Re:"Gender Exploration?" That's like, totally gay!
on
Men Playing as Women
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· Score: 1
I think the original poster was going for satire. It's hard to be sure, I admit. You sometimes see that sort of cognitive dissonance in someone who's afraid of their own interest in the same gender.
The key clue that, to me, suggests that the poster was satirizing is that he used perfect grammar and capitalization. Yes, he used colloquialisms, but the satire couldn't have been crafted at all without them. And although I don't IRC much myself, I'm given to understand that English that good is not commonly used. That little inconsistency, to me, suggests satire.
(Most of my impression of IRC, incidentally, comes from my six years of being on a MUCK which does have moderately high standards of English. Most of the newbies who claim to be from IRC don't type good English, and a lot of them can't even do it when they try.)
I'm tired, cranky, and a little peeved off at the blatant sexism being displayed in earnest on this topic. So it seems I'm taking it out on the guy. That wasn't right.
Every time there's one of these why-aren't-there-more-women-in-CS topics, there's a sizeable smattering of "women's place is in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant" posts. Where are all these people coming from? And more importantly, are they for real?
If they are, I'm beginning to suspect that the fact that these people even exist, even in the small proportion that they (hopefully) represent in the general population, may well have something to do with the very problem we're discussing. As Dr. Borg points out, outright sexism is on the decline. But it's clearly not gone. And the fact that we still are seeing outright sexism tends to support the thesis that there's still a considerable amount of subtle and latent sexism in the society still.
I guess the main problem I had with the Dr. Borg interview is the complaint about being inadequately funded. The "Give us more money!" card always raises suspicions in my mind when it's played. Also, the article's awfully short on suggestions as to what we, the individual CS geeks of the world, can do about it -- those of us who really would like to see more women in the field (and NOT just so we can get a date!)
Well, if you have a relatively small handful of users at a thousand different ISPs, no one ISP is going to see enough of the traffic to be able to identify it as part of a DDoS attack.
Except at this point, unless I got lost somewhere in the thread, we aren't necessarily talking about a sysadmin of a high-profile website. We're talking about a bunch of people with a home computer and a DSL or cable-modem, whose computers out-of-the-box can be subverted and turned into a part of a distributed DoS attack. These people don't know a CERT advisory from a breath mint, and they shouldn't be expected to. But if you can crack enough of these people's computers, that adds up to a lot of bandwidth. Bottom line: in this era of broadband, consumer OSes need to be at least a little more secure.
The LONGDESC tag, as defined in HTML 4.0 is not displayed as a pop-up on images in IE, and probably not in Netscape either (I don't have it handy to test). And although I can't say for sure, I wouldn't be surprised if page readers could use the LONGDESC tag just fine.
I've read Behe a little. Here's my take on some of his arguments.
One of the points Behe repeatedly uses is the notion of irreducible complexity. Behe says that a system is "irreducibly complex" if removing any part of the system causes it to cease functioning. He then goes on to claim that such systems cannot have arisen from successive slight changes. This is, simply, incorrect.
Consider a stone arch. It is clearly irreducibly complex, for you cannot take away any stone without the whole arch collapsing. And yet, the stone arch can be constructed by successive slight changes. What you do is you make a big pile of stones to serve as scaffolding, lay down the arch's stones on top of the scaffolding, then remove the scaffolding. This is incomplete, of course, as an analogy to an evolved system; we would have to find an evolutionary advantage, or at least lack of disadvantage, for each one of the scaffolding stones. But the stone arch analogy does demonstrate that irreducible complexity isn't a "magic bullet" to demonstrate that a system cannot evolve.
I'm not qualified to address the specific examples that Behe uses to support his position, though, For example, I don't know enough about the blood clotting cascade to comment in detail on it; I have seen critiques that purported to demonstrate how the structure could have arisen by successive slight modifications, all advantageous by themselves, but I'm afraid I've lost track of any links to them. On the other hand, I think that Behe is being unfair in some of his other examples. For example, he points out that we have absolutely no idea how the bacterial flagellum may have evolved. Well, of course not! We still have only a very rough understanding of how the bacterial flagellum even works; how can we possibly expected to guess how it could have worked in the past?
If I recall correctly, Philip Johnson claims that, as a lawyer, he's well qualified to detect logical flaws in the evolutionists' thinking. From what I've read of the man on the subject of evolution, the only thing I can see is that lawyers are also skilled in obfuscating the truth.
For one thing, I'm pretty sure that in one of Johnson's books, he uses the "if man evolved from apes, why are there still apes" argument! That really makes me hard to take Johnson seriously on the issue.
Respect for the rule of law is contingent upon the law deserving respect. The United States was founded upon disrespect for the laws of England. And as others have argued more eloquently than I could, this is more than a matter of petty convenience.
It's just that I, as a white person, have never (so far as I know) been harmed in any way by discrimination against white people. If there were some "relentless assault of anti-white racism", I would have thought I would have experienced some of it. Either the original poster's life experience differs significantly from mine, or we have different notions about what it means to be discriminated against.
Let's start with something simple. Give some examples of "anti-white racism" and "liberal hypocrisy" that have any real detrimental effects on the lives of white people generally.
Helpless immobile machines? Bugger that. I'm darn well gonna want the machine to have access to some sort of mobile interface to the meat world before I download myself. But seriously, I think Kurzweil is, at best, wildly optimistic about the sort of computing power, and advances in neurobiology, that will be needed to make this a reality.
You know, something just occurred to me. It is this: If you know lots of people are going to be reading the source you release, it drives you to make your code a lot cleaner than it would've been if it were closed. And of course, cleaner code is easier for you to maintain too.
I wonder if ESR has commented on this benefit of open source...
What's happening is that when the text from the Comment field is pasted into the TEXTAREA tag to create the Preview page, the The workaround is to click Preview, and if it's okay, click Back and then click Submit. The fix, for Rob, would be to replace < and > signs and suchlike with their HTML entity equivalents when generating the TEXTAREA tag.
If you think that both major parties aren't worth voting for, such that you're considering not voting at all, why not find whichever minority party you most agree with and voting for them? If you're going to "throw your vote away" anyway, throw it in a direction that says something, no matter how faintly.
Unless you can't even find a "third party" candidate you could accept, of course.
Fortunately, slashdolt-terminal's foolishness is generating a considerable amount of signal. Anyone with a mind open enough to actually understand how Usenet works can learn a lot by reading the replies to his posts.
I'll admit, mind you, that it's gotten rather redundant, since s-t keeps posting the same clueless swill and people respond with the same counterarguments. But that's Slashdot for you.
Um, did you read the call for UDP message that was sent yesterday? People have been complaining... and complaining... and complaining.
Maybe a lot of slashdotters haven't personally suffered from spam from @Home, but those of us who have any familiarity with Usenet history are aware that a UDP is a last resort for dealing with companies that don't respond. So when we outside observers conclude that @Home doesn't respond to complaints, we are only assuming that the folks calling for the UDP aren't lying through their teeth.
As for whether they're fixing it: We'll see. Any company threatened with a UDP is going to claim that they're addressing the problem; but the proof is in the pudding. If the spam volume from @home's network goes down, the UDP will be called off. Otherwise, not. Don't tell me, by the way, that "five business days isn't enough time"; the complaints have been piling up for over a year, and @Home has had more than enough time to do something about it.
If this is the same poster who's posted in a number of other threads, what she (generic pronoun) is objecting to is not path filtering, but third-party cancels. Path filtering alone is known as a passive UDP; what @home is being considered for is an active UDP where ALL posts from @home are being cancelled by spam-cancellers. Part of the reason for the objection is, if I remember correctly, that in an active UDP, news admins who aren't intentionally participating in the UDP will still have @home postings removed, because they haven't configured their news server to restrict third party cancels. This is different from a passive UDP inasmuch as only those news admins who have consciously decided to participate in the UDP will drop the messages.
Personally, I think that any news admins that have a significant feed, that is accepting just any old third-party cancels, is going to have a crippled news feed anyway, due to the actions of cancellers with less "noble" agendas (e.g. Scientologists' various attempts to shut down alt.religion.scientology); so inadvertently participating in UDPs is the least of the problems such a news server has. But the practice of third-party-cancelling posts that aren't spam should be questioned, and the questioner deserves a reasoned and well-thought-out response. Which I'm not really qualified to give.
(assuming you speak of the AC I was responding to)
I wouldn't have thought that there was enough cause to conclude that the AC is a spammer herself (feminine pronoun used arbitrarily). It is possible that she is merely vehement that All Third-Party Cancels Are Wrong, no matter the cause. Given the assortment of other posts thread which are expressing the same opinion, scattered amongst about 3 or 4 different subthreads, she must be very vehement...
Also, I'll note that she appears to have altered her posts based on further information, and now seems to has no problem with denying service to messages originating from @Home; she is merely insisting that cancels not be used. I'll leave it to others to address whether this is possible, or address why cancels ought to be used anyway.
I think you fail to understand the dynamics of Usenet and the server administrators who hold the whole ball of chewing gum and wire together. Nearly every Usenet server admin hates spam with a passion (it consumes gigabytes of space, and that comes out of their budget, requires them to set ludicrously short article expire times, etc.), and will go as far as they feel they can to block it. As far as valid and useful information, that's a rare gem on Usenet these days anyway:-)
Slashdot Mirror
The key clue that, to me, suggests that the poster was satirizing is that he used perfect grammar and capitalization. Yes, he used colloquialisms, but the satire couldn't have been crafted at all without them. And although I don't IRC much myself, I'm given to understand that English that good is not commonly used. That little inconsistency, to me, suggests satire.
(Most of my impression of IRC, incidentally, comes from my six years of being on a MUCK which does have moderately high standards of English. Most of the newbies who claim to be from IRC don't type good English, and a lot of them can't even do it when they try.)
Can someone go in and mark my posts "flamebait"?
Who are you trying to discredit with this nonsense, and why?
If they are, I'm beginning to suspect that the fact that these people even exist, even in the small proportion that they (hopefully) represent in the general population, may well have something to do with the very problem we're discussing. As Dr. Borg points out, outright sexism is on the decline. But it's clearly not gone. And the fact that we still are seeing outright sexism tends to support the thesis that there's still a considerable amount of subtle and latent sexism in the society still.
I guess the main problem I had with the Dr. Borg interview is the complaint about being inadequately funded. The "Give us more money!" card always raises suspicions in my mind when it's played. Also, the article's awfully short on suggestions as to what we, the individual CS geeks of the world, can do about it -- those of us who really would like to see more women in the field (and NOT just so we can get a date!)
This troll would have been a lot more amusing if it had had a punchline.
Heh. Burning off karma, guys? ;-)
Well, if you have a relatively small handful of users at a thousand different ISPs, no one ISP is going to see enough of the traffic to be able to identify it as part of a DDoS attack.
Except at this point, unless I got lost somewhere in the thread, we aren't necessarily talking about a sysadmin of a high-profile website. We're talking about a bunch of people with a home computer and a DSL or cable-modem, whose computers out-of-the-box can be subverted and turned into a part of a distributed DoS attack. These people don't know a CERT advisory from a breath mint, and they shouldn't be expected to. But if you can crack enough of these people's computers, that adds up to a lot of bandwidth. Bottom line: in this era of broadband, consumer OSes need to be at least a little more secure.
The LONGDESC tag, as defined in HTML 4.0 is not displayed as a pop-up on images in IE, and probably not in Netscape either (I don't have it handy to test). And although I can't say for sure, I wouldn't be surprised if page readers could use the LONGDESC tag just fine.
(with apologies to Terry Pratchett)
One of the points Behe repeatedly uses is the notion of irreducible complexity. Behe says that a system is "irreducibly complex" if removing any part of the system causes it to cease functioning. He then goes on to claim that such systems cannot have arisen from successive slight changes. This is, simply, incorrect.
Consider a stone arch. It is clearly irreducibly complex, for you cannot take away any stone without the whole arch collapsing. And yet, the stone arch can be constructed by successive slight changes. What you do is you make a big pile of stones to serve as scaffolding, lay down the arch's stones on top of the scaffolding, then remove the scaffolding. This is incomplete, of course, as an analogy to an evolved system; we would have to find an evolutionary advantage, or at least lack of disadvantage, for each one of the scaffolding stones. But the stone arch analogy does demonstrate that irreducible complexity isn't a "magic bullet" to demonstrate that a system cannot evolve.
I'm not qualified to address the specific examples that Behe uses to support his position, though, For example, I don't know enough about the blood clotting cascade to comment in detail on it; I have seen critiques that purported to demonstrate how the structure could have arisen by successive slight modifications, all advantageous by themselves, but I'm afraid I've lost track of any links to them. On the other hand, I think that Behe is being unfair in some of his other examples. For example, he points out that we have absolutely no idea how the bacterial flagellum may have evolved. Well, of course not! We still have only a very rough understanding of how the bacterial flagellum even works; how can we possibly expected to guess how it could have worked in the past?
You can probably find better critiques of Behe's arguments at the talk.origins archive.
For one thing, I'm pretty sure that in one of Johnson's books, he uses the "if man evolved from apes, why are there still apes" argument! That really makes me hard to take Johnson seriously on the issue.
Respect for the rule of law is contingent upon the law deserving respect. The United States was founded upon disrespect for the laws of England. And as others have argued more eloquently than I could, this is more than a matter of petty convenience.
It's just that I, as a white person, have never (so far as I know) been harmed in any way by discrimination against white people. If there were some "relentless assault of anti-white racism", I would have thought I would have experienced some of it. Either the original poster's life experience differs significantly from mine, or we have different notions about what it means to be discriminated against.
Let's start with something simple. Give some examples of "anti-white racism" and "liberal hypocrisy" that have any real detrimental effects on the lives of white people generally.
Helpless immobile machines? Bugger that. I'm darn well gonna want the machine to have access to some sort of mobile interface to the meat world before I download myself. But seriously, I think Kurzweil is, at best, wildly optimistic about the sort of computing power, and advances in neurobiology, that will be needed to make this a reality.
I wonder if ESR has commented on this benefit of open source...
You say that as if it were a bad thing...
What's happening is that when the text from the Comment field is pasted into the TEXTAREA tag to create the Preview page, the The workaround is to click Preview, and if it's okay, click Back and then click Submit. The fix, for Rob, would be to replace < and > signs and suchlike with their HTML entity equivalents when generating the TEXTAREA tag.
Unless you can't even find a "third party" candidate you could accept, of course.
I'll admit, mind you, that it's gotten rather redundant, since s-t keeps posting the same clueless swill and people respond with the same counterarguments. But that's Slashdot for you.
Maybe a lot of slashdotters haven't personally suffered from spam from @Home, but those of us who have any familiarity with Usenet history are aware that a UDP is a last resort for dealing with companies that don't respond. So when we outside observers conclude that @Home doesn't respond to complaints, we are only assuming that the folks calling for the UDP aren't lying through their teeth.
As for whether they're fixing it: We'll see. Any company threatened with a UDP is going to claim that they're addressing the problem; but the proof is in the pudding. If the spam volume from @home's network goes down, the UDP will be called off. Otherwise, not. Don't tell me, by the way, that "five business days isn't enough time"; the complaints have been piling up for over a year, and @Home has had more than enough time to do something about it.
If this is the same poster who's posted in a number of other threads, what she (generic pronoun) is objecting to is not path filtering, but third-party cancels. Path filtering alone is known as a passive UDP; what @home is being considered for is an active UDP where ALL posts from @home are being cancelled by spam-cancellers. Part of the reason for the objection is, if I remember correctly, that in an active UDP, news admins who aren't intentionally participating in the UDP will still have @home postings removed, because they haven't configured their news server to restrict third party cancels. This is different from a passive UDP inasmuch as only those news admins who have consciously decided to participate in the UDP will drop the messages.
Personally, I think that any news admins that have a significant feed, that is accepting just any old third-party cancels, is going to have a crippled news feed anyway, due to the actions of cancellers with less "noble" agendas (e.g. Scientologists' various attempts to shut down alt.religion.scientology); so inadvertently participating in UDPs is the least of the problems such a news server has. But the practice of third-party-cancelling posts that aren't spam should be questioned, and the questioner deserves a reasoned and well-thought-out response. Which I'm not really qualified to give.
I wouldn't have thought that there was enough cause to conclude that the AC is a spammer herself (feminine pronoun used arbitrarily). It is possible that she is merely vehement that All Third-Party Cancels Are Wrong, no matter the cause. Given the assortment of other posts thread which are expressing the same opinion, scattered amongst about 3 or 4 different subthreads, she must be very vehement...
Also, I'll note that she appears to have altered her posts based on further information, and now seems to has no problem with denying service to messages originating from @Home; she is merely insisting that cancels not be used. I'll leave it to others to address whether this is possible, or address why cancels ought to be used anyway.
I think you fail to understand the dynamics of Usenet and the server administrators who hold the whole ball of chewing gum and wire together. Nearly every Usenet server admin hates spam with a passion (it consumes gigabytes of space, and that comes out of their budget, requires them to set ludicrously short article expire times, etc.), and will go as far as they feel they can to block it. As far as valid and useful information, that's a rare gem on Usenet these days anyway :-)