy down in Sugarland, and the dev folks in India.

Usually, the CEO leads, sharing a preso via GoToMeeting. That alone is pretty nice; we’ve seen many meetings get totally ruined with maybe-it-works virtual meeting software, but GoToMeeting just works. It’s nice.

When it really got wacky was when we handed control over to India, so S. could show us what he’d been working on. Now, for background, we should note that we put a new consumer-grade PC on the Heathen network last week for India to access here in Houston, since it’s not practical to move multi-gigabyte files halfway ’round the world on the fly. Another Citrix product, GoToMyPC, allows them to use this machine more or less like it was there in India. It’s neat. Windows being Windows, we can even watch what they’re doing in real time, since they’re really just remote controlling the machine.

So it turns out the screen S. wanted to share with us was in fact his GoToMyPC screen, which shows on our monitor exactly what’s on the monitor on top of the Vista box at the other end of my desk. The screen has travelled from here to India via GoToMyPC, and then back to here as part of the GoToMeeting.

And it gets even wackier when we realize that the screen is also a Virtual PC screen, not the host OS.

Sometimes, there actually IS evidence we live in the future.

SCO has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Carl Sagan explains the 4th dimension. It’s shockingly accessible, which is, we reckon, one of the billions of reasons we miss Sagan.

“There has never existed a mole of any human artifact, except maybe atoms of pollution.”

A British beekeeper put a bell jar over one entrance to one of his hives; read from the bottom for context. (Via BoingBoing.)

They’ve been patching people’s computers without their consent, regardless of what the user’s settings were.

There’s a lot wrong with this, but let’s start with two main points:

1. The machine belongs to the User, not to Bill. It is ultimately up to the USER and the USER ALONE to decide what goes on the computer. Software that installs itself silently and without consent is, under most circumstances, viewed as malware (at best) or evidence of criminal trespass (at worst).

2. Building this back door in is simply inexcusable. If it’s there, it’s going to get exploited by black hat types. Period. WTF were they thinking?

Sun now sells Windows servers.

Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot.

Let’s lay this out: In the mid-to-late 90s, Sun was the go-to vendor for high-end server hardware, PLUS they had the best commercial Unix by a damn sight. Solaris — poorly named though it was — had it all over the similar offerings from HP (HP/UX), IBM (AIX), and others now lost to history. Add to this their visionary — at the time — pursuit of a cross-platform programming language more or less “native” to the Internet (Java), and you got an image of a company really going places.

Then a couple things happened.

First, Linux happened when a Finnish kid managed to assemble a workable Unix clone from the Gnu project and a new kernel. It started out ok, but improved VERY rapidly; in the 16 years since its first released, it’s become one of the most popular Unix choices even in conservative enterprise situations; of the proliferation of commercial Unixes that Solaris competed against in the 90s, only a few remain, and most of them are weak indeed. Linux gives the user freedoms you don’t get with proprietary, closed choices, and can now boast of a developer ecosystem that pretty much dwarfs that of any closed-source server OS. Even Solaris is now Open Source (or has an OS version), since that’s the only way to compete with Linux.

Second, the commodity Intel box got more and more and more powerful, meaning folks didn’t NEED Sun hardware to do things like run mail and web servers, or even databases, for most applications. Serious hardware just isn’t indicated in 99.9% of situations — and even when it is, Intel architecture boxes have grown up into high-availability tools that cost a fraction of what Sun’s Sparc hardware demanded.

The combination of a free operating system better than Solaris and cheap hardware getting more cost-effective than Sparc has pretty much cut off Sun’s oxygen supply, to steal a phrase.

It’s amusing that Sun’s lasting legacy is Java, but also predictable. Sun realized that for Java to succeed, it needed to be essentially free. Sun makes almost no money from Java, and can’t — if they charged for it, they’d kill it. The era of pay-to-play development environments is just plain over. Java’s still huge, and will likely stay that way for a while, but it’s impossible for Sun to monetize that success. (Even so, the rise of dynamic languages and frameworks will likely mean Java’s time as king of the hill is limited.)

“Wow, Vista really blows.”

There is now a device on the market that enables the one to replace your car horn with the MP3 of your choice.

Even in the TWENTY FIRST CENTURY, there are files so big — say, 15 gigabytes — that they cannot meaningfully be transmitted over the Internet to, say, India.

And we like it that way. In the new job, though, we’ll have to at least be aware of it even if we don’t use it, so in order to facilitate some user migrations, we spooled up a virtual XP box and installed Outlook 2007.

Holy. Crap. This thing is totally broken. Here’s two bits we’ve run into right away:

• First, if you go through the setup and elect to create an Exchange account, but get it wrong, you’re in a dead end — Outlook will really, really want to connect to the Exchange server, and if it can’t for whatever reason, it’s going to fall over. We couldn’t find any config files or Outlook folders in our home directory to zap and start over, so we asked the tech. Turns out, to make Outlook ‘start over’, you need to go into the frigging Control Panel, to the Mail option, and delete the bolloxed profile. Then you can start over.

• It gets better. If, later, after getting Outlook running without an Exchange account configured, you decide you want to try to add one, you can’t — at least not from inside Outlook. Exchange accounts have to be added through the self-same Control Panel -> Mail -> Profiles mechanism we mentioned above.

Who thought this was a good idea? Is someone at Microsoft just trying to create absurdist, unfriendly, unintuitive, totally b0rked interfaces comprised entirely of Fail? We understand they want to tie everything to Windows so it’s impossible to switch, but come ON, people, the whole rest of the universe understands that a mail program is just a mail program, not something that should need to be managed from our operating system’s byzantine configuration tools. Sheesh.

This is an excellent example of why open tools are better, by the way. With an open tool — not just open source, but any software designed to be flexible and friendly to the user — you can use it while following your own software plan. With a closed, locked-up tool like Outlook, you’re definitely being coerced into following Microsoft’s business plan, which is probably not yours.

This one is made from melted 1980s metal band cassettes. Rock on!

Citing the huge backlash from the early-adopter crowd over the sudden $200 price drop on iPhones, Apple announced today that they were giving all iPhone buyers a $100 Apple-store credit as a goodwill gesture.

You always know that, when you buy something electronic, the price will drop dramatically, and quickly. It’s the nature of the beast. Apple’s step here — which is worth, on paper, nearly $100M US, but will cost them far less — is a grand gesture sure to silence 99% of the grumbling horde. Good choice, Steve.

Check out this find over at Notebookism. It’s basically a Victorian Palm Pilot made out of ivory (natch).

(And it’s still cooler than the Foleo.)

They announced today that they’ve aborted the Foleo, which is a good idea seeing as how it was sort of a product in search of a market.

Sadly, we’re still pretty sure they’re doomed.

The Debian-founder-turned-Sun-employee seems to think OpenSolaris will challenge Linux.

Wow. And they say Jobs has a “reality distortion field;” McNealy’s must be amazing. Frankly, we remain baffled about Murdoch joining Sun in the first place. We hope he’s being paid in boatloads of cash, because any sort of equity compensation is a sucker’s bet. Sun continues to appear doomed, doomed, doomed. They made their bones on hardware that nobody wants anymore, and remain in the public light really only because of Java — which, amusingly, cannot be easily monetized. Spending cash and time on Solaris strikes us a just about the last thing they should be doing, and yet, here they are.

Over at the BoingBoing Gadget Blog, they’ve got video of a Russian helicopter shot with some video camera that happened to have a “shutter speed” more or less exactly in sync with the rotation of the main rotor. Result? A chopper flying with an apparently motionless rotor. Neat.

Over the last 2,458 days, we have provided you people with 4,917 posts. Today, the all-time posts-per-day average is above 2.000 (it’s actually 2.0004) for the first time. Despite the recent loquaciousness, the first few years of Heathen were based on a much less friendly system that made it a pain in the ass to post. Consequently we posted far fewer screeds; the site’s been consistently over two per day since 2004, but it took a long time to drag the life-of-Heathen average up.

We hope you people are happy. ;)

Other upcoming bloggy milestones: the 5,000th post should come in about 40 days, and the 7th anniversary is approaching in November. Mark your calendars, or whatever.

In a pre-coffee stroll through Wikipedia this morning, we found ourselves browsing the entries for a variety of handgun rounds (already far afield of our original quest there, which was to determine the age of the .32-20 round mentioned in a Robert Johnson song; for the record, it’s from 1882, already venerable with Johnson mentioned it).

Anyway, on the entry for .500 S&W Magnum (a truly absurd round about the diameter of a AA battery), we found some interesting choices for “related” articles, preserved via screenshot at right.

Heh.

A bit bulky, but we like these even more than RPN models.

Don’t you hate it when reality bites you on the ass, Darl?

SCO lost. This is a big deal, at least to Geeks.

(More background here.)

High-speed x-ray shots of bullets going through things.

It’s really all we can do to NOT put this little snippet of code into Heathen. (from /.)

So, the Predator-catchin’ pseudo-journalists at Dateline decided they’d try to get someone in undercover at the annual DefCon hacker conference this week. We’re sure that, had they succeeded, we’d all hear about how AWFUL and DANGEROUS they all are, and how THEY COULD GET TO YOU RIGHT NOW and all sorts of other alarmist crap, since that’s what passes for journalism on TV these days.

Fortunately for the attendees (and TV viewers), it turns out their mole got found out, so the organizers amended all the presentations to be given to include her photograph and the information that she was in fact an NBC reporter, etc. The first “reveal” was actually set up as an ambush for the reporter, just like their usual victims. Awesome! Hi-larious!

However, the real “WTF?” moment on all this is pretty simple: Here’s who they picked to infiltrate the conference. Dude, that’s a girl. Are you HIGH?

Al Gore can be pretty funny.

Chances are, if you work for a company or organization big enough to think filtering your net access is a good idea, your local IT people are about as bright as bags of hair. Fortunately, Lifehacker has some advice on how to deal with clueless but powermad local admins. You know the type.

(Don’t start with me if you read this and think I’m casting aspersions on your technical skills; if you read this, you’re almost certainly not an idiot.)

Today, the usually-pretty-savvy LifeHacker covered some very dubious services that purport to give you the ability to edit, recall, or even set expiration/self-destruction dates for your email.

The short answer here, dear Heathen, is that absolutely NONE of these will EVER work in a reliable way on the open Internet. It’s possible, within some corporate email systems (Exchange, Notes) to do this, but that’s because those servers and clients all speak the same proprietary language. On the Internet, you have to play by the global standard rules, and most mail servers see no reason to honor the requests of mail senders to edit, remove, expire, or otherwise molest emails — largely because once you hit send and the mail finds its way to our mailbox, we consider it OURS, not YOURS, and our systems aren’t interested in deleting our stuff on your say-so.

This is the right answer. This is the way these things SHOULD work. Anything else is a security nightmare and shady besides.

We took a look at one such system today: BigString. Note their initials; it’s prophetic. They claim to be able to “un-send” a message, delete a message after the fact, set expiration/auto-deletion dates, track how often a message is read, and a myriad of other things that, in all honesty, cannot be done with Internet email. Curious, we signed up to see how it worked.

As expected, they’re doing this by:

1. Turning your email text into a graphic;
2. Hosting that graphic on their server;
3. Sending a mail message that references, but does not enclose, that graphic.

At this point, you’re reading a web page, not an email. This means that non-graphic-friendly email clients (Windows Mobile, perhaps Treos and Blackberries, etc) won’t be able to read the mail at all, and people with sane security settings on their desktops will have to adjust their mail configuration before they can see anything. That’s charming, right? Anyway, while they claim they can keep recipients from saving or printing these messages, we had no trouble at all dragging the graphic to our desktop to save for later, printing the file, or forwarding the graphic to someone else. (Also, they’re treading into the same dodgy territory as DidTheyReadIt and their ilk, covered previously.)

It’s just not possible to control, and here’s why: your computer has to make a copy of the file to show it to you. You’re not reading it off their server. You’re reading it locally, and once you have it locally, it’s beyond their control.

Put not your trust in these foolish things. Be careful what you put in a mail, and forget giving bozos like BS time or money. Email is as it always was, and attempts to make it jump through hoops like this are doomed to failure.

(Oh, another thing about Big String: it took them nearly and hour to deliver my test message to me, and test messages sent to my test account at BS have yet to arrive, more than an hour later. This suggests they may have bigger issues than a snake-oil product.)

Best. Spacewalks. EVAR. (via BB.)

Anybody at 365 Main in San Francisco. Some event there has apparently taken down Craigslist, LiveJournal, TypePad, Technorati, etc.

AND HEATHEN IS STILL HERE.

Charlie Stross imagines explaining WOW gold farming to someone in 1977.

This has apparently been around for a long, long time, but it’s new to us. The author, one Jeff Bigler, attempts to explain the sort of weird apparent courtesy mismatch that sometimes happens between nerds and regular people. His theory is that everyone has a tact filter; it’s just that regular people use theirs when they speak, and nerds use theirs when they listen. Here’s the whole text, reproduced in accordance with the copyright notice on his page.

All people have a “tact filter”, which applies tact in one direction to everything that passes through it. Most “normal people” have the tact filter positioned to apply tact in the outgoing direction. Thus whatever normal people say gets the appropriate amount of tact applied to it before they say it. This is because when they were growing up, their parents continually drilled into their heads statements like, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all!”

“Nerds,” on the other hand, have their tact filter positioned to apply tact in the incoming direction. Thus, whatever anyone says to them gets the appropriate amount of tact added when they hear it. This is because when nerds were growing up, they continually got picked on, and their parents continually drilled into their heads statements like, “They’re just saying those mean things because they’re jealous. They don’t really mean it.”

When normal people talk to each other, both people usually apply the appropriate amount of tact to everything they say, and no one’s feelings get hurt. When nerds talk to each other, both people usually apply the appropriate amount of tact to everything they hear, and no one’s feelings get hurt. However, when normal people talk to nerds, the nerds often get frustrated because the normal people seem to be dodging the real issues and not saying what they really mean. Worse yet, when nerds talk to normal people, the normal people’s feelings often get hurt because the nerds don’t apply tact, assuming the normal person will take their blunt statements and apply whatever tact is necessary.

So, nerds need to understand that normal people have to apply tact to everything they say; they become really uncomfortable if they can’t do this. Normal people need to understand that despite the fact that nerds are usually tactless, things they say are almost never meant personally and shouldn’t be taken that way. Both types of people need to be extra patient when dealing with someone whose tact filter is backwards relative to their own.

(Text copyright © 1996, 2006 Jeff Bigler.)