I recently finished a CS degree, and my class was definitely male dominated. I had many discussions with some of my classmates about sexism, and I was shocked to find that most of them thought sexism didn't exist any more. While most of the people I was friends with didn't discriminate on the basis of my gender, it did still happen. I also had to listen to a lot of well-meant but offensive jokes, such as references to my grades being due to sexual favors provided to professors.
I think that things are changing for the better, but both men and women have a lot of work to do. Maybe there's a certain amount of truth to there being a real difference between men and women, but I don't think it's as great as what the enrollment statistics show. It would probably help a lot if women felt more comfortable in the industry. To my mind, one of the first things that needs to happen is that men have to think sometimes before making sexual remarks, and women need to start telling men when they're crossed the line.
I don't think affirmative action programs are the way to go. They may have helped women get their foot in the door, but they're really just reverse discrimination. They had their time, but it's past now. Using them will just cause a backlash.
I'm afraid I don't really expect much out of a visual representation of the series. The problem is that Dune is a very internalized, very intellectual series. It's been a while since I've seen the movie (I watched it once and hated it), but I believe that it failed because it's very difficult to visualize the thoughts going through a character's head. They could try adding voiceovers to add that component in, but again, so much of it happens that every scene would take forever as each character individually voices his or her thoughts. Not only that, it would probably begin to grate on the nerves after a while. Despite all the above, I'll still probably watch the miniseries just on the off chance that it does succeed. Dune has to rate as the most extraordinary piece of science fiction I've ever read, and a well done TV movie version, even if it doesn't match up to the book, would still be a treat.
I've recently been hearing a lot about the use of elliptic curves in cryptography as a new type of public key algorithm. Do you see this as a potential alternative to RSA?
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I recently finished a CS degree, and my class was definitely male dominated. I had many discussions with some of my classmates about sexism, and I was shocked to find that most of them thought sexism didn't exist any more. While most of the people I was friends with didn't discriminate on the basis of my gender, it did still happen. I also had to listen to a lot of well-meant but offensive jokes, such as references to my grades being due to sexual favors provided to professors.
I think that things are changing for the better, but both men and women have a lot of work to do. Maybe there's a certain amount of truth to there being a real difference between men and women, but I don't think it's as great as what the enrollment statistics show. It would probably help a lot if women felt more comfortable in the industry. To my mind, one of the first things that needs to happen is that men have to think sometimes before making sexual remarks, and women need to start telling men when they're crossed the line.
I don't think affirmative action programs are the way to go. They may have helped women get their foot in the door, but they're really just reverse discrimination. They had their time, but it's past now. Using them will just cause a backlash.
I'm afraid I don't really expect much out of a visual representation of the series. The problem is that Dune is a very internalized, very intellectual series. It's been a while since I've seen the movie (I watched it once and hated it), but I believe that it failed because it's very difficult to visualize the thoughts going through a character's head. They could try adding voiceovers to add that component in, but again, so much of it happens that every scene would take forever as each character individually voices his or her thoughts. Not only that, it would probably begin to grate on the nerves after a while. Despite all the above, I'll still probably watch the miniseries just on the off chance that it does succeed. Dune has to rate as the most extraordinary piece of science fiction I've ever read, and a well done TV movie version, even if it doesn't match up to the book, would still be a treat.
I've recently been hearing a lot about the use of elliptic curves in cryptography as a new type of public key algorithm. Do you see this as a potential alternative to RSA?