Oh man, you're absolutely right. All those Dark Castle sounds just came back to me in a rush. The one I'd add to the list you already gave is when the hero dies with a last gasp of "blah".
Hmm! A feminist card! I'd love to have one of those. It would simplify things considerably - it'd be like belonging to a club, and no one would misinterpret what it meant. How does one go about acquiring such a thing?
Slightly off-topic: do you think the slur 'feminazi' can be applied to someone male? Imagine some guy being called that in person. Would it make sense? Just curious.
Quite true! The same argument applies to anti-pornography conservatives, as well. However, for the purposes of my (rather simple) argument I just made a generalization. Which should be allowable because it's ultimately not very relevant to my original point.
There is one thing that unites us all- our love of pornography.
What a silly thing to say. Taking it seriously for a moment - There are lots of people who disapprove of pornography, for one reason or another. The political left (feminism) considers it exploitative, the political right (conservative religious) consider it amoral, and women (even geek women) don't tend to be consumers of pornography. Since Slashdot certainly has its share of political left, right, and women, it's easy to see that no one thing will EVER unite ALL Slashdot readers.
That being said, posts about pornography don't get modded up to +5 Funny more than any other running joke. It hardly takes the entire Slashdot community to moderate a post to +5 Funny, and it doesn't happen any more often than your obligatory Simpsons quote, or CowboyNeal reference, or beowolf cluster, etc.
Actually, the source of the story itself is investigative journalist Gregory Palast, who did an interview with Democracy Now radio. Now, the Register article may be based on the interview that Palast did with the radio station, but that doesn't change the fact that it was Palast who did the story - and not some radio host independently reporting it as news.
If the name Gregory Palast sounds familiar to anyone, it's probably because he wrote The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, which is definitely interesting reading. The first two chapters are even freely available from his own website:
My mistake, after a closer look I don't think the video is embedded at all. It looks like individual still keyframes from the actual video were just copied into the Flash movie in a sequence. Which means that lower version Flash players should be able to play it without a problem.
Not only will you need Flash to watch it at all, but you'll need the latest version of the Flash player in particular (6, which can include video). Of course, it's a moot point anyway because Honda.co.uk can't take the Slashdot burden.
Thanks for the expansion of your previous points. I'm at work and shouldn't be replying, but damn if I just can't help it.
Most of us do not make the distinction when speaking plainly. When I say "linked" I imply that there may be a casual relationship. I am not explicitly stating the latter because of my low level of certainty. However, whenever I see a correlation, I usually consider it prudent to investigate the relationship further.
Fair enough. I was saying that Watson had explicitly made the cause-and-effect claim absurdly early and without proper evidence. But of course this doesn't mean that other correlations don't warrant further investigation, even though the majority aren't cause-and-effect - which is very difficult to adequately prove.
But as for the evidence, there have been statistical surveys of sexual drive and such (forgive me for not remembering the reference), which show that sun exposure really is associated with greater sexual drive. Such a study can not prove whether it is a cause or just a coincidence, but that goes for pretty much all "studies" in the so-called "human sciences", where even the unlikeliest coincidences end up on TV as major breakthroughs in understanding. The most you can expect is a reasonably high level of confidence in your results, and that is exactly what Watson had.
Yeah, correlations are everywhere, and yeah, they tend to get picked up by the media: "New study finds that cat-owners have a 20% lower risk of cancer! Get a cat!" etc. Watson's correlation is particularly susceptible to scrutiny because he claims that sexual drive is biologically linked to a skin chemical, and to back it up with numbers he uses examples from around the world - in different geographical regions and different cultures. In order to show that a relationship is truly biological it needs to hold across all human cultures, otherwise there exists at least some significant societal (nuture) influence. He didn't address that. Also, based on the fact that this one kind of protein plays a role in creating several different hormones, he was claiming strong correspondence among those created hormones. I do know enough about hormone science to say that hormone production and effect on the body is more complex than that - research in this area is huge and ongoing and it's taken decades to figure out the exact roles of some of the more simple and well-known human hormones (fe estrogen - which actually still isn't completely known).
What do you think scientific research is all about? It is about having an opinion (which is usually called a 'hypothesis') and systematically going about trying to prove it.
Yup. Watson has a perfect right to form his hypothesis based on his opinions. And I think his opinions are pretty easy to read. Therefore I have a perfect right to think that Watson, personally, is a bigoted, sexist, asshole based on his opinions. But hell, I can form that opinion based only on his book The Double Helix. He's quite unashamed and frank about it too, which I think is kinda amusing. Good for him.
You see, the arabs consider their women to be sexual aggressors. They implicitly believe that if a man and a woman were left alone in a room, they would inevitably have sex. [See 'The Arab Mind' by Raphael Patai, an arab, for more interesting facts on the arabic world.] This is a reason for the head-to-toe robes and general segregation by gender (there are other reasons too, of course).
Ok, I think you're generalizing here. Patai describes the beliefs and culture of particular kinds of arabs and applies it to the entire region. Muslim beliefs aren't that homogeneous across the mideast and africa, let alone all the various subcultures. Also, the book is 20 years old. But this is a non-sequitor. Of course there are other reasons for gender segregation.
Back to the point: it is pretty obvious that an arab woman wearing her robes all the time would receive much less sun expos
All he said was that sun exposure may be linked with sexual drive and that obesity lowers charisma. No, this is not what he said at all. First, he wasn't saying that there was a link between sun exposure and sexual drive - he stated that the relationship was cause-and-effect. There's an absolutely enormous difference between the two, but I don't think I need to point that out. Second, his point about being fat was that it decreased ambition and drive to work, but increased sexual drive. Not quite the same as lowered charisma (what is this, D&D? Charisma is personal magnetism and enthusiastic devotion - it's what Jesus had).
The former was a valid speculation based on statistical evidence You lost me here. What statistical evidence? His supporting evidence to show that thin people are unhappy but ambitious was a slide of a sad-faced Kate Moss. What the hell does that prove? The scientific method is spinning in its grave.
the latter is obvious to anyone even though nobody wants to admit it openly I don't think you got the latter quite right, but that's besides the point. There have been lots of studies done on obesity - both sociological and biological, covering mental, physical, and social health. It's well-worn territory. Watson was in essence stating his opinion on the matter, and passing it off as scientific research.
And so what if he showed some pictures of scantily clad women to illustrate his point? This isn't Human Nature science. He was trying to contrast these pictures with pictures of Muslim women to show sexual drive. I'm surprised if you can't see why this would be offensive. Over and over again, his claims are nothing more than assumptions based on racial and cultural stereotypes.
If scantily clad pictures were demeaning to women, bikinis would not have been all that popular. Nobody is forcing women to dress sexy; they dress sexy because they want to, and to suggest otherwise is indeed sexist. Your logic here is flawed and doesn't have much, if anything, to do with the Watson talk. You're assuming that women, in general, would never do something that's demeaning and so therefore anything that they do do is perfectly ok. This is totally untrue. Just because somebody does something (like wear a bikini) that doesn't mean that they don't also feel demeaned by it. And just because one woman feels completely comfortable wearing bikinis (even though men almost never wear the man-equivalent - a speedo), it doesn't mean that another woman won't feel objectified.
Getting more and more off-topic, you said that nobody is forcing women to dress sexy. Look around you! Watch some TV! Read some Cosmo, for crying out loud. There are societal pressures everywhere for women to look like supermodels, behave like a good girl, and have the sexual drive and experience of a porn star (but only for pleasing their man, not themselves). When somebody wants to do things that they otherwise find demeaning, they've accepted and internalized the idea that those demeaning actions are the norm. That is, they repress their own feelings of being uncomfortable until they can't feel it anymore. It's learned behavior. According to your logic, as long as something is popular, there's nothing wrong with it because lots of people are doing it. Majority always rules. The free market is always right. So does that apply to everybody? How about other countries and cultures? To apply the logic to a more obvious and extreme example, how about countries where women are stoned to death for being seen with a man who isn't a relation? The other women also throw stones, so it must be ok - they've chosen it.
Back on topic - Watson's talk is entirely based on racial and cultural stereotypes. He presented no scientific basis whatsoever for his claims. While he undoubtedly has made contributions to science in the past (DNA, human genome project), as far as I'm concerned he hasn't made much of a contribution as a human being.
Like so many other things, the Simpsons have been predicting this for years. And without duplicates, too.
Lionel Hutz: Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to prove to you not only that Freddy Quimby is guilty, but that he is also innocent of not being guilty. I refer you to my expert witness, Dr. Hibbert.
Hibbert: Well, only one in two million people has what we call the "evil gene". (holds up a card showing DNA) Hitler had it, Walt Disney had it, and Freddy Quimby has it. (chuckles)
Hutz: Thank you, Dr. Hibbert. I rest my case.
Judge: You rest your case?
Hutz: What? Oh no, I thought that was just a figure of speech. Case closed.
Ok, details on this app are a bit scarce right now. From reading over the white paper quickly it looks like Macromedia has created an OS app that does a few key things - someone please correct me if my impression is wrong.
1) Manages caching of online data for its Flash apps in XML format so the apps themselves don't need to worry about it. I should say that this is really just a guess. At the least I'm sure that Central provides a way for the Flash apps to manage the caching themselves.
2) Creates a centralized "internet center" that tries to do the same kinds of things that all those Windows media player have tried to do for so long: create a single application that buys your groceries, checks stocks, etc. Is it me or is this some kind of holy grail of application dominance? I mean, hence the name "Central" after all.
3) Gives developers an easy channel for selling their Flash applications, and exposes a Flash Actionscript API for letting them decide how much to charge for their service.
Ok, so here's my quick-n-dirty analysis of it. First of all, Flash apps always had the capability of being played offline. Technically, that's all that a Flash movie is - it's a file that's executed and drawn by the client using the installed Flash Player. What's different here is that Macromedia is pushing (quite hard) for Flash apps to become web applications. They've already created an entire framework for doing the Flash equivalent of remote-procedure calls on web services (I'm simplifying here a bit), which of course would require being online. What I believe the Central app does is point 1) above: it abstracts the difference between being online and offline, making it easier for developers to create Flash web applications, which is where Macromedia is pushing Flash these days (via XML, mostly).
The other important thing to note is point 3) above. If you were a Flash developer and had, say, created an web services-aware Flash application that checked stock prices, it's not very easy for you to sell it yourself. You have to have all the backend framework in place to handle who's connecting, who's paid, who hasn't paid, etc. And all of that is complex and has nothing to do with Flash (pick your favorite server-side scripting and DB). Plus, you have the problem of advertising and distribution - who's going to find out about your little Flash app? And how are they going to get it? And then pay for it? What if they just copy the.swf file from somebody else? Worse, what if they decompile the code (Flash actionscript is interpreted, remember)? Macromedia has created a centralized app that handles this messy part for the Flash developers.
Almost makes me wish I was a full-time professional Flash developer. Actually, it doesn't at all. Coding in Flash is an exercise in futility and hacks. I'll stick to being a hobbyist Flash game developer, thank-you-very-much.
in fact, Squaresoft is basically putting ALL the emphasis on plot!
You mean the plot where a young group of rag-tag heros with a plucky/brooding/reluctant leader have to go travel the world on an adventure to destroy an ancient/extraterrestrial evil that has somehow awoken, during which the companions learn the true value of friendship, loyalty, and teamwork?
That one would be Final Fantasy.. erm.. all of them.
No, sadly.:( That would have been awesome, though. Maybe those parts were sold separately. Or maybe I got the pre-crucified version and there's a separate post-crucified version.
The best part is that the packaging has a brief description on the front about who this "Jesus" is - like a profile (though no age/height/weight). Just in case, y'know, you never heard of him or you need some reminding.
I got it at Camden market in London, probably one of the best places to get weird things like that. You can find a bunch for sale online, although I couldn't find any that come with a crucifix.
There are definitely a lot of factors at work in situations like this - things are never simple enough that there's an easy quick-fix solution. I'll front just one of them to consider.
Going into CS, like most subjects, has a prerequisite of interest. Ignoring all those people who go into programming thinking that there are going to be high salaries involved (are there still people like that nowadays?), most others do it because they're interested in the subject and the material. The question to ask then is why are they interested in it?
I'll go out on a limb and say that most people choosing to go into CS have significant background experience with computers. Of course this isn't true 100% of the time, but I'm going to generalize and say that it's the majority. This experience could be anything from playing lots of games to just feeling really comfortable in an OS (any OS), but generally more than just using a word processor.
So someone with a strong computer background is likely to be interested in going into CS. Fair enough. So how many women have a strong background in computers? And by that I mean how many women have been raised using computers, who tinker around with an OS, and feel comfortable with the technology? I would venture not many.
For those of you that grew up using a computer, how young were you when you first used a mouse or keyboard? How much of your time in your youth was spent interacting with a machine? And more importantly, how did your parents respond?
Here's my point. No matter how progressive universities are and how accepting of all sexes their CS programs may be, they're nothing compared to the forces of society that shape expectations. While it's much more acceptable now for women to be interested in computers and it isn't even unheard of for them to get encouragement, remember that there are a _lot_ of parents out there that are _not_ going to encourage their daughters play around with an old Apple or Pentium or what have you. Never underestimate the impact of dolls vs. legos on a child's development - think about the message being given to the child.
It doesn't necessarily have to be active discouragement for it do be discouraging. How many men in CS are there who were never encouraged to use a computer? Or may not have had a computer? Or might have been told that that wasn't for them? Or didn't have a social group of peers with the same interest? Don't underestimate the powers of peer pressure - at least most nerd boys know at least one nerd they can be friends with and get encouragement.
In summary, a reason that we would see more and more women in law and medicine but not CS is a reflection of our current society's attitude towards girls in that field. At least with law and medicine one doesn't generally have a strong background in the field before one begins to study it - CS is generally a different case.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh man, you're absolutely right. All those Dark Castle sounds just came back to me in a rush. The one I'd add to the list you already gave is when the hero dies with a last gasp of "blah".
Hmm! A feminist card! I'd love to have one of those. It would simplify things considerably - it'd be like belonging to a club, and no one would misinterpret what it meant. How does one go about acquiring such a thing?
Slightly off-topic: do you think the slur 'feminazi' can be applied to someone male? Imagine some guy being called that in person. Would it make sense? Just curious.
Hey, sorry for my previous comment. I've been having a bad day and making that type of remark is normally uncharacteristic of me.
No, I was just in a really bad mood and wanted to vent some frustration.
In retrospect, it was totally unnecessary.
Of course - being realistic, you're right. There can't be any sort of those people on Slashdot.
Oh wait, except I'm one of them.
Congratulations and welcome to my foes list, dick.
Quite true! The same argument applies to anti-pornography conservatives, as well. However, for the purposes of my (rather simple) argument I just made a generalization. Which should be allowable because it's ultimately not very relevant to my original point.
There is one thing that unites us all- our love of pornography.
What a silly thing to say. Taking it seriously for a moment - There are lots of people who disapprove of pornography, for one reason or another. The political left (feminism) considers it exploitative, the political right (conservative religious) consider it amoral, and women (even geek women) don't tend to be consumers of pornography. Since Slashdot certainly has its share of political left, right, and women, it's easy to see that no one thing will EVER unite ALL Slashdot readers.
That being said, posts about pornography don't get modded up to +5 Funny more than any other running joke. It hardly takes the entire Slashdot community to moderate a post to +5 Funny, and it doesn't happen any more often than your obligatory Simpsons quote, or CowboyNeal reference, or beowolf cluster, etc.
For lots more information about Haymarket, here is an excellent resource from the chicago historical society. A friend of mine wrote the website:
The Dramas of Haymarket
If you want to skip all the historical background and go straight to the bombing, read from Act II.
A quick search on the lovely capalert site reveals that there is exactly one movie that has received a perfect zero rating: American Psycho.
My favorite choice quote from the "review":
There is no listing of Chapter and Verse references for this movie. There is not enough room.
Bwahaha!
Actually, the source of the story itself is investigative journalist Gregory Palast, who did an interview with Democracy Now radio. Now, the Register article may be based on the interview that Palast did with the radio station, but that doesn't change the fact that it was Palast who did the story - and not some radio host independently reporting it as news.
If the name Gregory Palast sounds familiar to anyone, it's probably because he wrote The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, which is definitely interesting reading. The first two chapters are even freely available from his own website:
1. The Unreported Story of How They Fixed the Vote in Florida
2. The Bushes and the Billionaires Who Love Them
My mistake, after a closer look I don't think the video is embedded at all. It looks like individual still keyframes from the actual video were just copied into the Flash movie in a sequence. Which means that lower version Flash players should be able to play it without a problem.
The video itself plays within a Flash movie.
Not only will you need Flash to watch it at all, but you'll need the latest version of the Flash player in particular (6, which can include video).
Of course, it's a moot point anyway because Honda.co.uk can't take the Slashdot burden.
Thanks for the expansion of your previous points. I'm at work and shouldn't be replying, but damn if I just can't help it.
Most of us do not make the distinction when speaking plainly. When I say "linked" I imply that there may be a casual relationship. I am not explicitly stating the latter because of my low level of certainty. However, whenever I see a correlation, I usually consider it prudent to investigate the relationship further.
Fair enough. I was saying that Watson had explicitly made the cause-and-effect claim absurdly early and without proper evidence. But of course this doesn't mean that other correlations don't warrant further investigation, even though the majority aren't cause-and-effect - which is very difficult to adequately prove.
But as for the evidence, there have been statistical surveys of sexual drive and such (forgive me for not remembering the reference), which show that sun exposure really is associated with greater sexual drive. Such a study can not prove whether it is a cause or just a coincidence, but that goes for pretty much all "studies" in the so-called "human sciences", where even the unlikeliest coincidences end up on TV as major breakthroughs in understanding. The most you can expect is a reasonably high level of confidence in your results, and that is exactly what Watson had.
Yeah, correlations are everywhere, and yeah, they tend to get picked up by the media: "New study finds that cat-owners have a 20% lower risk of cancer! Get a cat!" etc. Watson's correlation is particularly susceptible to scrutiny because he claims that sexual drive is biologically linked to a skin chemical, and to back it up with numbers he uses examples from around the world - in different geographical regions and different cultures. In order to show that a relationship is truly biological it needs to hold across all human cultures, otherwise there exists at least some significant societal (nuture) influence. He didn't address that. Also, based on the fact that this one kind of protein plays a role in creating several different hormones, he was claiming strong correspondence among those created hormones. I do know enough about hormone science to say that hormone production and effect on the body is more complex than that - research in this area is huge and ongoing and it's taken decades to figure out the exact roles of some of the more simple and well-known human hormones (fe estrogen - which actually still isn't completely known).
What do you think scientific research is all about? It is about having an opinion (which is usually called a 'hypothesis') and systematically going about trying to prove it.
Yup. Watson has a perfect right to form his hypothesis based on his opinions. And I think his opinions are pretty easy to read. Therefore I have a perfect right to think that Watson, personally, is a bigoted, sexist, asshole based on his opinions. But hell, I can form that opinion based only on his book The Double Helix. He's quite unashamed and frank about it too, which I think is kinda amusing. Good for him.
You see, the arabs consider their women to be sexual aggressors. They implicitly believe that if a man and a woman were left alone in a room, they would inevitably have sex. [See 'The Arab Mind' by Raphael Patai, an arab, for more interesting facts on the arabic world.] This is a reason for the head-to-toe robes and general segregation by gender (there are other reasons too, of course).
Ok, I think you're generalizing here. Patai describes the beliefs and culture of particular kinds of arabs and applies it to the entire region. Muslim beliefs aren't that homogeneous across the mideast and africa, let alone all the various subcultures. Also, the book is 20 years old. But this is a non-sequitor. Of course there are other reasons for gender segregation.
Back to the point: it is pretty obvious that an arab woman wearing her robes all the time would receive much less sun expos
Ok, I'm going to reply piece-by-piece.
All he said was that sun exposure may be linked with sexual drive and that obesity lowers charisma.
No, this is not what he said at all. First, he wasn't saying that there was a link between sun exposure and sexual drive - he stated that the relationship was cause-and-effect. There's an absolutely enormous difference between the two, but I don't think I need to point that out. Second, his point about being fat was that it decreased ambition and drive to work, but increased sexual drive. Not quite the same as lowered charisma (what is this, D&D? Charisma is personal magnetism and enthusiastic devotion - it's what Jesus had).
The former was a valid speculation based on statistical evidence
You lost me here. What statistical evidence? His supporting evidence to show that thin people are unhappy but ambitious was a slide of a sad-faced Kate Moss. What the hell does that prove? The scientific method is spinning in its grave.
the latter is obvious to anyone even though nobody wants to admit it openly
I don't think you got the latter quite right, but that's besides the point. There have been lots of studies done on obesity - both sociological and biological, covering mental, physical, and social health. It's well-worn territory. Watson was in essence stating his opinion on the matter, and passing it off as scientific research.
And so what if he showed some pictures of scantily clad women to illustrate his point?
This isn't Human Nature science. He was trying to contrast these pictures with pictures of Muslim women to show sexual drive. I'm surprised if you can't see why this would be offensive. Over and over again, his claims are nothing more than assumptions based on racial and cultural stereotypes.
If scantily clad pictures were demeaning to women, bikinis would not have been all that popular. Nobody is forcing women to dress sexy; they dress sexy because they want to, and to suggest otherwise is indeed sexist.
Your logic here is flawed and doesn't have much, if anything, to do with the Watson talk. You're assuming that women, in general, would never do something that's demeaning and so therefore anything that they do do is perfectly ok. This is totally untrue. Just because somebody does something (like wear a bikini) that doesn't mean that they don't also feel demeaned by it. And just because one woman feels completely comfortable wearing bikinis (even though men almost never wear the man-equivalent - a speedo), it doesn't mean that another woman won't feel objectified.
Getting more and more off-topic, you said that nobody is forcing women to dress sexy. Look around you! Watch some TV! Read some Cosmo, for crying out loud. There are societal pressures everywhere for women to look like supermodels, behave like a good girl, and have the sexual drive and experience of a porn star (but only for pleasing their man, not themselves). When somebody wants to do things that they otherwise find demeaning, they've accepted and internalized the idea that those demeaning actions are the norm. That is, they repress their own feelings of being uncomfortable until they can't feel it anymore. It's learned behavior. According to your logic, as long as something is popular, there's nothing wrong with it because lots of people are doing it. Majority always rules. The free market is always right. So does that apply to everybody? How about other countries and cultures? To apply the logic to a more obvious and extreme example, how about countries where women are stoned to death for being seen with a man who isn't a relation? The other women also throw stones, so it must be ok - they've chosen it.
Back on topic - Watson's talk is entirely based on racial and cultural stereotypes. He presented no scientific basis whatsoever for his claims. While he undoubtedly has made contributions to science in the past (DNA, human genome project), as far as I'm concerned he hasn't made much of a contribution as a human being.
neither Watson nor Crick have discovered or published anything significant since then.
This is true in Watson's case, unless you count blatantly sexist, racist, unsupported "research" as significant.
Which we don't. Can you believe this guy received a Nobel Prize?
He's done at least one other "publication" like this, too.
Like so many other things, the Simpsons have been predicting this for years. And without duplicates, too.
Lionel Hutz: Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to prove to you not only that Freddy Quimby is guilty, but that he is also innocent of not being guilty. I refer you to my expert witness, Dr. Hibbert.
Hibbert: Well, only one in two million people has what we call the "evil gene". (holds up a card showing DNA) Hitler had it, Walt Disney had it, and Freddy Quimby has it. (chuckles)
Hutz: Thank you, Dr. Hibbert. I rest my case.
Judge: You rest your case?
Hutz: What? Oh no, I thought that was just a figure of speech. Case closed.
Ok, details on this app are a bit scarce right now. From reading over the white paper quickly it looks like Macromedia has created an OS app that does a few key things - someone please correct me if my impression is wrong.
.swf file from somebody else? Worse, what if they decompile the code (Flash actionscript is interpreted, remember)? Macromedia has created a centralized app that handles this messy part for the Flash developers.
1) Manages caching of online data for its Flash apps in XML format so the apps themselves don't need to worry about it. I should say that this is really just a guess. At the least I'm sure that Central provides a way for the Flash apps to manage the caching themselves.
2) Creates a centralized "internet center" that tries to do the same kinds of things that all those Windows media player have tried to do for so long: create a single application that buys your groceries, checks stocks, etc. Is it me or is this some kind of holy grail of application dominance? I mean, hence the name "Central" after all.
3) Gives developers an easy channel for selling their Flash applications, and exposes a Flash Actionscript API for letting them decide how much to charge for their service.
Ok, so here's my quick-n-dirty analysis of it.
First of all, Flash apps always had the capability of being played offline. Technically, that's all that a Flash movie is - it's a file that's executed and drawn by the client using the installed Flash Player. What's different here is that Macromedia is pushing (quite hard) for Flash apps to become web applications. They've already created an entire framework for doing the Flash equivalent of remote-procedure calls on web services (I'm simplifying here a bit), which of course would require being online. What I believe the Central app does is point 1) above: it abstracts the difference between being online and offline, making it easier for developers to create Flash web applications, which is where Macromedia is pushing Flash these days (via XML, mostly).
The other important thing to note is point 3) above. If you were a Flash developer and had, say, created an web services-aware Flash application that checked stock prices, it's not very easy for you to sell it yourself. You have to have all the backend framework in place to handle who's connecting, who's paid, who hasn't paid, etc. And all of that is complex and has nothing to do with Flash (pick your favorite server-side scripting and DB). Plus, you have the problem of advertising and distribution - who's going to find out about your little Flash app? And how are they going to get it? And then pay for it? What if they just copy the
Almost makes me wish I was a full-time professional Flash developer. Actually, it doesn't at all. Coding in Flash is an exercise in futility and hacks. I'll stick to being a hobbyist Flash game developer, thank-you-very-much.
in fact, Squaresoft is basically putting ALL the emphasis on plot!
.. erm.. all of them.
You mean the plot where a young group of rag-tag heros with a plucky/brooding/reluctant leader have to go travel the world on an adventure to destroy an ancient/extraterrestrial evil that has somehow awoken, during which the companions learn the true value of friendship, loyalty, and teamwork?
That one would be Final Fantasy
Flamebait? Oh please, I wasn't being serious. There are plenty of +5 Funny posts that are technically flamebait.
Yessssss! Nurture wins!
In your FACE, Nature!! Nyaaaaa!
Nurture - 1, Nature - 0!
SWISH!!
<drunken singing>
Weeee are the schampions... WEEEE are the schampions... nooo time for looosers...
</drunken singing>
No, sadly. :( That would have been awesome, though. Maybe those parts were sold separately. Or maybe I got the pre-crucified version and there's a separate post-crucified version.
The best part is that the packaging has a brief description on the front about who this "Jesus" is - like a profile (though no age/height/weight). Just in case, y'know, you never heard of him or you need some reminding.
I got it at Camden market in London, probably one of the best places to get weird things like that. You can find a bunch for sale online, although I couldn't find any that come with a crucifix.
my Jesus Christ action figure with posable arms and legs? Want to make a ruling on that one? What would Jesus tax? (WWJT)
Well said! Wish I had mod points for you.
There are definitely a lot of factors at work in situations like this - things are never simple enough that there's an easy quick-fix solution. I'll front just one of them to consider.
Going into CS, like most subjects, has a prerequisite of interest. Ignoring all those people who go into programming thinking that there are going to be high salaries involved (are there still people like that nowadays?), most others do it because they're interested in the subject and the material. The question to ask then is why are they interested in it?
I'll go out on a limb and say that most people choosing to go into CS have significant background experience with computers. Of course this isn't true 100% of the time, but I'm going to generalize and say that it's the majority. This experience could be anything from playing lots of games to just feeling really comfortable in an OS (any OS), but generally more than just using a word processor.
So someone with a strong computer background is likely to be interested in going into CS. Fair enough. So how many women have a strong background in computers? And by that I mean how many women have been raised using computers, who tinker around with an OS, and feel comfortable with the technology? I would venture not many.
For those of you that grew up using a computer, how young were you when you first used a mouse or keyboard? How much of your time in your youth was spent interacting with a machine? And more importantly, how did your parents respond?
Here's my point. No matter how progressive universities are and how accepting of all sexes their CS programs may be, they're nothing compared to the forces of society that shape expectations. While it's much more acceptable now for women to be interested in computers and it isn't even unheard of for them to get encouragement, remember that there are a _lot_ of parents out there that are _not_ going to encourage their daughters play around with an old Apple or Pentium or what have you. Never underestimate the impact of dolls vs. legos on a child's development - think about the message being given to the child.
It doesn't necessarily have to be active discouragement for it do be discouraging. How many men in CS are there who were never encouraged to use a computer? Or may not have had a computer? Or might have been told that that wasn't for them? Or didn't have a social group of peers with the same interest? Don't underestimate the powers of peer pressure - at least most nerd boys know at least one nerd they can be friends with and get encouragement.
In summary, a reason that we would see more and more women in law and medicine but not CS is a reflection of our current society's attitude towards girls in that field. At least with law and medicine one doesn't generally have a strong background in the field before one begins to study it - CS is generally a different case.
You look like you're trying to track down a memory leak! Would you like me tojg80;/aOUT OF MEMORY