Personally I think the effects here are do in a large part to the Feminzais - the so called women's movement. Note that fields like CS, IT, are not on the list of endeavors pushed by the Feminists for "equality of women". Instead they focus on getting women to be in control of businesses and political organizations. The women of the US have been done a terrible disservice by the Feminists. This is evidenced in the article:
This occurred to me too. Feminism in America tends to really concentrate on getting women into traditional power positions rather than trying to get them actual equality. The idea is to take over the hierarchy and make it theirs, or at least force it to be shared. I think this is flawed thinking. It doesn't create true equality of opportunity, and breeds a lot of resentment which further undermines efforts to create true equality of opportunity.
I find it amusing that your comment was moderated as flamebait. A very politically unpopular thing to say no matter what the evidence says.
I don't think that's it though. Yes, studies show that there are fewer outliers both positive and negative among women. But that difference is not so pronounced that it should cause almost no women to enter IT. Most programmers are above average in intelligence, but not _that_ far above average. I would say only one or two standard deviations, and there's plenty of room there for lots of women programmers. It also doesn't explain away Asian women programmers that well.
I've been on the interviewer side of the table more than once when a woman showed up to be interviewed. In general, the reaction (not in front of her of course) has been to be flabbergasted and pleased that we might actually end up with a girl who was working in the tech side of the business.
We did apply the same standards of hiring both (yes, I said both, it only happened twice, and both times the girl was Asian) times and she made it. Once just scraping by (she didn't care a lot about quality and took criticism very poorly, but she did know how to program fairly well) and the other doing pretty well.
I find this rather depressing. When I worked at Amazon, the only women who were ever hired as programmers were from Asia (most from India). There is some strong cultural force at work here that discourages women from becoming programmers.
I wish I understand what it is that convinces US born women to not become programmers. I don't think it's a harassment issue. That's not something I've especially noticed. Though, since I'm a guy, it's possible it just passed me by.
But, I haven't noticed the bias you speak of. As I said, the places where I've been an interviewer people were really happy that a woman was interviewing. And it wasn't because they wanted to hit on her either.:-)
I believe the percentage of people who own a gun is much, much higher in Switzerland (approaching 100%). The country also happens to be one of the most peaceful on Earth. I don't think you can draw a more meaningful correlation between rates of gun ownership and gun violence than you can between media violence and real violence.
You deserved the down-moderation you got since I saw this comment. Slashdot denizens are not a homogeneous group. It is intellectually lazy to classify them all together in the manner you did. I would presume that the people you were castigating for throwing stones aren't the ones living in glass houses unless you can site specific examples to the contrary.
How in the heck is my parent post 'off-topic'? That makes no sense whatsoever unless someone has it in for anybody who suggests that bandwidth caps are in the least a good idea.
And I intend to have explicit usage caps. You will get full bandwidth until you get to about half the cap value, then you will be rate limited so you can no longer go over the cap. And this will be in the service agreement. And it would only extend to traffic going to one of the lines outside the ISP.
I would also like to run applications that allowed traffic to stay inside the ISP to help customers avoid the cap. If there are any programs that act as sort of a generic bittorrent trader so that most bittorrent traffic can be kepts inside the ISP, that would be great. Same with other filesharing programs.
It wouldn't be a matter of coming down on behavior that I thought was bad because anybody who engaged in it was obviously doing something else wrong. It would simply be a matter of preserving the quality of service for all the customers, not just the high-bandwidth users. I'm not the personal T3 connection for someone who's paying me $50/mo.
I hate Ubuntu. I file a bug report and get a tiny bit of activity on it in weeks or months. This has happened more than once. They never, ever even make the tiniest effort to backport a package to an older version of the distribution, even if the existing package has security holes. All in all I can't consider Ubuntu to be in the least bit a professional distribution.
If you're interested I can hunt down the bug report numbers on Launchpad so you can see just what kind of stupid runaround and non-answers show up from people who are trying to support the distribution.
I am sometimes frustrated by what RedHat chooses to fix or not fix, but at least someone generally responds to the bug report and says something about it fairly quickly. And if it's something really serious, someone almost always fixes it. The only thing I've been really frustrated with recently is when they left IPv6 router discovery (which basically breaks IPv6) broken in their release kernel for over a month. But that's not at all a common situation.
I think giving users Ubuntu would be a great disservice.
Well, I've never bought an iPod or a Bose product. I've bought a laptop from Apple, but I think I will stop doing that now. Now I know why prices for Bose and Apple products don't drop like they do for everything else.
In my opinion, instead of making Apple's practices even more legal, it should shift to trying to figure out a way to make them illegal while doing as little as possible to reduce any other freedom Apple has.
I didn't realize that competition among retailers was one of the big reasons you see price drops on consumer electronics stuff. But now that it's been pointed out it makes perfect sense. The product competes with itself to drive its own price down.
Yes, but I was talking about the client's interests, not ours. The client might decide she's stupid not to settle out-of-court for a sum like that. I wouldn't blame her.
She's a fool to go for an out-of-court settlement now. Not unless RIAA gives her some huge sum of money (> her attorney fees + $100000), and that's a whole different kind of precedent.
Sadly, you may be right. But I'm hoping that a few will implement it and that the lure of the shiny new technology plus the actual advantage of not having to create an account there to participate will convince people to move. There is marginally better utility for users in a site that uses OpenID, so I'm hopeful.
How are Myspace and OpenID remotely related? A decentralized social network would be nifty, but OpenID definitely isn't one. In the mean time, better social networks offer open APIs that let you access their friend data.
Because you could add someone as a MySpace friend without them having to have a MySpace account if MySpace implemented OpenID. If you just gave a list of OpenID URLs that had friend-type permission for your MySpace account and assigned them your own names then I think people would feel much less compelled to build a home on MySpace just so they could interact with a friend who had a home there.
Distributed identity and distributed social networking are strongly linked concepts. One enables the other.
Which is all the more reason to make sure that no software ever has a really huge user base. It's bad for everybody.
Right now, one major thing that keeps Myspace's user base so incredibly high is the lack of a widely adopted technology like OpenID. Many people get Myspace accounts because they're forced into it in order to communicate reasonably with a friend, and then decide "Oh, what the heck." and build content of their own there as well. I know that's why I have a MySpace account (and, strangely enough, Omnifarious on MySpace isn't me).
One sentence is talking about orbital weapons for ground targets. The other is talking about orbital weapons vs. other orbital targets. Those are very different scenarios and it makes perfect sense that orbital weapons would be a poor choice for some and a good choice for others.
I disagree. I know of at least two non-technical users who've moved to Linux with few problems. The vast majority of their problems would've gone away completely had there been full hardware support for all of their hardware. The only really ticklish thing was getting crossover office and Word for one person who absolutely couldn't use anything else because she had specific detailed instructions about what buttons to press and menu items to select in order to achieve certain effects in Word.
The other's main complaint is that he can't play a really old game (Redneck Rampage) on his computer anymore, but otherwise he really likes it and plays a lot of the Open Source games out there. He's especially pleased with the new version of Fedora because he can easily find and install packages himself.
The only time I intervene is to upgrade to a whole new version of the OS. And I bet they could do that for themselves too if I led them through it. I set them up with LVM and a separate/home so they can easily upgrade without trashing their data.
I don't think that I have to choose. I don't think that lower production and reducing incoming disparity are inextricably linked.
In fact, I think that reducing income disparity in the US right now might result in a total increase in production. This is because I suspect as much as 80% (a number I have no support for, am pulling out of thin air and may be totally wrong about) of current profits for the top 5% of corporations represents money gained from them purposely creating inefficiency in the market that they can exploit.
But, to answer your question directly, despite me thinking that it's not actually relevant to the situation, I think there's a balance to be struck. I think there needs to be some checks to make sure the rising tide really is raising all the boats. I think some small sacrifice of growth rate is reasonable to make this happen. But I think that a major sacrifice of growth rate would be highly counterproductive.
But I repeat that I think that addressing the problem in the US currently might well result in an increase in the growth rate, not a decrease. I think many large corporations use their power to distort the free market to artificially favor themselves.
Which goes back to my question - would you rather have a shallow line with very high production (which you claim to be unhealthy) or would you want an economy with lower production, but with low income inequality? You just answered my question - you prefer the latter.
I fail to see how my example was a straw man argument.
You present a false dichotomy. It's quite possible for the line to be shallow (actually, I think it would be steep, not shallow) and still have high production. I agree that it isn't possible for the line to be flat (actually vertical I think) and have high production because that means that something very artificial is going on making the curve that shape.
Microsoft was small when it started. So was Walmart.
And you present two good examples of 'class mobility'. Though I'm not talking about corporations, I'm talking about individuals. I don't know that much about Walmart, but Microsoft was a case of someone coming from a lower-upper-class background and catapulting himself into the stratosphere.
Part of that happened through criminal monopolistic practices though, so I don't know how good an example that is, especially since the system was unable to punish him effectively because he managed to use the power and influence his money gave him to affect it.
But regardless, I don't think we're at the stage I'm most worried about yet. But I think we're heading there, so you citing counterexamples from the recent past only mildly helps your argument. I think, for example, that it was actually a really bad sign that Microsoft was able to buy their way out of being effectively punished for their criminal behavior.
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You want more women software engineers just so you can date them? Perhaps that's the reason why there aren't so many.
This occurred to me too. Feminism in America tends to really concentrate on getting women into traditional power positions rather than trying to get them actual equality. The idea is to take over the hierarchy and make it theirs, or at least force it to be shared. I think this is flawed thinking. It doesn't create true equality of opportunity, and breeds a lot of resentment which further undermines efforts to create true equality of opportunity.
I find it amusing that your comment was moderated as flamebait. A very politically unpopular thing to say no matter what the evidence says.
I don't think that's it though. Yes, studies show that there are fewer outliers both positive and negative among women. But that difference is not so pronounced that it should cause almost no women to enter IT. Most programmers are above average in intelligence, but not _that_ far above average. I would say only one or two standard deviations, and there's plenty of room there for lots of women programmers. It also doesn't explain away Asian women programmers that well.
I've been on the interviewer side of the table more than once when a woman showed up to be interviewed. In general, the reaction (not in front of her of course) has been to be flabbergasted and pleased that we might actually end up with a girl who was working in the tech side of the business.
We did apply the same standards of hiring both (yes, I said both, it only happened twice, and both times the girl was Asian) times and she made it. Once just scraping by (she didn't care a lot about quality and took criticism very poorly, but she did know how to program fairly well) and the other doing pretty well.
I find this rather depressing. When I worked at Amazon, the only women who were ever hired as programmers were from Asia (most from India). There is some strong cultural force at work here that discourages women from becoming programmers.
I wish I understand what it is that convinces US born women to not become programmers. I don't think it's a harassment issue. That's not something I've especially noticed. Though, since I'm a guy, it's possible it just passed me by.
But, I haven't noticed the bias you speak of. As I said, the places where I've been an interviewer people were really happy that a woman was interviewing. And it wasn't because they wanted to hit on her either. :-)
I believe the percentage of people who own a gun is much, much higher in Switzerland (approaching 100%). The country also happens to be one of the most peaceful on Earth. I don't think you can draw a more meaningful correlation between rates of gun ownership and gun violence than you can between media violence and real violence.
You deserved the down-moderation you got since I saw this comment. Slashdot denizens are not a homogeneous group. It is intellectually lazy to classify them all together in the manner you did. I would presume that the people you were castigating for throwing stones aren't the ones living in glass houses unless you can site specific examples to the contrary.
How in the heck is my parent post 'off-topic'? That makes no sense whatsoever unless someone has it in for anybody who suggests that bandwidth caps are in the least a good idea.
Well, that's why I would only call it sort of an ISP. *big grin* I wouldn't be renting anything but the T3 or whatever from the telco. :-)
On a side note, I have no idea why my post was rated off-topic.
And I intend to have explicit usage caps. You will get full bandwidth until you get to about half the cap value, then you will be rate limited so you can no longer go over the cap. And this will be in the service agreement. And it would only extend to traffic going to one of the lines outside the ISP.
I would also like to run applications that allowed traffic to stay inside the ISP to help customers avoid the cap. If there are any programs that act as sort of a generic bittorrent trader so that most bittorrent traffic can be kepts inside the ISP, that would be great. Same with other filesharing programs.
It wouldn't be a matter of coming down on behavior that I thought was bad because anybody who engaged in it was obviously doing something else wrong. It would simply be a matter of preserving the quality of service for all the customers, not just the high-bandwidth users. I'm not the personal T3 connection for someone who's paying me $50/mo.
To some extent the bash history makes things a little more like that. You just up-arrow back to the command you want.
I hate Ubuntu. I file a bug report and get a tiny bit of activity on it in weeks or months. This has happened more than once. They never, ever even make the tiniest effort to backport a package to an older version of the distribution, even if the existing package has security holes. All in all I can't consider Ubuntu to be in the least bit a professional distribution.
If you're interested I can hunt down the bug report numbers on Launchpad so you can see just what kind of stupid runaround and non-answers show up from people who are trying to support the distribution.
I am sometimes frustrated by what RedHat chooses to fix or not fix, but at least someone generally responds to the bug report and says something about it fairly quickly. And if it's something really serious, someone almost always fixes it. The only thing I've been really frustrated with recently is when they left IPv6 router discovery (which basically breaks IPv6) broken in their release kernel for over a month. But that's not at all a common situation.
I think giving users Ubuntu would be a great disservice.
Well, I've never bought an iPod or a Bose product. I've bought a laptop from Apple, but I think I will stop doing that now. Now I know why prices for Bose and Apple products don't drop like they do for everything else.
In my opinion, instead of making Apple's practices even more legal, it should shift to trying to figure out a way to make them illegal while doing as little as possible to reduce any other freedom Apple has.
I didn't realize that competition among retailers was one of the big reasons you see price drops on consumer electronics stuff. But now that it's been pointed out it makes perfect sense. The product competes with itself to drive its own price down.
I suppose you're right. I'm thinking too small. :-)
Yes, but I was talking about the client's interests, not ours. The client might decide she's stupid not to settle out-of-court for a sum like that. I wouldn't blame her.
Well, what's new is that google is doing it.
She's a fool to go for an out-of-court settlement now. Not unless RIAA gives her some huge sum of money (> her attorney fees + $100000), and that's a whole different kind of precedent.
Not if you're a marketer. As near as I can tell, marketers generally consider customers to be the enemy to be subdued.
Sadly, you may be right. But I'm hoping that a few will implement it and that the lure of the shiny new technology plus the actual advantage of not having to create an account there to participate will convince people to move. There is marginally better utility for users in a site that uses OpenID, so I'm hopeful.
Because you could add someone as a MySpace friend without them having to have a MySpace account if MySpace implemented OpenID. If you just gave a list of OpenID URLs that had friend-type permission for your MySpace account and assigned them your own names then I think people would feel much less compelled to build a home on MySpace just so they could interact with a friend who had a home there.
Distributed identity and distributed social networking are strongly linked concepts. One enables the other.
Which is all the more reason to make sure that no software ever has a really huge user base. It's bad for everybody.
Right now, one major thing that keeps Myspace's user base so incredibly high is the lack of a widely adopted technology like OpenID. Many people get Myspace accounts because they're forced into it in order to communicate reasonably with a friend, and then decide "Oh, what the heck." and build content of their own there as well. I know that's why I have a MySpace account (and, strangely enough, Omnifarious on MySpace isn't me).
Ahh, you're correct, and that is a contradiction.
One sentence is talking about orbital weapons for ground targets. The other is talking about orbital weapons vs. other orbital targets. Those are very different scenarios and it makes perfect sense that orbital weapons would be a poor choice for some and a good choice for others.
I disagree. I know of at least two non-technical users who've moved to Linux with few problems. The vast majority of their problems would've gone away completely had there been full hardware support for all of their hardware. The only really ticklish thing was getting crossover office and Word for one person who absolutely couldn't use anything else because she had specific detailed instructions about what buttons to press and menu items to select in order to achieve certain effects in Word.
The other's main complaint is that he can't play a really old game (Redneck Rampage) on his computer anymore, but otherwise he really likes it and plays a lot of the Open Source games out there. He's especially pleased with the new version of Fedora because he can easily find and install packages himself.
The only time I intervene is to upgrade to a whole new version of the OS. And I bet they could do that for themselves too if I led them through it. I set them up with LVM and a separate /home so they can easily upgrade without trashing their data.
I don't think that I have to choose. I don't think that lower production and reducing incoming disparity are inextricably linked.
In fact, I think that reducing income disparity in the US right now might result in a total increase in production. This is because I suspect as much as 80% (a number I have no support for, am pulling out of thin air and may be totally wrong about) of current profits for the top 5% of corporations represents money gained from them purposely creating inefficiency in the market that they can exploit.
But, to answer your question directly, despite me thinking that it's not actually relevant to the situation, I think there's a balance to be struck. I think there needs to be some checks to make sure the rising tide really is raising all the boats. I think some small sacrifice of growth rate is reasonable to make this happen. But I think that a major sacrifice of growth rate would be highly counterproductive.
But I repeat that I think that addressing the problem in the US currently might well result in an increase in the growth rate, not a decrease. I think many large corporations use their power to distort the free market to artificially favor themselves.
You present a false dichotomy. It's quite possible for the line to be shallow (actually, I think it would be steep, not shallow) and still have high production. I agree that it isn't possible for the line to be flat (actually vertical I think) and have high production because that means that something very artificial is going on making the curve that shape.
And you present two good examples of 'class mobility'. Though I'm not talking about corporations, I'm talking about individuals. I don't know that much about Walmart, but Microsoft was a case of someone coming from a lower-upper-class background and catapulting himself into the stratosphere.
Part of that happened through criminal monopolistic practices though, so I don't know how good an example that is, especially since the system was unable to punish him effectively because he managed to use the power and influence his money gave him to affect it.
But regardless, I don't think we're at the stage I'm most worried about yet. But I think we're heading there, so you citing counterexamples from the recent past only mildly helps your argument. I think, for example, that it was actually a really bad sign that Microsoft was able to buy their way out of being effectively punished for their criminal behavior.