Are you female? If you are not, then how do you know they aren't interested?
I'm involved with various universities, a few weeks back one of them had its 100 year anniversary open day for prospective students. Hardly any of the high-school students that showed up at the engineering and CS demonstrations were female. Plenty of girls were interested in subjects like medicine and law though. So I assume they aren't interested because they don't even enrol. I think its an interesting point to make because some people here are saying females leave the CS industry because of some macho, misogynistic culture - but the fact is, they don't show up at the university level to get turned off.
If it's because they all say they do, have you asked them why? Do they even know why? Do you know why you do like to program?
I don't know why, I was just reporting my observations. Out of the 6 girls I mentioned in my post, I'm still in touch with 3, they have had very successful careers - they are each on decent 6-figure salaries, and 2 of them have managed to have some children along the way. I didn't mean to imply that women make bad programmers - that is not my experience at all - my point is that for whatever reason, females are not even trying to enter the industry.
As for myself, I haven't really been able to describe myself as a programmer for years - I'm more into building microelectronics devices these days, and really only do a fringe of programming to run design simulations, or to get my hardware to work. I found out early on that jobs that made me sit all day left me feeling sluggish and unwell. So I don't take jobs like that anymore.
As an aside, I avoided those programs for attracting women like the plague. I really hated them.
Now this is something I don't understand at all - and really would like your thoughts on. The scholarships are to attract more women into science, but if you were going to study CS anyway, why wouldn't you apply for a "women in science and engineering" scholarship? We can't even give the damn things away. What is up with that?
When used in the United States, such affectations are code for "I am a flaming homosexual and have the desire to fellate you".
I don't live in the United States, and even if I did, I'm also not homophobic. Your pitiful attempt at insult really says more about you than it does me.
, as a thousand separator? WTF, not everybody is english or american, the world does not revolve around you.
It's common courtesy. When in Rome, etc. If I post to a non-english website, I do my best to get my language, currency and date formats correct, and I expect the same when others come here. And at any rate, correcting this sort of thing in the summary is what the editors are for.
For the record, I'm neither english nor american and I don't live in either of those countries, so no, I don't think the world revolves around me.
Although the project's budget is $1.1 billion, an ALMA technician earns less than $2.000 per month.
1) Project budget is $1.1 billion. Sure, but over how many years? 1, 5, 10? Comparing a large number over many years to a monthly rate is disingenuous.
2) $2.000. WTF? Only some few european countries still use "." as a thousands separator instead of ",". This is an english language website, use english locale settings because to everyone else, that reads as $2.00 a month, which obviously has to be wrong.
3) Where does the $2000 a month figure come from anyway? It isn't in tfa. Citation needed.
And yes, I'm grumpy, I'm working because I have a major deadline next week.
Considering 2TB USB 3 external disk drives are fairly cheap you can put six times that and still carry around it in your shirt pocket. In fact you will soon be able to get 512 GB and 1TB USB thumb drives although initially they will not be cheap.
The point I was (rather poorly) trying to make is that steganography gives pretty rubbish data ratios. Even assuming you can get as good as something like 1:10, the 300 GB of Snowden files is going to become 3 TB of kitten pictures when you use steganography.
You can't use the same kitten picture for each image because then it is pretty obvious to someone searching your HD that you are using steganography and you are busted, so you have to find about 2.7 TB worth of different kitten pictures.
So, I stand by my statement: that's a lot of kitten pictures.
3rd paragraph of the wikipedia article. Note that deletion has a specific meaning in the music industry. Their stuff is definitely public domain in the UK, but I think the issue is more complex for the US.
The British police did not destroy the newspaper's hard drives. They just watched and took notes and photos while the paper's people destroyed the hard drives.
What is the point of that distinction? Does it matter at *all* whether the government agents destroyed the drives themselves, or coerced the owners of the drives to do it?
It reminds me of a bully using a weaker child's hand to hit that child: "You're hitting yourself. Why do you keep hitting yourself?"
The bully could punch the child directly (and likely cause more physical pain), but chooses to get the child to hit itself, because it isn't just about control, it is about humiliation and control, in order to try to stamp out any chance of resistance.
The paper's people were forced to destroy their own equipment for the same reasons, and it distresses me no end that UK government officials are using schoolyard bullying tactics in this situation.
And why would the UK government need even a bit of distraction over that particular issue?
Whoops - I posted a link to the wrong article - was trying for something more recent.
I get that a lot of Brits want to hang on to every remaining scrap of the British Empire, but I think there is also a lot of the populace that is sick to death of funding expensive wars on the other side of the world. Especially when the official line is that there is seems to be no money for services and education (but plenty for spying and war).
At any rate, Falklands was probably a bad example. I don't know what the distraction is in aid of - only that blind Freddy could have told you that going in, destroying some computers and stomping around making noises about black-ops helicopters is only going to increase attention on the Snowden files, and the government is likely competent enough to know that.
I don't know what their goal was, but it probably isn't what it seems, as someone else in this discussion said - this story is rage porn. I don't think their actions could be calculated more perfectly to get this issue to blow up. I really do want to know why.
Was that rather pointless and incompetent theater supposed to impress someone? I doubt the Guardian has been cowed by destruction of at most a few thousand dollars of equipment. And it shows that the UK is in bed with the US with this sort of spying.
Usually incompetent theater like this is a distraction to try and draw attention from something else that is going on. I don't know what - perhaps the fact that tensions over the Falkland Islands are flaring up again, and the UK might be going back to war. The Guardian seemed to be the only paper reporting on that - every other paper in the UK is back to back royal baby photos right now.
They know that the majority of people in the UK don't really care about this spying stuff and accept it as the cost of added security from terrorists, if they've thought about it at all. And freedom of the press is somewhat on the nose after all that phone tapping scandal stuff.
So they can do something pointless like this, knowing it will distract the Guardian, and knowing the UK populace won't care.
>In Australia, only transactions in AU dollars are regulated by the government
WRONG!
Barter is regulated (at least taxed, which, IMO, is a form of regulation) in Australia. While BitCoin is not exactly barter, barter itself is a non AU-Dollar transaction.
http://money.stackexchange.com/a/21449 find your country in this list.
I was referring to foreign currency transactions in that statement. Foreign currency transactions between banks and financial institutions etc., are not regulated in Australia with the exception that I previously posted.
This is a false equivalency. The US government is allowed to regulate it's own money - that is - the sovereign currency that it issues. Bitcoins aren't defined or issued by the US government, so it has as much right to regulate Bitcoins as it has to regulate the Euro.
This is retarded even by Slashdot standards. Using your logic, if I carried out a fraud in Europe in Euros, the EU is allowed to stop/punish it, but if I carried out a fraud in Europe in US dollars, they aren't.
Nope - in the part of my post that you didn't quote, I specifically said that crime would be the same if it was done in Bitcoins or marshmallows. That covers your example, and we don't need any new laws to deal with that situation.
What the conversation is about is whether a new regulatory framework needs to be set up to deal with Bitcoin. My belief is no, for the reasons I've already given.
This is utter nonsense - the US government is allowed to regulate anyone conducting financial transactions within the US. As I've said before, they don't care what those transactions are reckoned in - dollars, Bitcoins, or jars of hamster poop. The same rules apply to all of them.
If you say so, I'll believe you, I admittedly don't know the rules for financial exchanges in foreign currency for the US in any detail. In Australia, only transactions in AU dollars are regulated by the government - most foreign exchange transactions are not regulated (the exception being the retail cash exchange outlets - so that travellers don't get ripped off).
But what you say doesn't change my position - that governments shouldn't be regulating transactions which don't involve their sovereign currency in any way. The fact that my views align with the laws of the country I currently am living in is just a happy coincidence.
If that's right, with what justification is the SEC already regulating financial instruments issued by banks and not the US gouvernment?
The SEC exists to prevent corporations messing with their own share prices by cooking the books or insider trading. All those other derivatives that the SEC watches are an extension to this. It is to theoretically allow an even playing field on the stock market.
Obviously this doesn't apply to Bitcoin, since the intrinsic value of Bitcoins don't relate to the operation of an individual corporation. Additionally - Bitcoin is designed to be so independent that price fixing can't really occur - hence no need for the SEC.
or the banks? Because you can't have it both ways: Either the government regulates money for various reasons (crime, abuse, economic stability) or it doesn't.
This is a false equivalency. The US government is allowed to regulate it's own money - that is - the sovereign currency that it issues. Bitcoins aren't defined or issued by the US government, so it has as much right to regulate Bitcoins as it has to regulate the Euro.
but because if instruments and investments denominated in dollars are regulated but ones in Bitcoins are not, well guess what all the Wall Street scum will do? That's right, use Bitcoins.
Crime is still crime, and theft is still theft. You don't need specific government regulations on marshmallows to make stealing them illegal, the same goes for Bitcoins. But here it is you who is trying to have it both ways: you are asking us to trust the government to regulate money and the "Wall Street scum", when that same government hasn't prosecuted anyone for the theft of billions that led to the financial crisis.
Whilst the right regulations would likely have stopped the financial crisis, the government doesn't need those regulations now to prosecute the people who caused the financial crisis because the obvious theft is still obvious theft. Think of regulations like a safe: stealing the money is still illegal whether it is locked up in a safe or not. Regulations would be welcome, but the problem we have is that the government has somehow chosen not to prosecute any bankers.
Hang on, the surface can't do e-mail properly? Just how bad was the built in mail app if they think Outlook is going to contribute massively to sales?
I guess all those commercials with people playing badly choreographed percussion games with their surface's makes more sense now: it's the only thing you can do with the damn brick.
Whatever happen to those colour E-ink screens Pixel Qi was working on? They would be perfect
I was at a conference last year where some japanese guys were working on a microfluidic transflective displays - they are essentially as bright as the ambient light level is - those would also be pretty good for this.
Come on people - we need low power daylight readable screens already.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep: su username.
Genius!
You're catching on that it's person with the big stick that gets to make the rules.
Is that big stick called a ruler? Or is the person holding the stick called the ruler?
Are you female? If you are not, then how do you know they aren't interested?
I'm involved with various universities, a few weeks back one of them had its 100 year anniversary open day for prospective students. Hardly any of the high-school students that showed up at the engineering and CS demonstrations were female. Plenty of girls were interested in subjects like medicine and law though. So I assume they aren't interested because they don't even enrol. I think its an interesting point to make because some people here are saying females leave the CS industry because of some macho, misogynistic culture - but the fact is, they don't show up at the university level to get turned off.
If it's because they all say they do, have you asked them why? Do they even know why? Do you know why you do like to program?
I don't know why, I was just reporting my observations. Out of the 6 girls I mentioned in my post, I'm still in touch with 3, they have had very successful careers - they are each on decent 6-figure salaries, and 2 of them have managed to have some children along the way. I didn't mean to imply that women make bad programmers - that is not my experience at all - my point is that for whatever reason, females are not even trying to enter the industry.
As for myself, I haven't really been able to describe myself as a programmer for years - I'm more into building microelectronics devices these days, and really only do a fringe of programming to run design simulations, or to get my hardware to work. I found out early on that jobs that made me sit all day left me feeling sluggish and unwell. So I don't take jobs like that anymore.
As an aside, I avoided those programs for attracting women like the plague. I really hated them.
Now this is something I don't understand at all - and really would like your thoughts on. The scholarships are to attract more women into science, but if you were going to study CS anyway, why wouldn't you apply for a "women in science and engineering" scholarship? We can't even give the damn things away. What is up with that?
Yeah, my CS class started with 6 females and 200 males.
There are plenty of "women in science and engineering" type programs to try and attract more females- but the girls aren't interested.
Even if classes become 50-50 from now on ( and I'm not seeing any evidence of this) , it would take decades for the numbers in industry to equalise.
When used in the United States, such affectations are code for "I am a flaming homosexual and have the desire to fellate you".
I don't live in the United States, and even if I did, I'm also not homophobic. Your pitiful attempt at insult really says more about you than it does me.
, as a thousand separator? WTF, not everybody is english or american, the world does not revolve around you.
It's common courtesy. When in Rome, etc. If I post to a non-english website, I do my best to get my language, currency and date formats correct, and I expect the same when others come here. And at any rate, correcting this sort of thing in the summary is what the editors are for.
For the record, I'm neither english nor american and I don't live in either of those countries, so no, I don't think the world revolves around me.
Thanks SynFlood - your post is more informative than the entire article that was linked!
Disallowing the inspection of working conditions seems like pretty bad practice. Has ALMA given a reason for why they are doing that?
But you do all speak European languages...
Although the project's budget is $1.1 billion, an ALMA technician earns less than $2.000 per month.
1) Project budget is $1.1 billion. Sure, but over how many years? 1, 5, 10? Comparing a large number over many years to a monthly rate is disingenuous.
2) $2.000. WTF? Only some few european countries still use "." as a thousands separator instead of ",". This is an english language website, use english locale settings because to everyone else, that reads as $2.00 a month, which obviously has to be wrong.
3) Where does the $2000 a month figure come from anyway? It isn't in tfa. Citation needed.
And yes, I'm grumpy, I'm working because I have a major deadline next week.
300+ gig is a lot of kitten pictures.
Considering 2TB USB 3 external disk drives are fairly cheap you can put six times that and still carry around it in your shirt pocket. In fact you will soon be able to get 512 GB and 1TB USB thumb drives although initially they will not be cheap.
The point I was (rather poorly) trying to make is that steganography gives pretty rubbish data ratios. Even assuming you can get as good as something like 1:10, the 300 GB of Snowden files is going to become 3 TB of kitten pictures when you use steganography.
You can't use the same kitten picture for each image because then it is pretty obvious to someone searching your HD that you are using steganography and you are busted, so you have to find about 2.7 TB worth of different kitten pictures.
So, I stand by my statement: that's a lot of kitten pictures.
I second this. Using stenography within kitten pictures and pseudonymous identities would be safer.... not that it would be safe - just safer.
300+ gig is a lot of kitten pictures.
3rd paragraph of the wikipedia article. Note that deletion has a specific meaning in the music industry. Their stuff is definitely public domain in the UK, but I think the issue is more complex for the US.
The British police did not destroy the newspaper's hard drives. They just watched and took notes and photos while the paper's people destroyed the hard drives.
What is the point of that distinction? Does it matter at *all* whether the government agents destroyed the drives themselves, or coerced the owners of the drives to do it?
It reminds me of a bully using a weaker child's hand to hit that child: "You're hitting yourself. Why do you keep hitting yourself?"
The bully could punch the child directly (and likely cause more physical pain), but chooses to get the child to hit itself, because it isn't just about control, it is about humiliation and control, in order to try to stamp out any chance of resistance.
The paper's people were forced to destroy their own equipment for the same reasons, and it distresses me no end that UK government officials are using schoolyard bullying tactics in this situation.
And why would the UK government need even a bit of distraction over that particular issue?
Whoops - I posted a link to the wrong article - was trying for something more recent.
I get that a lot of Brits want to hang on to every remaining scrap of the British Empire, but I think there is also a lot of the populace that is sick to death of funding expensive wars on the other side of the world. Especially when the official line is that there is seems to be no money for services and education (but plenty for spying and war).
At any rate, Falklands was probably a bad example. I don't know what the distraction is in aid of - only that blind Freddy could have told you that going in, destroying some computers and stomping around making noises about black-ops helicopters is only going to increase attention on the Snowden files, and the government is likely competent enough to know that.
I don't know what their goal was, but it probably isn't what it seems, as someone else in this discussion said - this story is rage porn. I don't think their actions could be calculated more perfectly to get this issue to blow up. I really do want to know why.
Was that rather pointless and incompetent theater supposed to impress someone? I doubt the Guardian has been cowed by destruction of at most a few thousand dollars of equipment. And it shows that the UK is in bed with the US with this sort of spying.
Usually incompetent theater like this is a distraction to try and draw attention from something else that is going on. I don't know what - perhaps the fact that tensions over the Falkland Islands are flaring up again, and the UK might be going back to war. The Guardian seemed to be the only paper reporting on that - every other paper in the UK is back to back royal baby photos right now.
They know that the majority of people in the UK don't really care about this spying stuff and accept it as the cost of added security from terrorists, if they've thought about it at all. And freedom of the press is somewhat on the nose after all that phone tapping scandal stuff.
So they can do something pointless like this, knowing it will distract the Guardian, and knowing the UK populace won't care.
>In Australia, only transactions in AU dollars are regulated by the government WRONG!
Barter is regulated (at least taxed, which, IMO, is a form of regulation) in Australia. While BitCoin is not exactly barter, barter itself is a non AU-Dollar transaction.
http://money.stackexchange.com/a/21449 find your country in this list.
I was referring to foreign currency transactions in that statement. Foreign currency transactions between banks and financial institutions etc., are not regulated in Australia with the exception that I previously posted.
This is a false equivalency. The US government is allowed to regulate it's own money - that is - the sovereign currency that it issues. Bitcoins aren't defined or issued by the US government, so it has as much right to regulate Bitcoins as it has to regulate the Euro.
This is retarded even by Slashdot standards. Using your logic, if I carried out a fraud in Europe in Euros, the EU is allowed to stop/punish it, but if I carried out a fraud in Europe in US dollars, they aren't.
Nope - in the part of my post that you didn't quote, I specifically said that crime would be the same if it was done in Bitcoins or marshmallows. That covers your example, and we don't need any new laws to deal with that situation.
What the conversation is about is whether a new regulatory framework needs to be set up to deal with Bitcoin. My belief is no, for the reasons I've already given.
This is utter nonsense - the US government is allowed to regulate anyone conducting financial transactions within the US. As I've said before, they don't care what those transactions are reckoned in - dollars, Bitcoins, or jars of hamster poop. The same rules apply to all of them.
If you say so, I'll believe you, I admittedly don't know the rules for financial exchanges in foreign currency for the US in any detail. In Australia, only transactions in AU dollars are regulated by the government - most foreign exchange transactions are not regulated (the exception being the retail cash exchange outlets - so that travellers don't get ripped off).
But what you say doesn't change my position - that governments shouldn't be regulating transactions which don't involve their sovereign currency in any way. The fact that my views align with the laws of the country I currently am living in is just a happy coincidence.
If that's right, with what justification is the SEC already regulating financial instruments issued by banks and not the US gouvernment?
The SEC exists to prevent corporations messing with their own share prices by cooking the books or insider trading. All those other derivatives that the SEC watches are an extension to this. It is to theoretically allow an even playing field on the stock market.
Obviously this doesn't apply to Bitcoin, since the intrinsic value of Bitcoins don't relate to the operation of an individual corporation. Additionally - Bitcoin is designed to be so independent that price fixing can't really occur - hence no need for the SEC.
or the banks? Because you can't have it both ways: Either the government regulates money for various reasons (crime, abuse, economic stability) or it doesn't.
This is a false equivalency. The US government is allowed to regulate it's own money - that is - the sovereign currency that it issues. Bitcoins aren't defined or issued by the US government, so it has as much right to regulate Bitcoins as it has to regulate the Euro.
but because if instruments and investments denominated in dollars are regulated but ones in Bitcoins are not, well guess what all the Wall Street scum will do? That's right, use Bitcoins.
Crime is still crime, and theft is still theft. You don't need specific government regulations on marshmallows to make stealing them illegal, the same goes for Bitcoins. But here it is you who is trying to have it both ways: you are asking us to trust the government to regulate money and the "Wall Street scum", when that same government hasn't prosecuted anyone for the theft of billions that led to the financial crisis.
Whilst the right regulations would likely have stopped the financial crisis, the government doesn't need those regulations now to prosecute the people who caused the financial crisis because the obvious theft is still obvious theft. Think of regulations like a safe: stealing the money is still illegal whether it is locked up in a safe or not. Regulations would be welcome, but the problem we have is that the government has somehow chosen not to prosecute any bankers.
"And remember sports fans, patriotism is a form of racism!" - Mephisto
Yay, Outlook
Hang on, the surface can't do e-mail properly? Just how bad was the built in mail app if they think Outlook is going to contribute massively to sales?
I guess all those commercials with people playing badly choreographed percussion games with their surface's makes more sense now: it's the only thing you can do with the damn brick.
The NSA narrative has always been the same: give us more money so that we can protect you against a large unspecified threat.
As a former NSA chief this is ingrained behavior for him, and so Hayden will keep spouting that line long after he's past the point of senility.
Or maybe add in an ability to use sunlight as the display back lighting.
You scoff - but that is what transflective displays are supposed to do - we just need someone to get one working outside the lab.
Whatever happen to those colour E-ink screens Pixel Qi was working on? They would be perfect
I was at a conference last year where some japanese guys were working on a microfluidic transflective displays - they are essentially as bright as the ambient light level is - those would also be pretty good for this.
Come on people - we need low power daylight readable screens already.