This is a pretty funny thread. Actually if you go to a gay pride parade there is usually one or two floats that hold the drag queens. Drag queens are attention getters and performers. Media chooses to show them all the time because they are more sensational. I honestly don't know for sure but transvestites are spooky. They dress for sexual reasons. Transvestic fetishism is a sexual dysfunction as is Transsexuallity, though it has nothing to do with sex except in the medical term of sex=gender. Strange how they lump them together. If you see a transsexual float in a gay pride parade you'll just see a bunch of normally dressed women and men. Blue jeans and practical shoes mostly. We're kind of a boring bunch in all reality and most of us don't have a backbone to stand on so chances are you won't see a transsexual float unless it's a really large parade. Sad but true. Eddie Izzard I think would be more associated as a cross dresser as he just likes the clothes or maybe, and this is stretching it, a drag queen since he performs like that.
A transsexual on the other hand is someone who, for reasons unknown(but I have my theories) believe that their gender somehow got mixed up. I am transsexual. Believe me, it's not sexual. Last time I had sex, normal male/female type sex where I was the male role, I cried all the way through it. Not a pleasant situation to be in. So it's really not proper to lump that up with sexual issues either. And to boot I'm a lesbian and I'm not alone. So you can't lump me in with guys who just want to be with straight guys. It doesn't work that way.
In my experience, most gay men find drag queens a source of entertainment but really find women in general completely lacking anything that they find attractive(with the possible exceptions of boobs. They are hypnotic to a good portion of gay men for some strange reason.) Maybe that's a little harsh, a small portion of gay men are complete mysogenists as conversely a small portion of lesbians are complete man-haters. But the guy who said that 90% of gay men would rather go around naked than wear a dress, would hold fairly true.
Anyway, as you can see there really is a good seperation between everything. But we need each other for various reasons, such as gay rights and transgender(lumping of crossdressing, transsexuality, and gender expression) are linked together politically. If for instance, a bill passes that protect gay rights it specifically will leave out gender rights currently so that if a gay men is a bit nellie or a gay woman is a butch they can be terminated based on gender expression. It seems the gay community tries very hard sometimes to seperate itself from the transgender community when both are needed together to provide for a more well-rounded alternative community
Saddam killed many more. Where is the public outcry against this evil? Oh wait, that's right. It's ok if he kills tens of thousands of his own people. They are his people after all.
When will the world at large recognize that people like this are dangerous. We are not up for war crimes because we did what we had to do. You don't have to agree with that, but don't portray the US as some monster(at least not on this point) because civilians died. When there is war people die. This is why war is bad, mmkay? But sometimes evil people can cause even more damage. Hopefully stopped a lot of that and we can get the hell out and let the iraqis live in peace.
If you want to talk about human rights violations, let's talk about Guatanomo Bay. Now there's a human rights story. Let's talk about how nobody in the United States feels safe anymore no matter how draconian the police or how far-reaching the laws are. Or let's talk about the fact that gay's and lesbians and transgendered people do not have the right to live, love, and marry. The fact that we ONLY killed thousands in a full scale offensive attack says a lot. If this man had killed your husband for speaking out, sent your children to the army at age 15, and left you with no rights to even take off 40 layers of clothing so that you could breath and you said, "Give the guy a break. He only wants what's best for us." Then you can talk about crimes against humanity.
Get a clue, get some courage to come in under your real name and have an actual opinion, and then read some things like Human Rights Watch and find out what's really going on. The unexamined life is not worth living.
I hate reply to flamebait, BUT if we would have taken care of Hitler BEFORE he became a world wide problem we would not have had world war II.
When does war become necessary? Before or after my children are nuked, infected with smallpox, or whatever else this guy was working on. Both US and British intelligence said that this guy needed to go and his regime with him. Would I have liked everyone from the other countries in the world to get on board first? Absolutely. No question. But when foreign agencies are willing to put me and my family at risk for personal and financial gain, I have to say no thank you. You can't ignore a problem and hope it goes away. Sorry, but it's time to grow up and face the real world. Sadam was a danger to the world and it's a better place without him.
But I will say this. I respect your opinion on it. Noone likes war. Not even President Bush(though I'm guessing he likes it more than most. He never did lose that look in his eye after the World Trade Center Bombing). It's good to stand up and proclaim, "No war!" But there IS a time for war. And while we can hope beyond all hope, we can't ignore danger just because we don't want conflict.
...This is almost 1/2 a trillion dollars that won't be spent on "smart" bombs. Although I am not for the us military in general, I am all about it wasting it's money. Each $ wasted could be a life saved.
Personally I would rather see the money spent on smart bombs that minimalize civilian casualties. While I'm no lover of war, when it's necessary, I personally think killing less innocent people is good. So them spending huge amounts of money on insecure microsoft software seems like a terrible thing to me. Sure if we don't have any weapons we don't go to war, but we do need to defend ourselves. And that's half a billion dollars that isn't going into research giving real technical people jobs. Instead, it's going to Microsoft who will not hire new people because of this, but will most likely use half a billion dollars to destroy other smaller companies that get in it's way. So instead of creating jobs in research and development we are giving loads of money to a known abusive monopoly holder who will most likely use it to put good people out of work. I think the smart bombs have a smaller casualty rate personally.
I've played a lot of everquest. I've played a lot of both male and female characters. Being transsexual I can maybe give a little light to the argument. Very honestly I never really saw a problem with being hit on. Every once and awhile you get a perv with nothing better to do, but that isn't all THAT much different than real life though one might be a bit bolder when one can remain anonymous. Instead of occasional flirtation it's full-on tells for cyber but it's still infrequent enough that you can just put those on ignore.
Also, I am in a family oriented guild, so there is very little in the way of sexual harassment going on with the people I know and relate regularly with and the server I play on is an old server. The people on their TEND to be a little more mature. Also, most of the guys on everquest have a female character that they play from time to time. Currently my characters are in the hands of a guy who is using them to do trade skills and such. So he uses my female characters. And the assumption over time has become that female characters are most likely males anyway. So that contributes to a lot less cyber requests these days. Now in the first year it was much worse, but now it's not so bad.
When I was younger, I would play female characters in muds. Being transsexual I would usually make my main character female. This is before I transitioned. Before anyone knew. I would give excuses that I would be easily given money or equipment which was true(but not really my reason). So there are advantages that some guys will try to exploit by playing female characters as well.
Though with the bulk of everquest players assuming that any female character has a male behind it until proven elsewise, this has curbed quite a bit. Still, this perceived advantage(Assuming you can pull off an effectively female seeming character for long enough to fool some people) still shows up from time to time.
85% male seems about right and from what I've seen in Norrath at least 40% of the population is female. If you look at the traders that setup in the trading area though it is mostly male. Usually these are mule characters setup very quickly and not played. Just setup to sell stuff.
Gender in norrath is definitely an interesting subject.
That's a really great point. Many transgender women do give up their careers in more masculine engineering or computer sciences depending on their situation. Others, like me, believe that they can truely be whoever they are and that includes being a computer science geekette. That doesn't make me any less of who I am really, it's just something I like and that I'm good at. Quite frankly both of the companies I've worked for lacked estrogen in the computer department and inserting a scented candle here and there was definitely a value added service of having women there.
This was something that I grew up with. I personally was really poor at doing all the traditional guy stuff. With my computer I could use my imagination and I started out making pictures on my C64 and my program career began from there. I'm good at it and I plan to keep on doing it for as long as I can manage it.
Many people have said how they think that the point of this article isn't that women aren't in CS but rather it shows that they don't want to be. The question is, if women can do it and do it well, why don't they? And is something wrong with that? I mean is society pushing women away from these jobs. Long ago women couldn't vote and lots of women agreed with that point of view. Plenty of women would fight against the right of other women to vote saying that women didn't have the mind to do it and that they just in general didn't want to. That was societies position(and quite frankly seems to still hold true in a lot of positions of leadership.)
Should we as women try to change the view of computer science and women's role in it? I think we should. I'm not sure fighting for it is the right way to go about it, but showing that we can be everything that women, in general, are and want to be and also be programmers, engineers, and scientists. I think we are making headway, but the stigma still exists that computer people are unpopular single white boys and that's just not true.
As for transgender women in particular, I know plenty that are in masculine jobs. In ways, it's much easier. I feel I can pass easier with men than women, at least I don't feel as if small things will matter as much. But then life is a little too boring surrounded by nothing but guys. And I certainly feel safer with girls around. I've not had any bad experiences yet, but I'm careful and there are plenty of girls(both scientifically constructed and genetically born) that have been attacked or worse simply for being in a building late one night with a just a few guys. I would say the proportion of transgender women in IT as opposed to XX women is a much higher ratio that transgender to XX Women in general. Simply because to get to that point most transgendered women have to cut completely the ropes that society ties everyone down with and then get on with life.
I am one of those ultra-rare cases.;) Life is interesting. Out of 40 people at my previous job with a programming consulting company I could count the number of women there on one hand. One was the secretary, one was an accountant, one was in marketing and web design, one was our tester, and the last was a programmer. It's a bit alarming transitioning from male to female in a workforce dominated so completely by men. I watched, my friends position in the company and how she dealt with things and it came down to that she really had to be forceful to get anyone to listen to her. And she was good.
Most of my girlfriends just would rather not be thought of as geeks even with the positive meaning it now has. It would be incredibly hard to put into words what I've observed since starting my transition, but it is incredibly interesting. I wouldn't have ever actually believed it if I hand't lived it.
A lot of what I'm having to do is start over. Currently where I live, the computer job market has completely fallen apart. I just hope my future in computers isn't dictated so much by my gender.
And for the sarcastic person who remarked on how "hard" it was to tell the difference between a transsexual and a born woman on site, take it from me, it's not always as easy as you would think. I've never been clocked.;)
Most people lump Transexualism up with homosexuality, though the two are completely unrelated. So this two may hold some the reasoning why those pathways are slightly different. The only problem with this study limited number of Transexual participants. One can only study this part of the brain through death. With Transexuals being somewhere in the 1 in 30,000 range its very difficult to find cadavers for this study.
If I remember right, the Athlon licenses the EV6 System Bus from Digital/Compaq. Anybody care to comment on what this might mean. Will this mean that Intel will be able to directly manipulate the price of AMD's processors? Could someone out there who knows what they are talking about maybe comment on this. I hate to speculate.
In my opinion, the problem is more of a slippery sloap problem. If we allow this, then yes we can monitor our children from work or home. But, what if someone was doing this in your work place? Would you feel comfortable with it. " It was good enough for me when I was a kid." I know I've heard it said around the office several times. Now that its in your workplace, why don't we just start monitoring people all over the nation. Its for your safety as much as anything else. And then of course that leads into a bunch of privacy issues.
We need to watch these kinds of things and be wary of anything that takes away the privacy of our children because they will grow up without knowing the importance of privacy.
What about racial issues or religious issues. Maybe these childrens parents will see that they are hanging around too much with those white kids or maybe the hispanics seem to be grouping together to much and parents may come demanding diversity be enforced or that their children shouldn't be fraternizing with any jewish kids. Very extrem points and very unlikely I know, but what if. We shouldn't invite this kind of thing. The writers of our constitution give us the right to pursue happiness even. It doesn't disregard children in that matter.
There are some children that probably should be watched closely, but I don't like the whole being punished for the few. I will conced however that it is nice to be able to see what your children are up to, but will its positives outweigh the negatives. Just bear that in mind when you think about your children. And remember its not us against them with children. We may be older but we were young once. We have learned from our experiences and we can teach that to others young or old, but we can't make them follow our lessons. Even by constant monitoring.
"He who gives up liberty for security gets neither." - Ben Franklin
They will get the fingerprints from the files on your harddrive. You know that annoying that comes up right before it lets you do anything that reads all the files that your sharing and then sends the list to napster? They will just hook it into there and send the fingerprint along with it. Just use a different service. Or find a way to defeat the fingerprinting. There will be ways available I'm sure.
Fear doesn't go away. Fear changes. The individual is lost in such a society. Everyone is forced to conform to someone's ideal. Because its no privacy exists the fear becomes the fear of nonconformance.
Sounds like 1984 to me. I think we've been warned by authors such as Huxley and Wells about such "Open Societies." Such anti-utopians have been extensively covered in long detail. These kind of things depend on logic to survive and don't seem to take into account human nature.
1) Crime would greatly decrease.
Crime would change. Instead of becoming crimes of violence would go to those that "deserved it" by someones standards. Information overload would push these crimes underneath mounds of paper and video. Noone would have to know, but those monitoring and if they deserved what they got then who are they to say. Who will speak out against them. Certainly not anyone who did not deserve such things themselves.
2) Greater Honesty in society.
Hoensty would hidden. Greater lieing in the face of honesty. Who will be different now. Death of individualism is the death of honesty itself. People will still lie, its just will trust them now. And who's to stand against the lies. Certainly not a fine upstanding citizen of the republic.
3) Less Hypocrisy.
Perfection would only be expected, but required. People would be so afraid to make a mistake that it could be paralyzing. To have all things monitored would allow someone to have amunition against you. Hypocrisy might be dead, but so would honest mistakes.
"Many Eyes Make All Crimes Shallow" Didn't seem to for Hitler or Stalin. It just makes criminals out of victims. Privacy is needed. There are things we don't want to know about others. These things make us individuals. That allow us to see things in different ways and progress as a society.
That was bad wording on my part. Yes this is fundamental and much much needed information. My main point is the misinformation that seems to be plaguing the mass media seems to say things that are misleading or not even true. With headlines like "DNA As Buggy Code" where they equate a working delicate and so far not well understood strand of DNA to a bloated buggy untested piece of windows code. And you might disagree, but this is just a really small step in the great scheme of things to come. I don't think it should be blown out of proportion. People are going to start thinking mad scientists are out there changing around genetic code willy nilly without any forethought and thats not whats happening.
We don't have a buggy piece of windows code here. We have an elegant masterpiece of genetic material that our only real knowledge of so far consists of an overhead map of which we only the rudiments of knowledge. We've still got a long way to go. And while I agree completely that "understanding and knowledge of reality is *always* useful, even if there isn't an immediate application," I also think that we as scientists and people need to step back a moment and see that our crowning achievement with DNA will only come once we've had sufficient time to study and understand it more. And this is what the human genome project is going to allow.
These "functional applications" from the genome have been, at most, informed but lucky stabs in the dark. And generally, cures for genetic diseases have come more out of the study of cells and living processes than anything. We understand that familial Alzheimer's *may* have something to do with chromosome 19. But biologically we *know* that we can reduce the likely hood or increase the longevity of brain function by reducing the breakdown of acetylcholine in the brain. The current genetic therapies are either extremely slow tedious and nonpermanent or are extremely dangerous as producing a proper vector for gene replacement in living cells is still much in its infancy and we still don't know enough about how it works to really do this well.
And besides this specific article having the few bad analogies, its no different then any of the other news pieces on this same thing. These "anachronistic sequences" that it speaks of are actually our past and there is a lot of good that can come from that information. "It shouldn't work, but usually it does," is one of the most arrogant statements I've heard on the subject. Having so little knowledge of how it works how can we say that it shouldn't work.
This article just left a bad taste in my mouth and wasn't nearly as useful as some of the others that I've read recently. I'd give it a C- if I had read marking pin available.
I find it interesting how these scientists have "cracked the code" of the human genome and yet none of them can produce anything truly useful from this knowledge. This is just the first step in a very long process. We might have figured out which of our genes are active and which aren't, but we have almost no idea what activates them. We're barely able to produce differentiated cells from stem cells, and as far as I know, we've only got one company thats figured that out, and they aren't sharing.
We seem to be pretty arrogant to say that this is buggy code when we don't even know what we're looking at. We have gene sequences that produce proteins. This is a like a data segment in a program. What are the triggers? Where is the processing? How does it all work? No answers? Thats because we don't undrestand it, and until some guy can go through and start changing fundamental bodily processes, and I don't mean making a third arm or giving someone, I'm talking about creating entirely new transhuman processes into the body, then none of these articles will impress me. Its just plain arrogant.
Its quite interesting that they can get sample tissue to differentiate. This has lots of uses, but its still a long way till we can see donor organs available. This will still be useful for the cultivation of single tissue grafts and such, but its a long way from creating an organ. Just because you can differentiate to one type of tissue doesn't mean you can create liver for example. Still, this is great advancement in genetics and is one step closer to us understanding how all this stuff works. The next ten years are going to be amazing for biotech.
Maybe its just me, but this seems a little too close to console gaming. I mean if I wanted to reboot my computer to play a game, what would really be the point of having computer games over console games. I kind of like the fact that if I need to I can stop my game and do other things. Keep my ICQ going check email. This only seems useful if you were really going to pick apart the OS and get some specialized processing power. But this is out of scope with most game designers as it would take too many resources to make it viable.
Just my opinion
I'm mixed about this whole debate. I, unfortunately, left college to pursue a career. My mistake I think, but I do pretty well without it. As a matter of fact, there are very few people in our company, a small consulting company, that do actually have a degree. Even one of the principles does not have a degree. Now what I've seen are several dynamics in the way things go. We have 2 or 3 programmers, right out of college. I would say that their coding is below par. But I can't say mine was any better 3 years ago when I started coding. However, our Vice President, has a degree in Math, and it shows. He's an extremely hard working individual that has trouble communicating sometimes. Mainly because of a large amount terms that he uses that he assumes others have. Now, of the top five people consulting, I think 2 have degrees. One of which has been in the industry for at least 10 years and is a wonderful coder. The nongraduates though seem to have an essence, a certain unnamed something that puts them ahead of the rest. I know with me, its a thirst that went unrecognized for several years. I find myself pouring through textbooks day after day just to get what I think I need to know. Its an odd existence. However, while I might not be stuck, I am unwilling to stop my work to go back to college just yet. I have a lot of opportunity ahead of me. Now with that said, what I think I will be missing most about college is the chance to ask questions and to understand things out of my industry. For instance, I am currently reading David Copperfield. I have about a million questions that I've been wondering about since picking up the book, but without a teacher or even fellow classmates to discuss it with, where does that leave. Probably wrong in my assumptions. The point of all this is that, it seems to me that college does not make the man, the man makes the man. But college provides a chance for you to make yourself so much more. Hopefully, sometime soon I will be able to go back to school. Maybe find a better more challenging school that will take me. Here's hoping.
Sorry, your right, its not an engine. Its an API. But the idea is still the same. From reading some of the previous posts though, DirectX is at a much higher level than OpenGL or any other free renderer out there and the gaps are just getting bigger and bigger as more features become available. So it still costs more to write the code to make the same program just to add a little more market share. Look, I'm a fairly young consultant with only a few years of professional coding under my belt. I admit I know very little about the actual implementation of DirectX I looked at it a little bit back when it was the Games SDK. Regardless of that fact, I think the same principles I stated earlier apply even if I missed the wording slightly.
Three words: Time to market. Sure, you can write your own proprietary engine to do exactly what you want it to do. And it will only take you three times as long to bring that to market. Thats three times the salary, three times the rent, three times all expenses for the same profit only to have the chance to get that other 15% of the market. The math says no. And I don't really believe that a multiplier of 3 is too much, but I'm not a games programmer. But whenever I'm given the choice of say writing an object oriented wrapper for a database or just using something that already exists, I'm going to to just use that which already exists. Sure we could write our own database, but the cost associated with writing a proprietary database is phenomenal when I can pay someone else who has already developed, tested, and put into actual use their own database. Now instead of having 30 developers and 2 years to get this application done, we only need 5 developers and 2 months. Thats serious numbers.
Truthfully it is for this very reason that Microsoft has spent so much time creating the DirectX API. You will notice that despite everything else, Microsoft loves developers. Of course they do. Why do you think windows has an 85% Market Share. They have poured all these man hours into creating a really top notch API and give it away for free for what reason? Market Share. How many people honestly continue to have a windows PC at home for the express purpose of running games. I know I do. If I had everquest on Linux, I wouldn't need windows, thats for sure. Honestly, if you want to see these games continue to come out for linux and mac, do something about it. Lets see a better API, please.
I think they know what they are doing. They are still the defacto role-playing standard. When people think of role-playing games, they usually think of D&D first. Contrary to popular belief, tsr cracked down on any material that tried to modify the rules at all. Anyone remember Judges Guild(I don't know much about these guys, but one of my fellow gamers had told me that they had some really good products that modified AD&D, but we're forced off the shelves by T$R)? This license will allow for people to take the core D&D rules and make something which they prefer. House rules suddenly become documented and distributed freely on the net. Our gaming group found combat particularly weak, so we have spent the last 3 or 4 years working out getting the AD&D rules for Magic and Combat mixed with much the ICE combat and magic rules. Which gives a robust role-playing atmosphere and a with the added benefit of really detailed combat. What this means to WOTC is that anyone who wants to publish something that modifies and improves they're product gives them even more market share, and it allows those who actually can print good materials the ability to go with a name like TSR. This will also allow some type of middleware. Say your have rules-x gaming, but you can't seem to get it off the ground. After all, who's ever heard of rules-x gaming. So you take some of your rules and modify them slightly and put out some add-ons for AD&D. Suddenly you have a new group of gamers that are looking at your product. I don't think we need to be so cynical about this. Yeah, they are capitalizing on the buzzword. So what. Its good all around. Let it be. I think we will see a lot of really good stuff come out of this.
I don't believe Neverwinter will be open sourced, but from the sounds of it, it will be quite configurable. They are talking a lot about portals and local character vaults that would allow a certain network of individuals to all play in the same persistent world and a gm could input any amount of plot they wanted. Sounds pretty good to me. There isn't much available on the scripting language yet. Just a few snippits of code here and there from the programmers, but what I've seen is pretty impressive. NWScript seems like it will be fairly robust allowing us to modify gameplay. But to what extent, we won't know until the language reference is released, which probably won't be anytime in the very near future.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a pretty funny thread. Actually if you go to a gay pride parade there is usually one or two floats that hold the drag queens. Drag queens are attention getters and performers. Media chooses to show them all the time because they are more sensational. I honestly don't know for sure but transvestites are spooky. They dress for sexual reasons. Transvestic fetishism is a sexual dysfunction as is Transsexuallity, though it has nothing to do with sex except in the medical term of sex=gender. Strange how they lump them together. If you see a transsexual float in a gay pride parade you'll just see a bunch of normally dressed women and men. Blue jeans and practical shoes mostly. We're kind of a boring bunch in all reality and most of us don't have a backbone to stand on so chances are you won't see a transsexual float unless it's a really large parade. Sad but true. Eddie Izzard I think would be more associated as a cross dresser as he just likes the clothes or maybe, and this is stretching it, a drag queen since he performs like that.
A transsexual on the other hand is someone who, for reasons unknown(but I have my theories) believe that their gender somehow got mixed up. I am transsexual. Believe me, it's not sexual. Last time I had sex, normal male/female type sex where I was the male role, I cried all the way through it. Not a pleasant situation to be in. So it's really not proper to lump that up with sexual issues either. And to boot I'm a lesbian and I'm not alone. So you can't lump me in with guys who just want to be with straight guys. It doesn't work that way.
In my experience, most gay men find drag queens a source of entertainment but really find women in general completely lacking anything that they find attractive(with the possible exceptions of boobs. They are hypnotic to a good portion of gay men for some strange reason.) Maybe that's a little harsh, a small portion of gay men are complete mysogenists as conversely a small portion of lesbians are complete man-haters. But the guy who said that 90% of gay men would rather go around naked than wear a dress, would hold fairly true.
Anyway, as you can see there really is a good seperation between everything. But we need each other for various reasons, such as gay rights and transgender(lumping of crossdressing, transsexuality, and gender expression) are linked together politically. If for instance, a bill passes that protect gay rights it specifically will leave out gender rights currently so that if a gay men is a bit nellie or a gay woman is a butch they can be terminated based on gender expression. It seems the gay community tries very hard sometimes to seperate itself from the transgender community when both are needed together to provide for a more well-rounded alternative community
I'll get off my soap box now.
=)
--
Lissa Guillet
Saddam killed many more. Where is the public outcry against this evil? Oh wait, that's right. It's ok if he kills tens of thousands of his own people. They are his people after all.
When will the world at large recognize that people like this are dangerous. We are not up for war crimes because we did what we had to do. You don't have to agree with that, but don't portray the US as some monster(at least not on this point) because civilians died. When there is war people die. This is why war is bad, mmkay? But sometimes evil people can cause even more damage. Hopefully stopped a lot of that and we can get the hell out and let the iraqis live in peace.
If you want to talk about human rights violations, let's talk about Guatanomo Bay. Now there's a human rights story. Let's talk about how nobody in the United States feels safe anymore no matter how draconian the police or how far-reaching the laws are. Or let's talk about the fact that gay's and lesbians and transgendered people do not have the right to live, love, and marry. The fact that we ONLY killed thousands in a full scale offensive attack says a lot. If this man had killed your husband for speaking out, sent your children to the army at age 15, and left you with no rights to even take off 40 layers of clothing so that you could breath and you said, "Give the guy a break. He only wants what's best for us." Then you can talk about crimes against humanity.
Get a clue, get some courage to come in under your real name and have an actual opinion, and then read some things like Human Rights Watch and find out what's really going on. The unexamined life is not worth living.
I hate reply to flamebait, BUT if we would have taken care of Hitler BEFORE he became a world wide problem we would not have had world war II.
When does war become necessary? Before or after my children are nuked, infected with smallpox, or whatever else this guy was working on. Both US and British intelligence said that this guy needed to go and his regime with him. Would I have liked everyone from the other countries in the world to get on board first? Absolutely. No question. But when foreign agencies are willing to put me and my family at risk for personal and financial gain, I have to say no thank you. You can't ignore a problem and hope it goes away. Sorry, but it's time to grow up and face the real world. Sadam was a danger to the world and it's a better place without him.
But I will say this. I respect your opinion on it. Noone likes war. Not even President Bush(though I'm guessing he likes it more than most. He never did lose that look in his eye after the World Trade Center Bombing). It's good to stand up and proclaim, "No war!" But there IS a time for war. And while we can hope beyond all hope, we can't ignore danger just because we don't want conflict.
Personally I would rather see the money spent on smart bombs that minimalize civilian casualties. While I'm no lover of war, when it's necessary, I personally think killing less innocent people is good. So them spending huge amounts of money on insecure microsoft software seems like a terrible thing to me. Sure if we don't have any weapons we don't go to war, but we do need to defend ourselves. And that's half a billion dollars that isn't going into research giving real technical people jobs. Instead, it's going to Microsoft who will not hire new people because of this, but will most likely use half a billion dollars to destroy other smaller companies that get in it's way. So instead of creating jobs in research and development we are giving loads of money to a known abusive monopoly holder who will most likely use it to put good people out of work. I think the smart bombs have a smaller casualty rate personally.
I've played a lot of everquest. I've played a lot of both male and female characters. Being transsexual I can maybe give a little light to the argument. Very honestly I never really saw a problem with being hit on. Every once and awhile you get a perv with nothing better to do, but that isn't all THAT much different than real life though one might be a bit bolder when one can remain anonymous. Instead of occasional flirtation it's full-on tells for cyber but it's still infrequent enough that you can just put those on ignore.
Also, I am in a family oriented guild, so there is very little in the way of sexual harassment going on with the people I know and relate regularly with and the server I play on is an old server. The people on their TEND to be a little more mature. Also, most of the guys on everquest have a female character that they play from time to time. Currently my characters are in the hands of a guy who is using them to do trade skills and such. So he uses my female characters. And the assumption over time has become that female characters are most likely males anyway. So that contributes to a lot less cyber requests these days. Now in the first year it was much worse, but now it's not so bad.
When I was younger, I would play female characters in muds. Being transsexual I would usually make my main character female. This is before I transitioned. Before anyone knew. I would give excuses that I would be easily given money or equipment which was true(but not really my reason). So there are advantages that some guys will try to exploit by playing female characters as well.
Though with the bulk of everquest players assuming that any female character has a male behind it until proven elsewise, this has curbed quite a bit. Still, this perceived advantage(Assuming you can pull off an effectively female seeming character for long enough to fool some people) still shows up from time to time.
85% male seems about right and from what I've seen in Norrath at least 40% of the population is female. If you look at the traders that setup in the trading area though it is mostly male. Usually these are mule characters setup very quickly and not played. Just setup to sell stuff.
Gender in norrath is definitely an interesting subject.
That's a really great point. Many transgender women do give up their careers in more masculine engineering or computer sciences depending on their situation. Others, like me, believe that they can truely be whoever they are and that includes being a computer science geekette. That doesn't make me any less of who I am really, it's just something I like and that I'm good at. Quite frankly both of the companies I've worked for lacked estrogen in the computer department and inserting a scented candle here and there was definitely a value added service of having women there.
This was something that I grew up with. I personally was really poor at doing all the traditional guy stuff. With my computer I could use my imagination and I started out making pictures on my C64 and my program career began from there. I'm good at it and I plan to keep on doing it for as long as I can manage it.
Many people have said how they think that the point of this article isn't that women aren't in CS but rather it shows that they don't want to be. The question is, if women can do it and do it well, why don't they? And is something wrong with that? I mean is society pushing women away from these jobs. Long ago women couldn't vote and lots of women agreed with that point of view. Plenty of women would fight against the right of other women to vote saying that women didn't have the mind to do it and that they just in general didn't want to. That was societies position(and quite frankly seems to still hold true in a lot of positions of leadership.)
Should we as women try to change the view of computer science and women's role in it? I think we should. I'm not sure fighting for it is the right way to go about it, but showing that we can be everything that women, in general, are and want to be and also be programmers, engineers, and scientists. I think we are making headway, but the stigma still exists that computer people are unpopular single white boys and that's just not true.
As for transgender women in particular, I know plenty that are in masculine jobs. In ways, it's much easier. I feel I can pass easier with men than women, at least I don't feel as if small things will matter as much. But then life is a little too boring surrounded by nothing but guys. And I certainly feel safer with girls around. I've not had any bad experiences yet, but I'm careful and there are plenty of girls(both scientifically constructed and genetically born) that have been attacked or worse simply for being in a building late one night with a just a few guys. I would say the proportion of transgender women in IT as opposed to XX women is a much higher ratio that transgender to XX Women in general. Simply because to get to that point most transgendered women have to cut completely the ropes that society ties everyone down with and then get on with life.
I am one of those ultra-rare cases. ;) Life is interesting. Out of 40 people at my previous job with a programming consulting company I could count the number of women there on one hand. One was the secretary, one was an accountant, one was in marketing and web design, one was our tester, and the last was a programmer. It's a bit alarming transitioning from male to female in a workforce dominated so completely by men. I watched, my friends position in the company and how she dealt with things and it came down to that she really had to be forceful to get anyone to listen to her. And she was good.
;)
Most of my girlfriends just would rather not be thought of as geeks even with the positive meaning it now has. It would be incredibly hard to put into words what I've observed since starting my transition, but it is incredibly interesting. I wouldn't have ever actually believed it if I hand't lived it.
A lot of what I'm having to do is start over. Currently where I live, the computer job market has completely fallen apart. I just hope my future in computers isn't dictated so much by my gender.
And for the sarcastic person who remarked on how "hard" it was to tell the difference between a transsexual and a born woman on site, take it from me, it's not always as easy as you would think. I've never been clocked.
There have been similar studies in the domain of Transexuals. The BSTc portion of the hypothalamus seems to hold a clue to the difference there.
Link to BSTc study
Most people lump Transexualism up with homosexuality, though the two are completely unrelated. So this two may hold some the reasoning why those pathways are slightly different. The only problem with this study limited number of Transexual participants. One can only study this part of the brain through death. With Transexuals being somewhere in the 1 in 30,000 range its very difficult to find cadavers for this study.
If I remember right, the Athlon licenses the EV6 System Bus from Digital/Compaq. Anybody care to comment on what this might mean. Will this mean that Intel will be able to directly manipulate the price of AMD's processors? Could someone out there who knows what they are talking about maybe comment on this. I hate to speculate.
Alex, If your product actually does have the ability to give eternal life, why not just give these life time guarantees instead of 90 days.
In my opinion, the problem is more of a slippery sloap problem. If we allow this, then yes we can monitor our children from work or home. But, what if someone was doing this in your work place? Would you feel comfortable with it. " It was good enough for me when I was a kid." I know I've heard it said around the office several times. Now that its in your workplace, why don't we just start monitoring people all over the nation. Its for your safety as much as anything else. And then of course that leads into a bunch of privacy issues.
We need to watch these kinds of things and be wary of anything that takes away the privacy of our children because they will grow up without knowing the importance of privacy.
What about racial issues or religious issues. Maybe these childrens parents will see that they are hanging around too much with those white kids or maybe the hispanics seem to be grouping together to much and parents may come demanding diversity be enforced or that their children shouldn't be fraternizing with any jewish kids. Very extrem points and very unlikely I know, but what if. We shouldn't invite this kind of thing. The writers of our constitution give us the right to pursue happiness even. It doesn't disregard children in that matter.
There are some children that probably should be watched closely, but I don't like the whole being punished for the few. I will conced however that it is nice to be able to see what your children are up to, but will its positives outweigh the negatives. Just bear that in mind when you think about your children. And remember its not us against them with children. We may be older but we were young once. We have learned from our experiences and we can teach that to others young or old, but we can't make them follow our lessons. Even by constant monitoring.
"He who gives up liberty for security gets neither." - Ben Franklin
They will get the fingerprints from the files on your harddrive. You know that annoying that comes up right before it lets you do anything that reads all the files that your sharing and then sends the list to napster? They will just hook it into there and send the fingerprint along with it. Just use a different service. Or find a way to defeat the fingerprinting. There will be ways available I'm sure.
Fear doesn't go away. Fear changes. The individual is lost in such a society. Everyone is forced to conform to someone's ideal. Because its no privacy exists the fear becomes the fear of nonconformance. Sounds like 1984 to me. I think we've been warned by authors such as Huxley and Wells about such "Open Societies." Such anti-utopians have been extensively covered in long detail. These kind of things depend on logic to survive and don't seem to take into account human nature. 1) Crime would greatly decrease. Crime would change. Instead of becoming crimes of violence would go to those that "deserved it" by someones standards. Information overload would push these crimes underneath mounds of paper and video. Noone would have to know, but those monitoring and if they deserved what they got then who are they to say. Who will speak out against them. Certainly not anyone who did not deserve such things themselves. 2) Greater Honesty in society. Hoensty would hidden. Greater lieing in the face of honesty. Who will be different now. Death of individualism is the death of honesty itself. People will still lie, its just will trust them now. And who's to stand against the lies. Certainly not a fine upstanding citizen of the republic. 3) Less Hypocrisy. Perfection would only be expected, but required. People would be so afraid to make a mistake that it could be paralyzing. To have all things monitored would allow someone to have amunition against you. Hypocrisy might be dead, but so would honest mistakes. "Many Eyes Make All Crimes Shallow" Didn't seem to for Hitler or Stalin. It just makes criminals out of victims. Privacy is needed. There are things we don't want to know about others. These things make us individuals. That allow us to see things in different ways and progress as a society.
That was bad wording on my part. Yes this is fundamental and much much needed information. My main point is the misinformation that seems to be plaguing the mass media seems to say things that are misleading or not even true. With headlines like "DNA As Buggy Code" where they equate a working delicate and so far not well understood strand of DNA to a bloated buggy untested piece of windows code. And you might disagree, but this is just a really small step in the great scheme of things to come. I don't think it should be blown out of proportion. People are going to start thinking mad scientists are out there changing around genetic code willy nilly without any forethought and thats not whats happening.
We don't have a buggy piece of windows code here. We have an elegant masterpiece of genetic material that our only real knowledge of so far consists of an overhead map of which we only the rudiments of knowledge. We've still got a long way to go. And while I agree completely that "understanding and knowledge of reality is *always* useful, even if there isn't an immediate application," I also think that we as scientists and people need to step back a moment and see that our crowning achievement with DNA will only come once we've had sufficient time to study and understand it more. And this is what the human genome project is going to allow.
These "functional applications" from the genome have been, at most, informed but lucky stabs in the dark. And generally, cures for genetic diseases have come more out of the study of cells and living processes than anything. We understand that familial Alzheimer's *may* have something to do with chromosome 19. But biologically we *know* that we can reduce the likely hood or increase the longevity of brain function by reducing the breakdown of acetylcholine in the brain. The current genetic therapies are either extremely slow tedious and nonpermanent or are extremely dangerous as producing a proper vector for gene replacement in living cells is still much in its infancy and we still don't know enough about how it works to really do this well.
And besides this specific article having the few bad analogies, its no different then any of the other news pieces on this same thing. These "anachronistic sequences" that it speaks of are actually our past and there is a lot of good that can come from that information. "It shouldn't work, but usually it does," is one of the most arrogant statements I've heard on the subject. Having so little knowledge of how it works how can we say that it shouldn't work.
This article just left a bad taste in my mouth and wasn't nearly as useful as some of the others that I've read recently. I'd give it a C- if I had read marking pin available.
I find it interesting how these scientists have "cracked the code" of the human genome and yet none of them can produce anything truly useful from this knowledge. This is just the first step in a very long process. We might have figured out which of our genes are active and which aren't, but we have almost no idea what activates them. We're barely able to produce differentiated cells from stem cells, and as far as I know, we've only got one company thats figured that out, and they aren't sharing. We seem to be pretty arrogant to say that this is buggy code when we don't even know what we're looking at. We have gene sequences that produce proteins. This is a like a data segment in a program. What are the triggers? Where is the processing? How does it all work? No answers? Thats because we don't undrestand it, and until some guy can go through and start changing fundamental bodily processes, and I don't mean making a third arm or giving someone, I'm talking about creating entirely new transhuman processes into the body, then none of these articles will impress me. Its just plain arrogant.
Its quite interesting that they can get sample tissue to differentiate. This has lots of uses, but its still a long way till we can see donor organs available. This will still be useful for the cultivation of single tissue grafts and such, but its a long way from creating an organ. Just because you can differentiate to one type of tissue doesn't mean you can create liver for example. Still, this is great advancement in genetics and is one step closer to us understanding how all this stuff works. The next ten years are going to be amazing for biotech.
Maybe its just me, but this seems a little too close to console gaming. I mean if I wanted to reboot my computer to play a game, what would really be the point of having computer games over console games. I kind of like the fact that if I need to I can stop my game and do other things. Keep my ICQ going check email. This only seems useful if you were really going to pick apart the OS and get some specialized processing power. But this is out of scope with most game designers as it would take too many resources to make it viable. Just my opinion
I'm mixed about this whole debate. I, unfortunately, left college to pursue a career. My mistake I think, but I do pretty well without it. As a matter of fact, there are very few people in our company, a small consulting company, that do actually have a degree. Even one of the principles does not have a degree. Now what I've seen are several dynamics in the way things go. We have 2 or 3 programmers, right out of college. I would say that their coding is below par. But I can't say mine was any better 3 years ago when I started coding. However, our Vice President, has a degree in Math, and it shows. He's an extremely hard working individual that has trouble communicating sometimes. Mainly because of a large amount terms that he uses that he assumes others have. Now, of the top five people consulting, I think 2 have degrees. One of which has been in the industry for at least 10 years and is a wonderful coder. The nongraduates though seem to have an essence, a certain unnamed something that puts them ahead of the rest. I know with me, its a thirst that went unrecognized for several years. I find myself pouring through textbooks day after day just to get what I think I need to know. Its an odd existence. However, while I might not be stuck, I am unwilling to stop my work to go back to college just yet. I have a lot of opportunity ahead of me. Now with that said, what I think I will be missing most about college is the chance to ask questions and to understand things out of my industry. For instance, I am currently reading David Copperfield. I have about a million questions that I've been wondering about since picking up the book, but without a teacher or even fellow classmates to discuss it with, where does that leave. Probably wrong in my assumptions. The point of all this is that, it seems to me that college does not make the man, the man makes the man. But college provides a chance for you to make yourself so much more. Hopefully, sometime soon I will be able to go back to school. Maybe find a better more challenging school that will take me. Here's hoping.
Sorry, your right, its not an engine. Its an API. But the idea is still the same. From reading some of the previous posts though, DirectX is at a much higher level than OpenGL or any other free renderer out there and the gaps are just getting bigger and bigger as more features become available. So it still costs more to write the code to make the same program just to add a little more market share. Look, I'm a fairly young consultant with only a few years of professional coding under my belt. I admit I know very little about the actual implementation of DirectX I looked at it a little bit back when it was the Games SDK. Regardless of that fact, I think the same principles I stated earlier apply even if I missed the wording slightly.
Three words: Time to market. Sure, you can write your own proprietary engine to do exactly what you want it to do. And it will only take you three times as long to bring that to market. Thats three times the salary, three times the rent, three times all expenses for the same profit only to have the chance to get that other 15% of the market. The math says no. And I don't really believe that a multiplier of 3 is too much, but I'm not a games programmer. But whenever I'm given the choice of say writing an object oriented wrapper for a database or just using something that already exists, I'm going to to just use that which already exists. Sure we could write our own database, but the cost associated with writing a proprietary database is phenomenal when I can pay someone else who has already developed, tested, and put into actual use their own database. Now instead of having 30 developers and 2 years to get this application done, we only need 5 developers and 2 months. Thats serious numbers.
Truthfully it is for this very reason that Microsoft has spent so much time creating the DirectX API. You will notice that despite everything else, Microsoft loves developers. Of course they do. Why do you think windows has an 85% Market Share. They have poured all these man hours into creating a really top notch API and give it away for free for what reason? Market Share. How many people honestly continue to have a windows PC at home for the express purpose of running games. I know I do. If I had everquest on Linux, I wouldn't need windows, thats for sure. Honestly, if you want to see these games continue to come out for linux and mac, do something about it. Lets see a better API, please.
I think they know what they are doing. They are still the defacto role-playing standard. When people think of role-playing games, they usually think of D&D first. Contrary to popular belief, tsr cracked down on any material that tried to modify the rules at all. Anyone remember Judges Guild(I don't know much about these guys, but one of my fellow gamers had told me that they had some really good products that modified AD&D, but we're forced off the shelves by T$R)? This license will allow for people to take the core D&D rules and make something which they prefer. House rules suddenly become documented and distributed freely on the net. Our gaming group found combat particularly weak, so we have spent the last 3 or 4 years working out getting the AD&D rules for Magic and Combat mixed with much the ICE combat and magic rules. Which gives a robust role-playing atmosphere and a with the added benefit of really detailed combat. What this means to WOTC is that anyone who wants to publish something that modifies and improves they're product gives them even more market share, and it allows those who actually can print good materials the ability to go with a name like TSR. This will also allow some type of middleware. Say your have rules-x gaming, but you can't seem to get it off the ground. After all, who's ever heard of rules-x gaming. So you take some of your rules and modify them slightly and put out some add-ons for AD&D. Suddenly you have a new group of gamers that are looking at your product. I don't think we need to be so cynical about this. Yeah, they are capitalizing on the buzzword. So what. Its good all around. Let it be. I think we will see a lot of really good stuff come out of this.
I don't believe Neverwinter will be open sourced, but from the sounds of it, it will be quite configurable. They are talking a lot about portals and local character vaults that would allow a certain network of individuals to all play in the same persistent world and a gm could input any amount of plot they wanted. Sounds pretty good to me. There isn't much available on the scripting language yet. Just a few snippits of code here and there from the programmers, but what I've seen is pretty impressive. NWScript seems like it will be fairly robust allowing us to modify gameplay. But to what extent, we won't know until the language reference is released, which probably won't be anytime in the very near future.