Like most socialists, you do tend to drone on a bit.:-)
On the other hand, like most socialists, you seem genuinely well-meaning. I think your economic theory is a bit loopy, and would do much more harm than good. Likely neither of us will convince the other, but let's see.
Now money is suppose to be an object that represents(key word here!) the value of real things, eg: food, cars, and etc...
Says who? IMHO, money is no more an object than Beethoven's Ninth is a CD. Nor does it represent physical things; I believe it is simply a measure of value.
You have workers, they are being paid for work, and not their products today.
As it has always been, since the advent of money. Ok, Zanthrick, you watch my flock, and I'll give you two sheep at the end of the month. Oh? You don't want sheep? How about twenty talers?
I can only presume that under your system, either transaction would be illegal.
Money has never had a 1:1 correlation with physical goods; in the current state of society, it's simply becoming more evident. Money represents value, and people value physical goods, but they value other things as well.
Which isn't how it should be as this creates several problems, one being the ability to profit off of humans(just double speak for exploitation, look it up in the dictionary if you have to).
Merriam-Webster:
Exploitation: an act or instance of exploiting Exploit: 1) to make productive use of: UTILIZE [exploiting your talents] [exploit your opponent's weakness] 2) To make use of meanly or unjustly for one's own advantage [exploiting migrant farm workers]
Those are all the entries for exploit as a verb, I didn't hide any. You're trying to correlate sense #2 with simply profiting from humans. In fact, it'd be more appropriate to say, "profiting from others, when they do not profit as well". If anyone out there wants to exploit my time, make ten million dollars, and give me one million, please contact me asap.
The obvious answer to this is simple, the workers own the products they make. They sell it to the company. This is factored into the system in an autonomous way so that when they don't like what is going on they can just pull out the product making the company unable to profit from them.
In fact, who is this company, and why do the workers need them? They can just sell these physical doohickeys themselves. Then if they don't sell them, they won't profit. Which of course means they'll continue to sell them.
The rest of your argument, including that from your other post, can hardly be addressed, because what you're saying makes so little sense unless you define money as tokens representing physical thingies (and not that much even if you do, IMHO).
Lawyers are needed because people want to make contracts. Profit is possible without exploitation because we're not playing a zero-sum game. And talk about draconian... I suppose you'll have some system for keeping people from paying each other to do things for one another? Or from giving their goods to one another (which, because goods = money, would result in violation of the maximum wage law)?
True, and thanks for pointing out the speech. The laser printer story is actually pretty famous; he claims it as a critical experience, one which made him realize lots of stuff.
What I'm actually curious about would be stuff like, "Do you believe in natural rights?" or similar things. I'd have to think for a bit to come up with a good list, but lots of questions have occured to me as I've read his comments. And of course, his answers would provoke more questions... that's what makes interesting conversation.:-)
You know, I want video cards that'll do 1600x1200 with 24-bit color at a fast refresh rate. I don't care if the stupid things have the first clue what a polygon is. But it's getting tough to buy stuff. Older, high-quality video cards without all the 3D jazz are reaching the ends of their lives, so I'm left with two alternatives: buy expensive power I'll never use, or buy a poorly engineered piece of junk.
I'm right with you. And I have to think that a lot of corporations would be too. Video cards aren't new technology; I'd love to see some free hardware people make such a thing.
Of course if anybody has a more immediate suggestion, I'm all ears...
As a philosopher he's a joke. His views are not self-consistent.
I, for one, am not willing to make such a claim until I've seen him given the chance to respond. Unless you can point out some blatantly contradictory statements, I don't think your comments amount to much more than base slander.
All in all, I think we would have been better off without him. He's an annoying nut who makes the rest of us look crazy
I totally disagree. If I wanted to be a part of a community with One Official Voice I'd be sitting home watching network television, waiting to be told how I was going to vote in the next election.
I certainly don't buy all that he says, but I do think he's right in this: the community needs to talk about freedom. We can be Open Source when we're selling stuff to the suits (and I think ESR does a fine job there), but amongst ourselves I'm for Free Software.
The ancient Athenians called Socrates an annoying nut, and the sophists were irked because he made their respectable, lucrative trade took crazy. But they owed him a lot. Plato characterized him as "an annoying gadfly", questioning the comfortable, conventional assumptions of a lazy populace. And RMS, right or wrong, provokes thought.
We could live without the GPL, and we could certainly live without Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping!
True, Mr. Smarty-Pants. We could live without the GNU C compiler and GDB, too. But thank God we've got your... umm... refresh my memory?
That the source code be free is not so important. It's nice, but not crucial. What is important is that standards be open.
And you seriously think that we can have open standards without open source code?? ROTFL... well, golly, lemme just go look up the Windows API! Hell, no secrets there... why just ask 'em!
Oh, but wait:
The importance of open interfaces should be written into all IP laws.
That's it! Why didn't I think of it... The Government can help us! Now I see; we don't need to look at the source; there will be no undocumented "features" or hidden system calls because there's a law against them!
Your post manages to be rude, ill-considered and philistine, all under the thin masquerade of having something intelligent to say. I hope you're more likeable in person.
U.S. Constitution, Article I (legislative Powers vested in the Federal Congress), Section 8, Clause 8:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
How much are such laws actually promoting the progress of the "useful art" of television programming?
One question I asked was his opinion about where the border between hardware and software is (firmware comes to mind), and if he would like to see an open-hardware movement. Strangely, though, said that open-hardware was not that important, while the copying cost for hardware is quite high.
I have read Mr. Stallman's opinions for some time now, with an eye towards piecing them together and finding the ideas which underpin them. It ain't easy. For one instance of many: he often talks as if a particular principle were important for its own sake; then later you'll see him discount the importance of something similar on purely practical grounds. The difficulty of copying hardware is a good example.
I don't mean to imply that his views aren't internally consistent; he's not a dumb guy, after all. But they can seem paradoxical at times.
Part of the problem, I think, is that he's not very forthcoming with the personal views which inform his public stances. This is entirely understandable; he surely doesn't want his personal views to be a liability for positions he wants to promote.
Nevertheless, he has set himself up as a public philosopher, and this causes confusion. He mentioned somewhere-or-other, for instance, that he's an atheist... yet he frequently speaks of rights and ethical issues as if they were objective, rather than subjective. Not a self-contradictory stance, but an unusual one which begs questions.
I was puzzled to find him lukewarm of free hardware designs too. It'd be nice to get a chance to interrogate him on his deeper worldview sometime. One might even be able to make a case that he owes us an explanation.:-)
Jim Tully, EDA analyst with Gartner Group's Dataquest subsidiary in Egham, England, said, "Who's to say that this couldn't evolve into something the industry could use? Before Linux came along, who would have said that [the Linux phenomenon] could happen?"
Hey! An employee of a subsidiary of the Gartner Group made passing mention Linux in a way that seemed halfway positive! My cup runneth over; maybe Free Software is legitimate after all;-)
You know, I'm gettin' darned sick of all this bunk from the self-appointed human interface gurus.
I know a lot of people... non-geek people... who have mastered their environment. The sad thing is, they've become experts in manipulating the AOL mail system, or some other slave-to-the-mouse torture device, and their skills don't transfer anywhere.
Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, I don't think most people are really all that dumb. Most of them truly do need something less intimidating than a command line until they get some confidence. But locking them into some *standardized* environment where what they learn is grossly abstracted from the reality of what they're doing is just bad.
There is no reason at all to hide the filesystem hierarchy. Heck, when I started using Unix, I didn't know you could go up from your home directory, so how confused could I get?
And if a lay user has to say, "I'm sorry, I don't know Gnome, I only know WindowMaker," how is that different from, "Sorry, I don't know Windows, I only know Mac"? At least the OS is capable of switching window managers to whatever the user knows.
Yeah, yeah, X needs to be more friendly. No doubt. Contributions to that end are welcome, at least if they're GPLed. But I really don't think the totalitarian culture from Apple has much of a place in the Free Software world. It's not just information that wants to be free.
The same person who's Queen of Scotland and Queen of Wales and Queen of Australia by right of succesion. Elizabeth II.
I'm not sure that's entirely correct; after all, haven't Scotland and England been one kingdom since the Act of Union in 1707? There might not be a Queen of England... but I'm surely not an expert. I'd like to hear a proper explanation from someone who was, though.
This comment deserves to be moderated up... I almost missed it.:-)
Absolutely, they are justified when they question others' assumptions. Such questioning is a fine thing. Running roughshod over cogent arguments simply because they make trouble for science's (or rather, scientists') claims to absolute knowledge - this I protest. I think that science is a sensible undertaking. I would like to see those scientists that take it upon themselves to act as spokesmen for the science itself show the same intellectual integrity that most scientists show in the lab.
At any rate, as I said in another post, I like both science and, by and large, scientists.
But like them or not, I must agree with MillMan; in general, it may be said:
They have their own absolute truths, and anyone who tries to cross them gets cut down until the evidence is too overwhelming to ignore.
Well, that assumes that the universe is emperically knowable (which I think, but don't claim to know, that it is). Don't get me wrong: I love science. I even like scientists, generally. I don't like people... oh, say, Bertrand Russell... playing fascists of the mind.
>> They have their own absolute truths, and anyone who tries to cross them >> gets cut down until the evidence is too overwhelming to ignore.
> It may look that way to an outsider, but if you ever as a scientist you > will see that that simply isn't true. To be sure, there are some > scientists that are dogmatic about their beliefs, but on the > whole the scientific community as a whole is fairly tolerant of > unorthodox views, provided that there is at least a smidgeon of > evidence to back them up.
In fact, I must totally disagree. As a whole, the scientific community is fairly tolerant of unorthodox views, within the context of their own conceptual framework.
This is especially evident in epistemology. The scientific community of the twentieth century, confronted with the questions, "what is knowledge?" and "how are things knowable?" had two basic strategies. First, the great majority ignored them. Second, those few who took it upon themselves to become "philosophers of science" made great efforts to ramrod the truth into the mold of science. Perversely inverting the scientific method, they first they decided what was true, (that science was productive of knowledge), and then came up with reasons to justify it.
Take Logical Positivism, for instance, the darling of 20th century science. They chose to define knowledge to make science (and only science) fit it: "to be knowable is to be open, at least in theory, to empirical verification". This despite the obvious fact that this statement itself is not empirically, or even logically, verifiable!
Scientists are indeed open to a great deal, so long as you presume a materialist universe which is empirically knowable, and don't trod on any of their other pet assumptions. I have seldom heard any group, however, so willing to state their presumptions as fact: "the universe is without purpose", "evolution is the result of random mutation", even "B consistently follows A, so A causes B". Their faith is very strong, and many just as testy about it as the most dogmatic Christians.
I can think of something better: the Socratic method. Question everything. The unreflected life is not worth living.
Let me begin by saying that on a certain level, I sympathize with the author. I think that I hear a likeable voice behind all this, and my criticism is intended to be constructive.
Having said so... I thought this article was rather muddled. Scud's laxity with definitions does become an issue, and much of the argument hinges on sneaking Nature in by the back door.
At the very outset, Skud claims,
The "Nature" side of the discussion is very difficult to investigate.
Hence
...we cannot address the issue of "Nature" with respect to female geeks,
hence
this article will attempt to examine the "Nurture" side of the issue.
In the context of which, numerous of her other statements seem strange indeed. Why, for instance is is hard to imagine a woman totally adopting the hacker lifestyle, or writing the next Perl? Why ought we assume that by awarding "Soft Hacking" more esteem we would attract females to the community? In fact, she goes to the length of advocating women filling traditional roles... thus, one would suppose, furthering the process of socializing females away from "Hard Hacking".
I suggest that Skud is being slightly disingenuous here. She seems afraid that if she admits to inherent causes at all, she'll lose her ability to make the case that feminine hackishness can be fostered.
Which is a strange case to begin with, since we never find out what she means by it. Her suggestions suggest some serious equivocation around the words "hack", "hacker", and "hackerdom". For example:
Opening up our definition of hackerdom to include such traditionally female concepts...
Now pardon me, I've got to have some fun with this one. Redefine "hackerdom" so that it includes women? I've got a better idea... let's redefine half of the present hackers *as* women. We could draw straws... "Ooh! Bad luck, Erica S. Raymond!";-)
Now really... what can be the author's purpose in admitting women to "hackerdom", if she'll entertain this sort of notion? This, in fact, reminds me uncomfortably of a distasteful game played by certain feminists at large: changing definitions so that they can use words like "sexist" as a moral battering-ram to aid their agenda. I don't think any such ill thing of Skud, but I cannot help but think that exposure to such rhetorical methods may have colored her thinking a bit. I do not believe for a moment that she would, upon reflection, suggest making a car go faster by altering the spedometer.
So we're left with either changing the way girls think, or fitting them into the softer side of hacking.
Frankly, I think that most "young, straight, and single" male geeks have the former in mind, when asked whether they'd like more girls to become hackers. The subtext reads, "God, I wish girls were rational!" Which may be translated again as, "God I wish girls watched Dr. Who and liked to talk about the politics of operating systems!";-)
Anyway, changing the way girls think presumes that we're not dealing with a predominantly Natural phenomenon. Certainly there have been some software sorceresses in the past, and if better upbringing seems likely to produce more Ada Byrons or Grace Hoppers, I'm all for it. I don't claim to know, but I must say I'm skeptical of prospects. I'll spare everyone further discussion of a tired topic, even though several points of this paper warrant reply along those lines.
As far as fitting girls in goes...
Conscious redistribution of hacking glory I regard as unfeasible. "Hard" hacking is more glorious because fewer people can do it; it is a matter of supply and demand in our little gift economy. Similarly, when Scud asks,
So why is it that some people with no apparent social commitments and an interest in technology are nevertheless unable to excel in the field?
it seems a little like having a professional football player ask you, "I've torn my MCL, so I can't play. Your knees are fine... why aren't you out there playing?"
Skipping much more in the interests of brevity (or at least not droning on as long as I might be inclined), the end of this article really made me laugh:
To the men in Open Source, I say: take a look at your work, at your projects. Are your projects well managed and well documented in appropriate formats?
Why no! Maybe I should post an ad:
"Wanted: Geekettes to perform Soft Hacking on my project. You gather nuts and berries, while I go hunting. I promise to make you feel appreciated."
Scud, if you're reading, I applaud your effort. I think your stance needs work. I, for one, am only too happy to accept geeks of any sex or ethnic background; I'd better be, because I usually can't tell to which sex they belong or from which background they come. If girls want to be part of the community as girls, they can't just speak up when people ask, "Where are the girls?" A strong voice will be heard. In my opinion, much talking about girls in hackerdom will do far less than a single girl doing something cool, be that something Hard or Soft.
Slashdot Mirror
Log on, and I may deign to dignify this with a response. Coward.
No kidding; they'd go great with all the Free Beer I keep hearing about.
Actually, I'm a bratty older fellow on Slashdot. :-)
Oh, the old "who are you" argument. You earned your score on this one.
1) For any statement X, you can stupidly challenge it: "who are you to say X?" For instance: "Who are you to question whether I am a judge of art?"
2) The question wasn't "is television programming art?", it was, "is this law promoting the progress of the 'useful art' of television programming?"
3) Who am I? I'm Skald. I make judgements about what is art and what isn't, as, I imagine, do you.
4) Who are these people to limit my freedom?
On the other hand, like most socialists, you seem genuinely well-meaning. I think your economic theory is a bit loopy, and would do much more harm than good. Likely neither of us will convince the other, but let's see.
Now money is suppose to be an object that represents(key word here!) the value of real things, eg: food, cars, and etc...
Says who? IMHO, money is no more an object than Beethoven's Ninth is a CD. Nor does it represent physical things; I believe it is simply a measure of value.
You have workers, they are being paid for work, and not their products today.
As it has always been, since the advent of money. Ok, Zanthrick, you watch my flock, and I'll give you two sheep at the end of the month. Oh? You don't want sheep? How about twenty talers?
I can only presume that under your system, either transaction would be illegal.
Money has never had a 1:1 correlation with physical goods; in the current state of society, it's simply becoming more evident. Money represents value, and people value physical goods, but they value other things as well.
Which isn't how it should be as this creates several problems, one being the ability to profit off of humans(just double speak for exploitation, look it up in the dictionary if you have to).
Merriam-Webster:
Exploitation: an act or instance of exploiting
Exploit: 1) to make productive use of: UTILIZE [exploiting your talents] [exploit your opponent's weakness]
2) To make use of meanly or unjustly for one's own advantage [exploiting migrant farm workers]
Those are all the entries for exploit as a verb, I didn't hide any. You're trying to correlate sense #2 with simply profiting from humans. In fact, it'd be more appropriate to say, "profiting from others, when they do not profit as well". If anyone out there wants to exploit my time, make ten million dollars, and give me one million, please contact me asap.
The obvious answer to this is simple, the workers own the products they make. They sell it to the company. This is factored into the system in an autonomous way so that when they don't like what is going on they can just pull out the product making the company unable to profit from them.
In fact, who is this company, and why do the workers need them? They can just sell these physical doohickeys themselves. Then if they don't sell them, they won't profit. Which of course means they'll continue to sell them.
The rest of your argument, including that from your other post, can hardly be addressed, because what you're saying makes so little sense unless you define money as tokens representing physical thingies (and not that much even if you do, IMHO).
Lawyers are needed because people want to make contracts. Profit is possible without exploitation because we're not playing a zero-sum game. And talk about draconian... I suppose you'll have some system for keeping people from paying each other to do things for one another? Or from giving their goods to one another (which, because goods = money, would result in violation of the maximum wage law)?
Well, I've droned on long enough. :-)
What I'm actually curious about would be stuff like, "Do you believe in natural rights?" or similar things. I'd have to think for a bit to come up with a good list, but lots of questions have occured to me as I've read his comments. And of course, his answers would provoke more questions... that's what makes interesting conversation. :-)
I'm right with you. And I have to think that a lot of corporations would be too. Video cards aren't new technology; I'd love to see some free hardware people make such a thing.
Of course if anybody has a more immediate suggestion, I'm all ears...
I, for one, am not willing to make such a claim until I've seen him given the chance to respond. Unless you can point out some blatantly contradictory statements, I don't think your comments amount to much more than base slander.
All in all, I think we would have been better off without him. He's an annoying nut who makes the rest of us look crazy
I totally disagree. If I wanted to be a part of a community with One Official Voice I'd be sitting home watching network television, waiting to be told how I was going to vote in the next election.
I certainly don't buy all that he says, but I do think he's right in this: the community needs to talk about freedom. We can be Open Source when we're selling stuff to the suits (and I think ESR does a fine job there), but amongst ourselves I'm for Free Software.
The ancient Athenians called Socrates an annoying nut, and the sophists were irked because he made their respectable, lucrative trade took crazy. But they owed him a lot. Plato characterized him as "an annoying gadfly", questioning the comfortable, conventional assumptions of a lazy populace. And RMS, right or wrong, provokes thought.
We could live without the GPL, and we could certainly live without Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping!
True, Mr. Smarty-Pants. We could live without the GNU C compiler and GDB, too. But thank God we've got your... umm... refresh my memory?
That the source code be free is not so important. It's nice, but not crucial. What is important is that standards be open.
And you seriously think that we can have open standards without open source code?? ROTFL... well, golly, lemme just go look up the Windows API! Hell, no secrets there... why just ask 'em!
Oh, but wait:
The importance of open interfaces should be written into all IP laws.
That's it! Why didn't I think of it... The Government can help us! Now I see; we don't need to look at the source; there will be no undocumented "features" or hidden system calls because there's a law against them!
Your post manages to be rude, ill-considered and philistine, all under the thin masquerade of having something intelligent to say. I hope you're more likeable in person.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
How much are such laws actually promoting the progress of the "useful art" of television programming?
Apparently you're not the only one who didn't get it, though; some other insightless person actually moderated you as insightful.
I have read Mr. Stallman's opinions for some time now, with an eye towards piecing them together and finding the ideas which underpin them. It ain't easy. For one instance of many: he often talks as if a particular principle were important for its own sake; then later you'll see him discount the importance of something similar on purely practical grounds. The difficulty of copying hardware is a good example.
I don't mean to imply that his views aren't internally consistent; he's not a dumb guy, after all. But they can seem paradoxical at times.
Part of the problem, I think, is that he's not very forthcoming with the personal views which inform his public stances. This is entirely understandable; he surely doesn't want his personal views to be a liability for positions he wants to promote.
Nevertheless, he has set himself up as a public philosopher, and this causes confusion. He mentioned somewhere-or-other, for instance, that he's an atheist... yet he frequently speaks of rights and ethical issues as if they were objective, rather than subjective. Not a self-contradictory stance, but an unusual one which begs questions.
I was puzzled to find him lukewarm of free hardware designs too. It'd be nice to get a chance to interrogate him on his deeper worldview sometime. One might even be able to make a case that he owes us an explanation. :-)
Hey! An employee of a subsidiary of the Gartner Group made passing mention Linux in a way that seemed halfway positive! My cup runneth over; maybe Free Software is legitimate after all ;-)
What??? My friends told me Free Beer was one of the best things about Linux!
I know a lot of people... non-geek people... who have mastered their environment. The sad thing is, they've become experts in manipulating the AOL mail system, or some other slave-to-the-mouse torture device, and their skills don't transfer anywhere.
Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, I don't think most people are really all that dumb. Most of them truly do need something less intimidating than a command line until they get some confidence. But locking them into some *standardized* environment where what they learn is grossly abstracted from the reality of what they're doing is just bad.
There is no reason at all to hide the filesystem hierarchy. Heck, when I started using Unix, I didn't know you could go up from your home directory, so how confused could I get?
And if a lay user has to say, "I'm sorry, I don't know Gnome, I only know WindowMaker," how is that different from, "Sorry, I don't know Windows, I only know Mac"? At least the OS is capable of switching window managers to whatever the user knows.
Yeah, yeah, X needs to be more friendly. No doubt. Contributions to that end are welcome, at least if they're GPLed. But I really don't think the totalitarian culture from Apple has much of a place in the Free Software world. It's not just information that wants to be free.
Oh, yeah... I mean Moscow, Iowa ;-)
I'm not sure that's entirely correct; after all, haven't Scotland and England been one kingdom since the Act of Union in 1707? There might not be a Queen of England... but I'm surely not an expert. I'd like to hear a proper explanation from someone who was, though.
Absolutely, they are justified when they question others' assumptions. Such questioning is a fine thing. Running roughshod over cogent arguments simply because they make trouble for science's (or rather, scientists') claims to absolute knowledge - this I protest. I think that science is a sensible undertaking. I would like to see those scientists that take it upon themselves to act as spokesmen for the science itself show the same intellectual integrity that most scientists show in the lab.
At any rate, as I said in another post, I like both science and, by and large, scientists.
But like them or not, I must agree with MillMan; in general, it may be said:
They have their own absolute truths, and anyone who tries to cross them gets cut down until the evidence is too overwhelming to ignore.
>> gets cut down until the evidence is too overwhelming to ignore.
> It may look that way to an outsider, but if you ever as a scientist you
> will see that that simply isn't true. To be sure, there are some
> scientists that are dogmatic about their beliefs, but on the
> whole the scientific community as a whole is fairly tolerant of
> unorthodox views, provided that there is at least a smidgeon of
> evidence to back them up.
In fact, I must totally disagree. As a whole, the scientific community is fairly tolerant of unorthodox views, within the context of their own conceptual framework.
This is especially evident in epistemology. The scientific community of the twentieth century, confronted with the questions, "what is knowledge?" and "how are things knowable?" had two basic strategies. First, the great majority ignored them. Second, those few who took it upon themselves to become "philosophers of science" made great efforts to ramrod the truth into the mold of science. Perversely inverting the scientific method, they first they decided what was true, (that science was productive of knowledge), and then came up with reasons to justify it.
Take Logical Positivism, for instance, the darling of 20th century science. They chose to define knowledge to make science (and only science) fit it: "to be knowable is to be open, at least in theory, to empirical verification". This despite the obvious fact that this statement itself is not empirically, or even logically, verifiable!
Scientists are indeed open to a great deal, so long as you presume a materialist universe which is empirically knowable, and don't trod on any of their other pet assumptions. I have seldom heard any group, however, so willing to state their presumptions as fact: "the universe is without purpose", "evolution is the result of random mutation", even "B consistently follows A, so A causes B". Their faith is very strong, and many just as testy about it as the most dogmatic Christians.
I can think of something better: the Socratic method. Question everything. The unreflected life is not worth living.
Having said so... I thought this article was rather muddled. Scud's laxity with definitions does become an issue, and much of the argument hinges on sneaking Nature in by the back door.
At the very outset, Skud claims,
The "Nature" side of the discussion is very difficult to investigate.
Hence
hence
this article will attempt to examine the "Nurture" side of the issue.
In the context of which, numerous of her other statements seem strange indeed. Why, for instance is is hard to imagine a woman totally adopting the hacker lifestyle, or writing the next Perl? Why ought we assume that by awarding "Soft Hacking" more esteem we would attract females to the community? In fact, she goes to the length of advocating women filling traditional roles... thus, one would suppose, furthering the process of socializing females away from "Hard Hacking".
I suggest that Skud is being slightly disingenuous here. She seems afraid that if she admits to inherent causes at all, she'll lose her ability to make the case that feminine hackishness can be fostered.
Which is a strange case to begin with, since we never find out what she means by it. Her suggestions suggest some serious equivocation around the words "hack", "hacker", and "hackerdom". For example:
Opening up our definition of hackerdom to include such traditionally female concepts...
Now pardon me, I've got to have some fun with this one. Redefine "hackerdom" so that it includes women? I've got a better idea... let's redefine half of the present hackers *as* women. We could draw straws... "Ooh! Bad luck, Erica S. Raymond!" ;-)
Now really... what can be the author's purpose in admitting women to "hackerdom", if she'll entertain this sort of notion? This, in fact, reminds me uncomfortably of a distasteful game played by certain feminists at large: changing definitions so that they can use words like "sexist" as a moral battering-ram to aid their agenda. I don't think any such ill thing of Skud, but I cannot help but think that exposure to such rhetorical methods may have colored her thinking a bit. I do not believe for a moment that she would, upon reflection, suggest making a car go faster by altering the spedometer.
So we're left with either changing the way girls think, or fitting them into the softer side of hacking.
Frankly, I think that most "young, straight, and single" male geeks have the former in mind, when asked whether they'd like more girls to become hackers. The subtext reads, "God, I wish girls were rational!" Which may be translated again as, "God I wish girls watched Dr. Who and liked to talk about the politics of operating systems!" ;-)
Anyway, changing the way girls think presumes that we're not dealing with a predominantly Natural phenomenon. Certainly there have been some software sorceresses in the past, and if better upbringing seems likely to produce more Ada Byrons or Grace Hoppers, I'm all for it. I don't claim to know, but I must say I'm skeptical of prospects. I'll spare everyone further discussion of a tired topic, even though several points of this paper warrant reply along those lines.
As far as fitting girls in goes...
Conscious redistribution of hacking glory I regard as unfeasible. "Hard" hacking is more glorious because fewer people can do it; it is a matter of supply and demand in our little gift economy. Similarly, when Scud asks,
So why is it that some people with no apparent social commitments and an interest in technology are nevertheless unable to excel in the field?
it seems a little like having a professional football player ask you, "I've torn my MCL, so I can't play. Your knees are fine... why aren't you out there playing?"
Skipping much more in the interests of brevity (or at least not droning on as long as I might be inclined), the end of this article really made me laugh:
To the men in Open Source, I say: take a look at your work, at your projects. Are your projects well managed and well documented in appropriate formats?
Why no! Maybe I should post an ad:
Scud, if you're reading, I applaud your effort. I think your stance needs work. I, for one, am only too happy to accept geeks of any sex or ethnic background; I'd better be, because I usually can't tell to which sex they belong or from which background they come. If girls want to be part of the community as girls, they can't just speak up when people ask, "Where are the girls?" A strong voice will be heard. In my opinion, much talking about girls in hackerdom will do far less than a single girl doing something cool, be that something Hard or Soft.
> panel.
I don't normally say such things in public forums, but... your mom sounds hot ;-)