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User: Anghwyr

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  1. Re:In my corporate environment.... on Ask Slashdot: Do I Give IT a Login On Our Dept. Server? · · Score: 1

    IT is poorly capable of handling computers and software at the three institutes I've worked at (2x university, 1x government). We had our own private sysadmin at one of the faculties that did allow us to be productive researchers, rather than crippled ones. Scaled-up-to-whole-organization IT don't work that well in my experience, and getting anything sensible done (such as upgrading from IE6, or scaling 10mb mailboxes up to something fitting to this millenium) takes 5 years.

    Now we've both vented about 'the other guy', can we get back to normal and not assume we know the quality of the IT the OP is working with, the real job description of the OP, and his psychological profile? The guy is asking a question, and a sysadmin could tell him why his IT service finds it sufficient to have an account on the server to allow it.
     

  2. Re:Head of the division, you say? on Ask Slashdot: Do I Give IT a Login On Our Dept. Server? · · Score: 1

    Same surprise here at the aggressive responses to the OP. Haven't seen any answers yet from a sysadmin here on why the IT department would be ok with it if they had a user account on the box, which was the OP's question. What would an IT guy do with a user account?

  3. Re:Please give me GM everything. on Avoiding GM Foods? Monsanto Says You're Overly Fussy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why on earth do you need a carb-free bread? Unless you are allergic, just manage your eating habits in a normal way.

    The point of the above sentence being: medicine is not always the best answer. Third world countries are starving because we 1. destroy their local farmers' economy by dumping free food on them (note that when the chinese are dumping textile on european / USA markets, we start adding trade taxes for a reason), and 2. destroy what food-production they still have by making it financial beneficial for individual farmers to grow cheap maize for our cattle, rather than food for their countrymen. (3. Because their governments are far from brilliant, but we're not making it easy for those governments either).

    I can see that one solution is to make the few farmers these countries have be more efficient in producing grain with GM crops, but there's also the solution of 'lets stop to abuse the fcuk out of third world countries', which seems to be the higher moral ground.

  4. Re:If they do this.. on Preventing My Hosting Provider From Rooting My Server? · · Score: 1

    I think you are muddling the analogy here somewhat, possibly mixing up the concepts of 'can be a crime' and 'is illegal'.

    It is possible to legally pick up money, so money-from-the-porch regulations can be in a contract. What cannot be in a contract is that when I do something that you disapprove of, you are entitled to enslave me for 5 years. There is no way that slavery is legal, so it is meaningless in contracts.

  5. Re:tell me something a child couldn't figure out on Scientists Discover How DNA Is Folded Within the Nucleus · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The first observation is that genes are actually stored in two locations.

    This threw me off at first. It read like active genes have a backup stored somewhere in the inactive part. That is not the case =). We're not having and L1/2/3 cache in our genome.

  6. Re:I'll second the call for examples. on FOSS Sexism Claims Met With Ire and Denial · · Score: 1

    I think there's a good explanation why it doesn't work both ways (one being acceptable, and the other not).

    Women gained the right to vote as late as 1920 in the USA, and were seen as worth less than man for god knows how many years. That sort of leaves a mark.. and makes jokes about it a more sensitive issue than the other way around.

    And I've heard and made plenty of jokes about women, but not so much the other way around. Might be because I'm a boy, and spend quite some time in a fraternity.

  7. Re:Refreshment of memory on FOSS Sexism Claims Met With Ire and Denial · · Score: 1

    What I quoted is the response of a girl present at that conference. I just remembered that something like this hit the blogs a few months ago and googled for it.

    Khasim was asking for examples. This is one where a girl was offended by it. Doesn't say anything about inherently offending all women.

  8. Re:Read what you just wrote. on FOSS Sexism Claims Met With Ire and Denial · · Score: 1

    I think a white person would be seen as a poor coder being whipped forward by the management ;-).

    The difference is that white people didn't recently go through mass slavery or suppression. That context to me makes a white man a joke and the black man not.

    Slavery ended in the 1860's in the USA. Woman gained voting rights as late as 1920. While slavery is far worse than not being allowed to vote, both are a quite extreme expression of inequality.

  9. Re:I'll second the call for examples. on FOSS Sexism Claims Met With Ire and Denial · · Score: 1

    Not particularly disturbing. But I think that the current sensitivity to one thing or another isn't an objective reflection of how wrong something is.

    Your statement just reminded me of an old joke about women, which touches upon slavery as well.

    "What's wrong when you wife comes out of the kitchen and starts nagging you? You made the chain too long."

  10. Re:When this thread has ended ... on FOSS Sexism Claims Met With Ire and Denial · · Score: 1

    Noone in this thread is collecting all instances of sexism on the internet.

    A lot of people are quoting the latest, most exposed cases of sexism, which sort of seems the logical thing to do. Why quote an obscure case from 1996?

  11. Re:I'll second the call for examples. on FOSS Sexism Claims Met With Ire and Denial · · Score: 1

    Its' not about porn vs slavery, which would be a poor comparison indeed.

    It is about putting offending pictures to a particular group of people in your presentation, and I picked a stronger example on purpose to try (and fail to) show Khasim that frequency of nasty comments in a mailinglist isn't all that matters.

  12. Nope. on FOSS Sexism Claims Met With Ire and Denial · · Score: 1

    Why do I need to be 'there', in order to name an example of sexism. Doesn't seem to be a requirement.

    Why do I fail whenever I (or several others in the thread) try to explain that your defense in numbers of non-sexist posts is irrelevant.

    You show all the signs of a troll. /signing out.

  13. Re:I'll second the call for examples. on FOSS Sexism Claims Met With Ire and Denial · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Good point. Either would probably make me uncomfortable. And I'm male :).

    I tried to transpose the sexism to racism, as I thought that people would find it easier to pick up racism than sexism.

  14. Re:Where you there? on FOSS Sexism Claims Met With Ire and Denial · · Score: 1

    Lets' repeat ObsessiveMathsFreak answer again. If I don't shoot you a thousand times, and then shoot you, there is no problem?

  15. Re:Read what you just wrote. on FOSS Sexism Claims Met With Ire and Denial · · Score: 1

    You asked for examples, someone got you 4 examples 5 minutes after you asked, and you immediately discard that as 'not enough examples'. That doesn't bode well for any kind of rational discussion.

    To answer your last sentence: Lets' rephrase (again) it to this and see if it rings some bells:

    " So, if only 1.% of the developers are negroid ... but fewer than 0.1% of comments on development mailing lists are racist ... what is the real "problem" that exists? "

    Imagine that rather than having a naked chick every so many slides (as happened in a talk @ GoCaRuCo), you would have a picture of a negroid in chains animation pulling in the next slide of the presentation. Add a whip to the scene and it would make even a mostly white audience severely uncomfortable.

    I think we're just far more sensitive to racism than to sexism, which makes it a bit harder to pick up acts of sexism.

  16. Re:I'll second the call for examples. on FOSS Sexism Claims Met With Ire and Denial · · Score: 1, Troll

    Trying to figure out what you mean with that last sentence.. If I just translate it to another setting:

    " So, if only 1.% of the developers are negroid ... but fewer than 0.1% of comments on development mailing lists are racist ... what is the real "problem" that exists? "

    Imagine that rather than having a naked chick every so many slides (as happened in a talk @ GoCaRuCo), you would have a picture of a negroid in chains animation pulling in the next slide of the presentation. Add a whip to the scene and it would make even a mostly white audience severely uncomfortable.

    I think we're just far more sensitive to racism than to sexism, which makes it a bit harder to pick up acts of sexism.

  17. Refreshment of memory on FOSS Sexism Claims Met With Ire and Denial · · Score: 5, Informative

    There was an example on a ruby conference earlier this year: http://dyepot-teapot.com/2009/04/25/dear-fellow-rubyists/

    “If he had left it at a few introductory jokes, I would be writing a very different post. Instead the porn references continued with images of scantily-clad women gratuitously splashed across technical diagrams and intro slides. As he got into code snippets, he inserted interstitial images every few slides.

  18. Re:reversable solutions on UK Royal Society Claims Geo-Engineering Feasible · · Score: 1

    10 trillion tiny mirrors? Not sure if they had planned to control these, or just launch a giant reflecting cloud between us and the sun.

  19. reversable solutions on UK Royal Society Claims Geo-Engineering Feasible · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I would prefer a method that we can reverse if it turns out that we misunderstood a bit of the carboncycle.. so please not the millions of tiny mirrors?

  20. Re:Maybe point to Evaluation Assurance Level? on How To Argue That Open Source Software Is Secure? · · Score: 1

    I know that it is a poor measure, but it seems like something that carries weight when talking with customers. "There's this official security certificate system for Operating Systems, and Windows, Unix and Linux all reach the same EAL4+ level there." It seems like something that is nice and inspires confidence, and actually is true (but irrelevant). Wouldn't that work better to take a customers worry away then to educate them on FUD tactics, leaked source codes of windows being available, and the different comparisons of security flaws between operating systems?

  21. Maybe point to Evaluation Assurance Level? on How To Argue That Open Source Software Is Secure? · · Score: 1

    I know that EAL might not say that much, but it is a nice and clear concept. The most safe operating systems are those that are in fighter jets and all, with an EAL of 6+, there are a bunch of normal OSes valuated at EAL4+, most of them open source, but also windows 2000, and I belief windows xp. Windows vista thus far is evaluated at EAL1. So, right now just point your customers to these articles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation_Assurance_Level http://gabriel.lozano-moran.name/blog/PermaLink,guid,4dc0e36a-d623-4a89-9ae6-da6edd0d55bb.aspx

  22. Re:Hey, remember when Ender's Game was good? on Ender in Exile · · Score: 1

    So he is fanatical on the point of marriage. Pretty much everyone has a few idiotic blind spots like that, and all but politicians in public have expressed those points to friends or online at some point in time. Don't belief me? Take the hypothetical example of coming home and finding someone raping your wife/daughter/sister. Pretty much everyone you ask will have an urge to commit a violent act, where merely stopping the crime in progress and handing over the purpetrator to the authorities would be the right response. I am not banning someone from my life for a single weird point he / she makes. It might be different if I were gay, and therefore more sensitive to his opinions, but in this case it is just an extreme opinion to me.

  23. Re:It it just me? on Cutting-Edge AI Projects? · · Score: 1

    I intend to move into the field (messing with it small-time on my blog, and about to visit alifexi.org next month), and did some soulsearching about how I'd feel about (perhaps one day) being (partially) rsponsible for AI soldiers fighting something as messy as Iraq. The thought that convinced me was that whilst, yes, I might be creating soldiers, at least these fellows wouldn't be as sensitive to stress as humans, and do things like revenge, murder, rape. It might save life on boths sides of the conflict. Downside is. They're programs. They might be buggy.

  24. Re:I prefer instant blackout on Do Gamers Enjoy Dying in First-Person-Shooters? · · Score: 1

    Real snipers don't have to deal with respawns ;). They have however, other problems: http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/04/darpa_countersn.html