You're missing the point entirely. It doesn't matter how infrequently such stings are fatal, or how easily treated they are. People are going to associate the island with jellyfish stings now, and lots of people who might have otherwise been drawn in by the publicity are now going to instead be thinking "Screw that. I don't want to get stung by a jellyfish!"
I'm no big fan (nor hater, necessarily) of Ayn Rand, but I'm amazed at the frequency with which this quote from Atlas Shrugged has seemed particularly relevant over the last decade or so (emphasis mine):
"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion--when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing--when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors--when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you--when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice--you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot."
It's one thing to abuse a standards body (not to mention the English language) in order to call your proprietary crap a "standard", but it's another thing to get people to adopt your crappy so-called standard.
Of course, MS doesn't really care if anybody else adopts the standard or not - so long as they can use the words "ISO standard" in their advertising.
The point is, I can be okay with there being an OOXML "standard" as long as nobody else besides MS ends up using OOXML, and as long as the ISO committee isn't totally and permanently ruined as a result of having been used like a sock puppet by MS.
Of course, the ISO committee needs to at least stand up and put a stop to that "drafting errors" nonsense, but hopefully if they did that they could at least continue on with some amount of credibility intact.
I agree. I spent several years writing almost exclusively in Visual C++. We did mostly straight C with some C++ sprinkled in where it made sense, and we hand-rolled all our UIs in the Visual C++ resource editor.
Then I started learning VB, and realized I could save countless hours of tedious UI coding by slapping the UI together and VB, and compiling all the "hard core" C/C++ stuff as a DLL, which the VB UI would then call. That increased our productivity by an order of magnitude. No more having to write hundreds of lines of Petzold-style C code for every %@$*ing UI element. It was great.
Those who blindly made fun of VB as being wimpy and soft, just aren't using it right. Nobody ever said you were supposed to use VB for everything, including all your heavy, CPU-intensive algorithms.
I might even go as far as to say that instead of women shunning 'technology' careers, men are more likely to shun the 'thankless' careers I mentioned above. Maybe men seek, nay, demand appreciation and public spoils for the hard-gotten sacrifice of becoming skilled at their obscure trade.
That could be it, but I really don't think so. When I chose CS as my major back in college, it had absolutely nothing to do with the level of reward I thought I would get from it. I wasn't even particularly concerned about pay - superficially, perhaps, but it was far from being my main motivation.
To the contrary, my motivation for going into CS was that I'd found something I truly loved doing and couldn't imagine doing anything else. And for that matter, a fairly hefty percentage of the programmer/IT people I know went into it for very similar reasons.
Moreover, most IT guys I know don't seem to think of IT as being particularly rewarding. It's just what they're good at, and for the most part, they're good at it because they were drawn to it at an early age (not by the rewards it offered, but simply for the "oooh" factor and the satisfaction of knowing how computers work).
Seems like we have another story on this topic every couple months or so, but the basic problem hasn't changed.
The reason so few women go into computing is that it's viewed as a "nerd" thing, and our society generally associates "nerd" with "male". In other words, most women aren't interested in computing because of the stigma associated with it. For most college-age women, going into computer science would be viewed as social suicide.
My wife, for instance, has an above average intellect, and could have done well in almost any field she chose, but computer science was the last thing she wanted to do. Why? Because CS is beyond her mental capacity? Nope. But it is outside of the range of things that interest her. She has no appreciation or fascination for how computers work. She just wants one that works reliably, but beyond that she's not interested in knowing how they work. Same with her car.
Point is, you don't need to come up with complicated, obscure reasons why there aren't more women in computing. The answer is boring and cliched to the point of sounding trite, but it's right there in front of your nose. Women in our society are trained to not be interested in technical careers. This whole discussion, in fact, is probably just an extension of the age-old question of why there aren't more female auto mechanics, etc.
I'm just unclear on how that makes this a noteworthy "DRM is bad" case.
More like a "DRM is stupid" case. The point is not whose fault it was, but that DRM prevented a perfectly legal use of the material. The fact that the theater, having properly licensed the movie from the studio, still had to overcome this ridiculous DRM hurdle, shows that DRM is a pitiful joke.
Slashdot Mirror
About the same as for the average Slashdotter.
You're missing the point entirely. It doesn't matter how infrequently such stings are fatal, or how easily treated they are. People are going to associate the island with jellyfish stings now, and lots of people who might have otherwise been drawn in by the publicity are now going to instead be thinking "Screw that. I don't want to get stung by a jellyfish!"
"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion--when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing--when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors--when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you--when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice--you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot."
It's one thing to abuse a standards body (not to mention the English language) in order to call your proprietary crap a "standard", but it's another thing to get people to adopt your crappy so-called standard.
Of course, MS doesn't really care if anybody else adopts the standard or not - so long as they can use the words "ISO standard" in their advertising.
The point is, I can be okay with there being an OOXML "standard" as long as nobody else besides MS ends up using OOXML, and as long as the ISO committee isn't totally and permanently ruined as a result of having been used like a sock puppet by MS.
Of course, the ISO committee needs to at least stand up and put a stop to that "drafting errors" nonsense, but hopefully if they did that they could at least continue on with some amount of credibility intact.
It is.
Gotta love holographic decoys. Even the pretend ones.
I agree. I spent several years writing almost exclusively in Visual C++. We did mostly straight C with some C++ sprinkled in where it made sense, and we hand-rolled all our UIs in the Visual C++ resource editor.
Then I started learning VB, and realized I could save countless hours of tedious UI coding by slapping the UI together and VB, and compiling all the "hard core" C/C++ stuff as a DLL, which the VB UI would then call. That increased our productivity by an order of magnitude. No more having to write hundreds of lines of Petzold-style C code for every %@$*ing UI element. It was great.
Those who blindly made fun of VB as being wimpy and soft, just aren't using it right. Nobody ever said you were supposed to use VB for everything, including all your heavy, CPU-intensive algorithms.
Could be worse. He could have skipped VB and Delphi and learned PowerBuilder instead.
Actually, I linked to the wrong Wiki page. This one is more directly relevant, although the concept is the same: Pigeonholing
Pigeonhole, not pigeonhold.
That could be it, but I really don't think so. When I chose CS as my major back in college, it had absolutely nothing to do with the level of reward I thought I would get from it. I wasn't even particularly concerned about pay - superficially, perhaps, but it was far from being my main motivation.
To the contrary, my motivation for going into CS was that I'd found something I truly loved doing and couldn't imagine doing anything else. And for that matter, a fairly hefty percentage of the programmer/IT people I know went into it for very similar reasons.
Moreover, most IT guys I know don't seem to think of IT as being particularly rewarding. It's just what they're good at, and for the most part, they're good at it because they were drawn to it at an early age (not by the rewards it offered, but simply for the "oooh" factor and the satisfaction of knowing how computers work).
The reason so few women go into computing is that it's viewed as a "nerd" thing, and our society generally associates "nerd" with "male". In other words, most women aren't interested in computing because of the stigma associated with it. For most college-age women, going into computer science would be viewed as social suicide.
My wife, for instance, has an above average intellect, and could have done well in almost any field she chose, but computer science was the last thing she wanted to do. Why? Because CS is beyond her mental capacity? Nope. But it is outside of the range of things that interest her. She has no appreciation or fascination for how computers work. She just wants one that works reliably, but beyond that she's not interested in knowing how they work. Same with her car.
Point is, you don't need to come up with complicated, obscure reasons why there aren't more women in computing. The answer is boring and cliched to the point of sounding trite, but it's right there in front of your nose. Women in our society are trained to not be interested in technical careers. This whole discussion, in fact, is probably just an extension of the age-old question of why there aren't more female auto mechanics, etc.
More like a "DRM is stupid" case. The point is not whose fault it was, but that DRM prevented a perfectly legal use of the material. The fact that the theater, having properly licensed the movie from the studio, still had to overcome this ridiculous DRM hurdle, shows that DRM is a pitiful joke.