Actually, in a few game systems, including one that I created (and some others that I played in), I believe many simulators allowed more female space pilots to exist on the same life support requirements as male space pilots.
The only real problem is the spatial visualization. If you take a group of 100 males, perhaps only 5 could be space pilots; if you have a group of 100 females, perhaps only 2 could be space pilots. However, if we're talking space scientists, the whole visualization thing is less necessary, whereas a better center of gravity system and flexibility works out as a plus for women.
Sadly, in our culture, we put a bonus on TALL space pilots. Which is really inefficient, but culturally demanded.
Perhaps a mixed crew approach works out pretty well, though.
1. Women are discouraged from become technogeeks by friends, family, school, society. Especially if they are considered pretty.
2. Being a technogeek is more encouraging for certain types of personalities/traits. These traits have shown up in men more often than in women, either due to social conditioning or due to minor genetic differences.
Still, all in all, it reminds me of when the CAF did testing of women pilots versus male pilots. They found that women pilots were better pilots, especially of fighter jets. BUT - very few people can pass the tests to become pilots - you need spatial conception skills for example - and so, more men could become pilots than women. The same probably applies to women technogeeks. As a women surgeon was saying on NPR yesterday: "You have to be twice as a good a surgeon than a man would be if you're a woman, to be considered to be adequate. Luckily, it's not that hard to be twice as good."
Sadly, as a low-level politico, I'd have to agree with you on this. I've met the Gores a few times and respect them, but think Bradley would probably be better for tech in the long run.
Either Gore or Bradley would be better than most of the other crowd, though.
OK, this could either turn into a Retief-style CDT experiment or it could be the GI Bill of the 21st Century. I'm hoping for the latter, but since politicians are setting it up, betting on the former.
I regret that I have but one rev to give to my country.
I was kind of glad that Salon.com went up, since I've got some shares of that. Which is one of my rare mistakes - letting my emotions get the better of my judgement. At least I bought after the IPO, so I'm not that bad off.
The problem with the stock market's Linux craze is they push the bad along with the good. Red Hat could be considered reasonable (today) at a valuation around $200/share, but VA Linux Systems is probably only worth $125/share. Yet both are way up there.
When I asked Scott__ about the CyberNet IPO he hadn't even heard of them. Does anyone know anything about these guys or are they a spiffier version of LinuxOne?
Great. So now we'll not only encourage stupid people to have more kids than smart people, we'll encourage people with bad genes to live longer and pass them on.
And if those resulting humans ever colonize another planet and their tech fails them, they'll die in large numbers, being unsuited for survival.
Why don't you just rip out the teeth and bones and let us float in space habitats with cartilage only, and hard wire the pleasure centers so we never want to think hard thoughts or succeed at anything worthwhile? Just as effective - and just as useless.
Mr. Slippery said: Vegan and animal rights advocate that I am, I hope that given the tech level to create artery-scouring nanobots we'd put an end to slaughtering sentient creatures for pleasure and that you'd be eating tank-grown cloned meat instead.
Just because it's grown in a tank doesn't make it any less of an animal. You're still killing it. Just like you kill a tree when you buy a wood chair.
Don't get me wrong - I've cut down more forests than I care to remember and grew up on tree farms and so saw where the meat you eat comes from. And I still eat some meat.
I think the thing would be to try to grow food that was less expensive to the environment, personally. And maybe have the nanobots (or genetic viral alterations) make it so that a good soy burger tasted (in our brains) as good as a free-range cow burger.
jormurgandr said Hey, he was working newyears just like me, and I'd bet dollars to yen that he made the same overtime that I did (2.5 times normal!!!
Um, you get overtime? Some of do salary and bonus, maybe with options.
Loved the party food left over on Monday morning though - tons of supplies from the weekend that wasn't - and I just had to be on call with a beeper (first time in years).
We had a great time in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, with Elvis landing, Salsa dancing, and full to the brim with people. Plus, I met someone and she's muy sexy.
That plus not having to drive home was a plus.
OK, the Space Needle was a downer. And our mayor is a major wuss - even the NYTimes said so, and some other countries commented on it. But that doesn't mean you can't have fun anyway!
Personally, fireworks wise, Paris was THE PLACE TO BE. I think I'll go there for Y2K+1 and party with the fun people. If I don't, I'm still planning a bike trip of the wine and champagne regions in May/June 2001.
Oh, C'mon, any Aggie has got to have done at least two things that almost made him/her eligible for the Darwin Awards!
After all, if not, they can't be Aggies!
And, no, I didn't go to UTA... but I used to belong to the Texas Folklore Society and I remember many a tale of an Aggie that just missed the Golden Darwin ring by a hair...
Seriously, I live in Wuss City, formerly known as Seattle. As the "Darwin" awarder said, there might be some uses for risk-taking genes - and there are cases of people where they both have them (Paul Schell and the WTO) and then chicken out (Paul Schell and the No New Years At The Space Needle).
In my time in the military (ok, so you all don't believe that some of us do stupid things like that) I've seen MANY examples of pre-Darwin behaviour. Like playing with loaded guns, drinking large quantities of vodka before messing with explosives (including anti-personnel mines and tank mines), grabbing an M-90 one minute after it "didn't go off" (it then went off - just before his hand got it - and good thing he had thick glasses or he'd be blind).
Still, from a genetic point of view - they all "deserved to die". A lot of people take stupid risks like that and live - most of them shouldn't. And, most of the time, alcohol or other drugs are involved.
I agree, the comment about the guys with the land mine who their wives couldn't find the pieces of made me realize: "Oh, no, they may have already reproduced!"
One of the problem with safety precautions is that they let the unsafe and dangerous amongst us continue to live.
Now, don't get me wrong, I've been on the Net since '78, helped crack games back in Apple II days, and seen more OS than I care to recall (CP/M, DOS, Unix flavors, many more). But I have to admit, especially since I've set up Mac Servers to run native Unix, configured various daemons, and so on - it is a tad bit confusing on the Linux side. It would really be nice to do a default Secure install and then enable services as I need them, without looking totally clueless as to the exact name of the script I'm supposed to have guessed at somehow.
I can cope with it, especially with tons of Linux geeks amongst my friends - spent part of Trolloween talking about how to do IPV6 with another friend as we watched them light a dinosaur on fire, for example.
But I think we're going to get way more confusion than usual, as all the totally clueless come wandering over from MSFT Windows1900 to find something that works.
While some amongst us might think it silly, there were recently two men killed in Tacoma, Washington by flesh-eating bacteria. It was carried on the AP and Reuters wires and just happened.
One of the problem with antibiotics is that many strains of bacteria and virii are becoming immune to commonly-used antibiotics, to the point where doctors are now warned not to use the "new" antibiotics except when they know the infectious agent is already immune to the commonly prescribed antibiotics.
More people died from the Spanish Flu than from WWI, after all. And more people died in WWII from disease than any other cause.
Without antibiotics, many of the advances in civilization would have probably not survived. It gave us this breather until we could start working on genetic defenses and tailored anti-viral agents.
They may also be looking to save money. If Inprise can save money by getting open source developers to take over some or all of the load for new development and support for InterBase, it may be a win for them. A penny saved is a penny earned.
That was my first thought. Just think, now they can avoid all those Y2K-hungry lawyers looking to get bug fixes... just say "it's open source, you can fix it yourself and get lots of free on-line help" and problem solved.
And, as you also point out, this will cause more of us to think of buying Borland/Inprise development tools first, before we consider other ones. After all, even if it's proprietary today, it will be GPL tomorrow...
A nice theory, but people don't. Linux is normally pronounced by the great unwashed with two syllables, although Europeans tend to pronounce it differently than Americans. BSD, three syllables. Just like the Net is one syllable (three in French, but at least it's shorter than most words).
Spiff it up, give it a new name, a plush toy that won't poke kid's eyes out, and you've got marketing acceptance. Stick to the computerese and it loses points.
Sigh.
People frequently mistake my descriptions of reality for my personal opinion as to How Things Should Be - this is what I'm saying, not What Should Be.
I think it also has something to with the name. Maybe not for the serious amongst us, but I remember some of the reactions against unpopular languages were driven by how hard it was to say the name, in the past. Even if we can't agree on how to pronounce Linux, it still is easy to say. BSD, on the other hand, is very staccatto and doesn't roll trippingly off the tongue on the way to Piccadilly.
Also, if you got in at the IPO and held the 400 shares (or the 100 I had in the second group), you can now sell some of your shares. And, if like most Linux coders, you could only scrape up enough to buy 100 shares, now you can sell 100 of them and stop scraping by with no cash reserves.
The Stop Loss is a form of Limit order, only it acts as a downwards trigger, in that Stop Loss $250 means "when the price drops to $250, sell at the best price you can get". A standard Limit sell order would mean "when the price increases to $250, sell at the that price or higher".
Then there are Options, which I regard as being so speculative as to be gambling, but are really the purchase or sale of a contract to buy or sell a specific number of shares on a specific date. You could purchase an option for 1/15/2000 of LNUX for 100 shares - this would mean that you pay today for the right to buy 100 shares of LNUX at the price specified (say $200) from the person who sold you the option. If LNUX was trading at $150, you would let the option lapse; if it were trading at $450, you would exercise the option, and give the seller of the option $200 per share for 100 shares of LNUX. Which you could then sell for $450. In theory it sounds good, but almost all the time, the only person making money with options is a broker involved in the deal.
To qualify for IPOs, most brokers require that you be experienced enough to purchase/sell options. But I don't recommend it.
Sometimes, by holding a stock, you will receive (gratis) options regardings that stock or in another stock held by that firm. I get those about every month or two, and I usually let them expire, because they're usually worthless from my viewpoint. But, sometimes, they are worth exercising or at least selling.
At this point, you might want to just wait for the stock to engage in the classic post-IPO dip. Look at the RHAT chart and you'll see what I mean. It won't be for $45, that's for sure, but it might dip below $100 if you're patient. Don't wait till Jan 15, 2000, because they should have 4Q results by then, and the stock will go ballistic.
Seriously, my broker says the people buying it have no clue as to what Linux is, or what VA Linux Systems actually does, just that it "is" Linux and that it's supposed to be a good company.
They are in bubble mania territory.
I refuse to buy at this price, I'm sorry. When it dips below $100 I'll think about it, but I'd just be wasting my money or going on total speculation at this point.
And I just blew my morning waiting in Seattle (Fremont) for AT&T @Home to install my cable modem and they showed up 3.25 hours late. I left after 2.5 hours and rescheduled. At least they'll let you do a Linux install, but they only guarantee Windows.
If you want the real reason why people in Seattle are more willing to protest here, it's because we had a series of Stupid Sports Stadiums hoisted upon us that we have to pay for, but they ignore our (Seattle) votes against them. And now the WTO - we never voted for it, we didn't want it, and now we pay MILLIONS for it at a time when our city budget is slashing services.
So, if you're a sports fan, just remember - we will riot against your control of our city - and we will take no prisoners!
First ones up against the wall during the revolution will be those with SkyBoxes and Corporate Team Sponsorships. Then we Open Source the sports teams - no private ownership - no Ken Griffeys selling out Seattle for Big Bucks.
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Yes, but they weren't short either.
Actually, in a few game systems, including one that I created (and some others that I played in), I believe many simulators allowed more female space pilots to exist on the same life support requirements as male space pilots.
The only real problem is the spatial visualization. If you take a group of 100 males, perhaps only 5 could be space pilots; if you have a group of 100 females, perhaps only 2 could be space pilots. However, if we're talking space scientists, the whole visualization thing is less necessary, whereas a better center of gravity system and flexibility works out as a plus for women.
Sadly, in our culture, we put a bonus on TALL space pilots. Which is really inefficient, but culturally demanded.
Perhaps a mixed crew approach works out pretty well, though.
I think two different things are occurring:
1. Women are discouraged from become technogeeks by friends, family, school, society. Especially if they are considered pretty.
2. Being a technogeek is more encouraging for certain types of personalities/traits. These traits have shown up in men more often than in women, either due to social conditioning or due to minor genetic differences.
Still, all in all, it reminds me of when the CAF did testing of women pilots versus male pilots. They found that women pilots were better pilots, especially of fighter jets. BUT - very few people can pass the tests to become pilots - you need spatial conception skills for example - and so, more men could become pilots than women. The same probably applies to women technogeeks. As a women surgeon was saying on NPR yesterday: "You have to be twice as a good a surgeon than a man would be if you're a woman, to be considered to be adequate. Luckily, it's not that hard to be twice as good."
Sadly, as a low-level politico, I'd have to agree with you on this. I've met the Gores a few times and respect them, but think Bradley would probably be better for tech in the long run.
Either Gore or Bradley would be better than most of the other crowd, though.
OK, this could either turn into a Retief-style CDT experiment or it could be the GI Bill of the 21st Century. I'm hoping for the latter, but since politicians are setting it up, betting on the former.
I regret that I have but one rev to give to my country.
I was kind of glad that Salon.com went up, since I've got some shares of that. Which is one of my rare mistakes - letting my emotions get the better of my judgement. At least I bought after the IPO, so I'm not that bad off.
The problem with the stock market's Linux craze is they push the bad along with the good. Red Hat could be considered reasonable (today) at a valuation around $200/share, but VA Linux Systems is probably only worth $125/share. Yet both are way up there.
When I asked Scott__ about the CyberNet IPO he hadn't even heard of them. Does anyone know anything about these guys or are they a spiffier version of LinuxOne?
So what's to stop hackers from reprogramming the nanotechs to replicate? And turn everyone's hair purple?
Great. So now we'll not only encourage stupid people to have more kids than smart people, we'll encourage people with bad genes to live longer and pass them on.
And if those resulting humans ever colonize another planet and their tech fails them, they'll die in large numbers, being unsuited for survival.
Why don't you just rip out the teeth and bones and let us float in space habitats with cartilage only, and hard wire the pleasure centers so we never want to think hard thoughts or succeed at anything worthwhile? Just as effective - and just as useless.
Mr. Slippery said: Vegan and animal rights advocate that I am, I hope that given the tech level to create artery-scouring nanobots we'd put an end to slaughtering sentient creatures for pleasure and that you'd be eating tank-grown cloned meat instead.
Just because it's grown in a tank doesn't make it any less of an animal. You're still killing it. Just like you kill a tree when you buy a wood chair.
Don't get me wrong - I've cut down more forests than I care to remember and grew up on tree farms and so saw where the meat you eat comes from. And I still eat some meat.
I think the thing would be to try to grow food that was less expensive to the environment, personally. And maybe have the nanobots (or genetic viral alterations) make it so that a good soy burger tasted (in our brains) as good as a free-range cow burger.
jormurgandr said Hey, he was working newyears just like me, and I'd bet dollars to yen that he made the same overtime that I did (2.5 times normal!!!
Um, you get overtime? Some of do salary and bonus, maybe with options.
Loved the party food left over on Monday morning though - tons of supplies from the weekend that wasn't - and I just had to be on call with a beeper (first time in years).
We had a great time in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, with Elvis landing, Salsa dancing, and full to the brim with people. Plus, I met someone and she's muy sexy.
That plus not having to drive home was a plus.
OK, the Space Needle was a downer. And our mayor is a major wuss - even the NYTimes said so, and some other countries commented on it. But that doesn't mean you can't have fun anyway!
Personally, fireworks wise, Paris was THE PLACE TO BE. I think I'll go there for Y2K+1 and party with the fun people. If I don't, I'm still planning a bike trip of the wine and champagne regions in May/June 2001.
Oh, C'mon, any Aggie has got to have done at least two things that almost made him/her eligible for the Darwin Awards!
... but I used to belong to the Texas Folklore Society and I remember many a tale of an Aggie that just missed the Golden Darwin ring by a hair ...
After all, if not, they can't be Aggies!
And, no, I didn't go to UTA
Seriously, I live in Wuss City, formerly known as Seattle. As the "Darwin" awarder said, there might be some uses for risk-taking genes - and there are cases of people where they both have them (Paul Schell and the WTO) and then chicken out (Paul Schell and the No New Years At The Space Needle).
In my time in the military (ok, so you all don't believe that some of us do stupid things like that) I've seen MANY examples of pre-Darwin behaviour. Like playing with loaded guns, drinking large quantities of vodka before messing with explosives (including anti-personnel mines and tank mines), grabbing an M-90 one minute after it "didn't go off" (it then went off - just before his hand got it - and good thing he had thick glasses or he'd be blind).
Still, from a genetic point of view - they all "deserved to die". A lot of people take stupid risks like that and live - most of them shouldn't. And, most of the time, alcohol or other drugs are involved.
There should have been bonus points for his death, due to his status as a lawyer.
Darwin + Lawyer = +5 points on Darwin scale
I agree, the comment about the guys with the land mine who their wives couldn't find the pieces of made me realize: "Oh, no, they may have already reproduced!"
One of the problem with safety precautions is that they let the unsafe and dangerous amongst us continue to live.
Now, don't get me wrong, I've been on the Net since '78, helped crack games back in Apple II days, and seen more OS than I care to recall (CP/M, DOS, Unix flavors, many more). But I have to admit, especially since I've set up Mac Servers to run native Unix, configured various daemons, and so on - it is a tad bit confusing on the Linux side. It would really be nice to do a default Secure install and then enable services as I need them, without looking totally clueless as to the exact name of the script I'm supposed to have guessed at somehow.
I can cope with it, especially with tons of Linux geeks amongst my friends - spent part of Trolloween talking about how to do IPV6 with another friend as we watched them light a dinosaur on fire, for example.
But I think we're going to get way more confusion than usual, as all the totally clueless come wandering over from MSFT Windows1900 to find something that works.
While some amongst us might think it silly, there were recently two men killed in Tacoma, Washington by flesh-eating bacteria. It was carried on the AP and Reuters wires and just happened.
One of the problem with antibiotics is that many strains of bacteria and virii are becoming immune to commonly-used antibiotics, to the point where doctors are now warned not to use the "new" antibiotics except when they know the infectious agent is already immune to the commonly prescribed antibiotics.
More people died from the Spanish Flu than from WWI, after all. And more people died in WWII from disease than any other cause.
Without antibiotics, many of the advances in civilization would have probably not survived. It gave us this breather until we could start working on genetic defenses and tailored anti-viral agents.
Shouldn't that be:
Thanks for contributing the requisite uniformed Windows/NT user's perspective!
They may also be looking to save money. If Inprise can save money by getting open source developers to take over some or all of the load for new development and support for InterBase, it may be a win for them. A penny saved is a penny earned.
... just say "it's open source, you can fix it yourself and get lots of free on-line help" and problem solved.
...
That was my first thought. Just think, now they can avoid all those Y2K-hungry lawyers looking to get bug fixes
And, as you also point out, this will cause more of us to think of buying Borland/Inprise development tools first, before we consider other ones. After all, even if it's proprietary today, it will be GPL tomorrow
A nice theory, but people don't. Linux is normally pronounced by the great unwashed with two syllables, although Europeans tend to pronounce it differently than Americans. BSD, three syllables. Just like the Net is one syllable (three in French, but at least it's shorter than most words).
Spiff it up, give it a new name, a plush toy that won't poke kid's eyes out, and you've got marketing acceptance. Stick to the computerese and it loses points.
Sigh.
People frequently mistake my descriptions of reality for my personal opinion as to How Things Should Be - this is what I'm saying, not What Should Be.
I think it also has something to with the name. Maybe not for the serious amongst us, but I remember some of the reactions against unpopular languages were driven by how hard it was to say the name, in the past. Even if we can't agree on how to pronounce Linux, it still is easy to say. BSD, on the other hand, is very staccatto and doesn't roll trippingly off the tongue on the way to Piccadilly.
Also, if you got in at the IPO and held the 400 shares (or the 100 I had in the second group), you can now sell some of your shares. And, if like most Linux coders, you could only scrape up enough to buy 100 shares, now you can sell 100 of them and stop scraping by with no cash reserves.
The Stop Loss is a form of Limit order, only it acts as a downwards trigger, in that Stop Loss $250 means "when the price drops to $250, sell at the best price you can get". A standard Limit sell order would mean "when the price increases to $250, sell at the that price or higher".
Then there are Options, which I regard as being so speculative as to be gambling, but are really the purchase or sale of a contract to buy or sell a specific number of shares on a specific date. You could purchase an option for 1/15/2000 of LNUX for 100 shares - this would mean that you pay today for the right to buy 100 shares of LNUX at the price specified (say $200) from the person who sold you the option. If LNUX was trading at $150, you would let the option lapse; if it were trading at $450, you would exercise the option, and give the seller of the option $200 per share for 100 shares of LNUX. Which you could then sell for $450. In theory it sounds good, but almost all the time, the only person making money with options is a broker involved in the deal.
To qualify for IPOs, most brokers require that you be experienced enough to purchase/sell options. But I don't recommend it.
Sometimes, by holding a stock, you will receive (gratis) options regardings that stock or in another stock held by that firm. I get those about every month or two, and I usually let them expire, because they're usually worthless from my viewpoint. But, sometimes, they are worth exercising or at least selling.
At this point, you might want to just wait for the stock to engage in the classic post-IPO dip. Look at the RHAT chart and you'll see what I mean. It won't be for $45, that's for sure, but it might dip below $100 if you're patient. Don't wait till Jan 15, 2000, because they should have 4Q results by then, and the stock will go ballistic.
Again.
Seriously, my broker says the people buying it have no clue as to what Linux is, or what VA Linux Systems actually does, just that it "is" Linux and that it's supposed to be a good company.
They are in bubble mania territory.
I refuse to buy at this price, I'm sorry. When it dips below $100 I'll think about it, but I'd just be wasting my money or going on total speculation at this point.
And I just blew my morning waiting in Seattle (Fremont) for AT&T @Home to install my cable modem and they showed up 3.25 hours late. I left after 2.5 hours and rescheduled. At least they'll let you do a Linux install, but they only guarantee Windows.
Sigh.
If you want the real reason why people in Seattle are more willing to protest here, it's because we had a series of Stupid Sports Stadiums hoisted upon us that we have to pay for, but they ignore our (Seattle) votes against them. And now the WTO - we never voted for it, we didn't want it, and now we pay MILLIONS for it at a time when our city budget is slashing services.
So, if you're a sports fan, just remember - we will riot against your control of our city - and we will take no prisoners!
First ones up against the wall during the revolution will be those with SkyBoxes and Corporate Team Sponsorships. Then we Open Source the sports teams - no private ownership - no Ken Griffeys selling out Seattle for Big Bucks.