I agree, I was under the assumption that this was considered by most who have studied it as the most probably cause. There have even been shows on the Discovery Channel that pretty much sum up as this. I guess as long as you have some sort of degree and can get a paper published its news, whether it's really new or not.
McVeigh was practically working solo. After he was caught there was simply no one else to go after. If he were working under the orders of the President, and the President refused to turn himself over then perhaps your comparison is valid.
This has nothing to do with hating the Afghan people. The Taliban were given more than enough chances to turn over bin Laden and dismantle any terrorist network within their borders. We've more than given them enough avenues out of this, they refuse. The Taliban have decided that the lives of THEIR OWN citizens is worth less than the life of a known terrorist. And yet, the US are the bad guys here.
Remember, the a war against terrorism has been declared. This isn't just about bin Laden. Afghanistan is known to be a terrorist haven more than any other country. They refuse to comply with pretty much the rest of the world in making life difficult for terrorists. They want to run their country, well, with that comes all the responsibility there in. The death of Afghani civilians falls on the shoulders of the Taliban.
Remember, if 5 weeks ago bin Laden were turned over, and all terrorists in Afghanistan were kicked out, not a single bomb would have been dropped.
If Ramadan is so important there is a simple solution. Turn over everyone associated wtih al-Qaida. Why should we go out of our way? The Afghanis as a nation need to take responsibility for what occures to their own country.
All I hear on here is the intolerance and ignorance of Americans, like everywhere we go its our way or no way at all. The US constantly goes out of its way not to trample on the beliefs of others.
On Thanksgiving Day in Saudi Arabia it was Americans who were forced to leave the country and go onto a ship simply to have a prayer. How many people have been forced to leave the US and go on a ship so that they could practice their religion.
As an aside, in the Spring we had an intern who was Islamic. On his first day here when he was being introduced he refused to shake hands with any of the women here. We have some pretty liberal femenist types working here, but surprisingly nothing was mentioned of it, even in private conversation. Thinking back now on it I wish it were challenged. That being said, he was a good kid, but sometimes you should do the old 'when in rome do as the romans do' thing.
And reguarding Vietnam, the reason the US lost was because winning would have likely brought China into the conflict. One Korea was enough. Ironically, I think if China really wants a free trade agreement with the US we should make them march into Afghanistan with a couple hundred thousand troops and do some grunt work.
So, how is this supposed to work? Get in your plane, accelerate up to mach 5, wait for scramjet to kick in, cruise for a while, then land. At mach 5 it takes under an hour to fly across the Continental US. Of course, you need to accelerate up to mach 5, unless you want everyone tossing their cookies you can't do that too fast. It'll probably take 1000+ miles of the trip just to get up to speed. Another 1000+ to decelerate.
Basically we've reduced this to those who fly half way around the world. And how many people do that often enough to make up for development costs? It aint ever going to happen. You're better off waiting for them to invent a transporter. The number of people with the desire for this kind of service is simply way too small.
That being said, its fun technology to watch, but you'll never see it used in the commercial airlines. And no, I didn't actually read the article;)
I'm 28 and I think that I'm really awesome. To show this I will list a whole bunch of crap that I've been through in the 6 years I've been out of college. Then I will tell you where I am currently heading and I will wait for the entire slashdot crowd to read in envy and then post about how awesome and on the right track I am. Oh, by the way, I rule.
For a start I'd have to say because whenever I type "/me shoots Alen." you don't get knocked to the floor with a bloody hole in you.
Huh? In the real world you can come up to me and type "/me shoots Alen" all you want and I don't think it will hurt anyone.
According to your logic, every kid who plays guns would be dead. Your argument would also imply that it would be legal to hack into a bank system and transfer funds from one account to another because there is nothing tangible in the process.
Citing colleges and universities will probably do little good. The environments are likely completely different from the environment at work. For the most part colleges need a solution that is generic and covers a fairly small toolset that just about everyone will use. Compare that to a work environment where each individual may have a different job title and role. It's now necessary to make sure that each individual will have all of the tools (s)he needs for the job.
Univeristy need to have a few machines that are a generic solution for the student body in general. Companies generally have a single machine that has the tools it needs to get the job done.
Note, before you go and say that Linux has program xyz to do whatever you want, that isn't what this post is about. It's about finding an accurate model to use in your comparisons.
Ok, everyone that is using encryption seems to have there panties in a twist over this. My question is, why? Why, just because you decide you want to use encryption should you be given any more protection than those who dont.
Assuming that the government has an infinite number of monkeys, does the fact that it is encrypted really matter? All encryption is adding is complexity to the equation. In Big O terms, some constant, which can be dropped.
Quite frankly, i can care less whether the government *can* look at what i do, the real question is under what circumstances are they allowed to do so. Let them be able to look at anything they want as along as they have a court order saying that they are allowed to do it. This is a privacy issue that has nothing to do with whether it happens to be encrypted or not.
How is this any different than saying, 'I correspond with my friend in Japaneese because most people in the US dont understand it and i feel safer that way. How dare the US government employ Japaneese linguists who can understand it.' I really don't care if they can read it, the real question is should they read it. Everything else is just technology, which isn't a good basis to use for reasoning.
Bottom line, do i care that they can decrypt anything that they want? No. Do i care that they want to do so without a court order. You bet I do.
Carpet bombing does work. It works very well. Its failure in Vietnam was simply because it wasn't utilized enough, primarily up north because of fear of drawing the Chineese into the war, one Korea was enough. Whenever the Vietnamese left the table, guess what always brought them back? B52s heading to Hanoi.
In Korea, carpet bombing held a Chineese force that had over a 10 to 1 superiority on the ground at bay.
In Vietnam carpet bombing reached its objective 100% of the time. Look at the Khe Sahn and tell me that carpet bombing didn't meet its objectives.
Desert storm? Republican Army who? Enough said.
Next to the nuclear option there is nothing more awe inspring than seeing the contrails of 4 wings of B52s fly over head, and then feeling the ground shake when you know that you are 30+ miles away from impact.
Proximity to Diego Garcia means that if there is a target that needs to be removed, it will be the 40+ year old B52 that will get the job done.
Anyone who has either lived through, or witnessed carpet bombing in action will point out that the armchair general who claims they don't work simply doesn't know his history.
No, the major reason they aren't connected to the internet is because they don't want a breach of security. Lets see, do you want someone who is not an employee and is only in your facility for a week to have free reign on your intranet?
Especially in cases such as Sun where for the majority of the class you may have root privileges. Granted, for the most part the lab machines are wiped clean and reinstalled between sessions, but still, its mainly security.
The fact that people may actually pay attention a little more is a nice little added bonus.
Its much better to lug around an empeg wherever you go because who would be crazy enough to leave it in your car? sure, put it in your trunk, that does a lot of good when its -10 out and i want to listen to something before it has a chance to warm up. Oh, and the lack of a tuner is wonderful too. I never thought i would actually care about an fm tuner until Sept 11. Now I realize a tuner is a good thing. At the very least you have to pull your empeg out and bring it in to download music about as often as I have to put a new cd in my car case.
That being said, are they a neat idea, sure. Worth the money? Not even close.
Oh come on now, it was a joke. Lighten up a little. And if slashdot got hacked, would anyone really notice?:) Maybe they would be able to fix the crappy article threading. I'm really getting tired of reading all of an articles responses in one big nested bullet.
Lets see, we can spend our time trying examine millions of messages that we can decrypt, or we will spend a little bit of time to decrypt those messages that are in some home grown, probably relatively simplistic and fairly easily breakable encryption. Which do you think is going to draw the attention?
The fact that a municpal would have to increase the taxes of everyone in the city in order to provide a non essential service is a bit disturbing. What percentage of a city actually needs broadband? Are we now saying that broadband is on the same level as electricity, water, plumbing and plowing streets? How many people above 60 are willing to have their taxes increased so that a bunch of 14 year olds can play counterstrike.
All that you need to get from the net can be done over dial up. Broadband for the most part is a luxury that I would rather not have my taxes paying for. There are much better ways to spend my money, thank you.
Because it's not as simple as just banning songs that the public might listen to. Have you ever listened to Howard Stern? There are groups of disc jockeys out there will use any means possible to try to get a laugh. This usually involves the use of sound clips from songs, titles, etc. These shock jocks are the real targets of all of this. All it takes is one idiot disc jockey out there to do something inappropriate and the entire company will be boycotted.
The vast majority of people do not understand the real reason for this list. It is not so much to keep the listeners from hearing it, it is more because there exists a certain number of DJs who are willing to do anything for a laugh. Most of the songs in question as a whole are fine, however, take a few lines, or simply the title of the song out of context, insert them into a sound bite in the background, and viola, you have alot of insulted listeners. Sure, there are probably a few songs on there that they don't want listeners to be requesting, listening to. But for the most part its an attempt to keep DJs from doing something stupid.
Of course, the DJs will never admit this, they will just talk being censored, not about the small portion of their peers who lack the maturity to restrain themselves.
Umm..its only censorship if someone forces you to do it. Perhaps the owners/board of directors came upon this decision on there own? They are the ones in control of the company. At this point it is their choice. Just like you have the choice to listen to another station.
And don't give me crap about how the DJs are being censored by not being able to play the music they want. They are simple employees.
This may be silly, but it is not censorship and it has nothing to do with our civil liberties being violated.
This is the problem with alot of OS software, it simply looks, and in this case sounds, unprofessional. I mean, what kind of name is bugzilla and what is the deal with the silly red barnie wannabe graphics. Have you seen the web pages? They are absolutely godawful ugly. You goto the report section and some of the output criteria are things like 'most doomed', and 'most recently doomed'. I'm supposed to sell this product to a bunch of manager types? I know, everything is html and can be changed to do what we want, but then my free product isn't being very free, is it.
This isn't meant to be a flame. I'm simply pointing out yet again what many people have said. Open Source is terrible at getting the last mile done. Although it may be evil, marketing works. If you want something to be used, you have to present it well. Until that happens people will just keep turning to Rational ClearQuest, even tho it costs money.
Err...you assume he isn't in the reserves. I hope that you enjoy all of the rights you are given that were granted to you through the blood of your bretheren.
The fact that they are seperated is the difference between real and fantasy. Why is it ok to go and cheer on mel gibson in leathal weapon? Because it is so unbelievable and fantastic that that it can't be true, so you can enjoy the carnage.
In indepence day when the aliens zap all of those buildings, people were in awe, enjoyed it, and in some cases cheered. Of course, this was ok to do, why because it could never happen.
However, just a few days ago we saw that 2 of the tallest, amazing structures in the world could be taken down. Nobody enjoyed or cheered about that, but the end result was the same, a huge pile of rubble.
Seperation between the medias is essential sometimes. If a movie that just happened to show a large building being destroyed were released today, it would completely have a different effect on people than it was intended. The creators are looking to entertain, and awe people. They aren't looking to bring people to tears in the theaters.
The movies that they have postponed are meant to be fun, not stir terrible memories.
I mean, pointing us to a schedule listing is hardly any shred of evidence that this had anything to do with the bombings. And if it did, and the ratings were good enough, give it some time and it will be back. Perhaps they pulled it because they studied the demograph that watches and it decided maybe they should be something a little more constructive, like watching the news?
Or, maybe possibly, its just simply part of the Fall schedule shifts that always happen. But nah, even tho we have no real reason to think it, its gotta be the man.
We used to build giant wind turbines (read big windmills) for electricity until we sold off that business in the late 80s, I believe to a Swedish company. There was a case where we had a very large turbine(believe it was one of the largest in the world at the time) set up in the midwest. One day, an old ladies house just all of a sudden collapsed. This house was on a hill something like 5 miles away, and it was strucurally fine. As it turned out, the natural sound waves that were produces by the slow spinning blades happened to be just the right frequency to cause the house to collapse. Who would have thunk? Obviously, no one.
The moral of the story is nothing is free and totally clean. Everything has a side effect. It wouldn't be such a good thing to place one of these in a city and then 6 months later have a dozen buildings 5 miles away go toppling down. The idea is great, but that doesn't mean its the right thing to do.
Actually, a study was done about this and it was determined that while working outside of the ISS, the HUT can withstand a hit from an object about the size of a pencil eraser without being penetrated. Unfortunately, I can't remember the actual speed that this assumed the object was moving at, but I think around 20K mph is ball park. The speed in which this study was asked for and done makes me suspect that there may have been a near miss of some sort during a mission. Officially we'll probably never find that out.
Menstration is not really a problem. If needed, there are drugs available that will all but halt the menstration process. Also, although they make up a relatively small percentage of EVAs, women hold some of the longest duration space walks ever. And we aren't talking about just floating in space, we are talking about rigorous work such as assembling parts of the ISS. The reasoning behind this has generally been that women have a lower repseratory rate than most men, and are typically smaller, which gives them a center of mass more suitable for work in a weightless environment.
Of course, the disadvantage of this is that the suits have to be that much smaller, and currently there is an awefull lot packed into each suit. It used to be that each suit was designed for an individual. Now they come in sizes. Currently work is being done on an extra small suit, with the target astronaut being Japanees females.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, I was under the assumption that this was considered by most who have studied it as the most probably cause. There have even been shows on the Discovery Channel that pretty much sum up as this. I guess as long as you have some sort of degree and can get a paper published its news, whether it's really new or not.
McVeigh was practically working solo. After he was caught there was simply no one else to go after. If he were working under the orders of the President, and the President refused to turn himself over then perhaps your comparison is valid.
This has nothing to do with hating the Afghan people. The Taliban were given more than enough chances to turn over bin Laden and dismantle any terrorist network within their borders. We've more than given them enough avenues out of this, they refuse. The Taliban have decided that the lives of THEIR OWN citizens is worth less than the life of a known terrorist. And yet, the US are the bad guys here.
Remember, the a war against terrorism has been declared. This isn't just about bin Laden. Afghanistan is known to be a terrorist haven more than any other country. They refuse to comply with pretty much the rest of the world in making life difficult for terrorists. They want to run their country, well, with that comes all the responsibility there in. The death of Afghani civilians falls on the shoulders of the Taliban.
Remember, if 5 weeks ago bin Laden were turned over, and all terrorists in Afghanistan were kicked out, not a single bomb would have been dropped.
If Ramadan is so important there is a simple solution. Turn over everyone associated wtih al-Qaida. Why should we go out of our way? The Afghanis as a nation need to take responsibility for what occures to their own country.
All I hear on here is the intolerance and ignorance of Americans, like everywhere we go its our way or no way at all. The US constantly goes out of its way not to trample on the beliefs of others.
On Thanksgiving Day in Saudi Arabia it was Americans who were forced to leave the country and go onto a ship simply to have a prayer. How many people have been forced to leave the US and go on a ship so that they could practice their religion.
As an aside, in the Spring we had an intern who was Islamic. On his first day here when he was being introduced he refused to shake hands with any of the women here. We have some pretty liberal femenist types working here, but surprisingly nothing was mentioned of it, even in private conversation. Thinking back now on it I wish it were challenged. That being said, he was a good kid, but sometimes you should do the old 'when in rome do as the romans do' thing.
And reguarding Vietnam, the reason the US lost was because winning would have likely brought China into the conflict. One Korea was enough. Ironically, I think if China really wants a free trade agreement with the US we should make them march into Afghanistan with a couple hundred thousand troops and do some grunt work.
So, how is this supposed to work? Get in your plane, accelerate up to mach 5, wait for scramjet to kick in, cruise for a while, then land. At mach 5 it takes under an hour to fly across the Continental US. Of course, you need to accelerate up to mach 5, unless you want everyone tossing their cookies you can't do that too fast. It'll probably take 1000+ miles of the trip just to get up to speed. Another 1000+ to decelerate.
;)
Basically we've reduced this to those who fly half way around the world. And how many people do that often enough to make up for development costs? It aint ever going to happen. You're better off waiting for them to invent a transporter. The number of people with the desire for this kind of service is simply way too small.
That being said, its fun technology to watch, but you'll never see it used in the commercial airlines. And no, I didn't actually read the article
I'm 28 and I think that I'm really awesome. To show this I will list a whole bunch of crap that I've been through in the 6 years I've been out of college. Then I will tell you where I am currently heading and I will wait for the entire slashdot crowd to read in envy and then post about how awesome and on the right track I am. Oh, by the way, I rule.
For a start I'd have to say because whenever I type "/me shoots Alen." you don't get knocked to the floor with a bloody hole in you.
Huh? In the real world you can come up to me and type "/me shoots Alen" all you want and I don't think it will hurt anyone.
According to your logic, every kid who plays guns would be dead. Your argument would also imply that it would be legal to hack into a bank system and transfer funds from one account to another because there is nothing tangible in the process.
Citing colleges and universities will probably do little good. The environments are likely completely different from the environment at work. For the most part colleges need a solution that is generic and covers a fairly small toolset that just about everyone will use. Compare that to a work environment where each individual may have a different job title and role. It's now necessary to make sure that each individual will have all of the tools (s)he needs for the job.
Univeristy need to have a few machines that are a generic solution for the student body in general. Companies generally have a single machine that has the tools it needs to get the job done.
Note, before you go and say that Linux has program xyz to do whatever you want, that isn't what this post is about. It's about finding an accurate model to use in your comparisons.
Ok, everyone that is using encryption seems to have there panties in a twist over this. My question is, why? Why, just because you decide you want to use encryption should you be given any more protection than those who dont.
Assuming that the government has an infinite number of monkeys, does the fact that it is encrypted really matter? All encryption is adding is complexity to the equation. In Big O terms, some constant, which can be dropped.
Quite frankly, i can care less whether the government *can* look at what i do, the real question is under what circumstances are they allowed to do so. Let them be able to look at anything they want as along as they have a court order saying that they are allowed to do it. This is a privacy issue that has nothing to do with whether it happens to be encrypted or not.
How is this any different than saying, 'I correspond with my friend in Japaneese because most people in the US dont understand it and i feel safer that way. How dare the US government employ Japaneese linguists who can understand it.' I really don't care if they can read it, the real question is should they read it. Everything else is just technology, which isn't a good basis to use for reasoning.
Bottom line, do i care that they can decrypt anything that they want? No. Do i care that they want to do so without a court order. You bet I do.
Carpet bombing does work. It works very well. Its failure in Vietnam was simply because it wasn't utilized enough, primarily up north because of fear of drawing the Chineese into the war, one Korea was enough. Whenever the Vietnamese left the table, guess what always brought them back? B52s heading to Hanoi.
In Korea, carpet bombing held a Chineese force that had over a 10 to 1 superiority on the ground at bay.
In Vietnam carpet bombing reached its objective 100% of the time. Look at the Khe Sahn and tell me that carpet bombing didn't meet its objectives.
Desert storm? Republican Army who? Enough said.
Next to the nuclear option there is nothing more awe inspring than seeing the contrails of 4 wings of B52s fly over head, and then feeling the ground shake when you know that you are 30+ miles away from impact.
Proximity to Diego Garcia means that if there is a target that needs to be removed, it will be the 40+ year old B52 that will get the job done.
Anyone who has either lived through, or witnessed carpet bombing in action will point out that the armchair general who claims they don't work simply doesn't know his history.
No, the major reason they aren't connected to the internet is because they don't want a breach of security. Lets see, do you want someone who is not an employee and is only in your facility for a week to have free reign on your intranet?
Especially in cases such as Sun where for the majority of the class you may have root privileges. Granted, for the most part the lab machines are wiped clean and reinstalled between sessions, but still, its mainly security.
The fact that people may actually pay attention a little more is a nice little added bonus.
Its much better to lug around an empeg wherever you go because who would be crazy enough to leave it in your car? sure, put it in your trunk, that does a lot of good when its -10 out and i want to listen to something before it has a chance to warm up. Oh, and the lack of a tuner is wonderful too. I never thought i would actually care about an fm tuner until Sept 11. Now I realize a tuner is a good thing. At the very least you have to pull your empeg out and bring it in to download music about as often as I have to put a new cd in my car case.
That being said, are they a neat idea, sure. Worth the money? Not even close.
Apparently no comparison at all. The aiwa is a much better deal, at least thats what consumers say.
Oh come on now, it was a joke. Lighten up a little. And if slashdot got hacked, would anyone really notice? :) Maybe they would be able to fix the crappy article threading. I'm really getting tired of reading all of an articles responses in one big nested bullet.
Lets see, we can spend our time trying examine millions of messages that we can decrypt, or we will spend a little bit of time to decrypt those messages that are in some home grown, probably relatively simplistic and fairly easily breakable encryption. Which do you think is going to draw the attention?
The fact that a municpal would have to increase the taxes of everyone in the city in order to provide a non essential service is a bit disturbing. What percentage of a city actually needs broadband? Are we now saying that broadband is on the same level as electricity, water, plumbing and plowing streets? How many people above 60 are willing to have their taxes increased so that a bunch of 14 year olds can play counterstrike.
All that you need to get from the net can be done over dial up. Broadband for the most part is a luxury that I would rather not have my taxes paying for. There are much better ways to spend my money, thank you.
Because it's not as simple as just banning songs that the public might listen to. Have you ever listened to Howard Stern? There are groups of disc jockeys out there will use any means possible to try to get a laugh. This usually involves the use of sound clips from songs, titles, etc. These shock jocks are the real targets of all of this. All it takes is one idiot disc jockey out there to do something inappropriate and the entire company will be boycotted.
The vast majority of people do not understand the real reason for this list. It is not so much to keep the listeners from hearing it, it is more because there exists a certain number of DJs who are willing to do anything for a laugh. Most of the songs in question as a whole are fine, however, take a few lines, or simply the title of the song out of context, insert them into a sound bite in the background, and viola, you have alot of insulted listeners. Sure, there are probably a few songs on there that they don't want listeners to be requesting, listening to. But for the most part its an attempt to keep DJs from doing something stupid.
Of course, the DJs will never admit this, they will just talk being censored, not about the small portion of their peers who lack the maturity to restrain themselves.
Umm..its only censorship if someone forces you to do it. Perhaps the owners/board of directors came upon this decision on there own? They are the ones in control of the company. At this point it is their choice. Just like you have the choice to listen to another station.
And don't give me crap about how the DJs are being censored by not being able to play the music they want. They are simple employees.
This may be silly, but it is not censorship and it has nothing to do with our civil liberties being violated.
This is the problem with alot of OS software, it simply looks, and in this case sounds, unprofessional. I mean, what kind of name is bugzilla and what is the deal with the silly red barnie wannabe graphics. Have you seen the web pages? They are absolutely godawful ugly. You goto the report section and some of the output criteria are things like 'most doomed', and 'most recently doomed'. I'm supposed to sell this product to a bunch of manager types? I know, everything is html and can be changed to do what we want, but then my free product isn't being very free, is it.
This isn't meant to be a flame. I'm simply pointing out yet again what many people have said. Open Source is terrible at getting the last mile done. Although it may be evil, marketing works. If you want something to be used, you have to present it well. Until that happens people will just keep turning to Rational ClearQuest, even tho it costs money.
Err...you assume he isn't in the reserves. I hope that you enjoy all of the rights you are given that were granted to you through the blood of your bretheren.
The fact that they are seperated is the difference between real and fantasy. Why is it ok to go and cheer on mel gibson in leathal weapon? Because it is so unbelievable and fantastic that that it can't be true, so you can enjoy the carnage.
In indepence day when the aliens zap all of those buildings, people were in awe, enjoyed it, and in some cases cheered. Of course, this was ok to do, why because it could never happen.
However, just a few days ago we saw that 2 of the tallest, amazing structures in the world could be taken down. Nobody enjoyed or cheered about that, but the end result was the same, a huge pile of rubble.
Seperation between the medias is essential sometimes. If a movie that just happened to show a large building being destroyed were released today, it would completely have a different effect on people than it was intended. The creators are looking to entertain, and awe people. They aren't looking to bring people to tears in the theaters.
The movies that they have postponed are meant to be fun, not stir terrible memories.
I mean, pointing us to a schedule listing is hardly any shred of evidence that this had anything to do with the bombings. And if it did, and the ratings were good enough, give it some time and it will be back. Perhaps they pulled it because they studied the demograph that watches and it decided maybe they should be something a little more constructive, like watching the news?
Or, maybe possibly, its just simply part of the Fall schedule shifts that always happen. But nah, even tho we have no real reason to think it, its gotta be the man.
We used to build giant wind turbines (read big windmills) for electricity until we sold off that business in the late 80s, I believe to a Swedish company. There was a case where we had a very large turbine(believe it was one of the largest in the world at the time) set up in the midwest. One day, an old ladies house just all of a sudden collapsed. This house was on a hill something like 5 miles away, and it was strucurally fine. As it turned out, the natural sound waves that were produces by the slow spinning blades happened to be just the right frequency to cause the house to collapse. Who would have thunk? Obviously, no one.
The moral of the story is nothing is free and totally clean. Everything has a side effect. It wouldn't be such a good thing to place one of these in a city and then 6 months later have a dozen buildings 5 miles away go toppling down. The idea is great, but that doesn't mean its the right thing to do.
Actually, a study was done about this and it was determined that while working outside of the ISS, the HUT can withstand a hit from an object about the size of a pencil eraser without being penetrated. Unfortunately, I can't remember the actual speed that this assumed the object was moving at, but I think around 20K mph is ball park. The speed in which this study was asked for and done makes me suspect that there may have been a near miss of some sort during a mission. Officially we'll probably never find that out.
Menstration is not really a problem. If needed, there are drugs available that will all but halt the menstration process. Also, although they make up a relatively small percentage of EVAs, women hold some of the longest duration space walks ever. And we aren't talking about just floating in space, we are talking about rigorous work such as assembling parts of the ISS. The reasoning behind this has generally been that women have a lower repseratory rate than most men, and are typically smaller, which gives them a center of mass more suitable for work in a weightless environment.
Of course, the disadvantage of this is that the suits have to be that much smaller, and currently there is an awefull lot packed into each suit. It used to be that each suit was designed for an individual. Now they come in sizes. Currently work is being done on an extra small suit, with the target astronaut being Japanees females.