Boys were given boys toys and shied away from doing 'girl things.'
Well first of all, that wasn't what I asked. But since you brought it up, I'm sorry that some parents buy toys their children don't want, but for most children, studies show that they do prefer those gender-specific toys, and that these aren't "perceived" roles, as you put it, but inborn preferences. Men and women are different because of our genes.
The question I asked, which nobody has answered yet, is if anyone can give an example of girls being told they not supposed to be interested in IT. I can give you an example of the opposite:
Think about what it means to be a geek. If you're a guy, the joke is that you'll be a virgin until you're 30, and you'll live in your mother's basement. What's it like for a self-identified geek male in highschool? You're a social outcast. Society tells you that you're a failure, and to be a real man, you need to do manly things and the most important thing for you to do is to get a girlfriend. Being a geek or a nerd as a male is a death sentence.
Now look at what it's like for a girl. Geek girls are awesome. Many girls self-identify as geeks even though they have no real knowledge or propensity for computers. It's just so great - it's considered so cool, that they actually lie about it. Anything that you want to do, as a girl, is encouraged.
So that's the world as I see it. Boys feel tremendous pressure to avoid being labeled a geek, being associated with computers, etc. But for girls, anything they do, and everything they do is just super. Wow, you go girl! Girl power! Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them, right? There are no examples of girls being told they're not supposed to be in the IT field because that's just ridiculous. That doesn't happen in the western world. A girl who wants to be in the IT industry is fawned over. She's so special, so awesome, we just love geek girls. But for a guy, it's a hard, lonely life.
And yet, even in this climate, more boys than girls choose the IT field. It is clear to me that this happens in spite of culture, not because of it.
I think that any blame in this imbalance has to fall on anti-intellectualism among boys.
I wholeheartedly agree. Look at the difference in culture here. Girls have feminism. All their lives they're told that they're wonderful and special and have this innate power and value that comes from being a woman. Look at all the role models that women have in popular culture. In every movie and TV show, and especially in advertisements, women are always smart, always strong, always winners.
What are boys told? They are innately bad. Members of their sex are responsible for all the world's ills. Boys fall back on their instincts - they value themselves in terms of sexual conquests. They fall back on their instincts to achieve those. And the instincts serve them well all through high school, and they manage to feel okay. It's ok to cut school, ok to put all your time and attention into some stupid car (for example) because that gets you sex, and that makes you worth something.
Basically it's like you said, anti-intellectualism.
I don't think it necessarily precludes women from science/engineering.
Honestly, I'm a little disappointed that you made that statement after reading the book. Maybe you didn't mean it the way it sounds.
**Nothing in the book suggests that women are, or that they should be precluded from anything they want to do**
A little review of the difference between a statistic and discrimination: a statistic is something that is true of a population, for example, men are on average, taller than women. Discrimination is applying that statistic to an individual. For example, imagine a job for which height is a requisite (I can't think of such a job, please just play along) "wait a minute! who is this woman who wants to interview for this job? Women aren't tall enough! Statistics prove that! She can't have the job."
See what happened? It's entirely possible that she might be tall enough - even taller than the other men who are interviewing. I took the statistic (which was true) and applied it to an individual. That was discrimination. Nothing in the book supports or suggests discrimination.
More men might be interested in science. That's a statistic. It's true. There's nothing wrong with it being true, and we as a society shouldn't be afraid to say the truth. However, any individual woman that you might meet may well have more interest (and aptitude) for science than you or I or any individual male. So nobody should make the mistake of discrimination. Give everyone a fair shot. But don't be surprised when the outcome corresponds to the statistic.
I agree with you that our prisons don't do rehab. What changes would you make to them to accomplish: "breaking a person down into their individual pieces, examining all of those pieces, finding out what's wrong, and then learning to live life with the knowledge that you have a problem."
a. it would be inefficient, as only a small portion of the blast would be used to actually propel the craft, the rest would just go off into space.
Inefficient compared to what? An orion drive has the highest ISP of any propulsion system possible with our technology. In other words, it's *still* more efficient than a regular rocket.
b. it could only be used for non-fragile payloads (i.e. water, food) due to the sudden acceleration.
false. Shock absorbers would be used. See project orion. This has been studied by engineers a lot smarter than you or I.
c. how do you control direction ?
This question shows an incredible ignorance of how space travel works. You seem to be imagining a need to turn a corner.
then there's the political issues
Only because we're all pansies. An orion drive operating in outer space wouldn't harm the "environment" such as it is up there. What it would do, by making space travel affordable, is to bring incredible wealth to our civilization. One moderately sized asteroid has more iron (or, for that matter, pick any metal you need) than has ever been mined by humans. And these orion drives are powerful enough to lift whatever equipment you need to mine and process an asteroid.
Imagine a future where there are no factories and no power plants on Earth. Earth is a place where people live in comfort. All the difficult and polluting stuff is done elsewhere. The difference between life for the average person today and life in the dark ages is very simply, a difference in the total wealth of civilization. That's what we're talking about here. Increasing total wealth by opening up access to space. Your ancestors stood on the coast of (for example) northern Europe and said, "gee, wouldn't it be great if we could get oil from the bottom of the ocean" and I'm sure some people lacked the vision and foresight to understand that getting the oil would make everyone's lives better - I'm sure they scoffed, said it was too hard or too expensive. Fortunately, better people made it happen. Today, our whole society is powered by oil. Without it, we'd be living like the Amish. When the oil runs out we will be like that again.
So today, we look out at space, and some people talk about getting to the wealth that's there. But other people just recoil in fear at the very mention of the word nuclear. The difference between us and our ancestors is that today, the pansies rule. We wont go to space, except aboard $20,000 per lb chemical rockets. We wont mine the moon or asteroids. We wont get much, if any, benefit for what we do in space. And when the oil runs out, we'll descend into dark ages again.
But, people like you who have an irrational and uninformed fear of nuclear power, will feel warm and fuzzy. Hope you enjoy it.
Ultimately I don't know which (if any) of these are true, but I just felt like tossing out some ideas. Maybe it's something as simple as clogging up their gills.
I don't know either. I don't think anyone here knows. I'll go ask on a science board. FTA says, "There are now 146 coastal regions in the world in which fish and bottom-feeding life forms have been entirely eliminated because of a lack of oxygen" and I've heard this before. They definitely make it sound like the algae are consuming oxygen, but they aren't.
That was a star wars reference. The correct response is: The regional governors now have direct control over their territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line, fear of this battle station.
What you just said isn't a fantasy, because you were able to back it up with sound reasoning. My complaint is people who talk about silicon for no other reason than that they saw it on star trek.
Honestly, I tire of people who are convinced that earth-life is the only possible solution.
Don't take this personally, but I tire of people whose imaginations outstrip observed evidence. I can imagine all sorts of things - silicon-based life is just one of them.
But reality is that we're not finding life in places where modern-day earth life could exist, and we're not seeing or hearing evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy. I know that we've only begun to search, but we already have enough evidence to say for a fact that life is not ubiquitous.
So here's what we know: 1) once life gets started, it is very tenacious and difficult to snuff out. 2) but it's apparently *really* difficult to get life started. Those two facts combined suggest that yes, earth-like life might be the only possibly solution. I don't mean *exactly* earth like. I mean carbon and oxygen based.
To me, it is reasonable to speculate alien life with an extra nucleotide or two. It's reasonable to speculate about novel amino acids or DNA with a left hand twist. But to me, it's pure unfounded fantasy to suggest that life can be based on silicon.
Does this also pin down the value of pi? I mean, they know exactly how many silicon atoms are on the surface of the sphere, and they know exactly how many atoms there are from the center to the surface.
You deserve to have your computer taken (and to be beaten to unconsciousness) for using the word "kit" to describe everything. And I'm not exaggerating here, you guys call *everything* "kit." I even saw a soccer team described as kit. It's like you're all smurfs except that instead of calling everything "smurf" your cute little word is "kit."
Stop it. It's not amusing. It doesn't make you sound cool. Just stop it.
And don't even get me started on all the other retarded phrases you use. "Telly?" jesus man, grow up! Your people invented the English language, but your favorite pastime these days is raping it.
The issue of cargo cults has been raised several times already in this thread. Here's my take: when people like you and I meet people like this tribe, a much higher percentage of people from the tribe will desire our way of life, than people like you and I desiring their way of life.
The implication of that, in my mind, is that our way of life is better (on balance, I'm sure there are advantages to their way of life too).
So here we have fellow human beings. They have brains and consciousnesses just like ours. But they will live short lives, they will suffer terribly from things like cavities and common injuries, many of their children will die as infants, many of their mothers will die from complications of childbirth.
Seriously, can you imagine how much it must suck for one of them to have a cavity? Can you imagine what it's like to break a bone and have no cast, no pain medicine, etc? Would you prefer to live only 30 or 40 years at most, being eaten alive by parasites, watching your children and loved ones die and not understanding why?
These are not dogs. They are our fellow humans. We could show them a better life, and given them the choice to take it or not, but...
So they are going to be "protected" from contamination.
we're going to "protect" them. Why? Is it because this is what's best for them? No. It's because it amuses us - as if they're our pets.
newbie-friendly distros like Ubuntu actually preventing you from logging in as root
I agree with your statements about the bogusness of the targeted system argument, but I wonder if Ubuntu's policy (or any distro's policy) of using sudo is really going to stop malware.
Think about it, what is your mom going to do when the window pops up asking her to enter her password? Yeah, she's going to type it in.
The only way to keep her safe is if she doesn't know the password.
Quantum Entanglement does not transmit information faster than light.
Apparently, it does. Entangled particles *always* have opposite angular momentum. This has been observed experimentally. It may not be accurate to say that one particle is "transmitting" to another. It may be more accurate to say that each particle is independently reading the same variable in some higher dimension. But something is happening. It's not a trick.
Whether or not we can use this information to transmit information of our choosing is another issue entirely.
doing so breaks the link
It's possible that what you mean to say is that observing the system causes it to collapse, in which case you are right. But I'm not aware of any way to actually break the link between two entangled particles.
Some people like Visual Basic for its ease in creating good interfaces.
Perhaps OT: but I think people like VB because they don't know any other language.
I have never in my life heard anyone say, "I know C, Java, Ruby and VB and I really like VB!" More often it's, "I was working as an office assistant and wanted a promotion so I got a book titled, _Fast-Track Learn VB in 10 Hours for Dummies_ and this is the only language I've ever used - and I like it!"
Other than that, you're right. The language matters less than how you use it (and for performance, the language matters less than how it's implemented). But if you know several languages equally well, then you know the little idiosyncrasies that make each better suited to a particular task, and can make an informed choice.
If my memory serves me correct, the random number generator can or does use static input from key presses as well as mouse movements and other activities to create the "randomness".
For the third time, this is what I'm talking about.
the issue isn't the lack of a key for input being physically typed in
Slashdot Mirror
Boys were given boys toys and shied away from doing 'girl things.'
Well first of all, that wasn't what I asked. But since you brought it up, I'm sorry that some parents buy toys their children don't want, but for most children, studies show that they do prefer those gender-specific toys, and that these aren't "perceived" roles, as you put it, but inborn preferences. Men and women are different because of our genes.
The question I asked, which nobody has answered yet, is if anyone can give an example of girls being told they not supposed to be interested in IT. I can give you an example of the opposite:
Think about what it means to be a geek. If you're a guy, the joke is that you'll be a virgin until you're 30, and you'll live in your mother's basement. What's it like for a self-identified geek male in highschool? You're a social outcast. Society tells you that you're a failure, and to be a real man, you need to do manly things and the most important thing for you to do is to get a girlfriend. Being a geek or a nerd as a male is a death sentence.
Now look at what it's like for a girl. Geek girls are awesome. Many girls self-identify as geeks even though they have no real knowledge or propensity for computers. It's just so great - it's considered so cool, that they actually lie about it. Anything that you want to do, as a girl, is encouraged.
So that's the world as I see it. Boys feel tremendous pressure to avoid being labeled a geek, being associated with computers, etc. But for girls, anything they do, and everything they do is just super. Wow, you go girl! Girl power! Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them, right? There are no examples of girls being told they're not supposed to be in the IT field because that's just ridiculous. That doesn't happen in the western world. A girl who wants to be in the IT industry is fawned over. She's so special, so awesome, we just love geek girls. But for a guy, it's a hard, lonely life.
And yet, even in this climate, more boys than girls choose the IT field. It is clear to me that this happens in spite of culture, not because of it.
I think that any blame in this imbalance has to fall on anti-intellectualism among boys.
I wholeheartedly agree. Look at the difference in culture here. Girls have feminism. All their lives they're told that they're wonderful and special and have this innate power and value that comes from being a woman. Look at all the role models that women have in popular culture. In every movie and TV show, and especially in advertisements, women are always smart, always strong, always winners.
What are boys told? They are innately bad. Members of their sex are responsible for all the world's ills. Boys fall back on their instincts - they value themselves in terms of sexual conquests. They fall back on their instincts to achieve those. And the instincts serve them well all through high school, and they manage to feel okay. It's ok to cut school, ok to put all your time and attention into some stupid car (for example) because that gets you sex, and that makes you worth something.
Basically it's like you said, anti-intellectualism.
I don't think it necessarily precludes women from science/engineering.
Honestly, I'm a little disappointed that you made that statement after reading the book. Maybe you didn't mean it the way it sounds.
**Nothing in the book suggests that women are, or that they should be precluded from anything they want to do**
A little review of the difference between a statistic and discrimination: a statistic is something that is true of a population, for example, men are on average, taller than women. Discrimination is applying that statistic to an individual. For example, imagine a job for which height is a requisite (I can't think of such a job, please just play along) "wait a minute! who is this woman who wants to interview for this job? Women aren't tall enough! Statistics prove that! She can't have the job."
See what happened? It's entirely possible that she might be tall enough - even taller than the other men who are interviewing. I took the statistic (which was true) and applied it to an individual. That was discrimination. Nothing in the book supports or suggests discrimination.
More men might be interested in science. That's a statistic. It's true. There's nothing wrong with it being true, and we as a society shouldn't be afraid to say the truth. However, any individual woman that you might meet may well have more interest (and aptitude) for science than you or I or any individual male. So nobody should make the mistake of discrimination. Give everyone a fair shot. But don't be surprised when the outcome corresponds to the statistic.
Can you point to just one example of someone telling women they're "not supposed to be interested" in IT?
Because I'm calling bullshit on your comment.
I agree with you that our prisons don't do rehab. What changes would you make to them to accomplish: "breaking a person down into their individual pieces, examining all of those pieces, finding out what's wrong, and then learning to live life with the knowledge that you have a problem."
a. it would be inefficient, as only a small portion of the blast would be used to actually propel the craft, the rest would just go off into space.
Inefficient compared to what? An orion drive has the highest ISP of any propulsion system possible with our technology. In other words, it's *still* more efficient than a regular rocket.
b. it could only be used for non-fragile payloads (i.e. water, food) due to the sudden acceleration.
false. Shock absorbers would be used. See project orion. This has been studied by engineers a lot smarter than you or I.
c. how do you control direction ?
This question shows an incredible ignorance of how space travel works. You seem to be imagining a need to turn a corner.
then there's the political issues
Only because we're all pansies. An orion drive operating in outer space wouldn't harm the "environment" such as it is up there. What it would do, by making space travel affordable, is to bring incredible wealth to our civilization. One moderately sized asteroid has more iron (or, for that matter, pick any metal you need) than has ever been mined by humans. And these orion drives are powerful enough to lift whatever equipment you need to mine and process an asteroid.
Imagine a future where there are no factories and no power plants on Earth. Earth is a place where people live in comfort. All the difficult and polluting stuff is done elsewhere. The difference between life for the average person today and life in the dark ages is very simply, a difference in the total wealth of civilization. That's what we're talking about here. Increasing total wealth by opening up access to space. Your ancestors stood on the coast of (for example) northern Europe and said, "gee, wouldn't it be great if we could get oil from the bottom of the ocean" and I'm sure some people lacked the vision and foresight to understand that getting the oil would make everyone's lives better - I'm sure they scoffed, said it was too hard or too expensive. Fortunately, better people made it happen. Today, our whole society is powered by oil. Without it, we'd be living like the Amish. When the oil runs out we will be like that again.
So today, we look out at space, and some people talk about getting to the wealth that's there. But other people just recoil in fear at the very mention of the word nuclear. The difference between us and our ancestors is that today, the pansies rule. We wont go to space, except aboard $20,000 per lb chemical rockets. We wont mine the moon or asteroids. We wont get much, if any, benefit for what we do in space. And when the oil runs out, we'll descend into dark ages again.
But, people like you who have an irrational and uninformed fear of nuclear power, will feel warm and fuzzy. Hope you enjoy it.
the US has already claimed it
"Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. We came in peace for all mankind."
I wonder if China or Russia would make such a profound and inclusive statement.
Ultimately I don't know which (if any) of these are true, but I just felt like tossing out some ideas. Maybe it's something as simple as clogging up their gills.
I don't know either. I don't think anyone here knows. I'll go ask on a science board. FTA says, "There are now 146 coastal regions in the world in which fish and bottom-feeding life forms have been entirely eliminated because of a lack of oxygen" and I've heard this before. They definitely make it sound like the algae are consuming oxygen, but they aren't.
No, I don't get the idea.
The fish need oxygen.
There's algae in the water that CREATE MORE OXYGEN. (see the wikipedia link above).
What kills the first fish? You jumped into a loop about fish killing more fish. What kills the first fish??
which suffocates other lifeforms
The article says this as well, and I don't doubt it, I just don't understand. Bluegreen Algae are what gave us an oxygen atmosphere to begin with. How is it that they suffocate life, when they're giving off oxygen?
That was a star wars reference. The correct response is: The regional governors now have direct control over their territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line, fear of this battle station.
I will dissolve the DHS
How will the Emperor maintain control without the bureaucracy?
Why is that such a fantasy?
What you just said isn't a fantasy, because you were able to back it up with sound reasoning. My complaint is people who talk about silicon for no other reason than that they saw it on star trek.
we don't have the telescope resolution to really see if life exists elsewhere.
Yes, you're right.
Honestly, I tire of people who are convinced that earth-life is the only possible solution.
Don't take this personally, but I tire of people whose imaginations outstrip observed evidence. I can imagine all sorts of things - silicon-based life is just one of them.
But reality is that we're not finding life in places where modern-day earth life could exist, and we're not seeing or hearing evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy. I know that we've only begun to search, but we already have enough evidence to say for a fact that life is not ubiquitous.
So here's what we know: 1) once life gets started, it is very tenacious and difficult to snuff out. 2) but it's apparently *really* difficult to get life started. Those two facts combined suggest that yes, earth-like life might be the only possibly solution. I don't mean *exactly* earth like. I mean carbon and oxygen based.
To me, it is reasonable to speculate alien life with an extra nucleotide or two. It's reasonable to speculate about novel amino acids or DNA with a left hand twist. But to me, it's pure unfounded fantasy to suggest that life can be based on silicon.
Does this also pin down the value of pi? I mean, they know exactly how many silicon atoms are on the surface of the sphere, and they know exactly how many atoms there are from the center to the surface.
hmm.
LOL. Well in that case you should be beaten for watching that horrible show.
it can be weeks before people get their kit back.
You deserve to have your computer taken (and to be beaten to unconsciousness) for using the word "kit" to describe everything. And I'm not exaggerating here, you guys call *everything* "kit." I even saw a soccer team described as kit. It's like you're all smurfs except that instead of calling everything "smurf" your cute little word is "kit."
Stop it. It's not amusing. It doesn't make you sound cool. Just stop it.
And don't even get me started on all the other retarded phrases you use. "Telly?" jesus man, grow up! Your people invented the English language, but your favorite pastime these days is raping it.
As if the whole world revolves around it.
(the pun didn't quite sound right when I used the word orbit)
now *that* is an old-school joke. nicely done.
The issue of cargo cults has been raised several times already in this thread. Here's my take: when people like you and I meet people like this tribe, a much higher percentage of people from the tribe will desire our way of life, than people like you and I desiring their way of life.
The implication of that, in my mind, is that our way of life is better (on balance, I'm sure there are advantages to their way of life too).
So here we have fellow human beings. They have brains and consciousnesses just like ours. But they will live short lives, they will suffer terribly from things like cavities and common injuries, many of their children will die as infants, many of their mothers will die from complications of childbirth.
Seriously, can you imagine how much it must suck for one of them to have a cavity? Can you imagine what it's like to break a bone and have no cast, no pain medicine, etc? Would you prefer to live only 30 or 40 years at most, being eaten alive by parasites, watching your children and loved ones die and not understanding why?
These are not dogs. They are our fellow humans. We could show them a better life, and given them the choice to take it or not, but...
So they are going to be "protected" from contamination.
we're going to "protect" them. Why? Is it because this is what's best for them? No. It's because it amuses us - as if they're our pets.
You're right, this is arrogance.
newbie-friendly distros like Ubuntu actually preventing you from logging in as root
I agree with your statements about the bogusness of the targeted system argument, but I wonder if Ubuntu's policy (or any distro's policy) of using sudo is really going to stop malware.
Think about it, what is your mom going to do when the window pops up asking her to enter her password? Yeah, she's going to type it in.
The only way to keep her safe is if she doesn't know the password.
Quantum Entanglement does not transmit information faster than light.
Apparently, it does. Entangled particles *always* have opposite angular momentum. This has been observed experimentally. It may not be accurate to say that one particle is "transmitting" to another. It may be more accurate to say that each particle is independently reading the same variable in some higher dimension. But something is happening. It's not a trick.
Whether or not we can use this information to transmit information of our choosing is another issue entirely.
doing so breaks the link
It's possible that what you mean to say is that observing the system causes it to collapse, in which case you are right. But I'm not aware of any way to actually break the link between two entangled particles.
Some people like Visual Basic for its ease in creating good interfaces.
Perhaps OT: but I think people like VB because they don't know any other language.
I have never in my life heard anyone say, "I know C, Java, Ruby and VB and I really like VB!" More often it's, "I was working as an office assistant and wanted a promotion so I got a book titled, _Fast-Track Learn VB in 10 Hours for Dummies_ and this is the only language I've ever used - and I like it!"
Other than that, you're right. The language matters less than how you use it (and for performance, the language matters less than how it's implemented). But if you know several languages equally well, then you know the little idiosyncrasies that make each better suited to a particular task, and can make an informed choice.
If my memory serves me correct, the random number generator can or does use static input from key presses as well as mouse movements and other activities to create the "randomness".
For the third time, this is what I'm talking about.
the issue isn't the lack of a key for input being physically typed in
I know how public key cryptography works.