Dimwit, I will explain.
I will use smalls number so you can understand.
There are 2 people majoring in CS, they genuinely like it etc. They are both men (duh).
Now the salaries go crazy and the greedy show up, 4 men and 4 women join the program. What just happened to the skew?
So you are proposing that in fact the absolute numbers completely changed around in 1984, and that's what caused this? OK...so why didn't you actually go grab those numbers to prove me wrong?
Perhaps because the actual numbers don't show that? See, the absolute enrollment numbers for men and women went up during that period for a further 2 years, and then leveled off. There was a bubble there, but it peaked years after the share of women did, and the level on either side in absolute terms was roughly the 1983 numbers (whereas the delta afterwards has been steadily increasing). So no, there isn't really any relation between the absolute numbers and relative ones, and no, there was no huge drop off in enrollments in 1984.
Bah. Enough of doing trivial research for sexists with intellectual projection issues. Next time, do your own googling. I'm not interested in any more rectally-extracted theories.
Anything relating to race brings out the white supremacists.
That I've seen too. To a letter extent than the mysongony, but it happens. The thing is, the proverbial "racist, sexist, anti-gay..." folks are always here. They post on every story. Browse at -1 and you'll see what I mean. The difference is that on a story like this, the moderators agree with them.
None of your data support your argument that this is a problem though. What if women just aren't majorly interested in programming in IT, just like it seems men are less interested in daycare work ?
You are seriously countering objective data with "What if..." and absolutely nothing else? Simply stopping your search for information the instant you hit on something possibly exculpatory is for climate deniers and anti-vaxxers, not a self-respecting nerd. If you think there's a hole there, attack it. Go find yourself some data on women's "natural interests" that controls for societal effects, and throw it up here.
(Hint: unless you are far better at this than I, you won't find it. I've looked. It turns out that women's personalities aren't that different from men's, and what differences do seem to exist aren't of either the kind or the magnitude required to explain the data).
The girls were just picking majors based on salary surveys.
And guys don't do this? You have some data to back this speculation up with? I wouldn't dare make a blanket speculation about jewish people all being greedy or black people all being lazy without even a fig leaf of data to hold up. So why is it OK to do that with a stereotype-based argument about women being greedy and less interested in intellectual pursuits for their own sake than men?
I really don't get this. I don't get why its OK with everyone for an entire industry to be such a huge demographic anomaly, I don't get why its OK to dismiss every fact presented with BS made up on the spot, and I don't get why its OK to use complaints about it as a free excuse to spread unsupported (and provably wrong) stereotypes. Its like this one topic somehow magically transforms a community of data and logic driven thinkers into the Divinity School of Liberty University.
Stories about women in tech always bring out the best in Slashdot readers.
It really has gotten to where I dread opening any such story. For everything else, I can find really good insightful commentary. For this subject, it seems like all the moderators are members of the Bobby Riggs fan club.
The fact that 48% of first programmers are women does nothing to show more women are getting into programming. It is entirely possible (and maybe probable) that it's been 48% for a long time,
It hasn't been. For instance, here's a graph showing CS undergrad degrees (which ought to correlate a fair bit) plotted against the rate at which women enroll for other degrees. For every other degree there's a steady upward trend, but for women something weird happened in 1984 and they peaked there at about 37%. Last year (assuming I'm reading it right) only about 18% of CS undergrads were women. If there's been a big spike up, that's encouraging to see.
FWIW, I got my degree in '89 and this jibes pretty well with my experience. After my first year in the industry, when yes about a third of my coworkers were women, I had seemingly fewer female colleagues every year. My immediate development group has had no females in it since I started here in 1998, until this summer when we had a female intern for a few months.
One wonders why someone would speculate on this subject, when data is easily available. It really amazes me the length (male) people will go to in order to argue that there's no real problem here. I guess some guys really like living in 1975. Ugh.
Well, I don't know about where you live, but my understanding here is that you technically aren't supposed to go into the intersection at all unless you have the right of way, or there's nobody coming. Yes, most everyone if they are first in line for a left does just what you describe (including quite often me). However, you aren't supposed to.
One way this can hose you is that a lot of intersections have a weight on the left turn lane to detect when people need to turn and give them that protected left at the end of the green cycle. If you're waiting in the middle of the intersection and there's nobody behind you on that weight, you won't get your protected left.
Which is always going to be the problem... because as long as there are human drivers on the road, there will always be cases in which the computer utterly fails
More to the point, some folks are liable to learn how to abuse the algorithms. For example, depending on how its written, it might be quite possible to "herd" the google car somewhere it wouldn't otherwise go (eg: into a strip mall, onto the railroad tracks with an oncoming train, etc).
That's the UK. In Oklahoma (each US state has its own laws), if the light is red and you haven't made it through the intersection yet, that's a violation. Yellow is just a nice warning that you'd better get yourself out of the intersection before red happens.
On the plus side, that's a lot more objective. However, it has the unfortunate side-effect of inducing people to step on the gas in intersections.
...and yet another one is if it was dark or within a few minutes of dusk/dawn and you didn't have headlights on. Found that one out the hard way too. My son got hit by another teenaged driver on the way to school, made the mistake of answering "I'm not sure" to questions about whether he had his lights on and what the exact time in the morning was, and ended up at fault.:-(
Here in Oklahoma it just means the light is about to turn red. If its red, and you are in the intersection for some reason, that's when you can be cited.
Yeah, that rule of thumb about not braking "suddenly" because the light changed is still a good rule of thumb, but legally it has no weight. If I get ticketed, "it was yellow when I entered the intersection", or even "I would have had to slam on the brakes" is no excuse.
Primarily because the Christian Church has never claimed that the Christian Bible was received already written and merely transcribed.
Let's test this statement, with the actual doctrine of the USA's largest Christian demonization, the Southern Baptists, straight from their own website:
The Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired and is God's revelation of Himself to man. It is a perfect treasure of divine instruction. It has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter. Therefore, all Scripture is totally true and trustworthy.
So according to this, yes The Bible was authored by God, and merely transcribed by a collection of humans.
Of course this is already provably incorrect (or irrelevant, depending on how you look at it), because we don't have originals for any of the books of The Bible, the oldest copies are not entirely consistent with each other, and the books aren't consistent amongst themselves when they refer to the same events (or even try to transcribe the same passages). So its a little hypocritical for folks from countries with a Christian heritage to be pointing at the Koran and yelling "Aha!" over a couple decade discrepancy in the age of some parchment when they have this gigantic log in their own eye...
Its not even all that weird. Writing material was expensive back then, particularly for desert-dwellers. Its not at all uncommon to find ancient handwritten texts using reused paper (or parchment or whatever was used).
This whole thing is downright silly. If it dated to much *younger* than the traditional date of the Koran, that would be news. That the writing surface is a smidge older proves absolutely nothing.
Compare this with "The Bible", which actually does not exist as a single thing anywhere, but is known to us from a mismatched assortment of copied and recopied handwritten snippets that don't even match up with each other. The Koran is in much better shape as an authoritative source than that, but it doesn't stop a large amount of Christians from claiming The Bible is the inerrant word of God. So claiming this finding proves anything about the divinity of the Koran is somewhere between naive and offensive.
OK, now who's going to be monitoring those people, evaluating their performance, firing ones that aren't up to snuff, recruiting and hiring new ones, etc? You can't hire your way out of a "too many responsibilities" problem, any more than you can code yourself out of a "too many layers of indirection" problem by adding another layer of indirection.
A home is normally the single biggest item a person spends their income on, and with good reason
For a typical middle-class person, sure? For someone on the lower end of the upper class even, probably (the tax break is tough to beat). But for the true upper class, you should be spreading your investments around. At that level, you have plenty of other useful things you can do for investments and tax dodges. Unless you want to spend all day following the market, probably the best thing to do would be to put most of it in big indexed funds, and live off the interest (aka: a "Trust Fund"). But I'm not in that weight-class, so someone there could probably advise you better.
I depends on what you consider "obscure". If LISP counts, it is probably the most important obscure language ever, just because it influenced the design of nearly every major modern "scripting" language. Particularly those that aren't procedural.
If you mean languages most have probably never heard of, I'd go with CMS-2 It was (and probably still is) used extensively in shipboard systems in the US Navy. It was also the Navy's first crack at a "unified" language. This led to a concerted effort to get rid of the hundreds of single-purpose languages that helped make DoD systems so expensive and difficult to maintain. That led to the development of Ada, its temporary manadate, and to about a 20 year period starting in the 80's where small languages were looked down upon by the CS community.
This has recently been changing, with a profusion of new "Domain-Specific Languages". Give it a new buzzword, and what was old is cool again.
Interestingly, it seems he's already tried what I probably would have gone for at his age: Buying a ginormous house and trying to act like a hedonistic big shot.
As a... more experienced person nearing 50, I think my priorities would be different. Big houses suck. They require continual maintenance, and who's going to be wasting their time shepherding all that? Having to deal with stupid BS little issues all day is precisely what he sold to MS to avoid. The more big expensive crap you acquire, the more effort has to be expended to maintain it all. No wonder he's made himself miserable. I can always trade time for money, and that certainly goes moreso for someone with his new financial resources. Its TIME that is precious.
Today, I'd find a fun interesting place to live, and *rent* myself a place there. Preferably somewhere walkable, so I wouldn't have to maintain a car (gawd, what a time and money sink those things are). I'd probably approach a local charity (like the food bank) and offer to do some free computer work for them. Knowing myself (and as a developer he's probably similar), it wouldn't take long to find some really interesting problem in there that could have wide application.
As for meeting people, how is he going to meet cool new people while locked behind gates in that mansion? Blah.
This was basically the main plot element of John Scalzi's Redshirts
Yup, that's precisely where I got the idea. This would be pretty different, as in Redshirts they essentially invaded the writers' universe to force them to resolve the plot holes in theirs to end the whole thing properly. They essentially blew a huge gaping hole in the "third wall". GQ, due to its setup doesn't have that third wall problem. (unless you count the aliens who don't understand the concept of fiction). What I'm talking about is simply bringing a writer along on the ship for their weekly "adventures".
The idea behind Galaxy Quest was really neat for a single story. The problem with doing a series that way is that after an episode or two, it will necessarily just devolve into the bad Trek clone the movie was parodying. Voyager had the same problem. They set up this neat twist with mortal enemies forced to work together on the same ship to survive, but then once the pilot was over they were all chummy (because the fundamental survival problem was still there), and the rest of the run it became just another Trek TOS clone.
I can see two good ways out of this:
Way 1: Don't resolve the main plot in the pilot. Basically, they'd need to stretch the entire move out over a 3-5 season arc, more like Babylon-5 than like Trek. A lot of modern shows are doing this. The only issue is that it tends to make the series feel really slow and boring if you don't throw some other little things in there to resolve. There's only so much foreplay a guy will sit through...
Way 2: This time, take a writer with them. An actor playing a writer, I mean. Someone to think up the silly resolutions (like the stuff that TNG always had Wesley do). So every week the "writer" would have to think up a new ridiculous way to get everyone out of the latest pickle. After all, it was really the writers who thought up the BS resolutions that made Galaxy Quest (OK, Trek) so silly. There's probably enough silly kinds of SF plot devices to parody that you could get a good two or three seasons out of it.
At the time, the stories coming out were that there was a delay in the request for assistance, which is required before the federal government can come help.
In an emergency, with lives at stake, you are supposed to do what is needed and worry about the "proper" paperwork and chain of command later. Insisting you can't save lives without XQA dash 5 filled out is the kind of crap that our soldiers in WWII used to call chickenshit.
insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances. Chickenshit is so called — instead of horse — or bull — or elephant shit — because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously. Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war
This is pretty much an exact characterization of the response we got from the Federal government at the time, and the excuses that are still thrown up for their inaction today. Of course this is the exact flavor of shit you can expect when the POTUS in question hires a political donor to head an Emergency response agency instead of an experienced disaster response leader (as the POTUSes before and after him did).
When disaster strikes, and the locals aren't equipped to deal with it on their own, we need leaders, not chickenshits. That's what we are supposed to have a federal government for.
Additionally, Kansas has a very unusual history wrt the major parties. Look up Bleeding Kansas. Until fairly recently, the Democratic party wasn't a politically viable option at the state level or lower, so the national blue-red divide tends to play out there within the Republican party.
That means most of the political rules of thumb that apply elsewhere in the country don't necessarily apply there.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. While as insulting as all my other responses, this one is at least based on actual data. Bravo to you, AC!
Dimwit, I will explain. I will use smalls number so you can understand. There are 2 people majoring in CS, they genuinely like it etc. They are both men (duh). Now the salaries go crazy and the greedy show up, 4 men and 4 women join the program. What just happened to the skew?
So you are proposing that in fact the absolute numbers completely changed around in 1984, and that's what caused this? OK...so why didn't you actually go grab those numbers to prove me wrong?
Perhaps because the actual numbers don't show that? See, the absolute enrollment numbers for men and women went up during that period for a further 2 years, and then leveled off. There was a bubble there, but it peaked years after the share of women did, and the level on either side in absolute terms was roughly the 1983 numbers (whereas the delta afterwards has been steadily increasing). So no, there isn't really any relation between the absolute numbers and relative ones, and no, there was no huge drop off in enrollments in 1984.
Bah. Enough of doing trivial research for sexists with intellectual projection issues. Next time, do your own googling. I'm not interested in any more rectally-extracted theories.
Anything relating to race brings out the white supremacists.
That I've seen too. To a letter extent than the mysongony, but it happens. The thing is, the proverbial "racist, sexist, anti-gay..." folks are always here. They post on every story. Browse at -1 and you'll see what I mean. The difference is that on a story like this, the moderators agree with them.
That's the part that's so evil and depressing.
None of your data support your argument that this is a problem though. What if women just aren't majorly interested in programming in IT, just like it seems men are less interested in daycare work ?
You are seriously countering objective data with "What if..." and absolutely nothing else? Simply stopping your search for information the instant you hit on something possibly exculpatory is for climate deniers and anti-vaxxers, not a self-respecting nerd. If you think there's a hole there, attack it. Go find yourself some data on women's "natural interests" that controls for societal effects, and throw it up here.
(Hint: unless you are far better at this than I, you won't find it. I've looked. It turns out that women's personalities aren't that different from men's, and what differences do seem to exist aren't of either the kind or the magnitude required to explain the data).
The girls were just picking majors based on salary surveys.
And guys don't do this? You have some data to back this speculation up with? I wouldn't dare make a blanket speculation about jewish people all being greedy or black people all being lazy without even a fig leaf of data to hold up. So why is it OK to do that with a stereotype-based argument about women being greedy and less interested in intellectual pursuits for their own sake than men?
I really don't get this. I don't get why its OK with everyone for an entire industry to be such a huge demographic anomaly, I don't get why its OK to dismiss every fact presented with BS made up on the spot, and I don't get why its OK to use complaints about it as a free excuse to spread unsupported (and provably wrong) stereotypes. Its like this one topic somehow magically transforms a community of data and logic driven thinkers into the Divinity School of Liberty University.
Stories about women in tech always bring out the best in Slashdot readers.
It really has gotten to where I dread opening any such story. For everything else, I can find really good insightful commentary. For this subject, it seems like all the moderators are members of the Bobby Riggs fan club.
The fact that 48% of first programmers are women does nothing to show more women are getting into programming. It is entirely possible (and maybe probable) that it's been 48% for a long time,
It hasn't been. For instance, here's a graph showing CS undergrad degrees (which ought to correlate a fair bit) plotted against the rate at which women enroll for other degrees. For every other degree there's a steady upward trend, but for women something weird happened in 1984 and they peaked there at about 37%. Last year (assuming I'm reading it right) only about 18% of CS undergrads were women. If there's been a big spike up, that's encouraging to see.
FWIW, I got my degree in '89 and this jibes pretty well with my experience. After my first year in the industry, when yes about a third of my coworkers were women, I had seemingly fewer female colleagues every year. My immediate development group has had no females in it since I started here in 1998, until this summer when we had a female intern for a few months.
One wonders why someone would speculate on this subject, when data is easily available. It really amazes me the length (male) people will go to in order to argue that there's no real problem here. I guess some guys really like living in 1975. Ugh.
Well, I don't know about where you live, but my understanding here is that you technically aren't supposed to go into the intersection at all unless you have the right of way, or there's nobody coming. Yes, most everyone if they are first in line for a left does just what you describe (including quite often me). However, you aren't supposed to.
One way this can hose you is that a lot of intersections have a weight on the left turn lane to detect when people need to turn and give them that protected left at the end of the green cycle. If you're waiting in the middle of the intersection and there's nobody behind you on that weight, you won't get your protected left.
Which is always going to be the problem ... because as long as there are human drivers on the road, there will always be cases in which the computer utterly fails
More to the point, some folks are liable to learn how to abuse the algorithms. For example, depending on how its written, it might be quite possible to "herd" the google car somewhere it wouldn't otherwise go (eg: into a strip mall, onto the railroad tracks with an oncoming train, etc).
That's the UK. In Oklahoma (each US state has its own laws), if the light is red and you haven't made it through the intersection yet, that's a violation. Yellow is just a nice warning that you'd better get yourself out of the intersection before red happens.
On the plus side, that's a lot more objective. However, it has the unfortunate side-effect of inducing people to step on the gas in intersections.
...and yet another one is if it was dark or within a few minutes of dusk/dawn and you didn't have headlights on. Found that one out the hard way too. My son got hit by another teenaged driver on the way to school, made the mistake of answering "I'm not sure" to questions about whether he had his lights on and what the exact time in the morning was, and ended up at fault. :-(
Here in Oklahoma it just means the light is about to turn red. If its red, and you are in the intersection for some reason, that's when you can be cited.
Yeah, that rule of thumb about not braking "suddenly" because the light changed is still a good rule of thumb, but legally it has no weight. If I get ticketed, "it was yellow when I entered the intersection", or even "I would have had to slam on the brakes" is no excuse.
Found that one out the hard way.
Parts were written down, by heretics.
...where "heretics" means "people whose beliefs are inconvenient to their rulers".
Primarily because the Christian Church has never claimed that the Christian Bible was received already written and merely transcribed.
Let's test this statement, with the actual doctrine of the USA's largest Christian demonization, the Southern Baptists, straight from their own website:
The Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired and is God's revelation of Himself to man. It is a perfect treasure of divine instruction. It has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter. Therefore, all Scripture is totally true and trustworthy.
So according to this, yes The Bible was authored by God, and merely transcribed by a collection of humans.
Of course this is already provably incorrect (or irrelevant, depending on how you look at it), because we don't have originals for any of the books of The Bible, the oldest copies are not entirely consistent with each other, and the books aren't consistent amongst themselves when they refer to the same events (or even try to transcribe the same passages). So its a little hypocritical for folks from countries with a Christian heritage to be pointing at the Koran and yelling "Aha!" over a couple decade discrepancy in the age of some parchment when they have this gigantic log in their own eye...
Its not even all that weird. Writing material was expensive back then, particularly for desert-dwellers. Its not at all uncommon to find ancient handwritten texts using reused paper (or parchment or whatever was used).
This whole thing is downright silly. If it dated to much *younger* than the traditional date of the Koran, that would be news. That the writing surface is a smidge older proves absolutely nothing.
Compare this with "The Bible", which actually does not exist as a single thing anywhere, but is known to us from a mismatched assortment of copied and recopied handwritten snippets that don't even match up with each other. The Koran is in much better shape as an authoritative source than that, but it doesn't stop a large amount of Christians from claiming The Bible is the inerrant word of God. So claiming this finding proves anything about the divinity of the Koran is somewhere between naive and offensive.
The people you pay to do so?
OK, now who's going to be monitoring those people, evaluating their performance, firing ones that aren't up to snuff, recruiting and hiring new ones, etc? You can't hire your way out of a "too many responsibilities" problem, any more than you can code yourself out of a "too many layers of indirection" problem by adding another layer of indirection.
A home is normally the single biggest item a person spends their income on, and with good reason
For a typical middle-class person, sure? For someone on the lower end of the upper class even, probably (the tax break is tough to beat). But for the true upper class, you should be spreading your investments around. At that level, you have plenty of other useful things you can do for investments and tax dodges. Unless you want to spend all day following the market, probably the best thing to do would be to put most of it in big indexed funds, and live off the interest (aka: a "Trust Fund"). But I'm not in that weight-class, so someone there could probably advise you better.
I depends on what you consider "obscure". If LISP counts, it is probably the most important obscure language ever, just because it influenced the design of nearly every major modern "scripting" language. Particularly those that aren't procedural.
If you mean languages most have probably never heard of, I'd go with CMS-2 It was (and probably still is) used extensively in shipboard systems in the US Navy. It was also the Navy's first crack at a "unified" language. This led to a concerted effort to get rid of the hundreds of single-purpose languages that helped make DoD systems so expensive and difficult to maintain. That led to the development of Ada, its temporary manadate, and to about a 20 year period starting in the 80's where small languages were looked down upon by the CS community.
This has recently been changing, with a profusion of new "Domain-Specific Languages". Give it a new buzzword, and what was old is cool again.
Interestingly, it seems he's already tried what I probably would have gone for at his age: Buying a ginormous house and trying to act like a hedonistic big shot.
As a ... more experienced person nearing 50, I think my priorities would be different. Big houses suck. They require continual maintenance, and who's going to be wasting their time shepherding all that? Having to deal with stupid BS little issues all day is precisely what he sold to MS to avoid. The more big expensive crap you acquire, the more effort has to be expended to maintain it all. No wonder he's made himself miserable. I can always trade time for money, and that certainly goes moreso for someone with his new financial resources. Its TIME that is precious.
Today, I'd find a fun interesting place to live, and *rent* myself a place there. Preferably somewhere walkable, so I wouldn't have to maintain a car (gawd, what a time and money sink those things are). I'd probably approach a local charity (like the food bank) and offer to do some free computer work for them. Knowing myself (and as a developer he's probably similar), it wouldn't take long to find some really interesting problem in there that could have wide application.
As for meeting people, how is he going to meet cool new people while locked behind gates in that mansion? Blah.
This was basically the main plot element of John Scalzi's Redshirts
Yup, that's precisely where I got the idea. This would be pretty different, as in Redshirts they essentially invaded the writers' universe to force them to resolve the plot holes in theirs to end the whole thing properly. They essentially blew a huge gaping hole in the "third wall". GQ, due to its setup doesn't have that third wall problem. (unless you count the aliens who don't understand the concept of fiction). What I'm talking about is simply bringing a writer along on the ship for their weekly "adventures".
The idea behind Galaxy Quest was really neat for a single story. The problem with doing a series that way is that after an episode or two, it will necessarily just devolve into the bad Trek clone the movie was parodying. Voyager had the same problem. They set up this neat twist with mortal enemies forced to work together on the same ship to survive, but then once the pilot was over they were all chummy (because the fundamental survival problem was still there), and the rest of the run it became just another Trek TOS clone.
I can see two good ways out of this:
Way 1: Don't resolve the main plot in the pilot. Basically, they'd need to stretch the entire move out over a 3-5 season arc, more like Babylon-5 than like Trek. A lot of modern shows are doing this. The only issue is that it tends to make the series feel really slow and boring if you don't throw some other little things in there to resolve. There's only so much foreplay a guy will sit through...
Way 2: This time, take a writer with them. An actor playing a writer, I mean. Someone to think up the silly resolutions (like the stuff that TNG always had Wesley do). So every week the "writer" would have to think up a new ridiculous way to get everyone out of the latest pickle. After all, it was really the writers who thought up the BS resolutions that made Galaxy Quest (OK, Trek) so silly. There's probably enough silly kinds of SF plot devices to parody that you could get a good two or three seasons out of it.
At the time, the stories coming out were that there was a delay in the request for assistance, which is required before the federal government can come help.
In an emergency, with lives at stake, you are supposed to do what is needed and worry about the "proper" paperwork and chain of command later. Insisting you can't save lives without XQA dash 5 filled out is the kind of crap that our soldiers in WWII used to call chickenshit.
insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances. Chickenshit is so called — instead of horse — or bull — or elephant shit — because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously. Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war
This is pretty much an exact characterization of the response we got from the Federal government at the time, and the excuses that are still thrown up for their inaction today. Of course this is the exact flavor of shit you can expect when the POTUS in question hires a political donor to head an Emergency response agency instead of an experienced disaster response leader (as the POTUSes before and after him did).
When disaster strikes, and the locals aren't equipped to deal with it on their own, we need leaders, not chickenshits. That's what we are supposed to have a federal government for.
Additionally, Kansas has a very unusual history wrt the major parties. Look up Bleeding Kansas. Until fairly recently, the Democratic party wasn't a politically viable option at the state level or lower, so the national blue-red divide tends to play out there within the Republican party.
That means most of the political rules of thumb that apply elsewhere in the country don't necessarily apply there.
What has Notch programmed lately, other than the security code for his fabulous mansion?
After you get a $2.5 Billion payday, how hard will you work?
Good thing nobody told Notch that the days of the solo programmer are over.