I'd mod you up. I wish people could understand that feminism isn't some kind of zero-sum game that involves women achieving superiority over men. The end of silly sexual stereotypes is good for EVERYONE.
Yes, women earn less, but that's because they choose safer jobs on average (over 90% of workplace deaths are men), they are more likely to take extended periods of time away from their careers for child-rearing (in most places in the world, paternity leave is a pittance compared with maternity leave), they aren't as demanding when they ask for raises, they choose more pleasant indoor jobs at a higher rate than men do, they work fewer hours on average (men work more overtime on average and are more likely to be employed full-time), and other things of this nature.
1. None of this has anything to do with "equal pay for equal work". You're talking about people at different kinds of jobs getting paid differently, which is something that not too many people have a problem with. 2. The thing about maternity leave for women is a red herring - as you yourself say, paternity leave is much more difficult to get... because taking care of babies is a woman's job, of course.
Look at it this way: if you really could get the same amount of work from a woman at only 70% the cost, who would ever hire men?
The real figure is like 85% (see my link above). Also see the latest unemployment figures - you know, the ones that show males suffering disproportionally more unemployment?
Look, people need to understand that discrimination isn't just bad for women - it's bad for EVERYONE. Wouldn't you like to be able to get equal treatment for stuff like parental leave? Wouldn't it be nice is society didn't automatically decide that the father of a child didn't know what he was talking about when discussing a child's health, schoolwork, etc? Wouldn't it be nice if your wife, or daughter, or sister, could make an equitable salary?
I think you're correct about society's portrayal of men, which is frequently pretty bad. But let's not blame the women's movement. I read a couple of feminist blogs, and in addition to the expected coverage of discrimination against women, they spend a fair amount of time bitching about these stupid "men are stupid" portrayals. Just today in Broadsheet (which is part of Salon), there was a post demolishing some dumbass who had written an opinion piece to the effect that male contraceptives were a waste of time because 1) men were too dumb to remember to take them, and 2) no woman would ever be able to take a man's word that he was on the "male pill". So yeah - that stuff is out there. But actual feminists are about freedom from sexual stereotyping for everyone... not just for women.
... but this is just dumb on its face. First of all, it's really hard to argue that plastic surgery has "drastically reduced selection pressure" on women, when even today, not that many women actually get plastic surgery (relative to the female population). Second - who's most likely to get plastic surgery? Women of child-bearing age? Or older women? You get one guess. Finally, what basis is there to assume that, say, having a boob job makes you more likely to bear more (or fewer, I can't quite figure out your argument) children? Given that anyone who can afford plastic surgery can also afford birth control, I think it's pretty unlikely that there's any correlation at all.
And your logic isn't so great either. The fact that the Y chromosome is changing more rapidly does not mean that "males are evolving more rapidly than females". Here's a hint: entire male human being != Y chromosome. The Y chromosome represents a pretty tiny amount of genetic material, and doesn't have much of a function other than to control the development of male sexual characteristics. To say that men as a whole are "evolving more quickly" because a tiny amount of their genetic material changes at a faster rate than the other 45 chromosomes is, frankly, kind of dumb.
But hey - coming up with a more accurate headline wouldn't drive as many page views, now would it.
... would be a solution in search of a problem. Keyboards do one thing, and do it very well - they let you put in a lot of text very quickly. There hasn't been very much innovation in this area, because the problems have already been solved.
As a Linux developer this move screams to me: "HEY! WE'RE LENEVO, AND NOW THAT WE HAVE BOUGHT THE RIGHTS TO THE THINKPAD NAME FROM IBM, WE ARE SHOUTING HOW CLUELESS WE ARE BECOMING FROM THE VIRTUAL ROOFTOPS".
In one of the bigger ironies seen on Slashdot today, the guy who prefaces his post with a complaint about the CapsLock key... then goes on to type an entire sentence in all caps. If you did that without the CapsLock key, you did it the hard way.
... the market has already spoken, as every keyboard in existence has a CapsLock key, and no one (outside of Slashdot) has so much as discussed the idea of producing one without the key.
Hold on, had to dry my eyes after contemplating the depths of your suffering over the CapsLock key.
Caps lock is the bane of modern computing, costing industry and governments possibly millions in lost productivity and mis-communications.
[citation needed]
The thing was only ever invented to make typewriters friendlier.
Yes, and it carried over to keyboards to make them friendlier. The fact is that people need to be able to enter strings of capital letters from time to time, and it's extremely difficult to do so without a CapsLock key. Don't like the key? Don't use it. But lets stop with the rending of garments over the terrible harm caused by CapsLock - what's the worst that could happen? You occasionally miss the Tab key? Please.
I learned on an actual typewriter too, and every one I ever typed on, from old-fashioned mechanical jobs to the IBM Selectric, had a caps lock key. Trying to type out a series of caps is almost unbelievably difficult without one, whether you're on a PC keyboard or a typewriter.
And seriously, what "annoying disadvantages" are you talking about? I really don't get the CapsLock hatred. How big of a problem can it possibly be?
... any speculation about life in other galaxies is just that - speculation. There's no realistic hope of ever knowing whether there is or isn't any form of life in a body that's, say, 2.5 million light-years away (the distance to Andromeda). The only thing it really makes sense to even talk about is whether there's life elsewhere in THIS galaxy, and even that would be quite a trick to detect without some pretty substantial advances in technology. Mars is right next door, and we've been trying to answer this question for how many years? And we still don't really know.
I'll grant that the universe is a really huge place, and it seems likely that if life happened here, it probably happened SOMEWHERE else. But life outside the Milky Way might as well not exist, as far as we're concerned. We'll never be able to interact with it in any way.
... maybe Monsanto could quit withholding the data that would be required to, you know, actually have said rational discussion. Yes, there is a lot of hysteria on this subject. But the cause of the hysteria is stonewalling on the part of the GM companies.
... that these compounds are known to be toxic to various other organisms. Rather than blindly trust the company who's making a profit selling the stuff, perhaps we ought to test whether they're toxic to us too. Sure, insects are different from humans. But rats are considerably closer to us in their anatomy and physiology, and it looks like there's evidence that it's harmful to them too. And your response is that we should just take Monsanto's word that there's nothing to see here?
... some are engineered to be resistant to the effects of glyphosate (aka "Roundup"), an herbicide - so you can spray for weeds around your corn without killing the corn in the process. But the insecticidal ones have genes built in for Bt - Bacillus thuringiensis - a naturally occuring bacterium that produces compounds fatal to a number bugs... especially bugs in the butterfly/moth family. Corn borers are susceptible to it - at least for now. There have already been instances of resistance developing both the GM-introduced Bt and regular old Bt sprays (which have been in common use for decades as an organic insecticide - I use it in my garden).
I think the majority of "high prevalence of corn in processed foods" is HFCS
[citation needed]. In fact, there are tons of products made from ground corn, at least here in the US. Many, many breakfast cereals and snack foods are corn-based. Also, most livestock eat tons of corn, so there's certainly a chance that any problematic substances in the corn would build up in their bodies before you eat the meat.
Some of the stuff has been engineered to express Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis, or more specifically, the insecticidal compound that Bt produces). So in that case, yes, the plant produces its own insecticide. In other cases, the plants are engineered for resistance to glyphosate (aka "Roundup"), a commonly used herbicide. In that case, the plant doesn't produce any pesticidal chemicals, but the farmer can feel free to use much more Roundup on his plants.
The sun is around 4.5 billion years old, the universe as a whole - 14 billion years. So the sun has been around about 1/3 of the entire history of the universe. Human history, on the other hand, truly is an eyeblink when compared to the age of the universe, so your overall point may well be valid. We just don't really know how long human history will last, as it isn't quite over yet (Fukuyama notwithstanding).
That's also the problem with these extrapolations, because as the addresses become more scarce the assignment rate slows down.
Yeah, that's why this whole "peak oil" thing is bogus - because of course as we run out of oil, our rate of using it will go down!
...
You see the problem, right? At some point we're going to start feeling some pain - we'll be foregoing the use of an IP address that we could really put to productive use - but we can't because getting one is too difficult/expensive. The point is that your problems start long before you use up the absolute last bit of a valuable, scarce resource./p.
... I like to call them "flaming barricades"... is that they come with their own set of weird problems. Need to go "back to your PC" at home? Oops. Trying to do a BitTorrent download? You'll need to dick around with your firewall. And if you have firewalls at each machine? And you want to share files among them? Ruh-roh. Etc, etc.
Your point is valid - NAT wasn't really meant to be a security solution. But there are tradeoffs with firewalls too.
PDAs proved what was possible for that genre way back with the original Palm III (and I don't include that flop called Newton). PDAs were actually growing larger than smartphones, but because people felt strongly that they should die, killed them off.
"Original Palm III"? Why, in my day we had Pilot 5000's (yes, I still have mine!). And we liked it!
A physical UI, impossible to use with many (but not all) gloves on. Not everyone lives in California, some of us live where it gets cold in the winter (less of an issue with a tablet, more of an issue with a phone.)
To be fair, this has never been much of an issue for me, even though it's plenty cold enough around here to wear gloves. I just don't need to stand around outside using the iPhone very often, and when I do, I can do without gloves for long enough to get the job done. But yeah, there are definitely some advantages to the stylus+physical keyboard arrangement (former Treo owner here).
Slashdot Mirror
I'd mod you up. I wish people could understand that feminism isn't some kind of zero-sum game that involves women achieving superiority over men. The end of silly sexual stereotypes is good for EVERYONE.
[citation needed]. Here's one from me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_pay_for_women
1. None of this has anything to do with "equal pay for equal work". You're talking about people at different kinds of jobs getting paid differently, which is something that not too many people have a problem with. 2. The thing about maternity leave for women is a red herring - as you yourself say, paternity leave is much more difficult to get... because taking care of babies is a woman's job, of course.
The real figure is like 85% (see my link above). Also see the latest unemployment figures - you know, the ones that show males suffering disproportionally more unemployment?
Look, people need to understand that discrimination isn't just bad for women - it's bad for EVERYONE. Wouldn't you like to be able to get equal treatment for stuff like parental leave? Wouldn't it be nice is society didn't automatically decide that the father of a child didn't know what he was talking about when discussing a child's health, schoolwork, etc? Wouldn't it be nice if your wife, or daughter, or sister, could make an equitable salary?
I think you're correct about society's portrayal of men, which is frequently pretty bad. But let's not blame the women's movement. I read a couple of feminist blogs, and in addition to the expected coverage of discrimination against women, they spend a fair amount of time bitching about these stupid "men are stupid" portrayals. Just today in Broadsheet (which is part of Salon), there was a post demolishing some dumbass who had written an opinion piece to the effect that male contraceptives were a waste of time because 1) men were too dumb to remember to take them, and 2) no woman would ever be able to take a man's word that he was on the "male pill". So yeah - that stuff is out there. But actual feminists are about freedom from sexual stereotyping for everyone... not just for women.
... but this is just dumb on its face. First of all, it's really hard to argue that plastic surgery has "drastically reduced selection pressure" on women, when even today, not that many women actually get plastic surgery (relative to the female population). Second - who's most likely to get plastic surgery? Women of child-bearing age? Or older women? You get one guess. Finally, what basis is there to assume that, say, having a boob job makes you more likely to bear more (or fewer, I can't quite figure out your argument) children? Given that anyone who can afford plastic surgery can also afford birth control, I think it's pretty unlikely that there's any correlation at all.
And your logic isn't so great either. The fact that the Y chromosome is changing more rapidly does not mean that "males are evolving more rapidly than females". Here's a hint: entire male human being != Y chromosome. The Y chromosome represents a pretty tiny amount of genetic material, and doesn't have much of a function other than to control the development of male sexual characteristics. To say that men as a whole are "evolving more quickly" because a tiny amount of their genetic material changes at a faster rate than the other 45 chromosomes is, frankly, kind of dumb.
But hey - coming up with a more accurate headline wouldn't drive as many page views, now would it.
... would be a solution in search of a problem. Keyboards do one thing, and do it very well - they let you put in a lot of text very quickly. There hasn't been very much innovation in this area, because the problems have already been solved.
In one of the bigger ironies seen on Slashdot today, the guy who prefaces his post with a complaint about the CapsLock key... then goes on to type an entire sentence in all caps. If you did that without the CapsLock key, you did it the hard way.
... the market has already spoken, as every keyboard in existence has a CapsLock key, and no one (outside of Slashdot) has so much as discussed the idea of producing one without the key.
Hold on, had to dry my eyes after contemplating the depths of your suffering over the CapsLock key.
[citation needed]
Yes, and it carried over to keyboards to make them friendlier. The fact is that people need to be able to enter strings of capital letters from time to time, and it's extremely difficult to do so without a CapsLock key. Don't like the key? Don't use it. But lets stop with the rending of garments over the terrible harm caused by CapsLock - what's the worst that could happen? You occasionally miss the Tab key? Please.
I learned on an actual typewriter too, and every one I ever typed on, from old-fashioned mechanical jobs to the IBM Selectric, had a caps lock key. Trying to type out a series of caps is almost unbelievably difficult without one, whether you're on a PC keyboard or a typewriter.
And seriously, what "annoying disadvantages" are you talking about? I really don't get the CapsLock hatred. How big of a problem can it possibly be?
... and I have to type a lot of acronyms. Hands off my CapsLock key!
Obviously you never have to type acronyms. You can have my CapsLock key when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
Just like how, what with all the water, nothing got "built" on earth. Oh, wait...
... any speculation about life in other galaxies is just that - speculation. There's no realistic hope of ever knowing whether there is or isn't any form of life in a body that's, say, 2.5 million light-years away (the distance to Andromeda). The only thing it really makes sense to even talk about is whether there's life elsewhere in THIS galaxy, and even that would be quite a trick to detect without some pretty substantial advances in technology. Mars is right next door, and we've been trying to answer this question for how many years? And we still don't really know.
I'll grant that the universe is a really huge place, and it seems likely that if life happened here, it probably happened SOMEWHERE else. But life outside the Milky Way might as well not exist, as far as we're concerned. We'll never be able to interact with it in any way.
... maybe Monsanto could quit withholding the data that would be required to, you know, actually have said rational discussion. Yes, there is a lot of hysteria on this subject. But the cause of the hysteria is stonewalling on the part of the GM companies.
... that these compounds are known to be toxic to various other organisms. Rather than blindly trust the company who's making a profit selling the stuff, perhaps we ought to test whether they're toxic to us too. Sure, insects are different from humans. But rats are considerably closer to us in their anatomy and physiology, and it looks like there's evidence that it's harmful to them too. And your response is that we should just take Monsanto's word that there's nothing to see here?
... some are engineered to be resistant to the effects of glyphosate (aka "Roundup"), an herbicide - so you can spray for weeds around your corn without killing the corn in the process. But the insecticidal ones have genes built in for Bt - Bacillus thuringiensis - a naturally occuring bacterium that produces compounds fatal to a number bugs... especially bugs in the butterfly/moth family. Corn borers are susceptible to it - at least for now. There have already been instances of resistance developing both the GM-introduced Bt and regular old Bt sprays (which have been in common use for decades as an organic insecticide - I use it in my garden).
And they would know which corn products were Monsanto-ized, how, exactly? Giving up corn products altogether is a pretty giant step.
[citation needed]. In fact, there are tons of products made from ground corn, at least here in the US. Many, many breakfast cereals and snack foods are corn-based. Also, most livestock eat tons of corn, so there's certainly a chance that any problematic substances in the corn would build up in their bodies before you eat the meat.
Some of the stuff has been engineered to express Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis, or more specifically, the insecticidal compound that Bt produces). So in that case, yes, the plant produces its own insecticide. In other cases, the plants are engineered for resistance to glyphosate (aka "Roundup"), a commonly used herbicide. In that case, the plant doesn't produce any pesticidal chemicals, but the farmer can feel free to use much more Roundup on his plants.
The sun is around 4.5 billion years old, the universe as a whole - 14 billion years. So the sun has been around about 1/3 of the entire history of the universe. Human history, on the other hand, truly is an eyeblink when compared to the age of the universe, so your overall point may well be valid. We just don't really know how long human history will last, as it isn't quite over yet (Fukuyama notwithstanding).
Yeah, that's why this whole "peak oil" thing is bogus - because of course as we run out of oil, our rate of using it will go down!
...
You see the problem, right? At some point we're going to start feeling some pain - we'll be foregoing the use of an IP address that we could really put to productive use - but we can't because getting one is too difficult/expensive. The point is that your problems start long before you use up the absolute last bit of a valuable, scarce resource./p.
... I like to call them "flaming barricades"... is that they come with their own set of weird problems. Need to go "back to your PC" at home? Oops. Trying to do a BitTorrent download? You'll need to dick around with your firewall. And if you have firewalls at each machine? And you want to share files among them? Ruh-roh. Etc, etc.
Your point is valid - NAT wasn't really meant to be a security solution. But there are tradeoffs with firewalls too.
"Original Palm III"? Why, in my day we had Pilot 5000's (yes, I still have mine!). And we liked it!
To be fair, this has never been much of an issue for me, even though it's plenty cold enough around here to wear gloves. I just don't need to stand around outside using the iPhone very often, and when I do, I can do without gloves for long enough to get the job done. But yeah, there are definitely some advantages to the stylus+physical keyboard arrangement (former Treo owner here).