It occurred to me right after I hit "submit" that you may have been considering those three types of knowledge as examples of useless trivia that students simply memorize, regurgitate, and purge. In fact, they're very different from each other.
1. What a differential equation is -- if you recognize a differential equation, then you've almost certainly had some education in how to solve such equations. This is real, useful, lasting knowledge. Any reasonably intelligent person can learn it, to a degree, if they're well-taught -- and a hell of a lot more people should be learning it than do, and would be in a society that more valued knowledge over trivia.
2. The names of creators of specific schools of psychology -- this is trivia, but it's not entirely trivial trivia, if you see what I mean. I'd expect any working psychologist to know them, if for no other reason than that they make a useful type of shorthand for communicating ideas ("If we accept so-and-so's hypothesis that...") OTOH, for someone who takes Psych 101 to fulfill a general-studies requirement, I agree, the ideas are more important than the names.
3. The date of the end of the Civil War -- this one is tricky. When, in fact, did the Civil War end? When it became apparent that Richmond would eventually fall? At Appomattox? When the last Confederate forces surrendered? Almost a century later, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act? Is it still going on as long as there are people riding aound bumper stickers that say "The South Shall Rise Again"? These are useful questions, since they make people learn and think, which is kind of the point. I submit, however, that knowing that by the generally accepted definition, the war began in 1861 and ended in 1865 is pretty useful, even if you can't cite specific dates. It helps you put the events of the war in historical perspective, to understand how the war influenced and was influenced by what else was going on in the world.
What it comes down to is this: knowledge is never wasted, and other forms of knowledge than those you yourself possess are not to be despised.
How anyone can claim it is when we place such heavy emphasis on largely unnecessary, irrelevant and highly specialized classes (like calculus) when a typical citizen couldn't spot a cogent argument if it kicked him in the face, and your typical teenager has a lower literacy level than he should've had back in 5th grade. That's what happens when compulsory classes are science and math-related, as opposed to logic, philosophy and English. Not that there's anything wrong with math and science, but they're far less relevant to a typical person's life than the aforementioned subjects.
Yep, we sure are lucky we had all those logicians, philosophers, and grammarians around to invent this magic Interweb thingy so you could make that post!
What puzzles me about your post is the internal contradiction. I agree that the "MRP" approach is pretty much useless, but your assumption that only humanities subjects produce real, lasting, worthwhile knowledge is repellent. In your first paragraph, you ask, "How many 30 year-olds could look at a differential equation and tell you what it is? How many people remember creators of specific schools of psychology from psych 101? On what date did the Civil War end?" Indeed; and the first is no more or less important for true education than the last.
About ten years ago, someone told me that every once in a while people are still killed by unexploded Civil War ordinance. I have no idea if this is true or not, but if it is, it says something about how long these things can remain active.
Because it's "News for Nerds," not "News For Nerds Who Only Care About Things That Run On Silicon." It's the obsessives who think that computers are the be-all and end-all of everything that matters who give nerds in general a bad name, IMNSGDHO.
Thanks -- you answered that pretty much as I would have.
I'd like to add one thing: as a medic, I took the Geneva Conventions pretty damn seriously. Most of the wounded I treated in Desert Storm were Iraqis who, in some cases, had been trying to kill me a little while before, and I gave them the exact same level of care I gave wounded Americans. Part of the reason for upholding this standard is entirely pragmatic: enemy soldiers are much more likely to surrender, rather than fight to the death, if they know they'll be treated well. (E.g., Germans toward the end of WW2 were much more likely to surrender to US and UK forces than they were to the Soviets.) The other part of it is moral: it simply does not matter if those we fight are evil, whether in their treatment of prisoners or in any other aspect; we have to be better than that, or we risk losing everything we have sworn to defend.
FWIW, pretty much everybody on the battlefield understands that he's fighting for a specific objective, and more importantly, for his buddies. "The country" is what makes idealistic kids enlist, but in a war zone, it's very far away; the guy to your left, the guy to your right, and the hill you're supposed to take are right there.
[sigh] People like you just don't get it, do you? Shit like what happened at Abu Ghraib hurts us, it does not help us. It makes us less likely to win, not more. Stories and pictures of American soldiers torturing prisoners are the best recruiting tool al-Qaeda has. The same twisted "logic" that says Abu Ghraib was useful to American forces would indicate that 9/11 would have made Americans say, "Gee, this Osama bin Laden guy is pretty tough, we'd better do what he says."
Public transit, of course, costs money. Are you willing to pay the taxes to have these systems built? Since you called the parent poster a "socialist," you strike me as the sort who appreciates having these services available but bitches about having to pay the taxes that make such things possible.
This is really somebody's 7th grade social studies project, isn't it?
Actually, it's really just Sawyer being Sawyer. The guy is a technically competent writer with no imagination whatsoever -- as far as I can tell, he's won his awards through sheer politicking. This grab-bag of recycled Jetsons is exactly what I'd expect from his vision of the near future.
As IP becomes a larger and larger part of the economy, maybe there needs to be money involved, and maybe there doesn't. We don't know yet. We're a looong way from the "post-scarcity economy," but we can see the possibility on the horizon; it's worth discussing, if nothing else.
Re:Now if they could only get humans to evolve aga
on
Prions, Darwin's Friend
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem with the SFnal vision of the "hated race of supermen" (which goes at least back to Slan) is that no one is going to breed a race of posthumans who are superior to their makers in every way, nor is one going to emerge by mutation. Instead, if it does turn out that substantial improvements to the human germline are possible, what will happen is that we'll tinker around the edges, improving things here and there. The improvements that will make up the change from human to superhuman will happen one at a time, and be perceivable as a Big Change only from a historical perspective. No one at the time said, "we're in the middle of the Renaissance," or, "Here comes the Industrial Revolution."
[sigh] One of the things that drives me nuts about Randroids is the way they try to redefine perfectly good words to fit their own ends. (They remind me, in this as in a lot of ways, of Marxists. Actually.) "Greed" and "self-interest" do not have the same meaning; they are similar but distinct concepts, and everyone but fanatics understands this.
Greed: taking everything you can get your hands on.
Self-interest: acting in the way that most benefits you.
Untill you have a literally unlimited production capacity...
Thing is, when it comes to certain goods, of the sort that are generally lumped together under "intellectual property," we do have damn near unlimited production capacity. (Not "literally unlimited," of course, but close enough -- I may spend years writing a program, but it costs me only a few minutes' electricity to make it available for download, f'rinstance.) And the fundamental problems raised by this fact for people and businesses which have, up until now, made money based on the assumption of sharply limited production capacity are real ones; repeating the mantra of "the market will take care of it" will not, in fact, take care of it.
FWIW, I think that's because only in the US is ice so widely used by the general public. A friend visited from Germany recently, and everywhere he went, he had to make a point of asking them not to put ice in his drink...
If you honestly think that the "Swift Boat Veterans For Truth" (none of whom actually served with Kerry; everyone still living who actually did serve with him supports his story) are being ignored, and that the AWOL Bush story had legs (or that it was based on "the careful accretion of no facts at all," when in fact it is quite clear to anyone who examines the facts of the case that the President of the United States is a deserter) after the way it was buried during the 2000 campaign, in contrast to the spurious "Clinton is a draft dodger" line that we heard ad nauseam for eight years... in short, if you think the mass media has been anything but sycophantic toward the Republicans... you're living in a world so different from reality that I'm not sure that there's any point to this discussion.
Since yours is the only non-flame response I've received in the thread, sure, I'll be glad to.;)
1. Documentation. MySQL's documentation is so much better than PostgreSQL's, there's just no comparison. If there's something I want to do in MySQL that I don't know how to do (which doesn't happen very often these days; I will certainly grant that there's less to learn with MySQL than with a fuller-featured DBMS) I can almost always find out with a few minutes of searching. PostgreSQL's docs seem to have been written by people who take positive joy in making things as obscure as possible. Most commercial DBMS documentation seems to have been written by people who were getting paid by the word.
2. I like MySQL's command-line tool better than everyone else's. [shrug] This is a matter purely of personal preference, I admit.
3. There's no shortage of host language support for either MySQL or PostgreSQL; both have it better than most commercial systems seem to.
4. Speed. Many, many people will tell you that MySQL isn't "really" faster than other DBMS's, and come up with elaborate justifications for why this is so. As far as I'm concerned, they're akin to those who insist that [Linux | BSD | OS X] isn't "really" more secure than Windows: real-world performance proves them wrong.
Do the limitations of MySQL bother me? Sure; every once in a while I grit my teeth at having to write multiple queries, using temp tables and the like, to have to simulate nested queries and views. The lack of stored procedures and transactions can be dealt with in host language apps, but again, it can be a pain in the ass. But for me, the advantages I listed above outweigh all of these problems. Also, I'm willing to wait for the MySQL team to add in the missing features, one at a time, because based on past performance, I have faith that they'll do it right.
Roughly speaking, it seems to me, MySQL and PostgreSQL have followed opposite but converging development paths. The MySQL approach was to start with a very limited feature set, make it fast and easy to use and capable of running on a wide range of systems, and then add features in one at a time, making sure nothing breaks as they go along. The PostgreSQL approach was to start with everything and the kitchen sink, and then work on problems with speed, interface, and cross-platform compatibility.
For F/OSS projects in general, with limited resources to throw at the problem, I don't claim that either approach is better -- just different, is all. And like I said, at this point they seem to be converging... but twenty years from now, you'll probably have/.ers hashing it out over these competing memes.
Woah woah woah... slow down cowboy! This is slashdot. That comment might be ever so slightly construed as a round-about way to condone US foreign policy. We can't have that here, now can we?
You know, every time someone says something like that, he weakens his own case... I'm really sick of all the Bushies trying to act like they're persecuted for their views. They're not, on/. or anywhere else. But it's a remarkably effective bit of propaganda, isn't it?
Aaargh. Can we get rid of this stupid meme, please? I've been making a living as a DBA for almost five years now. I'm 2/3 of the way to a CS Master's. I've used Oracle, Sybase, and PostgreSQL. And I prefer MySQL. The idea that the only people who use MySQL are those who don't know any better has to die.
The two main varieties of AI are called "strong" and "weak". Strong AI argues that it is possible that one day a computer will be invented which can be called a mind in the fullest sense of the word. In other words, it can think, reason, imagine, etc., and do all the things that we currently associate with the human brain. Weak AI, on the other hand, argues that computers can only appear to think and are not actually conscious in the same way as human brains are.
The argument seems to me more a matter of quasi-religious philosophy than of computer science or biology. We can argue about how intelligent the systems we've already developed are or aren't, but to say definitively that "true" machine intelligence is or is not possible is a statement of faith. The fact of the matter is, we don't know. Anyone who says otherwise is forming a belief based on other pre-existing beliefs which have very little to do with science.
I'm as much of a language Nazi as anyone on/., but I have to point out that more than half of your "corrections" are matters of simple style, not actual correctness. You also have at least one typo in your version; it's a good idea to check your own usage very carefully before posting something like that.
[desperately trying to get this on topic] You sound a bit like a proofreading AI program that hasn't been fully trained yet.;)
We could easily fund FIRE, our share of ITER, and a couple of other programs as well. Which is what we should be doing, because there's no guarantee that any one approach is the right one. Why do people always think there's going to be one magic bullet?
They're talking about $5 billion, total, to build ITER. That's miniscule money compared to what we're throwing away on fighting in a certain country known for its oil...
"So-called" has two different meanings. One is derogatory, as in "George W. Bush is the so-called President of the United States." The other is frequently used in journalism to identify terms with which the reader is expected to be unfamiliar; you see this in pop science journalism a lot, as in "DNA is made of of four so-called nucleic acids." (I suspect the non-derogatory meaning may be the original one, but I don't know.) It is unfortunate, I agree. It would probably be better to add an explanatory clause: "Linux, which is of a type of software called open source,..."
A mix of politics and once-bitten, I think. The Newton was a beautiful piece of hardware that turned out to be a financial disaster -- and right when it was showing signs of not being a disaster was when Jobs came back to Apple, and IIRC the Newton was one of the first things to get "Steved." Which is really too bad, because if they'd stuck with it, it could have captured the mindshare (and market share) Palm did a couple of years later. Now, I suspect that anyone who suggests any kind of handheld computer at Apple is greeted with a mix of disdain and horror.
And of course the only reason there are fewere female programmers is because girls play differently than boys, and any attempt to change the situation must be "doing women a disservice" by "artificially make those fields more appealing to them just to push an agenda."
Absolutely! I agree 100%! And clearly any attempt to educate those lazy stupid fieldhands will be wasted -- look at them out there in the cotton fields, singing their spirituals and grinning everytime the overseer walks by! They're just naturally different from us, and we shouldn't try to push our agenda on them!
Quite seriously, for a man to say "bitch" and then say that it's not anti-woman is kind of like a white person saying "nigger" and then saying that it's not anti-black. Some insults are just insults, especially when used by a member of the group that's not being insulted, and there's no way to change that. It amazes me how many people don't get that, and when they're called on it, whine about "PC". It's not political correctness, folks, it's a matter of basic politeness.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I'm replying to my own post.
...") OTOH, for someone who takes Psych 101 to fulfill a general-studies requirement, I agree, the ideas are more important than the names.
It occurred to me right after I hit "submit" that you may have been considering those three types of knowledge as examples of useless trivia that students simply memorize, regurgitate, and purge. In fact, they're very different from each other.
1. What a differential equation is -- if you recognize a differential equation, then you've almost certainly had some education in how to solve such equations. This is real, useful, lasting knowledge. Any reasonably intelligent person can learn it, to a degree, if they're well-taught -- and a hell of a lot more people should be learning it than do, and would be in a society that more valued knowledge over trivia.
2. The names of creators of specific schools of psychology -- this is trivia, but it's not entirely trivial trivia, if you see what I mean. I'd expect any working psychologist to know them, if for no other reason than that they make a useful type of shorthand for communicating ideas ("If we accept so-and-so's hypothesis that
3. The date of the end of the Civil War -- this one is tricky. When, in fact, did the Civil War end? When it became apparent that Richmond would eventually fall? At Appomattox? When the last Confederate forces surrendered? Almost a century later, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act? Is it still going on as long as there are people riding aound bumper stickers that say "The South Shall Rise Again"? These are useful questions, since they make people learn and think, which is kind of the point. I submit, however, that knowing that by the generally accepted definition, the war began in 1861 and ended in 1865 is pretty useful, even if you can't cite specific dates. It helps you put the events of the war in historical perspective, to understand how the war influenced and was influenced by what else was going on in the world.
What it comes down to is this: knowledge is never wasted, and other forms of knowledge than those you yourself possess are not to be despised.
How anyone can claim it is when we place such heavy emphasis on largely unnecessary, irrelevant and highly specialized classes (like calculus) when a typical citizen couldn't spot a cogent argument if it kicked him in the face, and your typical teenager has a lower literacy level than he should've had back in 5th grade. That's what happens when compulsory classes are science and math-related, as opposed to logic, philosophy and English. Not that there's anything wrong with math and science, but they're far less relevant to a typical person's life than the aforementioned subjects.
Yep, we sure are lucky we had all those logicians, philosophers, and grammarians around to invent this magic Interweb thingy so you could make that post!
What puzzles me about your post is the internal contradiction. I agree that the "MRP" approach is pretty much useless, but your assumption that only humanities subjects produce real, lasting, worthwhile knowledge is repellent. In your first paragraph, you ask, "How many 30 year-olds could look at a differential equation and tell you what it is? How many people remember creators of specific schools of psychology from psych 101? On what date did the Civil War end?" Indeed; and the first is no more or less important for true education than the last.
About ten years ago, someone told me that every once in a while people are still killed by unexploded Civil War ordinance. I have no idea if this is true or not, but if it is, it says something about how long these things can remain active.
Because it's "News for Nerds," not "News For Nerds Who Only Care About Things That Run On Silicon." It's the obsessives who think that computers are the be-all and end-all of everything that matters who give nerds in general a bad name, IMNSGDHO.
Thanks -- you answered that pretty much as I would have.
I'd like to add one thing: as a medic, I took the Geneva Conventions pretty damn seriously. Most of the wounded I treated in Desert Storm were Iraqis who, in some cases, had been trying to kill me a little while before, and I gave them the exact same level of care I gave wounded Americans. Part of the reason for upholding this standard is entirely pragmatic: enemy soldiers are much more likely to surrender, rather than fight to the death, if they know they'll be treated well. (E.g., Germans toward the end of WW2 were much more likely to surrender to US and UK forces than they were to the Soviets.) The other part of it is moral: it simply does not matter if those we fight are evil, whether in their treatment of prisoners or in any other aspect; we have to be better than that, or we risk losing everything we have sworn to defend.
FWIW, pretty much everybody on the battlefield understands that he's fighting for a specific objective, and more importantly, for his buddies. "The country" is what makes idealistic kids enlist, but in a war zone, it's very far away; the guy to your left, the guy to your right, and the hill you're supposed to take are right there.
[sigh] People like you just don't get it, do you? Shit like what happened at Abu Ghraib hurts us, it does not help us. It makes us less likely to win, not more. Stories and pictures of American soldiers torturing prisoners are the best recruiting tool al-Qaeda has. The same twisted "logic" that says Abu Ghraib was useful to American forces would indicate that 9/11 would have made Americans say, "Gee, this Osama bin Laden guy is pretty tough, we'd better do what he says."
Public transit, of course, costs money. Are you willing to pay the taxes to have these systems built? Since you called the parent poster a "socialist," you strike me as the sort who appreciates having these services available but bitches about having to pay the taxes that make such things possible.
This is really somebody's 7th grade social studies project, isn't it?
Actually, it's really just Sawyer being Sawyer. The guy is a technically competent writer with no imagination whatsoever -- as far as I can tell, he's won his awards through sheer politicking. This grab-bag of recycled Jetsons is exactly what I'd expect from his vision of the near future.
As IP becomes a larger and larger part of the economy, maybe there needs to be money involved, and maybe there doesn't. We don't know yet. We're a looong way from the "post-scarcity economy," but we can see the possibility on the horizon; it's worth discussing, if nothing else.
The problem with the SFnal vision of the "hated race of supermen" (which goes at least back to Slan) is that no one is going to breed a race of posthumans who are superior to their makers in every way, nor is one going to emerge by mutation. Instead, if it does turn out that substantial improvements to the human germline are possible, what will happen is that we'll tinker around the edges, improving things here and there. The improvements that will make up the change from human to superhuman will happen one at a time, and be perceivable as a Big Change only from a historical perspective. No one at the time said, "we're in the middle of the Renaissance," or, "Here comes the Industrial Revolution."
[sigh] One of the things that drives me nuts about Randroids is the way they try to redefine perfectly good words to fit their own ends. (They remind me, in this as in a lot of ways, of Marxists. Actually.) "Greed" and "self-interest" do not have the same meaning; they are similar but distinct concepts, and everyone but fanatics understands this.
Greed: taking everything you can get your hands on.
Self-interest: acting in the way that most benefits you.
Is this too hard to understand?
Untill you have a literally unlimited production capacity ...
Thing is, when it comes to certain goods, of the sort that are generally lumped together under "intellectual property," we do have damn near unlimited production capacity. (Not "literally unlimited," of course, but close enough -- I may spend years writing a program, but it costs me only a few minutes' electricity to make it available for download, f'rinstance.) And the fundamental problems raised by this fact for people and businesses which have, up until now, made money based on the assumption of sharply limited production capacity are real ones; repeating the mantra of "the market will take care of it" will not, in fact, take care of it.
FWIW, I think that's because only in the US is ice so widely used by the general public. A friend visited from Germany recently, and everywhere he went, he had to make a point of asking them not to put ice in his drink ...
If you honestly think that the "Swift Boat Veterans For Truth" (none of whom actually served with Kerry; everyone still living who actually did serve with him supports his story) are being ignored, and that the AWOL Bush story had legs (or that it was based on "the careful accretion of no facts at all," when in fact it is quite clear to anyone who examines the facts of the case that the President of the United States is a deserter) after the way it was buried during the 2000 campaign, in contrast to the spurious "Clinton is a draft dodger" line that we heard ad nauseam for eight years ... in short, if you think the mass media has been anything but sycophantic toward the Republicans ... you're living in a world so different from reality that I'm not sure that there's any point to this discussion.
Would you be so gracious as to say why?
;)
... but twenty years from now, you'll probably have /.ers hashing it out over these competing memes.
Since yours is the only non-flame response I've received in the thread, sure, I'll be glad to.
1. Documentation. MySQL's documentation is so much better than PostgreSQL's, there's just no comparison. If there's something I want to do in MySQL that I don't know how to do (which doesn't happen very often these days; I will certainly grant that there's less to learn with MySQL than with a fuller-featured DBMS) I can almost always find out with a few minutes of searching. PostgreSQL's docs seem to have been written by people who take positive joy in making things as obscure as possible. Most commercial DBMS documentation seems to have been written by people who were getting paid by the word.
2. I like MySQL's command-line tool better than everyone else's. [shrug] This is a matter purely of personal preference, I admit.
3. There's no shortage of host language support for either MySQL or PostgreSQL; both have it better than most commercial systems seem to.
4. Speed. Many, many people will tell you that MySQL isn't "really" faster than other DBMS's, and come up with elaborate justifications for why this is so. As far as I'm concerned, they're akin to those who insist that [Linux | BSD | OS X] isn't "really" more secure than Windows: real-world performance proves them wrong.
Do the limitations of MySQL bother me? Sure; every once in a while I grit my teeth at having to write multiple queries, using temp tables and the like, to have to simulate nested queries and views. The lack of stored procedures and transactions can be dealt with in host language apps, but again, it can be a pain in the ass. But for me, the advantages I listed above outweigh all of these problems. Also, I'm willing to wait for the MySQL team to add in the missing features, one at a time, because based on past performance, I have faith that they'll do it right.
Roughly speaking, it seems to me, MySQL and PostgreSQL have followed opposite but converging development paths. The MySQL approach was to start with a very limited feature set, make it fast and easy to use and capable of running on a wide range of systems, and then add features in one at a time, making sure nothing breaks as they go along. The PostgreSQL approach was to start with everything and the kitchen sink, and then work on problems with speed, interface, and cross-platform compatibility.
For F/OSS projects in general, with limited resources to throw at the problem, I don't claim that either approach is better -- just different, is all. And like I said, at this point they seem to be converging
Woah woah woah... slow down cowboy! This is slashdot. That comment might be ever so slightly construed as a round-about way to condone US foreign policy. We can't have that here, now can we?
... I'm really sick of all the Bushies trying to act like they're persecuted for their views. They're not, on /. or anywhere else. But it's a remarkably effective bit of propaganda, isn't it?
You know, every time someone says something like that, he weakens his own case
Aaargh. Can we get rid of this stupid meme, please? I've been making a living as a DBA for almost five years now. I'm 2/3 of the way to a CS Master's. I've used Oracle, Sybase, and PostgreSQL. And I prefer MySQL. The idea that the only people who use MySQL are those who don't know any better has to die.
The two main varieties of AI are called "strong" and "weak". Strong AI argues that it is possible that one day a computer will be invented which can be called a mind in the fullest sense of the word. In other words, it can think, reason, imagine, etc., and do all the things that we currently associate with the human brain. Weak AI, on the other hand, argues that computers can only appear to think and are not actually conscious in the same way as human brains are.
The argument seems to me more a matter of quasi-religious philosophy than of computer science or biology. We can argue about how intelligent the systems we've already developed are or aren't, but to say definitively that "true" machine intelligence is or is not possible is a statement of faith. The fact of the matter is, we don't know. Anyone who says otherwise is forming a belief based on other pre-existing beliefs which have very little to do with science.
I'm as much of a language Nazi as anyone on /., but I have to point out that more than half of your "corrections" are matters of simple style, not actual correctness. You also have at least one typo in your version; it's a good idea to check your own usage very carefully before posting something like that.
;)
[desperately trying to get this on topic] You sound a bit like a proofreading AI program that hasn't been fully trained yet.
We could easily fund FIRE, our share of ITER, and a couple of other programs as well. Which is what we should be doing, because there's no guarantee that any one approach is the right one. Why do people always think there's going to be one magic bullet?
...
They're talking about $5 billion, total, to build ITER. That's miniscule money compared to what we're throwing away on fighting in a certain country known for its oil
"So-called" has two different meanings. One is derogatory, as in "George W. Bush is the so-called President of the United States." The other is frequently used in journalism to identify terms with which the reader is expected to be unfamiliar; you see this in pop science journalism a lot, as in "DNA is made of of four so-called nucleic acids." (I suspect the non-derogatory meaning may be the original one, but I don't know.) It is unfortunate, I agree. It would probably be better to add an explanatory clause: "Linux, which is of a type of software called open source, ..."
A mix of politics and once-bitten, I think. The Newton was a beautiful piece of hardware that turned out to be a financial disaster -- and right when it was showing signs of not being a disaster was when Jobs came back to Apple, and IIRC the Newton was one of the first things to get "Steved." Which is really too bad, because if they'd stuck with it, it could have captured the mindshare (and market share) Palm did a couple of years later. Now, I suspect that anyone who suggests any kind of handheld computer at Apple is greeted with a mix of disdain and horror.
And of course the only reason there are fewere female programmers is because girls play differently than boys, and any attempt to change the situation must be "doing women a disservice" by "artificially make those fields more appealing to them just to push an agenda."
Absolutely! I agree 100%! And clearly any attempt to educate those lazy stupid fieldhands will be wasted -- look at them out there in the cotton fields, singing their spirituals and grinning everytime the overseer walks by! They're just naturally different from us, and we shouldn't try to push our agenda on them!
Quite seriously, for a man to say "bitch" and then say that it's not anti-woman is kind of like a white person saying "nigger" and then saying that it's not anti-black. Some insults are just insults, especially when used by a member of the group that's not being insulted, and there's no way to change that. It amazes me how many people don't get that, and when they're called on it, whine about "PC". It's not political correctness, folks, it's a matter of basic politeness.