This is "stuff that matters."/. has a mature commenting-moderating-metamoderating threaded forum system (despite its noted failures such as UTF-8 support and WTF the mobile interface is supposed to be). I come here for the debates.
I'd like to see more articles on Syria or Nigeria. The whole Trayvon Martin thing was overblown in the mainstream media imo, but that's what the mainstream media does. I don't remember many articles here unless I just filtered them out and forgot about them. The mainstream media distracts us from the "stuff that matters" unless the shit is really hitting the fan somewhere. It's becoming more and more clear they're a propaganda machine that occasionally reports on world events to maintain a shred of credibility, but never without some partisan bullshit like the administration's refusal to classify this coup as a coup.
In these comments I see all kinds of points about policies and actions going back decades that have contributed to this situation. I'd never find something like that in the mainstream media, Google News included. They're too busy trying to convince me of which lizard is the wrong lizard.
The comments here tend to cut through that nonsense.
There was a comment a few up that was begging for a suggestion that Egypt should implement some form of instant runoff or approval voting since first-past-the-post is essentially how Morsi was even able to get elected. Granted, I haven't been paying that close attention to know how much "truthiness" that conjecture has.
Other news sites have comments but I haven't found one with the whole moderating-metamoderating karma shebang. I admit, I haven't tried Reddit much, so maybe that would be something to look into.
Also imo, a Third Amendment lawsuit may be relevant, but as "news for nerds," that is, nerds who even know what a Third Amendment is.
No thanks. I've looked into the MRM and been on MRA forums before. Frankly, these people seem more like a support group for men who are seeking foreign brides.
The sexism displayed by feminism and the sexism present in these groups is equally repugnant.
Additionally, I don't think they'd want a trans woman like me to foul up their female-bashing. (Much like how feminists don't want a "really a man" like me fouling up their male-bashing.)
I can't say I've found any kind of group to date that's even interested in gender equality. It's always male vs. female, testosterone vs. estrogen. Sorry, I don't fit into that dichotomy. I just want a world where I can be an individual, where everybody is an individual who "owns their own shit."
To the feminist, all I have to say in the end is, "You have the wrong person. I don't know what you're talking about wrt rape. I am an individual. I am not all men." To the MRA, all I have to say in the end is, "You have the wrong person. I don't know what you're talking about wrt all these stereotypes. I am an individual. I am not all women/gays/faggots/whatever."
MRAs want subservient male order brides. Feminists want to castrate me right up until they find out I actually want to be a woman and like being a woman, in which case they attack how I could ever possibly be a woman, and I just wish feminism and the MRM would shut up with the homophobic, transphobic bullshit long enough for me transition.
No, I'm not a 6'5" manjawed football player in a dress. I got lucky. I actually look good enough for men to come up to me and start flirting. I am regularly gendered female in public, even when wearing clothing that should be obviously male. And fortunately, I'm attracted to men. I just have this stupid problem with needing a paycheck and this stupid problem with the transphobia and how being transgendered must be a mental illness both feminism and the MRM are all too happy to "educate" the public about.
Half my frustration here is hearing Boylan toe the feminist line when she should damned well know better. Then again, she wasn't in school during the 90s when institutional discrimination against young males was seen as the panacea for the sexism of old males, and she didn't get into a career where she needed to be bashed over the head every five minutes with how sexist one is because there aren't enough women in the field!
And no, I've read Iron John: A Book About Men. I understand what the author was saying. I am not a victim of some castrated, feminized upbringing. I might be a victim of routine male genital mutilation. However, it's just as simple as when I went to bucket out the pond of my subconscious, I found something quite different from Iron John.
You of all commentators on the new Doctor might just be able to understand why regenerating as a woman, outside of a gag short involving a very elaborate fart joke juxtaposed with crossdresser jokes, might cause a problem for the character.
Who knows? Maybe that's what you're getting at?
I still remember throwing your book She's Not There across the room after you did something that's remained unobtainable for me for the past 10 years apparently without a single damned problem or setback. I guess maybe the real "glass ceilings" in this world are just fine for folks who need a damned job to keep a roof over their head because they don't have a way of making money rain from the sky like manna from heaven.
Look, you want a female Doctor? Dr. Song's pretty much outlived her character's story. Excuse my lack of knowledge about classic Doctor Who. What about Romana? Hell, there's a regenerated female clone of the Doctor out there somewhere galloping about the cosmos. Why not bring the Doctor-Donna out of retirement?
This has absolutely nothing to do with "glass ceilings" and you know it. The only glass ceilings womyn-born-womyn have are the their own self-imposed ones; I've seen it enough times myself to become physically ill. And don't you dare try to drag a womyn-born-womyn through her own self-imposed glass ceiling! She'll call you "mean" for trying to make her move past "math is hard!" I am so utterly sick of hearing this line from womyn-born-womyn who truly believe this. What the hell am I supposed to do about it when they're too busy viewing me as "all men" and when feminism views me as a metaphysical rapist every time I take my estrogen in the morning?!
The only glass ceilings rich trans women have are... I don't know, you tell me? When you're rich enough, does that promote you out of the category of a rapist appropriating the female form into a position where you can use feminist buzzwords like "glass ceiling?"
My thoughts exactly. You're already at +5, so I'll add other thoughts I had instead of modding +1 I agree in case that's a karma bonus putting you at +5 instead of +4.
I talk to plenty of people of the opposite sex. OOOOH, he means "talked" as in talked into bed, not just discussing TPS reports and being friendly to the members of the opposite sex my brother or ex have "talked to!" Ah, I see. Well, he can wake me up when there are any open-minded, intelligent, educated, bi females of a healthy body weight who have greater goals in life and interests than having children who would be interested in a relationship with me! Then I'll get around to "talking to" them. I see, I see.
(Disclaimer: I completely realize the fact I haven't found a single woman I care to date even after saying farewell to being a twenty-something recently says more about me than it does about "all women.")
Of course, the greater and always classic undertone here is to beware of young men who aren't falling over themselves fitting into their heteronormative role trying to find a wife and have children. Guys with families and responsibilities are much easier for oppressive governments/social orders to control.
Then again, I have an internet friend who's "talked to" plenty of girls. He like works out regularly, has a nice bod, and is interested in all kinds of athletic, outdoor activities. Definitely not a basement dweller. I honestly can't figure out for the life of me why he's never gotten beyond the makeout/cuddling stage unless his personality is completely different IRL vs. on IRC. Since he hasn't gotten any, i.e. failed in "talking to the opposite sex," does he fall within our new threat classification of "twenty-somethings who haven't talked to the opposite sex in five or six years?"
So your solution is that the average user who wants secure email knows the guy who knows the guy who knows the guy. Eh, it works for folks who want marijuana. Why not email?
WTF is wrong with you. The police can legally sell marijuana in order to have evidence that the person who bought it from them was a drug seeker. Of course the police can legally break whatever the fuck law they want. Where have you been?
All very good points. Imo, the best office suite I've ever used, even including Microsoft Office, was KOffice back in the 3.5 days. Figured it might be relevant to say that since they're using KDE. I loved how the styles were more well-defined in particular.
That being said, I've never done much "advanced" stuff in any WYSIWYG word processor. Well, the closest I've come is Word 2010's SmartArt feature, and I'd bet that neither LibreOffice or KOffice have something like that, but I haven't given KOffice a spin since 4.0 lost me as a KDE user. It makes it a breeze to do things like simple hierarchy charts and snazzed-up lists. I have no talent for graphic design, so that feature has made my (simpler) documents a whole lot more visually appealing.
However, I've found that if I need to do anything moderately complex, I turn to LaTeX even at work. Microsoft Word can be downright frustrating at times. Even though I spend time Googleing how to do things and staring at the LaTeX Wikibook, it seems I always spend less time doing that than fighting with Word.
In a longer document I honestly don't want to think about font sizes or which typeface I'm using or whether I've got a style that's being overridden by something else I don't want. I just want to type in what I have to write and let the formatting figure itself out. LaTeX, while not perfect, is the best solution I've seen yet.
I suppose it's just a shame that with the advent of the WYSIWYG word processor, people are more concerned with indenting things with spaces rather than using tabstops and obsessing over whether Comic Sans MS or Tahoma is more appropriate for this paragraph and how neat it looks if the next paragraph is in a completely different font or color! It would be nice if the focus were more on the structure of the document. I feel LaTeX does that for me, but I suppose the overarching problem is that people in general are not structural thinkers. They understand indenting the first line of a paragraph by hitting the space bar a few times; they don't understand telling the computer that it's a paragraph in an article or in a letter and letting the computer worry about the details.
Maybe I'm just having a bad week, but here goes. Insta -1 troll, karma to burn, etc.
But I thought that Linux was utterly sexist! I thought Linux discriminated against girls! I thought it was too technical!
Gah, I swear if I hear something along the lines of "math is hard" from another one of the real, flesh-and-blood women I know, I'm going to lose it.
Either that, or guess the fuck what. The body part between your legs does not determine your competency behind the keyboard. Women not using linux != some nebulous "discrimination" on the part of "all men."
Except I suppose this is desktop users we're talking about. Next we're going to hear how these poor girls have been discriminated against since they learned LibreOffice or KOffice and can't get hired. It's a male conspiracy!
Because its such a pain in the ass to use that no one other than some dorks trying to look like ultra-geeks and raving tinfoil-hat butters.
I'll guess I'll count several large, nation-wide, health care clients who needed my employer to use GnuPG (not the other way around--I'd offered GnuPG to clients looking for encryption before TLS between email servers was common, but I would never require somebody to use it, nor would I care to support it) next time I revise my list of "ultra-geeks and raving tinfoil-hat butters."
Most had been using GnuPG internally to protect emails that may contain ePHI and were looking for a call center that could send them their call records (ePHI) encrypted using GnuPG. I was happy to be able to say "yes." Others took a look at GnuPG and said "that's neat, let's do it." Of course with TLS between servers these days it often doesn't come up and we just test to see if their server is TLS-enabled, and if so, we tell them that data in motion is already encrypted, and that's good enough.
Again, I still honestly want to know why you think S/MIME is any better than PGP/GnuPG. Maybe you're just trolling and I should stop feeding. To be honest, if I had mod points today, and I don't usually downmod, but I would mod this comment troll or flamebait. You need a bit more than hot air to back up why you think PGP/GnuPG are flawed. You have valid points, but your presentation needs much work.
Its just RSA without the privilege of having an 'trusted' third party to verify.
Then you said:
SMIME with self signed/friend-signed certs is still far far better than PGP.
How do you figure this? If you're using self-signed certs or even a self-generated CA that you can share among your friends like I had while I was looking into S/MIME for work, you're still back to the web of trust model for all intents and purposes (assuming the NSA has the ability to compel entities like Verisign to sign forged certs) that GnuPG uses. I can trust my friend's cert because he gave it to me on a thumb drive, and he can trust my cert because I gave it to him on a thumb drive. Alternatively, I can self-generate a CA cert, give that cert to all my friends and sign all their certs with my CA. It's still a lot of manual effort that a lot of people don't care to do. Perhaps that will change.
The point is it seems you're being contradictory here. If we're reduced to a web of trust model by assuming that well-known, otherwise trustworthy CAs are untrustworthy because of the NSA's questionable actions, then S/MIME and GnuPG are both RSA without the privilege of having a "trusted" third party.
I was confused, though. Are you criticizing GnuPG's implementation of RSA and web of trust or are you criticizing GnuPG's ease of use?
You write:
GPG is just a horrible implementation (from a usability perspective)
But you had already written:
You already have fully functional encryption built into EVERY EMAIL CLIENT THAT MATTERS
Implying that S/MIME is more readily usable than GnuPG greatly depends on which email client we're talking about. If we're talking about Outlook, I'd argue that GnuPG is probably easier because of the hoops it makes you jump through, especially if we're talking about self-signed/friend-signed S/MIME certs. If we're talking about Gmail/Hotmail/Facebook/you-name-it, afaik and correct me if I'm wrong, but S/MIME is a complete non-starter. It's just not supported; you have to use GnuPG.
I do have to admit, I find this frustrating and I can sympathize with the sentiment you seem to be expressing. There is absolutely nothing available* that makes asymmetric encryption available to the layman. I could go full-on tinfoil hat and presume that it's due to some plot by the CIA/NSA/Illuminati/whatever, but I think there are simpler explanations. The layman does not understand the implications of sending an email in plaintext or the implications of presuming that an email is coming from who is appears to be coming from. Laypeople, from Babbage's time to the present, seem for whatever reason to have this utter "confusion of ideas" that if it's on a computer, it must be true (and conversely that if the computer gives wrong information, somebody must have personally been doing something underhanded to cause the wrong information).
*That being said, I remember one and only one email client I've used that made both S/MIME and GnuPG a breeze. Back in the KDE 3 days, I used to use KMail. I don't remember what versions specifically, but I have never used an email client since then that, out-of-the-box, without any finagling on my part, worked seamlessly with email encryption. I may not be remembering correctly, but I think it even made the process of exchanging public keys a breeze as well. I got scared away from KDE by KDE 4 and now use XFCE with Thunderbird, which is more on the level of Outlook with support.
At any rate, please clarify why GnuPG is inferior to S/MIME. Personally, I think either technology is about on equal footing with GnuPG having the advantage when considering webmail. IIRC, there's also a specification for a GPG/MIME mode, which puts both S/MIME and GnuPG squarely in the same arena and on similar terms. However, neither of those particular RSA implementatio
Coincidentally we seem to have the opposite situation over here. Women can choose to start families whenever they want with little regard for how they'll support their children, and they can also shut out the father from her life entirely with little to no consequences, both financially and socially. If she chooses to shut the father out of her life, we're more than happy to garnish his wages (no financial consequences whatsoever), and because women have the privilege of being presumed the victim, we'll even tell him that he must have done something abusive to get shut out (so perhaps that would be considered an opposite social consequence since we'll say good on her for throwing out somebody who just must have been a deadbeat).
I work in a predominantly female environment. Sexism isn't limited to the male gender. Go back and re-read that before you moderate. Women have the privilege of being seen as above sexism---as the victims of sexism even, which women have the privilege of painting as a problem exclusively the fault of "all men," but women are people, too.
I know the plural of anecdote is not data, but here's my anecdote anyway. I work in a call center, and when we upgraded our message taking software to a scripted system, I was promoted as a programmer. Drama ensued because customer service could no longer make changes to the questions we ask callers. So, I said, let's sit down and I'll teach you basic programming so that you can make changes again. We tried. And we tried. And we tried. And at the end of it, I found myself teaching remedial algebra and trying to overcome these women's math phobia. So, we scrapped it altogether, and I got a nice, secure job.
The fallout of that, though, was that it came to be believed that somehow, because I'm forced to work as the male gender (another topic entirely and beyond the scope of this discussion), and because we know that "all men" are sexist (and that statement somehow isn't sexist), that the failure of my co-workers to learn how to make even very basic changes such as adding or removing a prompt was definitive proof that I was doing something or had set the system up somehow in a way that was sexist and an inaccessible to the female mind.
I admit, I'm not the best teacher. That's why I don't teach for a living.
What flabbergasted me was the ways that the womyn-born-womyn entitlement complex, as I've come to call it (very different from the "princess entitlement complex" that MRAs go on about---I'm not attracted to women, don't date women, am not interested in the reasons MRAs seek mail-order brides, and the term "womyn-born-womyn entitlement complex" is intended to be completely separate from romantic relationships) prevented my co-workers from learning. Then when I start throwing corner cases and unexpected input at her program, I'm presumed to be just mean and putting up sexist barriers and going hard on them just because they're women. I'm sorry, no. Users will do whatever they can to break what you wrote, and if what you want is to be able to make changes that don't just utterly foul up a message script, then you need to step off your entitlement complex high horse and start taking a more humble approach. But not, it's just easier to call me sexist, because my legal gender is male and all men are sexist, so obviously I, individually, am sexist, and walk off in a huff.
What it came down to, and what it's come down to in other attempts of mine to help women out who are taking CS classes, is that they suppose that the computer can take vaguely worded requirements and know on its own how to do what she meant, much the same way her boyfriend or husband will know what she wants.
I mean, it's just, excuse me, but didn't Ada Lovelace specifically say that wouldn't be the case? I look back on this history of CS, and I see women like Ada Lovelac
You're exactly right, and Card's crossed that line between disapproval and hate speech on posterboards. In fact, I support the right to burn crosses or flags on one's own property. If one has a billboard, I think anybody should be able to say anything they want. That's free speech.
(Also note, if you trespass on my property to erect a cross, whether or not you burn it, I will be calling the police and pressing charges.)
As others have pointed out, however, Card's even gone beyond that. He actively uses his money to lobby for discriminatory marriage laws and anti-sodomy laws. If that's not crossing a line, I don't know what is.
If somebody was a brilliant science fiction writer (not saying Card is, but I would need to finish reading Ender's Game to give a complete opinion on that) and was also bankrolling laws that were discriminatory against Jews... well, you're the one who Godwined it already.
While I would defend to the death his right to publish his ravings on the internet, he still has no inherent right to my money.
Apparently a lot of other people feel the same way, hence a boycott.
I tried to read Ender's Game once. A friend lent a copy to me. I don't think I got further than the first 20 pages or so when I found myself thinking that, gee, something's not quite right here. This sounds just as contrived as a Chick tract. So I looked up his background and lo and behold I found out he was a Mormon.
Maybe some day I'll finish Ender's game, but if the first few pages are any indication, it's a contrived, shallow story that attempts to create a pity party for a contrived, shallow protagonist. Apparently I'm not the only person who thinks that, and apparently there are people who think that who don't even care about gay marriage.
Neon Genesis Evangelion was a much more compelling story with similar themes. Then again, I just set a pretty low bar for a compelling story.
That being said, maybe the movie will be better. Perhaps I'll torrent it at some point in the future and watch it opposite Battleship.
Furthermore, you do realize what the Bible says about that, right? True, some Christians try to argue this etymology or that etymology or alternate usage or translation error or any number of linguistic gymnastics. However, the only arguments that allow homosexuality in Christianity that make sense to me are the same arguments that say that women don't need to be "unclean" when they're menstruating.
However, you must remember, we love literal Bible interpretations. If somebody is going to warp their world view so much as to believe that the world is only 6,000 years old, that the dinosaurs were killed in the flood, and that carbon-14 dating is a big lie and can't possibly work, did it never occur to you what that person might think about something with an "ick" factor like homosexuality?
Not to ramble, but where I grew up, persecution of homosexuality and homosexuals is required to be considered devout. It's seen as sinful to allow a homosexual to live under one's roof. This town consideres itself very devout and is proud of the fact that it's legal there to discriminate against renters on the basis of sexual orientation. This is a fairly common thing in the USA.
So, I don't know what parallel universe you're posting from. Maybe in your parallel universe being homosexual is just another part of the great diversity that your god created when he/she/it created this planet. Not here, though.
A recent British review found suicide rates of up to 18 per cent among people who had undergone gender reassignment surgery.
Feh. Beats the 50% rate of suicide without bottom surgery. All it shows is how uncaring and inhuman people like you are.
What you don't realize is the huge bias against transgendered identities in psychology.
Here's the whole problem. Trans folks are routinely denied their voice in these matters. The system prefers objectifying them and finding every excuse to discredit any benefit they've found from HRT and bottom surgery.
This is how deep the problem goes. We're talking about "transgendered folks," but nobody yet in this entire/. discussion has acknowledged trans men.
Trans men exist. There are a couple in the local support group. Yes, that's right. Folks born with their reproductive systems on the inside who desire becoming men. They take testosterone. They have facial hair. Their voices deepen and become male voices. If you met one, you'd never know it, because they become practically indistinguishable from cis men (men who were born with their reproductive systems on the outside).
How do you explain that in terms of childhood sexual abuse or a desire to rape women in the bathroom or any other kind of theory of sexual perversion and sexual domanance that psychology assures us that the misguided trans woman is merely trying to acquire?
I'd recommend the book Whipping Girl by Julia Serano. It adequately sums up how utterly broken the treatment of trans women is. Did you know that it was until recently that trans women weren't even allowed to start HRT unless they could appear sexually stimulating to a psychologist?
There is a trifecta of religion, psychology, and feminism that is utterly undermined by the idea that somebody born into the male gender caste would desire being a woman. What I mean by gender caste is the idea that the gender one is assigned at birth on the basis on body parts is somehow far deeper than skin, much like the caste system in India. Religion finds this idea natural in its sole focus on reproduction. Feminism finds its construction of a woman as a victim undermined by the idea that someone who was born a rapist/aggressor/man would, of their own free will, desire to become a victim/woman. However, psychology has the solution. The trans woman could only make the decision to undergo gender transition on the basis on mental illness. Here we finally see the trans woman as the depraved serial killer in a woman suit she is.
The research you linked to is a direct product of that bias. We have bought into this narrative that men are sexual aggressors and women are victims so deeply that we cannot comprehend why a sexual aggressor would choose to become a victim except by painting it as mental illness.
Let me clue you in on something. When strangers see me, they believe I'm female. I also have no reason to argue with their assessment. This presents a dilemma. How can you tell somebody who is obviously female and being gendered female by others that she is really, somehow, a man? The only option you have is to do a Crocodile Dundee test and grab me in the crotch.
So, how, exactly, do these researchers figure that sex change surgery is not effective? It's highly dubious, especially after one considers how many trans women have had their lives improved by bottom surgery. However, their voices are easily dismissed because they do not fit into the narrative that femaleness is artifical vanity that womyn-born-womyn are helpless victims of and that maleness is somehow authentic. We look at the trans woman and we are deeply suspicious of her going about her day with long hair, which we understand the womyn-born-womyn only wears long because she's forced to by some vast male conspiracy (see the article "My Hair Is My Accompli
Came here for this comment. Very satisfied. Thank you.
Not going to leave satisfied quite yet until I choose to open my yap.
So, what has the Ada Initiative accomplished with their sexism and presumption that all men are rapists?
1. We now have a new joke every time there's an article about women in IT.
2. ???
How many more girls are going to pick up, well, in this case, Ruby on Rails and go "hey, that's neat!" and learn programming because the Ada Initiative handed out creeper cards, censored panels, and cost individuals their jobs?
0
The really sad part to all this the more I think about it is how it even had my misogyny going for a while. I was raised as a male during the 90s. Reverse discrimination across the board. I know what it's like to be unfairly treated in very overt ways simply because of a body part I never even wanted. Hell, that body part was even mutilated at birth and never properly healed, leaving me with the exquisite experience of knowing the kind of genital pain that's only supposed to be associated with FGM.
The trouble is that one of these days I'm going to be a woman looking for a job (mostly because undergoing gender transition in a nearly all conservative womyn-born-womyn environment just isn't going to work).
Is this what I get to thank the Ada Initiative for? Thanks, Ada Initiative. I'm really looking forward to being perceived as somebody who's going to be a total bitch who's going to sue for sexual harassment at the first dongle joke. Thanks, Ada Initiative. Sure, the Ada Initiative may not consider me a woman because I'm not a "womyn-born-womyn," but people who gender me female perceive me no differently than any other woman. Mostly because unlike in Crocodile Dundee, folks don't actually go checking genitals in real life.
Thanks, Ada Initiative. You sure did a favor for women.
Don't blame me. I voted for Bob Barr in 2008 and Gary Johnson in 2012. So yes, the other guy did win. Excuse me for not allowing mainstream media (especially Fox News) define my reality. However, the depressing thing is I live in a country where everyone else lets big media define their reality. See, I live in this wonderful place where all sorts of folks run for president and lots of other offices, too. I guess in this crazy world I live in, Noam Chomsky can endorse Jill Stein's presidential run. Did anybody even know she existed in 2012 besides me?
But no. Everybody's masturbating over Sarah Palin because zomg she would be the frist woman ever close to the presidency. Watch as we masturbate over Clinton when she runs in 2016 just like we were masturbating over her bid in 2008.
Folks need to wake up. Anyone who is voting either D or R, especially in local elections, is part of the problem.
The problem is so big, in fact, that I've been finding myself wondering whether, depending on how much of a homophobic, reactionary, police state-endorsing jerk gets the Republican nomination in 2016 and whether or not the Libertarian's 2016 candidate has even a shadow of a chance of getting 5% of the popular vote, whether I might actually end up turning into part of the problem myself by voting for Clinton.
What's to be done? You've got candidates running left and right that might actually do things like reducing the size of government, ending the wars on drugs and terror, and trying to undo the damage that's been done since we all lost our shit after 9/11. Yet everybody turns on Faux News, PMSNBC, and CNN and gets ready to root for either an R or D and blame all our problems on the other letter like this is some kind of meaningless sport.
Seconded. For the longest time I hated Java, but lately I've been finding that Java is very nice for the server side.
As others pointed out, nobody uses the built-in time classes like java.util.Calendar. That one in particular is just completely unweildy. Everyone who needs to do anything with time and time zones uses Joda time. In fact, I've found when using JPA that I can't even involve java.util.Date or java.util.Calendar because they insist on persisting system-local time in the database. System-local time is utterly useless when you're writing an application that needs to support users from Newfoundland to Hawaii.
Oracle's ownership of Java was nearly a deal breaker for me, but fortunately there are things like icedtea. Essentially, Oracle is irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. My projects rely heavily on Apache Commons and other free software. In fact, it's the free software ecosystem surrounding Java on the server side that attracted me in the first place.
Of course, since this is Slashdot, half the comments here are decrying Java as a security risk and proclaiming its death because when they hear Java they think applets from the 90s and horrible Swing applications. Applets are dead. Flash killed them, and now Flash applets are dead, too. HTML5 is the future for client-side, but something has to serve the data for HTML5 to consume. I've found, especially working in a Windows shop, that Java fits the bill very well.
Yes, but that's not even good enough. You and I both know how these arrogant pinheads work. They have a social status and nothing more. If some damned kid can just show them up, what would that mean about them? Sure we can call the kid a "genius" or a "wiz" and dress him up in other terms to attempt to shield the pinhead's social status, but at the end of the day the fact remains that the pinhead got shown up by a damned kid barely out of diapers.
It seems the only correct answer is to either do nothing or as another poster suggested, sell the information to others.
Now imagine the threat to the social status of a billionaire if some faggot like me found an exploit. Total social status inversion. I'm supposed to be an AIDS-infested nobody who's too incompetent to do anything. Imagine how embarassing that would be to a billionaire to get shown up by an AIDS-infested (presumably) faggot.
It's all about social status. The taller they are, the harder they fall. Fortunately for them, we live in a culture that can shoot the messenger so they don't have to fall.
Those evil hackers, I'll tell ya. They're genius mutant autistic savants from the 9th dimension who never get laid. That's the only reason they can show up our best and brightest.
I think I heard this in a song once while playing Rock Band:
Peace sells, but who's buying?
It seems to adequately explain the prediciment we find ourselves in.
Now Tumblr and lolcats, there you can make some $$$ and get a nice Lambo that you can cruise down the main drag in with a chick with nice tits in your passenger seat. I've always been a fan of the Countach, but maybe a Ford Shelby GT or a Corvette ZR1, hell, why not a Zonda? Imagine, you could be crusing down a main drag with a hot chick in a skinny little dress in your Zonda. Everyone else would turn green as you went by. All you need is the $$$, so go out and get it.
Peace; innovation; meaningful progress; using our wealth to find ways to tackle problems such as overpopulation and world hunger; deliberately investing in technologies to push us into a post-scarcity civilization; safe, sustainable fission power, fusion power, or some other way to harness the power output from that big fusion reactor in the sky; terraforming other planetoids in our solar system and engaging in multi-generational projects to ensure our survival as spacefaring species—sure all that sells, but who's buying?
I agree. I usually vote Libertarian. Voting Republican would be the height of absurdity for me. That being said, neither major party has ever been terribly attractive to me.
Let me guess. This means that we need more womyn-born-womyn in software development ASAP because, as we all know, despite any personal experiences otherwise, womyn-born-womyn are all better communicators than any man or trans woman could ever hope to be. I mean, they just feel they communicate better. How can you argue with something a womyn-born-womyn just feels must be true. After all, she has a vagina and gave birth a few times, so that means she must just be a better person than any man or trans woman could hope to be, what with our incomplete XY configuration.
Seriously, all this feminism crap can cram it up its vagina. I've got karma to burn. I don't care.
I am utterly sick and tired of this shit. I am sick and tired of being beat over the head with Ada Lovelace because apparently, according to womyn-born-womyn, her vagina was the body part that enabled her to be a programmer. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the gray matter between her ears or her reputation as an astute mathematician.
Where are the womyn-born-womyn taking programming classes? Where are the womyn-born-womyn educating themselves to prepare for a career in software development? Where the fuck are they?
And then these feminist assclowns think that the solution to the problem is to put completely unqualified womyn-born-womyn who wouldn't even be able to understand Lovelace's Notes into programming positions just because we absolutely need womyn-born-womyn programmers. "It's so unfair!" they scream. Show me womyn-born-womyn who are being turned away from programming classes because of their vaginas, and I might give a shit.
Show me a womyn-born-womyn who can even understand "garbage in, garbage out." You can't do it!
Yet we still need to get bashed over the head by Ada Lovelace and feminism. Obviously, everyone with a defective Y chromosome must be sexist! How do we know they're sexist? Because they have Y chromosomes! That's why they're sexist.
Never mind that these damned womyn-born-womyn can't even understand that Lovelace herself invented garbage in, garbage out.
Slashdot Mirror
This is "stuff that matters." /. has a mature commenting-moderating-metamoderating threaded forum system (despite its noted failures such as UTF-8 support and WTF the mobile interface is supposed to be). I come here for the debates.
I'd like to see more articles on Syria or Nigeria. The whole Trayvon Martin thing was overblown in the mainstream media imo, but that's what the mainstream media does. I don't remember many articles here unless I just filtered them out and forgot about them. The mainstream media distracts us from the "stuff that matters" unless the shit is really hitting the fan somewhere. It's becoming more and more clear they're a propaganda machine that occasionally reports on world events to maintain a shred of credibility, but never without some partisan bullshit like the administration's refusal to classify this coup as a coup.
In these comments I see all kinds of points about policies and actions going back decades that have contributed to this situation. I'd never find something like that in the mainstream media, Google News included. They're too busy trying to convince me of which lizard is the wrong lizard.
The comments here tend to cut through that nonsense.
There was a comment a few up that was begging for a suggestion that Egypt should implement some form of instant runoff or approval voting since first-past-the-post is essentially how Morsi was even able to get elected. Granted, I haven't been paying that close attention to know how much "truthiness" that conjecture has.
Other news sites have comments but I haven't found one with the whole moderating-metamoderating karma shebang. I admit, I haven't tried Reddit much, so maybe that would be something to look into.
Also imo, a Third Amendment lawsuit may be relevant, but as "news for nerds," that is, nerds who even know what a Third Amendment is.
No thanks. I've looked into the MRM and been on MRA forums before. Frankly, these people seem more like a support group for men who are seeking foreign brides.
The sexism displayed by feminism and the sexism present in these groups is equally repugnant.
Additionally, I don't think they'd want a trans woman like me to foul up their female-bashing. (Much like how feminists don't want a "really a man" like me fouling up their male-bashing.)
I can't say I've found any kind of group to date that's even interested in gender equality. It's always male vs. female, testosterone vs. estrogen. Sorry, I don't fit into that dichotomy. I just want a world where I can be an individual, where everybody is an individual who "owns their own shit."
To the feminist, all I have to say in the end is, "You have the wrong person. I don't know what you're talking about wrt rape. I am an individual. I am not all men." To the MRA, all I have to say in the end is, "You have the wrong person. I don't know what you're talking about wrt all these stereotypes. I am an individual. I am not all women/gays/faggots/whatever."
MRAs want subservient male order brides. Feminists want to castrate me right up until they find out I actually want to be a woman and like being a woman, in which case they attack how I could ever possibly be a woman, and I just wish feminism and the MRM would shut up with the homophobic, transphobic bullshit long enough for me transition.
No, I'm not a 6'5" manjawed football player in a dress. I got lucky. I actually look good enough for men to come up to me and start flirting. I am regularly gendered female in public, even when wearing clothing that should be obviously male. And fortunately, I'm attracted to men. I just have this stupid problem with needing a paycheck and this stupid problem with the transphobia and how being transgendered must be a mental illness both feminism and the MRM are all too happy to "educate" the public about.
Half my frustration here is hearing Boylan toe the feminist line when she should damned well know better. Then again, she wasn't in school during the 90s when institutional discrimination against young males was seen as the panacea for the sexism of old males, and she didn't get into a career where she needed to be bashed over the head every five minutes with how sexist one is because there aren't enough women in the field!
And no, I've read Iron John: A Book About Men. I understand what the author was saying. I am not a victim of some castrated, feminized upbringing. I might be a victim of routine male genital mutilation. However, it's just as simple as when I went to bucket out the pond of my subconscious, I found something quite different from Iron John.
It was recommended to me as an example of a successful gender transition. It actually wasn't half bad.
Really?
You of all commentators on the new Doctor might just be able to understand why regenerating as a woman, outside of a gag short involving a very elaborate fart joke juxtaposed with crossdresser jokes, might cause a problem for the character.
Who knows? Maybe that's what you're getting at?
I still remember throwing your book She's Not There across the room after you did something that's remained unobtainable for me for the past 10 years apparently without a single damned problem or setback. I guess maybe the real "glass ceilings" in this world are just fine for folks who need a damned job to keep a roof over their head because they don't have a way of making money rain from the sky like manna from heaven.
Look, you want a female Doctor? Dr. Song's pretty much outlived her character's story. Excuse my lack of knowledge about classic Doctor Who. What about Romana? Hell, there's a regenerated female clone of the Doctor out there somewhere galloping about the cosmos. Why not bring the Doctor-Donna out of retirement?
This has absolutely nothing to do with "glass ceilings" and you know it. The only glass ceilings womyn-born-womyn have are the their own self-imposed ones; I've seen it enough times myself to become physically ill. And don't you dare try to drag a womyn-born-womyn through her own self-imposed glass ceiling! She'll call you "mean" for trying to make her move past "math is hard!" I am so utterly sick of hearing this line from womyn-born-womyn who truly believe this. What the hell am I supposed to do about it when they're too busy viewing me as "all men" and when feminism views me as a metaphysical rapist every time I take my estrogen in the morning?!
The only glass ceilings rich trans women have are... I don't know, you tell me? When you're rich enough, does that promote you out of the category of a rapist appropriating the female form into a position where you can use feminist buzzwords like "glass ceiling?"
My thoughts exactly. You're already at +5, so I'll add other thoughts I had instead of modding +1 I agree in case that's a karma bonus putting you at +5 instead of +4.
I talk to plenty of people of the opposite sex. OOOOH, he means "talked" as in talked into bed, not just discussing TPS reports and being friendly to the members of the opposite sex my brother or ex have "talked to!" Ah, I see. Well, he can wake me up when there are any open-minded, intelligent, educated, bi females of a healthy body weight who have greater goals in life and interests than having children who would be interested in a relationship with me! Then I'll get around to "talking to" them. I see, I see.
(Disclaimer: I completely realize the fact I haven't found a single woman I care to date even after saying farewell to being a twenty-something recently says more about me than it does about "all women.")
Of course, the greater and always classic undertone here is to beware of young men who aren't falling over themselves fitting into their heteronormative role trying to find a wife and have children. Guys with families and responsibilities are much easier for oppressive governments/social orders to control.
Then again, I have an internet friend who's "talked to" plenty of girls. He like works out regularly, has a nice bod, and is interested in all kinds of athletic, outdoor activities. Definitely not a basement dweller. I honestly can't figure out for the life of me why he's never gotten beyond the makeout/cuddling stage unless his personality is completely different IRL vs. on IRC. Since he hasn't gotten any, i.e. failed in "talking to the opposite sex," does he fall within our new threat classification of "twenty-somethings who haven't talked to the opposite sex in five or six years?"
So your solution is that the average user who wants secure email knows the guy who knows the guy who knows the guy. Eh, it works for folks who want marijuana. Why not email?
WTF is wrong with you. The police can legally sell marijuana in order to have evidence that the person who bought it from them was a drug seeker. Of course the police can legally break whatever the fuck law they want. Where have you been?
That's pretty neat! Mod parent up. Einstein@Home and SETI@Home here.
I just installed it on my phone (Tegra 3) and will be putting it on my tablet (Tegra 2) later, so I'll see how it goes.
All very good points. Imo, the best office suite I've ever used, even including Microsoft Office, was KOffice back in the 3.5 days. Figured it might be relevant to say that since they're using KDE. I loved how the styles were more well-defined in particular.
That being said, I've never done much "advanced" stuff in any WYSIWYG word processor. Well, the closest I've come is Word 2010's SmartArt feature, and I'd bet that neither LibreOffice or KOffice have something like that, but I haven't given KOffice a spin since 4.0 lost me as a KDE user. It makes it a breeze to do things like simple hierarchy charts and snazzed-up lists. I have no talent for graphic design, so that feature has made my (simpler) documents a whole lot more visually appealing.
However, I've found that if I need to do anything moderately complex, I turn to LaTeX even at work. Microsoft Word can be downright frustrating at times. Even though I spend time Googleing how to do things and staring at the LaTeX Wikibook, it seems I always spend less time doing that than fighting with Word.
In a longer document I honestly don't want to think about font sizes or which typeface I'm using or whether I've got a style that's being overridden by something else I don't want. I just want to type in what I have to write and let the formatting figure itself out. LaTeX, while not perfect, is the best solution I've seen yet.
I suppose it's just a shame that with the advent of the WYSIWYG word processor, people are more concerned with indenting things with spaces rather than using tabstops and obsessing over whether Comic Sans MS or Tahoma is more appropriate for this paragraph and how neat it looks if the next paragraph is in a completely different font or color! It would be nice if the focus were more on the structure of the document. I feel LaTeX does that for me, but I suppose the overarching problem is that people in general are not structural thinkers. They understand indenting the first line of a paragraph by hitting the space bar a few times; they don't understand telling the computer that it's a paragraph in an article or in a letter and letting the computer worry about the details.
Westcliff High School for Girls Academy (WHSG)
Maybe I'm just having a bad week, but here goes. Insta -1 troll, karma to burn, etc.
But I thought that Linux was utterly sexist! I thought Linux discriminated against girls! I thought it was too technical!
Gah, I swear if I hear something along the lines of "math is hard" from another one of the real, flesh-and-blood women I know, I'm going to lose it.
Either that, or guess the fuck what. The body part between your legs does not determine your competency behind the keyboard. Women not using linux != some nebulous "discrimination" on the part of "all men."
Except I suppose this is desktop users we're talking about. Next we're going to hear how these poor girls have been discriminated against since they learned LibreOffice or KOffice and can't get hired. It's a male conspiracy!
What is your beef with PGP/GnuPG?
Because its such a pain in the ass to use that no one other than some dorks trying to look like ultra-geeks and raving tinfoil-hat butters.
I'll guess I'll count several large, nation-wide, health care clients who needed my employer to use GnuPG (not the other way around--I'd offered GnuPG to clients looking for encryption before TLS between email servers was common, but I would never require somebody to use it, nor would I care to support it) next time I revise my list of "ultra-geeks and raving tinfoil-hat butters."
Most had been using GnuPG internally to protect emails that may contain ePHI and were looking for a call center that could send them their call records (ePHI) encrypted using GnuPG. I was happy to be able to say "yes." Others took a look at GnuPG and said "that's neat, let's do it." Of course with TLS between servers these days it often doesn't come up and we just test to see if their server is TLS-enabled, and if so, we tell them that data in motion is already encrypted, and that's good enough.
Again, I still honestly want to know why you think S/MIME is any better than PGP/GnuPG. Maybe you're just trolling and I should stop feeding. To be honest, if I had mod points today, and I don't usually downmod, but I would mod this comment troll or flamebait. You need a bit more than hot air to back up why you think PGP/GnuPG are flawed. You have valid points, but your presentation needs much work.
Thanks
You said:
Its just RSA without the privilege of having an 'trusted' third party to verify.
Then you said:
SMIME with self signed/friend-signed certs is still far far better than PGP.
How do you figure this? If you're using self-signed certs or even a self-generated CA that you can share among your friends like I had while I was looking into S/MIME for work, you're still back to the web of trust model for all intents and purposes (assuming the NSA has the ability to compel entities like Verisign to sign forged certs) that GnuPG uses. I can trust my friend's cert because he gave it to me on a thumb drive, and he can trust my cert because I gave it to him on a thumb drive. Alternatively, I can self-generate a CA cert, give that cert to all my friends and sign all their certs with my CA. It's still a lot of manual effort that a lot of people don't care to do. Perhaps that will change.
The point is it seems you're being contradictory here. If we're reduced to a web of trust model by assuming that well-known, otherwise trustworthy CAs are untrustworthy because of the NSA's questionable actions, then S/MIME and GnuPG are both RSA without the privilege of having a "trusted" third party.
I was confused, though. Are you criticizing GnuPG's implementation of RSA and web of trust or are you criticizing GnuPG's ease of use?
You write:
GPG is just a horrible implementation (from a usability perspective)
But you had already written:
You already have fully functional encryption built into EVERY EMAIL CLIENT THAT MATTERS
Implying that S/MIME is more readily usable than GnuPG greatly depends on which email client we're talking about. If we're talking about Outlook, I'd argue that GnuPG is probably easier because of the hoops it makes you jump through, especially if we're talking about self-signed/friend-signed S/MIME certs. If we're talking about Gmail/Hotmail/Facebook/you-name-it, afaik and correct me if I'm wrong, but S/MIME is a complete non-starter. It's just not supported; you have to use GnuPG.
I do have to admit, I find this frustrating and I can sympathize with the sentiment you seem to be expressing. There is absolutely nothing available* that makes asymmetric encryption available to the layman. I could go full-on tinfoil hat and presume that it's due to some plot by the CIA/NSA/Illuminati/whatever, but I think there are simpler explanations. The layman does not understand the implications of sending an email in plaintext or the implications of presuming that an email is coming from who is appears to be coming from. Laypeople, from Babbage's time to the present, seem for whatever reason to have this utter "confusion of ideas" that if it's on a computer, it must be true (and conversely that if the computer gives wrong information, somebody must have personally been doing something underhanded to cause the wrong information).
*That being said, I remember one and only one email client I've used that made both S/MIME and GnuPG a breeze. Back in the KDE 3 days, I used to use KMail. I don't remember what versions specifically, but I have never used an email client since then that, out-of-the-box, without any finagling on my part, worked seamlessly with email encryption. I may not be remembering correctly, but I think it even made the process of exchanging public keys a breeze as well. I got scared away from KDE by KDE 4 and now use XFCE with Thunderbird, which is more on the level of Outlook with support.
At any rate, please clarify why GnuPG is inferior to S/MIME. Personally, I think either technology is about on equal footing with GnuPG having the advantage when considering webmail. IIRC, there's also a specification for a GPG/MIME mode, which puts both S/MIME and GnuPG squarely in the same arena and on similar terms. However, neither of those particular RSA implementatio
This is interesting.
Coincidentally we seem to have the opposite situation over here. Women can choose to start families whenever they want with little regard for how they'll support their children, and they can also shut out the father from her life entirely with little to no consequences, both financially and socially. If she chooses to shut the father out of her life, we're more than happy to garnish his wages (no financial consequences whatsoever), and because women have the privilege of being presumed the victim, we'll even tell him that he must have done something abusive to get shut out (so perhaps that would be considered an opposite social consequence since we'll say good on her for throwing out somebody who just must have been a deadbeat).
I work in a predominantly female environment. Sexism isn't limited to the male gender. Go back and re-read that before you moderate. Women have the privilege of being seen as above sexism---as the victims of sexism even, which women have the privilege of painting as a problem exclusively the fault of "all men," but women are people, too.
I know the plural of anecdote is not data, but here's my anecdote anyway. I work in a call center, and when we upgraded our message taking software to a scripted system, I was promoted as a programmer. Drama ensued because customer service could no longer make changes to the questions we ask callers. So, I said, let's sit down and I'll teach you basic programming so that you can make changes again. We tried. And we tried. And we tried. And at the end of it, I found myself teaching remedial algebra and trying to overcome these women's math phobia. So, we scrapped it altogether, and I got a nice, secure job.
The fallout of that, though, was that it came to be believed that somehow, because I'm forced to work as the male gender (another topic entirely and beyond the scope of this discussion), and because we know that "all men" are sexist (and that statement somehow isn't sexist), that the failure of my co-workers to learn how to make even very basic changes such as adding or removing a prompt was definitive proof that I was doing something or had set the system up somehow in a way that was sexist and an inaccessible to the female mind.
I admit, I'm not the best teacher. That's why I don't teach for a living.
What flabbergasted me was the ways that the womyn-born-womyn entitlement complex, as I've come to call it (very different from the "princess entitlement complex" that MRAs go on about---I'm not attracted to women, don't date women, am not interested in the reasons MRAs seek mail-order brides, and the term "womyn-born-womyn entitlement complex" is intended to be completely separate from romantic relationships) prevented my co-workers from learning. Then when I start throwing corner cases and unexpected input at her program, I'm presumed to be just mean and putting up sexist barriers and going hard on them just because they're women. I'm sorry, no. Users will do whatever they can to break what you wrote, and if what you want is to be able to make changes that don't just utterly foul up a message script, then you need to step off your entitlement complex high horse and start taking a more humble approach. But not, it's just easier to call me sexist, because my legal gender is male and all men are sexist, so obviously I, individually, am sexist, and walk off in a huff.
What it came down to, and what it's come down to in other attempts of mine to help women out who are taking CS classes, is that they suppose that the computer can take vaguely worded requirements and know on its own how to do what she meant, much the same way her boyfriend or husband will know what she wants.
I mean, it's just, excuse me, but didn't Ada Lovelace specifically say that wouldn't be the case? I look back on this history of CS, and I see women like Ada Lovelac
You're exactly right, and Card's crossed that line between disapproval and hate speech on posterboards. In fact, I support the right to burn crosses or flags on one's own property. If one has a billboard, I think anybody should be able to say anything they want. That's free speech.
(Also note, if you trespass on my property to erect a cross, whether or not you burn it, I will be calling the police and pressing charges.)
As others have pointed out, however, Card's even gone beyond that. He actively uses his money to lobby for discriminatory marriage laws and anti-sodomy laws. If that's not crossing a line, I don't know what is.
If somebody was a brilliant science fiction writer (not saying Card is, but I would need to finish reading Ender's Game to give a complete opinion on that) and was also bankrolling laws that were discriminatory against Jews... well, you're the one who Godwined it already.
While I would defend to the death his right to publish his ravings on the internet, he still has no inherent right to my money.
Apparently a lot of other people feel the same way, hence a boycott.
I tried to read Ender's Game once. A friend lent a copy to me. I don't think I got further than the first 20 pages or so when I found myself thinking that, gee, something's not quite right here. This sounds just as contrived as a Chick tract. So I looked up his background and lo and behold I found out he was a Mormon.
Maybe some day I'll finish Ender's game, but if the first few pages are any indication, it's a contrived, shallow story that attempts to create a pity party for a contrived, shallow protagonist. Apparently I'm not the only person who thinks that, and apparently there are people who think that who don't even care about gay marriage.
Neon Genesis Evangelion was a much more compelling story with similar themes. Then again, I just set a pretty low bar for a compelling story.
That being said, maybe the movie will be better. Perhaps I'll torrent it at some point in the future and watch it opposite Battleship.
coinreturn is correct.
Furthermore, you do realize what the Bible says about that, right? True, some Christians try to argue this etymology or that etymology or alternate usage or translation error or any number of linguistic gymnastics. However, the only arguments that allow homosexuality in Christianity that make sense to me are the same arguments that say that women don't need to be "unclean" when they're menstruating.
However, you must remember, we love literal Bible interpretations. If somebody is going to warp their world view so much as to believe that the world is only 6,000 years old, that the dinosaurs were killed in the flood, and that carbon-14 dating is a big lie and can't possibly work, did it never occur to you what that person might think about something with an "ick" factor like homosexuality?
Not to ramble, but where I grew up, persecution of homosexuality and homosexuals is required to be considered devout. It's seen as sinful to allow a homosexual to live under one's roof. This town consideres itself very devout and is proud of the fact that it's legal there to discriminate against renters on the basis of sexual orientation. This is a fairly common thing in the USA.
So, I don't know what parallel universe you're posting from. Maybe in your parallel universe being homosexual is just another part of the great diversity that your god created when he/she/it created this planet. Not here, though.
Eh, no worries. Next incarnation you'll figure it out. It's just karma. No sympathy. Do not change anything.
Undoing a mod to reply to you.
John Hopkins... humm...
A recent British review found suicide rates of up to 18 per cent among people who had undergone gender reassignment surgery.
Feh. Beats the 50% rate of suicide without bottom surgery. All it shows is how uncaring and inhuman people like you are.
What you don't realize is the huge bias against transgendered identities in psychology.
Here's the whole problem. Trans folks are routinely denied their voice in these matters. The system prefers objectifying them and finding every excuse to discredit any benefit they've found from HRT and bottom surgery.
This is how deep the problem goes. We're talking about "transgendered folks," but nobody yet in this entire /. discussion has acknowledged trans men.
Trans men exist. There are a couple in the local support group. Yes, that's right. Folks born with their reproductive systems on the inside who desire becoming men. They take testosterone. They have facial hair. Their voices deepen and become male voices. If you met one, you'd never know it, because they become practically indistinguishable from cis men (men who were born with their reproductive systems on the outside).
How do you explain that in terms of childhood sexual abuse or a desire to rape women in the bathroom or any other kind of theory of sexual perversion and sexual domanance that psychology assures us that the misguided trans woman is merely trying to acquire?
I'd recommend the book Whipping Girl by Julia Serano. It adequately sums up how utterly broken the treatment of trans women is. Did you know that it was until recently that trans women weren't even allowed to start HRT unless they could appear sexually stimulating to a psychologist?
There is a trifecta of religion, psychology, and feminism that is utterly undermined by the idea that somebody born into the male gender caste would desire being a woman. What I mean by gender caste is the idea that the gender one is assigned at birth on the basis on body parts is somehow far deeper than skin, much like the caste system in India. Religion finds this idea natural in its sole focus on reproduction. Feminism finds its construction of a woman as a victim undermined by the idea that someone who was born a rapist/aggressor/man would, of their own free will, desire to become a victim/woman. However, psychology has the solution. The trans woman could only make the decision to undergo gender transition on the basis on mental illness. Here we finally see the trans woman as the depraved serial killer in a woman suit she is.
The research you linked to is a direct product of that bias. We have bought into this narrative that men are sexual aggressors and women are victims so deeply that we cannot comprehend why a sexual aggressor would choose to become a victim except by painting it as mental illness.
Let me clue you in on something. When strangers see me, they believe I'm female. I also have no reason to argue with their assessment. This presents a dilemma. How can you tell somebody who is obviously female and being gendered female by others that she is really, somehow, a man? The only option you have is to do a Crocodile Dundee test and grab me in the crotch.
So, how, exactly, do these researchers figure that sex change surgery is not effective? It's highly dubious, especially after one considers how many trans women have had their lives improved by bottom surgery. However, their voices are easily dismissed because they do not fit into the narrative that femaleness is artifical vanity that womyn-born-womyn are helpless victims of and that maleness is somehow authentic. We look at the trans woman and we are deeply suspicious of her going about her day with long hair, which we understand the womyn-born-womyn only wears long because she's forced to by some vast male conspiracy (see the article "My Hair Is My Accompli
Came here for this comment. Very satisfied. Thank you.
Not going to leave satisfied quite yet until I choose to open my yap.
So, what has the Ada Initiative accomplished with their sexism and presumption that all men are rapists?
1. We now have a new joke every time there's an article about women in IT.
2. ???
How many more girls are going to pick up, well, in this case, Ruby on Rails and go "hey, that's neat!" and learn programming because the Ada Initiative handed out creeper cards, censored panels, and cost individuals their jobs?
0
The really sad part to all this the more I think about it is how it even had my misogyny going for a while. I was raised as a male during the 90s. Reverse discrimination across the board. I know what it's like to be unfairly treated in very overt ways simply because of a body part I never even wanted. Hell, that body part was even mutilated at birth and never properly healed, leaving me with the exquisite experience of knowing the kind of genital pain that's only supposed to be associated with FGM.
The trouble is that one of these days I'm going to be a woman looking for a job (mostly because undergoing gender transition in a nearly all conservative womyn-born-womyn environment just isn't going to work).
Is this what I get to thank the Ada Initiative for? Thanks, Ada Initiative. I'm really looking forward to being perceived as somebody who's going to be a total bitch who's going to sue for sexual harassment at the first dongle joke. Thanks, Ada Initiative. Sure, the Ada Initiative may not consider me a woman because I'm not a "womyn-born-womyn," but people who gender me female perceive me no differently than any other woman. Mostly because unlike in Crocodile Dundee, folks don't actually go checking genitals in real life.
Thanks, Ada Initiative. You sure did a favor for women.
Don't blame me. I voted for Bob Barr in 2008 and Gary Johnson in 2012. So yes, the other guy did win. Excuse me for not allowing mainstream media (especially Fox News) define my reality. However, the depressing thing is I live in a country where everyone else lets big media define their reality. See, I live in this wonderful place where all sorts of folks run for president and lots of other offices, too. I guess in this crazy world I live in, Noam Chomsky can endorse Jill Stein's presidential run. Did anybody even know she existed in 2012 besides me?
But no. Everybody's masturbating over Sarah Palin because zomg she would be the frist woman ever close to the presidency. Watch as we masturbate over Clinton when she runs in 2016 just like we were masturbating over her bid in 2008.
Folks need to wake up. Anyone who is voting either D or R, especially in local elections, is part of the problem.
The problem is so big, in fact, that I've been finding myself wondering whether, depending on how much of a homophobic, reactionary, police state-endorsing jerk gets the Republican nomination in 2016 and whether or not the Libertarian's 2016 candidate has even a shadow of a chance of getting 5% of the popular vote, whether I might actually end up turning into part of the problem myself by voting for Clinton.
What's to be done? You've got candidates running left and right that might actually do things like reducing the size of government, ending the wars on drugs and terror, and trying to undo the damage that's been done since we all lost our shit after 9/11. Yet everybody turns on Faux News, PMSNBC, and CNN and gets ready to root for either an R or D and blame all our problems on the other letter like this is some kind of meaningless sport.
Seconded. For the longest time I hated Java, but lately I've been finding that Java is very nice for the server side.
As others pointed out, nobody uses the built-in time classes like java.util.Calendar. That one in particular is just completely unweildy. Everyone who needs to do anything with time and time zones uses Joda time. In fact, I've found when using JPA that I can't even involve java.util.Date or java.util.Calendar because they insist on persisting system-local time in the database. System-local time is utterly useless when you're writing an application that needs to support users from Newfoundland to Hawaii.
Oracle's ownership of Java was nearly a deal breaker for me, but fortunately there are things like icedtea. Essentially, Oracle is irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. My projects rely heavily on Apache Commons and other free software. In fact, it's the free software ecosystem surrounding Java on the server side that attracted me in the first place.
Of course, since this is Slashdot, half the comments here are decrying Java as a security risk and proclaiming its death because when they hear Java they think applets from the 90s and horrible Swing applications. Applets are dead. Flash killed them, and now Flash applets are dead, too. HTML5 is the future for client-side, but something has to serve the data for HTML5 to consume. I've found, especially working in a Windows shop, that Java fits the bill very well.
Yes, but that's not even good enough. You and I both know how these arrogant pinheads work. They have a social status and nothing more. If some damned kid can just show them up, what would that mean about them? Sure we can call the kid a "genius" or a "wiz" and dress him up in other terms to attempt to shield the pinhead's social status, but at the end of the day the fact remains that the pinhead got shown up by a damned kid barely out of diapers.
It seems the only correct answer is to either do nothing or as another poster suggested, sell the information to others.
Now imagine the threat to the social status of a billionaire if some faggot like me found an exploit. Total social status inversion. I'm supposed to be an AIDS-infested nobody who's too incompetent to do anything. Imagine how embarassing that would be to a billionaire to get shown up by an AIDS-infested (presumably) faggot.
It's all about social status. The taller they are, the harder they fall. Fortunately for them, we live in a culture that can shoot the messenger so they don't have to fall.
Those evil hackers, I'll tell ya. They're genius mutant autistic savants from the 9th dimension who never get laid. That's the only reason they can show up our best and brightest.
I think I heard this in a song once while playing Rock Band:
Peace sells, but who's buying?
It seems to adequately explain the prediciment we find ourselves in.
Now Tumblr and lolcats, there you can make some $$$ and get a nice Lambo that you can cruise down the main drag in with a chick with nice tits in your passenger seat. I've always been a fan of the Countach, but maybe a Ford Shelby GT or a Corvette ZR1, hell, why not a Zonda? Imagine, you could be crusing down a main drag with a hot chick in a skinny little dress in your Zonda. Everyone else would turn green as you went by. All you need is the $$$, so go out and get it.
Peace; innovation; meaningful progress; using our wealth to find ways to tackle problems such as overpopulation and world hunger; deliberately investing in technologies to push us into a post-scarcity civilization; safe, sustainable fission power, fusion power, or some other way to harness the power output from that big fusion reactor in the sky; terraforming other planetoids in our solar system and engaging in multi-generational projects to ensure our survival as spacefaring species—sure all that sells, but who's buying?
I agree. I usually vote Libertarian. Voting Republican would be the height of absurdity for me. That being said, neither major party has ever been terribly attractive to me.
Let me guess. This means that we need more womyn-born-womyn in software development ASAP because, as we all know, despite any personal experiences otherwise, womyn-born-womyn are all better communicators than any man or trans woman could ever hope to be. I mean, they just feel they communicate better. How can you argue with something a womyn-born-womyn just feels must be true. After all, she has a vagina and gave birth a few times, so that means she must just be a better person than any man or trans woman could hope to be, what with our incomplete XY configuration.
Seriously, all this feminism crap can cram it up its vagina. I've got karma to burn. I don't care.
I am utterly sick and tired of this shit. I am sick and tired of being beat over the head with Ada Lovelace because apparently, according to womyn-born-womyn, her vagina was the body part that enabled her to be a programmer. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the gray matter between her ears or her reputation as an astute mathematician.
Where are the womyn-born-womyn taking programming classes? Where are the womyn-born-womyn educating themselves to prepare for a career in software development? Where the fuck are they?
And then these feminist assclowns think that the solution to the problem is to put completely unqualified womyn-born-womyn who wouldn't even be able to understand Lovelace's Notes into programming positions just because we absolutely need womyn-born-womyn programmers. "It's so unfair!" they scream. Show me womyn-born-womyn who are being turned away from programming classes because of their vaginas, and I might give a shit.
Show me a womyn-born-womyn who can even understand "garbage in, garbage out." You can't do it!
Yet we still need to get bashed over the head by Ada Lovelace and feminism. Obviously, everyone with a defective Y chromosome must be sexist! How do we know they're sexist? Because they have Y chromosomes! That's why they're sexist.
Never mind that these damned womyn-born-womyn can't even understand that Lovelace herself invented garbage in, garbage out.
Give me a fucking break. I'm sick of it.