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 !
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.
'nuff said.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
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.
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!
She's also used a lot of material without permission or even attribution, she's knowingly and repeatedly published incorrect or misleading videos and statements and she's taken an extremely antagonistic attitude which has ironically been fueling a lot of hate speech of late. Her cause definitely has merit, but her arguments are often weak and her methods questionable.
She doesn't hold a candle to Snowden.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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
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.
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.
Yep, feminist internet video bloggers have a reputation for lyching nerds in real life, then getting off scot free from a jury of like mineded feminist internet bloggers.[sic]
You know, the overboard notions in your third statement indicate that you are intending a sarcastic tone for this; however, figuratively speaking...this statement is not far off from the truth. Let me change the sentence to make it more like how it really has become (with spelling corrections):
Even here on /. it's difficult to make a statement to showcase just how over the top the feminist voice has become without facing ad hominem rebuttals or getting modded down into oblivion.
The feminazis have made statements that they want a discussion about sexism in gaming, but whenever someone brings up a valid point on the opposing view the feminazis return with ad hominem attacks and such great stereotyping like the stupid ass "#YesAllMen" hashtag crap.
No.
I'm sorry, that's not a discussion.
That's a War.
The feminazis don't want discussion. They have drawn a line in the sand and the voices are either for them, or they're against them. Well, I am a feminist moderate looking for true equality between men and women (which Video Games have, on the great scale, equally objectified Men and Women)... and I stand firmly against them.
Bring the Rain.
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.