How would you differentiate between "no genitalia" and "both genitalia"?
And why?
This is starting to sound a bit like tracking fractions of negro blood a person has. Why does a driver's license need to specify one's degree of maleness and/or femaleness? Is it so that police can pay special attention to the driving problems of "lady drivers" or some other pre-civil-rights-era nonsense?
But gender isn't a simple boolean value. Not medically, not psychologically, and not even sociologically.
And if we aim to be a society which treats people equally regardless of gender, why should it matter whether we treat it as a single-bit boolean or a floating-point or a short string of ASCII? Isn't it something we should be working harder to simply ignore (except where genuinely relevant)?
First, despite what you learned in 7th grade Biology class, sex is not a simple matter of X and Y genes. A person's sex genes may be altered, or due to environmental factors, don't express normally. A surprising ratio of babies are born with ambiguous genitalia, which the attending medical staff will respond to by either guessing how the child will develop, or suggesting surgery to select one or the other gender. Parents will sometimes leave the child's physical features as they are, but (for obvious reasons) pick on gender or the other and raise the child accordingly, which may work OK for a while, but by the time of puberty the fact that their child isn't simply "male" or simply "female" becomes more problematic.
If you're really sincere about supporting equality, then please make a little genuine effort to better understand the subject. Talking about transgender identity as a "mental health issue" is about as respectful - and medically accurate - as referring to homosexual or left-handed people as having mental disorders.
"a tiny minority of people who knew going into it"
You mean before they were born?
(This is going to sound a lot like the kind of lecture you used to have to give people about sexual orientation, but that's how it goes....)
Being transgender isn't something that someone just decides to do one day, as an adult. It's about people who are designated "male" or "female" at birth (usually based on whether they have an identifiable dick or not) but grow up feeling that they've been miscategorized. The "how"s and "why"s of it aren't especially well understood, but the fact that it happens is (or at least should be) well established and accepted.
Those who go through with legal and/or physical gender reassignment don't do it by "choice", but because they feel a need to. Yes, they know they'll face pointless bureaucratic red tape, and possibly a lifetime of trying to explain to friends, coworkers, employers, and service providers with crappy customer service. They do it for their sense of self-identity and emotional well-being. It can be a nightmare. Even though it doesn't need to be. But it is, mostly because of dismissive jerks like you, who don't want to be bothered by taking it seriously.
So by "flying bicycle" they mean "personal hovercraft built around a bicycle".
Besides, wasn't something like the Gossamer Condor (built way back when I was a lad, in the 1970s) closer to the concept of a "flying bicycle"? Pedal powered, and able to fly, and it even had two wheels.
Considering that the Maldives themselves stand a chance of being half-underwater within 100 years, to the point that the president proposed that the country start shopping for a new homeland, this looks like someone planning for the future.
I think it's interesting the way they're describing this. "Windows has already contributed 10% off the PC cost." Not "Microsoft" the company, but "Windows" the operating system. As if the software itself were somehow tapping into a bank account to contribute. Is Microsoft trying to avoid its own brand here?
(All of which is just a bunch of marketing nonsense. Microsoft isn't "chipping in" 10%; it's offering a 10% discount. In exchange for... your personal info, and that of your friends and family with money.)
If it's any consolation, a copy of Action Comics #1 (cover date June 1938, some guy in a cape on the cover) was recently discovered serving as insulation in the wall of a house bought for salvage for $10K. It's currently on auction, with bidding at $137K. (It'd be fetching more money, but the back cover got ripped in a grabbing contest between the guy who found it and his wife's aunt.)
A while back I signed up for a MOOC in a subject that I find very interesting. The structure of the "learning" environment, with no way to engage in any kind of discussion without first navigating the colossal trainwreck of a message board cluttered with hundreds (thousands?) of introductory messages that no human being could possibly sort through, was such a huge turn-off that I can't imagine why I'd ever want to look at one of them again. They actually recommended Twitter - the most superficial, badly-threaded "communication" method since shouting to strangers at riots - to use as a discussion tool. A podcast that didn't try to be interactive would've been better, because at least it wouldn't have had "first day at a new high school" front-loaded onto it. Or give me a book to read rather than making me listen to a stilted one-way lecture that I can't skim as needed. For someone who went to a small college, in part to avoid those god-awful 100-student lecture classes, it was the most pedagogically hostile environment I've ever seen passed off as "education".
If there is anything I have learned, it is that most humans have a desire to throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation.
Then you have not learned anything, padawan. It may be commonly true of your peers, but it is not true of most humans in middle age or later, especially those of less tech-friendly varieties.
I actually did very well in school, despite being a social misfit of sorts: a fairly typical smart kid who'd rather make stuff in his room than play with the other kids. Great GPA, test scores in the 99th percentile, etc. But it hasn't correlated with my professional and financial success, which has been... limited. Which may just mean that success in school isn't always dependent on the attributes that make one successful in later life. Or maybe I've just been screwed over more than statistically average.
For those hesitant to google it, but curious what this is: it involves refashioning the end of the forearm into pincers, using each of the bones as a "finger".
Yeah, this is a textbook example* of how relying on an outside "cloud" service – especially one that you have no contractual control over – to store your data is a really dumb idea.
"Do you really expect me to disconnect an employee computer, hull it up to my office, and reinstall there - just so I can have a standard local root password the other admins also know?"
That'd be a more appropriate place to do an OS install, but no: I expect you to lift your head and look around before typing, to see if anyone is staring at the screen. Because if there are other people in the room, and you're really that concerned that they'll be snooping at your root password, they can just as easily look at your hands on the keyboard.
The practice of masking passwords in all circumstances is a perfect example of unthinking That's How We've Always Done It Syndrome. It dates back to the days of printing terminals, where everything you typed was dot-matrixed onto a roll of paper as you went. It was a very good idea and very important that those passwords not be echoed back to the user, because they'd be preserved on greenbar paper for someone else in the terminal room or computer lab to find.
But most password entry isn't done in that context anymore. With password-saving features on web browsers and smartphones, it's often done once, then left alone; people can easily take a quick look around to make sure no one's looking when they tap their e-mail password into their smartphone during initial setup. A login screen that doesn't echo the password as you type it, but has "remember my password" checkbox... makes no sense whatsoever. But they're programmed that way, because That's How We've Always Done It. Not masking the password when you initially set the password is a good idea because it's really not that difficult to make the same typo twice in a row, and once you've done that with the root password on a new system, you're screwed.
I work in an IT office, and every day I get multiple calls from users who've locked themselves out of their accounts because they couldn't see what they were typing. Caps-Lock is a frequent culprit, and if I had a dollar for every time I've asked a user to check that and try again (and it worked), I'd be able to buy pizza for the whole department every Friday.
There are certainly circumstances where masking the password is a good idea. Kiosks where the user is likely to have strangers standing in line behind her, portable devices that are likely to be used on coffee shop tables, and high-security environments of various kinds. But not all password entry requires that level of looking-over-your-shoulder-but-not-really-because-you-can't-be-bothered-to paranoia to applied. If I'm logging in to Netflix.com to add a movie to my queue, I don't need the kind of password-masking secrecy needed to log in to the medical-records software used where I work. And it's high time someone had the critical thinking skills to start making this judgment call on a case-by-case basis.
"What is wrong with enforcing the laws we have?"
Aside from the fact that some of the laws we have are wrong-headed and counterproductive (e.g. copyright terms that not only outlive the creators, but also their children, and even their grandchildren, thus stifling independent creative appropriation), there's the fact that the laws we have don't make any sense (as in "I have no idea what this means", not just merely misguided) in the context of modern technology.
Don't forget the low-cost dumb terminals – I'm sorry: "thin clients" – which are incapable of doing anything at all independently of the centrally-adminstered silicon. The computing environment I work in today is architecturally very similar to the one I started working in back in the mid-1980s.
"Limits on what you can do with it" do not equal "compromised". I can't install arbitrary code on my crock pot either, but that doesn't mean it constitutes a security or privacy risk. Redefining words like this is a Fox-News trick.
And why would a guest – even one as paranoid as the poster – be concerned that Apple might record what web site they looked at and attribute it to someone else?
Slashdot Mirror
How would you differentiate between "no genitalia" and "both genitalia"?
And why?
This is starting to sound a bit like tracking fractions of negro blood a person has. Why does a driver's license need to specify one's degree of maleness and/or femaleness? Is it so that police can pay special attention to the driving problems of "lady drivers" or some other pre-civil-rights-era nonsense?
But gender isn't a simple boolean value. Not medically, not psychologically, and not even sociologically.
And if we aim to be a society which treats people equally regardless of gender, why should it matter whether we treat it as a single-bit boolean or a floating-point or a short string of ASCII? Isn't it something we should be working harder to simply ignore (except where genuinely relevant)?
Compared to asking each person to self-identify, which has a success rate of 100.000%.
Gender is not determined (solely) by genetics.
First, despite what you learned in 7th grade Biology class, sex is not a simple matter of X and Y genes. A person's sex genes may be altered, or due to environmental factors, don't express normally. A surprising ratio of babies are born with ambiguous genitalia, which the attending medical staff will respond to by either guessing how the child will develop, or suggesting surgery to select one or the other gender. Parents will sometimes leave the child's physical features as they are, but (for obvious reasons) pick on gender or the other and raise the child accordingly, which may work OK for a while, but by the time of puberty the fact that their child isn't simply "male" or simply "female" becomes more problematic.
If you're really sincere about supporting equality, then please make a little genuine effort to better understand the subject. Talking about transgender identity as a "mental health issue" is about as respectful - and medically accurate - as referring to homosexual or left-handed people as having mental disorders.
"a tiny minority of people who knew going into it"
You mean before they were born?
(This is going to sound a lot like the kind of lecture you used to have to give people about sexual orientation, but that's how it goes....)
Being transgender isn't something that someone just decides to do one day, as an adult. It's about people who are designated "male" or "female" at birth (usually based on whether they have an identifiable dick or not) but grow up feeling that they've been miscategorized. The "how"s and "why"s of it aren't especially well understood, but the fact that it happens is (or at least should be) well established and accepted.
Those who go through with legal and/or physical gender reassignment don't do it by "choice", but because they feel a need to. Yes, they know they'll face pointless bureaucratic red tape, and possibly a lifetime of trying to explain to friends, coworkers, employers, and service providers with crappy customer service. They do it for their sense of self-identity and emotional well-being. It can be a nightmare. Even though it doesn't need to be. But it is, mostly because of dismissive jerks like you, who don't want to be bothered by taking it seriously.
So by "flying bicycle" they mean "personal hovercraft built around a bicycle".
Besides, wasn't something like the Gossamer Condor (built way back when I was a lad, in the 1970s) closer to the concept of a "flying bicycle"? Pedal powered, and able to fly, and it even had two wheels.
If Slashdot were just a bit less responsible, the (technically incorrect but misleading) headline on this would be "Kodak stops making film".
Considering that the Maldives themselves stand a chance of being half-underwater within 100 years, to the point that the president proposed that the country start shopping for a new homeland, this looks like someone planning for the future.
"For every 22 year old twerp in the movie, I’ve met some 40-somethings who know a thing or two and work at Google."
<sarcasm>As someone who is nearly 50 – and still at least 20 years from retirement – I find this oh so very reassuring.</sarcasm>
I think it's interesting the way they're describing this. "Windows has already contributed 10% off the PC cost." Not "Microsoft" the company, but "Windows" the operating system. As if the software itself were somehow tapping into a bank account to contribute. Is Microsoft trying to avoid its own brand here? (All of which is just a bunch of marketing nonsense. Microsoft isn't "chipping in" 10%; it's offering a 10% discount. In exchange for... your personal info, and that of your friends and family with money.)
If it's any consolation, a copy of Action Comics #1 (cover date June 1938, some guy in a cape on the cover) was recently discovered serving as insulation in the wall of a house bought for salvage for $10K. It's currently on auction, with bidding at $137K. (It'd be fetching more money, but the back cover got ripped in a grabbing contest between the guy who found it and his wife's aunt.)
$640K should be enough for anybody.
Posting this immediately after an article about how teens are sharing too much personal information online is (as those kids are saying) epic.
A while back I signed up for a MOOC in a subject that I find very interesting. The structure of the "learning" environment, with no way to engage in any kind of discussion without first navigating the colossal trainwreck of a message board cluttered with hundreds (thousands?) of introductory messages that no human being could possibly sort through, was such a huge turn-off that I can't imagine why I'd ever want to look at one of them again. They actually recommended Twitter - the most superficial, badly-threaded "communication" method since shouting to strangers at riots - to use as a discussion tool. A podcast that didn't try to be interactive would've been better, because at least it wouldn't have had "first day at a new high school" front-loaded onto it. Or give me a book to read rather than making me listen to a stilted one-way lecture that I can't skim as needed. For someone who went to a small college, in part to avoid those god-awful 100-student lecture classes, it was the most pedagogically hostile environment I've ever seen passed off as "education".
Then you have not learned anything, padawan. It may be commonly true of your peers, but it is not true of most humans in middle age or later, especially those of less tech-friendly varieties.
I actually did very well in school, despite being a social misfit of sorts: a fairly typical smart kid who'd rather make stuff in his room than play with the other kids. Great GPA, test scores in the 99th percentile, etc. But it hasn't correlated with my professional and financial success, which has been ... limited. Which may just mean that success in school isn't always dependent on the attributes that make one successful in later life. Or maybe I've just been screwed over more than statistically average.
For those hesitant to google it, but curious what this is: it involves refashioning the end of the forearm into pincers, using each of the bones as a "finger".
Yeah, this is a textbook example* of how relying on an outside "cloud" service – especially one that you have no contractual control over – to store your data is a really dumb idea.
*OK, maybe it's just in the teacher's edition.
"Do you really expect me to disconnect an employee computer, hull it up to my office, and reinstall there - just so I can have a standard local root password the other admins also know?"
That'd be a more appropriate place to do an OS install, but no: I expect you to lift your head and look around before typing, to see if anyone is staring at the screen. Because if there are other people in the room, and you're really that concerned that they'll be snooping at your root password, they can just as easily look at your hands on the keyboard.
The practice of masking passwords in all circumstances is a perfect example of unthinking That's How We've Always Done It Syndrome. It dates back to the days of printing terminals, where everything you typed was dot-matrixed onto a roll of paper as you went. It was a very good idea and very important that those passwords not be echoed back to the user, because they'd be preserved on greenbar paper for someone else in the terminal room or computer lab to find.
But most password entry isn't done in that context anymore. With password-saving features on web browsers and smartphones, it's often done once, then left alone; people can easily take a quick look around to make sure no one's looking when they tap their e-mail password into their smartphone during initial setup. A login screen that doesn't echo the password as you type it, but has "remember my password" checkbox... makes no sense whatsoever. But they're programmed that way, because That's How We've Always Done It. Not masking the password when you initially set the password is a good idea because it's really not that difficult to make the same typo twice in a row, and once you've done that with the root password on a new system, you're screwed.
I work in an IT office, and every day I get multiple calls from users who've locked themselves out of their accounts because they couldn't see what they were typing. Caps-Lock is a frequent culprit, and if I had a dollar for every time I've asked a user to check that and try again (and it worked), I'd be able to buy pizza for the whole department every Friday.
There are certainly circumstances where masking the password is a good idea. Kiosks where the user is likely to have strangers standing in line behind her, portable devices that are likely to be used on coffee shop tables, and high-security environments of various kinds. But not all password entry requires that level of looking-over-your-shoulder-but-not-really-because-you-can't-be-bothered-to paranoia to applied. If I'm logging in to Netflix.com to add a movie to my queue, I don't need the kind of password-masking secrecy needed to log in to the medical-records software used where I work. And it's high time someone had the critical thinking skills to start making this judgment call on a case-by-case basis.
Ideologues don't allow the possibility that there are ever valid exceptions to their dogma.
Please read the second half of my reply. That is what's wrong with "enforcing the laws we have".
"What is wrong with enforcing the laws we have?" Aside from the fact that some of the laws we have are wrong-headed and counterproductive (e.g. copyright terms that not only outlive the creators, but also their children, and even their grandchildren, thus stifling independent creative appropriation), there's the fact that the laws we have don't make any sense (as in "I have no idea what this means", not just merely misguided) in the context of modern technology.
Don't forget the low-cost dumb terminals – I'm sorry: "thin clients" – which are incapable of doing anything at all independently of the centrally-adminstered silicon. The computing environment I work in today is architecturally very similar to the one I started working in back in the mid-1980s.
"Limits on what you can do with it" do not equal "compromised". I can't install arbitrary code on my crock pot either, but that doesn't mean it constitutes a security or privacy risk. Redefining words like this is a Fox-News trick. And why would a guest – even one as paranoid as the poster – be concerned that Apple might record what web site they looked at and attribute it to someone else?