There are a lot of dumb posts on /. Many readers seem willing to argue extreme positions, in violation of common sense. Obviously, this site is composed mainly of university-educated geeks -- the kind of people that you would normally think of as intelligent. So why are so many of the comments on /. so dumb? Why do they so frequently fly in the face of common sense? How can so many readers shirk reality in favour of wishful thinking?

Is /. now entirely Microsoft funded? I haven't seen a non-MSDN ad for over a week now.

-a

Over the last few years, I have noticed a disturbing trend: /. readers really like to argue by analogy. State an argument using facts or statistics or common sense and you're likely to get an analogy in return.

"Open source software is like a car." "Copying music is like reading a book." "Source code is speech."

Well, after a few weeks of posting anonymously, I finally bit the bullet and created a new account. I never bothered to write down my old password since I had it stored as an e-mail. Why is it that all the free PST readers out there on the net (and even the ones you have to pay for) don't mention that they only work if you have Outlook installed. What use is that?

-a