But perhaps the white males [...] have one quality that enables them to succeed where others fail[...]. I suspect that all humans are born with this ability[...].
I'll assume the first bit of phrasing was a bit of an oversight, and that the last bit there is the important part. Perhaps the culture of CS is more accessible to white males, who are much more likely to grow up with computers available to them as a relevant part of their day-to-day adolescent lives.
This is a very narrow definition of what constitutes racism, one that unfortunately has the broadest acceptance in American culture. By this definition, racism must be deliberate and an aspect of a person's identity. The person must identify as being or not being a certain race, and applying an absolutist belief that one race is superior or inferior to the others. Further more, that valuation is taken as something concrete and consequential, upon which the person must act when race rises as a relevant factor in their social interactions with others. Most people are not racist in this way because it is stupid and stigmatized. But if CSE is not racist or sexist, how do you account for the extreme overrepresentation of white males in CSE?
But that is not the sort of racism (or sexism, which I'm not including for brevity,) that articles like this are addressing. The title, by including the term 'racism' is unfortunately inflammatory because almost nobody wants to be identified as a racist. A better title would have been rephrased as 'unintentionally discriminatory' or something similarly benign instead. Racism, as it is currently understood within academia and sociology (and by most non-white people in America), is the attribution of the assumed qualities of of a group to an individual based on their perceived race. Everybody does this. We visually evaluate people and make snap intuitive judgments, and unfortunately, race factors into this, even if only at a subconscious levels beneath other factors such as socio-economic class and beauty. At our best, we try to mitigate the affects of these judgments in our day-to-day lives, but at our worst, we pretend they are justified. It should not be seen, though, as a matter of the person being a racist person, but rather a particular judgment or action being perceived as racist. If you ever get called racist, you're best off apologizing for the act or judgment and moving on. Denying that something is racist more often falls in line with pretending it is justified, although the intention was more likely to have been to disassociate oneself from the definition of racism in the previous paragraph.
What the article attempts to address is not an exculsively race-related issue, but one that also ties in heavily with class. For dealing with black subsets of the population, there is an unfortunate overrepresentation of black people in the lower socio-economic class. Though I forget the specific statistics, I believe that the approximation is that where black people make up 10% of the American population, they make up 50% of the lower class, meaning that where class-based discriminatory practices exist, they will also be consequentially racially discriminatory (though not inherently racist). CS is heavily class-based in its discrimination, as access to computers and appropriate education is much more limited to families in lower classes than to those coming from more stable or privileged socio-economic backgrounds.
If the article's cultural design tools are meant to address an underrepresentation of non-white minorities in CS, there is value in that, but it is not entirely un-problematic. Things such as teaching cultural histories and linking them to CS reinforce the ideas of cultural/racial identities and could be in that sense considered racist, and the graffiti art could be much more considered classist, but until the groups are no longer disproportionately overrepresented in the lower class, offering cultural and lower class-based points of identification for people in a predominantly white, middle class area of study is one of the only (and statistically most effective) ways to encourage the underrepresented to cross the culture gap. Overall it's not a perfect solution, but it is a corrective one. The only other real options are pretending that racial, class-based, and sexist discrimination are not relevant in CS, and that unfortunately leads to doing nothing and consequently perpetuating the same discriminatory practices that are currently in place.
Ditto on the space pens for blobbing, and it should also be noted that their points are nowhere near the fineness the OP asked for. But as a general use pen for writing, the Fisher AG-7 is the best thing i've ever found, and I'd recommend it to anyone.
It shows that they can be touched, that the MPAA, despite however much power they may hold financially and politically, still can't even protect their own website. It's symbolic justice for those of us who would wish to see these bully organizations stood up to every once in a while.
No sarcasm at all! I'm a poor grad student in the humanities, so fancy tech toys are not something I can afford, but when I find something that I like, I stick with it for a long time. With my last phone upgrade, I went with a Palm Centro because it was cheap, and I needed a new device to put my eReader software on, since my old Palm z22 had finally kicked the bucket a few weeks before. I'll probably continue using the phone until the battery starts to fade, but for now, I'm still getting a comfortable 3 days worth of use before it's even lost half of its charge.
Does that mean that if I come up with my own kernel, lets call it Assfuck, using your GNU shit, calling it GNU/Assfuck is appropriate?
It seems to me that, yes, it would be appropriate to call the whole operating system 'GNU/Assfuck' to distinguish it from your Assfuck kernel alone. 'Assfuck' without 'GNU shit' would be pretty lonely and boring, and most uninformed computer-dumb users (with tech knowledge levels as low as my own) would wonder what the point of Assfuck is if there's no shit to play with.
It's refreshing to see so many other prodigies expressing their opinions on this matter. That's one thing that I like about slashdot--everybody is smarter than everybody else, and it's one of the reasons I love reading everything everybody else has to say.
However, I feel that there is an underrepresentation of the majority at work here: the stupid people, and being one of the token few who make it to slashdot, I feel obligated to express my opinion so that all the smartypantses can understand the perspective of the child's peers. If you stick this kid in too many classes with dumber, older students, you'll de-motivate and humiliate them, which will provoke us into retaliating through socially ostracizing the student. This will deplete his social resources and inevitably drive him to a future of loneliness and depression that will be the cause of his burnout.
I recall fondly the many nerds I de-pantsed in the hallways during my sixth year of high school. Sure, I may not be able to install an operating system without a GUI, but I CAN throw rubber balls in gym class with enough force to smash a kid's plastic frames in two after she makes me feel stupid in math class.
The threat of death won't stymie the flow of low-level underlings and lackeys who peddle drugs on street corners. There will always be somebody jobless and hungry, and whether you're stealing a loaf of bread at the threat of your hand getting cut off or selling drugs at risk of getting killed, the severity of punishment is a minor factor in the decision making of these people. Yes, maybe you'd kill off a lot of awful people and social pariahs by doing this, but you'd be killing a lot of momentarily down-on-their-luck normal people, too.
Just because there aren't drugs to traffic doesn't mean the problem will be solved. Organized crime will not vanish, but merely shift its business to some other form of social exploitation. There's a lot more than just money involved in this trade, and the cartel members aren't just going to go get normal jobs if the demand for drugs diminishes. It's clear already that they know threats of violence can be used to extort money from teachers--and I hate to think how this might escalate if it became their only source of income. But I do agree with you on the legalization issue. We gotta get tax money from somewhere, and I think drugs would provide a wonderful source of funding for social programs.
Hey, I will have none of this 'retarding-it-down' nonsense. I may have mental diffabilities, but being a semi-literate computer user, Gnome is even a bit too simplified for me.
google needs to convert the Ogg Vorbis files over to MP3, which is neither free nor better. What is the reasoning behind this? Would implementing basic support for Ogg Vorbis be beyond the magical powers of google, or did they have to strike up some evil pact of exclusivity and goat sacrifice with the people who own the MP3 patent in order that their product would have a familiar/attractive format de/compression capability?
From a resident of Carmel, Indiana, the idea of traffic being stopped around a roundabout for longer than around a stop sign sounds absurd to me. I've lived in Carmel for 20+ years, and the flow on the roads is better than anywhere else I've ever been. I've never seen one of the roundabouts stopped up because people couldn't exit them. This may be true in huuuge cities, but roundabouts have increased the quality of life living in this little suburbia by a good 10% for me.
As a resident of Carmel, I can assure you that they cannot so easily be replaced by stop signs. This may be anecdotal evidence, but the 4-way stop intersection near my house (106th & Gray Rd) used to be backed up for 5+ minutes for anybody going north or south during rush hour, but after they got a roundabout installed, I never had to wait more than two minutes. Yes, they may be terrifying to newcomers, and Keystone ave is an absolute confusing mess, but they have really sped the town up quite a bit.
I've bumped into a few problems with my Ubuntu box, and the tech support has always (eventually) gotten around to helping me out with very well-informed and clear and precise solutions to my problems. The unfortunate part, however, is that I've had to run through back-and-forths with low-level IT lackeys who probably don't know what 'command line' means before they finally refer me over to a linux specialist that I requested in the first place.
I followed IU's recent exploration of ebooks, and it looks like they're pretty keen on making sure that no mandatory ebooks will be platform-specific or without a deadtree alternative, so I won't have to install Windows to read DRMCOPYRIGHTSPAZ publisher's textbooks. I don't much trust the university administrators on this matter, but all the tech people I've met who are in charge of things have seemed very capable, and I hope the final say on everything stays in their hands.
But I'm in the humanities, not CS. (*gasp!*). The only real problems I have is with typing things on campus. All the computer labs (that I know of) only have Windows and Mac computers that run MS Office exclusively, so all my AbiWord/LibreOffice docs like to go through formatting bloat and eventually get corrupted when I try to work on them on campus. Portable apps are my friend, but that has led to corrupted flash drives and even more data loss.
But overall, I feel as though IU takes pretty good care of us, even if users have to jump through a few more flaming hoops.
Slashdot Mirror
But perhaps the white males [...] have one quality that enables them to succeed where others fail[...]. I suspect that all humans are born with this ability[...].
I'll assume the first bit of phrasing was a bit of an oversight, and that the last bit there is the important part. Perhaps the culture of CS is more accessible to white males, who are much more likely to grow up with computers available to them as a relevant part of their day-to-day adolescent lives.
This is a very narrow definition of what constitutes racism, one that unfortunately has the broadest acceptance in American culture. By this definition, racism must be deliberate and an aspect of a person's identity. The person must identify as being or not being a certain race, and applying an absolutist belief that one race is superior or inferior to the others. Further more, that valuation is taken as something concrete and consequential, upon which the person must act when race rises as a relevant factor in their social interactions with others. Most people are not racist in this way because it is stupid and stigmatized. But if CSE is not racist or sexist, how do you account for the extreme overrepresentation of white males in CSE?
But that is not the sort of racism (or sexism, which I'm not including for brevity,) that articles like this are addressing. The title, by including the term 'racism' is unfortunately inflammatory because almost nobody wants to be identified as a racist. A better title would have been rephrased as 'unintentionally discriminatory' or something similarly benign instead. Racism, as it is currently understood within academia and sociology (and by most non-white people in America), is the attribution of the assumed qualities of of a group to an individual based on their perceived race. Everybody does this. We visually evaluate people and make snap intuitive judgments, and unfortunately, race factors into this, even if only at a subconscious levels beneath other factors such as socio-economic class and beauty. At our best, we try to mitigate the affects of these judgments in our day-to-day lives, but at our worst, we pretend they are justified. It should not be seen, though, as a matter of the person being a racist person, but rather a particular judgment or action being perceived as racist. If you ever get called racist, you're best off apologizing for the act or judgment and moving on. Denying that something is racist more often falls in line with pretending it is justified, although the intention was more likely to have been to disassociate oneself from the definition of racism in the previous paragraph.
What the article attempts to address is not an exculsively race-related issue, but one that also ties in heavily with class. For dealing with black subsets of the population, there is an unfortunate overrepresentation of black people in the lower socio-economic class. Though I forget the specific statistics, I believe that the approximation is that where black people make up 10% of the American population, they make up 50% of the lower class, meaning that where class-based discriminatory practices exist, they will also be consequentially racially discriminatory (though not inherently racist). CS is heavily class-based in its discrimination, as access to computers and appropriate education is much more limited to families in lower classes than to those coming from more stable or privileged socio-economic backgrounds.
If the article's cultural design tools are meant to address an underrepresentation of non-white minorities in CS, there is value in that, but it is not entirely un-problematic. Things such as teaching cultural histories and linking them to CS reinforce the ideas of cultural/racial identities and could be in that sense considered racist, and the graffiti art could be much more considered classist, but until the groups are no longer disproportionately overrepresented in the lower class, offering cultural and lower class-based points of identification for people in a predominantly white, middle class area of study is one of the only (and statistically most effective) ways to encourage the underrepresented to cross the culture gap. Overall it's not a perfect solution, but it is a corrective one. The only other real options are pretending that racial, class-based, and sexist discrimination are not relevant in CS, and that unfortunately leads to doing nothing and consequently perpetuating the same discriminatory practices that are currently in place.
Ditto on the space pens for blobbing, and it should also be noted that their points are nowhere near the fineness the OP asked for. But as a general use pen for writing, the Fisher AG-7 is the best thing i've ever found, and I'd recommend it to anyone.
It shows that they can be touched, that the MPAA, despite however much power they may hold financially and politically, still can't even protect their own website. It's symbolic justice for those of us who would wish to see these bully organizations stood up to every once in a while.
If only the media industry hadn't gotten that money from us in the first place!
No sarcasm at all! I'm a poor grad student in the humanities, so fancy tech toys are not something I can afford, but when I find something that I like, I stick with it for a long time. With my last phone upgrade, I went with a Palm Centro because it was cheap, and I needed a new device to put my eReader software on, since my old Palm z22 had finally kicked the bucket a few weeks before. I'll probably continue using the phone until the battery starts to fade, but for now, I'm still getting a comfortable 3 days worth of use before it's even lost half of its charge.
This can't be right! My phone still runs PalmOS v5, and I refuse to be statistically insignificant!
I don't believe in imaginary property.
Please send me all your money, via wire transfer. Thank you.
Clearly he doesn't have any--otherwise he wouldn't feel that way.
Does that mean that if I come up with my own kernel, lets call it Assfuck, using your GNU shit, calling it GNU/Assfuck is appropriate?
It seems to me that, yes, it would be appropriate to call the whole operating system 'GNU/Assfuck' to distinguish it from your Assfuck kernel alone. 'Assfuck' without 'GNU shit' would be pretty lonely and boring, and most uninformed computer-dumb users (with tech knowledge levels as low as my own) would wonder what the point of Assfuck is if there's no shit to play with.
It's refreshing to see so many other prodigies expressing their opinions on this matter. That's one thing that I like about slashdot--everybody is smarter than everybody else, and it's one of the reasons I love reading everything everybody else has to say.
However, I feel that there is an underrepresentation of the majority at work here: the stupid people, and being one of the token few who make it to slashdot, I feel obligated to express my opinion so that all the smartypantses can understand the perspective of the child's peers. If you stick this kid in too many classes with dumber, older students, you'll de-motivate and humiliate them, which will provoke us into retaliating through socially ostracizing the student. This will deplete his social resources and inevitably drive him to a future of loneliness and depression that will be the cause of his burnout.
I recall fondly the many nerds I de-pantsed in the hallways during my sixth year of high school. Sure, I may not be able to install an operating system without a GUI, but I CAN throw rubber balls in gym class with enough force to smash a kid's plastic frames in two after she makes me feel stupid in math class.
The threat of death won't stymie the flow of low-level underlings and lackeys who peddle drugs on street corners. There will always be somebody jobless and hungry, and whether you're stealing a loaf of bread at the threat of your hand getting cut off or selling drugs at risk of getting killed, the severity of punishment is a minor factor in the decision making of these people. Yes, maybe you'd kill off a lot of awful people and social pariahs by doing this, but you'd be killing a lot of momentarily down-on-their-luck normal people, too.
Just because there aren't drugs to traffic doesn't mean the problem will be solved. Organized crime will not vanish, but merely shift its business to some other form of social exploitation. There's a lot more than just money involved in this trade, and the cartel members aren't just going to go get normal jobs if the demand for drugs diminishes. It's clear already that they know threats of violence can be used to extort money from teachers--and I hate to think how this might escalate if it became their only source of income. But I do agree with you on the legalization issue. We gotta get tax money from somewhere, and I think drugs would provide a wonderful source of funding for social programs.
Hey, I will have none of this 'retarding-it-down' nonsense. I may have mental diffabilities, but being a semi-literate computer user, Gnome is even a bit too simplified for me.
It was a great place to start learning, though.
google needs to convert the Ogg Vorbis files over to MP3, which is neither free nor better. What is the reasoning behind this? Would implementing basic support for Ogg Vorbis be beyond the magical powers of google, or did they have to strike up some evil pact of exclusivity and goat sacrifice with the people who own the MP3 patent in order that their product would have a familiar/attractive format de/compression capability?
Why are responses to pranksterish antics and merrymaking always so boring?
From a resident of Carmel, Indiana, the idea of traffic being stopped around a roundabout for longer than around a stop sign sounds absurd to me. I've lived in Carmel for 20+ years, and the flow on the roads is better than anywhere else I've ever been. I've never seen one of the roundabouts stopped up because people couldn't exit them. This may be true in huuuge cities, but roundabouts have increased the quality of life living in this little suburbia by a good 10% for me.
As a resident of Carmel, I can assure you that they cannot so easily be replaced by stop signs. This may be anecdotal evidence, but the 4-way stop intersection near my house (106th & Gray Rd) used to be backed up for 5+ minutes for anybody going north or south during rush hour, but after they got a roundabout installed, I never had to wait more than two minutes. Yes, they may be terrifying to newcomers, and Keystone ave is an absolute confusing mess, but they have really sped the town up quite a bit.
I think you underestimate the fanatical nature of us Sega nerds.
I don't have money either, so I make the library buy books I want to read.
I've bumped into a few problems with my Ubuntu box, and the tech support has always (eventually) gotten around to helping me out with very well-informed and clear and precise solutions to my problems. The unfortunate part, however, is that I've had to run through back-and-forths with low-level IT lackeys who probably don't know what 'command line' means before they finally refer me over to a linux specialist that I requested in the first place.
I followed IU's recent exploration of ebooks, and it looks like they're pretty keen on making sure that no mandatory ebooks will be platform-specific or without a deadtree alternative, so I won't have to install Windows to read DRMCOPYRIGHTSPAZ publisher's textbooks. I don't much trust the university administrators on this matter, but all the tech people I've met who are in charge of things have seemed very capable, and I hope the final say on everything stays in their hands.
But I'm in the humanities, not CS. (*gasp!*). The only real problems I have is with typing things on campus. All the computer labs (that I know of) only have Windows and Mac computers that run MS Office exclusively, so all my AbiWord/LibreOffice docs like to go through formatting bloat and eventually get corrupted when I try to work on them on campus. Portable apps are my friend, but that has led to corrupted flash drives and even more data loss.
But overall, I feel as though IU takes pretty good care of us, even if users have to jump through a few more flaming hoops.