Something similiar happened to a friend of mine at UCR a few years back. There were these *REALLY* radical lesbian types who had come to campus
In other words these were visitors
and been "preaching" all week -- you know the type, "I cant get a boyfriend, or I got raped, so all men are evil, lets eat pussy" kind of girls. They were male bashing on campus all week, so this frat went out and setup a table, and they each took giant cards to rate the women who passed by. Long story short -- they were hauled before the vice dean at the complaint of the radical lesbians who had been male bashing all week
Sounds like a classic case of some bullies who got upset when people stood up to them.
Another story at UCR -- happened to me personally, I got TOTALLY screwed out of a job. Now the university has an office that investigates unfair hiring practices, but ONLY as it applies to minorities. I was told since I was not a minority, woman, disabled, that they wouldnt investigate. So basically, the only group they DONT represent is -- white men.
But once we've eliminated gender discrimination (both against AND FOR, including the ridiculous idea that both genders are identical), it will tend toward that point on its own.
That isn't likely to happen for quite a while. Gender discrimination is complex, different discriminations interact with each other, things such as "peer-backed" discrimination tend to be ignored and there are plenty of advocates of all sorts of discrimination...
As long as women WANT to "marry UP" and can get away with it (and who wouldn't) they will always find themselves in relationships which work better if the male is the workaholic.
This also has the effect of meaning that average figures for men's earnings will tend to be greater than average figures of women's earnings. Which is something about which a lot of fuss is made. It is also possible that the average amount of money available for a woman to spend is greater than the average amount of money available for a man to spend...
This is why paternity leave is so vital to even out the marketplace. If companies have to pay for (and accept) the loss of their male employees in just the same way, it puts them on an equal footing.
Note that it does have to be an level of leave. Including issues like who pays. Even with this there is still the issue of Stay at Home parents even which parent does a school call first with a sick or injured child.
When you go for jobs, there are people who think, "Well, she's going to want to start a family soon, so I'd better not go with her; she's going to be undependable", without having any evidence of her dependability.
Quite likely an employer would get in trouble if the asked that question directly. Possibly from they experience that is a real risk...
What does "predisposed" mean? Before technology, there was no "technological work." Are you saying there was some evolutionary pressure, during the few thousand years that humans have had culture, for males to develop more technological ability than females?
What method is available to show if a piece of flint was knapped by a man or a woman? Or for that matter any piece of prehistoric technology. Note that gender roles and stereotypes tend to be most common in industrial societies. But are rarely completly rigid anyway.
Sorry, but it takes a screwed up woman to look at a childs toy and compare herself physically to it.
Actually the original poster was talking about the influence of such toys on young children. There's also the effect of adults precieving young children differently depending on if they think a child is a boy or a girl.
And this is where you shoot yourself in the foot. Those same hormones that cause sex differentiation cause structural differences in the brain as well.
This should be quite simple to test. Have someone identify if a set of MRI's come from a man's or a woman's brain. Where this theory runs into problems is that function, even structure, of mammalian brains is also affected by environment. e.g. it's been shown that the left brain/right brain split differs between Japanese and Europeans.
Are men and women different? Sure. Men have penises and testicles, and women have vaginas. They're *generally* hormonally different, and *generally* have tendencies toward certain things.
Neither men nor woman are a homogeneous group. Even if X has mostly men interested in it that dosn't mean that it isn't perfectly normal for women to also be interested in it.
That doesn't mean it's useless to examine what factors cause those tendencies, or that it's a good thing that we have self-reinforcing gender stereotypes.
Such stereotypes may or may not have a biological basis. It's even possible for them to be contrary to biology. In many cases gender stereotypes are not consistent across cultures or history.
Examine behavior rationally
Not likely to happen with something which is so highly politicised. Especially with the kind of hypocrits who like to claim "men and women are equally capable of doing good things, but men are far more capable of doing bad/criminal things" or something to that effect.
I don't see any studies coming out asking "Why is the percentage of women so low amongst asphalt pouring crews" or anything like that. I also don't see any studies asking whey more men aren't going into nursing.
A lot of the time the people selecting the criteria involved have their own sets of biases. You are equally unlikely to see claims about women being "under-represented" in the prison population or men being "under-represented" in the "stay at home spouse" population.
Why do we seem to have this societal obsession with getting more women into computer science / engineering, etc?
Probably because these are fairly safe (unlike construction) and fairly high status positions.
Maybe, just maybe, it's the case that most women just don't *want* to be computer scientists or engineers. I mean, do we have hoardes of women protesting that they tried to get into this field and were discriminated against on a sexual basis (hint: no)?
Logic dosn't work very well here. The response to that argument is likely to be the Patriarchy Conspiracy Theory(TM)...
The opportunities are there for women who *do* want to do this kind of stuff. So tell me again why this "issue" keeps coming up time and time again??
The country is slowly turning into a police state, but it is being done using the "boiling a frog" process, so very few seem to notice it. We keep singing "home of the free" even after it has lost all meaning.
The latter appears to be part of a process of denial.
Because there are all kinds of people who did nothing more than "gripe" about the government who are in Guantanamo.
Many of them did nothing other than be in the wrong place at the wrong time. With exactly zero of them convicted of anything. Dispite the level of bullying by the US.
None of them turned up among anti-American Muslim extremists in Pakistan or Afghanistan wielding weapons against US forces,
Because it's not proper for people to fight back if their country is invaded...
As a software developer, I know firsthand that Microsoft is trying to get application developers to stop writing programs that require the users to be Admin level. If you know anything about.NET logo certification, you would know that in order for your application to pass the test, it has to be able to be successfully installed at all login levels (except Guest, I think).
Installing an application is something which should actually need elevated privileges. Allowing unprivileged installs is a security problem. This is a different issue from a program requiring privileges in order to run. In some cases as daft as refusing to open a data file which is read only.
I'm aware of, at least) that for a long while there were a bunch of application developers who had no idea what they were doing.
I'm not convinced the tense is correct here. It isn't just old Windows applications which are affected by this issue.
That's what the whole idea of the.NET framework is about - standardization.
.NET isn't a magic wand. If developers don't understand issues of file permissions, locking and multiple access to files then they can still end up with software which dosn't work well.
A space shuttle isn't a car. I really doubt you could make a craft that can go into orbit and re-enter the atmosphere without any damage.
IIRC quite a bit of damage was being caused by sand on the runway.
How do you make sure that every one of thousands of hoses, wires, and other parts is not damaged after a flight?
These arn't very different from those on a commercial aircraft. Boeing and Airbus appear to have worked out how to do it. The major difference on the shuttle is the heatsheild. Which is constructed of materials which are highly fragile.
From an engineering standpoint, there isn't a single design goal that demands a reusable spacecraft.
In which case why isn't NASA looking at alternatives, rather than returning their "deathtrap design" to service.
Yeah, I never worked in a call center for tech support with and endless stream of callers that say my "Internet is broken" when they really mean that home.excite.com changed to www.attbi.com.
It gets worst with those who think they know things. Thus comming up with thinks like "the hard drive is broken" when they actually mean "Windows comes up with a new message when it starts up". Or paraphrase and mutate error messages.
Likewise for time limited documents etc, we (as a company) will NEVER accept anything written in vanishing ink.
The most common form of "vanishing ink" is thermal fax paper. If people need to archive the output of such a fax machine they just use a photocopier. If the whatever exists for long enough to be of any practical use it exists for long enough to be copied. DRM is intended to be "magic ink". Unless you get your documents delivered by an owl it just isn't going to happen.
Or how about DRM allows video producers to have a video be playable only from their web site and for a certain amount of time before it expires?
Even assuming this were doable it would mean that whoever provided such video would need vast bandwidth. In the real world someone sooner or later (most likely sooner) would work out a way to either proxy or make a recording of such a system. The time limiting idea just isn't going to work.
They'd be up on bittorrent within under an hour. Sorry to break it to you, but DRM is the only way to sell media on computers without mass piracy.
The problem with "DRM" is that it will never work. The way to sell content is to make it easily available for anyone to buy at a fair price. Such that buying becomes the "easy option".
Unless they intend to make on-the-fly DRM-decrypting headphones. Now that's a scary thought.
Thus leading to a fight between the music industry and sellers of wigs and hats As the former try to make models of heads illegal under the DMCA. Whilst the latter complain that it would adversely affect their business.
Along comes a company that wants to do DRM. They could do use a very strong cipher but the chip that does that costs $0.05 instead of $0.03.
The strength of a cipher is only part of the problem. A bad key management system can easily make a strong cipher effectivly useless.
They could open it up to peer review but they want it secret and they want it by the end of next quarter.
Proprietary implimentations (let alone proprietary ciphers) have a great tendency to be poor. Especially if there isn't a cryptographer involved in the design.
Their decisions will be based on what will give them good margins this quarter and next, not what will keep them secure for years to come. DRM is in a terrible position because it has to go in consumer electronics, where these pressures are at their worst.
Once something winds up in a piece of consumer electronics it's also fixed. Together with the issue of copyright terms being measured in terms of decades.
Slashdot Mirror
Something similiar happened to a friend of mine at UCR a few years back. There were these *REALLY* radical lesbian types who had come to campus
In other words these were visitors
and been "preaching" all week -- you know the type, "I cant get a boyfriend, or I got raped, so all men are evil, lets eat pussy" kind of girls. They were male bashing on campus all week, so this frat went out and setup a table, and they each took giant cards to rate the women who passed by. Long story short -- they were hauled before the vice dean at the complaint of the radical lesbians who had been male bashing all week
Sounds like a classic case of some bullies who got upset when people stood up to them.
Another story at UCR -- happened to me personally, I got TOTALLY screwed out of a job. Now the university has an office that investigates unfair hiring practices, but ONLY as it applies to minorities. I was told since I was not a minority, woman, disabled, that they wouldnt investigate. So basically, the only group they DONT represent is -- white men.
Who actually are a "minority".
Just kidding. April Fool's!
Thing is that April Fool's Day traditionally ends at noon. This was posted at 13:38.
I don't know many countries that it is legal to sell your offsprings.
Wonder if there's anywhere it is legal to sell your politicans. Not that most of them would raise much money.
But once we've eliminated gender discrimination (both against AND FOR, including the ridiculous idea that both genders are identical), it will tend toward that point on its own.
That isn't likely to happen for quite a while. Gender discrimination is complex, different discriminations interact with each other, things such as "peer-backed" discrimination tend to be ignored and there are plenty of advocates of all sorts of discrimination...
As long as women WANT to "marry UP" and can get away with it (and who wouldn't) they will always find themselves in relationships which work better if the male is the workaholic.
This also has the effect of meaning that average figures for men's earnings will tend to be greater than average figures of women's earnings. Which is something about which a lot of fuss is made.
It is also possible that the average amount of money available for a woman to spend is greater than the average amount of money available for a man to spend...
This is why paternity leave is so vital to even out the marketplace. If companies have to pay for (and accept) the loss of their male employees in just the same way, it puts them on an equal footing.
Note that it does have to be an level of leave. Including issues like who pays. Even with this there is still the issue of Stay at Home parents even which parent does a school call first with a sick or injured child.
When you go for jobs, there are people who think, "Well, she's going to want to start a family soon, so I'd better not go with her; she's going to be undependable", without having any evidence of her dependability.
Quite likely an employer would get in trouble if the asked that question directly. Possibly from they experience that is a real risk...
What does "predisposed" mean? Before technology, there was no "technological work." Are you saying there was some evolutionary pressure, during the few thousand years that humans have had culture, for males to develop more technological ability than females?
What method is available to show if a piece of flint was knapped by a man or a woman? Or for that matter any piece of prehistoric technology.
Note that gender roles and stereotypes tend to be most common in industrial societies. But are rarely completly rigid anyway.
Sorry, but it takes a screwed up woman to look at a childs toy and compare herself physically to it.
Actually the original poster was talking about the influence of such toys on young children.
There's also the effect of adults precieving young children differently depending on if they think a child is a boy or a girl.
And this is where you shoot yourself in the foot. Those same hormones that cause sex differentiation cause structural differences in the brain as well.
This should be quite simple to test. Have someone identify if a set of MRI's come from a man's or a woman's brain.
Where this theory runs into problems is that function, even structure, of mammalian brains is also affected by environment. e.g. it's been shown that the left brain/right brain split differs between Japanese and Europeans.
Are men and women different? Sure. Men have penises and testicles, and women have vaginas. They're *generally* hormonally different, and *generally* have tendencies toward certain things.
Neither men nor woman are a homogeneous group. Even if X has mostly men interested in it that dosn't mean that it isn't perfectly normal for women to also be interested in it.
That doesn't mean it's useless to examine what factors cause those tendencies, or that it's a good thing that we have self-reinforcing gender stereotypes.
Such stereotypes may or may not have a biological basis. It's even possible for them to be contrary to biology. In many cases gender stereotypes are not consistent across cultures or history.
Examine behavior rationally
Not likely to happen with something which is so highly politicised. Especially with the kind of hypocrits who like to claim "men and women are equally capable of doing good things, but men are far more capable of doing bad/criminal things" or something to that effect.
I don't see any studies coming out asking "Why is the percentage of women so low amongst asphalt pouring crews" or anything like that. I also don't see any studies asking whey more men aren't going into nursing.
A lot of the time the people selecting the criteria involved have their own sets of biases. You are equally unlikely to see claims about women being "under-represented" in the prison population or men being "under-represented" in the "stay at home spouse" population.
Why do we seem to have this societal obsession with getting more women into computer science / engineering, etc?
Probably because these are fairly safe (unlike construction) and fairly high status positions.
Maybe, just maybe, it's the case that most women just don't *want* to be computer scientists or engineers. I mean, do we have hoardes of women protesting that they tried to get into this field and were discriminated against on a sexual basis (hint: no)?
Logic dosn't work very well here. The response to that argument is likely to be the Patriarchy Conspiracy Theory(TM)...
The opportunities are there for women who *do* want to do this kind of stuff. So tell me again why this "issue" keeps coming up time and time again??
Because it suits a political adgenda.
See, one of the fundamental assumptions in our society is that the government is legitimate and that it obeys the rules set out for it.
Actually a fundermental rule of government is that it will always try to bend it's own rules or seek loopholes in them.
The first thing you need to realize is that the people who created our government were smarter than you are.
The people who set up the US government saw little wrong with a government being overthrown. After all that is what they had just done.
They concocted a system of government that works under all conditions, past or present. Our system of government has never yet failed.
The US Congress having a greater proportion of criminals than the general population is not a failure?
The country is slowly turning into a police state, but it is being done using the "boiling a frog" process, so very few seem to notice it. We keep singing "home of the free" even after it has lost all meaning.
The latter appears to be part of a process of denial.
Because there are all kinds of people who did nothing more than "gripe" about the government who are in Guantanamo.
Many of them did nothing other than be in the wrong place at the wrong time. With exactly zero of them convicted of anything. Dispite the level of bullying by the US.
None of them turned up among anti-American Muslim extremists in Pakistan or Afghanistan wielding weapons against US forces,
Because it's not proper for people to fight back if their country is invaded...
As a software developer, I know firsthand that Microsoft is trying to get application developers to stop writing programs that require the users to be Admin level. If you know anything about .NET logo certification, you would know that in order for your application to pass the test, it has to be able to be successfully installed at all login levels (except Guest, I think).
.NET framework is about - standardization.
Installing an application is something which should actually need elevated privileges. Allowing unprivileged installs is a security problem.
This is a different issue from a program requiring privileges in order to run. In some cases as daft as refusing to open a data file which is read only.
I'm aware of, at least) that for a long while there were a bunch of application developers who had no idea what they were doing.
I'm not convinced the tense is correct here. It isn't just old Windows applications which are affected by this issue.
That's what the whole idea of the
.NET isn't a magic wand. If developers don't understand issues of file permissions, locking and multiple access to files then they can still end up with software which dosn't work well.
A space shuttle isn't a car. I really doubt you could make a craft that can go into orbit and re-enter the atmosphere without any damage.
IIRC quite a bit of damage was being caused by sand on the runway.
How do you make sure that every one of thousands of hoses, wires, and other parts is not damaged after a flight?
These arn't very different from those on a commercial aircraft. Boeing and Airbus appear to have worked out how to do it. The major difference on the shuttle is the heatsheild. Which is constructed of materials which are highly fragile.
From an engineering standpoint, there isn't a single design goal that demands a reusable spacecraft.
In which case why isn't NASA looking at alternatives, rather than returning their "deathtrap design" to service.
Another reusable craft would have to have a shorter turnaround time
The original estimate for the shuttle was around 2 weeks. Which was way, way off.
What's the point of making it reusable? That's the main reason the shuttle is so expensive.
Considering the amount of maintanance which is needed after each flight it barely qualifies as "reusable" in the first place.
Yeah, I never worked in a call center for tech support with and endless stream of callers that say my "Internet is broken" when they really mean that home.excite.com changed to www.attbi.com.
It gets worst with those who think they know things. Thus comming up with thinks like "the hard drive is broken" when they actually mean "Windows comes up with a new message when it starts up". Or paraphrase and mutate error messages.
Likewise for time limited documents etc, we (as a company) will NEVER accept anything written in vanishing ink.
The most common form of "vanishing ink" is thermal fax paper. If people need to archive the output of such a fax machine they just use a photocopier.
If the whatever exists for long enough to be of any practical use it exists for long enough to be copied.
DRM is intended to be "magic ink". Unless you get your documents delivered by an owl it just isn't going to happen.
Or how about DRM allows video producers to have a video be playable only from their web site and for a certain amount of time before it expires?
Even assuming this were doable it would mean that whoever provided such video would need vast bandwidth.
In the real world someone sooner or later (most likely sooner) would work out a way to either proxy or make a recording of such a system. The time limiting idea just isn't going to work.
They'd be up on bittorrent within under an hour. Sorry to break it to you, but DRM is the only way to sell media on computers without mass piracy.
The problem with "DRM" is that it will never work. The way to sell content is to make it easily available for anyone to buy at a fair price. Such that buying becomes the "easy option".
Unless they intend to make on-the-fly DRM-decrypting headphones. Now that's a scary thought.
Thus leading to a fight between the music industry and sellers of wigs and hats As the former try to make models of heads illegal under the DMCA. Whilst the latter complain that it would adversely affect their business.
Along comes a company that wants to do DRM. They could do use a very strong cipher but the chip that does that costs $0.05 instead of $0.03.
The strength of a cipher is only part of the problem. A bad key management system can easily make a strong cipher effectivly useless.
They could open it up to peer review but they want it secret and they want it by the end of next quarter.
Proprietary implimentations (let alone proprietary ciphers) have a great tendency to be poor. Especially if there isn't a cryptographer involved in the design.
Their decisions will be based on what will give them good margins this quarter and next, not what will keep them secure for years to come. DRM is in a terrible position because it has to go in consumer electronics, where these pressures are at their worst.
Once something winds up in a piece of consumer electronics it's also fixed. Together with the issue of copyright terms being measured in terms of decades.