Microsoft is a corporation. It is required to follow laws which, for the most part, are written to exclude the oppression of women (at least in letter).
Linux, on the other hand, is not only written by men from non-progressive countries such as Norway, but also has no legal status and is therefore free to exploit as much as it wants.
For completely missing the point of feminism. The idea is not to get men to act nice around you because you are cute (or your friends might be) and like the same operating system. The idea is get men to stop oppressing, raping and killing Women all over the world.
Of course, I shouldn't be surprised at your acceptance of penile games--you show it in so many other ways. C programming and use of Linux, for example, both correlate highly with oppressive attitudes towards women.
Where's the outrage over how our nation's youth are being hardened towards violence? Where's the call to end this kind of glorification of killing? Where's the disgust at outrageous and gratuitous gore?
A waystation. Basically an intergalactic bar and grill, with Uncle "Tom" Sisko as head janitor and bouncer. True leadership.
And ask yourself how often Janeway runs to the men of the ship for "guidance", then compare that number to how often Kirk gives any creedence to the slightest utterance from Uhura.
I assume you mean the Vulcan character. Cerebral? Bitchy is more accurate. And with a body that is not only not real but not even possible for a human.
How forward thinking! And all working together under the whip of a white male with absolute authority over his planation^H^H^H, I mean "starship".
In fact, all leadership roles on Star Trek, old and new, are white males. Spock. McCoy and Scotty both headed up sections of their own. Picard. Riker. Every single "Federation" person ever seen on screen. The black woman was a receptionist. The Asian a chauffer. The "Russian" was another young, white male with a bad accent.
And on the new show there are no minorities at all, except Worf who is basically a futuristic black street thug.
Star Trek is widely considered the most misogynistic TV show ever[1]. The original show had it's highest ranking female as a high-tech receptionist and all other women relegated to a position of servitude to the "Captain" (itself a highly charged word, sexually speaking). The new show is, if anything, worse with women being portrayed as being simply a bag of vague emotions or an object to receive sexual advances from the predatory Riker character.
Therefore I am unsurprised that "techies" (i.e. a bunch of young, rich, white males) would be drawn to this show. Nor am I surprised that I will be modded down for pointing any of this out.
[1]By feminist thinkers. I've never watched it myself.
A movie is supposed to impart human feelings via relationships and understanding. The way to measure the success of this is to ask people if they felt empathy for the characters and if they were moved by the plot.
The Star Wars() franchise is all about lasers, explosions and stepping in animal droppings. The success is measured in dollars.
Why am I not suprised that Slashdot prefers the latter?
I find it sad, though typical, that science fiction movies would be ranked on their ability to produce the male hormone adrenaline. Tell me, would a movie that just jumped out and said "boo!" rank highly on this scale?
As for Gattaca not being in the top 20, please break out of your "if it doesn't have laser and explosions, it isn't SciFi" male mindset. Gattaca tells the story of our near (if not present) future. A world dominated by questions of identity and possibility. And biological world. As such it is much closer to the Gaea-inspired reality that is our world than the sterile outlook of Star Wars (is every planet in the universe a desert?) or the techno-masturbation fantasy of The Matrix.
Why did Lindows pick that name? To poke at Microsoft. And MS took the bait and ran crying to Mommy. The entire thing is utterly meaningless and so typically penile. Lindows is obviously in the wrong here but MS is only marginally better.
Young, white, technologist males never fail to amaze me. First you distance yourself from emotional attachment via watching a movie instead of real involvment with a human being. Then instead of grappling with the issues and characters of the story you instead dive into the minutia of making sure the dolby levels are equalized. And then, to top it all off, you want to "ultimate control" (a telling phrase in itself) over the whole thing via a computer.
Get off your blinkered, paternalistic asses, go outside and interact with a real human.
It used to be that the young were educated into the traditions of culture: Shakespeare, Rembrandt, da Vinci, etc. But in our new permissive, culturally-relative society it's anything goes and we treat throwaway entertainment as "art". This appears to be especially the case in the young male population wherein even the most picayune and trivially obvious statements are held up as profound wisdom.
But it never hurts to try: Stop your video game. Turn off your computer. Go to a real art museum. Then come back and compare the image of, say, Manet's A Bar at the Folie-Bergere with a picture of Mario. Which one is art again?
When this story was posted the first time, I said it was a "low tech implementation". But, because I am a woman, my views were ignored and my post modded down.
This microchip is just like all other microchips. It has certain physical and electrical properties. It helps render information on a computer. It does this slightly faster than previous microchips at a much greater price.
What is so fascinating about this to young, white males? It presents itself in many scenarios: cars are "tweaked" at the cost of hundreds of dollars for tiny percentages in "performance" (read: "speed") gain. Cooking appliances are bought that shave seconds off of cooking time. It's ridiculous.
Slow down, enjoy life. You'll get there when you get there. Enjoy the journey. Your graphics will be rendered in plenty of time, for now just enjoy the scenery.
Comics books don't have any underlying physical laws which is going to give the entirely wrong impression to the students.
To those that claim it will "get them interested" I have this to say: As soon as the students find out that real physics has nothing to do with misogynistic hypermasculinity they won't be interested anymore. Which is just as well, my own anecdotal evidence indicates that comic book readers, while scoring high among people who think they are smart, score pretty low among people who are actually smart.
As a fellow woman, though, I'd like to ask why you didn't address the topic of women in technology, despite not being asked. A way needs to be found to interest young women in the technical/scientific fields. The scientific viewpoint of a woman is unique and precious and if a way is not found to include it we will eventually live to regret it.
The Wal-Mart machine itself strikes me as a very reasonable clone. With the exception of the modem, all the hardware seems to work. I have had to live with useless modems in clones before, but at least this modem is a card that can be removed from the machine. I should also note that Mandrake installed on the box easier than Windows ME did. If I had wanted to keep Windows on the machine, I would have had to manually install drivers for both the ethernet and sound card, because Windows did neither on installation.
So it appears that the Wal-Mart machine as tested makes a very reasonable Linux box. But I suggest you lose the Lucent modem card and replace it with a real hardware modem. This will set you back $100 but as Franklin said the tree of freedom must be periodically irrigated with the money of fanatics.
This echoes a sentiment on a bunch of security-minded posters we have around the lab: "The nuclear spy could be YOU!" Just as 90% of all homicides are committed by family members, almost all national security issues are due to American citizens. That's why the CIA, NSA, etc prefer to hire foreign nationals.
The company was able to make the system affordable by limiting the recognition to a flat, 2-dimensional image.
Unfortunately this opens up the possibility of simply taping a photocopy of somebody else's thumbprint onto my own thumb. A higher quality system will verify human temperature, skin color and can even tell if the image applied has a component third dimension (i.e. are those ridges or just pictures of ridges).
I ought to know, thanks to the nuclear secrets scandal a couple years ago I use one of these babies up to 10 times per day.
but instead of spending millions on a long-shot like an alien phone call, I'd prefer it if we invested in our future--like new energy sources, moon-based astronomy and farm yield gains.
Robotics is the future. They can go places and do things that humans cannot. Playing soccer is not one of these things.
The only reason they are staging this competition is that combat seems to be the only way that men express themselves or advance their knowledge. Isn't it enough that a robot can track, intercept and guide an object without having to turn it into a "battle" complete with winners and losers?
It would be much more helpful, not to mention supportive and nurturing of the budding scientists, if they instead focussed their aggressive tendencies towards solving problems of vision and cognition.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux, on the other hand, is not only written by men from non-progressive countries such as Norway, but also has no legal status and is therefore free to exploit as much as it wants.
Of course, I shouldn't be surprised at your acceptance of penile games--you show it in so many other ways. C programming and use of Linux, for example, both correlate highly with oppressive attitudes towards women.
Cool toilets. Sick minds. We are Slashdot.
And ask yourself how often Janeway runs to the men of the ship for "guidance", then compare that number to how often Kirk gives any creedence to the slightest utterance from Uhura.
Your other claims are similarly ridiculous.
In fact, all leadership roles on Star Trek, old and new, are white males. Spock. McCoy and Scotty both headed up sections of their own. Picard. Riker. Every single "Federation" person ever seen on screen. The black woman was a receptionist. The Asian a chauffer. The "Russian" was another young, white male with a bad accent.
And on the new show there are no minorities at all, except Worf who is basically a futuristic black street thug.
and your lack of same, but I am sadly disenfranchised from the penis length measuring game of self-worth determination.
Therefore I am unsurprised that "techies" (i.e. a bunch of young, rich, white males) would be drawn to this show. Nor am I surprised that I will be modded down for pointing any of this out.
[1]By feminist thinkers. I've never watched it myself.
The Star Wars() franchise is all about lasers, explosions and stepping in animal droppings. The success is measured in dollars.
Why am I not suprised that Slashdot prefers the latter?
As for Gattaca not being in the top 20, please break out of your "if it doesn't have laser and explosions, it isn't SciFi" male mindset. Gattaca tells the story of our near (if not present) future. A world dominated by questions of identity and possibility. And biological world. As such it is much closer to the Gaea-inspired reality that is our world than the sterile outlook of Star Wars (is every planet in the universe a desert?) or the techno-masturbation fantasy of The Matrix.
Why did Lindows pick that name? To poke at Microsoft. And MS took the bait and ran crying to Mommy. The entire thing is utterly meaningless and so typically penile. Lindows is obviously in the wrong here but MS is only marginally better.
Get off your blinkered, paternalistic asses, go outside and interact with a real human.
But it never hurts to try: Stop your video game. Turn off your computer. Go to a real art museum. Then come back and compare the image of, say, Manet's A Bar at the Folie-Bergere with a picture of Mario. Which one is art again?
When this story was posted the first time, I said it was a "low tech implementation". But, because I am a woman, my views were ignored and my post modded down.
What is so fascinating about this to young, white males? It presents itself in many scenarios: cars are "tweaked" at the cost of hundreds of dollars for tiny percentages in "performance" (read: "speed") gain. Cooking appliances are bought that shave seconds off of cooking time. It's ridiculous.
Slow down, enjoy life. You'll get there when you get there. Enjoy the journey. Your graphics will be rendered in plenty of time, for now just enjoy the scenery.
To those that claim it will "get them interested" I have this to say: As soon as the students find out that real physics has nothing to do with misogynistic hypermasculinity they won't be interested anymore. Which is just as well, my own anecdotal evidence indicates that comic book readers, while scoring high among people who think they are smart, score pretty low among people who are actually smart.
As a fellow woman, though, I'd like to ask why you didn't address the topic of women in technology, despite not being asked. A way needs to be found to interest young women in the technical/scientific fields. The scientific viewpoint of a woman is unique and precious and if a way is not found to include it we will eventually live to regret it.
The Wal-Mart machine itself strikes me as a very reasonable clone. With the exception of the modem, all the hardware seems to work. I have had to live with useless modems in clones before, but at least this modem is a card that can be removed from the machine. I should also note that Mandrake installed on the box easier than Windows ME did. If I had wanted to keep Windows on the machine, I would have had to manually install drivers for both the ethernet and sound card, because Windows did neither on installation.
So it appears that the Wal-Mart machine as tested makes a very reasonable Linux box. But I suggest you lose the Lucent modem card and replace it with a real hardware modem. This will set you back $100 but as Franklin said the tree of freedom must be periodically irrigated with the money of fanatics.
This echoes a sentiment on a bunch of security-minded posters we have around the lab: "The nuclear spy could be YOU!" Just as 90% of all homicides are committed by family members, almost all national security issues are due to American citizens. That's why the CIA, NSA, etc prefer to hire foreign nationals.
The company was able to make the system affordable by limiting the recognition to a flat, 2-dimensional image.
Unfortunately this opens up the possibility of simply taping a photocopy of somebody else's thumbprint onto my own thumb. A higher quality system will verify human temperature, skin color and can even tell if the image applied has a component third dimension (i.e. are those ridges or just pictures of ridges).
I ought to know, thanks to the nuclear secrets scandal a couple years ago I use one of these babies up to 10 times per day.
but instead of spending millions on a long-shot like an alien phone call, I'd prefer it if we invested in our future--like new energy sources, moon-based astronomy and farm yield gains.
The only reason they are staging this competition is that combat seems to be the only way that men express themselves or advance their knowledge. Isn't it enough that a robot can track, intercept and guide an object without having to turn it into a "battle" complete with winners and losers?
It would be much more helpful, not to mention supportive and nurturing of the budding scientists, if they instead focussed their aggressive tendencies towards solving problems of vision and cognition.