So what conclusion do you draw from that study? That the gender ratio difference in programming is natural and not worth challenging?
I'll repeat my counterexample below: in 1970, 7% of doctors were female; currently, 30% of doctors are female, and their participation is expected to continue to grow. Medicine, like programming, relies heavily on scientific thinking--logic, analysis, reasoning. Is medicine the aberration, or programming?
My observation about what we all know or don't know was meant to point out that, even granting the truth of the study you cite, it's not obvious that women can't participate in equal numbers in technical fields, even if they have different strengths. In the year since I was laid off and become a consultant, I've observed (and had confirmed to me by many) that my social skills are one my greatest assets. I'm technically as good as anyone I'm competing against, but I'm far better at customer relations than most. That seems like a distinctly female strength.
Your reasoning is speculative, and argued against by the existence of matriarchal societies in the past. Regardless, you're arguing contingencies--the fact that our society happens to descend from patriarchal societies says nothing about whether we should remain patriarchal, or view our status quo as somehow not worth challenging.
You mention programming as a male-dominated profession due to an evolutionary trait; I'll counter with medicine, specifically doctors. A hundred years ago, female doctors were unknown; now they make up around 30% of the profession, a figure that's been climbing continuously since the 60s (women were 7% of the doctors in 1970) and is expected to continue to grow. I presume you'd agree that being a doctor is similarly demanding in terms of logic, critical analysis, knowledge, and just generally those scientific skills that are common to both medicine and programming. If your stereotype holds true, than wouldn't all professions that elevate logic above emotion show approximately the same lack of participation by women?
For that matter, we don't even know that men are more logical than women. We know that many people think like you do, but people are notoriously bad at appraising their own strengths and weaknesses, so their conformity to the stereotype of "men are logical, women emotional" should also be seriously doubted.
Short version: We can't have a good idea of whether men are more naturally inclined to jobs like programming until we've cleared away all the historical and cultural baggage keeping women out, so that natural gender-based inclination is the only cause left to explain the disparity.
No, we don't all know this. More specifically, we don't all "know" that differences that superficially exist matter in some material way to whether or not someone can have a meaningful and productive career in a particular area; we also don't "know" that those apparent differences are biological, as opposed to socially conditioned (and thus, whether we should simply accept them, or challenge as a regrettable and changeable part of the status quo).
Thanks to the license under which the current version of MySQL was released, it doesn't matter what Oracle does--existing installs will continue to run just as before, both physically and in licensing terms. All that Oracle can do by nuking MySQL is close off a development path that's already been replicated elsewhere--in MariaDB, forked by Widenius and the other founders, as well as several other forks.
That's a big assumption, and almost certain to be wrong in detail. IP battles in court go on for years and delve into exhaustive detail, and may turn on minutiae. The only thing you can be certain about is that "I own half the IP!" "No you don't!" is a useless oversimplification of the real situation, which sounds like a loose verbal agreement that let each party believe what it wants to believe.
Besides, why do you feel any need at all to defend Michael Arrington? You owe him nothing. If he'd succeeded as he planned, he'd have made millions off of you and others. Your job as a consumer is to look out for yourself.
While I agree with your point about shred and STFU, your legal interpretation is off. Mens rea is usually a requirement, but some crimes carry strict liability, meaning 'guilty mind' is not required, possession is enough.
Even if you're correct about the prosecution being unable to conclusively prove mens rea, it wouldn't surprise me to find a lawyer advising a plea deal or 'no contest' plea because the alternative is going to court to argue "my client is not into child pornography, appearances notwithstanding". Some crimes, especially sex crimes, place an incredibly burden on the defendent to prove his innocence in the face of the jury's disgust with the crime and emotional need to punish someone.
They didn't think they were the Wall St. Journal. At the time they implemented the paywall, they were very upfront about the fact that they were a small startup looking to survive, and were (somewhat desperately) exploring different ways to meet their costs. The paywall turned out to be a bad idea, but their process was an awesome model of how a business works transparently with its customers to find a survivable business model.
I'll agree that schools should not be run as a business, but that idea doesn't exempt them from spending money appropriately--namely on educating children. A million dollars running SETI@home would be better spent on staff, facilities, and educational opportunities for children. Or even just upgrading the computer facilities for actual use by the students.
And where schools do research on potentially useless projects, the money is still evaluated against the likelihood of a meaningful result. Yes, they risk dollars on research, but that risk is calculated against the likely returns and the odds of seeing them. A PR victory (with no financial return) that's rarer than winning the lottery is a waste of limited resources.
So the fact that you're still staring at icons on a desktop tells you that not much has changed? There have been vast changes in the internals across all major operating systems in the 14 years since Windows 95 came out. Your question and followup comments strongly imply that little has changed. Your comment about OSX being in that same bucket is doubling down on your ignorance.
Better to say that the desktop metaphor has survived 20 years of constant use and evolution because it works really well.
It's called a cost/benefit analysis, factored by probability. On the one hand you have the million being spent for actual upkeep of the machines; on the other hand the PR benefit in the *ahem* statistically unlikely event that 1) aliens are trying to contact us, 2) we're listening on the right frequency in the right way, and 3) the school's computers are the ones that detect it.
The negro workers in the deep South, picking cotton on plantations before the civil war, were given food and a roof over their heads. By common labor law, that counts as compensation. Does that mean they weren't slaves?
When I worked at RSA Security in their tech support department, we were paid $300 to be on call for the weekend, meaning carrying the company cell phone and being no more than 30 minutes from some way to handle a support case (VPN to the office was fine). For each call/case we received (I think) $75. Overall a pretty good deal for people handling products like ClearTrust, FIM, or Keon; not so good for the SecurId guys, who could make $1,000 on a busy weekend by working full time. They were guaranteed to get a bunch of cases; we weren't.
One amusing story a SecurId guy told me: There was extra pressure on them to handle cases quickly because, when you get fired, one of the first things they do is de-activate your token. If the server crashes on a Sunday morning, everyone who tries to authenticate from home can't log in and thinks they've been fired. Monday morning half your company is spamming resumes to your competitors.
I just don't see how you can claim that a crime which requires the union of two jurisdictions to even be defined can legitimately be tried at either end.
The crime doesn't require the union of two jurisdictions to be a crime. Both jurisdictions agree that it is a crime, so who tries and sentences the guilty offender is an administrative matter handled by treaty negotiated between governments.
Perhaps you genuinely don't see anything wrong with that.
In general, no. The issue of crimes that cross jurisdictions is one that appeared the minute there was such a thing as a jurisdiction.
Say I stand on the Canadian side of the border, and you on the American side. I shoot you. You're dead, and absent an invisible line, I'm your murderer. If your position had its way, I'd be guilty of no crime at all. I wasn't in the U.S. when I pulled the trigger, therefore I haven't committed a crime in the U.S. I'm allowed to fire a gun in Canada, so I haven't committed a crime in Canada.
How do you suggest that this situation be legally resolved? Should Canada have laws governing the behaviour of people in Canada as they might affect anything outside of Canada? That would seem to be a far worse situation than an extradition treaty. It would endlessly multiply legal codes by needing to take into account every possible cross-jurisdictional crime possible. And what if Canada decided not to do anything about it? Are you really prepared to accept that punishment for your murderer depends upon another sovereign nation bothering to do something about a consequence that fell nowhere within its own borders?
It is not contradictory or hypocritical to make distinctions within the parts of the legal framework.
Not necessarily, no. But you haven't offered a reason that extradition is a bad thing except for your logically absurd contention that MacKinnon didn't commit a crime in the U.S.
I'm not wrong in claiming that no hacking act by McKinnon was performed in the US.
Yes, you are wrong. There's a clear chain of causality between what MacKinnon did in the UK and the hacking that occurred in the U.S. Saying 'the telco' did it is absurd--the telco did nothing but transmit MacKinnon's keystrokes, as it's supposed to. The telco lacked any intent to hack; by your argument, no crime at all was committed, since the agent who carried it out lacked mens rea, a guilty mind. Likewise, MacKinnon can't be guilty of hacking since his mens rea lack all consequence. He can't be guilty of hacking if nothing was hacked as a direct result of his intentions. Therefore, no crime at all has occurred.
This position is idiosyncratic, and disconnected from legal reality: A court on either side will have no problem accepting that MacKinnon did the hack.
On top of that, in your own country, whether your actions represent a crime or not is a matter for your country's laws to define.
And thanks to the extradition treaty signed by my country, my country defines the crime as one requiring extradition.
You're cherry picking the legal aspects that you want to prove your case: It's fine for a country to define a law to prosecute me for a crime, unless it means handing someone over to another country, in which case the law is wrong. Either you accept the legal framework of a country to decide these things, or you don't.
First off, hacking is a crime in the U.K., so you're just wrong there.
Second, given that you acknowledge that everything did, in fact, happen, then it was obviously "physically" possible. For a crime to be "physically" impossible, the act must be physically impossible, which it wasn't.
Whether or not a crime occurred is a legal matter, and one that the longstanding legal frameworks of two countries seem to have no problem agreeing agreeing on. You may disagree, but the weight of two governments, two legal systems, many lawyers and judges, and the diplomats who negotiated the extradition treaty are on the other side, and the fact that you think they're wrong might be a clue that you don't have a full understanding of the situation.
As for remote crimes, this shouldn't be troubling either. If I contract a hitman in another country by the mail to murder someone in that foreign country, and then pay him afterwards with a mailed money order, where did the crime substantially occur? Was it perpetrator-less? Obviously not, and I don't think anyone would have a problem with extraditing me to the foreign country to face first degree murder charges.
The point remains that unless you're doing something that's illegal in your country, it doesn't matter if it's illegal in theirs. Again, you can't be extradited to face blasphemy charges in Ireland because the U.S. doesn't have laws against blasphemy.
Anything that will get you extradited is something that will already get you in trouble in your home country.
You would be subject to the laws of Saudi Arabia if 1) the U.S. had an extradition treaty with them, 2) you committed a crime in Saudi Arabia that has a parallel crime in the U.S.
Say you arranged to murder someone in Saudi Arabia by hiring a Saudi hit man that you find by looking through Saudi message boards. You email him, agree on a price, he kills the dude, and you mail him an untraceable money order. The crime was committed in Saudi Arabia, and it's the Saudis who would prosecute you after extradition. You might not like that, but that's the reality--the crime occurred in Saudi Arabia, and they're the ones with the greatest interest in putting you in jail.
You might separately be guilty of crimes in the U.S., but the way it would work is that U.S. would let the Saudis have their shot first since the victim was Saudi, the killer was Saudi, and the killing happened in Saudi Arabia. The fact that you never set foot in Saudi Arabia is irrelevant.
Since there's no crime of blasphemy in the U.S., the U.S. wouldn't extradite you under the treaty for breaking Saudi blasphemy laws. It's only for the crimes that both countries agree are crimes.
I don't find it scary at all. The U.S. wouldn't be extraditing MacKinnon if he'd hacked into British computers. If you arrange a Ponzi scheme by telegraph in another country, then you've obviously committed a crime in that country, and you've done so knowing that you're operating in another country. If you truly stay out of that other country by not visiting it and not carrying out any actions in that country by some form of remote control or access, you've got nothing to worry about.
This isn't a case you can be unknowingly, unwittingly subject to another country's laws when you've done nothing to affect them.
Slashdot Mirror
So what conclusion do you draw from that study? That the gender ratio difference in programming is natural and not worth challenging?
I'll repeat my counterexample below: in 1970, 7% of doctors were female; currently, 30% of doctors are female, and their participation is expected to continue to grow. Medicine, like programming, relies heavily on scientific thinking--logic, analysis, reasoning. Is medicine the aberration, or programming?
My observation about what we all know or don't know was meant to point out that, even granting the truth of the study you cite, it's not obvious that women can't participate in equal numbers in technical fields, even if they have different strengths. In the year since I was laid off and become a consultant, I've observed (and had confirmed to me by many) that my social skills are one my greatest assets. I'm technically as good as anyone I'm competing against, but I'm far better at customer relations than most. That seems like a distinctly female strength.
Your reasoning is speculative, and argued against by the existence of matriarchal societies in the past. Regardless, you're arguing contingencies--the fact that our society happens to descend from patriarchal societies says nothing about whether we should remain patriarchal, or view our status quo as somehow not worth challenging.
You mention programming as a male-dominated profession due to an evolutionary trait; I'll counter with medicine, specifically doctors. A hundred years ago, female doctors were unknown; now they make up around 30% of the profession, a figure that's been climbing continuously since the 60s (women were 7% of the doctors in 1970) and is expected to continue to grow. I presume you'd agree that being a doctor is similarly demanding in terms of logic, critical analysis, knowledge, and just generally those scientific skills that are common to both medicine and programming. If your stereotype holds true, than wouldn't all professions that elevate logic above emotion show approximately the same lack of participation by women?
For that matter, we don't even know that men are more logical than women. We know that many people think like you do, but people are notoriously bad at appraising their own strengths and weaknesses, so their conformity to the stereotype of "men are logical, women emotional" should also be seriously doubted.
Short version: We can't have a good idea of whether men are more naturally inclined to jobs like programming until we've cleared away all the historical and cultural baggage keeping women out, so that natural gender-based inclination is the only cause left to explain the disparity.
We all know men and women are different
No, we don't all know this. More specifically, we don't all "know" that differences that superficially exist matter in some material way to whether or not someone can have a meaningful and productive career in a particular area; we also don't "know" that those apparent differences are biological, as opposed to socially conditioned (and thus, whether we should simply accept them, or challenge as a regrettable and changeable part of the status quo).
Thanks to the license under which the current version of MySQL was released, it doesn't matter what Oracle does--existing installs will continue to run just as before, both physically and in licensing terms. All that Oracle can do by nuking MySQL is close off a development path that's already been replicated elsewhere--in MariaDB, forked by Widenius and the other founders, as well as several other forks.
That's a big assumption, and almost certain to be wrong in detail. IP battles in court go on for years and delve into exhaustive detail, and may turn on minutiae. The only thing you can be certain about is that "I own half the IP!" "No you don't!" is a useless oversimplification of the real situation, which sounds like a loose verbal agreement that let each party believe what it wants to believe.
Besides, why do you feel any need at all to defend Michael Arrington? You owe him nothing. If he'd succeeded as he planned, he'd have made millions off of you and others. Your job as a consumer is to look out for yourself.
Interesting: The application of logic to a comment on ./ is modded OffTopic. Good to know.
False dilemma, have you met him? He's a really good guy to know!
While I agree with your point about shred and STFU, your legal interpretation is off. Mens rea is usually a requirement, but some crimes carry strict liability, meaning 'guilty mind' is not required, possession is enough.
Even if you're correct about the prosecution being unable to conclusively prove mens rea, it wouldn't surprise me to find a lawyer advising a plea deal or 'no contest' plea because the alternative is going to court to argue "my client is not into child pornography, appearances notwithstanding". Some crimes, especially sex crimes, place an incredibly burden on the defendent to prove his innocence in the face of the jury's disgust with the crime and emotional need to punish someone.
They didn't think they were the Wall St. Journal. At the time they implemented the paywall, they were very upfront about the fact that they were a small startup looking to survive, and were (somewhat desperately) exploring different ways to meet their costs. The paywall turned out to be a bad idea, but their process was an awesome model of how a business works transparently with its customers to find a survivable business model.
I'll agree that schools should not be run as a business, but that idea doesn't exempt them from spending money appropriately--namely on educating children. A million dollars running SETI@home would be better spent on staff, facilities, and educational opportunities for children. Or even just upgrading the computer facilities for actual use by the students.
And where schools do research on potentially useless projects, the money is still evaluated against the likelihood of a meaningful result. Yes, they risk dollars on research, but that risk is calculated against the likely returns and the odds of seeing them. A PR victory (with no financial return) that's rarer than winning the lottery is a waste of limited resources.
So the fact that you're still staring at icons on a desktop tells you that not much has changed? There have been vast changes in the internals across all major operating systems in the 14 years since Windows 95 came out. Your question and followup comments strongly imply that little has changed. Your comment about OSX being in that same bucket is doubling down on your ignorance.
Better to say that the desktop metaphor has survived 20 years of constant use and evolution because it works really well.
It's called a cost/benefit analysis, factored by probability. On the one hand you have the million being spent for actual upkeep of the machines; on the other hand the PR benefit in the *ahem* statistically unlikely event that 1) aliens are trying to contact us, 2) we're listening on the right frequency in the right way, and 3) the school's computers are the ones that detect it.
I don't think it's a hard decision.
This is an impressively stupid comment. I mean, really impressively stupid, which is saying something on ./
The negro workers in the deep South, picking cotton on plantations before the civil war, were given food and a roof over their heads. By common labor law, that counts as compensation. Does that mean they weren't slaves?
When I worked at RSA Security in their tech support department, we were paid $300 to be on call for the weekend, meaning carrying the company cell phone and being no more than 30 minutes from some way to handle a support case (VPN to the office was fine). For each call/case we received (I think) $75. Overall a pretty good deal for people handling products like ClearTrust, FIM, or Keon; not so good for the SecurId guys, who could make $1,000 on a busy weekend by working full time. They were guaranteed to get a bunch of cases; we weren't.
One amusing story a SecurId guy told me: There was extra pressure on them to handle cases quickly because, when you get fired, one of the first things they do is de-activate your token. If the server crashes on a Sunday morning, everyone who tries to authenticate from home can't log in and thinks they've been fired. Monday morning half your company is spamming resumes to your competitors.
You must be new here.
The crime doesn't require the union of two jurisdictions to be a crime. Both jurisdictions agree that it is a crime, so who tries and sentences the guilty offender is an administrative matter handled by treaty negotiated between governments.
In general, no. The issue of crimes that cross jurisdictions is one that appeared the minute there was such a thing as a jurisdiction.
Say I stand on the Canadian side of the border, and you on the American side. I shoot you. You're dead, and absent an invisible line, I'm your murderer. If your position had its way, I'd be guilty of no crime at all. I wasn't in the U.S. when I pulled the trigger, therefore I haven't committed a crime in the U.S. I'm allowed to fire a gun in Canada, so I haven't committed a crime in Canada.
How do you suggest that this situation be legally resolved? Should Canada have laws governing the behaviour of people in Canada as they might affect anything outside of Canada? That would seem to be a far worse situation than an extradition treaty. It would endlessly multiply legal codes by needing to take into account every possible cross-jurisdictional crime possible. And what if Canada decided not to do anything about it? Are you really prepared to accept that punishment for your murderer depends upon another sovereign nation bothering to do something about a consequence that fell nowhere within its own borders?
Not necessarily, no. But you haven't offered a reason that extradition is a bad thing except for your logically absurd contention that MacKinnon didn't commit a crime in the U.S.
Yes, you are wrong. There's a clear chain of causality between what MacKinnon did in the UK and the hacking that occurred in the U.S. Saying 'the telco' did it is absurd--the telco did nothing but transmit MacKinnon's keystrokes, as it's supposed to. The telco lacked any intent to hack; by your argument, no crime at all was committed, since the agent who carried it out lacked mens rea, a guilty mind. Likewise, MacKinnon can't be guilty of hacking since his mens rea lack all consequence. He can't be guilty of hacking if nothing was hacked as a direct result of his intentions. Therefore, no crime at all has occurred.
This position is idiosyncratic, and disconnected from legal reality: A court on either side will have no problem accepting that MacKinnon did the hack.
And thanks to the extradition treaty signed by my country, my country defines the crime as one requiring extradition.
You're cherry picking the legal aspects that you want to prove your case: It's fine for a country to define a law to prosecute me for a crime, unless it means handing someone over to another country, in which case the law is wrong. Either you accept the legal framework of a country to decide these things, or you don't.
First off, hacking is a crime in the U.K., so you're just wrong there.
Second, given that you acknowledge that everything did, in fact, happen, then it was obviously "physically" possible. For a crime to be "physically" impossible, the act must be physically impossible, which it wasn't.
Whether or not a crime occurred is a legal matter, and one that the longstanding legal frameworks of two countries seem to have no problem agreeing agreeing on. You may disagree, but the weight of two governments, two legal systems, many lawyers and judges, and the diplomats who negotiated the extradition treaty are on the other side, and the fact that you think they're wrong might be a clue that you don't have a full understanding of the situation.
As for remote crimes, this shouldn't be troubling either. If I contract a hitman in another country by the mail to murder someone in that foreign country, and then pay him afterwards with a mailed money order, where did the crime substantially occur? Was it perpetrator-less? Obviously not, and I don't think anyone would have a problem with extraditing me to the foreign country to face first degree murder charges.
The point remains that unless you're doing something that's illegal in your country, it doesn't matter if it's illegal in theirs. Again, you can't be extradited to face blasphemy charges in Ireland because the U.S. doesn't have laws against blasphemy.
Anything that will get you extradited is something that will already get you in trouble in your home country.
What's physically impossible about hacking into NASA computers over the Internet?
You would be subject to the laws of Saudi Arabia if 1) the U.S. had an extradition treaty with them, 2) you committed a crime in Saudi Arabia that has a parallel crime in the U.S.
Say you arranged to murder someone in Saudi Arabia by hiring a Saudi hit man that you find by looking through Saudi message boards. You email him, agree on a price, he kills the dude, and you mail him an untraceable money order. The crime was committed in Saudi Arabia, and it's the Saudis who would prosecute you after extradition. You might not like that, but that's the reality--the crime occurred in Saudi Arabia, and they're the ones with the greatest interest in putting you in jail.
You might separately be guilty of crimes in the U.S., but the way it would work is that U.S. would let the Saudis have their shot first since the victim was Saudi, the killer was Saudi, and the killing happened in Saudi Arabia. The fact that you never set foot in Saudi Arabia is irrelevant.
Since there's no crime of blasphemy in the U.S., the U.S. wouldn't extradite you under the treaty for breaking Saudi blasphemy laws. It's only for the crimes that both countries agree are crimes.
I don't find it scary at all. The U.S. wouldn't be extraditing MacKinnon if he'd hacked into British computers. If you arrange a Ponzi scheme by telegraph in another country, then you've obviously committed a crime in that country, and you've done so knowing that you're operating in another country. If you truly stay out of that other country by not visiting it and not carrying out any actions in that country by some form of remote control or access, you've got nothing to worry about.
This isn't a case you can be unknowingly, unwittingly subject to another country's laws when you've done nothing to affect them.
MacKinnon has repeatedly admitted that he committed all the acts for which he's been charged with a crime.