Hey, dude, it's pretty clear that you're angry because you don't think that you make the money you deserve. Part of that might be your dick-ish attitude. People pick up on that, you know, and maybe that's why you don't get promoted as much as you think you should. It's a vicious cycle.
Haha. You couldn't be more wrong. I probably have one of the most secure jobs in the company I work for, and I've found that clients who get my contact info tend to gravitate towards being in contact with me instead of their service rep. My paycheck is just fine, thank you.
If anything, the vicious circle I've found myself in is that often when co-workers get a request from the client that's any slight deviation from the usual, it tends to wind up in my inbox with no further insight into the problem the service rep and customer have been discussing over the phone, off the record, etc. If I ask questions, bad on me. If I just do it, no matter whether I get it right or not, I win, because the service rep won't bother to double-check my work and I've concluded that with only a few exceptions they don't even have the first idea of what the solution to the client's problem might look like.
More job security for me I suppose, not to mention that because I've learned to assume that the service rep, for whatever reason, is not mentally up to the exercise of applying the problem solving process, they're more likely to send more work my way. The other techs haven't quite learned that when somebody is presenting them with a problem and refusing to do much of any work themselves, that the last thing you want to do is to make them do work. It's just the culture: "as long as I have my bread and circuses and as long as I'm living more comfortably than brown people, it doesn't matter that I don't even have basic problem-solving skills."
So, what happens is I tend to get work that's not only in my bailiwick, but I get work that's in the other tech's bailiwicks because the reps want to deal with me instead of a tech who might tell them that they're wrong. I suppose my attitude is a tad arrogant, but it's necessary and it makes so many things so much easier.
Believe whatever you want to believe. I prefer to work with the world as it is around me instead of the way I'd like it to be. Oh, but doesn't that get under your skin that I might not be this pimply-faced anti-social jerk you're envisioning and that despite what I write here on./ that my services are very much desired and valued?
Umm... apparently if you mix your ingredients in the wrong order, you won't get a souffle. I didn't even know that until I watched a Nova documentary on Netflix about evolution. Apparently, cooking can be very technical, unless your definition of cooking is along the same lines as the women I work with: throw a bunch of meat, cheese, and maybe something green in a crock pot, wait four hours, and eat. Delicious, but not a souffle.
It sounds like you're engaging in the anthropomorphising fallacy I offered up to Greyfox a few minutes ago. It's a form of magical thinking. In order of the oven to emit a cryptic message because the spatula has been misplaced, it would require that either the oven, drawer, and spatula be somehow linked and programmed (maybe via RFID) or that there's something magical happening that's enabling the oven to care about where the spatula is.
Why is the computer so mean? Why can't it just tell me what's wrong instead of playing a game with me?
The real reason that women do not tend to become successful at programming, I think , is because they're told from day one that women are more social and more socially-oriented, and they're discouraged from developing logical thinking skills, often by older women (elementary teachers, daycare providers, even their own mothers). They watch sci-fi where computer interaction is social, and they watch computers deliver English words to them as though the computer understands English, and they conclude that programming must be a social problem. Pedantic, logical geeks can successfully communicate with computers, so maybe it just takes a certain kind of person to socially engage a computer and talk it into playing nice. So, a computer becomes something like their autistic son rather than a machine.
I'm not saying that women can't program. I have a female-model brain (whether I like it or not) and because I was encouraged to value logical problem solving at a young age over being social (because my ex-parents figured that there must have been some fundamentally male "stuff" about me because of my male reproductive system), I am now able to successfully get computers to do all kinds of things.
Let's face it. Women are more religious and more prone to social reasoning and magical thinking. It's just how older women brainwash girls to be. There's no other reason it has to be that way. When I tell a co-worker that "no, I can't make the computer do that because the program is closed-source" they hear "I'm in a bad mood today, and I don't like you, so I'm not going to cooperate." The logical and critical listening and thinking stills aren't there.
I don't know what to make of it, and it's become rather vexing to me as I get closer to gender transition. How can I possibly be a woman if women can't program, if it's even women who are the ones telling me that programming is a matter of body parts, that being a boy is the main quality I possess, rather than years of experience, education, and tinkering, that enables me to program? Furthermore, not to go off on too big of a rant, if I did have a female reproductive system, why would I have even bothered with all that "hard" stuff like math if, as a question of my personal survival and role in life, I could just have found a successful guy, got married, and had kids? Yet, as a man, how can I suggest to women who tell me they're baby machines and social enablers by virtue of their reproductive systems that they're wrong?
Well, I'd conjecture that there are two "midiclorians" in play.
The most common failure I've seen is when people who want to learn programming anthropomorphise the computer and approach programming in a religious manner, as though a computer can somehow understand English the way you or I can. When they get a syntax error, they view the computer as being a grammar nazi. When the program they've written fails to produce the result they wanted, they see the computer as some kind of adversarial lawyer who's found a loophole in their program and is refusing to play nice with them just to piss them off. I attribute this mode of thinking to watching too much Star Trek or other sci-fi where computers are able to comprehend and respond to verbal, natural-language queries without ever coming back with "I'm sorry, Dave, but I was unable to parse that. Syntax error occurred because I expected a different infection follow the word 'and.' Would you please try again?"
People who fit in that category often have poor grammar. Just something I've noticed. Humans are very tolerant of improper grammar and bad usage. Computers aren't, and they can't understand why, especially if computers are supposed to be so much more smart than humans.
The other failure I've seen is also another mode of magical thinking: failure to understand what's going on under the hood. These are people who sometimes can get jobs as programmers, but they just don't "get it." XML is the best example I can think of. I've noticed some things written back when XML was the next big thing almost seemed to start from the permise that by virtue of being well-formed that XML would somehow be able to parse itself. Somehow, XML would imbue a computer program with a deep understanding of what a book or a library was.
Another example I think fits with the latter mode of magical thinking rather than the former is the idea that a "hacker" can "steal" one's IP address, as though an IP address is mystical knowledge, sort of like certain mystical traditions that believe that if somebody knows one's "true" name, then that person will somehow gain power over them.
I suppose, in conclusion, the very idea of a "midichlorian" i.e. magical thinking is what causes many people to fail at learning how to program.
Allow me to elaborate. It's the culture, stupid. While the older generation has a tendency to proclaim that the younger generation is somehow in decline, I think that the objective truth that it may just be the case here is made a bit more real to TechCrunch's reaction to these numbers.
So, essentially, the OECD is saying once again, "Hey, America, you're still hopelessly behind." Now, we have TechCrunch taking a teenage attitude about it. Absolutely amazing.
What are these mystical "gainful market skills" anyway? How are those measured? I've met more than enough HR bunnies and management majors who can't reason their way out of a paper bag. They got their job because they're an alumnus at blablabla university and know so-and-so, not because they even understand basic principles of even keeping an accurate employee roster on file. But hey, solving their asinine problems makes me money, so why am I complaining?
It's clear that the USA is running on little more than momentum anymore. Maybe it's true that all you need is a few innovators, but for every Elon Musk who got lucky and made it big, there are 10 rent seekers who got lucky and made it big and 100 "innovators" who are of the same caliber as Musk but just didn't make it big. All that talent is wasted working meaningless jobs where the only innovation they may do is to innovate how to take a broken, unorganized spreadsheet of employee info and somehow feed it into a computer system for tracking absentees.
Where's a job where I can actually put my talents to some gainful use for the human species? They aren't there, because the market wants someone who can talk buzzwords, foresee "what if" scenarios while being wise enough not to confuse the client by discussing contingencies in a rational manner ahread of time, and somebody whose talents are wasted on reorganizing spreadsheets for arrogant, egotistical figureheads who only have their position because they knew somebody.
Most people call me the arrogant one, and I'm sure I'll get more than enough flames agreeing. For a long time, I worried that I actually was arrogant. What I learned though is that I'm not arrogant; I'm merely talented. It's the figureheads who are arrogant, who confuse their 6 figure income with having talent. Instead, what I've learned to do is to stroke egos. What a waste. But hey, it pays the bills.
Sorry, you don't get to redefine the word fundamentalism. Genesis doesn't say crap about an atmosphere or about astronomical bodies. Additionally, the fundamentals that most of you believe in often seem to relate to persecution of others. Black people are black because your god marked them as slaves. Women should be property because of something some chick did in a garden once. Homosexuals are completely unnatural, despite evidence that homosexuality exists in the supposedly "untainted" animal kingdom, and they're incapable of experiencing the same kind of love as heterosexuals, because, well, because when you cheat on your wife or husband you need some reason to feel good about yourself and better than somebody else.
Nice troll, though. I'm not holding my breath to meet one of these "fundamentalists" who will defer to observations about the real world instead of the fantasy world inside their head, though.
You say that, and then proceed to spend 9 paragraphs attempting to evaluate the ethics of "genital mutilation". Calling it "mutilation" is in itself an attempt to evaluate the ethics. Presumably, you call oral surgery and orthodontics "mutilation" also, right? Every single one of your arguments is just as valid when applied to the "oral mutilation" performed by dentists and orthodontists.
Well, I'm biased there. My mouth is intact. I have both my tonsils and all my wisdom teeth.
I'd sure hate to be that false positive. But after they deduce that because of my 31337 computer sk1llz I must have hacked slashdot at the time of a post that was supposed to prove I was innocent and the fact that because of HRT I doublt I could rape anybody and I get convicted of both rape and a computer crime because DNA "evidence" giving a false positive in unpossible, well..
I suppose when I got out, I might just rape a nice looking girl so that I at least committed the crime I did the time for. And I mean, come on. Of course I'd do it so I wouldn't get caught.
I guess problem is for the guy they accuse of doing my crime because I planted his DNA evidence. Don't ask how I collected the semen..... see my other posts for how I might do that.
Good luck with that. You must be from that parallel universe where laws are made out of words that have meanings. I'll bet marihuana is legal over there too and alcohol illegal, since alcohol fits the bill for a Schedule I substance, while marihuana misses on most if not all criteria.
Besides, who cares about heathen yellow people anyway? If they were half as virtuous as us, they'd stage a rebellion and overthrow the communist government and welcome God and Man Jesus and everything would be magically milk and honey. That's the way it works, you know. Anybody who's going to let some damned technicality get in the way of me and my iBling is a no good Godless heathen and deserves to be put to work in that factory. Maybe it'll teach them some character.
Please note that I am not attempt to evaluate the ethics of FGM (or any genital mutilation) or to make a moral assessment of the situation. Please note that in my other comments I have attempted to present the ethical idea that men have the same right to intact bodies that women do.
Not all FGM is the same. With men, it's fairly simple and usually the only difference is age. For Jewish and USA-ian traditions, the foreskin is amputated at brith. For the African tradition depicted in Roots, the foreskin is amputated as part of a rite of passage into manhood.
Some female genital mutilation involves amputation of the clitoral hood. Other forms involve slicing the clitoris. Yet other forms involve amputation of the clitoris.
So far, we are still in the same territory as infant male genital mutilation. I believe that in most cases of infant genital mutilation (big exception for some forms of FGM I haven't touched yet) it's an issue of child abuse. It's well known that child abuse is an inter-generational issue. This is especially true for sexual abuse, which I believe infant genital mutilations are a form of.
It turns out that in traditions that practice clitoral hood amputation or clitoral slicing, the act is often performed by a matriarch figure who was herself mutilated as a child. She is merely keeping the tradition and passing the child abuse on to a new generation. In the case of the AAP, apparently we have mutilated men who have become doctors and are advocating passing on the tradition of male genital mutilation to a new generation.
Keep in mind that often male infants are circumcised without anesthesia as you had mentioned is often true of female genital mutilation procedures from clitoral slicing right up to sewing the vagina shut or amputating the labia.
In 2010, the AAP had attempted to put forth a protocol to satisfy certain religious requirements for clitoral slicing. There would be a form, and if correctly filled out, a female infant would be placed under local anesthesia and her clitoris would be "poked" with a pin to produce a drop of blood, thus satisfying the religious requirement. This is somewhere I need to be absolutely serious despite places others and I have suggested removing breast buds in infants to prevent breast cancer. Young girls every year are trafficked to 3rd world countries to have their clitorises sliced. This often results in infection necessitating complete amputation of the clitoris. The AAP was attempting to prevent those tragedies, but everybody lost their shit because somebody said FGM. So, infant females still face this problem.
The cases of labia amputation, sewing the vagina shut, and male circumcision as rite-of-passage are more unique in their ways. Labia amputation is something I've heard of but have not researched, so I can't say whether it's abuse or control motivated. The traditions that sew an infant's vagina shut until marriage are clearly motivated by control. These few traditions are the only ones in which the feminist narritive of male control ring true. Adult male circumcision presents its own interesting facets. Infant male genital mutilation involves forecefully separating the glans and foreskin, two organs that are not meant to be separated until about 12 to 18 months. It's similar to tearing a fingernail off.
In the case of the rite-of-passage circumcision depicted in Roots, it is a much less violent act than infant circumcision. The foreskin has already detached, and can be amputated with one swift motion. Additionally, the subject is consenting, something an infant never can do. Removing the foreskin from an infant is much more violent.
I think the best weapon against infant genital mutilation (female or male) is knowledge and the ethical argument of my body, my choice. It is not about a statistic here or there or about kinky sexual pleasure. I believe that if we approach the problem rationally and ethically, instead of exaggerating cases of female genital mutilation and downplaying cases of male genital mutilation, we will conclude that there is no ethically or medically valid reason to mutilate a helpless infant.
Some forms do, and some forms don't. The form of female genital mutilation that's the most like male ritual circumcision is removal of the clitoral hood. Then there is removal of the clitoris, of which the male equivalent would be chopping off the glans. In some cases of ritual male circumcision gone wrong, this is what happens. Traditions that remove the labia would be akin to removing the scrotum. Sometimes when a male genital mutilation goes horrendously wrong, that, along with what remains of the male genitalia is removed.
In one remarkable case, a nurse attempted to perform a circumcision with a laser cauterizer. It didn't go as expected. It melted most of the penis. So, this kid's future already ruined, the parents and doctor made a massive derp. After all, we know that gender is only socially constructed, right? Well, so, since they just melted the kid's dick off, they removed the rest of the tissue and raised him as a girl.
Unfortunately, it turns out that gender is not socially constructed. There were problems from day one. Long story short, after going through female puberty, growing breasts thanks to forced estrogen HRT, and finally having the accident revealed to him, years afterwards, unable to live as a man, either, he killed himself.
If this were a female "circumcision," even the clitoral pin-poke that the AAP attempted to create a protocol for in 2010, that story would have been all over the news. Instead, I only know about the case after doing extensive reading to educate myself about gender and genital mutilation.
Of course, there is no male equivalent of traditions that sew the vagina shut and leave most of the rest of the anatomy intact.
The common thread that both share is control and abuse. Male genital mutilation was proposed originally to prevent masturbation. Ironically, because of the pain I was left with due to insufficient skin to allow for an erection, I had to teach myself how to masturbate, because otherwise when I awoke in pain in the middle of the night, I would not be able to get back to sleep for up to 45 minutes sometimes. It was not pleasurable masturbation. I hated masturbation, but it was necessary to be able to get back to sleep and maybe delay the next episode of pain. It would be disingenuous for me to attempt to say that going through that experience while women's periods only put them in pain for a week with a 3 week break did not "do" things to me.
If I were a woman who had psychosexual problems due to a clitoral pin-prick, I would be a feminist poster girl warning about the horrors of Female Genital Mutilation and why we should revile the AAP for even trying to prevent infant girls from being trafficked to unsanity 3rd world countries to get their clitorises sliced. Instead, I am a mutilated man/mutilated trans woman. And when the AAP says that what happened to me was unpossible, NPR and others yawn and say that we'd better just lop off foreskins willy-nilly because men like me don't exist and years and years of pain due to an unnecessary surgery can be assigned a monetary value.
Please, let me pay $313. I have thousands in the bank. Anything to undo an adolescence spent in pain. Yet, that's the truly impossible thing.
-=-
Female genital mutilation in some traditions is a method of control. The sewed up vagina being the most extreme example of control-based female genital mutilation.
Yes, I know we've all been brainwashed to lose our shit at the mention of female genital mutilation. The sad fact, though, is that genital mutilation in both males and females is a form of child abuse in most cases, not a form of control. Child abuse is a problem that is passed from father to son and mother to daughter. In less severe traditions of female genital mutilation, it is often the role of the grandmother to either slice the clitoris or amputate the clitoral hood. And, as evinced by both the 2012 and 1986 AAP reports on male genital mutilation (contradicted by every other report
So, there are no men who are HIV positive AND circumcised, right? Oh, wait, no, there are. Also depending on how you interpret a study they did in Africa on the subject, circumcision may actually increase trasmission rate. You should read it. It's um, interesting, to say the least.
I homosexual, and I don't have AIDS or HIV. Somehow, I think the fact that I don't sleep around and don't cheat when I'm in a relationship has more to do with that than whether or not I have a foreskin.
It's nuclear powered, so I believe it's just enough fuel to maintain its current minimal levels of operation until 2020, after which it will be little more than a chunk of metal floating through space.
Probably, but to karma whore a bit, as Sagan writes in Pale Blue Dot (pp 124-125):
Accordingly, as each Voyager left Earth for the planets and the stars, it carried with it a golden phonograph record encased in a golden, mirrored jacket containing, among other things: greetings in 59 human languages, and one whale language; a 12-minute sound essay including a kiss, a baby's cry, and an EEG record of the meditations of a young woman in love; 116 encoded pictures, on our science, our civilization, and ourselves; and 90 minutes of the Earth's greatest hits—Eastern and Western, classical and folk, including a Navajo night chant, a Japanese shakuhachi piece, a Pygmy girl's initiation song, a Peruvian wedding song, a 3,000-year-old composition for the ch'in called "Flowering Streams," Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky, Louis Armstrong, Blind willie Johnson, and Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode."
Space is nearly empty. There is virtually no chance that one of the Voyagers will ever enter another solar system...
But being much more advanced scientists and engineers than we—otherwise they would never be able to find and retrieve the small, silent spacecraft in interstellar space—perhaps the aliens would have no difficulty understanding what is encoded on these golden records.
I wouldn't be so sure of that. I'll still stand in defense of my original doctor's intuition, only because there is so little data regarding the complications of foreskin amputation when done to infants and so little data regarding the neurological basis of gender.
So, my stance I suppose is a conflicted one. Again, it comes down to proving something in my heart. I could not imagine living, for all its risks (breast cancer in paticular and hypertension and potential loss of bone density), without estrogen.
I want to be able to express a purely ethical argument the same way the feminists present their argument against female genital mutilation. This is me, in my natural state. Conflicted between genders, yet who gives the right to amputate my body parts? What becomes of "my body, my choice?" What should I do, once a body part that's not even of the gender I wish to be (yet an analogue, and I've pondered writing transformation stories where the transformee becomes female only to miss her clitoral hood because the magic had no foreskin to work with) has been amputated, causing me unnecessary complications, so easily denied on the basis of dogma by people I thought I loved?
It's a complex question, and the complexities should not be relegated to the realm of superstition. As I mentioned in my letter to NPR, my ex-parents did not hede the word of the AAP (who so recently recommended amputation) in 1983 to keep me intact. And the problems of that failure have caused me to forgoe communication with the two people on this planet who gave me life. Their own failure may have caused them to be unable to pass the genetic information I carry on to another generation.
I guess what I'm saying is that it's a complex issue, and I can only wish, as you do, betelgueseian, that the same ethics that are applied to the biologies that incubate our young for 9 months, can be applied to the other sex.
Maybe if Dr. S- had been involved in the decision to amputate, as he was in the decision to inject me with testosterone to correct my short height. He veoted the idea of my ex-father's to inject me with testosterone to make me tall based on the evidence: the data is murky in rose colored glasses towards amputation or augmentation, contraindacative probably in reality---do not amputate, do not augment. In the decision to authorize my estrogen HRT, Dr. S- delivered a similar common-sense answer: if it works, let's continue it. Dr. S- believed in first, cause no harm.
Yet, I was mutilated my Dr. D, a one-off, irreversible act that affected me deeply.
DELETE FROM MyDamnedTripsTableWithGuids
WHERE DATEDIFF(hour, created_stamp, CURRENT_TIMESTAMP) > 24)
Am I doin it rite?
O I forgot, this is corporate America (FUCK YEAH!)
INSERT INTO MyWaitingToBeDataminedArchivedTrips (GUID, created_stamp, lat, lng, protocol_vendor, protocol_version, odometer, font_left_tire_pressure, front_right_tire_pressure, rear_left_tire_pressure, rear_right_tire_pressure) -- note: HR 84732XYZ prevents us from storing the VIN and various other diagnostic codes and *snort* identifiable info for more than 48 hours
SELECT * FROM MyDamnedTripsTableWithGuids
WHERE DATEDIFF(hour, created_stamp, CURRENT_TIMESTAMP) > 24
Ah, good. I was looking for a comment like this. The thing is that I started writing my own programs before I knew algebra. I was comfortable with the idea of a variable around the time I was memorizing my times tables. I think my early experiences with computer programming helped imensely in forming the kind of abstract thinking that was crucial for learning higher maths. What would have been really cool is if when I was 7 there had been somebody to explain to me what those strange functions that return odd decimals like sin, cos, and tan were, and what on earth "radians" were.
(Being 7 at the time, puzzling over the strange decimals without a clear answer and lacking the intuition to see if a pattern emerged in the output values of sin(x) as I gradually increased x, heading out to check out the fort and all the cool stuff that B- [a boy-type] and R- [a girl-type] had found often took a more firm grasp on my attention. And, being a boy in a religious family that would later careen into fundamentalism headfirst as the Jew plot to take over the government with the Y2K bug became ever more scriptually obvious, a boy who was scared to death of this god, a being who could hear my every thought and was just waiting to burn me alive for thinking something bad, burned and killed and erased from existence like those boys in ancient Egypt whose parents hadn't the foresight to acquire lamb's blood and paint it above their doors, I knew better than to ask my daddy what a sin function was for, and were cos and tan also works of the devil? Alas, the questions of a 7 year old mind, and the sad, sad realization a little over a score years later that for some people, the answer is "Yes, it's named sin, so cos and tan must be sins as well, and since you asked, you must be in league with the devil.")
I guess what I'm saying is that I think that learning computer programming before algebra made the whole exercise of learning algebra and even to some extent calculus and trig a kind of "oh, I should have thought of that" no-brainer. I remember that once they gave me this completely obtuse order-of-operations test and they were astounded that, having never been exposed to "transition math" (or pre-algebra), that I was able to properly evalue a Rube Goldberg mess of parentheses and multiplications-following-additions. They bumped me two years ahead in math because of that test (to be fair, they'd already identified me as an accelerated maths student in Elementary). That was all thanks to the experience of telling a computer, using parentheses and being able to take for granted that when I wrote Let X:= X + DX * SPEEDMUL what I meant was first, multiply DX by SPEEDMUL, then add X and store the result in X, exactly how to arrive at the number I wished to calculate (and how to get the spaceship's laser beam to deduct life from the final boss as a quaint side-effect).
Why? What's the point? A few more days per year isn't going to overturn an entire culture that eschews things like math and proper writing skills as stuff for dorks who never get laid.
Ditto. I'm actually looking forward to 8 based on how much nerd rage there is against it.
I've observed that the entire UI paradigm of having applications running in windows (be it my XFCE, KDE, Gnome 2, LXDE, or Windows 3.1 thru 7) is more than the average user can handle. Add to it MDIs and it can become a hopeless mess. Scroll panes within scroll panes within scroll panes. I'd use a tiling window manager myself, but I haven't found one that's just right (I switch to Ratpoison every now and then but always find myself putting xfce4-session back in my xinitrc sooner or later).
You know what? I'll commit another slashdot heresy. I actually like the ribbon. Seriously, I do. I tap alt and I'm in keyboard shortcut heaven. Here I used to use the mouse like a fool to create tables in Word. Now it's alt+n, t, and arrow for rows x columns. Boom. Done. Centering? alt+h, a, c. Boom. Done. I just haven't been able to figure out if there's a shortcut for changing to a level 1 or 2 heading style. At any rate, it's like emacs done right (this coming from a vimmer who uses Pentadactyl for Firefox).
The best part is I now no longer get panicked calls as you mentioned from co-workers who clicked something or pressed something (and they can never remember what it was they pressed) that removed some toolbar. The multiple toolbars pinned to some toolbar container paradigm is as broken as MDI and applications running in windows for user-friendliness.
Aa! Where's my mod points gone? Somebody mod informative. I do something similar with my windows. Works like a charm and I haven't missed not having AC (well, except last Memorial Day weekend, that was a bit much).
Maybe he's got or wants it hooked up to some kind of home automation system. We got a new client at work the other week who sells a home automation system you can control from IOS or Android devices. Not sure how you'd control a fan, though. Maybe there's a replacement knob assembly that operates over 802.11g.
In the long term -- "long" that makes the current age of the universe look like an eye-blink and protons seem unstable -- the CMB will be redshifted away until even supermassive black holes begin losing mass.
You are correct, Mr. Coward! I wonder what on earth their 90% reduction was, then. All UTI rates, mutilated or not are under 3%. Guess that's what happens when I let my emotions run amok. I miss the really interesting questions.
Let's do a switcheroo here. The first mistake you're making is letting your knee jerk and equating a sterile clitoral pin-prick (which, yes, should not happen in an idea world) with clitoral or clitoral hood amputation. So here we go.
Then I watch how people react to allowing US hospitals to administer "methadone" to methamphetamine addicts which fulfills their addiction. There is no danger to life and property from amateur meth labs. Read my other comments, and I would gladly trade 10 years of PMITA federal prison where I learned all the tricks of the drug trafficking trade for some methadone. People lose their shit. Really, I had a comment removed from NPR.org just for mentioning that hospitals (and the AAP) had considered creating a protocol for this methadone.
If I can be 100% serious for a moment, think about it. Bros every year are put in PMITA federal prison where they become hardened criminals and recividists when they're really victims of a substance addiction. US hospitals are offering to do something that will be done anyway in a less severe, much more sterile and theraputic manner. And people still lose their shit. So, the bros continue to get sent to PMITA prisons and continue to become hardened criminals, resulting in increasing drug trade that only profits Mexican cartel lords. Have you seen Juarez lately? BUT OMG METH BRAIN LEAKS OUT EAR. But adderoll, ok, that's cool.
I probably should have used marijuana or cocaine for a more sympathtic case, but you're probably ignorant of the nuances of female genital mutilation.
Often times, the mother herself has been mutilated. She has the same problem that circumcised American men face: why did this happen to me?
Nobody wants to really wants to believe that their body has been violated for no good reason. It could drive one insane. One of my best friends (who is also intact) has told me to my face that I'm being an idiot for paying this much attention to the issue of male genital mutilation. He might have something. It's because my mind is allergic to cognative dissonance. I've observed (and I've sure other slashdotters have as well) that the typical mind is quite welcoming to cognative dissonance.
I'm reading Pale Blue Dot right now (yeah, I know, what took me so long). Most people are reading some potboiler crap or some work of religious masturbation reassuring them that their god really does exist and really will burn heathans like me with fire... soon...
My point is, that for victims of both male and female infant genital mutilation, there is a strong urge to rationalize it, somewhat similar to how a drug addict rationalizes his behavior. Then, once rationalized with fabulous evidence extolling its virtues, it would be unethical and immoral to not give one's son or daughter these virtues.
So, the mutilated becomes the mutilator. To reiterate, child abuse is often a generational issue. There are very few cases where the feminists are right about it being a matter male dominance. In most cases, it's simply a matter of passing down an ages old tradition of child abuse.
I believe that the solution in any case (including meth) is education and treatment with mitigational measures along the way as necessary.
Female genital mutilation, I'm confident will be eradicated from the world, and good riddance. My concern is that fighting male genital mutilation is an uphill battle. I would be so bold as to say that male genital mutilation, the involuntary nature of erections, the necessity of the now missing foreskin for allowing an erection to take place properly, and the array of possible complications is so traumatic that it compares only to the most extreme forms of female genital mutilation. I'm afriad we really are fighting the patriarchy, and feminism is lending us no aid or comfort.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, dude, it's pretty clear that you're angry because you don't think that you make the money you deserve. Part of that might be your dick-ish attitude. People pick up on that, you know, and maybe that's why you don't get promoted as much as you think you should. It's a vicious cycle.
Haha. You couldn't be more wrong. I probably have one of the most secure jobs in the company I work for, and I've found that clients who get my contact info tend to gravitate towards being in contact with me instead of their service rep. My paycheck is just fine, thank you.
If anything, the vicious circle I've found myself in is that often when co-workers get a request from the client that's any slight deviation from the usual, it tends to wind up in my inbox with no further insight into the problem the service rep and customer have been discussing over the phone, off the record, etc. If I ask questions, bad on me. If I just do it, no matter whether I get it right or not, I win, because the service rep won't bother to double-check my work and I've concluded that with only a few exceptions they don't even have the first idea of what the solution to the client's problem might look like.
More job security for me I suppose, not to mention that because I've learned to assume that the service rep, for whatever reason, is not mentally up to the exercise of applying the problem solving process, they're more likely to send more work my way. The other techs haven't quite learned that when somebody is presenting them with a problem and refusing to do much of any work themselves, that the last thing you want to do is to make them do work. It's just the culture: "as long as I have my bread and circuses and as long as I'm living more comfortably than brown people, it doesn't matter that I don't even have basic problem-solving skills."
So, what happens is I tend to get work that's not only in my bailiwick, but I get work that's in the other tech's bailiwicks because the reps want to deal with me instead of a tech who might tell them that they're wrong. I suppose my attitude is a tad arrogant, but it's necessary and it makes so many things so much easier.
Believe whatever you want to believe. I prefer to work with the world as it is around me instead of the way I'd like it to be. Oh, but doesn't that get under your skin that I might not be this pimply-faced anti-social jerk you're envisioning and that despite what I write here on ./ that my services are very much desired and valued?
Umm... apparently if you mix your ingredients in the wrong order, you won't get a souffle. I didn't even know that until I watched a Nova documentary on Netflix about evolution. Apparently, cooking can be very technical, unless your definition of cooking is along the same lines as the women I work with: throw a bunch of meat, cheese, and maybe something green in a crock pot, wait four hours, and eat. Delicious, but not a souffle.
It sounds like you're engaging in the anthropomorphising fallacy I offered up to Greyfox a few minutes ago. It's a form of magical thinking. In order of the oven to emit a cryptic message because the spatula has been misplaced, it would require that either the oven, drawer, and spatula be somehow linked and programmed (maybe via RFID) or that there's something magical happening that's enabling the oven to care about where the spatula is.
Why is the computer so mean? Why can't it just tell me what's wrong instead of playing a game with me?
The real reason that women do not tend to become successful at programming, I think , is because they're told from day one that women are more social and more socially-oriented, and they're discouraged from developing logical thinking skills, often by older women (elementary teachers, daycare providers, even their own mothers). They watch sci-fi where computer interaction is social, and they watch computers deliver English words to them as though the computer understands English, and they conclude that programming must be a social problem. Pedantic, logical geeks can successfully communicate with computers, so maybe it just takes a certain kind of person to socially engage a computer and talk it into playing nice. So, a computer becomes something like their autistic son rather than a machine.
I'm not saying that women can't program. I have a female-model brain (whether I like it or not) and because I was encouraged to value logical problem solving at a young age over being social (because my ex-parents figured that there must have been some fundamentally male "stuff" about me because of my male reproductive system), I am now able to successfully get computers to do all kinds of things.
Let's face it. Women are more religious and more prone to social reasoning and magical thinking. It's just how older women brainwash girls to be. There's no other reason it has to be that way. When I tell a co-worker that "no, I can't make the computer do that because the program is closed-source" they hear "I'm in a bad mood today, and I don't like you, so I'm not going to cooperate." The logical and critical listening and thinking stills aren't there.
I don't know what to make of it, and it's become rather vexing to me as I get closer to gender transition. How can I possibly be a woman if women can't program, if it's even women who are the ones telling me that programming is a matter of body parts, that being a boy is the main quality I possess, rather than years of experience, education, and tinkering, that enables me to program? Furthermore, not to go off on too big of a rant, if I did have a female reproductive system, why would I have even bothered with all that "hard" stuff like math if, as a question of my personal survival and role in life, I could just have found a successful guy, got married, and had kids? Yet, as a man, how can I suggest to women who tell me they're baby machines and social enablers by virtue of their reproductive systems that they're wrong?
Who knows... anyway. I digress.
Well, I'd conjecture that there are two "midiclorians" in play.
The most common failure I've seen is when people who want to learn programming anthropomorphise the computer and approach programming in a religious manner, as though a computer can somehow understand English the way you or I can. When they get a syntax error, they view the computer as being a grammar nazi. When the program they've written fails to produce the result they wanted, they see the computer as some kind of adversarial lawyer who's found a loophole in their program and is refusing to play nice with them just to piss them off. I attribute this mode of thinking to watching too much Star Trek or other sci-fi where computers are able to comprehend and respond to verbal, natural-language queries without ever coming back with "I'm sorry, Dave, but I was unable to parse that. Syntax error occurred because I expected a different infection follow the word 'and.' Would you please try again?"
People who fit in that category often have poor grammar. Just something I've noticed. Humans are very tolerant of improper grammar and bad usage. Computers aren't, and they can't understand why, especially if computers are supposed to be so much more smart than humans.
The other failure I've seen is also another mode of magical thinking: failure to understand what's going on under the hood. These are people who sometimes can get jobs as programmers, but they just don't "get it." XML is the best example I can think of. I've noticed some things written back when XML was the next big thing almost seemed to start from the permise that by virtue of being well-formed that XML would somehow be able to parse itself. Somehow, XML would imbue a computer program with a deep understanding of what a book or a library was.
Another example I think fits with the latter mode of magical thinking rather than the former is the idea that a "hacker" can "steal" one's IP address, as though an IP address is mystical knowledge, sort of like certain mystical traditions that believe that if somebody knows one's "true" name, then that person will somehow gain power over them.
I suppose, in conclusion, the very idea of a "midichlorian" i.e. magical thinking is what causes many people to fail at learning how to program.
lol
Allow me to elaborate. It's the culture, stupid. While the older generation has a tendency to proclaim that the younger generation is somehow in decline, I think that the objective truth that it may just be the case here is made a bit more real to TechCrunch's reaction to these numbers.
So, essentially, the OECD is saying once again, "Hey, America, you're still hopelessly behind." Now, we have TechCrunch taking a teenage attitude about it. Absolutely amazing.
What are these mystical "gainful market skills" anyway? How are those measured? I've met more than enough HR bunnies and management majors who can't reason their way out of a paper bag. They got their job because they're an alumnus at blablabla university and know so-and-so, not because they even understand basic principles of even keeping an accurate employee roster on file. But hey, solving their asinine problems makes me money, so why am I complaining?
It's clear that the USA is running on little more than momentum anymore. Maybe it's true that all you need is a few innovators, but for every Elon Musk who got lucky and made it big, there are 10 rent seekers who got lucky and made it big and 100 "innovators" who are of the same caliber as Musk but just didn't make it big. All that talent is wasted working meaningless jobs where the only innovation they may do is to innovate how to take a broken, unorganized spreadsheet of employee info and somehow feed it into a computer system for tracking absentees.
Where's a job where I can actually put my talents to some gainful use for the human species? They aren't there, because the market wants someone who can talk buzzwords, foresee "what if" scenarios while being wise enough not to confuse the client by discussing contingencies in a rational manner ahread of time, and somebody whose talents are wasted on reorganizing spreadsheets for arrogant, egotistical figureheads who only have their position because they knew somebody.
Most people call me the arrogant one, and I'm sure I'll get more than enough flames agreeing. For a long time, I worried that I actually was arrogant. What I learned though is that I'm not arrogant; I'm merely talented. It's the figureheads who are arrogant, who confuse their 6 figure income with having talent. Instead, what I've learned to do is to stroke egos. What a waste. But hey, it pays the bills.
Fine. I'll bite, just because you were modded up.
Sorry, you don't get to redefine the word fundamentalism. Genesis doesn't say crap about an atmosphere or about astronomical bodies. Additionally, the fundamentals that most of you believe in often seem to relate to persecution of others. Black people are black because your god marked them as slaves. Women should be property because of something some chick did in a garden once. Homosexuals are completely unnatural, despite evidence that homosexuality exists in the supposedly "untainted" animal kingdom, and they're incapable of experiencing the same kind of love as heterosexuals, because, well, because when you cheat on your wife or husband you need some reason to feel good about yourself and better than somebody else.
Nice troll, though. I'm not holding my breath to meet one of these "fundamentalists" who will defer to observations about the real world instead of the fantasy world inside their head, though.
You say that, and then proceed to spend 9 paragraphs attempting to evaluate the ethics of "genital mutilation". Calling it "mutilation" is in itself an attempt to evaluate the ethics. Presumably, you call oral surgery and orthodontics "mutilation" also, right? Every single one of your arguments is just as valid when applied to the "oral mutilation" performed by dentists and orthodontists.
Well, I'm biased there. My mouth is intact. I have both my tonsils and all my wisdom teeth.
I'd sure hate to be that false positive. But after they deduce that because of my 31337 computer sk1llz I must have hacked slashdot at the time of a post that was supposed to prove I was innocent and the fact that because of HRT I doublt I could rape anybody and I get convicted of both rape and a computer crime because DNA "evidence" giving a false positive in unpossible, well..
I suppose when I got out, I might just rape a nice looking girl so that I at least committed the crime I did the time for. And I mean, come on. Of course I'd do it so I wouldn't get caught.
I guess problem is for the guy they accuse of doing my crime because I planted his DNA evidence. Don't ask how I collected the semen..... see my other posts for how I might do that.
Interesting.
Good luck with that. You must be from that parallel universe where laws are made out of words that have meanings. I'll bet marihuana is legal over there too and alcohol illegal, since alcohol fits the bill for a Schedule I substance, while marihuana misses on most if not all criteria.
Besides, who cares about heathen yellow people anyway? If they were half as virtuous as us, they'd stage a rebellion and overthrow the communist government and welcome God and Man Jesus and everything would be magically milk and honey. That's the way it works, you know. Anybody who's going to let some damned technicality get in the way of me and my iBling is a no good Godless heathen and deserves to be put to work in that factory. Maybe it'll teach them some character.
Please note that I am not attempt to evaluate the ethics of FGM (or any genital mutilation) or to make a moral assessment of the situation. Please note that in my other comments I have attempted to present the ethical idea that men have the same right to intact bodies that women do.
Not all FGM is the same. With men, it's fairly simple and usually the only difference is age. For Jewish and USA-ian traditions, the foreskin is amputated at brith. For the African tradition depicted in Roots, the foreskin is amputated as part of a rite of passage into manhood.
Some female genital mutilation involves amputation of the clitoral hood. Other forms involve slicing the clitoris. Yet other forms involve amputation of the clitoris.
So far, we are still in the same territory as infant male genital mutilation. I believe that in most cases of infant genital mutilation (big exception for some forms of FGM I haven't touched yet) it's an issue of child abuse. It's well known that child abuse is an inter-generational issue. This is especially true for sexual abuse, which I believe infant genital mutilations are a form of.
It turns out that in traditions that practice clitoral hood amputation or clitoral slicing, the act is often performed by a matriarch figure who was herself mutilated as a child. She is merely keeping the tradition and passing the child abuse on to a new generation. In the case of the AAP, apparently we have mutilated men who have become doctors and are advocating passing on the tradition of male genital mutilation to a new generation.
Keep in mind that often male infants are circumcised without anesthesia as you had mentioned is often true of female genital mutilation procedures from clitoral slicing right up to sewing the vagina shut or amputating the labia.
In 2010, the AAP had attempted to put forth a protocol to satisfy certain religious requirements for clitoral slicing. There would be a form, and if correctly filled out, a female infant would be placed under local anesthesia and her clitoris would be "poked" with a pin to produce a drop of blood, thus satisfying the religious requirement. This is somewhere I need to be absolutely serious despite places others and I have suggested removing breast buds in infants to prevent breast cancer. Young girls every year are trafficked to 3rd world countries to have their clitorises sliced. This often results in infection necessitating complete amputation of the clitoris. The AAP was attempting to prevent those tragedies, but everybody lost their shit because somebody said FGM. So, infant females still face this problem.
The cases of labia amputation, sewing the vagina shut, and male circumcision as rite-of-passage are more unique in their ways. Labia amputation is something I've heard of but have not researched, so I can't say whether it's abuse or control motivated. The traditions that sew an infant's vagina shut until marriage are clearly motivated by control. These few traditions are the only ones in which the feminist narritive of male control ring true. Adult male circumcision presents its own interesting facets. Infant male genital mutilation involves forecefully separating the glans and foreskin, two organs that are not meant to be separated until about 12 to 18 months. It's similar to tearing a fingernail off.
In the case of the rite-of-passage circumcision depicted in Roots, it is a much less violent act than infant circumcision. The foreskin has already detached, and can be amputated with one swift motion. Additionally, the subject is consenting, something an infant never can do. Removing the foreskin from an infant is much more violent.
I think the best weapon against infant genital mutilation (female or male) is knowledge and the ethical argument of my body, my choice. It is not about a statistic here or there or about kinky sexual pleasure. I believe that if we approach the problem rationally and ethically, instead of exaggerating cases of female genital mutilation and downplaying cases of male genital mutilation, we will conclude that there is no ethically or medically valid reason to mutilate a helpless infant.
Thanks,
Vel
Some forms do, and some forms don't. The form of female genital mutilation that's the most like male ritual circumcision is removal of the clitoral hood. Then there is removal of the clitoris, of which the male equivalent would be chopping off the glans. In some cases of ritual male circumcision gone wrong, this is what happens. Traditions that remove the labia would be akin to removing the scrotum. Sometimes when a male genital mutilation goes horrendously wrong, that, along with what remains of the male genitalia is removed.
In one remarkable case, a nurse attempted to perform a circumcision with a laser cauterizer. It didn't go as expected. It melted most of the penis. So, this kid's future already ruined, the parents and doctor made a massive derp. After all, we know that gender is only socially constructed, right? Well, so, since they just melted the kid's dick off, they removed the rest of the tissue and raised him as a girl.
Unfortunately, it turns out that gender is not socially constructed. There were problems from day one. Long story short, after going through female puberty, growing breasts thanks to forced estrogen HRT, and finally having the accident revealed to him, years afterwards, unable to live as a man, either, he killed himself.
If this were a female "circumcision," even the clitoral pin-poke that the AAP attempted to create a protocol for in 2010, that story would have been all over the news. Instead, I only know about the case after doing extensive reading to educate myself about gender and genital mutilation.
Of course, there is no male equivalent of traditions that sew the vagina shut and leave most of the rest of the anatomy intact.
The common thread that both share is control and abuse. Male genital mutilation was proposed originally to prevent masturbation. Ironically, because of the pain I was left with due to insufficient skin to allow for an erection, I had to teach myself how to masturbate, because otherwise when I awoke in pain in the middle of the night, I would not be able to get back to sleep for up to 45 minutes sometimes. It was not pleasurable masturbation. I hated masturbation, but it was necessary to be able to get back to sleep and maybe delay the next episode of pain. It would be disingenuous for me to attempt to say that going through that experience while women's periods only put them in pain for a week with a 3 week break did not "do" things to me.
If I were a woman who had psychosexual problems due to a clitoral pin-prick, I would be a feminist poster girl warning about the horrors of Female Genital Mutilation and why we should revile the AAP for even trying to prevent infant girls from being trafficked to unsanity 3rd world countries to get their clitorises sliced. Instead, I am a mutilated man/mutilated trans woman. And when the AAP says that what happened to me was unpossible, NPR and others yawn and say that we'd better just lop off foreskins willy-nilly because men like me don't exist and years and years of pain due to an unnecessary surgery can be assigned a monetary value.
Please, let me pay $313. I have thousands in the bank. Anything to undo an adolescence spent in pain. Yet, that's the truly impossible thing.
-=-
Female genital mutilation in some traditions is a method of control. The sewed up vagina being the most extreme example of control-based female genital mutilation.
Yes, I know we've all been brainwashed to lose our shit at the mention of female genital mutilation. The sad fact, though, is that genital mutilation in both males and females is a form of child abuse in most cases, not a form of control. Child abuse is a problem that is passed from father to son and mother to daughter. In less severe traditions of female genital mutilation, it is often the role of the grandmother to either slice the clitoris or amputate the clitoral hood. And, as evinced by both the 2012 and 1986 AAP reports on male genital mutilation (contradicted by every other report
So, there are no men who are HIV positive AND circumcised, right? Oh, wait, no, there are. Also depending on how you interpret a study they did in Africa on the subject, circumcision may actually increase trasmission rate. You should read it. It's um, interesting, to say the least.
I homosexual, and I don't have AIDS or HIV. Somehow, I think the fact that I don't sleep around and don't cheat when I'm in a relationship has more to do with that than whether or not I have a foreskin.
You are correct. Amputation of the foreskin is amputation of about a 3 x 5 card worth of adult tissue (skin AND a tendon).
It's nuclear powered, so I believe it's just enough fuel to maintain its current minimal levels of operation until 2020, after which it will be little more than a chunk of metal floating through space.
Probably, but to karma whore a bit, as Sagan writes in Pale Blue Dot (pp 124-125):
Accordingly, as each Voyager left Earth for the planets and the stars, it carried with it a golden phonograph record encased in a golden, mirrored jacket containing, among other things: greetings in 59 human languages, and one whale language; a 12-minute sound essay including a kiss, a baby's cry, and an EEG record of the meditations of a young woman in love; 116 encoded pictures, on our science, our civilization, and ourselves; and 90 minutes of the Earth's greatest hits—Eastern and Western, classical and folk, including a Navajo night chant, a Japanese shakuhachi piece, a Pygmy girl's initiation song, a Peruvian wedding song, a 3,000-year-old composition for the ch'in called "Flowering Streams," Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky, Louis Armstrong, Blind willie Johnson, and Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode."
Space is nearly empty. There is virtually no chance that one of the Voyagers will ever enter another solar system...
But being much more advanced scientists and engineers than we—otherwise they would never be able to find and retrieve the small, silent spacecraft in interstellar space—perhaps the aliens would have no difficulty understanding what is encoded on these golden records.
Thanks. I hope more men debate this and come to similar conclusions as we.
I wouldn't be so sure of that. I'll still stand in defense of my original doctor's intuition, only because there is so little data regarding the complications of foreskin amputation when done to infants and so little data regarding the neurological basis of gender.
So, my stance I suppose is a conflicted one. Again, it comes down to proving something in my heart. I could not imagine living, for all its risks (breast cancer in paticular and hypertension and potential loss of bone density), without estrogen.
I want to be able to express a purely ethical argument the same way the feminists present their argument against female genital mutilation. This is me, in my natural state. Conflicted between genders, yet who gives the right to amputate my body parts? What becomes of "my body, my choice?" What should I do, once a body part that's not even of the gender I wish to be (yet an analogue, and I've pondered writing transformation stories where the transformee becomes female only to miss her clitoral hood because the magic had no foreskin to work with) has been amputated, causing me unnecessary complications, so easily denied on the basis of dogma by people I thought I loved?
It's a complex question, and the complexities should not be relegated to the realm of superstition. As I mentioned in my letter to NPR, my ex-parents did not hede the word of the AAP (who so recently recommended amputation) in 1983 to keep me intact. And the problems of that failure have caused me to forgoe communication with the two people on this planet who gave me life. Their own failure may have caused them to be unable to pass the genetic information I carry on to another generation.
I guess what I'm saying is that it's a complex issue, and I can only wish, as you do, betelgueseian, that the same ethics that are applied to the biologies that incubate our young for 9 months, can be applied to the other sex.
Maybe if Dr. S- had been involved in the decision to amputate, as he was in the decision to inject me with testosterone to correct my short height. He veoted the idea of my ex-father's to inject me with testosterone to make me tall based on the evidence: the data is murky in rose colored glasses towards amputation or augmentation, contraindacative probably in reality---do not amputate, do not augment. In the decision to authorize my estrogen HRT, Dr. S- delivered a similar common-sense answer: if it works, let's continue it. Dr. S- believed in first, cause no harm.
Yet, I was mutilated my Dr. D, a one-off, irreversible act that affected me deeply.
I hope my comments help. Thanks.
Am I doin it rite?
O I forgot, this is corporate America (FUCK YEAH!)
Ah, good. I was looking for a comment like this. The thing is that I started writing my own programs before I knew algebra. I was comfortable with the idea of a variable around the time I was memorizing my times tables. I think my early experiences with computer programming helped imensely in forming the kind of abstract thinking that was crucial for learning higher maths. What would have been really cool is if when I was 7 there had been somebody to explain to me what those strange functions that return odd decimals like sin, cos, and tan were, and what on earth "radians" were.
(Being 7 at the time, puzzling over the strange decimals without a clear answer and lacking the intuition to see if a pattern emerged in the output values of sin(x) as I gradually increased x, heading out to check out the fort and all the cool stuff that B- [a boy-type] and R- [a girl-type] had found often took a more firm grasp on my attention. And, being a boy in a religious family that would later careen into fundamentalism headfirst as the Jew plot to take over the government with the Y2K bug became ever more scriptually obvious, a boy who was scared to death of this god, a being who could hear my every thought and was just waiting to burn me alive for thinking something bad, burned and killed and erased from existence like those boys in ancient Egypt whose parents hadn't the foresight to acquire lamb's blood and paint it above their doors, I knew better than to ask my daddy what a sin function was for, and were cos and tan also works of the devil? Alas, the questions of a 7 year old mind, and the sad, sad realization a little over a score years later that for some people, the answer is "Yes, it's named sin, so cos and tan must be sins as well, and since you asked, you must be in league with the devil.")
I guess what I'm saying is that I think that learning computer programming before algebra made the whole exercise of learning algebra and even to some extent calculus and trig a kind of "oh, I should have thought of that" no-brainer. I remember that once they gave me this completely obtuse order-of-operations test and they were astounded that, having never been exposed to "transition math" (or pre-algebra), that I was able to properly evalue a Rube Goldberg mess of parentheses and multiplications-following-additions. They bumped me two years ahead in math because of that test (to be fair, they'd already identified me as an accelerated maths student in Elementary). That was all thanks to the experience of telling a computer, using parentheses and being able to take for granted that when I wrote Let X := X + DX * SPEEDMUL what I meant was first, multiply DX by SPEEDMUL, then add X and store the result in X, exactly how to arrive at the number I wished to calculate (and how to get the spaceship's laser beam to deduct life from the final boss as a quaint side-effect).
Why? What's the point? A few more days per year isn't going to overturn an entire culture that eschews things like math and proper writing skills as stuff for dorks who never get laid.
Ditto. I'm actually looking forward to 8 based on how much nerd rage there is against it.
I've observed that the entire UI paradigm of having applications running in windows (be it my XFCE, KDE, Gnome 2, LXDE, or Windows 3.1 thru 7) is more than the average user can handle. Add to it MDIs and it can become a hopeless mess. Scroll panes within scroll panes within scroll panes. I'd use a tiling window manager myself, but I haven't found one that's just right (I switch to Ratpoison every now and then but always find myself putting xfce4-session back in my xinitrc sooner or later).
You know what? I'll commit another slashdot heresy. I actually like the ribbon. Seriously, I do. I tap alt and I'm in keyboard shortcut heaven. Here I used to use the mouse like a fool to create tables in Word. Now it's alt+n, t, and arrow for rows x columns. Boom. Done. Centering? alt+h, a, c. Boom. Done. I just haven't been able to figure out if there's a shortcut for changing to a level 1 or 2 heading style. At any rate, it's like emacs done right (this coming from a vimmer who uses Pentadactyl for Firefox).
The best part is I now no longer get panicked calls as you mentioned from co-workers who clicked something or pressed something (and they can never remember what it was they pressed) that removed some toolbar. The multiple toolbars pinned to some toolbar container paradigm is as broken as MDI and applications running in windows for user-friendliness.
Aa! Where's my mod points gone? Somebody mod informative. I do something similar with my windows. Works like a charm and I haven't missed not having AC (well, except last Memorial Day weekend, that was a bit much).
Maybe he's got or wants it hooked up to some kind of home automation system. We got a new client at work the other week who sells a home automation system you can control from IOS or Android devices. Not sure how you'd control a fan, though. Maybe there's a replacement knob assembly that operates over 802.11g.
You say that now....
In the long term -- "long" that makes the current age of the universe look like an eye-blink and protons seem unstable -- the CMB will be redshifted away until even supermassive black holes begin losing mass.
"This, too, shall pass."
Maybe.
You are correct, Mr. Coward! I wonder what on earth their 90% reduction was, then. All UTI rates, mutilated or not are under 3%. Guess that's what happens when I let my emotions run amok. I miss the really interesting questions.
Let's do a switcheroo here. The first mistake you're making is letting your knee jerk and equating a sterile clitoral pin-prick (which, yes, should not happen in an idea world) with clitoral or clitoral hood amputation. So here we go.
Then I watch how people react to allowing US hospitals to administer "methadone" to methamphetamine addicts which fulfills their addiction. There is no danger to life and property from amateur meth labs. Read my other comments, and I would gladly trade 10 years of PMITA federal prison where I learned all the tricks of the drug trafficking trade for some methadone. People lose their shit. Really, I had a comment removed from NPR.org just for mentioning that hospitals (and the AAP) had considered creating a protocol for this methadone.
If I can be 100% serious for a moment, think about it. Bros every year are put in PMITA federal prison where they become hardened criminals and recividists when they're really victims of a substance addiction. US hospitals are offering to do something that will be done anyway in a less severe, much more sterile and theraputic manner. And people still lose their shit. So, the bros continue to get sent to PMITA prisons and continue to become hardened criminals, resulting in increasing drug trade that only profits Mexican cartel lords. Have you seen Juarez lately? BUT OMG METH BRAIN LEAKS OUT EAR. But adderoll, ok, that's cool.
I probably should have used marijuana or cocaine for a more sympathtic case, but you're probably ignorant of the nuances of female genital mutilation.
Often times, the mother herself has been mutilated. She has the same problem that circumcised American men face: why did this happen to me?
Nobody wants to really wants to believe that their body has been violated for no good reason. It could drive one insane. One of my best friends (who is also intact) has told me to my face that I'm being an idiot for paying this much attention to the issue of male genital mutilation. He might have something. It's because my mind is allergic to cognative dissonance. I've observed (and I've sure other slashdotters have as well) that the typical mind is quite welcoming to cognative dissonance.
I'm reading Pale Blue Dot right now (yeah, I know, what took me so long). Most people are reading some potboiler crap or some work of religious masturbation reassuring them that their god really does exist and really will burn heathans like me with fire... soon...
My point is, that for victims of both male and female infant genital mutilation, there is a strong urge to rationalize it, somewhat similar to how a drug addict rationalizes his behavior. Then, once rationalized with fabulous evidence extolling its virtues, it would be unethical and immoral to not give one's son or daughter these virtues.
So, the mutilated becomes the mutilator. To reiterate, child abuse is often a generational issue. There are very few cases where the feminists are right about it being a matter male dominance. In most cases, it's simply a matter of passing down an ages old tradition of child abuse.
I believe that the solution in any case (including meth) is education and treatment with mitigational measures along the way as necessary.
Female genital mutilation, I'm confident will be eradicated from the world, and good riddance. My concern is that fighting male genital mutilation is an uphill battle. I would be so bold as to say that male genital mutilation, the involuntary nature of erections, the necessity of the now missing foreskin for allowing an erection to take place properly, and the array of possible complications is so traumatic that it compares only to the most extreme forms of female genital mutilation. I'm afriad we really are fighting the patriarchy, and feminism is lending us no aid or comfort.