Desktop pretends to be (or maybe they actually believe that's what they are creating) a product for end users but is a product for admins and developers who are familiar and comfortable with the UNIX-like environment to use on their personal computers.
This is total BS. Lots of people who aren't computer experts use Linux desktops every day. My wife is one of them. I never have to do anything much with that computer, besides regular backups of course. Back when she was running Windows, I had no end of problems with it. I'm sure plenty of people here can attest to similar stories, of switching their spouses or parents to Linux and no longer needing to spend any time being their unpaid tech support.
What desktop Linux is, is a very good product for people who don't need to run any Windows (or OSX) applications. For home users who just surf the web, use Facebook, and do basic PC tasks like some basic word processing or whatever, Linux works extremely well. For people who just *have* to run Photoshop or whatever, obviously that's a problem, but not everyone is like that.
The Linux desktop community is a mess of hundreds of different distributions, various different protocols for doing things (how many freaking sound subsystems do you need?! ALSA, PulseAudio, FFADO, Jack, OSS, etc...) and all kinds of different UI paradigms, frameworks and toolkits.
You're completely overblowing things. Most modern Linux distros have settled on ALSA and PulseAudio (ALSA is the kernel-level drivers; PulseAudio is a userspace layer on top of that) and it works fine. No one uses OSS on Linux any more, and Jack is only used by a small number of people doing high-performance audio stuff. Different UIs aren't a big problem; people get along just fine choosing a desktop environment like KDE or Cinnamon and sticking with that. Different toolkits don't matter if you aren't developing software; you can run software written in one just fine in a DE written in another.
The problem with that is that the vast majority of computer uses do not want to choose every different option for every different part of the operating system
And they don't need to. Just download a copy of Ubuntu or Mint and be done with it. That's what everyone else does. This choice is generally made by the person who's computer-savvy, and the user doesn't question it. My wife uses KDE because I chose that for her since I prefer it and it works similarly to Windows, and she's never had a problem with it. She doesn't know or ask about Unity, Gnome3, Cinnamon, MATE, Xcfe, etc. People have zillions of choices when they buy a car too, but regular, everyday people don't have a problem there. They pick something they like and stop worrying about it. It may be a car their friend had, or they may have just stopped at a dealership and checked out a few things based on a salesman's advice. No one checks out every single model of car before making a decision.
yes i know you set it up for your grandma and she likes it -- represents falls outside the vast majority).
No, actually it doesn't (BTW, your sentence doesn't parse here). Most home users don't do anything terribly complicated with their computers, and these days they really don't do anything besides use it for web-surfing. This is why tablets have become so popular: people are sick of Windows problems, and tablets work just fine for using Facebook. Linux works fine here too, and better than tablets (since you get a real monitor, a real keyboard, real storage space, etc.). For the things most home users do, Linux does them extremely well. It can even play a lot of games now too, though that still works better on Windows because many games still don't support Linux (including anything that isn't on Steam) of course. No, it doesn't do TurboTax, but who cares: everyone's moving to web-based stuff for that. No, it doesn't run Pro/E, but how many home users do that. I've never heard of someone's grandma running engineering software. No, it doesn't run [random Windows software], but neither does Mac OSX, but I never hear of anyone saying Macbooks aren't viable alternatives.
No, that's what you get for anyone on your network running windows.
Not a problem on my home network. Besides, that's only if you actually set your system up so that Windows has access to the NAS box.
My friend lived in a low budget rental with 4 random roommates (former roommate was the thief,
That sounds like a good lesson in choosing your roommates more carefully, or better yet not having any (and certainly not 4).
For $100 + a few minutes every weekend doing incremental backups, I'll go the external harddisk over a NAS anyday. Though realistically I went for both a NAS and an external offsite backup.
Personally I prefer the external HD and incremental backups strategy too, but the downside with this compared to the NAS strategy is that you don't get automatic, regular backups: you have to be diligent in actually doing the backups, and you're only going to do them so often (once per week in your case), whereas with a NAS you can schedule them to be far more frequent, daily or even hourly.
I believe the other poster even suggested having two NAS boxes: one in active use doing hourly backups, and the other in off-site storage. Swap them out every month or week so your off-site is never that far behind, and then if something happens to your on-site systems you still have a fairly recent backup set. This is somewhat pricey, but seems like a robust strategy to me.
Comparing the hits of any Linux distro to iOS/OSX or Windows is an apples-and-oranges comparison, and makes little sense. Everyone knows that desktop Linux has a tiny marketshare. It might make some sense to compare to OSX perhaps, but certainly not Windows, and definitely not a mobile OS like iOS.
What you should be comparing is how popular it is in relation to Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Fedora, Arch, OpenSUSE, and Slackware.
3) Any user who chooses to blow a hardware "fuse" can install any software he wants to without permission from the auto-maker, BUT prior to driving the vehicle on the public road he must register his car as an "experimental vehicle"
This is idiotic. I'm quite sure that no cars actually tie the airbags (or engine ECU, or ABS, etc.) into the infotainment computer.
never mind having responsibility for a few hundred tons of freight/passengers barrelling down the lines upwards of 60 mph.
Not disagreeing, but the Amtrak train that wrecked goes up to 125mph on the DC-NYC route. I've been on it myself and clocked it with a GPS speedometer app. And that's the regular train; Amtrak's Acela Express goes faster than that (I think up to 150, I'm not sure). And trains don't surround you with airbags and lock you in your seat with seat belts the way cars do, and cars only go up to 75-80mph on normal highways.
The USPS *is* a government entity. It's wholly owned by the US Government, therefore it's a government entity. It's largely run like a private company, but not entirely; Congress actually has a lot of say in its operations. The USPS isn't allowed to change the days they deliver mail, for instance, without Congressional approval. (They tried to eliminate delivery for one day a week not long ago and Congress refused.)
I'd like to know why no one ever talks about the other, fairly cheap and easy method of preventing train-driver error: hiring a second driver.
Every single passenger-carrying airplane in the US has two pilots, a pilot and a co-pilot. If the pilot screws up badly, or becomes incapacitated (people do have seizures and blackouts sometimes, you never know), or just needs to go to the bathroom badly because of some shitty Mexican food he ate earlier, then the co-pilot is there to take over.
Why do trains not have co-engineers? These aren't taxis with a handful of passengers, or even buses with up to ~50 passengers, these are trains with hundreds of passengers, just like large airliners.
We can talk about PTC (I think that's the acronym, positive train control) systems, and how effective they are, but a simple fix to this problem is to simply put a second engineer in the cabin.
No, cameras are never a bad idea for public-service employees. A good example of this is bus drivers. All the public buses I've taken in recent years had cameras on board, showing both the drivers and the passengers, along with signs warning that assaulting a bus driver carries a stiff prison sentence. The cameras are ostensibly to protect the drivers from bad passengers, but they obviously can also be used to see what the driver was doing in case of a crash, which is a good thing.
There isn't much difference between a train driver and a bus driver, except that the train driver doesn't have to interact with the public/passengers. There's no good reason at all to not have their activities recorded on camera while they're working.
He's obviously not talking about freight, he's talking about passenger transportation. Since the US spans a continent, and has large ports on both coasts, and also because it produces a lot of raw materials for export (such as coal), it's no surprise it does a lot of freight hauling on railroads. But that doesn't help people who need to get somewhere. The days of hobos are long past.
Hmm... so maybe eliminating a bunch of these parasites would actually help out a lot of other animals populations, including various endangered species (ones which we actually care about, like various mammals and birds)?
You and your friend are extremely unlikely. Most people never get hit by lightning, ever. Most people also never get burgled. (Your friend was not robbed, BTW, unless he was in the house at the time.)
As for ransomware affecting NAS, that's what you get for running Windows.
Oh please. The main reasons for backups (esp. for individuals) are 1) user error, and 2) hardware failure, not acts of god. An on-site NAS protects against those just fine. It protects against viruses too, since the virus isn't going to easily affect the NAS box (though even better is to simply not run Windows).
Theft? How many people have had thieves run around their house looking for NAS boxes? What kind of thieves even bother to steal electronics these days anyway? They aren't worth enough on the used market to bother with.
What are you talking about? That's a bunch of crap. A USB hard drive is nothing more than a standard laptop hard drive in a special box with a SATA-to-USB interface board. If what you said was true, then laptop hard drives would be failing left and right; instead, they have generally excellent lifetimes, just like desktop hard drives. And USB hard drives actually do better since they're unpowered most of the time.
India has Bollywood, yes, but Indians seem to have a much more realistic grasp of what career paths are actually feasible and which aren't. Of course, there's also a huge number of middle-class (for India) Indians, since their population is enormous. Finally, I've never heard of sports being a big thing in India. They have cricket of course, but I don't think it's like the sports-mania we have here in the US.
China, having an authoritarian government, probably does things to strongly discourage too many people from wasting their time on dead-end career paths like acting. Here in the US, it's easy to get student loans or even scholarships to go to college for theater. I knew a girl who did this not that long ago; she had a full-ride scholarship, and what did she blow it on? Theater. Did she get a job in theater? Nope; she moved towards make-up and costumes in her senior year thinking that would be a more realistic career path, graduated, and ended up working at a hotel in customer service. A complete waste of a degree. I wouldn't be surprised to find that China doesn't allow silliness like this with student loans or other public funding.
As for Africa, that's hard to say, because Africa has no industry at all to speak of. I can't imagine that software engineering has much prestige there because people probably can't think much beyond life in a mud hut. Even if you go to South Africa or one of the Arabic northern countries, there's not much industry there either, and not much employment for programmers.
Bats eat mosquitoes, but they eat a lot of other bugs too. I doubt they'll miss the mosquitoes much, and other bugs will fill in that food source.
And you better hope you don't have to go back to black powder; that stuff sucks. Not only does it make a lot of smoke, it fouls up guns very quickly, so you have to constantly clean them (much more than with modern guns). It also has poor ballistic performance. Aside from that, there's more to cartridges than powder and bullets: you also need a primer. Reloaders today save money by loading their own cartridges, since the powder is cheap in bulk and lead is easy to cast (or you can buy those premade if you want), and it's easy with some simple hand tools to put this stuff into brass shells and press them together, but I've never heard of anyone making their own primers; they have to buy those pre-made.
If it was easy for the government to, on a whim, make highly popular companies with "irresistable tech", then the Soviets would have succeeded economically in a big way.
You can't create or plan for success like Google; it just happens. It is possible the NSA infiltrated them after-the-fact, but the idea that the NSA created Google is just ridiculous.
little boys want a place to 'perform', while little girls want a place to 'relate'.
That's BS. The prevalence of girls/women in theater disproves it.
Also, coding on computers hardly counts as "performing". It's something that socially awkward boys like to do because computers are highly predictable and won't make fun of you. Boys who like to perform go into sports and theater, not computers. Girls go into cheerleading, sports, and theater; they too like to perform.
I think you're ignoring the aspect of social standing and prestige here. Plays are a big part of American culture at that age, and acting is a highly prestigious vocation in our society. A-list actors make huge amounts of money. It's the same with sports: school sports has a huge amount of prestige, and again leads to a highly respected and prestigious vocation with enormous pay. Women's sports has little to no prestige, but female actors like Julia Roberts are extremely well-paid, so while little boys pursue football, little girls (and some little boys) pursue theater.
Of course, these professions also have an enormous drop-out rate: for every superstar raking in big bucks, there's thousands upon thousands of others who end up waiting tables to make ends meet, and eventually drop out (and there's a bunch of B-listers who make OK pay but nothing spectacular). But every little kid in our society is taught to follow their dreams, no matter what the odds, because all our movies show stories of people who do just that and succeed, despite all the odds against them, and live happily in lavish lifestyles.
A robotics program isn't very attractive to kids because it doesn't lead to a career with lavish pay. No one is going to be a billionaire working as an engineer at some corporate job. So why should kids pursue it?
Some little boys pursue it: these are the boys who aren't cut out for sports or acting. They're generally introverted and not so social, and they're smart enough to realize that those career paths are foolhardy unless you really are super-talented. Those are the boys who go into coding or robotics programs. Little girls don't, because girls are more social than boys, and there's a social stigma attached to anything "nerdy" (even though everyone and his brother has a smartphone now, a direct product of nerds).
I'll bet if you tried an experiment in schools in India and China with kids being able to go into either a coding/robotics program or a school play production, you'd have vastly different results.
There is no reason anyone should be stuck with a sex arbitrarily chosen by nature. Everyone should be able to pick and choose whatever is best for them at any given moment in their life.
Um, there's a very good reason people should be, and are, stuck with the sex arbitrarily chosen for them by nature: we simply don't have the technology to change it. No, cosmetic surgery doesn't count, it's just a poor attempt at making someone appear to be the opposite sex. To actually change someone's sex, you'd have to figure out how to actually change their genes in all their cells, and then change their physical characteristics too. Maybe in the future we'll figure out how to do that with all this stem-cell research, and that would indeed be very cool, but not now. Until you can actually change someone enough that they can actually reproduce as a member of the opposite sex, and also exist as a member of that sex without needing hormone therapy, then it isn't real, it's just a facsimile.
I'm not saying people shouldn't be free to take advantage of current transsexual medical technology and techniques, and I do wish the situation were better for their sake, but let's not fool ourselves as to how effective it really is. It's a very, very rare transsexual who doesn't look like someone who got GRS, rather than just a normal member of that sex (and the ones who really do "pass" always seem to be Asian for some reason). You can mess around with hormones, reconstructive genital surgery, even facial surgery (to make the face look more masculine or feminine), but you still can't do stuff like change the shoulder-to-waist ratio, hand and foot sizes, etc. And this is also neglecting many other things, such as that men's and women's brains have different structures.
Mosquitoes are parasites. They don't polinate anything. They just fly around and suck blood from hapless victims, human and animal. No one is going to miss them when they're gone, just like no one will miss roundworms.
Yes, for other insects, you're right: they may occupy an important part in the ecological chain. I've never seen any evidence that mosquitoes have any value at all.
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Desktop pretends to be (or maybe they actually believe that's what they are creating) a product for end users but is a product for admins and developers who are familiar and comfortable with the UNIX-like environment to use on their personal computers.
This is total BS. Lots of people who aren't computer experts use Linux desktops every day. My wife is one of them. I never have to do anything much with that computer, besides regular backups of course. Back when she was running Windows, I had no end of problems with it. I'm sure plenty of people here can attest to similar stories, of switching their spouses or parents to Linux and no longer needing to spend any time being their unpaid tech support.
What desktop Linux is, is a very good product for people who don't need to run any Windows (or OSX) applications. For home users who just surf the web, use Facebook, and do basic PC tasks like some basic word processing or whatever, Linux works extremely well. For people who just *have* to run Photoshop or whatever, obviously that's a problem, but not everyone is like that.
The Linux desktop community is a mess of hundreds of different distributions, various different protocols for doing things (how many freaking sound subsystems do you need?! ALSA, PulseAudio, FFADO, Jack, OSS, etc...) and all kinds of different UI paradigms, frameworks and toolkits.
You're completely overblowing things. Most modern Linux distros have settled on ALSA and PulseAudio (ALSA is the kernel-level drivers; PulseAudio is a userspace layer on top of that) and it works fine. No one uses OSS on Linux any more, and Jack is only used by a small number of people doing high-performance audio stuff. Different UIs aren't a big problem; people get along just fine choosing a desktop environment like KDE or Cinnamon and sticking with that. Different toolkits don't matter if you aren't developing software; you can run software written in one just fine in a DE written in another.
The problem with that is that the vast majority of computer uses do not want to choose every different option for every different part of the operating system
And they don't need to. Just download a copy of Ubuntu or Mint and be done with it. That's what everyone else does. This choice is generally made by the person who's computer-savvy, and the user doesn't question it. My wife uses KDE because I chose that for her since I prefer it and it works similarly to Windows, and she's never had a problem with it. She doesn't know or ask about Unity, Gnome3, Cinnamon, MATE, Xcfe, etc. People have zillions of choices when they buy a car too, but regular, everyday people don't have a problem there. They pick something they like and stop worrying about it. It may be a car their friend had, or they may have just stopped at a dealership and checked out a few things based on a salesman's advice. No one checks out every single model of car before making a decision.
yes i know you set it up for your grandma and she likes it -- represents falls outside the vast majority).
No, actually it doesn't (BTW, your sentence doesn't parse here). Most home users don't do anything terribly complicated with their computers, and these days they really don't do anything besides use it for web-surfing. This is why tablets have become so popular: people are sick of Windows problems, and tablets work just fine for using Facebook. Linux works fine here too, and better than tablets (since you get a real monitor, a real keyboard, real storage space, etc.). For the things most home users do, Linux does them extremely well. It can even play a lot of games now too, though that still works better on Windows because many games still don't support Linux (including anything that isn't on Steam) of course. No, it doesn't do TurboTax, but who cares: everyone's moving to web-based stuff for that. No, it doesn't run Pro/E, but how many home users do that. I've never heard of someone's grandma running engineering software. No, it doesn't run [random Windows software], but neither does Mac OSX, but I never hear of anyone saying Macbooks aren't viable alternatives.
No, that's what you get for anyone on your network running windows.
Not a problem on my home network. Besides, that's only if you actually set your system up so that Windows has access to the NAS box.
My friend lived in a low budget rental with 4 random roommates (former roommate was the thief,
That sounds like a good lesson in choosing your roommates more carefully, or better yet not having any (and certainly not 4).
For $100 + a few minutes every weekend doing incremental backups, I'll go the external harddisk over a NAS anyday. Though realistically I went for both a NAS and an external offsite backup.
Personally I prefer the external HD and incremental backups strategy too, but the downside with this compared to the NAS strategy is that you don't get automatic, regular backups: you have to be diligent in actually doing the backups, and you're only going to do them so often (once per week in your case), whereas with a NAS you can schedule them to be far more frequent, daily or even hourly.
I believe the other poster even suggested having two NAS boxes: one in active use doing hourly backups, and the other in off-site storage. Swap them out every month or week so your off-site is never that far behind, and then if something happens to your on-site systems you still have a fairly recent backup set. This is somewhat pricey, but seems like a robust strategy to me.
Comparing the hits of any Linux distro to iOS/OSX or Windows is an apples-and-oranges comparison, and makes little sense. Everyone knows that desktop Linux has a tiny marketshare. It might make some sense to compare to OSX perhaps, but certainly not Windows, and definitely not a mobile OS like iOS.
What you should be comparing is how popular it is in relation to Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Fedora, Arch, OpenSUSE, and Slackware.
3) Any user who chooses to blow a hardware "fuse" can install any software he wants to without permission from the auto-maker, BUT prior to driving the vehicle on the public road he must register his car as an "experimental vehicle"
This is idiotic. I'm quite sure that no cars actually tie the airbags (or engine ECU, or ABS, etc.) into the infotainment computer.
1) Programmers who do not require password to be changed,
Hey, don't blame the programmers. Most likely, someone did suggest requiring the password to be changed, and management said no for some dumb reason.
never mind having responsibility for a few hundred tons of freight/passengers barrelling down the lines upwards of 60 mph.
Not disagreeing, but the Amtrak train that wrecked goes up to 125mph on the DC-NYC route. I've been on it myself and clocked it with a GPS speedometer app. And that's the regular train; Amtrak's Acela Express goes faster than that (I think up to 150, I'm not sure). And trains don't surround you with airbags and lock you in your seat with seat belts the way cars do, and cars only go up to 75-80mph on normal highways.
Maybe an hour of each person gets viewed once a week or so
Why would it ever be viewed at all, unless something happened? Who wants to waste their time watching drivers pick their noses?
you can assume that a train isn't going to be jumping off the tracks 500 feet into a field to the left so that does make the job a little easier.
Too bad Google Maps doesn't make that kind of assumption.
The USPS *is* a government entity. It's wholly owned by the US Government, therefore it's a government entity. It's largely run like a private company, but not entirely; Congress actually has a lot of say in its operations. The USPS isn't allowed to change the days they deliver mail, for instance, without Congressional approval. (They tried to eliminate delivery for one day a week not long ago and Congress refused.)
I'd like to know why no one ever talks about the other, fairly cheap and easy method of preventing train-driver error: hiring a second driver.
Every single passenger-carrying airplane in the US has two pilots, a pilot and a co-pilot. If the pilot screws up badly, or becomes incapacitated (people do have seizures and blackouts sometimes, you never know), or just needs to go to the bathroom badly because of some shitty Mexican food he ate earlier, then the co-pilot is there to take over.
Why do trains not have co-engineers? These aren't taxis with a handful of passengers, or even buses with up to ~50 passengers, these are trains with hundreds of passengers, just like large airliners.
We can talk about PTC (I think that's the acronym, positive train control) systems, and how effective they are, but a simple fix to this problem is to simply put a second engineer in the cabin.
No, cameras are never a bad idea for public-service employees. A good example of this is bus drivers. All the public buses I've taken in recent years had cameras on board, showing both the drivers and the passengers, along with signs warning that assaulting a bus driver carries a stiff prison sentence. The cameras are ostensibly to protect the drivers from bad passengers, but they obviously can also be used to see what the driver was doing in case of a crash, which is a good thing.
There isn't much difference between a train driver and a bus driver, except that the train driver doesn't have to interact with the public/passengers. There's no good reason at all to not have their activities recorded on camera while they're working.
He's obviously not talking about freight, he's talking about passenger transportation. Since the US spans a continent, and has large ports on both coasts, and also because it produces a lot of raw materials for export (such as coal), it's no surprise it does a lot of freight hauling on railroads. But that doesn't help people who need to get somewhere. The days of hobos are long past.
Hmm... so maybe eliminating a bunch of these parasites would actually help out a lot of other animals populations, including various endangered species (ones which we actually care about, like various mammals and birds)?
I wonder if there'd be any problems if fleas went away too.
OK, how about tapeworms? Is there any value to those?
You and your friend are extremely unlikely. Most people never get hit by lightning, ever. Most people also never get burgled. (Your friend was not robbed, BTW, unless he was in the house at the time.)
As for ransomware affecting NAS, that's what you get for running Windows.
Oh please. The main reasons for backups (esp. for individuals) are 1) user error, and 2) hardware failure, not acts of god. An on-site NAS protects against those just fine. It protects against viruses too, since the virus isn't going to easily affect the NAS box (though even better is to simply not run Windows).
Theft? How many people have had thieves run around their house looking for NAS boxes? What kind of thieves even bother to steal electronics these days anyway? They aren't worth enough on the used market to bother with.
What are you talking about? That's a bunch of crap. A USB hard drive is nothing more than a standard laptop hard drive in a special box with a SATA-to-USB interface board. If what you said was true, then laptop hard drives would be failing left and right; instead, they have generally excellent lifetimes, just like desktop hard drives. And USB hard drives actually do better since they're unpowered most of the time.
India has Bollywood, yes, but Indians seem to have a much more realistic grasp of what career paths are actually feasible and which aren't. Of course, there's also a huge number of middle-class (for India) Indians, since their population is enormous. Finally, I've never heard of sports being a big thing in India. They have cricket of course, but I don't think it's like the sports-mania we have here in the US.
China, having an authoritarian government, probably does things to strongly discourage too many people from wasting their time on dead-end career paths like acting. Here in the US, it's easy to get student loans or even scholarships to go to college for theater. I knew a girl who did this not that long ago; she had a full-ride scholarship, and what did she blow it on? Theater. Did she get a job in theater? Nope; she moved towards make-up and costumes in her senior year thinking that would be a more realistic career path, graduated, and ended up working at a hotel in customer service. A complete waste of a degree. I wouldn't be surprised to find that China doesn't allow silliness like this with student loans or other public funding.
As for Africa, that's hard to say, because Africa has no industry at all to speak of. I can't imagine that software engineering has much prestige there because people probably can't think much beyond life in a mud hut. Even if you go to South Africa or one of the Arabic northern countries, there's not much industry there either, and not much employment for programmers.
Bats eat mosquitoes, but they eat a lot of other bugs too. I doubt they'll miss the mosquitoes much, and other bugs will fill in that food source.
And you better hope you don't have to go back to black powder; that stuff sucks. Not only does it make a lot of smoke, it fouls up guns very quickly, so you have to constantly clean them (much more than with modern guns). It also has poor ballistic performance. Aside from that, there's more to cartridges than powder and bullets: you also need a primer. Reloaders today save money by loading their own cartridges, since the powder is cheap in bulk and lead is easy to cast (or you can buy those premade if you want), and it's easy with some simple hand tools to put this stuff into brass shells and press them together, but I've never heard of anyone making their own primers; they have to buy those pre-made.
If it was easy for the government to, on a whim, make highly popular companies with "irresistable tech", then the Soviets would have succeeded economically in a big way.
You can't create or plan for success like Google; it just happens. It is possible the NSA infiltrated them after-the-fact, but the idea that the NSA created Google is just ridiculous.
little boys want a place to 'perform', while little girls want a place to 'relate'.
That's BS. The prevalence of girls/women in theater disproves it.
Also, coding on computers hardly counts as "performing". It's something that socially awkward boys like to do because computers are highly predictable and won't make fun of you. Boys who like to perform go into sports and theater, not computers. Girls go into cheerleading, sports, and theater; they too like to perform.
I think you're ignoring the aspect of social standing and prestige here. Plays are a big part of American culture at that age, and acting is a highly prestigious vocation in our society. A-list actors make huge amounts of money. It's the same with sports: school sports has a huge amount of prestige, and again leads to a highly respected and prestigious vocation with enormous pay. Women's sports has little to no prestige, but female actors like Julia Roberts are extremely well-paid, so while little boys pursue football, little girls (and some little boys) pursue theater.
Of course, these professions also have an enormous drop-out rate: for every superstar raking in big bucks, there's thousands upon thousands of others who end up waiting tables to make ends meet, and eventually drop out (and there's a bunch of B-listers who make OK pay but nothing spectacular). But every little kid in our society is taught to follow their dreams, no matter what the odds, because all our movies show stories of people who do just that and succeed, despite all the odds against them, and live happily in lavish lifestyles.
A robotics program isn't very attractive to kids because it doesn't lead to a career with lavish pay. No one is going to be a billionaire working as an engineer at some corporate job. So why should kids pursue it?
Some little boys pursue it: these are the boys who aren't cut out for sports or acting. They're generally introverted and not so social, and they're smart enough to realize that those career paths are foolhardy unless you really are super-talented. Those are the boys who go into coding or robotics programs. Little girls don't, because girls are more social than boys, and there's a social stigma attached to anything "nerdy" (even though everyone and his brother has a smartphone now, a direct product of nerds).
I'll bet if you tried an experiment in schools in India and China with kids being able to go into either a coding/robotics program or a school play production, you'd have vastly different results.
In summary, it's the culture, stupid!
There is no reason anyone should be stuck with a sex arbitrarily chosen by nature. Everyone should be able to pick and choose whatever is best for them at any given moment in their life.
Um, there's a very good reason people should be, and are, stuck with the sex arbitrarily chosen for them by nature: we simply don't have the technology to change it. No, cosmetic surgery doesn't count, it's just a poor attempt at making someone appear to be the opposite sex. To actually change someone's sex, you'd have to figure out how to actually change their genes in all their cells, and then change their physical characteristics too. Maybe in the future we'll figure out how to do that with all this stem-cell research, and that would indeed be very cool, but not now. Until you can actually change someone enough that they can actually reproduce as a member of the opposite sex, and also exist as a member of that sex without needing hormone therapy, then it isn't real, it's just a facsimile.
I'm not saying people shouldn't be free to take advantage of current transsexual medical technology and techniques, and I do wish the situation were better for their sake, but let's not fool ourselves as to how effective it really is. It's a very, very rare transsexual who doesn't look like someone who got GRS, rather than just a normal member of that sex (and the ones who really do "pass" always seem to be Asian for some reason). You can mess around with hormones, reconstructive genital surgery, even facial surgery (to make the face look more masculine or feminine), but you still can't do stuff like change the shoulder-to-waist ratio, hand and foot sizes, etc. And this is also neglecting many other things, such as that men's and women's brains have different structures.
Mosquitoes are parasites. They don't polinate anything. They just fly around and suck blood from hapless victims, human and animal. No one is going to miss them when they're gone, just like no one will miss roundworms.
Yes, for other insects, you're right: they may occupy an important part in the ecological chain. I've never seen any evidence that mosquitoes have any value at all.