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User: kria

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  1. Re:"Free" is harmful? on Zero-Rating Harms Poor People, Public Interest Groups Tell FCC (vice.com) · · Score: 2

    The argument appears to be that if they offer data for certain apps at a discounted rate, that effectively it means they are overcharging for other things, such as the more general internet service that people using their phone for all their internet would likely to be doing more of. I don't know if I buy it, but that appears to be the argument.

  2. Re:can someone give the TL;DR on Zero-Rating Harms Poor People, Public Interest Groups Tell FCC (vice.com) · · Score: 4, Informative

    Zero-rating (also called toll-free data or sponsored data) is the practice of mobile network operators (MNO), mobile virtual network operators (MVNO), and Internet Service Providers (ISP) not to charge end customers for data used by specific applications or internet services through their network, in limited or metered data plans.[1][2][3][4][5][6] It allows customers to use provider-selected content sources or data services like an app store,[7] without worrying about bill shocks, which could otherwise occur if the same data was normally charged according to their data plans and volume caps. This has especially become an option to market 4G networks, but has also been used in the past for SMS or other content services.
    From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

  3. Re:As long as.... on The Case Against Algebra · · Score: 1

    In contrast, my college required all engineering degrees (literally, with engineer in the degree name), I believe, to take technical communication and write a huge paper, while I as a computer science major did not. (I did, however, have to do a team senior project with a real company that went from requirements definition to creating training documents and having a fake trade show.)

  4. Re:update - there were other tosses which Sanders on Perfect Coin-Toss Record Broke 6 Clinton-Sanders Deadlocks In Iowa (marketwatch.com) · · Score: 1

    Why is this only modded to a score of three? I want to vote for Bernie, but the idea that Clinton was cheating at coin tosses was a little silly, and I'm glad to see the complete picture posted. Now, mod it the rest of the way up, folks. :)

  5. Or a better school. on Do Tech Firms Really Want Liberal Arts Majors? · · Score: 1

    My college (Rose Hulman), an all engineering and science one, required us to take ten humanities and social sciences (on a three quarter system). I had enough required math courses in my CS degree to have a built in math major, but I also took Music Theory and Early Twentieth Century American Literature. Admittedly, it's the only school I attended so my basis for comparison is pretty limited, but it doesn't seem like these were any kind of blow off classes either.

  6. Re:Uhmmmm on What's the Oldest Technology You've Used In a Production Environment? · · Score: 1

    We used that for our time card when I first started at my defense contractor employer, in 1999. I'm going to guesstimate that we replaced it six or seven years ago?

    We write in Ada, but at least it's Ada95 not Ada83. We used to use Rational Apex as our editor until we migrated our software completely from Solaris to Windows.

    In some of my college classes (95-99), we would telnet into a VAX to compile Ada code. Yes, Ada in college, at one of the last places that taught it.

  7. Re:$6K a course for a "free video lecture" on New Google and CMU Moonshot: the 'Teacherless Classroom' · · Score: 1

    This was my second thought - that I would feel ripped off to spend private university tuition on something like that. Perhaps they can figure out a way to make it work, but that was one reason I went to a top private university, to be in small classes with more professor support - my school (an academic rival of CMU, as I understand it - Rose-Hulman) advertised and delivered on not having classes taught by TAs, and a video class seems far worse than that.

    My first thought was that apparently Rose-Hulman will continue to be number one in it's category.

  8. Re:Bedtimes are linked to Waking times on How Light at Night Affects Preschoolers' Sleep Patterns (Video) · · Score: 1

    My daughter is only eight months old, but she generally wakes up between 5:30 and 6:30 on her own. Being eight months old, that means that yes, her bedtime is between 6:30 and 7:30 at night. Not sure why a bedtime for children while the sun is up should be an issue. Thick curtains help a lot, for one.

    On the other side, she also is already fascinated by our phones and other pieces of technology, including ones that don't seem like they should be terribly interesting, like television remotes and computer cables. Perhaps some of it is the allure of things that we try to keep her from grabbing and stuffing in her mouth.

  9. Re:Why not find out how to keep female engineers? on How To Increase the Number of Female Engineers · · Score: 2

    I'm a female engineer. I've worked at my place of business for fifteen years. I plan on staying in programming. I have an eight month old daughter and a stay at home father husband.

    Most of what you just listed, I would be lousy at. I'm an INTJ and lack the patience with idiots to be a teacher, nor do I have the calling to work the long hours required of many of those professions. (I should note that I'm lucky to be at a company that doesn't have mandatory unpaid overtime, like far too many software places.)

    I am lucky in that I had supportive parents and teachers who didn't put up roadblocks to my doing what I wanted to do when I was growing up, indeed, they encouraged me. I went to an all engineering college that was accepting female students for the first time and I'm happy to say that the most sexist attitude I encountered amongst the faculty was from my psych prof (there's got to be a joke in that statement).

    I think out of the female friends from college I'm still in touch with (say, 20 people at the periphery as facebook friends), there are only 2-3 who have stopped being engineers.

  10. Re:Hostile environments on How To Increase the Number of Female Engineers · · Score: 1

    I'm not going to disagree, but I think that it _is_ true that the hostile environments can extend back far enough to initially dissuade people from going into certain fields. I had a friend who managed to go to college over the objections of her own father that she would get married and waste all that education (by, in his world, presumably becoming a stay at home mom).

    It would be a wondrous world where everyone could support themselves doing something that love, on a very slight tangent.

  11. Hostile environments on How To Increase the Number of Female Engineers · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I am, gasp, a female software engineer. I work at a defense contractor, and I'm thankful to say that every year there are fewer fossils who think that women don't belong in software, let alone working on military software. The hostile environment is sometimes present in subtle ways, such as important discussions that occur spontaneously in the men's restroom or cubicle artwork that borders on inappropriate. Or, of course, trying to get projects assigned to other, male, engineers. Heck, I once heard a co-worker complain that he would have gotten his promotion if he's been a woman, with an obvious implication since I had gotten mine - ignoring that I've worked here three years longer, am considered more helpful and, oh yeah, _trained him_ when he got here. Nope, obviously, it's because I'm a woman.

    Anyway, Slashdot is a perfect example of said hostile environment, from the subtle ("You're joking, there aren't any women on the internet!") to the cesspit that the discussion turns into whenever the topic comes up. I'm sick of it, frankly, and I really should just stop bothering to read the comments on most stories, causing me to lose out on the occasional insightful nugget, but helping my blood pressure. Someday, it might even be bad enough to drive me away.

    Which was my point. Telling someone that they are imagining there is a problem is highly offensive, really, and tends to make people not want to be around you.

  12. Re:We have already figured most of this out. on Can Civilization Reboot Without Fossil Fuels? · · Score: 1

    Those are needed to build roads _quickly_, but there's always doing it the Roman way, which as I recall amounts to building a wall under ground level. And they certainly don't need repaired as often.

  13. Re:Make it DARKER dammit. on Spock and the Legacy of Star Trek · · Score: 2

    It did make for good TV though.

    .... it did? Most of us in my group of friends in college thought Voyager stunk on ice. That's as people who were, after all, in college when it came out - I know that I wasn't an expert on the original series, enjoyed TNG and DS9. (DS9 is my favorite these days, I would say.)

  14. Re:Pointing fingers at problems on Will Elementary School Teachers Take the Rap For Tech's Diversity Problem? · · Score: 1

    (Perhaps things are more skewed in Indiana. It's a surprisingly conservative place.)

    And it's very, very difficult to find the line between evolutionary programming and societal conditioning. I'm a female computer programmer at a defense contractor, while my husband has a degree in art and is currently staying home with our five month old baby. Not only is this the best financial situation, but I think that we both are far happier than if we went the opposite routes.

    I think that most normal feminists, rather than misandrists on the fringe, just want artificial barriers for everyone in all professions to be removed. We've come very far in a relatively short time, and things will continue to improve. My mother received an education fit for becoming a secretary (and became a waitress), I had friends who were discouraged by teachers and even parents from technical fields, but I didn't experience that myself. Things will continue to be more open for my daughter, I hope.

  15. Re:Why is it even a problem? on Will Elementary School Teachers Take the Rap For Tech's Diversity Problem? · · Score: 1

    I'm a feminist, but not a misandrist. I'm also an engineer, and I want to find the cause of things and fix it. Men have been the ones in a position of leadership for most of human history, nothing more. Women have, sadly, been fairly bad in many points in history at taking and making opportunities for themselves, since society has conditioned both genders in how they should behave.

    I believe they didn't grade the test twice because this was an examination of available data rather than a created situation - they were two different tests that were typically graded in these different ways.

  16. Re:Why is it even a problem? on Will Elementary School Teachers Take the Rap For Tech's Diversity Problem? · · Score: 1

    Oh, sorry, I thought we were actually looking at the problem, not trying to claim there's some vast conspiracy.

  17. Re:Pointing fingers at problems on Will Elementary School Teachers Take the Rap For Tech's Diversity Problem? · · Score: 1

    Instead, women have their out scutwork jobs that no one really wants - low paid waitressing and grocery store clerks. Not as dirty or dangerous, but still undesirable and slanted the other direction genderwise.

  18. Re:Why is it even a problem? on Will Elementary School Teachers Take the Rap For Tech's Diversity Problem? · · Score: 1

    You say that like it's impossible for a female teacher to have biases about what the genders are good at. Reverse it, if you'd like - how many boys with an interest in something typically female may be dissuaded by their own fathers? Personally, I feel lucky in that I had teachers throughout my school career that were encouraging me, telling me that I could do whatever I wanted, in contrast to other women I've met who were discouraged by everyone from their math and science teachers to their own parents.

  19. Re:shame on RadioShack Near Deal To Sell Half of Its Stores, Close the Rest · · Score: 1

    I remember mistakenly thinking that Radio Shack was the place to go look for an odd conversion cable (I think it was for a laptop to a tv that didn't have the most expected combination of ports) and the person behind the counter looking at me like I was speaking Greek. I wonder if anyone still makes the cool little electronics experiment kits?

  20. Theory on Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There are studies that show that women are less likely to speak up when outnumbered by men. So if the most successful teams were ones where everyone contributed equally, it seems like those groups would tend to either have more women so that women are more willing to speak up, or no women at all (assuming that men are all likely to contribute in that environment).

    http://www.salon.com/2012/09/2...
    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01...

  21. Re:Other factors can ease parenting "instinct" in on Parenting Rewires the Male Brain · · Score: 1

    Look, look, another woman here! :) Anyway, I was considering joking that as an expecting geek mom, that if men's brains get rewired, then perhaps there's a chance that I'll become more maternal. I worry about it.

    The rest of your commentary makes sense to me. So far, I haven't been getting much advice that is critical of our plans, except from one person: my very traditional mother, who is probably secretly horrified that my husband is going to stay at home. She's already claimed that my longterm breastfeeding plans will never work out (no, not _that_ longterm, I just mean that I'm not doing formula if I don't have to), that trying to use cloth diapers is silly and my plans to downsize to reduce debt so that we can afford for my husband to not work mean I'll "never live in a house that big again".

    Okay, I've gotten it off my chest now.

  22. Re:Mirror image on Scientists/Actress Say They Were 'Tricked' Into Geocentric Universe Movie · · Score: 1

    re: average age of marriage

    BS.

    The average age of marriage for women during much of the middle ages was in the early twenties, and older for men. That's for the average person, not some member of the royalty that had an alliance marriage made for him/her when they were children, usually by proxy and certainly not consummated until they were of age. The reason for the commoners needing to wait: they needing to actually learn how to do a job, even if that was farming. Mommy and Daddy peasant weren't going to be able to set them up, so they needed to actually have earned some money to have an independent life.

  23. Memories on Born To RUN: Dartmouth Throwing BASIC a 50th B-Day Party · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I remember as a child reading BASIC programs out of Compute Magazine for my dad to type in on our TI computer. That likely means I was reading code before I read my first real novel, which is amusing.

    I try not to admit at work that I've had to learn VBA for Excel for a tool we use.

  24. Re:Could it be on One In Ten Americans Thinks HTML Is a Type of Sexually Transmitted Infection · · Score: 1

    There's actually a fairly good (for a media tie in) novel written by Andy Robinson, the actor who played Garak, about his past called A Stitch in Time. The series of novels set in post-series Deep Space Nine have been good overall, but unfortunately they've slowed down (hopefully not stopped!) coming out so they could make room on the release schedule for drek related to the recent movies.

  25. Lab on Ask Slashdot: Do You Still Need a Phone At Your Desk? · · Score: 1

    IM works great, except when a tester wants to talk to you from the lab, where they don't have a personal machine. I don't travel, so there's no reason for the company to give me a phone. I'd rather there wasn't a compiled list of people's personal cell phone numbers for anything other than emergency on-call purposes.