I did ask many females in computer science and engineering about this, because most of those that made it through their bachelor were as good as any man in their field. So I started to wonder why there's so few of them there.
Guess what! The most obstacles to overcome were other females during their teen years. Because showing an interest in technology, computers, science and other hobbies that belong to the 'nerds', a subset of boys, got them ostracized from social groups they simply 'had to belong to' according to societal standards. They also had to take an interest in things that were liked and accepted by the majority of their age group (boy groups, pop music, MTVs, cosmetics and fashion clothing) in order to fit in. And well... you can only do so much with your spare time. Many of them simply accepted their role as an outsider and followed their own ambitions. I have a lot of respect for that, because I've received plenty of support from other boys of my age, teachers and other adults because of my 'nerd' interests.
Granted, those people went through the equivalent of high-school during the late 80s to the early 2000s in Germany, so it might be out of date.
I suppose that not only IP pros, but most people who had to fix some internet/browser related issue for someone else, have found out one or more thing about that person, that could be considered as embarrassing. Especially when it comes to personal machines, that are only used by a single person, the use of some kind of "privacy mode" seems to be overwhelmed by the convenience of using bookmarks and similar things.
I've seen a couple of things that I consider to be weird, but I do not judge people based on that, since it's none of my business.
I'll try to keep it short But I can make no promises.
In this case, the entity who's delivering the message is partially to blame, even if the message was from a friend. For example it's a very common thing here to have a "no unsolicited advertisement" sticker on your physical mailbox. Which tells the entity who delivers ads, that you do not want them on your property. From my moral point of view, something similar as you've already mentioned (opt out or even better an opt in) would be absolutely sufficient in order to resolve this matter. And this is what I believe to be the consequence of this. Some mechanism where you opt in and then receive all those updates, similar to a newsletter, which is not considered to be spam.
A blanket ban would not infringe those who welcome those ads. Since this is civilian law, a person who has been damaged or had their rights violated has to sue first. And if they do not chose to sue, it's none of the state's business. If a 3rd person chooses to sue on your behalf, but without your consent, they can't build a case, since no one was damaged. Just as with unwanted advertisements in your physical mailbox, usually the worst thing that will happen to the party that distributes unwanted ads are complaints. They might get some angry letters, faxes or phone calls. But virtually no one is suing about something that's so insignificant.
I'm not sure how our courts would view something like a profile on facebook. As far as I know there's no precedent. But I suppose, as long as the messages stay on facebook and are not delivered to your private eMail box, it's not considered as spam. But again, I'm not sure here. Depending on the judges and lawyers, they may very well find some odd loopholes for this.
Ultimately I'm not sure if this is much of a free speech issue. I was just replying to people who were trying to make it a free speech issue and pointing out that such an act would not be protected by free speech.
Yes, I know that the laws can differ greatly from state to state.
Here, where I live it's similar to what you're writing about Maine. Well, actually what I'm going to talk about here is federal law in Germany.
I also do not have the right to use force in order to get rid of trespassers or even burglars for that matter. I've got to call the police. And that's how it usually goes down, when it come to trespassing. You ask them to leave and if they refuse, non violently, you call the police. Then they'll be removed and possibly liable for the damages they've caused, if there are any.
I'm fine with this. I'm not a violent person and prefer a peaceful way of resolving a conflict.
But there's something else that bothers me a lot. It doesn't matter if they're breaking into my house, destroy everything in their way and threaten my children. If I hit them and hurt them, in a situation that didn't call for it, then I'll be having my day in court. And there's no jury which may emphasize with my situation. On the contrary, it's likely that there will be lawyers which are making me look like the bad guy, for not inviting the burglars into my house (doesn't matter if they didn't even bother to ask first) and share some of my wealth, because those burglars had a very difficult childhood and whatever. God forbid if I dare to shoot them with the guns that I legally own (I do not own any guns at the moment). Doesn't matter if they're armed as that would only entitle me to defend myself with non firearms. Since I'm basically not allowed to have a loaded weapon in my house. Doing that would pretty much result in jail time, even though I only protected my family from someone who forcefully broke into my home. Pretty much the only scenario where I'd be allowed to use weapons, is when they're armed and shoot first.
In fact what I'm supposed to do is retreating. Hiding, calling the police and wait until the burglars are long gone before they arrive. I'm not even allowed to capture the burglars by non violent means, like l
I don't really care that much nationality related things.
I just wanted to shed some light on the issue of freedom of speech here. When it comes to your private property, your freedom of speech supersedes that of others who might want to voice their opinion on your private property. If you do not like advertisements from certain individuals or groups on your private property, you're entitled to take legal action against them.
It's not that dissimilar from the US. There you also don't have to allow someone to voice their opinion when they're on your property. You're within your rights to shoo them away or even use force. For example you've got the right to get rid of WBC protesters that are protesting on the lawn in front of your lawn (if applicable) if you do not agree with them. But once they're on public property, you're not allowed to censor their speech.
On the internet, without knowing the true intention of the participants of a discussion, it's often nearly impossible to tell trolling apart from actual stupidity.
I'm not sure how it works in your country, but freedom of speech in Germany doesn't entitle you to dump your unsolicited advertisements on the property of others. I can see how they want to extend these laws to things like eMail-boxes as well.
However, I don't see why they're targeting Amazon here. As I understand it, it's the people who use that share button who are to blame.
If I may ask: What do you find tedious about typing German with a German keyboard layout?
Other than that, I can't confirm that Germany officially discourages the use of accented letters. They did do it in the past, but not any more. For example I've got a lot of "ü" and "ß" on my ID card.
Yeah, that infamous Alt Gr key.
Luckily, during the mid 90's, many German schools offered typewriting courses on Windows machines, where I at least learned how to use an @ properly.
I managed to get used to the layout over time. At least when it comes to the plain and simple Cherry keyboards, that I've been using.
But, yes, a huge problem is that accessing those special keys totally interrupts the flow when typing. For example if I want to use curled brackets, which are extremely common when it comes to the syntax of various languages, then I have to either press Ctrl+Alt+7/0 or Right Alt+7/0. This means that I either have to take me left or right hand completely away from the default position in order to access these important keys. The French layout is even worse.
I don't think that you could call it the same problem.
Sure, the layout is really bad for coding, because of the impractical placement of the bracket symbols. But for writing in the common German or the English language, the layout is rather efficient.
It would be only prudent to assume that those nations in question at least tried to spy on their supposed friends.
Yes, governments are spying on their own people, which is against the constitutional rights of most of those countries. But the fact that there's already this kind of injustice, does in no way justify even more injustice.
What about that?
While some may call it hypocrisy if those nations do it to their own citizens, it doesn't justify the mass surveillance from a foreign entity. How do you think the US government would react if it became public that those EU countries, that spy on their own people, targeted the US population? Perhaps they'd also invite the Russians and Chinese to the party.
Creating demand is exactly what the prevalent theory is about this issue. And yes, by that logic downloading music/movies/series does also increase demand, there were even articles on Slashdot about that, containing studies. The record and film industry being oblivious of these findings, doesn't make the issue with CP any less true.
Other than that, yeah, how some jurisdictions can see something like a highly stylized comic (manga for example) as CP, does seem weird and idiotic to me as well. In this case, a rational thinking mind has to assume that there are no victims until proven otherwise.
The thing is that they're not losing their 'roots' in many European countries.
They might lose their native languages over the time, but specialized schools, maktab, make sure that they do not loosen their values. There they receive 'education' in Islamic studies and learn what their god-given rights and duties, mostly due to Quran recitals and readings. The things that children learn there are often anti constitutional.
Of course, not every Muslim child is attending one of these schools, it's not compulsory education, but there are still plenty of children who do so because their parents make them. And through the indoctrination and the fact that these secular societies are already large enough, the odds are that their own children will attend such a school as well. Sure, there are those who escape this cycle and have no desire to return to it, but the fact that this is still going on with 2nd, 3rd and even 4th generation Muslim immigrants, is worrying.
I agree with you. Those people are in fact deniers. But in most conversations I've been, they were adamant on being labelled as "sceptics. Many of them state that they'll believe reliable evidence and then ask for such evidence. But in the end virtually everything will be shot down in many cases. Most commonly by ad hominem, nitpicking, strawmen, false dichotomies and similar things.
The most fruitful conversations I've had in these cases where, when people simply admitted that they they are mostly sceptical of the agendas of politicians and other powerful people/organisations. And again, I don't want to argue a strawman here myself. This is just an anecdote on my part.
If that only was true.
The forms of scepticism that I've encountered most frequently is the refusal of any data that is presented by any sources but themselves. (Note that not all of the sceptics are like this. But many of those with a particularly loud voice are like this)
Then it doesn't matter whether there are rather reliable temperature records for the past 200 years. Since the chair of IPCC was accused of sexual harassment every single thing that is connected with the issue must be a lie.
As a German, it bothers me as well, that something like that is illegal. But I'll have to thank the Allied forces for that remnant in our laws. It once served the task to get rid of the remaining Nazis after the war had ended and the rebuilding began. But today, it's mostly censorship. Especially since there are hardly any holocaust survivors left, that could be deeply hurt or offended by such a denial. After all, we don't live forever.
In my opinion, if someone wants to present their ignorance and stupidity to the world by denying the holocaust, let them.
However, when it comes to hate speech, things are different. In hate speech, people declare their intent to take violent actions against other people, with the intend to cause harm or death.
This is not protected by freedom of speech. You're not free to make death threats, whether you're joking or not.
I'm not sure how the engineering curriculum is designed around the world. From what I get here, engineers around the world are little more than glorified mechanics.
Where I come from, engineers take exactly the same classes in math and physics as the physicists and mathematicians, although not all of them. For example I did study electrical engineering (classified as an engineering 'science') at one of the major universities in Germany. Mathematical proof (problem solving) was the order of the day for the first two years. to build a scientific foundation of understanding. I was taught that this was the way to make sure your 'tools' work properly. After that, application became more important. You have your set of 'tools' of which you know by now, that they're working for certain problems and when they're not working properly, you've got the means to research and develop new 'tools' that solve the problem.
That's what is taught anyway, not necessarily what people actually do in the end.
As far as I know AMD's Mantle is freeware and isn't limited to AMD hardware. It could be adopted by nVidia if they wanted to, but their stance so far is that there would be no benefit using Mantle.
Yet neither "side" is unanimous. And we can't even really tell to which side the trolls actually belong to.
From what I've seen is that this whole discussion us full of straw man arguments, ad hominem, ad nauseam, circular logic, appeals to emotion and moralizing.
If anything this showed me again that arguing on the internet is mostly pointless.
Minority group perhaps, but that doesn't mean that they don't deserve encouragement.
Looking back at my time at the university there were very few female students. A true minority, if you will. Most of those women were rather geeky and talking to some of them revealed for me that they didn't have it easy growing up with their particular hobbies. The female geek seemed to have an extra hard time in society because they performed in a field that was somehow attributed to boys and frowned upon by other girls of younger ages, making them social pariahs, because they weren't interested in most of that "girly" stuff, that simply every girl at that age had to be in head over heels. Now I realize that this is clearly some sample bias, but combined with all the efforts universities take nowadays to encourage women to enter the STEM fields and their little success it made me curious.
These things lead me to believe that the lack of women in the STEM fields is mostly a result of cultural stereotyping, which begins at an early age. Most likely it starts at home with their parents, TV shows that their parents watch and so on. Therefore I think that Kari Byron did serve as a useful role model for people that deserve a role model, a women being successful doing geeky stuff while not being super boring.
While you may question the "science" that was done on the show and find out that it is of little value to scientific literate people, they actually managed to reach a lot of the rest, perhaps got them curious and thinking about some of that rather mundane stuff.
It may be trolls, people being "attention whores" or simply people trying to pull rank. They try to create a false authority while the argumentum ab auctoritate itself is often a fallacy, since a high IQ is not a validation for an argument. It's really hard to tell without strong indicators of their intention.
I've always thought that it was the other way around. Yeah, I can smell the sarcasm in this.
From my experience with internet forums, especially gaming forums, youtube commentaries, twitter and facebook, 98% of the observable internet IQs would barely scratch the three digit threshold. A lot of people appear to be well-read, yet basic logic seems to escape most of them. Non-sequitur, strawmen, false dilemma, practically the whole list of logical fallacies can be found there. Yet a lot of people are easily fooled and mistake a few fancy words for competence, which is probably why politicians get elected despite being dumber than a bag of rocks.
I'd say, that most of the internet has about the same average IQ as the general population. Some of US may be a bit more tech savvy, but that's it.
Upfront: I don't know the exact rules that are in play in Florida. Therefore the article could very well be a strawman by neglecting that all these practices are tied into this leasing business model.
When someone sells their excess energy over the electrical grid of a private entity, then they should be held accountable for maintenance costs, but also after all the subsidies an electrical company gets from the sate. The thing with the energy prices is a little bit more complicated. But we can agree that a full market rate is bogus. There's a similar problem where I live. Power companies have to buy at a fixed rate which they dump on the end user by increasing the prices.
The problem that I see is that article makes it sound as if all kinds of lease agreements are illegal for PV, makes it sound like they make it harder for you to become independent, even if you only want to provide your own energy, without selling any.
Owning large, usable sunshine roofs is often used as an argument, because it puts other people, that don't own such property, at a disadvantage. But the basic logic behind those arguments makes it sound like I'm not entitled to use the rainwater, which is collected in tanks, because I can use rainwater for my plants instead of tap water. Therefore I should pay for maintenance of the water grid (which I already do for sewer maintenance, where I live). And as we're already there, then the plants I grow myself for eating and selling are also a bad thing. If I eat my own food and don't buy it from the market, then I'm hurting said market, and should be held accountable for logistic costs.
From this perspective it sounds like the big companies want people to stay dependent and convinced the government to enforce this by laws.
Slashdot Mirror
I did ask many females in computer science and engineering about this, because most of those that made it through their bachelor were as good as any man in their field. So I started to wonder why there's so few of them there. Guess what! The most obstacles to overcome were other females during their teen years. Because showing an interest in technology, computers, science and other hobbies that belong to the 'nerds', a subset of boys, got them ostracized from social groups they simply 'had to belong to' according to societal standards. They also had to take an interest in things that were liked and accepted by the majority of their age group (boy groups, pop music, MTVs, cosmetics and fashion clothing) in order to fit in. And well... you can only do so much with your spare time. Many of them simply accepted their role as an outsider and followed their own ambitions. I have a lot of respect for that, because I've received plenty of support from other boys of my age, teachers and other adults because of my 'nerd' interests. Granted, those people went through the equivalent of high-school during the late 80s to the early 2000s in Germany, so it might be out of date.
I suppose that not only IP pros, but most people who had to fix some internet/browser related issue for someone else, have found out one or more thing about that person, that could be considered as embarrassing. Especially when it comes to personal machines, that are only used by a single person, the use of some kind of "privacy mode" seems to be overwhelmed by the convenience of using bookmarks and similar things.
I've seen a couple of things that I consider to be weird, but I do not judge people based on that, since it's none of my business.
I'll try to keep it short But I can make no promises.
In this case, the entity who's delivering the message is partially to blame, even if the message was from a friend. For example it's a very common thing here to have a "no unsolicited advertisement" sticker on your physical mailbox. Which tells the entity who delivers ads, that you do not want them on your property. From my moral point of view, something similar as you've already mentioned (opt out or even better an opt in) would be absolutely sufficient in order to resolve this matter. And this is what I believe to be the consequence of this. Some mechanism where you opt in and then receive all those updates, similar to a newsletter, which is not considered to be spam.
A blanket ban would not infringe those who welcome those ads. Since this is civilian law, a person who has been damaged or had their rights violated has to sue first. And if they do not chose to sue, it's none of the state's business. If a 3rd person chooses to sue on your behalf, but without your consent, they can't build a case, since no one was damaged. Just as with unwanted advertisements in your physical mailbox, usually the worst thing that will happen to the party that distributes unwanted ads are complaints. They might get some angry letters, faxes or phone calls. But virtually no one is suing about something that's so insignificant.
I'm not sure how our courts would view something like a profile on facebook. As far as I know there's no precedent. But I suppose, as long as the messages stay on facebook and are not delivered to your private eMail box, it's not considered as spam. But again, I'm not sure here. Depending on the judges and lawyers, they may very well find some odd loopholes for this.
Ultimately I'm not sure if this is much of a free speech issue. I was just replying to people who were trying to make it a free speech issue and pointing out that such an act would not be protected by free speech.
Yes, I know that the laws can differ greatly from state to state.
Here, where I live it's similar to what you're writing about Maine. Well, actually what I'm going to talk about here is federal law in Germany.
I also do not have the right to use force in order to get rid of trespassers or even burglars for that matter. I've got to call the police. And that's how it usually goes down, when it come to trespassing. You ask them to leave and if they refuse, non violently, you call the police. Then they'll be removed and possibly liable for the damages they've caused, if there are any.
I'm fine with this. I'm not a violent person and prefer a peaceful way of resolving a conflict.
But there's something else that bothers me a lot. It doesn't matter if they're breaking into my house, destroy everything in their way and threaten my children. If I hit them and hurt them, in a situation that didn't call for it, then I'll be having my day in court. And there's no jury which may emphasize with my situation. On the contrary, it's likely that there will be lawyers which are making me look like the bad guy, for not inviting the burglars into my house (doesn't matter if they didn't even bother to ask first) and share some of my wealth, because those burglars had a very difficult childhood and whatever. God forbid if I dare to shoot them with the guns that I legally own (I do not own any guns at the moment). Doesn't matter if they're armed as that would only entitle me to defend myself with non firearms. Since I'm basically not allowed to have a loaded weapon in my house. Doing that would pretty much result in jail time, even though I only protected my family from someone who forcefully broke into my home. Pretty much the only scenario where I'd be allowed to use weapons, is when they're armed and shoot first.
In fact what I'm supposed to do is retreating. Hiding, calling the police and wait until the burglars are long gone before they arrive. I'm not even allowed to capture the burglars by non violent means, like l
I don't really care that much nationality related things.
I just wanted to shed some light on the issue of freedom of speech here. When it comes to your private property, your freedom of speech supersedes that of others who might want to voice their opinion on your private property. If you do not like advertisements from certain individuals or groups on your private property, you're entitled to take legal action against them.
It's not that dissimilar from the US. There you also don't have to allow someone to voice their opinion when they're on your property. You're within your rights to shoo them away or even use force. For example you've got the right to get rid of WBC protesters that are protesting on the lawn in front of your lawn (if applicable) if you do not agree with them. But once they're on public property, you're not allowed to censor their speech.
On the internet, without knowing the true intention of the participants of a discussion, it's often nearly impossible to tell trolling apart from actual stupidity.
I'm not sure how it works in your country, but freedom of speech in Germany doesn't entitle you to dump your unsolicited advertisements on the property of others. I can see how they want to extend these laws to things like eMail-boxes as well.
However, I don't see why they're targeting Amazon here. As I understand it, it's the people who use that share button who are to blame.
If I may ask: What do you find tedious about typing German with a German keyboard layout?
Other than that, I can't confirm that Germany officially discourages the use of accented letters. They did do it in the past, but not any more. For example I've got a lot of "ü" and "ß" on my ID card.
Yeah, that infamous Alt Gr key. Luckily, during the mid 90's, many German schools offered typewriting courses on Windows machines, where I at least learned how to use an @ properly.
I managed to get used to the layout over time. At least when it comes to the plain and simple Cherry keyboards, that I've been using.
But, yes, a huge problem is that accessing those special keys totally interrupts the flow when typing. For example if I want to use curled brackets, which are extremely common when it comes to the syntax of various languages, then I have to either press Ctrl+Alt+7/0 or Right Alt+7/0. This means that I either have to take me left or right hand completely away from the default position in order to access these important keys. The French layout is even worse.
I don't think that you could call it the same problem.
Sure, the layout is really bad for coding, because of the impractical placement of the bracket symbols. But for writing in the common German or the English language, the layout is rather efficient.
It would be only prudent to assume that those nations in question at least tried to spy on their supposed friends.
Yes, governments are spying on their own people, which is against the constitutional rights of most of those countries. But the fact that there's already this kind of injustice, does in no way justify even more injustice.
What about that?
While some may call it hypocrisy if those nations do it to their own citizens, it doesn't justify the mass surveillance from a foreign entity.
How do you think the US government would react if it became public that those EU countries, that spy on their own people, targeted the US population? Perhaps they'd also invite the Russians and Chinese to the party.
Creating demand is exactly what the prevalent theory is about this issue. And yes, by that logic downloading music/movies/series does also increase demand, there were even articles on Slashdot about that, containing studies. The record and film industry being oblivious of these findings, doesn't make the issue with CP any less true.
Other than that, yeah, how some jurisdictions can see something like a highly stylized comic (manga for example) as CP, does seem weird and idiotic to me as well. In this case, a rational thinking mind has to assume that there are no victims until proven otherwise.
The thing is that they're not losing their 'roots' in many European countries.
They might lose their native languages over the time, but specialized schools, maktab, make sure that they do not loosen their values. There they receive 'education' in Islamic studies and learn what their god-given rights and duties, mostly due to Quran recitals and readings. The things that children learn there are often anti constitutional.
Of course, not every Muslim child is attending one of these schools, it's not compulsory education, but there are still plenty of children who do so because their parents make them. And through the indoctrination and the fact that these secular societies are already large enough, the odds are that their own children will attend such a school as well. Sure, there are those who escape this cycle and have no desire to return to it, but the fact that this is still going on with 2nd, 3rd and even 4th generation Muslim immigrants, is worrying.
I agree with you. Those people are in fact deniers.
But in most conversations I've been, they were adamant on being labelled as "sceptics. Many of them state that they'll believe reliable evidence and then ask for such evidence. But in the end virtually everything will be shot down in many cases. Most commonly by ad hominem, nitpicking, strawmen, false dichotomies and similar things.
The most fruitful conversations I've had in these cases where, when people simply admitted that they they are mostly sceptical of the agendas of politicians and other powerful people/organisations. And again, I don't want to argue a strawman here myself. This is just an anecdote on my part.
If that only was true.
The forms of scepticism that I've encountered most frequently is the refusal of any data that is presented by any sources but themselves. (Note that not all of the sceptics are like this. But many of those with a particularly loud voice are like this)
Then it doesn't matter whether there are rather reliable temperature records for the past 200 years. Since the chair of IPCC was accused of sexual harassment every single thing that is connected with the issue must be a lie.
As a German, it bothers me as well, that something like that is illegal. But I'll have to thank the Allied forces for that remnant in our laws. It once served the task to get rid of the remaining Nazis after the war had ended and the rebuilding began. But today, it's mostly censorship. Especially since there are hardly any holocaust survivors left, that could be deeply hurt or offended by such a denial. After all, we don't live forever.
In my opinion, if someone wants to present their ignorance and stupidity to the world by denying the holocaust, let them.
However, when it comes to hate speech, things are different. In hate speech, people declare their intent to take violent actions against other people, with the intend to cause harm or death.
This is not protected by freedom of speech. You're not free to make death threats, whether you're joking or not.
I'm not sure how the engineering curriculum is designed around the world. From what I get here, engineers around the world are little more than glorified mechanics.
Where I come from, engineers take exactly the same classes in math and physics as the physicists and mathematicians, although not all of them. For example I did study electrical engineering (classified as an engineering 'science') at one of the major universities in Germany. Mathematical proof (problem solving) was the order of the day for the first two years. to build a scientific foundation of understanding. I was taught that this was the way to make sure your 'tools' work properly. After that, application became more important. You have your set of 'tools' of which you know by now, that they're working for certain problems and when they're not working properly, you've got the means to research and develop new 'tools' that solve the problem.
That's what is taught anyway, not necessarily what people actually do in the end.
There would certainly be some who'd call it 'racist', but I don't know about everyone.
Thomas Sowell said something on this topic, and although you might not agree with him on other things, this doesn't make this quote any less true.
The word 'racism' is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything - and demanding evidence makes you a 'racist.'
As far as I know AMD's Mantle is freeware and isn't limited to AMD hardware. It could be adopted by nVidia if they wanted to, but their stance so far is that there would be no benefit using Mantle.
So yeah, I don't see a point in blaming AMD here.
Yet neither "side" is unanimous. And we can't even really tell to which side the trolls actually belong to.
From what I've seen is that this whole discussion us full of straw man arguments, ad hominem, ad nauseam, circular logic, appeals to emotion and moralizing.
If anything this showed me again that arguing on the internet is mostly pointless.
Minority group perhaps, but that doesn't mean that they don't deserve encouragement.
Looking back at my time at the university there were very few female students. A true minority, if you will. Most of those women were rather geeky and talking to some of them revealed for me that they didn't have it easy growing up with their particular hobbies. The female geek seemed to have an extra hard time in society because they performed in a field that was somehow attributed to boys and frowned upon by other girls of younger ages, making them social pariahs, because they weren't interested in most of that "girly" stuff, that simply every girl at that age had to be in head over heels. Now I realize that this is clearly some sample bias, but combined with all the efforts universities take nowadays to encourage women to enter the STEM fields and their little success it made me curious.
These things lead me to believe that the lack of women in the STEM fields is mostly a result of cultural stereotyping, which begins at an early age. Most likely it starts at home with their parents, TV shows that their parents watch and so on. Therefore I think that Kari Byron did serve as a useful role model for people that deserve a role model, a women being successful doing geeky stuff while not being super boring. While you may question the "science" that was done on the show and find out that it is of little value to scientific literate people, they actually managed to reach a lot of the rest, perhaps got them curious and thinking about some of that rather mundane stuff.
It may be trolls, people being "attention whores" or simply people trying to pull rank. They try to create a false authority while the argumentum ab auctoritate itself is often a fallacy, since a high IQ is not a validation for an argument. It's really hard to tell without strong indicators of their intention.
I've always thought that it was the other way around. Yeah, I can smell the sarcasm in this.
From my experience with internet forums, especially gaming forums, youtube commentaries, twitter and facebook, 98% of the observable internet IQs would barely scratch the three digit threshold. A lot of people appear to be well-read, yet basic logic seems to escape most of them. Non-sequitur, strawmen, false dilemma, practically the whole list of logical fallacies can be found there. Yet a lot of people are easily fooled and mistake a few fancy words for competence, which is probably why politicians get elected despite being dumber than a bag of rocks.
I'd say, that most of the internet has about the same average IQ as the general population. Some of US may be a bit more tech savvy, but that's it.
Upfront: I don't know the exact rules that are in play in Florida. Therefore the article could very well be a strawman by neglecting that all these practices are tied into this leasing business model.
When someone sells their excess energy over the electrical grid of a private entity, then they should be held accountable for maintenance costs, but also after all the subsidies an electrical company gets from the sate.
The thing with the energy prices is a little bit more complicated. But we can agree that a full market rate is bogus. There's a similar problem where I live. Power companies have to buy at a fixed rate which they dump on the end user by increasing the prices.
The problem that I see is that article makes it sound as if all kinds of lease agreements are illegal for PV, makes it sound like they make it harder for you to become independent, even if you only want to provide your own energy, without selling any.
Owning large, usable sunshine roofs is often used as an argument, because it puts other people, that don't own such property, at a disadvantage. But the basic logic behind those arguments makes it sound like I'm not entitled to use the rainwater, which is collected in tanks, because I can use rainwater for my plants instead of tap water. Therefore I should pay for maintenance of the water grid (which I already do for sewer maintenance, where I live). And as we're already there, then the plants I grow myself for eating and selling are also a bad thing. If I eat my own food and don't buy it from the market, then I'm hurting said market, and should be held accountable for logistic costs.
From this perspective it sounds like the big companies want people to stay dependent and convinced the government to enforce this by laws.