That guy with the faded Space Invaders shirt might look like a good guy for a nerd to talk to, but it's possible - nay, likely - that he is a normal person who will be put off by the nerd's social clumsiness, resulting in awkwardness and humiliation. (Who else is willing to pick strawberries and do the IT grunt work?) They can't even confidently stay out of the danger zone anymore. They can't claim that the world would fall apart without them, except in the same sense that immigrant laborers can. Geeks (ack! again, I mean nerds) no longer have any safe haven or any unique reason to live. That means that the excluded and inept can no longer comfort themselves with their geek status, because all the cool aspects of geekdom have been invaded by good-looking and/or confident people who are able to understand the mysteries of human interaction. Ironically, stripping the negative aspects out of the word "geek" made it possible for non-inept, non-excluded people to accept the geek label and still enjoy their status as full-fledged people. (Technology nerds have been successful in business, where successful is idempotent with welcome, for over a century, maybe much longer. Since nerds accept the boundaries imposed on them, society feels no need to remind them of what make them different. Most nerds are quite happy living without those things, especially now that they have a positive label for themselves. Society didn't want nerds to be condemned and repressed they just didn't want the nerds asking them for dates, sitting with them at lunch, and trying to go to their parties. After all, geeks (sorry, nerds) weren't trying to shoulder their way into the circles they were excluded from. The rest of the world bears so little ill-will toward geeks (unlike queers, whom homophobes hate passionately) that they allowed geeks to redefine the word geek. They will be defined solely by their negative characteristics. By attempting to erase their negative attributes, the geeks (nerds) will end up losing their claim on the positive attributes once associated with them. Fortunately, there were positive aspects of geekiness, so they simply threw out the negative characteristics and stressed the positive ones. They were ashamed of being socially inept, excluded, and driven to alternative worlds by their treatment in this one. Unlike the gay-bi folks who reclaimed the word "queer," the geeks who reclaimed "geek" were self-haters. The meaning of geek you describe was invented by geeks to reclaim the word geek, kind of like the queer community reclaimed the world "queer," except that the queer community didn't have to change the meaning of the word, merely the attitude behind it, since they were fine with being queer.
So in recap, I've been threatened, strong armed, and intimidated (you should have read those letters), via my webhost and registrar for simply hosting:Ī) A textbook implementation of the AACS protocol and
As far as I'm concerned, they demanded something of me, it's up to them to confirm that I have complied. In addition, the second letter dictated that I must call the law firm and inform them that I have complied. A month or so passed by and I received another letter, this time through my registrar, GoDaddy, demanding that I remove all the volume keys from the site or be sued out of house and home. This demand arrived at the same time Sourceforge received a similar letter. At first, I received a DMCA takedown sent to my dedicated host provider (Layered Technologies), demanding that my hosted copy of BackupHDDVD be removed. In addition, there was a searchable form on the index page where you could lookup keys. I established the site back when BackupHDDVD was released, and modified the source adding the ability for the program to automatically retrieve volume keys from the site when they were not found in the local key database.
On a serious note, I am the owner of, and I have felt the full brunt of this censorship.