Here's the thing though. Say I make $10,000 in a year by exercising options, so my employer has to pay $10,000 less in taxes. Well, if I spend any of that money, then I pay sales tax when I do. Since I made more money that year, my personal income taxes go up. If I invest that money in the stock market, and then sell it when the stock's gone up, I pay income tax on that too. The fact of the matter AFAIK is that ultimately, stock options cause more spendable (and therefore) taxable money to be dumped into the economy, so the feds get their goodies in the end.
Well, I read the AP article, and they indicate there that girls in highschool and so on are scared of working in a place full of geeky guys, windowless rooms, and endless hours in front of a monitor.
Now, fortunately, the definition of "geek" is finally becoming more positive, albeit slowly. However, the above description does match pretty well with a lot of high-tech workplaces I've seen. If young women really don't want to work in these environments, then they're probably making the right choice not jumping into CS in college.
The interesting thing to me is that more men aren't turned away by the same description. Honestly, the high-tech people I know, including myself, lead really grueling lives with little personal time. Perhaps the article is really saying that women, even at high school and younger ages, place a higher priority on non-financial "quality of life" things than young men do. Thoughts?
I really can't agree with this entirely. Yes, I think that RMS is a bit radical. However, I also think that there absolutely must be someone out there who takes the stances that RMS does on issues.
Free (as in speech) software is quietly coming under seige, in my opinion. For example, you have Red Hat. These guys have a firm commitment that all the software they work on be released in a completely free way. At the same time, they just started shipping their "enterprise" version of Linux, which is basically the OS with Oracle 8i bundled in and easy to install. So you have one of the most "free" Linux compaines out there shipping a product which is designed to appeal to companies because it includes a massive, proprietary app. This kind of gentle errosion is happening all over the place. Except with people like RMS.
So beyond all of his contributions in terms of coding, I think it's really important that people like RMS are willing to stand up and shout about their ideals, so that we don't all forget the mindset that brought us so far. We need to be careful not to loose site of these things as the business presence rushes in.
That's actually a really good question. If I write some GUI thing for Linux b/c I have a Linux box at home, but I want to make sure that the *BSD build works too, then it would be really nice if I could just compile it there and then fire it up over X. Otherwise, I would need to get my hands on a *BSD box to test the build, which would be a lot more of a pain than enabling X tunnels.
Of course, there certainly may be security issues. Not sure how to handle that well...
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Oops. My bad... too many windows open...
Here's the thing though. Say I make $10,000 in a year by exercising options, so my employer has to pay $10,000 less in taxes. Well, if I spend any of that money, then I pay sales tax when I do. Since I made more money that year, my personal income taxes go up. If I invest that money in the stock market, and then sell it when the stock's gone up, I pay income tax on that too. The fact of the matter AFAIK is that ultimately, stock options cause more spendable (and therefore) taxable money to be dumped into the economy, so the feds get their goodies in the end.
Well, I read the AP article, and they indicate there that girls in highschool and so on are scared of working in a place full of geeky guys, windowless rooms, and endless hours in front of a monitor.
Now, fortunately, the definition of "geek" is finally becoming more positive, albeit slowly. However, the above description does match pretty well with a lot of high-tech workplaces I've seen. If young women really don't want to work in these environments, then they're probably making the right choice not jumping into CS in college.
The interesting thing to me is that more men aren't turned away by the same description. Honestly, the high-tech people I know, including myself, lead really grueling lives with little personal time. Perhaps the article is really saying that women, even at high school and younger ages, place a higher priority on non-financial "quality of life" things than young men do. Thoughts?
I really can't agree with this entirely. Yes, I think that RMS is a bit radical. However, I also think that there absolutely must be someone out there who takes the stances that RMS does on issues.
Free (as in speech) software is quietly coming under seige, in my opinion. For example, you have Red Hat. These guys have a firm commitment that all the software they work on be released in a completely free way. At the same time, they just started shipping their "enterprise" version of Linux, which is basically the OS with Oracle 8i bundled in and easy to install. So you have one of the most "free" Linux compaines out there shipping a product which is designed to appeal to companies because it includes a massive, proprietary app. This kind of gentle errosion is happening all over the place. Except with people like RMS.
So beyond all of his contributions in terms of coding, I think it's really important that people like RMS are willing to stand up and shout about their ideals, so that we don't all forget the mindset that brought us so far. We need to be careful not to loose site of these things as the business presence rushes in.
That's actually a really good question. If I write some GUI thing for Linux b/c I have a Linux box at home, but I want to make sure that the *BSD build works too, then it would be really nice if I could just compile it there and then fire it up over X. Otherwise, I would need to get my hands on a *BSD box to test the build, which would be a lot more of a pain than enabling X tunnels.
Of course, there certainly may be security issues. Not sure how to handle that well...