Please consider this me raising my glass to you, a fellow engineer/techie/coder/geek (whatever you may be) irrespective of your gender. We need (and indeed have) a lot of women like yourself in our industry. No doubt we need more, but the way these shrill and often non-technical people go about advocating for it does nothing to advance their cause.
If you want to feel like a average-geek elitist asshole, sure, go for Mac. But if you want to be the uber-geek elitist, then try and get *BSD or even better, OpenSolaris to work on your computer. If you can get KDE to work on top of OpenSolaris, and can configure your devices, you get major elitist street-cred:P
True enough. I have some anecdotal evidence on that. I administer the network in my student residence because I'm the only CS major/science major there (yes, majority of residents are women and yes that's a good thing). Whenever any resident comes to me with a software problem like a virus in their Windows system, or some kind of "it was working a few minutes ago" etc., I just tell them to go for Ubuntu. Most of them don't, but I have had quite a few people convert to Linux, most of whom are art students, law students, medical students, philosophy majors etc. And the important thing is, the ones who take the time become MORE PROFICIENT at administering their Linux machines than their former Windows boxes. The reason is simple, we have LOTS of forums and documentation and instructions available online for how to get your Linux box working, not as much is available for Windows.
Regards.
Your problem sir is not with engineering, but with the laws of mathematics and physics that govern our universe. What you hated most about engineering is what I loved the most, at the end of it all I could always tell whether my solution to a problem was correct, and if correct, whether it was optimal or suboptimal.
I am with you on that my white brother! There should be some way to preserve the white race, some sort of program that ensures that pure whites breed with each other so that every white woman has at least two pure-breed children, if we don't do that we'll lose the white line in a few thousand years. As a non-white person, I would find that sort of world a completely sad place.
Regards.
Oh please! Free speech my ass. I'm an atheist living in Europe, if you're such a gung ho defender of free speech just go to Austria, Germany, France, or a host of other European countries and talk about The Holocaust the wrong way and see yourself dragged off to prison faster than you can say "oye ve".
Yes I know those laws were passed by democratically elected parliaments. But if they were passed then at least Europe should have the decency to say they protect free speech as and when it concurs with their own ideals, ideas and beliefs.
Regards.
Thanks! That said, I do feel sorry for the fact that one of our networking guys mucked up youtube for the whole world. But that's because we lag so damn far behind in training and education that it was just a matter of ignorance. And if any concerned Americans are reading this, don't give us weapons, give us books and help us get our people educated. That's the best answer to any extremism; though I'm happy that we completely demolished the religious right in the elections just held, yay.
Hi,
I'm a Pakistani, I strongly disagree with our government's action to ban youtube in Pakistan, but I also don't think it's anybody else's place to pass judgments on it. It's an internal matter for us, no need for anybody to get all hot and bothered. Oh, and please let us bring ourselves into the 21st century, you guys have quite a big pair of "bringing" burdens on your able backs already, so try to get them into the 21st.
Regards.
All I was saying that if you want to look at the root causes of terrorism today don't buy into the "they hate our freedoms" routine. The real cause is US troops stationed in their countries without the peoples' consent, the US backing of dictatorships over them and finally remarks like that of Ms. Albright that I quoted in my last post.
Also, you had said that the Afghan government went "meh" rather than hunting his ass down, I showed you a link where the Afghan govt offered to capture and prosecute him. Your point that they would have let him off because of what you might think the system of govt might have been is speculation, and unfortunately we will never know. In any case it might have been a good idea to see how they tried him before going into Afghanistan all gung-ho. It's been 6.5 years, and no bin Ladin, and no Mullah Omar. All a bunch of BS if you ask me.
I'm an atheist and so have no special love of Islam at heart. But what you are saying is grossly misleading. First off, only a couple of Baptists blew up abortion clinics because the only problem they have is that the policy of their democratic country is not in accordance with their opinion, they are not oppressed. Please take a long hard look at the Islamic world of today. American troops are stationed in Saudi Arabia at the invitation of a dictator that America itself props up, against the will of the people, Iraq was bombarded and sanctioned throughout the 90s and reduced to rubble, when Madeleine Albright was asked whether the 500,000 children that died due to non-availability of medicines in Iraq was a fair price to pay, she said "yes it is a fair price". What do you expect from a people when your leaders tell them that half a million of their dead children is a fair price to pay?
As for "system of government hunting his ass down", wellllll please take a look at this http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/10/07/ret.us.taliban/ and then come back and discuss it.
Slashdot Mirror
Please consider this me raising my glass to you, a fellow engineer/techie/coder/geek (whatever you may be) irrespective of your gender. We need (and indeed have) a lot of women like yourself in our industry. No doubt we need more, but the way these shrill and often non-technical people go about advocating for it does nothing to advance their cause.
If you want to feel like a average-geek elitist asshole, sure, go for Mac. But if you want to be the uber-geek elitist, then try and get *BSD or even better, OpenSolaris to work on your computer. If you can get KDE to work on top of OpenSolaris, and can configure your devices, you get major elitist street-cred :P
True enough. I have some anecdotal evidence on that. I administer the network in my student residence because I'm the only CS major/science major there (yes, majority of residents are women and yes that's a good thing). Whenever any resident comes to me with a software problem like a virus in their Windows system, or some kind of "it was working a few minutes ago" etc., I just tell them to go for Ubuntu. Most of them don't, but I have had quite a few people convert to Linux, most of whom are art students, law students, medical students, philosophy majors etc. And the important thing is, the ones who take the time become MORE PROFICIENT at administering their Linux machines than their former Windows boxes. The reason is simple, we have LOTS of forums and documentation and instructions available online for how to get your Linux box working, not as much is available for Windows. Regards.
Your problem sir is not with engineering, but with the laws of mathematics and physics that govern our universe. What you hated most about engineering is what I loved the most, at the end of it all I could always tell whether my solution to a problem was correct, and if correct, whether it was optimal or suboptimal.
I am with you on that my white brother! There should be some way to preserve the white race, some sort of program that ensures that pure whites breed with each other so that every white woman has at least two pure-breed children, if we don't do that we'll lose the white line in a few thousand years. As a non-white person, I would find that sort of world a completely sad place. Regards.
Oh please! Free speech my ass. I'm an atheist living in Europe, if you're such a gung ho defender of free speech just go to Austria, Germany, France, or a host of other European countries and talk about The Holocaust the wrong way and see yourself dragged off to prison faster than you can say "oye ve". Yes I know those laws were passed by democratically elected parliaments. But if they were passed then at least Europe should have the decency to say they protect free speech as and when it concurs with their own ideals, ideas and beliefs. Regards.
Thanks! That said, I do feel sorry for the fact that one of our networking guys mucked up youtube for the whole world. But that's because we lag so damn far behind in training and education that it was just a matter of ignorance. And if any concerned Americans are reading this, don't give us weapons, give us books and help us get our people educated. That's the best answer to any extremism; though I'm happy that we completely demolished the religious right in the elections just held, yay.
Hi, I'm a Pakistani, I strongly disagree with our government's action to ban youtube in Pakistan, but I also don't think it's anybody else's place to pass judgments on it. It's an internal matter for us, no need for anybody to get all hot and bothered. Oh, and please let us bring ourselves into the 21st century, you guys have quite a big pair of "bringing" burdens on your able backs already, so try to get them into the 21st. Regards.
All I was saying that if you want to look at the root causes of terrorism today don't buy into the "they hate our freedoms" routine. The real cause is US troops stationed in their countries without the peoples' consent, the US backing of dictatorships over them and finally remarks like that of Ms. Albright that I quoted in my last post. Also, you had said that the Afghan government went "meh" rather than hunting his ass down, I showed you a link where the Afghan govt offered to capture and prosecute him. Your point that they would have let him off because of what you might think the system of govt might have been is speculation, and unfortunately we will never know. In any case it might have been a good idea to see how they tried him before going into Afghanistan all gung-ho. It's been 6.5 years, and no bin Ladin, and no Mullah Omar. All a bunch of BS if you ask me.
I'm an atheist and so have no special love of Islam at heart. But what you are saying is grossly misleading. First off, only a couple of Baptists blew up abortion clinics because the only problem they have is that the policy of their democratic country is not in accordance with their opinion, they are not oppressed. Please take a long hard look at the Islamic world of today. American troops are stationed in Saudi Arabia at the invitation of a dictator that America itself props up, against the will of the people, Iraq was bombarded and sanctioned throughout the 90s and reduced to rubble, when Madeleine Albright was asked whether the 500,000 children that died due to non-availability of medicines in Iraq was a fair price to pay, she said "yes it is a fair price". What do you expect from a people when your leaders tell them that half a million of their dead children is a fair price to pay? As for "system of government hunting his ass down", wellllll please take a look at this http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/10/07/ret.us.taliban/ and then come back and discuss it.