Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Asks: The Beanies Return; Who Deserves Recognition for 2014?
It's been a long time since Slashdot has awarded the Beanies -- nearly 15 years, in fact. But there's no time like the present, especially since tomorrow edges on the new year, and in early 2015 we'd like to offer a Beanie once again, to recognize and honor your favorite person, people (or project; keep reading) of the past year. Rather than a fine-grained list of categories like in 2000, though, this time around we're keeping it simple: we can always complicate things later, if warranted. So, please nominate below whoever you think most deserves kudos for the last twelve months. Is it ...
- Edward Snowden, for the impact his leaks (though they began in 2013) have continued to make? (Or William Binney, for similar reasons?)
- Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzay, who fought a difficult battle for children's right to an education?
- Telescope popularizer John Dobson, who died earlier this year at the age of 98, after bringing space a little more down to earth for many thousands of people?
- May-Britt Moser, her husband Edvard Moser, and John O'Keefe for their discoveries about how the brain navigates through the world?
- Eben Upton, whose little educational hardware project has bloomed into millions and millions of cheap, hackable Linux computers?
- How about Maryam Mirazkhani, the first woman to become a Fields medalist?
- Theo de Raadt, who stepped in with replacement project LibreSSL soon after cracks appeared in OpenSSL, and who's been helming the OpenBSD project since 1995?
- The ESA team that landed a probe on a comet, or the ISRO engineers who managed to send a probe to Mars on a shoestring budget?
- Anita Sarkeesian, for helping draw attention to undue harassment faced by women in the video game world?
- Someone relatively quiet or obscure who's nonetheless made the world better through some kind of interesting innovation or contribution?
Read on below to see how you can take part, and then nominate your favorite in the comments below.
A few guidelines to make this work:- Please use the title of your post well; in the form "Name: Description of why they're deserving." (Example: "Harold Ramis: Goodbye, and thanks for all the laughs.") That way, your title can help organize the discussion, and will be easy to scan for. (That's how we'll look to credit the first one to suggest a candidate, as well.)
- Speaking of which: please scan the other suggestions first; if you find there one you'd like to argue for or against, better to do it there, rather than start a new thread.
- Please name an actual person, or a specific group of people, so we can send your choice -- or a representative, as appropriate -- some kind of token (to wit, a beanie). But be as creative as you want: the names listed above are just starting points.
- Explain why your choice deserves to be lauded, with links and words; underrated heroes are welcome. If there's a relevant Slashdot story to link to, so much the better, but it's no requirement. Make it clear why your favorite deserves recognition for 2014, even if it's for contributions that started longer ago. Feel free to nominate yourself, but the same guidelines apply.
- Accentuate the positive. We figure beanies sent to Keith Alexander, John Brennan, or Kim Jong Un won't get worn very often. Maybe there can be some anti-Beanies down the road, but for now, name the good guys, of whatever variety.
- You need not be logged in to take part -- anonymous entries are welcome. However, because of comment thresholds, among other reasons, logged in comments may carry more weight.
We'll winnow down the suggestions below into a short list for further consideration -- and perhaps toss in a few more options to boot -- and aim to come up with a deserving new Beanie recipient (possibly more than one) before the first new moon of 2015.
Submit away.
... and only being remembered [by the really stupid plebe] for his really cool shirt !
What about Bennett Haselton, for always so graciously providing his view?
He didn't land a probe on the moon.
You are going to put someone who whines about cyberbullies on the same list as the first woman to win a Fields medal?
For unifying the hate of hundreds (thousands?) of unwashed geeks.
Lets be fair here. Yes there might be some need for attention to women in game development. But if you make a kickstarter for 12 videos about the plight of women in video games, get a lot more than your goal required and then only make 6 (and only 3 of the 12 topics covered), its more like a fraud than caring about women in video games. Never mind many other fishy things like suggesting they are a not for profit but them only having become so long after the kickstarter, when it became useful because they took copyrighted materials.
I personally think that The fine young capitalists has done a lot more for women in video games than Anita will ever do. Its nice to point out there are only very few female game designers and AAA games aimed specifically at women, its better to directly enable women to become part of the club.
Bennett Haston, the frequent contributor, is the Beanie Overlord
'nuff said.
Ezekiel 23:20
Christ, even the asshole nominating him for the least prestigious award in history can't even remember where he landed a probe...
Ummm Fappening.
I know a lot of young amateurs with our club own a worthwhile scope because of Dobson's innovations. I hated to see him go. He made good equipment affordable and he spent a lot of evenings out on urban street corners, giving the curious a chance to see something they may never have been able to otherwise while asking nothing in return. He also ran a pretty serious lecture circuit that a lot of small astronomy groups took advantage of.
He may not have had the most notable achievements from an overall view of the field of contenders but he did it selflessly. He's the Mother Theresa of astronomy as far as I'm concerned.
And doing so at the right time, before most people had formed an opinion about Google Glass.
From a developer's perspective, for 2014 I'd suggest Miguel de Icaza. From his Mono roots he built Xamarin for cross-platform mobile development, and appears to have been a force in the NET Open Sourcing.
I disagree entirely. He was/is a patriot. I was all over Manning for being a traitor, based on motive and the actions he/she took. I'm a Republican and have been for a long time.
Snowden was doing us a favor and sacrificed a nice cushy life for that. I have a hard time calling a person who did that a traitor. The fact that he's holed up in Russia speaks volumes toward where the United States has gone wrong with extraconstitutional surveillance and paramilitary action after 9/11. We used to be the place where political prisoners fled to, rather than away from.
The country I grew up in wouldn't tolerate what is going on right now with renditions, endless war composed of drone strikes and literally unfettered domestic surveillance.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I recommend Edward Snowden, for being the first to demonstrate that Theo de Raadt isn't too paranoid.
(I say this with great respect for Theo's amazing work over the years)
Nobel Peace prize winner that actually tries to do some good.
Was shot in the head, recovered, and is now fighting for what is right at the risk of her life.
I see no debate on this one.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Before we go and mark Anita for sainthood, has anyone actually watched her videos? She literally pisses on virtually everything as being demeaning to women. If I had to go by the things she said, I would be convinced that there was a definite conspiracy to hold women down and subjugate them through companies failed attempts to incorporate girls toys (Legos), or to suck as a feminine heroine (Hunger Games) or any other medium to try and reach out to girls for inspiration. And I'd be damn convinced that the Founding Fathers of the US were a gang of men bent on male domination, why else would the Washington Monument be such a phallic symbol? Honestly, I think Anita suffers from some kind of gender-based delusion and has spent far to many years in "Women's Studies". My daughter played Lego's as a young girl and was more than willing to build a space ship right along side the boys. And you know what, I thought the flowers on the spaceship were pretty darn cute.
Select from tblFriends where interesting >= 4;
Also consider that She in fact does none of her own work. Mcintosh writes for her, she is merely a puppet.
It would be like awarding a presenter for a scientist's findings. And I am being nice here.
What about Bennett Haselton, for always so graciously providing his view?
Totally agree with SoCalChris. Bennett Haselton has always provided deep and insightful analysis here at Slashdot, and should whole-heartedly be nominated.
Don't tell me it was our system's seventh planet ...
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Theo de Raadt for no other reason than he is Theo de Raadt.
Trolling is a art,
Educating children trumps everything and everyone else on that list Malala should get the prize.
Anita Sarkeesian, for helping draw attention to undue harassment faced by women in the video game world?
Bullshit issue. Some women got harassed by dorks and immediately attributed it to their sex.
When people are mean - which is pretty much always - they will use whatever personal attribute they can use: woman, black, short, bald, religious, atheist, whatever ....
And sometimes, they will make something up - like how many dorks on Slashdot will call people stupid or some other slight on their intelligence.
So, if I wanted to insult a gamer, I would call him a fat neck bearded loser who can't get laid.
Do I hate fat people? Nope. But I use it as ammunition.
Got it?
...and for once again demonstrating that just because something sounds like tinfoil-hattery doesn't mean it isn't true.
As for Sarkeesian, I say we arrange for a debate between her and Theo de Raadt.
Like him or not, call him hero or traitor... there is no way 'round observing the sowing of universal mistrust of governments he has instilled in our populace.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I'm sure everyone here knows who he is. In my opinion, hes the most eloquent, humorous, reasonable, and personable ambassador from a hard core scientific discipline of this generation. Watch cosmos if you haven't already. His ability to break it down for the layman while preserving the incredible spectacle of the universe is right there with all the Carl Sagans of the past. And....he did it on Fox of all places!
oops, I don't really know where the "moon" came from as I kept thinking about a "comet" :-/
While he himself nor his organization did not put a LapTop in the hands of children the rest of the LapTop manufacturers did manage to get hundreds of thousands posibly millions of LapTops into children's hands, so I think he deservs cudos for his efforts and success.
I would agree for the most part, except for the fact where he turned over OTHER information, such as spying techniques.
...then its definitely because the Patriarchy are still working to suppress women's voices.
And if you're not part of the Patriarchy then you should be contributing to Anita's Kickstarter.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
If I had a daughter, I would dream of her developing the same courage, and a comparable intelligence. What she ( Malala, not my inexistent daughter ) advocates trumps anything else on the list, however important it may be. Malala should get the prize.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Anita Sarkeesian, for helping draw attention to undue harassment faced by women in the video game world?
Career feminist looking for social injustice and finding it in _______? How does that deserve special recognition? It's what they do. It would be shocking if she looked somewhere and *didn't* find any injustice... that might actually deserve some kind of an honesty award.
Yes she did receive rape and death threats and I do not think she deserved it, but guess what, they were just threats. There was no way in hell she was going to actually be raped or killed by these juvenile gamers (juvenile either literally or the 30 year old virgins who never moved out of their parents basement and are juvenile in all but age)
But if instead of taking on relatively harmless gaming nerdz, had she had taken on, oh let's say Islam -- in the name of whose religion millions of women are sexually maimed and sometimes outright killed each year -- I would say she deserved a big award. Because getting your vagina mutilated and your head bashed in with stones is so much worse than being objectified as a sex object in some video game. And because whereas gaming nerdz post rape and death threats on Twitter but have never actually carried one out to date (because they're virgins and wouldn't actually know how to rape a woman), Islam does actually rape and kill and behead women. Frequently.
Thanks for wasting everyone's time with moldy, stale "news" that is nothing more than clickbait for Dice.
I'd say sell the site back to CmdrTaco but it was shit then and it's shit now.
Actually, the person who deserves the beanie is the slashdot coder who implements a true account deletion, a way to delete an account and all comments. That is what slashdot truly needs.
"Oh, but slashdot has never deleted comments" -- OH YES THEY HAVE. Ask the Scientologists about that one.
Sock Puppets: damn_registrars=pudge_confirmer=jimmy_slimmy=raiigunner=cml4524=a_klavan=red4men=ronpaulisanidiot
Whether he was a traitor or a patriot depends on whether you consider the US government a god-like entity that can do no wrong or one somewhat more human and flawed that requires checks and bounds.
A coward, however, he is most assuredly not, for it takes some huge pair of balls to go up against a government which you have just discovered through objective evidence will stop at nothing, neither legal nor illegal, moral nor immoral, just nor unjust, to wreak vengeance.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Well, we made him into a fugitive, so what did you expect? Now he has to earn his keep somehow. I'm waiting now for someone to tell me that they'd like to count trees or kill themselves rather than eke out a living by giving minimal assistance to your 'hosts'? That's a BS argument on its face.
This is a problem of US government creation, not Snowden's. We forced him into a very bad solution set. Give up his integrity or hang the extent of the surveillance out for public view. Just shows you how weak-willed the rest are...or entirely lacking in integrity.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I mean seriously, is there any other person who has left a larger mark on the world this year? He's put his life on the line, angering the largest world power in order to reveal a bewilderingly sprawling surveillance network spying on its own citizens with a complete lack of ethics and oversight. He will not be able to step into most of the Western world for years to come because of his honesty and moral code. Everyone has heard of his revelations and we are still not done with them.
and making the world really understand what goes on in Washington
And you're anonymous. And a coward at that.
... for the can blend in with the mundanes.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Yet 95% of the politicians still won reelection and will again in two years. His effect domestically is temporary and trivial. And like with the 'torture' report, we find little disapproval of spying or torture, less than 50% in the media polls, and about 1% in the actual elections. The country you (and I) grew up in was little different, just a little more discreet about exposing their real feelings in public. Bleh, reliving events of 40 years ago, this is a remake... Nothing changed then either, out of one war, into the next.. *Not that I care anymore, I don't, it's just something to talk about besides the weather and my arthritis.*
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If Snowden's revelations were actually a surprise to me I'd have nominated him instead, but what he revealed I'd already simply guessed and been warning everyone about (and hence been ignored as being paranoid and delusional for) since about 1997.
How is it that we got a Church Committee, limited as its gains were, back in the 70s and then zilch now?
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
This just in, every country spies on every other country and their own people.
All other governments know this, only their blissfully ignorant average citizens were ever in the dark.
I think it was "Blessed are the Cheesemakers".
Aha, what's so special about the cheesemakers?
Well, obviously it's not meant to be taken literally; it refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.
I put this in the same category as Kim Jong Un - assuming it was North Korea behind the Sony attack, both did something bad that caused a lot of pain but in the end something good came out of both.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Thank you for host file!
I don't have a problem, I don't see a problem so there is no problem.
Not listed above, but probably should be: Appelbaum is one of the authors of the Spiegel article linked here the other day (https://yro.slashdot.org/story/14/12/28/2054228/snowden-documents-show-how-well-nsa-codebreakers-can-pry), a Tor developer, security researcher more generally, and generally a smart-ass, in a non-pejorative sense. He's been (after his involvement was outed) a sort of diplomatic bridge to Wikileaks, and helped found San Francisco hackerspace Noisebridge. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J... - and any slashdot story about Tor, and many of the ones about Wikileaks ;)
I think that Snowden would have been the 100% best choice for 2013, but this isn't the nobel prize and a 2014 award should honor somebody who broke new ground in 2014.
That's a good point, in a world of Oprah, Jenny Jones, and reality TV, where everything is public even things we wish we didn't know..........why is it surprising that people don't care about government surveillance?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
for creating something worth arguing about
People don't care about government surveillance because they have nothing to hide from the government.
Most people obey the law, don't associate with terrorists, etc.
We don't fear what the NSA would find in our phone records, even if they had some reason to start looking.
I don't know what most Slashdotters are worried about--is it porn, warez, and weed?
It's not about direct contact.
I've always been more worried about what can be derived from big data. If your browsing patterns, SAT scores, home mortgage rate, and Facebook likes can be fed into an algorithm that labels you a possible threat to the nation. Then yeah, I have a problem with that.
Now imagin every world power with a security agency is doing this. Worried now?
Are you kidding me?!
Eon is NOTHING but a copycat loser.
AND HE was part of the founding of PayPal - a corrupt, unethical, asshole company.
Elon has done NOTHING of value. Nothing.
Got it?
He hasn't done anything of value.
EVERYTHING he takes credit for has been done by others.
GOT IT?!
God, there are plenty of folks who are doing something of value for society and you chose Musk? A dipshit?
Eben Upton gets my nod. The Raspberry Pi is a huge success; his goals were noble; they were to make an inexpensive computer that **anybody** could afford and use to learn about computing. Delivered.
As far as Snowden goes -- I award him some used toilet paper. If he was a patriot, then he would have kept his disclosures to what was patently illegal, that is, the NSA's warrantless collection of data from American citizens in America. But Eddy went way past that; he had an agenda, and his agenda was not to surface the NSA's illegal activities in the US, his agenda was to burn down the NSA completely. He's not a patriot, he is a criminal, a traitor, and I pray the next time he sees his homeland it is is from the inside of a cell. Meanwhile, I hope he is freezing his ass off in Russia.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Whoever put Sarkeesian on that list deserves a swift kick in the head.
Reeducation in the 80s, to help forget the past.. Now most are conditioned to accept it and even advocate it. And we really got nothing but a repainted facade from the Church committee. It also had no effect on the elections. Swapping between democrats and republicans was the same charade back then as it is now. The game can last indefinitely, as long as people believe there's a future.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Don't know if it was this past year or from 2013 into this year but he captured the attention of many people who forgot about space.
See, this attitude is the problem. It's not about whether or not you truly have something to hide. It's about whether or not your government could use its unfettered access to your personal communications to associate you or your circumstance with its profile of an "enemy" or a "criminal" without regard for context. It could be something as simple as placing you at the scene of or finding motive for a crime you had nothing to do with, so you find yourself the target of an investigation, or facing an indictment. Even if you win the trial (because it turns out their evidence was only circumstantial and not enough to convict), your life is ruined. Your friends and family will suspect you may actually have been guilty. You will lose your job. You'll be out legal fees. Or it could be something along the lines of building a profile about you and putting you on the top secret "terrorist watch list" because you once made a joke in an IM to a close friend that met some automated criteria. Or maybe over time the criteria that associates somebody with a terrorist changes, and the government starts targeting people who closely fit your political beliefs, geographic region, ethnicity, religion or circle of friends. Perhaps you won't even know this until you try to board a flight, or exercise a constitutional right. Not to mention there are over 4000 crimes in the US code alone. Are you 100% certain you have never broken any of these statutes? Further, even if you trust your government not to abuse this data, our government has shown the world that it's ok to spy on its citizens because it even does that itself. It's a welcome for any other nation, friend or foe, to likewise intercept, datamine and correlate online behavior for building profiles on American citizens.
I'm not an expert, but I play one on slashdot.
So the problem was geeks weren't being bullied enough? And a courageous group of hatemongering women decided to fix that?
Well good for them, the world needed more bullies.
Snowden risked everything to alert\confirm our suspicions that endanger our individual freedom and liberty. The only thing more he could have done was lose his like, which could have happened. With out question Edward Snowden contributed the most.
IMO the primary reason she doesn't give credit to others isn't to plagiarize, but to keep the audience in the echo chamber. Comments and ratings (i.e. any public feedback) are always disabled on her vids, so linking or mentioning any other creators runs the risk of exposing her viewers to other opinions and communities (especially after those other creators find out who she is and what she does).
The funny part is that one of the few times she apparently did have to create her own footage, it was to go out of her way to kill two strippers in Hitman and drag their bodies all over each other (which no one else wants to do).
Christ, even the asshole nominating him for the least prestigious award in history can't even remember where he landed a probe...
It happens when the only thing the geek remembers are the leather clad babes with guns on his tee shirt.
Maybe it's because I grew up in Pasadena, home of Caltech, mother ship of science nerdery, but I recognized Taylor's type immediately. Take a look at him: the dorky eyeglasses, the beard that's not really hip enough to be hipster, the elaborate tattoos that spill out from under that shirt all the way to Taylor's wrists. The man even had a tattoo of the Rosetta landing needled onto his leg back in January! And garish casual shirts of all kinds are part of his everyday wardrobe. Matt Taylor could be a character in ''The Big Bang Theory.''
And part of Science Nerd culture seems to be that if your brain is big enough, it's OK for you to dress for every single occasion as though you were pondering the theory of relativity while walking your dog. So Matt Taylor donned completely inappropriate wear -- inappropriate because a scientist ought to dress professionally when presenting his work to the public, which is not the same as messing around in a lab.
The real problem with Rosetta scientist's inappropriate shirt
She is nothing more than a "feminazi" with a political agenda and she'll seek public attention through shock jock styled reporting that is very often times devoid of fact.
You could make a drinking game of it.
Take a shot for each time a geek shouts out "Feminazi!" in response to Slashdot story about gender issues in tech. Two shots for each high-pitched whine where he sounds like he's just been kicked where it hurts.
John Dobson spent a large part of his life giving to the community. He helped bring amateur astronomy to the masses, and inspired many to not only build their own scopes but make discoveries that the "big boys" did not. He opened the universe to everyone.
Nah, Sarkeesian was a hack before the whole gamer gate thing even started.
Gamergate itself has clearly done more good than Sarkeesian ever hoped to.
It exposed nepotism and collusion in games journalism.
It got Brad Wardell (CEO of Stardock) some long-overdue apologies for hit pieces run against him.
https://twitter.com/iamDavidWi...
http://www.gamepolitics.com/20...
http://www.zenofdesign.com/in-...
Oh, you didn't hear about that? Well, I guess the same corrupt media (and the mainstream media, in turn) didn't report it, so, like whoever's in charge of Slashdot, we should pretend it never happened. You know, the same way we pretend that Snowden did no good because the corrupt NSA (and the Executive and Congress in turn) never acknowledged it.
And it's forcing Gawker to revise its policies to comply with updated FTC guidelines, which the FTC acknowledges came about because of Gamergate's OperationUV.
Damn, look at all these journalists, forced to be ethical against their will. If the media ever covers it, they'll probably invent some new term for the headlines, like "Ethics Rape."
Your above two comments were very well put, modded them up accordingly.
Just posting to undo a moderation misfire... m(
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
Kim Kardashian for breaking the Internet ? NSFW Linky
Oh enough, if a woman wore that kind of clothing during the interview, even if it was a shirt covered in pictures of hunky men, the usual talking heads bobbing up and down showering her with praise would have to wrestle with the thirsty white knights to bray the most approval. You go girl, fight that patriarchy!
Bigotry of all sorts needs to be rooted out, especially the spreading boil that is feminism.
He just took things he didn't really know anything about and sold them to China and the Russia.
What a tool.
This looks like those spambots that post generic comments on blogs to create low-quality organic links.
lucm, indeed.
No, I'm "Sternishefan", here on slashdot. I am not a bot, been on /. at least for 4 years, shortly after I had ''excellent karma'', for what that's worth. (captha: delivers)
I'm a guy so each time I see the name of a gamergate girl I can't help but google her to see her picture. And each time I'm surprised that they all more or less look like the geek girl in Criminal Minds... Always a bad hybrid of a tattoo parlor employee and an overweight self-published YA novel author that looks more like her father than her mother.
I'm ok with being called an ignorant and a despicable misogynist, but could that movement please find an attractive spokesperson to do so? They could even rent one with all the money they make from extra traffic sent to their blogs. Show a little respect.
lucm, indeed.
I just said it *looks* like a spambot. It could be a lot worse; the message happens to have 70 characters, and that's an exact match for a Google Adsense body - or half a tweet.
Also for all I know you could be impersonating Sternishefan, a respected member of this community, like those scammers on Craigslist who pretend to be legitimate landlords. Providing a captcha (which may or may not be real) is no proof. How can we tell if it's you?
lucm, indeed.
It's not about direct contact.
I've always been more worried about what can be derived from big data. If your browsing patterns, SAT scores, home mortgage rate, and Facebook likes can be fed into an algorithm that labels you a possible threat to the nation. Then yeah, I have a problem with that.
Now imagin every world power with a security agency is doing this. Worried now?
Almost everyone with more than two brain cells is a potential threat ... or a potential ally. Treat people like assholes, don't be surprised if they take it personally.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Anita Sarkesian should not be rewarded for anything as she has done nothing to further a worthy cause
Besides cherry picking examples from video games that fit her argument (games she never played or even researched btw) and taking stupid people's money to make 2 youtube videos a year after her own deadline, she has only set the feminist movement back 20 years.
I know I'll probably be called a rape apologist just like anyone else who disagrees with her, that's just her camps MO.
If anything Thunderf00t should be recognized for calling out her bullshit
She deserves it.
May-Brit; the brain breakthrough may prove very significant both scientifically and in technology. The rest of the suggestions are cultural noise, about matters of minimal significance to those not personally involved somehow.
I honestly don't understand it. Is it not clear to everyone who has seen her videos that she is attempting to force all culture to promote the feminist paradigm of the blank slate?
"Sexism in games makes people sexist" is a claim that only makes sense under the blank slate paradigm, that is our thoughts, opinions and actions are the product of environment alone. And let's not forget how gender roles are "social constructs". These are views that are mutually exclusive with evidence from evolutionary biology, neuroscience and linguistics. They are incorrect. People who do agree need to read Steve Pinkers thorough disproval of in his book "The Blank Slate".
You simply cannot agree with Sarkeesians views without ignoring these facts.
If a Christian tries to force blatantly scientifically incorrect ideology on culture and pass it off as fact, as with creationism, people here are generally pragmatic enough to oppose it as pseudoscience that has no place in the collective consciousness.
When people try to do the same thing, to push blatantly incorrect pseudoscience as fact, except this time under the feminism/social justice banner, you want to praise them.
Apparently the perceived importance of the message excuses it from it's philosophical burden of evidence.
It's baffling, and sad to see ideology take a front seat to evidence on Slashdot. Sad indeed.
There isn't a single kind of feminism. Many feminists have no problem with that dude's t-shirt. Anybody who decries feminism and feminists en toto is providing pretty good evidence for his or her own prejudice.
A feminist is anybody who advocates for the rights of women. Period. Think "programmer"--no degree required, just a keen interest in the topic and a willingness to practice your interest, in this case participating in public forums. And like a children's rights advocate, or patients' rights advocates, you needn't be hostile to everybody else. More importantly, there's no set list of rights, and not all feminists argue for a "right" not to see a bikini clad women on a t-shirt in the office.
Sadly, the only feminists who get attention in the popular media are the ones making the more outrageous claims. Not that I think the issue with the t-shirt is outrageous (mostly silly, but also a less-than-ideal place to begin a discussion about workplaces which can make women feel out of place), but it's extreme enough that it's fit to print to turn heads. That you haven't grasped this while, presumably (I'm being generous), understanding how the press does this with topics you hold a personal interest in (computer security?), only speaks to how quickly you're ready to judge a group based on your own prejudices.
For forever tainting their slashdot ID's by repeated endorsing and defending the exposed Liar, Anti-Women Sexist, Pick Up Artist-who-calls-women-sluts, $160k-richer-after-all-this .... the one, the only .... Anita S.
:-)
Oh, wait, it's not that kind of award?
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Debian rejects game due to authors opinion on women.
A properly licensed opensource casino video game was
recently posted to the debian bug tracker as a request
for packaging, as is the standard method for pursuing
such things in debian.
The bug was quickly closed, tagged as "won't fix"
The reason given by one of the debian developers
alluded to the authors past anti-feminist remarks:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bi...
The piece of software in question is licensed
under the GPL and is one of the only of it's
kind for linux (ascii-art console slot machine software)
Is professing progressive politics now a hard requirement
for being allowed to contribute to free software projects?
Some "reasonable" statements by Anita:
>We need to seriously address connections between violence, sexism and toxic ideas of manhood before boys and men commit more mass shootings.
>Not a coincidence it’s always men and boys committing mass shootings. The pattern is connected to ideas of toxic masculinity in our culture.
1. For the Raspberry Pi, for thinking up the idea, for getting people and companies engaged to make it happen
2. For the community around the R-Pi that formed after the launch, dirven by both Eben and Liz Upton (she deserves credit for the Blog on the R-Pi Foundation website, which has been an inspiration to many)
3. For the metric fuck-ton of creativity that the R-Pi releases. Almost evrybody who plays with it gets a wild idea and goes off and implements it. God only knows what it is that makes that happen, but that flow of white-hot creativity is what drives the whole R-Pi phenomenon.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
For his efforts in popularizing BSD and keeping Microsoft going.
[citation needed]
In other words, you can make up crap all day on the inerne but it doesn't make it anything more than wild fancies of speculation until or IF it ever actually happens.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Seems to me that the exact opposite is true. Women are regularly criticised for what they wear, or don't wear on TV. From wardrobe malfunctions to newsreaders showing a bit too much cleavage, it's not uncommon to read about it in the news.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
That should rule him out for ever being considered good for human society.
Such is the pure evil of PayPal that what Musk did should never be forgotten on forgiven. It should be recorded on his gravestone.
Now there are rumours that Google will buy PayPal from eBay. That would also provide the ultimate proof that Google's new motto is "BE Evil"
-AC.
I just replied to a comment you made in another story about chess, re: it was me. :^)
There isn't a single kind of feminism.
And you lose in the first sentence. Patriarchy theory is as fundamental to feminism as Christ is to Christianity, you can't have one without the other.
Which is of course secondary to the actual issue, in that the correct answer to people criticising your psychotic associates is NOT to say "not all feminists are like that", but to demand stridently that the leadership/movement dissociate those nutballs post haste, and if they don't get the hell out yourself.
If you don't do that you absolutely deserve to be tarred with the same brush.
only speaks to how quickly you're ready to judge a group based on your own prejudices
Don't even bother, cupcake.
Does this criticism include calling them hateful racist misogynists, and/or are they professional entertainers of one sort or another? If not, then try comparing apples to apples for a change. And that's before we start looking at who exactly is doing most of the criticising, and certainly the most biting. If you guessed "women", you'd be correct!
The patriarchy made them do it, right?
But this is just more of the same old damned if you do, damned if you don't bullshit from feminists. Your cursed religion and its fellow travellers can't die soon enough for my liking.
Seems to me that the exact opposite is true. Women are regularly criticised for what they wear, or don't wear on TV.
Your perception contradicts other empirical observations
Anita Sarkessian herself has observed that society loves seeing scantly clad women. It's in our TV, movies, and video games. When wardrobe malfunctions happen, when a celeb's nekkid pix or sex tapes pop up, the misogynists doesn't shame or blame the woman, but rather ask for a copy ("torrent where?").
You can't have it both ways. It's logically inconsistent to say society loves to see women with little clothes or have accidents, and say society often criticize women who do just that at the same time.
From wardrobe malfunctions to newsreaders showing a bit too much cleavage, it's not uncommon to read about it in the news.
It's actually very uncommon. In the news, what is common is this - women are depicted sexually all the time, and all the men and misogynists just accept that as the norm. Showing skin being an issue is the exception, mostly raised by housewives (not misogynists or the patriarchy)
Check out these submissions:
Wikia Deletes Evidence Of Wikipedia Administrator Misconduct - A neutral Wiki site that was documenting the controversy had a page deleted for showing Wikipedia administrators tearing up their rulebook to ban anyone who deviates from their POV.
Woman game developer may have never "fled her home" - Someone said that this story got more votes than another Gamergate story that the editors ran on the same day. The other story said that Gamergate was only about misogyny.
Wikipedia bans all references to Breitbart - This was greenlit within 30 minutes and then disappeared from the submissions queue.
Based on what happened to that last submission, I think it's safe to say that the editors are suppressing the story. It reminds me of the Scientology mess when people were posting the OT docs in the comments and the site was being threatened with lawsuits. At least the submissions were not deleted.
For me it is Edward Snowden.
No one has had a bigger impact on the world and affected so many people.
He is also the only one if you say any of those names on the street that anyone will recognize.
He is basically living in exile for what he did.
He is probably the most controversial (as I am sure this forum will illustrate).
He has even been turned into a verb on the new TV show Ascension "...going to go full Snowden..." in regards to telling the world about something kept secret that they believe is very wrong.
I'll try not to have a spoiler, but it doesn't end very well for the character that uttered that phrase...
Having your name basically associated as a martyr for the truth is aligned with the principles of Slashdot, and besides, it pretty much validates all the tinfoil hats we've all been wearing as more than just a fashion statement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
STFU mikeUSA, no one gives a damn.
Your game is bad, and you should feel bad.
Radhakrishnan was basically Indias "W. von Braun" and made ISRO the success it is today - including MOM. He just retired today.
After delivering five consecutive successful PSLV missions, including the PSLV-C08 that lifted Chandrayaan-I, and leading several crucial technology development at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Radhakrishnan took the reins of India's space programme in November 2009.
With the 12 successful PSLV missions, the successful launch of GSLV with indigenous cryogenic stage, the Mars Orbiter Mission, LVM-3 experimental flight with CARE module, the six Insat/GSAT satellites, three navigation satellites and six earth observation satellites (including RISAT-1, the first microwave imaging satellite), Radhakrishnan is leaving Isro at its “most glorified pedestal ever”, it said.
He has been nominated to Natures top ten scientists list
http://www.thehindu.com/sci-te...
http://www.business-standard.c...
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
Maybe she's right. Because the above quote came from a mass shooting. You'd have a point that this was a wacky thing to say if the data didn't support her thesis. Which, sadly, it does. The language school shooters use when making angry as fuck disaffected manifestos is always the same spew of pseudo macho toxic masculine shit. Never mind Anders Brevik and Marc Lepine, either.
It's not like she has experience with this or anything.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I'd recommend focusing on who or what has most affected us, the Slashdot community. What has most affected they way you act, think, feel, live or work? How and why did it happen? Of these sources, which will keep affecting us into the future?
Frankly, while I'm a huge supporter and fan of Malala, my daily life hasn't (yet) been affected by her work or that of her supporters. And while that may be a shame, it's true. I'd cross Malala off my list for that reason.
I'd have to put Don Knuth near the top of my list for purely practical reasons. And Linus Torvalds and the entire Linux developer community for even more practical reasons.
And a certain Philosophy professor back in college who helped me and many hundreds of other students learn to reason more clearly about the less clear parts of life (which has helped all aspects of my life). I wish a single philosopher could rise to the top of my list, but there's no single one that was a guiding light for me: It took working through the work of many to gain reason, which is the path that professor started me on.
I'd also put the best "explainers" near the top of the list, such as science bloggers, investigative reporters, and other members of the Fourth Estate. And maybe even meta-explainers, such as Slashdot and Hackaday, who gather so many great things for me to learn about, making it possible to stay in touch with our ever-changing world..
I hope those examples adequately share my perspective. What should the Beanies represent? What should they stand for?
It's a welcome for any other nation, friend or foe, to likewise intercept, datamine and correlate online behavior for building profiles on American citizens.
I pretty much agreed with most of what you said; however, the little gem I quoted above is something I have a problem with:
There are no rules or other obligations concerning non-US groups and/or entities from spying on me, collating data, or building profiles; therefore, I fully expect such behavior, even from supposedly friendly entities. I would even hope that the NSA and other American entities would be helping to protect me against such nastiness. Instead, what we have here is the NSA not only NOT helping me, they are doing it themselves! WTF, over.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
For surviving a for of terrorism attack when some songs were leaked online.
Me, because I deserve a second award for my comments 15 years after they gave me my first one.
-AC
Those threats were dismissed by local, state, and federal police and alphabet-soup agencies as being "not a threat", as well as by the dean. Nice use of Polygon though. It totally isn't biased towards Sarkeesian or anything.
I just lost a little bit of respect for the Beanies!
http://www.gibby.net.au
I do not vote Anita
she is a fraud-hack
She deserves every bit of hate she receives, she incites it
she makes money from it. death threats take it too far. but its OK to hate her
Citation needed.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
"“Following a disturbing email received late Monday evening, Utah State University police and administrators have been working throughout the day to assess any level of risk to students or to a speaker scheduled to visit. USU police, in conjunction with several teams of state and federal law enforcement experts, determined that there was no threat to students, staff or the speaker, so no alert was issued...
When asked why, if the threats were consistent with other serious threats directed toward Sarkeesian in the past, the school decided to go on with the event anyway, he replied, “Those threats never amounted to any action, and the law enforcement experts that were assessing the threat said that the threat was not real.”"
http://www.avoiceformen.com/allnews/anita-sarkeesian-feminism-online-harrassment-2/