There are many strains of Feminism, and pretending that it is a single philosophy is either ignorant or disingenuous.
Perhaps. But any strain of feminism (or any other philosophy) that requires that one deny propositional logic (e.g. accept that p && !p is not necessarily false) and accept the philosophy only on its own terms -- that's one of the crazy ones.
Which is why the environmentalists need to force them on us. LEDs suck too, but less so. When someone comes up with a phosphor which can decently approximate a blackbody spectrum, let me know. Until then, phosphor-based lights will continue to suck.
I really understand that this is what the calls to remove it look like. And I agree (without having seen whether the general sexism was light or included threatening language) that it is over the top to call for people to lose their jobs for public sexism.
Well, if you thought that was over the top, how about the calls to have people prosecuted for following the project? You want to talk about oppression, that's oppression, of the old fashioned government-run sort.
Do take a minute and give the women reading this in an environment that is already exclusionary a thought. We are constantly pushed (or driven, with threats of rape or death) away from the possibility of earning a living with our skills.
Yes, that's right. Every time women walk into a tech office, they're bombarded with threats of rape and murder. They get more catcalls and lewd remarks on the way down the hallway than they would have in the New York subway in the 1980s. It's common to find hung and/or mutilated effigies of women in various places around the office.
Wait, no they aren't. Nothing of the sort happens, at least not in any office I have been in. Death and rape threats from internet trolls, yes. Death and rape threats against women in a professional environment, no.
So, what you are saying is that politicians claim to be on the "right" and then once they get into power, they operate from the "left's" perspective that increasing government power is in their own interest? And your answer to this problem is to vote for politicians who openly ADVOCATE for increasing government control over your life?
It's almost as if you're damned either way. (And if you take the position that the left is more honest, please examine Mr. Obama's various broken promises).
I'm going to argue that media that is very important to geek culture may nonetheless contribute to a hostile work environment.
Great, you're really advancing the cause of women in tech that way.
Take Asimov. Widely held to be a wonderful science fiction writer, and a touchstone of geek culture. But his books don't handle women particularly well, if at all.
Yes, and so what? Asimov wasn't all that good at human characterization in general; with few exceptions (including one woman - Susan Calvin - though she was a stereotype as well) his human characters are little more than set pieces to drive the plot. There's reasons for the lack of women in Asimov's stories, some of which Asimov wrote about himself. And Asimov himself was known as a womanizer and a groper; he got away with it because he was Asimov and fame like rank has its privileges.
But the inclusion of SF in geek culture isn't about geeks thinking SF stories are the way the world should be nor about venerating SF writers personally. If it were, the inclusion of _The Left Hand of Darkness_ and "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" (among others) in the SF canon would be hostile to various more-well-represented-groups as well. And then there's Heinlein, in whose works you can find something to offend anyone; _Friday_ alone can easily offend arch-conservatives and feminists alike.
It's not that feminists hate science fiction, it's that science fiction, especially "classic" science fiction, has a problem with women. And if you're a feminist, the most terrifying thing in the world is a vision of the future with the women of the 50s.
If that last statement is true, feminists need to get a sense of perspective. There's far worse treatment of women in parts of the world today than in the US of the 1950s. And if feminists have a problem with the books enjoyed by geeks because the authors were not themselves feminists or those books didn't meet the feminist standards of gender ratio or female characterization, that's really their problem; stretching geek enjoyment of such books into a hostile act just makes geeks (justifiably) defensive.
I would hazard to guess that most techie geeks don't dominate anybody. We tend to be put-upon. We're not the problem.
Careful. As a man, if you suggest you're anything other than "privileged", you'll get the whole speech about how you as a guy don't have to worry about being raped every time you step outside your door.
It seems like that would make feminists more attracted to geeks...but all we get is "Nerds? Ewww! Gross!"
And by being gross nerds we're providing an environment that is hostile to women, thereby driving them out of the tech workforce. So we should be forced to act less nerdy.
Fsck that, and I mean that in the most non-sexual way possible.
How about the guy who's honest opinion is supporting the feminist position, that women are men's equals, with all sorts of hopes and dreams just like I have?
The feminists being mocked are part of the problem, not part of the solution. A few here have claimed that the brand of feminism being mocked is no longer in vogue, in which case it's merely a parody which misses the target. But if so, why are so many offended by it?
As for the article you cited:
The stereotype of computer scientists as geeks who memorize Star Trek lines and never leave the lab may be driving women away from the field, a new study suggests.
And women can be turned off by just the physical environment, say, of a computer-science classroom or office that's strewn with objects considered "masculine geeky," such as video games and science-fiction stuff.
Guess what: tough shit. This stuff is part of geek culture. And it's not inherently anti-female or offensive to women (the article itself admits this). Video games, science fiction, and related paraphenalia are not in themselves any way conducive to a hostile workplace environment to women. And if a "feminist" comes in and under the banner of gender equality demands these things be eliminated, she's just given a bunch of geeks reason to be hostile to feminism... and, unfortunately, perhaps to women as well.
As with other niche communities, feminists have invaded the programming community, and then demanded that the community change its character and become a 'safe space'.
WTF kind of drugs are you on?
That statement can be verified by nothing more than reading a few slashdot threads about gender imbalance in programming.
In this context, 'safe' means that feminists must be able to unilaterally dictate social norms, and that criticism of feminism is pushed out.
Yet more crap.
Yeah, that's what they all say, until they find themselves at an exit interview because they objected to some such nonsense.
You need to come up with a shred of evidence before posting shit like that if you wish to have any credibility at all. And if what your talking about essentially boiles down to being against brogrammers and a locker room mentality, then I don't want that either and I'm a guy.
Careful. If you're a guy and against feminist nonsense, you're an ordinary pig. If you're a guy and you support that crap, you instead get branded as a "white knight", which some feminists find even MORE offensive. Anyway, "brogrammers" are a straw man. The whole "brogrammer" phenomenon was a hoax.
Or maybe the third book could be a satire - introduce a Snowden-type character into the novel and have him assassinated / kidnapped by the government, or start a war between the US and the country providing his asylum that ends in nuclear winter.
Doesn't work; the UK authorities (who are in cahoots with the US on this) in Charles Stross's worlds are reasonable authority figures -- the good guys.
A lot of US suburbs have community mailboxes, and many areas have mailboxes on the street (as opposed to through-the-door delivery). When I lived in a community mailbox area, the mail carrier would bring packages or mail that didn't fit into the box to the door; if I had to go to the post office (their slogan: "when you have the time, we're closed") every time that happened, it would suck.
Care to share the Distro of choice on those linux based non chromebook machines? Is it a free employee option ? Are there a set number of pre-approved distros? Is there a top-secret Google Gnu-Linux Distro that dispenses chocolates on the half hour?
The last, only it's healthy-organic-snack-of-the-week rather than chocolates. Seriously, it's a Google-specific distribution called Goobuntu.
People comitted suicide from dealing with us even when doing so made no sense; they simply let their ignorant fears of the Big Bad put them in a bad place, mentally.
When a parade of kooks and idiots testified to Congress in 1998 that we were all baby-eating monsters, NO ONE stood up for us. Horrific legislation that left the agency permanently hamstrung resulted.
I don't know how you missed this while working there, but the IRS deliberately cultivates that reputation. They WANT to be known as baby-eating killers, they want people to fear dealing with them so much that they don't even risk anything which could result in an audit even if it's 100% legal. The IRS has been doing government by terrorism for a very long time now, and it's quite effective.
Every so often the people get uppity, so the IRS has to pull something like holding day care students hostage until the parents pay the school's taxes. That usually works.
It's interesting to see the amount of vitriol heaped upon Taco Cowboy.
Shiver in the dark environmentalists deserve what they get.
As for "detritus ecosystem": We're not going back to pre-industrial times (and having the vast majority of the population die off in the process) voluntarily. If you're right, it's going to happen anyway, but there's no reason to start dying off before the resources are exhausted.
Dunno what the excuse for solar will be, but I'd wager the sheer amount of land covered.
Disrupting the fragile desert habitat and (one I used to use as a joke until I saw it used seriously; Poe's Law strikes again) reducing the albedo of the planet.
How many of the users here taught themselves to write code before they age of 10? Face it, it doesn't take a special mind or superior intellect to write code.
Actually, it does. It's just that most people who have the knack can express it by age 10.
Everyone still believes that you must stay away from saturated fats and cholesterol, even though it's been shown over and over again that increasing or decreasing "dietary" fats and cholesterols has almost no link whatsoever to increasing or decreasing levels of fats and cholesterol in the body and blood, most of which is created by your own liver.
Yes, if you want to be fat and miserable, listen to a nutritionist. They'll tell you to cut out all tasty foods and subsist on grains and high-bulk low-calorie vegetables. This will leave you hungry (and on the pot) all the time but would cause you to lose weight if you kept grain portions under control. But most likely you'll add oils (e.g. salad dressings) and eat too much grain, and while you'll still feel like you're eating nothing but "healthy foods", you're actually overeating in total.
They have patients coming in day in and day out who swear they eat like a bird and they exercise regularly and are still gaining weight. Perhaps 1 in 1000 of these patients have some medical condition; the rest will likely have been eating candy bars in the waiting room, or will constantly snack on "energy bars", or whatever. And they hold bizarre ideas of what sorts of foods "don't count" (like celery... with dip).
Giving them drugs is just a waste of time, effort, and drugs. And if they don't work or have side effects, lawsuit time.
IANAPA (I Am Not A Patent Agent) and I disagree. It's a slippery slope to allow software but argue that "most" is too obvious to be patentable.
Not only is it a slippery slope, but it's one we've already slid down. The reason patent attorneys like requiring obviousness and prior art to be used is they've already pretty much killed those two. Any slight difference between the patent claim (or even the wording of the claim) and the prior art is enough to make it "novel" in the eyes of the patent office. And "obviousness" always runs up agains the idea that "if it was so obvious, why hasn't it been done before?"
Of course, when it comes to proving infringement, all those slight differences which make the patent different from the prior art don't matter; they just wave the Doctrine of Equivalents around and your device is infringing as long as it's "close enough".
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps. But any strain of feminism (or any other philosophy) that requires that one deny propositional logic (e.g. accept that p && !p is not necessarily false) and accept the philosophy only on its own terms -- that's one of the crazy ones.
I'd be happy to, but they are due for phase-out as well.
Which is why the environmentalists need to force them on us. LEDs suck too, but less so. When someone comes up with a phosphor which can decently approximate a blackbody spectrum, let me know. Until then, phosphor-based lights will continue to suck.
Well, if you thought that was over the top, how about the calls to have people prosecuted for following the project? You want to talk about oppression, that's oppression, of the old fashioned government-run sort.
Yes, that's right. Every time women walk into a tech office, they're bombarded with threats of rape and murder. They get more catcalls and lewd remarks on the way down the hallway than they would have in the New York subway in the 1980s. It's common to find hung and/or mutilated effigies of women in various places around the office.
Wait, no they aren't. Nothing of the sort happens, at least not in any office I have been in. Death and rape threats from internet trolls, yes. Death and rape threats against women in a professional environment, no.
It's almost as if you're damned either way. (And if you take the position that the left is more honest, please examine Mr. Obama's various broken promises).
Cut the network cable, remove the power cord, and call it a day.
Great, you're really advancing the cause of women in tech that way.
Yes, and so what? Asimov wasn't all that good at human characterization in general; with few exceptions (including one woman - Susan Calvin - though she was a stereotype as well) his human characters are little more than set pieces to drive the plot. There's reasons for the lack of women in Asimov's stories, some of which Asimov wrote about himself. And Asimov himself was known as a womanizer and a groper; he got away with it because he was Asimov and fame like rank has its privileges.
But the inclusion of SF in geek culture isn't about geeks thinking SF stories are the way the world should be nor about venerating SF writers personally. If it were, the inclusion of _The Left Hand of Darkness_ and "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" (among others) in the SF canon would be hostile to various more-well-represented-groups as well. And then there's Heinlein, in whose works you can find something to offend anyone; _Friday_ alone can easily offend arch-conservatives and feminists alike.
If that last statement is true, feminists need to get a sense of perspective. There's far worse treatment of women in parts of the world today than in the US of the 1950s. And if feminists have a problem with the books enjoyed by geeks because the authors were not themselves feminists or those books didn't meet the feminist standards of gender ratio or female characterization, that's really their problem; stretching geek enjoyment of such books into a hostile act just makes geeks (justifiably) defensive.
...conceptual art.
Careful. As a man, if you suggest you're anything other than "privileged", you'll get the whole speech about how you as a guy don't have to worry about being raped every time you step outside your door.
And by being gross nerds we're providing an environment that is hostile to women, thereby driving them out of the tech workforce. So we should be forced to act less nerdy.
Fsck that, and I mean that in the most non-sexual way possible.
He's a white knight, despised by both sides.
The feminists being mocked are part of the problem, not part of the solution. A few here have claimed that the brand of feminism being mocked is no longer in vogue, in which case it's merely a parody which misses the target. But if so, why are so many offended by it?
As for the article you cited:
Guess what: tough shit. This stuff is part of geek culture. And it's not inherently anti-female or offensive to women (the article itself admits this). Video games, science fiction, and related paraphenalia are not in themselves any way conducive to a hostile workplace environment to women. And if a "feminist" comes in and under the banner of gender equality demands these things be eliminated, she's just given a bunch of geeks reason to be hostile to feminism... and, unfortunately, perhaps to women as well.
That statement can be verified by nothing more than reading a few slashdot threads about gender imbalance in programming.
Yeah, that's what they all say, until they find themselves at an exit interview because they objected to some such nonsense.
Careful. If you're a guy and against feminist nonsense, you're an ordinary pig. If you're a guy and you support that crap, you instead get branded as a "white knight", which some feminists find even MORE offensive. Anyway, "brogrammers" are a straw man. The whole "brogrammer" phenomenon was a hoax.
Doesn't work; the UK authorities (who are in cahoots with the US on this) in Charles Stross's worlds are reasonable authority figures -- the good guys.
A lot of US suburbs have community mailboxes, and many areas have mailboxes on the street (as opposed to through-the-door delivery). When I lived in a community mailbox area, the mail carrier would bring packages or mail that didn't fit into the box to the door; if I had to go to the post office (their slogan: "when you have the time, we're closed") every time that happened, it would suck.
The last, only it's healthy-organic-snack-of-the-week rather than chocolates. Seriously, it's a Google-specific distribution called Goobuntu.
No, a VPN still depends on a perimeter defense; the VPN is an tunnel through the perimeter and once the tunnel is set up, you have full access.
I don't know how you missed this while working there, but the IRS deliberately cultivates that reputation. They WANT to be known as baby-eating killers, they want people to fear dealing with them so much that they don't even risk anything which could result in an audit even if it's 100% legal. The IRS has been doing government by terrorism for a very long time now, and it's quite effective.
Every so often the people get uppity, so the IRS has to pull something like holding day care students hostage until the parents pay the school's taxes. That usually works.
And how long, and how much aluminum and concrete, does it take to build a 1GW solar plant?
Shiver in the dark environmentalists deserve what they get.
As for "detritus ecosystem": We're not going back to pre-industrial times (and having the vast majority of the population die off in the process) voluntarily. If you're right, it's going to happen anyway, but there's no reason to start dying off before the resources are exhausted.
Disrupting the fragile desert habitat and (one I used to use as a joke until I saw it used seriously; Poe's Law strikes again) reducing the albedo of the planet.
Actually, it does. It's just that most people who have the knack can express it by age 10.
Yes, if you want to be fat and miserable, listen to a nutritionist. They'll tell you to cut out all tasty foods and subsist on grains and high-bulk low-calorie vegetables. This will leave you hungry (and on the pot) all the time but would cause you to lose weight if you kept grain portions under control. But most likely you'll add oils (e.g. salad dressings) and eat too much grain, and while you'll still feel like you're eating nothing but "healthy foods", you're actually overeating in total.
They have patients coming in day in and day out who swear they eat like a bird and they exercise regularly and are still gaining weight. Perhaps 1 in 1000 of these patients have some medical condition; the rest will likely have been eating candy bars in the waiting room, or will constantly snack on "energy bars", or whatever. And they hold bizarre ideas of what sorts of foods "don't count" (like celery... with dip).
Giving them drugs is just a waste of time, effort, and drugs. And if they don't work or have side effects, lawsuit time.
Not only is it a slippery slope, but it's one we've already slid down. The reason patent attorneys like requiring obviousness and prior art to be used is they've already pretty much killed those two. Any slight difference between the patent claim (or even the wording of the claim) and the prior art is enough to make it "novel" in the eyes of the patent office. And "obviousness" always runs up agains the idea that "if it was so obvious, why hasn't it been done before?"
Of course, when it comes to proving infringement, all those slight differences which make the patent different from the prior art don't matter; they just wave the Doctrine of Equivalents around and your device is infringing as long as it's "close enough".
Trading record labels for social media is merely switching from the devil you know well to the devil you know less well.