Wasn't surprised to hear The Hacktory decided to get involved. Philly's got a pretty active "maker" culture, and isn't exactly short of a few colleges that have healthy STEM departments.
But what do I know, huh? Big cities are the worst places ever. Best to hole up as a hermit on a 50-acre property where the the gamma rays from space can't geolocate you.
Point being that the idea of "coding" and "putting your hands on the metal" is so much more accessible to the normal person nowadays that anyone who has access to something that looks a little more technical than a toaster gets the idea that they are within reach of a job as a coding ninja.
Another is that coding won't be the primary job of most of the college graduates in the future, but that it will be a necessary subset of skills required to do a job (not realistic until it's sold that way).
We're probably already at the place where anyone with an Sparkfun account feels like they're an expert, and coding is something anyone can and should pick up.
Anecdote incoming, which I fully acknowledge is not the singular of "data": I was having an eye-roll moment recently when a young woman I follow on Facebook (who isn't in tech for a living) espoused using Arduino to learn about computer security as a way to tell people to "educate yourselves" (as if, somehow, YouTube isn't an acceptable tool for learning things, and far more versatile...it was far more a play to say "hey, I know Arduino, pat me on the back for being so smart, would ya?").
I imagine, though, she didn't pick up that attitude in a vacuum.
I acknowledge that Arduino is quite a powerful tool for a lot of things, but fiddling with one makes you about as much an expert as picking up a baseball bat makes you a professional ballplayer.
Point being that the idea of "coding" and "putting your hands on the metal" is so much more accessible to the normal person nowadays that anyone who has access to something that looks a little more technical than a toaster is within reach of a job as a coding ninja.
Yeah, I know, he's laying on the heavy appeal to emotion of "b-b-but my SIXTEEN YEAR OLD DAUGHTER!!!!", when really it should be the privacy of his entire family that's at stake here.
The law hasn't caught up with technology, and knowing a few things about how the government works, it's not going to for another few years.
But there are a few things about common decency that need to be acknowledged here.
One is that if a drone of unknown origin is hovering over your house, as is alleged here, it very likely has a camera and is watching something.
Another is while there's no absolute right to privacy that's can delineate whether or not privacy is being violated, I think we can agree that if a drone is flying over head and stops over your house, it should be perfectly fine to assume that if you don't know the origin, there's ill intent involved.
A third is if some person who is unknown to you is hanging around your house and looking in the windows, you do your damndest to make sure they don't do it anymore.
A fourth is coming to the reasonable assumption that the drone pilot knows what he/she is doing.
And finally, since the law isn't really clear on what drones can/will do, you can be pretty damned sure the police can do virtually nothing about said drone.
Therefore, I'd fucking shoot the thing to make sure that the owner of said drone understands that the protection of my home and property is serious fucking business to me.
The mistake you're making is that you think GG wasn't already a thing.
It just wasn't called "Gamergate".
Talk to anyone in any given subculture with a propensity for getting a bad rap from the outside and you'll find someone with a story of how some group of outsiders walked in, demanded to be paid attention to before earning status, and decided it wanted to rule the roost by taking authority away from the people who built it by power of slandering using blackmail:
"You nerds change your ways to suit us, your new overlords, or we're going to tell everyone how awful you are. And don't think for a second they'll believe you over us. Confirmation bias, bitches!"
It's been seen in comics, sci-fi, BDSM, metal and atheism. All groups subject to one level or another of people coming in for a hostile takeover and demanding "safe spaces" and "diversity" instead of promoting their own corner and unity despite differences. It's making enemies where you should be making friends. It's the hypocritical posturing of saying: "We're not the threatening ones, but cross us and there will be hell to pay!"
Make no mistake. This kind of fight has been around for years.
Who the fuck cares how many women visit the site, as long as you have quality content? Women can choose to click, on it, or not. The only thing the site should care about is money.
Good tech news doesn't really care about the contents of your pants.
I'll concede that it's difficult to just let that go when the charge goes basically unchecked in the court of public opinion.
However, I would tell anyone in the debate the exact same thing I said about Brianna Wu a few days ago:
You project what you want to be seen as. If the main thing you talk about is identity politics, then do you really have the right to claim you want to have a discussion about something else?
The fact that feminist websites still bother with the business make me wonder why feminists are taken seriously at all.
The loudest feminist voices about the "crimes" against women in first-world nations are often the ones least qualified to talk about it.
(Oh, so you're in "gender studies", but you're marching into tech offices across the country to demand how shit should be done, huh? How precious of you. Would you also like to wear a tiara while you take your afternoon tea?)
"men are doing all the bad things and women are the helpless victims" idea we are presented with all the time here.
That's the thing that continually irks me about this whole business.
Under this whole idea does the whole feminist house of cards fall down.
You're a strong, capable woman, until you're confronted with *gasp* bad words on the internet?
Fuck, if someone calls me a cunt (because, apparently, that's the worst thing you can call a woman), guess what? I'm having a really good day. If that's the worst thing you've got for me, and not, say, a bullet to the head, I'm-a have me a party because life is good, and, bonus, I managed to piss someone off enough that they decided on the nuclear option.
Except it's not "nuclear" because it doesn't bother me.
Guess what, Slashdot, and incoming new owners, there are more women like me out there, who don't give a fuck about a few naughty words on the internet. We drink, we smoke cigars, we watch porn, we swear, we play and watch sports, and we're not weepy little damsels who need a leg up, because sistahs be doin' it for ourselves.
We don't need no stinking women's "initiatives", because we got the goods already. Always have. And any woman who says different isn't in the game for the love, they're in it to be a "woman in..." because they want a pat on the back for being a woman doing it.
Except neither side was willing to let any of that go. That's the problem I had with it.
You want to be about ethics in journalism, then ignore the talk of misogyny, since it's not doing any good anyway. And just because you call the biggest agitators "Literally Who" doesn't mean you've stopped talking about them.
You want to have games be more "educational" and less "violent"? Stop pretending gaming is a binary world and make your own games, not tearing down the people actually working in the field with thin accusations and petty bullshit. It's not like the market has only so much room in it.
Both sides were dishonest, about a lot of things. I simply hated the misrepresentation of the narrative the anti-side put forward.
Because I search sites that aren't blatantly biased pro-radical-feminist garbage?
I have a feeling that no evidence for my side of the argument is ever going to be good enough for you, so I'm not even going to bother trying to refute anything you're saying here.
And no, I've actually done more research on the MRA, it seems, than you have.
MRAs =/= MGTOW =/= Return of Kings.
They are separate paradigms. I know this because I'm not afraid of hunting down information from the source. It seems you have a problem doing that.
In fact, RoK detests MRAs, but, if you'd even bothered to look past pro-feminist literature on the matter, you might know that.
As someone who ends up on the side of the pro-GG side of the argument more often than not, I can't imagine that Gamergate is all that important to anyone that far removed from either the people directly affected or anyone willing to jump in and be a part of it.
In fact, the reason I ended up doing any research on the matter at all is because another site I frequent tends to use terms like "Gamergater" as a derogatory term without any context as a reminder that we're supposed to think of that guy as bad (much the same way that "MRA" is used and misused) and thus disregard any opinions that the accused has for fear of catching the plague.
So I researched it. I had to do more work than I wanted to, really, particularly in proportion to how big it is. And it's not big. It's a teeny-tiny little world that to escape, all I have to do is browse away from any site talking about it and it's gone from my sight.
Point being, I'm actually quite glad that Slashdot didn't add Gamergate to the stinking, festering pile of identity politics it already took upon itself to be responsible for.
Thank you. I am also mixed race and I feel the same as you do, in that, I don't need extra help, and I don't need to point out that I am a woman every time I goof up at things (I goof up because I'm not perfect).
It's nice to know I have a fantasy-world husband now. Our babies will be steampunk parkour ninjas. No baby-sized fedoras for our little sprouts!
Most people want the comfort of familiarity in many situations. That's not surprising. It's why they fall prey to the "I work with my friends" mentality.
It isn't bad, but if the only people that are your friends are the people you work with, you've got a looming problem ahead of you.
I joined a church to attempt to combat that, but then I fell into the participation trap there as well. And then when I got burned out (though no shortage of interpersonal politics played into this as well), and I told them exactly what I put in the above post, they seemed really surprised when I took a long walk.
You already lose credibility by citing "We Hunted the Mammoth", a hatefully biased source in and of itself.
And yes, I did my research. As far as I can tell, the whole Zoe Post thing was just a breaking point in a long drawn-out consumer unrest that should have begun and ended with "we're not clicking your pages anymore, sorry".
As for Brianna Wu, I'd never heard of her before Gamergate. The first I'd ever heard of her was that she'd been harassed. That was it. Her game was nothing special. And I follow gaming enough to not be totally ignorant about what goes on in the community, even though I'm not a big gamer anymore.
And I cannot condone the idea of blaming many for the actions of a few. Threats happened, sure, but by a stark minority. They should be singled out and punished accordingly, but to blame a group using a hashtag? That's nonsense and antithetical to true justice.
My point still stands, though. She wants to be taken seriously as a developer before a feminist champion, then that's the face she should show to the community. If she wants to be a pundit, that's fine, but she can't whine and pout that she's not being taken seriously as a developer when in her public persona it takes a back seat to being a victim of a movement whose crimes can barely be addressed by little more than stereotypes.
Basically, what I'm saying is not that she imagined the threats; in fact I believe that she has received them - part and parcel for being a public figure, you see.
No, what I am saying is that she used the few threats she got and "inflated" it into what she characterizes as a "terror movement" for which she can call out a snipe hunt.
And think what you want of Gamergate*, but I have zero belief that it is an organized threat aimed at hounding women out of videogames. It's been around nearly a year, and if it truly were a movement that intended to carry out such awful plans, it's either extremely terrible at it, or (and this is more likely) isn't even doing that in the first place.
The media's in the tank for women. If women were being hounded out in droves, the media would make no hesitation to blow it up into a newsworthy thread. As it stands, no credible threat has surfaced on any supposed Gamergate "targets". I wonder why that is.
As for Ms. Wu herself, had she any compunction towards personal responsibility, she wouldn't be blaming Gamergate. She'd be looking for the precise people who were sending the threats. Not blaming a whole (leaderless and shapeless, might I add) group, which doubtlessly only a few of the really, really socially disordered ones are sending threats in the first place.
So no, I'm not saying that she's faking anything. Though her tack in combatting it is a trifle too optimistic for my tastes, particularly as she claims she's a feminist, and is thus a member of a group that's all too quick to lay blame on a different shapeless and leaderless group ("The Patriarchy"**).
*Point of order: Gamergate is a strange entity that isn't terribly honest with itself, but isn't as bad as people like Ms. Wu would make it out to be. That's why I take neither side of that particular skirmish.
**If you're going to ask me to believe in "The Patriarchy", you may just as well ask me to believe in pink bunnies on the moon.
Slashdot Mirror
https://aoprals.state.gov/web9...
No per diem rates for the moon.
Well, that settles it. If the State Department doesn't have per diem for it, it must mean no travel took place.
How can you fill out TDY forms if you don't have a per diem rate that you can cash in on, amirite, Govvies on Slashdot?
As was sci-fi and children's cartoons before it.
Who cares? Nobody's forcing you to spend money on it.
Wasn't surprised to hear The Hacktory decided to get involved. Philly's got a pretty active "maker" culture, and isn't exactly short of a few colleges that have healthy STEM departments.
But what do I know, huh? Big cities are the worst places ever. Best to hole up as a hermit on a 50-acre property where the the gamma rays from space can't geolocate you.
No mod points, just wanted to say +1 Funny, would LOL again.
Sorry, what I meant was:
Point being that the idea of "coding" and "putting your hands on the metal" is so much more accessible to the normal person nowadays that anyone who has access to something that looks a little more technical than a toaster gets the idea that they are within reach of a job as a coding ninja.
That's one theory (and the more realistic one).
Another is that coding won't be the primary job of most of the college graduates in the future, but that it will be a necessary subset of skills required to do a job (not realistic until it's sold that way).
We're probably already at the place where anyone with an Sparkfun account feels like they're an expert, and coding is something anyone can and should pick up.
Anecdote incoming, which I fully acknowledge is not the singular of "data": I was having an eye-roll moment recently when a young woman I follow on Facebook (who isn't in tech for a living) espoused using Arduino to learn about computer security as a way to tell people to "educate yourselves" (as if, somehow, YouTube isn't an acceptable tool for learning things, and far more versatile...it was far more a play to say "hey, I know Arduino, pat me on the back for being so smart, would ya?").
I imagine, though, she didn't pick up that attitude in a vacuum.
I acknowledge that Arduino is quite a powerful tool for a lot of things, but fiddling with one makes you about as much an expert as picking up a baseball bat makes you a professional ballplayer.
Point being that the idea of "coding" and "putting your hands on the metal" is so much more accessible to the normal person nowadays that anyone who has access to something that looks a little more technical than a toaster is within reach of a job as a coding ninja.
Social engineering is strongly related to computer hacking?
And would have taken the arrest in stride.
Yeah, I know, he's laying on the heavy appeal to emotion of "b-b-but my SIXTEEN YEAR OLD DAUGHTER!!!!", when really it should be the privacy of his entire family that's at stake here.
The law hasn't caught up with technology, and knowing a few things about how the government works, it's not going to for another few years.
But there are a few things about common decency that need to be acknowledged here.
One is that if a drone of unknown origin is hovering over your house, as is alleged here, it very likely has a camera and is watching something.
Another is while there's no absolute right to privacy that's can delineate whether or not privacy is being violated, I think we can agree that if a drone is flying over head and stops over your house, it should be perfectly fine to assume that if you don't know the origin, there's ill intent involved.
A third is if some person who is unknown to you is hanging around your house and looking in the windows, you do your damndest to make sure they don't do it anymore.
A fourth is coming to the reasonable assumption that the drone pilot knows what he/she is doing.
And finally, since the law isn't really clear on what drones can/will do, you can be pretty damned sure the police can do virtually nothing about said drone.
Therefore, I'd fucking shoot the thing to make sure that the owner of said drone understands that the protection of my home and property is serious fucking business to me.
The mistake you're making is that you think GG wasn't already a thing.
It just wasn't called "Gamergate".
Talk to anyone in any given subculture with a propensity for getting a bad rap from the outside and you'll find someone with a story of how some group of outsiders walked in, demanded to be paid attention to before earning status, and decided it wanted to rule the roost by taking authority away from the people who built it by power of slandering using blackmail:
"You nerds change your ways to suit us, your new overlords, or we're going to tell everyone how awful you are. And don't think for a second they'll believe you over us. Confirmation bias, bitches!"
It's been seen in comics, sci-fi, BDSM, metal and atheism. All groups subject to one level or another of people coming in for a hostile takeover and demanding "safe spaces" and "diversity" instead of promoting their own corner and unity despite differences. It's making enemies where you should be making friends. It's the hypocritical posturing of saying: "We're not the threatening ones, but cross us and there will be hell to pay!"
Make no mistake. This kind of fight has been around for years.
Seriously?
"Larger social context"?
Who the fuck cares how many women visit the site, as long as you have quality content? Women can choose to click, on it, or not. The only thing the site should care about is money.
Good tech news doesn't really care about the contents of your pants.
I'll concede that it's difficult to just let that go when the charge goes basically unchecked in the court of public opinion.
However, I would tell anyone in the debate the exact same thing I said about Brianna Wu a few days ago:
You project what you want to be seen as. If the main thing you talk about is identity politics, then do you really have the right to claim you want to have a discussion about something else?
The fact that feminist websites still bother with the business make me wonder why feminists are taken seriously at all.
The loudest feminist voices about the "crimes" against women in first-world nations are often the ones least qualified to talk about it.
(Oh, so you're in "gender studies", but you're marching into tech offices across the country to demand how shit should be done, huh? How precious of you. Would you also like to wear a tiara while you take your afternoon tea?)
"men are doing all the bad things and women are the helpless victims" idea we are presented with all the time here.
That's the thing that continually irks me about this whole business.
Under this whole idea does the whole feminist house of cards fall down.
You're a strong, capable woman, until you're confronted with *gasp* bad words on the internet?
Fuck, if someone calls me a cunt (because, apparently, that's the worst thing you can call a woman), guess what? I'm having a really good day. If that's the worst thing you've got for me, and not, say, a bullet to the head, I'm-a have me a party because life is good, and, bonus, I managed to piss someone off enough that they decided on the nuclear option.
Except it's not "nuclear" because it doesn't bother me.
Guess what, Slashdot, and incoming new owners, there are more women like me out there, who don't give a fuck about a few naughty words on the internet. We drink, we smoke cigars, we watch porn, we swear, we play and watch sports, and we're not weepy little damsels who need a leg up, because sistahs be doin' it for ourselves.
We don't need no stinking women's "initiatives", because we got the goods already. Always have. And any woman who says different isn't in the game for the love, they're in it to be a "woman in..." because they want a pat on the back for being a woman doing it.
Except neither side was willing to let any of that go. That's the problem I had with it.
You want to be about ethics in journalism, then ignore the talk of misogyny, since it's not doing any good anyway. And just because you call the biggest agitators "Literally Who" doesn't mean you've stopped talking about them.
You want to have games be more "educational" and less "violent"? Stop pretending gaming is a binary world and make your own games, not tearing down the people actually working in the field with thin accusations and petty bullshit. It's not like the market has only so much room in it.
Both sides were dishonest, about a lot of things. I simply hated the misrepresentation of the narrative the anti-side put forward.
Because I search sites that aren't blatantly biased pro-radical-feminist garbage?
I have a feeling that no evidence for my side of the argument is ever going to be good enough for you, so I'm not even going to bother trying to refute anything you're saying here.
And no, I've actually done more research on the MRA, it seems, than you have.
MRAs =/= MGTOW =/= Return of Kings.
They are separate paradigms. I know this because I'm not afraid of hunting down information from the source. It seems you have a problem doing that.
In fact, RoK detests MRAs, but, if you'd even bothered to look past pro-feminist literature on the matter, you might know that.
As someone who ends up on the side of the pro-GG side of the argument more often than not, I can't imagine that Gamergate is all that important to anyone that far removed from either the people directly affected or anyone willing to jump in and be a part of it.
In fact, the reason I ended up doing any research on the matter at all is because another site I frequent tends to use terms like "Gamergater" as a derogatory term without any context as a reminder that we're supposed to think of that guy as bad (much the same way that "MRA" is used and misused) and thus disregard any opinions that the accused has for fear of catching the plague.
So I researched it. I had to do more work than I wanted to, really, particularly in proportion to how big it is. And it's not big. It's a teeny-tiny little world that to escape, all I have to do is browse away from any site talking about it and it's gone from my sight.
Point being, I'm actually quite glad that Slashdot didn't add Gamergate to the stinking, festering pile of identity politics it already took upon itself to be responsible for.
Read my responses to serviscope_minor above, in which I state in no uncertain terms that I believe she did receive threats.
And my post hardly reads as "desperate". Your characterization as such is projection, since I have at no time presented a case that seems tenuous.
You got your hypothesis in my theory!
You got your theory in my hypothesis!
Alas, the end result isn't a Reese's cup.
Or maybe string cheese theory?
Mmmmm...string cheese...
So when they get back, is it a good time to start telling "Yo Mama" jokes?
Thank you. I am also mixed race and I feel the same as you do, in that, I don't need extra help, and I don't need to point out that I am a woman every time I goof up at things (I goof up because I'm not perfect).
It's nice to know I have a fantasy-world husband now. Our babies will be steampunk parkour ninjas. No baby-sized fedoras for our little sprouts!
Most people want the comfort of familiarity in many situations. That's not surprising. It's why they fall prey to the "I work with my friends" mentality.
It isn't bad, but if the only people that are your friends are the people you work with, you've got a looming problem ahead of you.
I joined a church to attempt to combat that, but then I fell into the participation trap there as well. And then when I got burned out (though no shortage of interpersonal politics played into this as well), and I told them exactly what I put in the above post, they seemed really surprised when I took a long walk.
You already lose credibility by citing "We Hunted the Mammoth", a hatefully biased source in and of itself.
And yes, I did my research. As far as I can tell, the whole Zoe Post thing was just a breaking point in a long drawn-out consumer unrest that should have begun and ended with "we're not clicking your pages anymore, sorry".
As for Brianna Wu, I'd never heard of her before Gamergate. The first I'd ever heard of her was that she'd been harassed. That was it. Her game was nothing special. And I follow gaming enough to not be totally ignorant about what goes on in the community, even though I'm not a big gamer anymore.
And I cannot condone the idea of blaming many for the actions of a few. Threats happened, sure, but by a stark minority. They should be singled out and punished accordingly, but to blame a group using a hashtag? That's nonsense and antithetical to true justice.
My point still stands, though. She wants to be taken seriously as a developer before a feminist champion, then that's the face she should show to the community. If she wants to be a pundit, that's fine, but she can't whine and pout that she's not being taken seriously as a developer when in her public persona it takes a back seat to being a victim of a movement whose crimes can barely be addressed by little more than stereotypes.
Sorry, not "optimistic" but "opportunistic".
You're gleaning a lot.
Basically, what I'm saying is not that she imagined the threats; in fact I believe that she has received them - part and parcel for being a public figure, you see.
No, what I am saying is that she used the few threats she got and "inflated" it into what she characterizes as a "terror movement" for which she can call out a snipe hunt.
And think what you want of Gamergate*, but I have zero belief that it is an organized threat aimed at hounding women out of videogames. It's been around nearly a year, and if it truly were a movement that intended to carry out such awful plans, it's either extremely terrible at it, or (and this is more likely) isn't even doing that in the first place.
The media's in the tank for women. If women were being hounded out in droves, the media would make no hesitation to blow it up into a newsworthy thread. As it stands, no credible threat has surfaced on any supposed Gamergate "targets". I wonder why that is.
As for Ms. Wu herself, had she any compunction towards personal responsibility, she wouldn't be blaming Gamergate. She'd be looking for the precise people who were sending the threats. Not blaming a whole (leaderless and shapeless, might I add) group, which doubtlessly only a few of the really, really socially disordered ones are sending threats in the first place.
So no, I'm not saying that she's faking anything. Though her tack in combatting it is a trifle too optimistic for my tastes, particularly as she claims she's a feminist, and is thus a member of a group that's all too quick to lay blame on a different shapeless and leaderless group ("The Patriarchy"**).
*Point of order: Gamergate is a strange entity that isn't terribly honest with itself, but isn't as bad as people like Ms. Wu would make it out to be. That's why I take neither side of that particular skirmish.
**If you're going to ask me to believe in "The Patriarchy", you may just as well ask me to believe in pink bunnies on the moon.