Hi Andrew I completely disagree with You. this is the problem with this PC stupidity, When I use this term is not in any way related to any discriminating action from my part and as such people should not take it that way !!! I am Portuguese and I live in the UK for almost 7 years and My experience is: if you stop people from using certain words and expressions it will not make the people that actually believe in that stop doing so, and it will make life harder for you and in a way make your relationship with the rest of the people around you very difficult. I meet a few people that are racist, but I meet many more people that are just brilliant and when we are talking and joking around they call me a Portuguese bastard, bloody foreigner and such, and yes if I wanted I could probably go around suing everyone in the company but what kind of stupid life that would be ? the problem with this PC stupidity is the fact that they are stopping people from saying it but not making an effort to educate people not to think it, and with that it's just making people resent it even more. As an example, in the town I live a lady as some pet pigs, and she loves them, so much so that she had some porcelain little pigs on her windows. it was funny to just pass by her house, because she had so many of all colours and sizes in the window, it was kind of a landmark. a year ago a Muslim family moved to the house in front had problems with pigs and the council took the lady to court to force her to remove the pigs of the window ( PC police strikes again). What this episode achieved was, as the lady never meant any offence, as she always had the little pigs in the window was to make her and her friends and everybody that knows about this resentful, including me. In life I found that you can not be this cut and dry or the world will go nowhere, we will all get bog down in this mindless stupidity. best regards Luis -----Original Message----- From: Andrew Warren [mailto:aiw@CYPRESS.COM] Sent: 26 November 2003 20:50 To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU Subject: Re: [OT]: Un-frigging-believable Jinx wrote: > http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=3 > 8908 64 [which described the City of Los Angeles's recent email to > its computer-equipment suppliers asking them to avoid using the > term "Master/Slave" in product descriptions] I'm surprised by the piclist's response (Lawrence Lile's excepted) to this. If your spouse told you, "There's this thing you do that bothers me; I'd be happier if you stopped," I don't think many of you would respond with, "Your feelings are stupid; I'm going to keep doing it because you really shouldn't be bothered by it." Or, hmm... Engineers ARE stereotypically unskilled at social interaction; maybe the stereotype is accurate and most of you WOULD say that to your husband or wife. In any case, telling your CUSTOMERS that you're going to ignore their feelings because they're illogical/stupid/liberal/PC/etc is just bad business. If you can make a customer happier by doing something as simple as changing two words, why wouldn't you? It doesn't matter AT ALL whether you think the request is logical or necessary. Besides, Master/Slave can usually be replaced without loss of meaning, and in fact, the replacement can often be MORE meaningful. PC hard disk drives, for instance, are more accurately described as Primary/Secondary than Master/Slave, right? -Andy === Andrew Warren -- aiw@cypress.com === Principal Design Engineer === Cypress Semiconductor Corporation === === Opinions expressed above do not === necessarily represent those of === Cypress Semiconductor Corporation -- http://www.piclist.com#nomail Going offline? Don't AutoReply us! email listserv@mitvma.mit.edu with SET PICList DIGEST in the body -- http://www.piclist.com hint: To leave the PICList mailto:piclist-unsubscribe-request@mitvma.mit.edu