Humans are like data. Unless you have them in more than one location, they don't exist.
Doesn't anyone tell these people about putting all your eggs in one basket?
Seriously though, I know its impossible to rip a few pennies out of taxpayers hands for anything short of an infant bleeding in the sidewalk, but SCIENCE IS IMPORTANT YOU IDIOTS
So based on the name of a variable the attack is from a certain geographic location?
The 'who else but the Chinese Government would want access to human rights activist accounts' argument is a little thin. So suddenly if anyone's account gets hacked, we can just immediately assume it's a group that opposes them and then pull our business out of an entire market?
sometimes there are just new words for old things.
i don't think many of us are upset about having our email 'in the cloud' for example, but what we like is being able to sync it to our phones and computers. but this universally accepted and successful(?) 'cloud' model is near universal.
i'd say the same about my other documents. i don't mind a 'repository' of my music, documents, etc., which I access over the net, but I do want to have local copies.
sometimes it seems to me like internet companies are trying to stockpile data so that they "can't" go away, get propped up by governments, necessity of access to information. doesn't really seem healthy.
makes me think of highly encrypted shared clouds done on a bittorrent/TOR like model, decentralize the thing...
Of all the technical challenges of this, they were all that worried about localizing this?
Sounds like an off the cuff remark that has no basis in reality. They had an idea, their project got cancelled. Don't you think you could provide some instructions for what gestures to recognize and people would learn them like 'moves' in a game?
Totally useless summary, information, article, and conclusion. Shouldn't have clicked on any of this.
Hope it's not flamebait but: You must have some huge balls on you, using 'ironic' on Slashdot and thinking that you're not going to get a firm talking to for your use of the word.
'The fear is that if you pursue computer science, you will be stuck in a basement, writing code. That is absolutely not the reality.'
Yeah. The reality is that you will be stuck in a small cube writing code instead.
This story speaks to me in a lot of ways.
My only exposure to anything related to programming before college was HTML. I had no idea of the 'magic' of programming until I was in a college level programming course. Which I was only in because it was a requirement for electrical engineering classes I was interested in because I wanted to understand synthesizers and analog circuits better.
I grew up under a lot more pressure to be an 'artist' or creative-type than engineer. Most of my friends are from this world as well. From the outside, computer science looks pretty bleak. My idea of it was as follows. You sit at a computer terminal for your entire life, typing. And no one even reads what you write. If I was going to sit at a computer, why wouldn't I at least write for an audience? Why would I choose a job that seems solitary and unexciting? It seems like what you'd think being an accountant would be like.
Having just graduated and spent the last few years doing programming internships, it amazes me how wrong I was about the rewards of programming. No one told me the 'power' I would wield, the infinities of computing, the vastness of what you can express with programming language. That I'd confront hundreds of problems with thousands of solutions, and use my creativity and cunning to apply the most elegant and effective one. That the 'barrier to entry' of creating your own startup that could influence millions of users is little more than some education and a laptop and a server in your closet.
I feel like I found a goldmine that no one was hinting at. It is a primary goal of my professional career to expose more kids like myself to programming. The sentiment of the article is right on. Computers are not leveraged nearly enough in the fields I'm interested in. And it's due primarily I think to a misunderstanding about what programming is, and how it feels to do it. I encounter this firsthand often in Linguistics (also something I focused on in college) where many problems of data collection and analysis are considered impossible by my peers but understood as a solvable engineering problem to me.
I hope that this continues to be in focus. Too often it is a dichotomy between being a 'computer-person' or not, and I think many of us who were into other things got sucked into computers when we discovered them. It's a deep field and difficult to get a handle on, I think, coming from another area. But the benefits are too great to ignore.
Well, my priority was never to make money. In fact, that's been one of my least favorite parts of this discipline--the number of folks who are involved not because of passion for computing, but for monetary reasons. That said, I'm certainly not upset that I have done well financially with this decision. It's great that in very short order I was able to make far more than my parents, and have been able to give back to my family. But in my family, our primary goal is happiness, and they would have been just as proud of me regardless of my salary. I work in computer security.
I have always had a technical bent but I thought that programming would be boring and monotonous. I feared sitting at a computer screen, wasting away for the rest of my existence. It seemed a miserable and dystopian world from the outside.
What I discovered (without being interested in game examples, though I have been playing video games all my life), is that while I may be sitting at a computer screen, programming is very exciting, stimulating, challenging, even thrilling! The possibilities and accessibility of computing blew me away, and I knew that I could apply it to any field I wanted. I was hooked.
One thing I can say about the quality of the two programs: engineering is far more demanding. This may be obvious to a lot of folks, but this is another aspect of it that drew me in. I understand that this aspect may turn some off, though, and that we could benefit from teaching more people about our art without wrecking them the way that the engineering program at my school does. For full disclosure, I ended up with degrees in both Linguistics and Computer Science. The computer science and engineering courses were an order of magnitude more difficult than the linguistics or the music courses I took beforehand. And not simply because the material is more difficult to master, but the amount of work assigned, expectations of the students, etc, was much greater. As I said, I thrived on this, but many did not, and I know personally of programmers lost because the pressure was too great.
I didn't realize we were all bored to tears with our CS courses.
Personally, I went into the introductory programming course at my school (as a music major) expecting the worst. I was taking the course because it was required for some music technology-related courses I wanted to take later on. It was a very traditional class. By the second week, I had changed my major to computer science.
You don't need to make math and science and technology "fun". That attitude is patronizing and obnoxious. If you have competent, passionate instructors then you can teach students.
Making a game isn't necessarily more fun, accessible, interesting or inspiring than making something else. For example, In my second programming course, which was titled Data Structures and Algorithms, two of our major projects were making a text-based Arkanoid clone, and making a text-based spreadsheet application (all C++, by the way). One of the requirements for our spreadsheet was that it be able to save and load 200,000+ cells of data, in a hash table we implemented ourselves. It was much more impressive to me to create an application that could scale like this than the small, limiting world of the Arkanoid game.
It's my fear that we would be dumbing down the discipline for the sake of accessibility. It's something that requires balance, and a good project and a good instructor are necessary. It should not necessarily be, nor not be a game. It should be appropriate to demonstrate the techniques and theory to build upon to foster an understanding of computing.
I don't know what sort of mind it would take to not be awestruck by the power afforded to one by programming modern computers. It speaks for itself.
The SF bay area and LA had both Walmart and Target long before rural Wisconsin did
While you're correct by saying the "SF Bay Area" I would like to point out that the City and County of San Francisco does not have a Walmart or a Target, as the city has resisted these franchises.
As my evangelical Sparks drinking friend used to say, "The alcohol needed to come up with bad ideas, and the energy required to follow through with them".
He checks the Sparks present in all the liquor stores he goes into to see if they still have the Old Label, thus still containing the original recipe... Still fairly common here in San Francisco
As we all should know by now, impenetrable security doesn't exist. What we should probably have is tighter backup power for essential services and places like hospitals, where local redundancy could help in the face of a remote 'hacker' type attack
Places where there is a lot of danger for people without electrical power don't need billions spent on the security of their power systems. They need redundancy, generators in their buildings that could be used to keep people alive, batteries, and common sense.
Oh well, let's spend a bunch of money on fear like we always do.
They said WHERE they got the samples and how they picked them. But do you think most users get infected by dropping an individual malware sample on their machine and executing it? They probably get a huge load at a time from an installer that claims to be something else and anti-virus, if present, would have a stab at detecting system changes at that point, or maybe even when the file was downloaded...
Obviously a destructive rootkit could change any number of things about your system that COULD be impossible to restore. This isn't a shortcoming of a security product but a factor of being able to perform actions as an administrator, something the system must have SOME way for you to do, and therefore can be abused. Granted, some systems will be tighter about this than others, and there's a trade-off in usability, etc. But that is for the OS designer, not the AV provider.
there's no real ethical or legal excuse for pirating something, simply because you don't like the price of it. If you don't like the quality of the offering at the price it is offered, then don't buy it.
Ok, I'll give you that there's no LEGAL excuse. But ethical?
I realized something about piracy, that changed my viewpoint on it recently. And I think piracy is the sort of thing that most of us had an opinion on before we knew much about, and have essentially sought out opinions and resources that support our own point of view on it. Or maybe that's just me, anyhow:
This is what happened. I ride a bike to a very hilly campus every day. I'm not entirely positive that my bike is welcome on elevators. (I'm always relieved when I don't have to ride with someone else along with my bike, as I don't know if they are comfortable with it). However, there is a crucial point at which I can save carrying my bike up 5 flights of stairs if I ride this elevator with it. So I do.
I feel this is somewhat the dilemma the content providers are leaving me with. They've got a 10 story elevator and they want me to walk up the stairs to get their content. There's simply no way to tie down digital media files without completely changing the way that computer systems work. Do WHATEVER you want to the file, if someone can decode it to watch it, they can capture that stream and encode it in a way that can be shared. I'm sorry content providers, but it's GAME OVER.
And that's unfortunate for them, but I don't want my entire digital future dictated by some media companies needs. Because the laws they want to enact will take away the freedom and control you have over your systems.
Maybe high production value films and albums will go away. I think humanity, as a whole, will survive without that. Plus we have all the crap you've been spending tons of money on for years that we never saw, market that to us. Eventually this system will be rolled into the soil and something new will emerge. Some say this is obviously 'better' but I don't think it matters. The point is that the old system must go away if our freedom is to be retained.
I understand that this message will probably not get across and that these laws will pass and these content providers will continue to treat their customers like criminals. I believe this will leave us with one alternative: to exist digitally only on anonymous networks, encrypt all our traffic, let none know of our files
Things that are SO TRIVIALLY EASY such as downloading a file should not be made illegal. It's not going to work, whether I think piracy is OK or not.
Those of us with beta accounts are familiar with the fact that its slow, clumsy and unexciting.
Sort of sad how everyone is shitting themselves because they found ONE decent use for Wave. A dedicated program for D&D, which dedicated players would rather use than a general tool shoehorned into D&D and stuck in the damn browser, would be much better.
I used to like Google's products because they were simple and responsive. This is what I would expect out of a startup, not a company with resources and experience like Google.
They've probably already realized this is a failed experiment, and they'd be better off shoving it under the rug now than pushing forward as if this is the next Google Search or Mail.
I wasn't sure if the OP had a point until I read the thread
As the president of a campus Linux Users Group as well as working at a Fortune 100 for about a year, I've had a bit of experience with computer enthusiasts and their choices as well as the (my) work environment.
Obviously there is an imbalance, and I see a lot of folks saying "OK, whatever", but this is a discussion for people who care about this sort of thing. There are other issues as well, such as, why, in California, there are so few Latinos in either of these situations I'm in?
I'll go on to say that the issue is MUCH worse in the campus organization I've recently taken the reigns on than my workplace. Though, at my workplace I have several female coworkers, very few of these are in positions above standard "Software Engineer". At school though, we have very few girls come around. I think a lot of this could be attributed to the behaviour of the other members of the group. I think it may be more due to the "expected maturity level difference" between the two situations, ie, the relative amount of bullshit a woman would need to put up with in one situation vs. the other.
So, this speaks to me that I need to do what I can to perhaps persuade my members to be more "professional" as this might create a less antagonizing situation. But then I'm in a bit of a catch-22 as I've got more than a few mini-Stallmans in my group who are purposefully "anti-professional", even. Somehow the "hacker ethic" fails to include, even actively excludes women with the sort of behaviour and organizations that it spawns.
I know that bringing in more girls would actually make some of my fellow members uncomfortable. Linux is somewhat of a boys' clubhouse and while I've never seen people here treat women badly, they're not as capable, subconsciously, at making them feel welcome.
I think the behaviour at play in the guys in my group and FOSS is a much lower-level, clan-making, different-people excluding sort of impulse that is totally backwards and unhealthy. The attitude that this "doesnt matter" is one that will only lead to increased marginalization of the community, as well as continuing to exist without some great talent that will lie dormant in the meantime. What a huge boon it might be to open source projects..
I suspect, however, that these projects are happier to be unofficially mens only and will hopefully fade into irrelevance as maybe some of us direct our projects into less exclusive clubs. It's my hope that this is an 'old guard' sort of situation and that some new progressiveness, as it begins to encourage nerdiness in the female also will grow enough to supplant the current status quo.
Though the world and the US and California (Prop 8??????????????????) have continued to surprise me with their ongoing bigotry, so thats probably a pipe dream. Maybe I can at least change my small part of the software world
If my Tweets do belong to me, then this can be proven in exactly one way. If my Tweets belong to me than I should have the ability at any time to take them all down and they will not be seen again on Twitter unless I retype them all back in -- 140 characters at a time.
When that happens then I'll say that they've told the truth.
Until that happens, they don't really belong to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Humans are like data. Unless you have them in more than one location, they don't exist.
Doesn't anyone tell these people about putting all your eggs in one basket?
Seriously though, I know its impossible to rip a few pennies out of taxpayers hands for anything short of an infant bleeding in the sidewalk, but SCIENCE IS IMPORTANT YOU IDIOTS
So based on the name of a variable the attack is from a certain geographic location?
The 'who else but the Chinese Government would want access to human rights activist accounts' argument is a little thin. So suddenly if anyone's account gets hacked, we can just immediately assume it's a group that opposes them and then pull our business out of an entire market?
Seems pretty dubious to me
BTW, why are there 5 FAs to read. Holy sheit
.. there's no need to oversensationalize.
new here?
sometimes there are just new words for old things.
i don't think many of us are upset about having our email 'in the cloud' for example, but what we like is being able to sync it to our phones and computers. but this universally accepted and successful(?) 'cloud' model is near universal.
i'd say the same about my other documents. i don't mind a 'repository' of my music, documents, etc., which I access over the net, but I do want to have local copies.
sometimes it seems to me like internet companies are trying to stockpile data so that they "can't" go away, get propped up by governments, necessity of access to information. doesn't really seem healthy.
makes me think of highly encrypted shared clouds done on a bittorrent/TOR like model, decentralize the thing...
Of all the technical challenges of this, they were all that worried about localizing this?
Sounds like an off the cuff remark that has no basis in reality. They had an idea, their project got cancelled. Don't you think you could provide some instructions for what gestures to recognize and people would learn them like 'moves' in a game?
Totally useless summary, information, article, and conclusion. Shouldn't have clicked on any of this.
foot.shoot() isn't a very good function call. That would seem to me to imply that your foot shoots something to me.
Maybe gun.shoot(foot)
Hope it's not flamebait but: You must have some huge balls on you, using 'ironic' on Slashdot and thinking that you're not going to get a firm talking to for your use of the word.
Johnny Five had no problem flipping pages and scanning them back in 1986. I don't see what the big deal is here.
Crisis? There was a crisis? Other than one invented by scam artists and the media?
Yes, exactly that crisis. And that was crisis enough
Us programmers always get the negative press.
So you consider 1990 to be part of the 'eighties'?
I'll bite
Since you cant be troubled, the list is as following:
Rock Band
Tony Hawk: Ride
Wii
Wacom tablet
iPhone
Johnny 5
UTF-8
The Internet
Debian Etch
RIAA universal communication surveillance
Yeah. The reality is that you will be stuck in a small cube writing code instead.
This story speaks to me in a lot of ways.
My only exposure to anything related to programming before college was HTML. I had no idea of the 'magic' of programming until I was in a college level programming course. Which I was only in because it was a requirement for electrical engineering classes I was interested in because I wanted to understand synthesizers and analog circuits better.
I grew up under a lot more pressure to be an 'artist' or creative-type than engineer. Most of my friends are from this world as well. From the outside, computer science looks pretty bleak. My idea of it was as follows. You sit at a computer terminal for your entire life, typing. And no one even reads what you write. If I was going to sit at a computer, why wouldn't I at least write for an audience? Why would I choose a job that seems solitary and unexciting? It seems like what you'd think being an accountant would be like.
Having just graduated and spent the last few years doing programming internships, it amazes me how wrong I was about the rewards of programming. No one told me the 'power' I would wield, the infinities of computing, the vastness of what you can express with programming language. That I'd confront hundreds of problems with thousands of solutions, and use my creativity and cunning to apply the most elegant and effective one. That the 'barrier to entry' of creating your own startup that could influence millions of users is little more than some education and a laptop and a server in your closet.
I feel like I found a goldmine that no one was hinting at. It is a primary goal of my professional career to expose more kids like myself to programming. The sentiment of the article is right on. Computers are not leveraged nearly enough in the fields I'm interested in. And it's due primarily I think to a misunderstanding about what programming is, and how it feels to do it. I encounter this firsthand often in Linguistics (also something I focused on in college) where many problems of data collection and analysis are considered impossible by my peers but understood as a solvable engineering problem to me.
I hope that this continues to be in focus. Too often it is a dichotomy between being a 'computer-person' or not, and I think many of us who were into other things got sucked into computers when we discovered them. It's a deep field and difficult to get a handle on, I think, coming from another area. But the benefits are too great to ignore.
Well, my priority was never to make money. In fact, that's been one of my least favorite parts of this discipline--the number of folks who are involved not because of passion for computing, but for monetary reasons. That said, I'm certainly not upset that I have done well financially with this decision. It's great that in very short order I was able to make far more than my parents, and have been able to give back to my family. But in my family, our primary goal is happiness, and they would have been just as proud of me regardless of my salary. I work in computer security.
I have always had a technical bent but I thought that programming would be boring and monotonous. I feared sitting at a computer screen, wasting away for the rest of my existence. It seemed a miserable and dystopian world from the outside.
What I discovered (without being interested in game examples, though I have been playing video games all my life), is that while I may be sitting at a computer screen, programming is very exciting, stimulating, challenging, even thrilling! The possibilities and accessibility of computing blew me away, and I knew that I could apply it to any field I wanted. I was hooked.
One thing I can say about the quality of the two programs: engineering is far more demanding. This may be obvious to a lot of folks, but this is another aspect of it that drew me in. I understand that this aspect may turn some off, though, and that we could benefit from teaching more people about our art without wrecking them the way that the engineering program at my school does. For full disclosure, I ended up with degrees in both Linguistics and Computer Science. The computer science and engineering courses were an order of magnitude more difficult than the linguistics or the music courses I took beforehand. And not simply because the material is more difficult to master, but the amount of work assigned, expectations of the students, etc, was much greater. As I said, I thrived on this, but many did not, and I know personally of programmers lost because the pressure was too great.
I didn't realize we were all bored to tears with our CS courses.
Personally, I went into the introductory programming course at my school (as a music major) expecting the worst. I was taking the course because it was required for some music technology-related courses I wanted to take later on. It was a very traditional class. By the second week, I had changed my major to computer science.
You don't need to make math and science and technology "fun". That attitude is patronizing and obnoxious. If you have competent, passionate instructors then you can teach students.
Making a game isn't necessarily more fun, accessible, interesting or inspiring than making something else. For example, In my second programming course, which was titled Data Structures and Algorithms, two of our major projects were making a text-based Arkanoid clone, and making a text-based spreadsheet application (all C++, by the way). One of the requirements for our spreadsheet was that it be able to save and load 200,000+ cells of data, in a hash table we implemented ourselves. It was much more impressive to me to create an application that could scale like this than the small, limiting world of the Arkanoid game.
It's my fear that we would be dumbing down the discipline for the sake of accessibility. It's something that requires balance, and a good project and a good instructor are necessary. It should not necessarily be, nor not be a game. It should be appropriate to demonstrate the techniques and theory to build upon to foster an understanding of computing.
I don't know what sort of mind it would take to not be awestruck by the power afforded to one by programming modern computers. It speaks for itself.
The SF bay area and LA had both Walmart and Target long before rural Wisconsin did
While you're correct by saying the "SF Bay Area" I would like to point out that the City and County of San Francisco does not have a Walmart or a Target, as the city has resisted these franchises.
Hack the planet!!
As my evangelical Sparks drinking friend used to say, "The alcohol needed to come up with bad ideas, and the energy required to follow through with them".
He checks the Sparks present in all the liquor stores he goes into to see if they still have the Old Label, thus still containing the original recipe... Still fairly common here in San Francisco
Base on the moon! Lets go fuckers!
Probably impossible.
As we all should know by now, impenetrable security doesn't exist. What we should probably have is tighter backup power for essential services and places like hospitals, where local redundancy could help in the face of a remote 'hacker' type attack
Places where there is a lot of danger for people without electrical power don't need billions spent on the security of their power systems. They need redundancy, generators in their buildings that could be used to keep people alive, batteries, and common sense.
Oh well, let's spend a bunch of money on fear like we always do.
They said WHERE they got the samples and how they picked them. But do you think most users get infected by dropping an individual malware sample on their machine and executing it? They probably get a huge load at a time from an installer that claims to be something else and anti-virus, if present, would have a stab at detecting system changes at that point, or maybe even when the file was downloaded...
Obviously a destructive rootkit could change any number of things about your system that COULD be impossible to restore. This isn't a shortcoming of a security product but a factor of being able to perform actions as an administrator, something the system must have SOME way for you to do, and therefore can be abused. Granted, some systems will be tighter about this than others, and there's a trade-off in usability, etc. But that is for the OS designer, not the AV provider.
there's no real ethical or legal excuse for pirating something, simply because you don't like the price of it. If you don't like the quality of the offering at the price it is offered, then don't buy it.
Ok, I'll give you that there's no LEGAL excuse. But ethical?
I realized something about piracy, that changed my viewpoint on it recently. And I think piracy is the sort of thing that most of us had an opinion on before we knew much about, and have essentially sought out opinions and resources that support our own point of view on it. Or maybe that's just me, anyhow:
This is what happened. I ride a bike to a very hilly campus every day. I'm not entirely positive that my bike is welcome on elevators. (I'm always relieved when I don't have to ride with someone else along with my bike, as I don't know if they are comfortable with it). However, there is a crucial point at which I can save carrying my bike up 5 flights of stairs if I ride this elevator with it. So I do.
I feel this is somewhat the dilemma the content providers are leaving me with. They've got a 10 story elevator and they want me to walk up the stairs to get their content. There's simply no way to tie down digital media files without completely changing the way that computer systems work. Do WHATEVER you want to the file, if someone can decode it to watch it, they can capture that stream and encode it in a way that can be shared. I'm sorry content providers, but it's GAME OVER.
And that's unfortunate for them, but I don't want my entire digital future dictated by some media companies needs. Because the laws they want to enact will take away the freedom and control you have over your systems.
Maybe high production value films and albums will go away. I think humanity, as a whole, will survive without that. Plus we have all the crap you've been spending tons of money on for years that we never saw, market that to us. Eventually this system will be rolled into the soil and something new will emerge. Some say this is obviously 'better' but I don't think it matters. The point is that the old system must go away if our freedom is to be retained.
I understand that this message will probably not get across and that these laws will pass and these content providers will continue to treat their customers like criminals. I believe this will leave us with one alternative: to exist digitally only on anonymous networks, encrypt all our traffic, let none know of our files
Things that are SO TRIVIALLY EASY such as downloading a file should not be made illegal. It's not going to work, whether I think piracy is OK or not.
Those of us with beta accounts are familiar with the fact that its slow, clumsy and unexciting.
Sort of sad how everyone is shitting themselves because they found ONE decent use for Wave. A dedicated program for D&D, which dedicated players would rather use than a general tool shoehorned into D&D and stuck in the damn browser, would be much better.
I used to like Google's products because they were simple and responsive. This is what I would expect out of a startup, not a company with resources and experience like Google.
They've probably already realized this is a failed experiment, and they'd be better off shoving it under the rug now than pushing forward as if this is the next Google Search or Mail.
A large rat glowers at you dubiously
I wasn't sure if the OP had a point until I read the thread
As the president of a campus Linux Users Group as well as working at a Fortune 100 for about a year, I've had a bit of experience with computer enthusiasts and their choices as well as the (my) work environment.
Obviously there is an imbalance, and I see a lot of folks saying "OK, whatever", but this is a discussion for people who care about this sort of thing. There are other issues as well, such as, why, in California, there are so few Latinos in either of these situations I'm in?
I'll go on to say that the issue is MUCH worse in the campus organization I've recently taken the reigns on than my workplace. Though, at my workplace I have several female coworkers, very few of these are in positions above standard "Software Engineer". At school though, we have very few girls come around. I think a lot of this could be attributed to the behaviour of the other members of the group. I think it may be more due to the "expected maturity level difference" between the two situations, ie, the relative amount of bullshit a woman would need to put up with in one situation vs. the other.
So, this speaks to me that I need to do what I can to perhaps persuade my members to be more "professional" as this might create a less antagonizing situation. But then I'm in a bit of a catch-22 as I've got more than a few mini-Stallmans in my group who are purposefully "anti-professional", even. Somehow the "hacker ethic" fails to include, even actively excludes women with the sort of behaviour and organizations that it spawns.
I know that bringing in more girls would actually make some of my fellow members uncomfortable. Linux is somewhat of a boys' clubhouse and while I've never seen people here treat women badly, they're not as capable, subconsciously, at making them feel welcome.
I think the behaviour at play in the guys in my group and FOSS is a much lower-level, clan-making, different-people excluding sort of impulse that is totally backwards and unhealthy. The attitude that this "doesnt matter" is one that will only lead to increased marginalization of the community, as well as continuing to exist without some great talent that will lie dormant in the meantime. What a huge boon it might be to open source projects..
I suspect, however, that these projects are happier to be unofficially mens only and will hopefully fade into irrelevance as maybe some of us direct our projects into less exclusive clubs. It's my hope that this is an 'old guard' sort of situation and that some new progressiveness, as it begins to encourage nerdiness in the female also will grow enough to supplant the current status quo.
Though the world and the US and California (Prop 8??????????????????) have continued to surprise me with their ongoing bigotry, so thats probably a pipe dream. Maybe I can at least change my small part of the software world
If my Tweets do belong to me, then this can be proven in exactly one way. If my Tweets belong to me than I should have the ability at any time to take them all down and they will not be seen again on Twitter unless I retype them all back in -- 140 characters at a time. When that happens then I'll say that they've told the truth. Until that happens, they don't really belong to me.
Um.. you do have that ability.