Virus Shield, by developer Deviant Solutions, was a handsome, apparently easy-to-use security app for Android devices. For $4, the app promised hassle-free, ad-free security for Android users, without impacting battery life or performance. And, mostly, Virus Shield delivered - no ads, no fuss.
What's noteworthy is how successful Virus Shield apparently was the app made it into several "top paid" lists on the Play Store, and was apparently purchased more than 10,000 times since its release on March 28, making it at least a $40,000 payday for the mysterious Deviant Solutions.
Do, please, try to keep up and leave your biases at home. Slashdot, it may seem so at times, really isn't the place to proudly display your bigotry as though you're a peacock.
Interesting. I ask you some discomfiting questions, you interpret that as bigotry.
Please try answering them instead? Or you may give others the wrong impression.
Regardless of chemicals you take, or surgeries you under go; your gender does not change.
I agree - but it may not be the one assigned to you at birth.
Gender change in 46,XY persons with 5alpha-reductase-2 deficiency and 17beta-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase-3 deficiency. Cohen-Kettenis PT. Arch Sex Behav. 2005 Aug;34(4):399-410.
Individuals with 5alpha-reductase-2 deficiency (5alpha-RD-2) and 17beta-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase-3 deficiency (17beta-HSD-3) are often raised as girls. Over the past number of years, this policy has been challenged because many individuals with these conditions develop a male gender identity and make a gender role change after puberty. --- That's because they have a natural FtoM sex change.
Welcome to womanhood. You were a girl who looked like a boy. Now that's changing.
It gets better too
If you want to know why you're like this - there's two papers you should read.
Sexual Hormones and the Brain: An Essential Alliance for Sexual Identity and Sexual Orientation Garcia-Falgueras A, Swaab DF Endocr Dev. 2010;17:22-35
The fetal brain develops during the intrauterine period in the male direction through a direct action of testosterone on the developing nerve cells, or in the female direction through the absence of this hormone surge. In this way, our gender identity (the conviction of belonging to the male or female gender) and sexual orientation are programmed or organized into our brain structures when we are still in the womb. However, since sexual differentiation of the genitals takes place in the first two months of pregnancy and sexual differentiation of the brain starts in the second half of pregnancy, these two processes can be influenced independently, which may result in extreme cases in trans-sexuality. This also means that in the event of ambiguous sex at birth, the degree of masculinization of the genitals may not reflect the degree of masculinization of the brain. There is no indication that social environment after birth has an effect on gender identity or sexual orientation.
Biased-Interaction Theory of Psychosexual Development: “How Does One Know if One is Male or Female?” M.Diamond Sex Roles (2006) 55:589–600
A theory of gender development is presented that incorporates early biological factors that organize predispositions in temperament and attitudes. With activation of these factors a person interacts in society and comes to identify as male or female. The predispositions establish preferences and aversions the growing child compares with those of others. All individuals compare themselves with others deciding who they are like (same) and with whom are they different. These experiences and interpretations can then be said to determine how one comes to identify as male or female, man or woman. In retrospect, one can say the person has a gendered brain since it is the brain that structures the individual’s basic personality; first with inherent tendencies then with interactions coming from experience.
Your reported experience before age 10 matches my own pretty closely, BTW. It's a common pattern, one shared by women with CAH.
Up until age 5, I was a child. No real concept of gender.
At 6, I went to school, and noticed something was wrong. I was dressed as a boy, I looked like a boy, but I didn't think like "other boys". I still liked toy guns, and Meccano rather than dolls, but I was different.
At 7, I knew I wasn't a boy, but didn't know what I was. I thought boys were puerile, and girls too silly and sissy. A classic Tomboy in retrospect.
At 8, I got to play hopscotch with other girls, and I felt at home. They thought like I did, they cried like I did. I still didn't see myself as more than an honourary girl though. Even if my favourite toy car was Lady Penelope's pink Rolls-Royce.
At 9, more by a process of elimination than anything else, I realised I was female. Boys could just as well have been an alien species. Girls were just like me, in feelings and values.
At 10, I was in a boys boarding school then, and I was able to make up boardgames of astounding complexity when it rained. I had my own secret garden in the nearby woods, with flowerbeds I'd planted. I could sit and read amidst the flowers, and was terribly happy. It was then I picked the name Zoe, and planned what I was going to do with my life. I wanted children, a husband, the white picket fence etc, but also to be a Rocket Scientist and to travel the world, things that Wives and Mothers Just Did Not Do in the 60's.
Even though it had been obvious since age 7 that I’d never be “svelte” or “petite”, that I’d be the g
Is being left-handed - something also caused by unusual neurology - a mental health issue too? If not, why not?
What about cases like this - a girl with 5ARD, meaning she's undergoing a natural sex change at puberty - and desperately doesn't want it. Is that a "mental health problem"?
http://home.vicnet.net.au/~aissg/2010_FamCA_237.pdf
What about boys in the same situation - born looking female, naturally changing to look male later, and welcoming it. Are they "mentally ill" for wanting the change?
I note that in the new ICD-11 manual, this whole syndrome is being moved out of the mental health section.
However, if there's any validity to the claim about a difference in coding styles between the male and female populations, I wonder whether gay men tend to pattern one way or the other.
Striking similarities between the brains of gay men and straight women have been discovered by neuroscientists, offering fresh evidence that sexual orientation is hardwired into our neural circuitry.
Scans reveal homosexual men and heterosexual women have symmetrical brains, with the right and left hemispheres almost exactly the same size. Conversely, lesbians and straight men have asymmetrical brains, with the right hemisphere significantly larger than the left.
Scientists at the prestigious Stockholm Brain Institute in Sweden also found certain brain circuits linked to emotional responses were the same in gay men and straight women.
The findings, published tomorrow in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest the biological factors that influence sexual orientation - such as exposure to testosterone in the womb - may also shape the brain's anatomy.
The study, led by the neurobiologist Ivanka Savic, builds on previous research that has identified differences in spatial and verbal abilities related to sex and sexual orientation. Tests have found gay men and straight women fare better at certain language tasks, while heterosexual men and lesbians tend to have better spatial awareness.
A subject dear to my heart, as I'm Intersexed. Also not so much ambidextrous as ambiclumsy.
If performance is an issue, it's often better to write the simple-and-readable version first, then comment it out and write the hand-optimised version underneath, with a note saying that the two should be semantically equivalent and what shortcuts the uncommented version gives.
You Grok in Fullness. I'd add a corollary: in many cases the simple-and-readable version will end up more easily optimisable by a smart compiler too. Get the understandable version working first, as a proof of principle. It may end up meeting spec anyway. Don't try hand-optimising until you're sure you need to. Then do a dynamic analysis, find the bottlenecks, and if need be, write those in assembler.
I've saved O($10e7) in development costs that way - and not had to resort to clever coding, just clever architecture.
Men and women's brains use different strategies to remember highly emotional images, according to a new brain imaging study. The discovery helps explain how women manage to remember emotional events better than men, something psychologists have known for years.
"It's hard evidence that there are differences in the brains of men and women," says Stephen Maren, of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, commenting on the research.
He thinks that evolution may explain the differences. Women tend to be caregivers, more empathetic and more verbal: "Those traits are reflected in brain mechanisms."
In the study, Turhan Canli, at the State University of New York at Stony brook, and his colleagues asked 12 women and 12 men to view a selection of images while their brains were being scanned by functional MRI.
Other papers include:
Zhou J.-N, Hofman M.A, Gooren L.J, Swaab D.F (1997)
A Sex Difference in the Human Brain and its Relation to Transsexuality.
Kruijver F.P.M, Zhou J.-N, Pool C.W., Swaab D.F. (2000)
Male-to-Female Transsexuals Have Female Neuron Numbers in a Limbic Nucleus
...and so on and so on. Male and Female brains tend to be quite different, though there's overlap in some areas. None in others.
I'm acutely aware of this as I'm Intersexed, so with a rather mixed and nonstandard neurology.
Like real programmers dont need debuggers, they just read the core dump. With cat
cat? No, just a light to put the punch cards up to, to see the holes.
In the old days, Real programmers also had one of their canines sharpened to bite rectangular holes in cards to change the source, and the other sharpened to bite circular holes in the patch punch-tape.
It has been useful in other problem domains to have an exercise OPFOR and training grounds. See Crocodile03, Red Flag, Fincastle Trophy etc.
Are there plans to both co-operate with allied nations, use "Tiger teams" to assess vulnerabilities in both US and allied infrastructure, train a specialist OPFOR using likely enemy tactics, have an "inactive reserve" of irregular cyber-militia... and is there a (preferably multinational) group studying such "Blue Sky" ideas? How do we go about starting one if not? This Slashdot experiment indicates someone is on the ball, at least...
About 15 years ago, I was part of an unofficial e-mail-ex that happened immediately after an unfortunate incident involving a QANTAS trans-pacific flight and the USN. We examined just what might happen in case of severe tension between the US and Australia. The problem from the Australian viewpoint was not causing unacceptable damage to the US in order to coerce the country into behaving as they'd wish, it was doing so without causing unacceptable collateral damage to the world economy. This pre-dated Tom Clancy's "Debt of Honor", which contained a few of the ideas. Both sides retired shaken, and resolved to try pretty much anything before going that far in actuality. Hopefully infrastructure has been secured a bit since then. As a regular reader of the RISKS digest http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks , I wouldn't bet on it.
Yes, but the fact that you realise you're not doing good Engineering puts you streets ahead of most in the business.
I speak as one who has at any one time got several hundred people's lives depending on systems I've been responsible for. I'd rather have someone like you on my team - who realises just how slipshod commercial practices usually are - than the usual Hackers.
The difficulty is convincing management that better and cheaper is possible using good Engineering principles, and with Aspect-Oriented Development we're working on quicker too.
Those of us who have experienced the hatred, the violence, the rape, the cigarette burns.... the usual stuff every transsexual boy or girl goes through should be kinder to those who are Intersexed. Remember, this woman was made transsexual at the point of a scalpel.
I'm both Transsexed (as in "brain physically mainly of one sex, body physically of the opposite sex:"), and Intersexed. Androgen Insensitivity, Adrenal Hyperplasia, and a Leydig cell anomaly, not that I have any Leydig cells any more. I know what it's like to have to pretend to be one sex, even though I was the other, and do so with the additional handicap that the body wasn't 100% functional in either role, but a mixture. It was easier for me though, I had no surgical intervention, and Dr Suporn in Thailand has taken my sorta masculinised groinal area and made it indistinguishable from that of a natal female (AT LAST!).
Those of us who are Intersexed should look at the latest Scientific and Medical Evidence that Transsexuality (as opposed to crossdressing etc) is just another Intersex condition, and no longer consider TS people psychos, freaks and weirdoes who we want nothing to do with.
Wolfsdaughter, this person has had bucketloads of pain all their life. Unlike us, they could maybe have had a normal life in their actual gender, with children, but a surgeon's knife took that away. How can we blame them for seeing people with normal genitalia getting them re-shaped and made sterile, and thinking that we are wasting a gift they would have given anything for? Yes, her words were hurtful, but if anyone has a right to hurt us, she does. Not the "norms", the ones who stoned us or beat us with crowbars just because we "vibed wrong". So please, forgiveness. Yes, her remarks hurt me too, BTW, but no matter.
Let's just make sure the World, the/. ers anyway, know we exist. That we are human. That the rate of transsexuality in the general population may be 1:3000 (not 1:30,000 as is usually stated) but in the InfoTech area it's more like 1:300, as we're good at it. Our brains are wired up differently, and in some ways, many of us are smarter than the average bear. Let the/. ers know that during their careers, they will see people like us. As the line in Transamerica goes, "we walk among you".
And Please, Please, Please, as Transsexuals who know just exactly how much that condition SUX, stop the "genital normalisation" of babies until they've grown up enough to tell us whether they're boys or girls (almost always by age 7, often even by age 3). Because there is a difference, in the brain structure, and although there are people who can function in whatever role they're brought up in, for most of us it's hard-wired long before birth. Please let us stop the surgical creation of Transsexual babies.
Unfortunately there's still so little research done on the more outrageously rare (we think) Intersex conditions, often because of sheer emberressment. Think how terrible it must be to be a self-fertilising hermaphrodite. Or to be a really spectacularly gorgeous-looking girl, who at age 17 or so finds out she is actually genetically male but with Complete Androgen Insensitivity (hence 100% female-looking rather than the 90-something most women are).
Or worse, those women born with 5-alpha-reductase-deficiency, who turn into guys late in puberty. Though many 5ARD cases are male-brained so it's a dream come true rather than a nightmare. Or maybe a guy with CAH (Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia) who finds out he's actually genetically female. Or neither 46xy (male) or 46xx (female) but 47xxy (Kleinfelter). Have you had your karyotype checked lately?
Yes, it's fine to make jokes about people like that - unless you're one of them, and have to deal with something like Ideopathic Partial Sex Reversal, meaning "well, it's a good job you've always thought you were a lesbian trapped in a male body, as your body isn't male any more. Not quite fully female either, but we can fix that surgically now.". 9 Cases I know of. Including me. Worst thing is, I'm no longer lesbian. Something to do with vassopressin receptors we think.
You know some readers will think I'm joking (don't blame them) or perhaps just crackers (don't blame them either). But we have the photos, blood tests etc. And may I refer everyone to the Intersex Society of North America for more details on various of the more common Intersex conditions. There are hundreds.
There's already a lot of International co-operation in space R&D. Take for example the Australian satellite Fedsat. Bus design by SIL of the UK, completed and re-engineered by Auspace in Australia, Star Camera from Stellenbosch in South Africa, Attitude Control System by Dynacon Canada, GPS system by NASA, USA. Telemetry standards by the European Space Agency. And launched on a Japanase H2A booster.
With a design lifetime of 3 years, it's been operational for 4, and was the first satellite to demonstrate self-healing of radiation damage in Space.
The key is to minimise bureaucracy, and have a single systems integrator. Probably not in the US due to some eccentric export control restrictions you have.
And yes, I had the honour and privelege of heading the on-board computer development team. I spent most of my time sorting out inconsistencies between the many different Universities in Australia involved, not to mention the International partners. Having to make decisions - one experiment suddenly needed more resources, who can I rob? Fortunately I always kept a reserve... so no-one ended up losing, and I could even give them a bit more than they asked for in the end.
Best thing about it? Well, at age 10 in 1968 I watched Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and vowed I'd be working on a space programme in 2001. That, and being entitled to wear a T-shirt saying "As a matter of fact, I am a Rocket Scientist!".
Gosh, where to begin. I've had to become knowledgeable about this in the last 18 months due to being a bit strange biologically, and here's a simplified summary of what I've found out.
It's simple for most of us - we either have 46xy chromosomes, a male body, and a male gender identity, or alternately, 46xx chromosomes, a female body, and a female gender identity. Some of us are Gay, some Lesbian, some straight, some bisexual, some asexual, but that's beside the point.
First, I'll start with the hundreds of different syndromes that collectively are called Intersex Conditions. What is Intersex? A practical definition is that the body is neither wholly male nor female. Some definitions insist that the condition must be present at birth to be "truly" Intersexed, others require both male and female characteristics to be present. Depending on your definition, 1.7% of the populace are Intersexed, but in only 1 in 1000 is it noticeable, and causes a problem.
Now to Genetic Sex. 46xx equals boy, 46xx equals girl, right? Not necessarily. From Nature :
But in most cases of anatomically complete XX men -- who have functional testes, but without a Y are infertile -- SRY is involved. For this reason, it has long been called the gene that defines 'maleness'.[1]
But now Giovanna Camerino of the University of Pavia in Italy and colleagues have found another gene that is equally important to the process.
The team studied a family in which four brothers were each XX. None carried the 'male' SRY gene. Instead, the team reports in Nature Genetics [2], they each have a mutation in a gene called RSPO1.
See what I mean? Then there's conditions like Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, where a 46xy girl results. For real biological weirdness, look at 5-alpha-reductase deficiency (5ARD) syndrome, where a child who appears to be a girl until puberty becomes a boy afterwards.
I say "girl" and "boy" because that's what they look like externally.
But gender - or gender identity if you like - appears to be a consequence of brain morphology. Just as there are Intersex conditions that can give people cross-gendered genitalia and secondary sex characteristics, it's possible to have a cross-gendered brain. Most are familar with how exposure to the drug Thalidomide causes foetal deformity of the limbs - though many have limb deformities without exposure. But few are aware of the effect of the drug DiEthylStilEstrol, a drug commonly administered to pregnant women in the 50s, 60s and 70s. A 5 year study of DES-sons showed that 1 in 5 had some degree of Gender Dysphoria - basically, they thought like girls, they had girls emotions, and a male body felt terribly uncomfortable to them. Their brains were female, and we now know from dynamic MRI scans, autopsies, and examination of individual brain cells that male and female brains are far more different that we'd believed even ten years ago.
How and why do I know all this? I had one of the really odd conditions. Until age 47, I was thought to be a male with partial androgen insensitivity, slight hypogonadism. Then weird stuff happened, and my body rapidly feminised - something I'd dreamed of but knew was medically impossible. Turns out it's not, I know 7 other cases now of women with HBS who have spontaneously feminised between age 40 and 55. There's at least 3 different mechanisms that can cause it. Being a Geek Girl, I blogged about it as it happened, of course.
Neither Gender nor Sex are easy things to determine for a tiny minority of
One time, I was 1 week into a 3-month posting in Europe, and I got an e-mail from Australia telling me my 3-month notice period started immediately. I had to work through it of course. I was paid out the 4 weeks of vacation I'd accumulated, but lost the hundreds of hours of time-off-in-lieu. I'd been with the firm 8 years.
Trying to find a new job when you're 10,000 miles away from home isn't easy. And of course the customer, who had paid $$$ for my services, was not pleased, they wanted me to stay longer and work on other stuff.
Yes, I should have taken the time off in lieu, but that would have been cheating the customer. There's such a thing as professional ethics.
I took the firm to industrial arbitration, won, but the legal fees ate up nearly all of the 3 months pay I got.
For my sins, I was part of an independant audit of a new laser surgical device about a year ago.
The people who did the audit are the same people who do audits of aircraft, spacecraft, weapons systems etc.
The only way someone could get seriously, even fatally, hurt with this equipment was during loading or unloading, if it fell on them. The only way someone could have their eyesight permanently and uncorrectably damaged was if during maintenance, they fell over and poked themselves in the eye with one of the partially disassembled control sticks. With the particular design under consideration (some others aren't nearly as safe), even if the software went berserk, the CPUs all byzantine-failed, all the failsafes fused etc etc the absolute worst that could happen would be that the patient would need a corneal transplant. That would occur 3 times in a 100,000 treatments (IIRC)where the wrong prescription had been fed in, and the machine's automatic measuring system had been manually over-ridden.
The rest of the time, even with the wrong prescription etc etc the next worst thing was that re-treatment would be needed, and with fewer corneal cells to work with.
A lot of LASIK devices in service as at Mid 2004 are relatively crude, like doing the reshaping of a 6 ft wide lump of jello with a few hundred scoops with a trowel, or even a shovel. The newer stuff, just coming into service, does the same thing, but with thousands of scoops with a teaspoon. You get better results, less cell removal, a curve closer-to-perfect.
My advice - put it off for a year or 18 months till the technology improves, or make sure the LASIK equipment is this year's model.
Slashdot Mirror
Sourcecode
CSOnline
Do, please, try to keep up and leave your biases at home. Slashdot, it may seem so at times, really isn't the place to proudly display your bigotry as though you're a peacock.
Interesting. I ask you some discomfiting questions, you interpret that as bigotry.
Please try answering them instead? Or you may give others the wrong impression.
Regardless of chemicals you take, or surgeries you under go; your gender does not change.
I agree - but it may not be the one assigned to you at birth.
Gender change in 46,XY persons with 5alpha-reductase-2 deficiency and 17beta-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase-3 deficiency. Cohen-Kettenis PT. Arch Sex Behav. 2005 Aug;34(4):399-410.
Individuals with 5alpha-reductase-2 deficiency (5alpha-RD-2) and 17beta-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase-3 deficiency (17beta-HSD-3) are often raised as girls. Over the past number of years, this policy has been challenged because many individuals with these conditions develop a male gender identity and make a gender role change after puberty.
---
That's because they have a natural FtoM sex change.
See http://www.usrf.org/news/010308-guevedoces.html
Things are perhaps a tiny bit more complex than your dogmatic statement allows.
Not 99.999%. About 99.7%. 1 in 300 men aren't 46,XY. Some women are. 1 in 450 men are 47,XXY. etc.
Welcome to womanhood. You were a girl who looked like a boy. Now that's changing.
It gets better too
If you want to know why you're like this - there's two papers you should read.
Sexual Hormones and the Brain: An Essential Alliance for Sexual Identity and Sexual Orientation Garcia-Falgueras A, Swaab DF Endocr Dev. 2010;17:22-35
The fetal brain develops during the intrauterine period in the male direction through a direct action of testosterone on the developing nerve cells, or in the female direction through the absence of this hormone surge. In this way, our gender identity (the conviction of belonging to the male or female gender) and sexual orientation are programmed or organized into our brain structures when we are still in the womb. However, since sexual differentiation of the genitals takes place in the first two months of pregnancy and sexual differentiation of the brain starts in the second half of pregnancy, these two processes can be influenced independently, which may result in extreme cases in trans-sexuality. This also means that in the event of ambiguous sex at birth, the degree of masculinization of the genitals may not reflect the degree of masculinization of the brain. There is no indication that social environment after birth has an effect on gender identity or sexual orientation.
Biased-Interaction Theory of Psychosexual Development: “How Does One Know if One is Male or Female?” M.Diamond Sex Roles (2006) 55:589–600
A theory of gender development is presented that incorporates early biological factors that organize predispositions in temperament and attitudes. With activation of these factors a person interacts in society and comes to identify as male or female. The predispositions establish preferences and aversions the growing child compares with those of others. All individuals compare themselves with others deciding who they are like (same) and with whom are they different. These experiences and interpretations can then be said to determine how one comes to identify as male or female, man or woman. In retrospect, one can say the person has a gendered brain since it is the brain that structures the individual’s basic personality; first with inherent tendencies then with interactions coming from experience.
Your reported experience before age 10 matches my own pretty closely, BTW. It's a common pattern, one shared by women with CAH.
Up until age 5, I was a child. No real concept of gender.
At 6, I went to school, and noticed something was wrong. I was dressed as a boy, I looked like a boy, but I didn't think like "other boys". I still liked toy guns, and Meccano rather than dolls, but I was different.
At 7, I knew I wasn't a boy, but didn't know what I was. I thought boys were puerile, and girls too silly and sissy. A classic Tomboy in retrospect.
At 8, I got to play hopscotch with other girls, and I felt at home. They thought like I did, they cried like I did. I still didn't see myself as more than an honourary girl though. Even if my favourite toy car was Lady Penelope's pink Rolls-Royce.
At 9, more by a process of elimination than anything else, I realised I was female. Boys could just as well have been an alien species. Girls were just like me, in feelings and values.
At 10, I was in a boys boarding school then, and I was able to make up boardgames of astounding complexity when it rained. I had my own secret garden in the nearby woods, with flowerbeds I'd planted. I could sit and read amidst the flowers, and was terribly happy. It was then I picked the name Zoe, and planned what I was going to do with my life. I wanted children, a husband, the white picket fence etc, but also to be a Rocket Scientist and to travel the world, things that Wives and Mothers Just Did Not Do in the 60's.
Even though it had been obvious since age 7 that I’d never be “svelte” or “petite”, that I’d be the g
Is being left-handed - something also caused by unusual neurology - a mental health issue too? If not, why not? What about cases like this - a girl with 5ARD, meaning she's undergoing a natural sex change at puberty - and desperately doesn't want it. Is that a "mental health problem"? http://home.vicnet.net.au/~aissg/2010_FamCA_237.pdf What about boys in the same situation - born looking female, naturally changing to look male later, and welcoming it. Are they "mentally ill" for wanting the change? I note that in the new ICD-11 manual, this whole syndrome is being moved out of the mental health section.
YMMV on that one. It's not just Transgender, but Intersex too. Some conditions cause a natural sex change. e.g. http://www.usrf.org/news/010308-guevedoces.html
It's not the size of what's in a man's lap, it's what he does with it. 10" is adequate for any woman, trust me.
Probably
.From the Grauniad June 16 2008:
A subject dear to my heart, as I'm Intersexed. Also not so much ambidextrous as ambiclumsy.If performance is an issue, it's often better to write the simple-and-readable version first, then comment it out and write the hand-optimised version underneath, with a note saying that the two should be semantically equivalent and what shortcuts the uncommented version gives.
You Grok in Fullness. I'd add a corollary: in many cases the simple-and-readable version will end up more easily optimisable by a smart compiler too. Get the understandable version working first, as a proof of principle. It may end up meeting spec anyway. Don't try hand-optimising until you're sure you need to. Then do a dynamic analysis, find the bottlenecks, and if need be, write those in assembler.
I've saved O($10e7) in development costs that way - and not had to resort to clever coding, just clever architecture.
I disagree.
Evidence:
Burman DD, Talin T, Booth JR (2006)
Sex Differences in Neural Processing of Language Among Children
Example from New Scientist
Other papers include:
Zhou J.-N, Hofman M.A, Gooren L.J, Swaab D.F (1997)
A Sex Difference in the Human Brain and its Relation to Transsexuality.
Kruijver F.P.M, Zhou J.-N, Pool C.W., Swaab D.F. (2000)
Male-to-Female Transsexuals Have Female Neuron Numbers in a Limbic Nucleus
...and so on and so on. Male and Female brains tend to be quite different, though there's overlap in some areas. None in others.
I'm acutely aware of this as I'm Intersexed, so with a rather mixed and nonstandard neurology.
cat? No, just a light to put the punch cards up to, to see the holes.
In the old days, Real programmers also had one of their canines sharpened to bite rectangular holes in cards to change the source, and the other sharpened to bite circular holes in the patch punch-tape.
Smile when you say that, pardner. :)
No, a true videophile uses Betamax.
Allied nations have similar programmes.
It has been useful in other problem domains to have an exercise OPFOR and training grounds. See Crocodile03, Red Flag, Fincastle Trophy etc.
Are there plans to both co-operate with allied nations, use "Tiger teams" to assess vulnerabilities in both US and allied infrastructure, train a specialist OPFOR using likely enemy tactics, have an "inactive reserve" of irregular cyber-militia... and is there a (preferably multinational) group studying such "Blue Sky" ideas? How do we go about starting one if not? This Slashdot experiment indicates someone is on the ball, at least...
About 15 years ago, I was part of an unofficial e-mail-ex that happened immediately after an unfortunate incident involving a QANTAS trans-pacific flight and the USN. We examined just what might happen in case of severe tension between the US and Australia. The problem from the Australian viewpoint was not causing unacceptable damage to the US in order to coerce the country into behaving as they'd wish, it was doing so without causing unacceptable collateral damage to the world economy. This pre-dated Tom Clancy's "Debt of Honor", which contained a few of the ideas. Both sides retired shaken, and resolved to try pretty much anything before going that far in actuality. Hopefully infrastructure has been secured a bit since then. As a regular reader of the RISKS digest http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks , I wouldn't bet on it.
Yes, but the fact that you realise you're not doing good Engineering puts you streets ahead of most in the business.
I speak as one who has at any one time got several hundred people's lives depending on systems I've been responsible for. I'd rather have someone like you on my team - who realises just how slipshod commercial practices usually are - than the usual Hackers.
The difficulty is convincing management that better and cheaper is possible using good Engineering principles, and with Aspect-Oriented Development we're working on quicker too.
Those of us who have experienced the hatred, the violence, the rape, the cigarette burns.... the usual stuff every transsexual boy or girl goes through should be kinder to those who are Intersexed. Remember, this woman was made transsexual at the point of a scalpel.
I'm both Transsexed (as in "brain physically mainly of one sex, body physically of the opposite sex:"), and Intersexed. Androgen Insensitivity, Adrenal Hyperplasia, and a Leydig cell anomaly, not that I have any Leydig cells any more. I know what it's like to have to pretend to be one sex, even though I was the other, and do so with the additional handicap that the body wasn't 100% functional in either role, but a mixture. It was easier for me though, I had no surgical intervention, and Dr Suporn in Thailand has taken my sorta masculinised groinal area and made it indistinguishable from that of a natal female (AT LAST!).
Those of us who are Intersexed should look at the latest Scientific and Medical Evidence that Transsexuality (as opposed to crossdressing etc) is just another Intersex condition, and no longer consider TS people psychos, freaks and weirdoes who we want nothing to do with.
Wolfsdaughter, this person has had bucketloads of pain all their life. Unlike us, they could maybe have had a normal life in their actual gender, with children, but a surgeon's knife took that away. How can we blame them for seeing people with normal genitalia getting them re-shaped and made sterile, and thinking that we are wasting a gift they would have given anything for? Yes, her words were hurtful, but if anyone has a right to hurt us, she does. Not the "norms", the ones who stoned us or beat us with crowbars just because we "vibed wrong". So please, forgiveness. Yes, her remarks hurt me too, BTW, but no matter.
Let's just make sure the World, the /. ers anyway, know we exist. That we are human. That the rate of transsexuality in the general population may be 1:3000 (not 1:30,000 as is usually stated) but in the InfoTech area it's more like 1:300, as we're good at it. Our brains are wired up differently, and in some ways, many of us are smarter than the average bear. Let the /. ers know that during their careers, they will see people like us. As the line in Transamerica goes, "we walk among you".
And Please, Please, Please, as Transsexuals who know just exactly how much that condition SUX, stop the "genital normalisation" of babies until they've grown up enough to tell us whether they're boys or girls (almost always by age 7, often even by age 3). Because there is a difference, in the brain structure, and although there are people who can function in whatever role they're brought up in, for most of us it's hard-wired long before birth. Please let us stop the surgical creation of Transsexual babies.
Unfortunately there's still so little research done on the more outrageously rare (we think) Intersex conditions, often because of sheer emberressment. Think how terrible it must be to be a self-fertilising hermaphrodite. Or to be a really spectacularly gorgeous-looking girl, who at age 17 or so finds out she is actually genetically male but with Complete Androgen Insensitivity (hence 100% female-looking rather than the 90-something most women are).
Or worse, those women born with 5-alpha-reductase-deficiency, who turn into guys late in puberty. Though many 5ARD cases are male-brained so it's a dream come true rather than a nightmare. Or maybe a guy with CAH (Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia) who finds out he's actually genetically female. Or neither 46xy (male) or 46xx (female) but 47xxy (Kleinfelter). Have you had your karyotype checked lately?
Yes, it's fine to make jokes about people like that - unless you're one of them, and have to deal with something like Ideopathic Partial Sex Reversal, meaning "well, it's a good job you've always thought you were a lesbian trapped in a male body, as your body isn't male any more. Not quite fully female either, but we can fix that surgically now.". 9 Cases I know of. Including me. Worst thing is, I'm no longer lesbian. Something to do with vassopressin receptors we think.
You know some readers will think I'm joking (don't blame them) or perhaps just crackers (don't blame them either). But we have the photos, blood tests etc. And may I refer everyone to the Intersex Society of North America for more details on various of the more common Intersex conditions. There are hundreds.
There's already a lot of International co-operation in space R&D. Take for example the Australian satellite Fedsat. Bus design by SIL of the UK, completed and re-engineered by Auspace in Australia, Star Camera from Stellenbosch in South Africa, Attitude Control System by Dynacon Canada, GPS system by NASA, USA. Telemetry standards by the European Space Agency. And launched on a Japanase H2A booster.
With a design lifetime of 3 years, it's been operational for 4, and was the first satellite to demonstrate self-healing of radiation damage in Space.
The key is to minimise bureaucracy, and have a single systems integrator. Probably not in the US due to some eccentric export control restrictions you have.
And yes, I had the honour and privelege of heading the on-board computer development team. I spent most of my time sorting out inconsistencies between the many different Universities in Australia involved, not to mention the International partners. Having to make decisions - one experiment suddenly needed more resources, who can I rob? Fortunately I always kept a reserve... so no-one ended up losing, and I could even give them a bit more than they asked for in the end.
Best thing about it? Well, at age 10 in 1968 I watched Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and vowed I'd be working on a space programme in 2001. That, and being entitled to wear a T-shirt saying "As a matter of fact, I am a Rocket Scientist!".
Gosh, where to begin. I've had to become knowledgeable about this in the last 18 months due to being a bit strange biologically, and here's a simplified summary of what I've found out.
It's simple for most of us - we either have 46xy chromosomes, a male body, and a male gender identity, or alternately, 46xx chromosomes, a female body, and a female gender identity. Some of us are Gay, some Lesbian, some straight, some bisexual, some asexual, but that's beside the point.
First, I'll start with the hundreds of different syndromes that collectively are called Intersex Conditions. What is Intersex? A practical definition is that the body is neither wholly male nor female. Some definitions insist that the condition must be present at birth to be "truly" Intersexed, others require both male and female characteristics to be present. Depending on your definition, 1.7% of the populace are Intersexed, but in only 1 in 1000 is it noticeable, and causes a problem.
Now to Genetic Sex. 46xx equals boy, 46xx equals girl, right? Not necessarily. From Nature :
See what I mean? Then there's conditions like Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, where a 46xy girl results. For real biological weirdness, look at 5-alpha-reductase deficiency (5ARD) syndrome, where a child who appears to be a girl until puberty becomes a boy afterwards.
I say "girl" and "boy" because that's what they look like externally.
But gender - or gender identity if you like - appears to be a consequence of brain morphology. Just as there are Intersex conditions that can give people cross-gendered genitalia and secondary sex characteristics, it's possible to have a cross-gendered brain. Most are familar with how exposure to the drug Thalidomide causes foetal deformity of the limbs - though many have limb deformities without exposure. But few are aware of the effect of the drug DiEthylStilEstrol, a drug commonly administered to pregnant women in the 50s, 60s and 70s. A 5 year study of DES-sons showed that 1 in 5 had some degree of Gender Dysphoria - basically, they thought like girls, they had girls emotions, and a male body felt terribly uncomfortable to them. Their brains were female, and we now know from dynamic MRI scans, autopsies, and examination of individual brain cells that male and female brains are far more different that we'd believed even ten years ago.
So in addition to the obviously Intersexed, there's the people who have Congenital Neurological Intersex, or Harry Benjamin's Syndrome, or Transsexuality.
How and why do I know all this? I had one of the really odd conditions. Until age 47, I was thought to be a male with partial androgen insensitivity, slight hypogonadism. Then weird stuff happened, and my body rapidly feminised - something I'd dreamed of but knew was medically impossible. Turns out it's not, I know 7 other cases now of women with HBS who have spontaneously feminised between age 40 and 55. There's at least 3 different mechanisms that can cause it. Being a Geek Girl, I blogged about it as it happened, of course.
Neither Gender nor Sex are easy things to determine for a tiny minority of
Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of those.
it happens only in America
Nope.
One time, I was 1 week into a 3-month posting in Europe, and I got an e-mail from Australia telling me my 3-month notice period started immediately. I had to work through it of course. I was paid out the 4 weeks of vacation I'd accumulated, but lost the hundreds of hours of time-off-in-lieu. I'd been with the firm 8 years.
Trying to find a new job when you're 10,000 miles away from home isn't easy. And of course the customer, who had paid $$$ for my services, was not pleased, they wanted me to stay longer and work on other stuff.
Yes, I should have taken the time off in lieu, but that would have been cheating the customer. There's such a thing as professional ethics.
I took the firm to industrial arbitration, won, but the legal fees ate up nearly all of the 3 months pay I got.
For my sins, I was part of an independant audit of a new laser surgical device about a year ago.
The people who did the audit are the same people who do audits of aircraft, spacecraft, weapons systems etc.
The only way someone could get seriously, even fatally, hurt with this equipment was during loading or unloading, if it fell on them. The only way someone could have their eyesight permanently and uncorrectably damaged was if during maintenance, they fell over and poked themselves in the eye with one of the partially disassembled control sticks. With the particular design under consideration (some others aren't nearly as safe), even if the software went berserk, the CPUs all byzantine-failed, all the failsafes fused etc etc the absolute worst that could happen would be that the patient would need a corneal transplant. That would occur 3 times in a 100,000 treatments (IIRC)where the wrong prescription had been fed in, and the machine's automatic measuring system had been manually over-ridden.
The rest of the time, even with the wrong prescription etc etc the next worst thing was that re-treatment would be needed, and with fewer corneal cells to work with.
A lot of LASIK devices in service as at Mid 2004 are relatively crude, like doing the reshaping of a 6 ft wide lump of jello with a few hundred scoops with a trowel, or even a shovel. The newer stuff, just coming into service, does the same thing, but with thousands of scoops with a teaspoon. You get better results, less cell removal, a curve closer-to-perfect.
My advice - put it off for a year or 18 months till the technology improves, or make sure the LASIK equipment is this year's model.
Or you could end up being spat upon and beaten up by the Goon Squads outside the theatres.