As a girlgeek, it frustrates me to see another article where women geeks get such a cursory mention.
If you are a geek (female or otherwise) can you please first describe the problem, then explain how bad it is instead of doing the second without the first? I don't think, any male geek on slashdot (editors included) has a slightest idea, what kind of sex/romance/dating-relared problems do female geeks have in SV.
Bullshit. Computers aren't out partners -- they are extensions of us, our tools, our means of expression, out arms, legs, eyes, ears and mouths. But in no case they are partners.
I went to college in Newark, NJ (not far from NYC). There is a large population in the Northeastern US and an exceptionally high concentration in this particular area. I found that you can still be very much alone in the middle of all that humanity, but it's likely that you will run into someone along the line that is interesting enough that you'll want to talk to them. There are so many forums to provide an opportunity to find someone with similar interests.
Schools and work have very little in common. Social interaction at work is suppressed if for no other reason, by the amount of things, everyone is expected to do. Companies specialize in one activity per location, so people are heavily segregated by their activity -- and in the case of EE/CS, gender. There are no organizations or activities, specifically designed to bring people together. So if geeks have their chances at school, it definitely ends with graduation.
How does she go about finding a nice, geeky guy who is not scared away by an instant family?
Good luck to her, but I should warn you and her -- geeks, no matter how bad do they feel, value their self-respect, and can reject a single mother for a simple reason that choosing a woman that has kids should be made by them consciously, not out of desperation. If they feel that they have no choice but look among women, stigmatized by society for something, they don't really relate to (geeks wouldn't have problem with a woman, stigmatized for her geekiness, manner of thinking, etc -- but social position with no "merit" is different), they can reject such a forced choice unless they will see something seriously valuable, _superior_ to others in that woman.
So, am I the only one with this problem or are there others like me?
Others have the same problem but much worse. I have been programming for 14 years, 6 of them in this country, with stable result of zero attention from women in all situations that I happened to go through.
I do not relate to this article at all. I have a very healthy sex life but lack a stable relationship. I would prefer to have a good relationship but mindless sex helps me mind less. I find geek women are less likely to want to commit and prefer casual sex. I used to be married and I think I have more sex now, than when I was married (In fact I am sure I do).
You almost answered your own question. Just like geek girls are less interested in casual sex, a lot of geek guys aren't interested in it either. Foreign geek guys even more often so because in a lot of cultures either casual sex is frowned upon in general, or at least is considered acceptable with worthy partner (whatever "worthy" is, it rarely overlaps with a kind of american woman that likes to sleep around). So at least some geeks consider casual sex to be a "masturbation with female body" and are looking for something more meaningful.
Geeks are ugly. Or, more to the point, people who sit around all day doing softare or electrical design, aren't usually the sort who live in their bodies. They tend to live in their heads, and sod all with that bag of flesh down below.
They talk about how nobody's getting any, then they talk about how everyone was into S&M, and then they started talking about how noone is getting any again. WTF?
In more simplified form it's something like "In this subculture the best way to get sex is to look for a kind of sex that 1. is rare (so people involved/interested in it will value them more), 2. breaks some norms in local society (so people, involved/interested in it would be tolerant to geeks, breaking other norms of the same society)".
You all miss the point. Human behavior related to dating and sex always in large part determined by protocols. It can't avoid that -- instincts and culture always create some kind of protocol that determines the basics -- how complete strangers are supposed to start a conversation, how reaction can be judged, etc. Personality of every person determines, what actually is done, yet the basics are just as pre-determined as normal spoken language. There is nothing insulting to our human nature in it, strict rules of English language didn't make Shakespeare a worse writer than if he invented a language for himself, they provided means of expression. And just like people now have trouble understanding some thing in Shakespeare because he used slightly different language from modern English, cultural rules, involved in dating may be completely unknown or misunderstood by a person who comes from different culrural background -- especially from different country.
When people spend their whole life in the same or similar cultural environment they spend their childhood absorbing ("learning" won't be the right word) things that aren't completely based on instinct yet never are expressed in plain words. When any serious change of environment happens people always face the fact that environment changed and their rules don't work. People, unless they are very perceptive or interested in psychology, can't understand, what rules don't work -- they never "knew" rules that they apply in the first place. They get wrong ideas about what people are trying to express. My own main complaint for a long time was a tone, Americans use in their speech, smiles at completely inappropriate times, etc -- it looked like Americans allow themselves to be or look blatantly insincere with their friends and co-workers at the extent that I would consider to be a deep personal insult -- like if in the restaurant a waiter would bring me some dish that costs about $100 and supplied me with plastic fork and knife (no offence to people who didn't mean to insule me -- this is how they looked in the content of my, completely foreign for them, Russian culture).
Most of emotions, values and even behavior norms are universal (more universal than my spelling of "behavior" for sure). No self-respecting male geek (I am talking about men here) would tell a girl that he loves her, and be disinterested in her feelings, or would not try to make her feel comfortable. But the form, in which he would do that, or, even worse, form, in which he would try to start a conversation or judge first reaction to him, would unlikely match local cultural norms. Neither he nor girl would really understand it -- both are acting on things that never were written, expressed or explained to them, but both would feel discomfort in such a situation. In modern culture such discomfort is often expressed as that "chemistry" wasn't compatible (or, in subcultures that are not so fond for pseudoscientific explanations, "I have got a feeling that it isn't for me"), but this is wrong -- no "chemistry" unless it's some really noticeable stench of sweat, can be incompatible with everybody around, and no serious negative "feeling" can be derived from one minute of conversation with a stranger that behaves reasonably courteous. What we see here is plain and simple incompatibility of language, not some unreasonable expectations that human will behave like computer.
The really bad part of it is that no one seriously studied cultural norms of that kind -- people much more embarrassed to dig into "in what situation and how exactly it's appropriate to say 'how are you?' and demonstrate that the answer will be ignored" or "how is it appropriate to reject a guy, romantically interested in you while pretending to care about his feelings, so you wouldn't feel bad about yourself" than in any kind of sexually-freudian crap that ever was written in psychology books or was exchanged between psychoanalyst and patients. This mean, geeks, most of whom represent rather closed subculture, and especially foreign geeks, who represent completely different, sometimes hostile in their base cultures, have no means to learn them unless they will find a way to re-live at least teenage years immersed in this culture (as members, not as outsiders, like even local geeks are at their teenage years).
I understand that the approach that I have used here is clearly and blatantly geeky and definitely not compatible with an attitude, normal in this society. Still it doesn't make me wrong, and history knows a lot of cases when only this kind of approach succeeded in discovering (or expressing, or just in raising awareness) of problems that plagued the societies for decades. I don't know of any solution -- if I knew I would definitely used it for myself -- but I believe, people should realize that this problem exists, and try to solve it, not accuse geeks in "not being sensitive enough", suppress all thoughts of it, pretending that things are supposed to be that way.
That aside, if the corporations code were abolished, then all the assets of all the corporations in the US would go to the shareholders, and any concerted effort thereafter would have unlimited liability. In other words, if the business was sued, the plaintiffs could reach the owners' assets. Who would invest under such circumstances?
Organized crime isn't even legal under existing laws, yet a lot of people participate and invest in it. If "abolished", corporation will just convert themselves into something similar.
The thing that you are forgetting is that corporations are a legal fiction. They exist only because the state allows them to exist. So no, under no circumstance would SuperCorp be able to run the government. The government could always nullify corporate law.
With the government of three people in a shack it will be very hard to implement. Libertarians ignore the fact that after some growth large companies can gain more real power than government, and rule the country basically by themselves (and definitely not in anyone's other than themselves' interest -- there is no mechanism that enforces their responsibility to population, and their commercial interests with the absence of any restraints that government provides, will be to turn the country into something like 14-th century's Europe).
You make it sound like getting a patent is the end all of legal protection for your product. This is not true. You not only have to get the patent, you also have to protect it.
You would be right if government would pay everyone who challenge others' patents -- then after patenting everything would be under strict scrutiny. Unfortunately the reverse is true now -- one has to pay to challenge a patent (law prohibits challenging a patent without a patent lawyer), and fees that are involved in this process are incomparably higher than any fees spent on patenting, thus encouraging "blanket-patenting" obvious things and cross-licensing them in some exclusive "club" of patent-holder companies instead of challenging bogus patents.
Also, the existence of patent grants its holder a right to prevent others to do anything that is covered by the patent even if the patent itself was never challenged and thus should be considered to be unproven (PTO definitely doesn't do anything that can be considered "challenging"). This is even a deeper legal problem -- an accused person is presumed guilty and has to prove his innocence.
Did velco exist before it was discovered/invented?
This is an interesting question even in this simple example -- velcro is an "improvement" of the mechanism that was used by various plants that distributed their seeds covered with hook-shaped thorns by attaching them to animals' fur. However there are two things that can justify the patent. First, velcro uses large flat surface to increase the strength of the bond, and materials that didn't exist in nature, so this is an improvement that never existed before. Second, the application is noticeably different -- velcro isn't limited to carrying objects on the surface, can be reused without damaging the hooks and losing them in the wool, and is designed to allow the use by humans without any tools.
However small those differences are, velcro didn't exist before, and humans knew about seeds that stick to wool and fabric for as long as humans exist, so it's definitely not a discovery. Velcro patent doesn't cover seeds, and I hope, no one will argue that it will apply to, say, nanotechnological equivalent of velcro if such thing will be developed later.
They have invested _billions_ to get this information, and they can't afford to give it away.
Tough cookies. If someone would "invest" few trillions of dollars in the development of the faster than light travel, and would find nothing, it would be his problem, too. The difference is that a person who failed to develop faster than light travel, even if he would think that someone has to compensate for his work, probably wouldn't demand an exclusive right to tax the use and production of all existing and possible vehicles from bicycles to spaceships.
Serial protocols are useful for anything long-range, but when you need to deliver data between few devices located in the same box, and have to do it fast, one wire instead of 64 means theoretically 64 times less bandwidth, and in relaity at least twice less, no matter what. Only when the length of the line is enough to cause distortion/desynchronization of the signals serial protocol becomes superior to parallel one, and even that isn't true in all cases.
Important Browser Upgrade Information! If you are using a Netscape browser older than version 4.06, or Internet Explorer version 4.01 browser for the Macintosh, Citi f/i recommends that you download a newer version of these browsers before December 31, 1999. This is because the Certificate Authority certificate that allows you to use this service and other services from other companies securely (that is, with your communication encrypted) will expire at the end of 1999. Once the Certificate expires, you will receive a message online warning you that the certificate has expired.
In other words, instead of making a nice message on non-https part of the site and leaving it to users to take actions, smartasses decided to make wild assumptions, how User-Agent field must look in the "right" browser, and redirect everything that does not look like Windows or MacOS to a page with rude message and no mentioning of certificates, just because they don't know, which version of Netscape for other systems (hint to citifi -- the same as for Windows) they should recommend.
It's a real shame that the W3C standards haven't been followed, along with ECMAScript. If the damned browsers would only render absolutely to-spec, then it'd make all webauthor's jobs easier, make all webpages far more cross-platform compatible, support speech- and whatever-based browsers, and so on.
"Standards" are not written as "do this, and everything else is nonstandard". There are levels and optional features, extensions, fallbacks and mandatory subsets. And most important, there is the rule "Be conservative in what you send out and liberal with what you can accept as the input". If some page requires something that is not guaranteed to be implemented, and if such thing isn't present, can't be read at all, it's broken even if that something is included in some standard.
I think people who decide to switch to linux should just take what they get and not complain. They Chose to change OS's and if someone has a service for windows, then too bad. Don't complain! Accept it. Don't make everyone cater to your needs. babies.
Why should we allow them to pervert our ideas? We made those protocols, formats ansd servers, so it's our right to annoy the hell out of marketdroid slime that abuses it until they will comply. Who the hell are you and why you think that we should not do that?
Slashdot Mirror
See http://freebsd.nwserv.com/news/pres s-rel-1.html
See http://freebsd.nwserv.com/news/pres s-rel-1.html
As a girlgeek, it frustrates me to see another article where women geeks get such a cursory mention.
If you are a geek (female or otherwise) can you please first describe the problem, then explain how bad it is instead of doing the second without the first? I don't think, any male geek on slashdot (editors included) has a slightest idea, what kind of sex/romance/dating-relared problems do female geeks have in SV.
Bullshit. Computers aren't out partners -- they are extensions of us, our tools, our means of expression, out arms, legs, eyes, ears and mouths. But in no case they are partners.
I went to college in Newark, NJ (not far from NYC). There is a large population in the Northeastern US and an exceptionally high concentration in this particular area. I found that you can still be very much alone in the middle of all that humanity, but it's likely that you will run into someone along the line that is interesting enough that you'll want to talk to them. There are so many forums to provide an opportunity to find someone with similar interests.
Schools and work have very little in common. Social interaction at work is suppressed if for no other reason, by the amount of things, everyone is expected to do. Companies specialize in one activity per location, so people are heavily segregated by their activity -- and in the case of EE/CS, gender. There are no organizations or activities, specifically designed to bring people together. So if geeks have their chances at school, it definitely ends with graduation.
How does she go about finding a nice, geeky guy who is not scared away by an instant family?
Good luck to her, but I should warn you and her -- geeks, no matter how bad do they feel, value their self-respect, and can reject a single mother for a simple reason that choosing a woman that has kids should be made by them consciously, not out of desperation. If they feel that they have no choice but look among women, stigmatized by society for something, they don't really relate to (geeks wouldn't have problem with a woman, stigmatized for her geekiness, manner of thinking, etc -- but social position with no "merit" is different), they can reject such a forced choice unless they will see something seriously valuable, _superior_ to others in that woman.
So, am I the only one with this problem or are there others like me?
Others have the same problem but much worse. I have been programming for 14 years, 6 of them in this country, with stable result of zero attention from women in all situations that I happened to go through.
I do not relate to this article at all. I have a very healthy sex life but lack a stable relationship. I would prefer to have a good relationship but mindless sex helps me mind less. I find geek women are less likely to want to commit and prefer casual sex. I used to be married and I think I have more sex now, than when I was married (In fact I am sure I do).
You almost answered your own question. Just like geek girls are less interested in casual sex, a lot of geek guys aren't interested in it either. Foreign geek guys even more often so because in a lot of cultures either casual sex is frowned upon in general, or at least is considered acceptable with worthy partner (whatever "worthy" is, it rarely overlaps with a kind of american woman that likes to sleep around). So at least some geeks consider casual sex to be a "masturbation with female body" and are looking for something more meaningful.
Geeks are ugly. Or, more to the point, people who sit around all day doing softare or electrical design, aren't usually the sort who live in their bodies. They tend to live in their heads, and sod all with that bag of flesh down below.
Counter-example -- me.
They talk about how nobody's getting any, then they talk about how everyone was into S&M, and then they started talking about how noone is getting any again. WTF?
In more simplified form it's something like "In this subculture the best way to get sex is to look for a kind of sex that 1. is rare (so people involved/interested in it will value them more), 2. breaks some norms in local society (so people, involved/interested in it would be tolerant to geeks, breaking other norms of the same society)".
You all miss the point. Human behavior related to dating and sex always in large part determined by protocols. It can't avoid that -- instincts and culture always create some kind of protocol that determines the basics -- how complete strangers are supposed to start a conversation, how reaction can be judged, etc. Personality of every person determines, what actually is done, yet the basics are just as pre-determined as normal spoken language. There is nothing insulting to our human nature in it, strict rules of English language didn't make Shakespeare a worse writer than if he invented a language for himself, they provided means of expression. And just like people now have trouble understanding some thing in Shakespeare because he used slightly different language from modern English, cultural rules, involved in dating may be completely unknown or misunderstood by a person who comes from different culrural background -- especially from different country.
When people spend their whole life in the same or similar cultural environment they spend their childhood absorbing ("learning" won't be the right word) things that aren't completely based on instinct yet never are expressed in plain words. When any serious change of environment happens people always face the fact that environment changed and their rules don't work. People, unless they are very perceptive or interested in psychology, can't understand, what rules don't work -- they never "knew" rules that they apply in the first place. They get wrong ideas about what people are trying to express. My own main complaint for a long time was a tone, Americans use in their speech, smiles at completely inappropriate times, etc -- it looked like Americans allow themselves to be or look blatantly insincere with their friends and co-workers at the extent that I would consider to be a deep personal insult -- like if in the restaurant a waiter would bring me some dish that costs about $100 and supplied me with plastic fork and knife (no offence to people who didn't mean to insule me -- this is how they looked in the content of my, completely foreign for them, Russian culture).
Most of emotions, values and even behavior norms are universal (more universal than my spelling of "behavior" for sure). No self-respecting male geek (I am talking about men here) would tell a girl that he loves her, and be disinterested in her feelings, or would not try to make her feel comfortable. But the form, in which he would do that, or, even worse, form, in which he would try to start a conversation or judge first reaction to him, would unlikely match local cultural norms. Neither he nor girl would really understand it -- both are acting on things that never were written, expressed or explained to them, but both would feel discomfort in such a situation. In modern culture such discomfort is often expressed as that "chemistry" wasn't compatible (or, in subcultures that are not so fond for pseudoscientific explanations, "I have got a feeling that it isn't for me"), but this is wrong -- no "chemistry" unless it's some really noticeable stench of sweat, can be incompatible with everybody around, and no serious negative "feeling" can be derived from one minute of conversation with a stranger that behaves reasonably courteous. What we see here is plain and simple incompatibility of language, not some unreasonable expectations that human will behave like computer.
The really bad part of it is that no one seriously studied cultural norms of that kind -- people much more embarrassed to dig into "in what situation and how exactly it's appropriate to say 'how are you?' and demonstrate that the answer will be ignored" or "how is it appropriate to reject a guy, romantically interested in you while pretending to care about his feelings, so you wouldn't feel bad about yourself" than in any kind of sexually-freudian crap that ever was written in psychology books or was exchanged between psychoanalyst and patients. This mean, geeks, most of whom represent rather closed subculture, and especially foreign geeks, who represent completely different, sometimes hostile in their base cultures, have no means to learn them unless they will find a way to re-live at least teenage years immersed in this culture (as members, not as outsiders, like even local geeks are at their teenage years).
I understand that the approach that I have used here is clearly and blatantly geeky and definitely not compatible with an attitude, normal in this society. Still it doesn't make me wrong, and history knows a lot of cases when only this kind of approach succeeded in discovering (or expressing, or just in raising awareness) of problems that plagued the societies for decades. I don't know of any solution -- if I knew I would definitely used it for myself -- but I believe, people should realize that this problem exists, and try to solve it, not accuse geeks in "not being sensitive enough", suppress all thoughts of it, pretending that things are supposed to be that way.
I am a programmer, not a joutnalist. (apologies to McCoy).
Magazines would be about 10 times more expensive if it weren't for revenue from ads.
Can you tell me, where I can find those magazines that are 10 times more expensive but have actual content instead of ads?
Buffy, the AOL Lamer.
The Matrix is going down for reboot now! Stopping reality: OK. The system is halted.
That looks an awful lot like Redhat -- while The Matrix runs on FreeBSD ;-)
That aside, if the corporations code were abolished, then all the assets of all the corporations in the US would go to the shareholders, and any concerted effort thereafter would have unlimited liability. In other words, if the business was sued, the plaintiffs could reach the owners' assets. Who would invest under such circumstances?
Organized crime isn't even legal under existing laws, yet a lot of people participate and invest in it. If "abolished", corporation will just convert themselves into something similar.
The thing that you are forgetting is that corporations are a legal fiction. They exist only because the state allows them to exist. So no, under no circumstance would SuperCorp be able to run the government. The government could always nullify corporate law.
With the government of three people in a shack it will be very hard to implement. Libertarians ignore the fact that after some growth large companies can gain more real power than government, and rule the country basically by themselves (and definitely not in anyone's other than themselves' interest -- there is no mechanism that enforces their responsibility to population, and their commercial interests with the absence of any restraints that government provides, will be to turn the country into something like 14-th century's Europe).
You make it sound like getting a patent is the end all of legal protection for your product. This is not true. You not only have to get the patent, you also have to protect it.
You would be right if government would pay everyone who challenge others' patents -- then after patenting everything would be under strict scrutiny. Unfortunately the reverse is true now -- one has to pay to challenge a patent (law prohibits challenging a patent without a patent lawyer), and fees that are involved in this process are incomparably higher than any fees spent on patenting, thus encouraging "blanket-patenting" obvious things and cross-licensing them in some exclusive "club" of patent-holder companies instead of challenging bogus patents.
Also, the existence of patent grants its holder a right to prevent others to do anything that is covered by the patent even if the patent itself was never challenged and thus should be considered to be unproven (PTO definitely doesn't do anything that can be considered "challenging"). This is even a deeper legal problem -- an accused person is presumed guilty and has to prove his innocence.
Did velco exist before it was discovered/invented?
This is an interesting question even in this simple example -- velcro is an "improvement" of the mechanism that was used by various plants that distributed their seeds covered with hook-shaped thorns by attaching them to animals' fur. However there are two things that can justify the patent. First, velcro uses large flat surface to increase the strength of the bond, and materials that didn't exist in nature, so this is an improvement that never existed before. Second, the application is noticeably different -- velcro isn't limited to carrying objects on the surface, can be reused without damaging the hooks and losing them in the wool, and is designed to allow the use by humans without any tools.
However small those differences are, velcro didn't exist before, and humans knew about seeds that stick to wool and fabric for as long as humans exist, so it's definitely not a discovery. Velcro patent doesn't cover seeds, and I hope, no one will argue that it will apply to, say, nanotechnological equivalent of velcro if such thing will be developed later.
They have invested _billions_ to get this information, and they can't afford to give it away.
Tough cookies. If someone would "invest" few trillions of dollars in the development of the faster than light travel, and would find nothing, it would be his problem, too. The difference is that a person who failed to develop faster than light travel, even if he would think that someone has to compensate for his work, probably wouldn't demand an exclusive right to tax the use and production of all existing and possible vehicles from bicycles to spaceships.
Your Russian sucks so much, I have made a CRT using it.
Serial protocols are useful for anything long-range, but when you need to deliver data between few devices located in the same box, and have to do it fast, one wire instead of 64 means theoretically 64 times less bandwidth, and in relaity at least twice less, no matter what. Only when the length of the line is enough to cause distortion/desynchronization of the signals serial protocol becomes superior to parallel one, and even that isn't true in all cases.
Important Browser Upgrade Information!
If you are using a Netscape browser older than version 4.06, or Internet Explorer version 4.01 browser for the Macintosh, Citi f/i recommends that you download a newer version of these browsers before December 31, 1999. This is because the Certificate Authority certificate that allows you to use this service and other services from other companies securely (that is, with your communication encrypted) will expire at the end of 1999. Once the Certificate expires, you will receive a message online warning you that the certificate has expired.
In other words, instead of making a nice message on non-https part of the site and leaving it to users to take actions, smartasses decided to make wild assumptions, how User-Agent field must look in the "right" browser, and redirect everything that does not look like Windows or MacOS to a page with rude message and no mentioning of certificates, just because they don't know, which version of Netscape for other systems (hint to citifi -- the same as for Windows) they should recommend.
Very lame.
It's a real shame that the W3C standards haven't been followed, along with ECMAScript. If the damned browsers would only render absolutely to-spec, then it'd make all webauthor's jobs easier, make all webpages far more cross-platform compatible, support speech- and whatever-based browsers, and so on.
"Standards" are not written as "do this, and everything else is nonstandard". There are levels and optional features, extensions, fallbacks and mandatory subsets. And most important, there is the rule "Be conservative in what you send out and liberal with what you can accept as the input". If some page requires something that is not guaranteed to be implemented, and if such thing isn't present, can't be read at all, it's broken even if that something is included in some standard.
I think people who decide to switch to linux should just take what they get and not complain. They Chose to change OS's and if someone has a service for windows, then too bad. Don't complain! Accept it. Don't make everyone cater to your needs. babies.
Why should we allow them to pervert our ideas? We made those protocols, formats ansd servers, so it's our right to annoy the hell out of marketdroid slime that abuses it until they will comply. Who the hell are you and why you think that we should not do that?